Gnosticism, or, The Return of Simon the Magician
This is a column from ten years ago, whose point is timely and timeless enough to bear repeating. Reprinted here as a courtesy to readers who did not see it before:
It may strike some as a paradox that a science fiction writer, who pens space operas about optimistic futures filled with shining technological marvels, should at the same time voice such discontent with the modern day, and yearn for days of yore. How can a man so delighted with the miracles of aerospatial engineering and biotechnology, television and motor cars and flush toilets, have his heart at home in the Middle Ages?
My answer is that the miracles of modern technology were not created ex nihilo by Thomas Edison, but were the outgrowth of medieval developments in logic and natural philosophy, the institutions of the university. The Middle Ages had as vibrant an intellectual life as that of Ancient Athens.
In any case, it is not the technology of the Modern Age I find disquieting about it, it is the theology.
No doubt that answer strikes the modern ear as odd. Surely we have no theology any longer? Surely we have developed and advanced to the point where we can ignore every problem raised and answered by that science?
No. Every era and every man has some sort of theological and philosophical and metaphysical stance that informs his world view. Those who do not have an articulate stance have an inarticulate one. Those who do not ponder the issues merely accept uncritically, even unconsciously, the popular conceptions or misconceptions.
What I dislike about the Modern Age is that the modern theological stance of the postchristian world is a prechristian heresy called Gnosticism.
So it is not the modern things about the modern age I like. Those modern things, the science and logic, come from the Middle Ages when Christianity was in flower, from Albertus Magnus and William of Occam and Roger Bacon and from Saint Thomas Aquinas. The ancient things, this oldest and creepiest of heresies, the teachings of Simon the Magician, come from the dead, pagan mystery cult called Gnosticism. So it is not the modern things about the modern age I dislike; it is the long-dead things from the darkness before Christianity.
Since there are authors and stories I greatly admire who are openly Gnostic, such as AEGYPT by John Crowley and VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS by David Lindsay, as well as work greatly admired who are tacitly Gnostic, such as DARK CITY directed by Alex Proyas, or THE SHADOW MEN by A.E. van Vogt, and personal friends of long standing acquaintance who are, or toy with being, Gnostics, it behooves me to voice the source of my discontent with this heresy. I attempt no rigorous logical debunking: what follows is nothing more than list of the problems Gnosticism raises which I think insurmountable.
My first and most basic problem with Gnosticism is that it does not make a picture of any universe I recognize. As a theory, it does not explain the facts. It is like the “Faked Moonshot” conspiracy theory version of theology, blaming the government of heaven for the acts of hellish evildoers. Consider the five points on which the Gnostic doctrine rests:
1. God as Devil: The creator is not God but a blind angel or devil called the Demiurge who created the world as a trap, and imposed the Ten Commandments as a deception; the evil Demiurge also imprisons spark of divine spirit (“pnuema”) in the loathsome degradation of the physical body. We are not who we think we are; like Neo from THE MATRIX, the lives we live are false.
2. The Worldly Powers: Our real mission is to release the spark from its materialistic bodily cage and re-ascend through successive hostile barriers manned by supernatural jailors or powers of the world called Archons. Each Archon represents a different opiate lure meant to snare the unwary soul, either wealth, or filthy lucre, or honors, or power, or worldly learning.
3. Secret Knowledge: The Archons are to be overcome only by occult formula or secret knowledge (“gnosis”) from which Gnosticism takes its name. The spark ascends to the heaven above all heavens, called Pleroma, where the physical body and the animal soul will fall away like a shed cocoon, and we will return to cosmic oneness. Only esoteric wisdom can be trusted; anything put into words is suspect. Those who do not understand cannot be taught, and need not be reasoned with.
4. Creation as Evil: In Gnosticism, all created things and all physical bodies are radically evil. Unbeknownst to ourselves, we are gods, merely slumbering, enchanted into thinking we are material and mortal beings. Salvation consists of waking up, achieving enlightenment, and seeing through the illusion of the world.
5. The Church as Evil: The only thing standing in our way is the illusions of a malign but very real Demiurge, whom the foolish Christians worship as the Creator. We are the Enlightened Ones. None of the Benighted can be saved. We must be anarchists against the throne and monarchy of God, who is a false usurper, and we must cleave to the party of the Devil, who is right to rebel. Long live the Revolution!
Does that sound familiar? Gnosticism is oddly parallel to the basic modern view of life, except that the moderns tell only a worldly and material version of the myth:
1. Society as Devil: All souls are deceived not by the Demiurge but by their bourgeoisie false consciousness or Euro-centric social conditioning. This creates not a false cosmos, but a false “narrative” or false values used to deceive and trap the unenlightened.
2. The Worldly Powers: The Powers of the World are not Archons but powerful and malign social forces and factions (either Wall Street, or the phallocratic rape-culture of the Nuclear Family, the Military-Industrial Complex, the Establishment, or the traditional education of reading Dead White Males) which attempt to crush any opposition they cannot suborn or cow.
3. Secret Knowledge: Only a few and valiant souls, thanks to their Yale education in Homo-Marxism and Womyn’s Studies, use occult formula and to deconstruct and unravel the secret history of man, and ascending through these successive barriers of false learning, can revise all history and teaching. Only esoteric postmodern jabberwocky can be trusted; anything put into plain words is suspect. Those who do not understand cannot be taught, and need not be reasoned with.
4. All Creation as Evil: Everything created by human civilization, every institution including the individual conscience of every man, is based on institutionalized racism, sexism, and homophobia, and is radically evil and ergo must be radically altered or abolished altogether. Nothing is worth saving. By abolishing all rules, moral strictures, and oppression, the Enlightened can usher in the Pleroma of perfect and enduring Utopia on eugenic-socialist grounds under the rule of a scientific expert elite. Thanks to scientific education, man will be gods, and able to solve all problems and wipe all tears away.
5. Church as Evil: the only thing standing in our way is a malign but utterly fictitious Demiurge, whom the foolish Christians worship as the Creator. We are the Enlightened Ones. None of the Benighted can be saved. Long live the Revolution!
Modern thinking, with its materialistic metaphysics, arbitrary logic, subjectivist ethics and socialist politics, is basically a form of Gnosticism. I would go so far as to say that Gnosticism is the dominant worldview of our generation, even as Christianity was the dominant worldview of the Medieval Age. We live in an age of Materialist Gnosticism.
Or to put it another way, Gnosticism seems like a spiritual version of that post-modern multi-culti cult-o’-death socialist “reality is optional” crap the whole “reality based community” (as it, with unselfconscious irony, calls itself) has been stuffing down the collective throat of the world for years.
Neither the materialist nor the spiritualist form of Gnosticism is the stance of a well-wishers. It is bomb-throwing anarchy at a spiritual level: Satan’s rebellion against God.
My second problem with Gnosticism is the where they draw the line between good and evil. The creator, and all the material universe, is on the evil side of the line, and all spirits are on the good side. The idea of a good spirit incarnate, like Jesus, is impossible for the Gnostic; as is the idea of a spiritual evil, like Lucifer.
The most profound difference between Christianity and Gnosticism is that the Gnostics is in the theology of the body.
Christians say Adam was created as a man in a fleshly body, a glorified prelapsarian body which only later, after the Fall of Man, was made into a mortal thing, no longer under man’s total control, rebelling against his reason with uncouth desires, and prone to disease, and doomed to die. The Christians say Christ arose in a glorified body, and that it could eat real food, and that it bore real wounds, and that it was not merely a hologram nor an appearance, but neither did it seem to have normal human limitations – the Risen Christ seemed to be able to come and go through locked doors, or ascend into heaven. Everything defective in our fallen nature will be fulfilled and glorified and made right.
Gnostics say Adam was a disembodied soul or godlike spark of pre-existent being, who was only later (and cruelly) trapped in the horror of a fleshly body alien to him, and that this body is both a prison and a seducer. When finally we win free to the Demiurge, it will not be to glorious resurrected flesh, but to disembodied purely intellectual existence. Everything in our physical nature is radically evil and it all must be abolished to put ourselves right.
As with the body, so with the World. Christians say the cosmos was made right and went wrong when we Men, who have authority over all less nature, went wrong. Gnostics say the cosmos was made wrong and merely is here to deceive us; all physical nature is deception.
And it is that last claim, the claim of “all” physical nature being bad and being utterly bad that ultimately dumbfounds me.
Imagine a mother, holding to her tender bosom a dead but malformed newborn. This baby had a crippling birth defect. After a few short weeks of lying in a crib and screaming day and night in torment, he died of it. The child never grew old enough to be told any word of comfort, even if there were any words of comfort to give, and the mother, willing to have done anything to ease the pain, could do nothing, and the pain just went on and on. Now the mother is too tired from lack of sleep even to weep.
I can understand how she would curse the universe and the god who made it, and call that god a demiurge and a devil. On that her darkest day, it would require a miracle for any women to believe in a benevolent God, or to be comforted with the report that the baby is now safe and playing with Baby Jesus in the lap of Mother Mary. That miracle of comfort would be inconceivable. So it is far easier to conceive how she would naturally conclude the Gnostic conclusion instead, and reject the world and everything in it.
But then my imagination fails. Everything?
For let us pretend that mother came from a large family, and, on the same day when she is mourning, her first sister (blissfully unaware of the tragedy) has finished writing some brilliant work whose elegance and radiance will bring joy and sublime pleasure to countless readers for countless generations; her second sister has discovered some scientific truth elegantly explaining what had otherwise been a mystery since the dawn of time; the third sister, after long delay and doubt is getting married to a man perfectly suited to her and deeply in love; the fourth is a nun who kneels in prayer and in that same hour touches the hem of the ineffable and is transported in bliss; the fifth is a heroine, a Joan of Arc, who even now lifts a victorious sword over some defeated foe whose quarrel had no hint of merit, and decades of peace and justice are poised to bless her nation; the sixth is a queen who on that same day signs into law an edict to abolish an injustice centuries old; the seventh is a sage and wise woman at whose feet grateful students and disciples learn the profoundest truths of life, and stern moral precepts that will save all who heed them years of misery and sin. An eighth sister is a doctor, who saves lives daily. A ninth is a farmer’s wife, who looks out upon a golden field at a harvest her much hard work has made abundantly fruitful.
Everything? The Gnostic doctrine hold that all these things, each and every one, is a snare and a deception, merely the worm on a hook: art and learning, love and fellowship, devotion, heroism, justice, dignities and powers, wisdom, charity, and enjoying the fruits of one’s labor—according to the Gnostics each and every one of these things is the lure of the harlotry of the world, meant only to degrade your oh-so-delicate and noble otherworldliness.
The Christian view is more nuanced, and warns that while any of them might be used by sin to snare the soul (for any lesser good can be used to draw one away from the true and highest good, which is God) likewise every lesser good, if appreciated in the right way at the right time, can be sanctified and blessed and made into a promise of things to come. Any lesser good can be a step in a Jacob’s ladder leading to heaven.
Gnosticism rejects this hierarchy of goods, lesser goods leading to greater goods when in due season and conformity to reason. Instead the idea of good and evil is gross and obvious: evil = body and good = spirit. Gnosticism takes the rather subtle and nuanced Christian idea of evil, the spiritual idea of pride and all its myriad manifestations, and turns it into a clumsy physical notion. Ironically, the Gnostics are crass materialists. I cannot accept where they draw the line between good and evil because it is too simplistic.
My third problem with Gnosticism is that, even if it is the true picture of the world, it is less useful picture than the Christian picture. The Gnostic picture is self-centered. Thou Art God. It’s all about you, baby!
An example of this inutility: If a Christian falls ill, he can pray for health; but if the Gnostic falls ill, the trapped god-sparks in the mire of matter really have nothing to which to pray and nothing for which to pray, except, perhaps, a swift culmination of the disease in death so that one’s inner spark can be released. If you are studying asceticism, and training your will to be like an iron bar, stern to overcome all human weakness whatsoever, Gnosticism has something to say; but for any other problem in human experience, Gnosticism has nothing to say.
It may be nice to be a little god, trapped, poor little you, by a paranoid conspiracy of evil ghost-monsters, but if Thou Art God, then that are a very little god indeed, whose angels are no bigger than butterflies, and who cannot answer your own prayers to escape from the world-trap.
In the modern day, those who preach that Thou Art God say this to get you to say that you have the power to make the moral law to suit yourself, as God does. This allows them to bear false witness against their neighbors in the form of Political Correctness, and to covet and steal in the form of some prosperity-destroying socialist get-rich-quick scheme of generating wealth through confiscation and inflation. It allows them to murder unborn children in the name of Choice for Women. To disrespect and dishonor one’s mother and father is regarded as a normal and healthy part of growth, a sign of maturity and progress. To disobey the rule against adultery, to indulge in some sexual excess or perversion, is regarded not only as healthy, but as necessary for psychological wellbeing, and honesty toward one’s inmost nature.
In sum, the Gnostics tell you that you are a trapped and amnesiac god not so that you will achieve to yourself the righteousness, purity and holiness of God, but so that you will flee it. The incarnate God the Christians worship was humble unto death, and said he did nothing aside from his Father’s will in heaven. The incarnate gods the Gnostics worship is their own precious selves, and the main effect, at least in the modern day, of this self-worship is to abandon those moral precepts common sense and long centuries of experience show to be the minimum basics needed for a life free of self-inflicted misery. Hence Gnosticism is not merely useless and impractical, it is counterproductive.
The fourth problem I have with Gnosticism is how vacuous it is. It is not “for” anything, it is only “against” everything. The Creator is bad; His creation is bad; matter is bad; life is bad; man is bad; only I am good, and, at that, not all of me, but only the divine inner spark seeking release from the degrading vulgarity of incarnation.
By way of contrast, in Christianity, both matrimony is sacred and virginity is sacred. In Gnosticism, both are condemned. In Christianity, both the robust violence of a Saint George, and the retiring contemplation of a Saint Thomas Aquinas are lauded as sacred; in Gnosticism, both the physical life (“hylic”) and the life of the mind (“psychic”) are dismissed as illusive. Only a life of pure spiritualism (“pneumatic”) is worthy. In Christianity, both kings and beggars can be saints, Saint Louis as well as Saint Francis of Assisi; and cobblers have Saint Crispin and sailors have Saint Nicholas. In Gnosticism, all worldly accomplishment, education, and honor is dross and deceit. In Gnosticism, having children is evil, because it traps yet one more spark of pnuema into the corrosive vulgarity of flesh. In Gnosticism, every way of life is false. In Christianity, every imperfection in nature will be glorified and redeemed.
Gnosticism is a simplistic philosophy, because all problems in the world are merely one problem, that of escape from the world and everything in it. Consider a political question: there is no reason for a free man to rebel against a tyrant, nor to bow meekly and submit, nor to discuss which is the better course: because both tyranny and freedom are only illusions produced by the radically evil Demiurge who seeks to ensnare and degrade all souls in the web of worldly thinking. Christian philosophy speaks of “Just War” theory, and Christian pacifists as well as Christian knights can have a lively debate about the issues. In Christianity there is something to discuss. In Gnosticism, nothing is worth discussing.
The fifth and final problem I have is with how ugly Gnosticism is. Let me explain this by the Parable of the White Room.
Imagine two brothers are in some white room on cots, unable to sleep because both are in pain. From time to time, those who run the place come and subject them to various indignities and hurts. To one side is a view of a bright ocean beach where children laugh and play, and bathing beauties sun themselves and smile and wave their hands.
The two brothers have both been drugged, or are feverish, and both know their minds are not perfectly clear and lucid. The brothers talk.
One of them, let us say his name is Gnostic Guy, says the white room is a torture chamber in a prison camp, and that the image on the wall of the beach is a film projection, merely something set up by sadistic guards who build the white room in order to torment the prisoners with impossible longings for freedom and fresh sea air. One day, if all goes well, the white room will be burned to the ground to the last splinter, and the false image will vanish.
The other, let us say his name is Christian Guy, claims the white room is an infirmary, and that the pains are temporary, and each pain is either caused by a disease, or is caused by the workings of a cure, and that one day, if all goes well, both brothers will walk out of there on two strong legs: and the image of
the beach is a window, and shows a real scene, and when Christian walks out the door, the children will come clambering and shouting, because they are his own sons and daughters, and that beautiful woman in the bathing suit will come into his arms to kiss him with lingering passion and joy, because she is his wife; And when the fog of these pains and drugs passes, the two brothers shall see and remember everything clearly, where their true home is. But at the moment, they see as if through a glass, darkly.
Gnostic Guy asks that if this is an infirmary, why haven’t the doctors already cured and abolished all disease? Why are the medicines painful or disgusting rather than like the medicines in MARY POPPINS, where everything tastes like a spoonful of sugar. Why the scalpels and the needles? No, it is much easier to assume that all these things are torments meant merely to torment.
Christian Guy says that an enemy lured both brothers into drinking a poison the doctor warned us not to imbibe; but the enemy told us it would make us smarter and better than the doctor. The enemy, oddly enough, is an intern who used to work here, but who quarreled with the doctor and wanted to take over the place for himself and run things. The bottle had a skull and crossbones on it, so we are not exactly free of blame for landing ourselves in this spot.
Gnostic Guy says, no, I am as innocent as a snow-white lamb, and evil sadism merely dragged me into this chamber of horrors. I take no blame and seek no cure. I am smarter than you, and have a secret, hidden formula which will allow me to escape. There is no beach, no happy children, no pretty wives outside: I imagine it to be a colorless bright cloud in which there is nothing, not even myself, and I will float along in bliss hereafter.
Christian Guy says, but I had what can only be a supernatural experience: the window was cracked open and I smelled the smell of the sea, and it was like the smell of a better place than this, for this world smells of disinfectants and blood. Indeed, the doctor, a man named Christ, says we can leave this white
room, and walk outside, and even walk back in again, and he had in his hand a seashell from the beach, which shined with nacre, and he showed it to me. I cannot describe this seashell because there is nothing in the white room to which I can liken it: all I can say is that it came from a place outside the
white room, what we might call “super-room-ial.” The seashell was a sign from outside, a superroomial sign. Unfortunately, I don’t have the seashell with me to show you: just take my word for it.
Also, from time to time, I have asked the doctor for things, and he has brought them to me. For some reason, when I asked for fruit, he brought be fruit, but when I asked for a cigar, he did not bring that – I have decided to trust that the doctor knows what he is doing, and why some prayers are answered and other are not.
Gnostic Guy says, Bah! Why do you trust this doctor? I do not see him here. I do not see any reason to obey his orders or advice or take these potions – obviously part of the sadism of the torturers – they will not make me better, but make me worse! Instead, I assume that I AM THE DOCTOR! Obviously some terrible mistake happened, and I have been trapped here by enemies, and drugged up to make me forget that I run this whole institution. Doctors make a lot of money, and that should also all be mine.
Christian Guy says, Do you want a cure, or do you want power? You seem obsessed with the power the doctor has over our lives, but you do not seem to want to live a life of service to others, like he does. You did not see him, but his nameplate says DR. GUY, because he is our father. Everything he had, all his money, and the rule of this institution, he will share with use once we are cured. This white room was once a mansion, and contained no patients and no pain, back in the old days, before we fell sick. One day we will be cured. On that golden day, we will tear down the infirmary and put up the mansion we once knew in youth.
Let us leave the Guy brothers to their debate. I doubt they will settle the matter quickly, since both theories do indeed explain all the facts.
In one model, the room is an infirmary, some of the pains are bad but others are good, pain meant to cure, the doctor is benign, the image is a window looking out on a real beach, and something awaits outside that is like what things are inside, but better. In the other model, the room is a torture chamber, the pain is meaningless, the so-called doctor is a malign usurper, the image is a hologram or makebelieve, and what awaits outside has no relation to anything inside. It is just a colorless cloud of floaty nothingness.
So both models explain the room, the pain, the picture, the doctor, and the beach.
But the first model has hope, and the second one does not. Ironically, even if the second brother is correct, and the white room is merely a torture chamber, the hope of the first brother, the patient and cheerful way he submits to what he (mistakenly) thinks are surgical procedures and salutary drugs will make him much better able to endure the season of his pain than the despair of the brother who sees things truly.
And, more to the point, the second model is a paranoid conspiracy theory.
Gnostic Guy cannot just assume that he is in a torture chamber, he has to assume he is in a torture chamber cleverly tricked out to look like an infirmary, with a clever holographic window to deceive him into thinking there is a beach outside, with a clever actor portraying a doctor, and some unimaginable sequence of unlikely events that managed to allow an enemy to imprison the real doctor (Guy himself) but them erase his memory, falsify his beliefs, fool his senses, and trick his brother Christian – who, in order for the conspiracy theory to be true, has to be a gullible dunderhead.
And every promise made by the doctor has to be rejected because it sounds too good to be true.
So, setting aside for a moment which model is true, I say that, even if it is false, the Christian model is more pragmatic and beautiful, because it of necessity contains an incentive to be loving and forthcoming and hopeful; and even if it were true, the Gnostic model is impractical and ugly, because it of necessity contains an incentive to regard everyone outside one’s own cramped and tiny cadre of like-minded Gnostics to be gullible dunderheads, worthy of mere contempt, and it preaches a doctrine indistinguishable from despair.
Normally, one would not prefer a beautiful falsehood over an ugly truth, because, in every other case, the beauty of the model has no bearing on the truth of the model.
But in this case we are discussing the nature and attributes of God and His creation, and by hypothesis, God cannot be the author either of ugliness or untruth. Christianity says that the ugliness and untruth in life comes from the unsuccessful rebellion of subordinates against divine goodness and truth; Gnosticism says that the ugliness and untruth come from the world-creator, from the diabolical Demiurge, and the demiurge is a successful rebel against a weak or indifferent or impersonal higher god.
To sum up, my problems with Gnosticism are fivefold. As a model or picture of life, Gnosticism does not fit the facts and does not explain them. It only explains them away by calling everything false. It particularly calls the moral order false in order to lure its partisans to call evil good, and good evil. As a theory, Gnosticism is paranoid, simplistic, useless, vacuous and ugly.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
