OLIVE CHANCELLOR, the bluestocking feminist in Henry James’s The Bostonians, is a classic gnostic, if one draws on the definition of Eric Voegelin. “It was the usual things of life that filled her with silent rage; which was natural enough, inasmuch as, to her vision, almost everything that was usual was iniquitous.” Olive dreams of martyrdom and, as Thomas Bertonneau pointed out in the previous thread, she appears to view herself as a descendent of Hypatia, the Neo-Platonist scholar in early fifth century A.D., whom a Christian mob murdered during the burning of the famous Musaeon, or Library, at Alexandria. The gnostic is radically dissatisfied with the world at large and nevertheless retains hope that it can be changed. If that means going down in flames, as Olive does in her own way, that is the price to pay.

Lawrence Auster writes:

Your summation of the six characteristics of the gnostic is good. I am excited to see people picking up on the recent discussions and trying to bring gnosticism into ordinary usage as an accessible concept and analytical tool which can help us understand so many contemporary belief systems.

I find myself defining gnosticism over and over, because (1) I want it to be an understandable and usable idea and not something that seems esoteric or intimidating, and (2) I want to show that it means much more than “knowing” or “hidden knowing,” which is only one phase or aspect of gnosticism and not, in my view, the decisive aspect. As long as people think that gnosticism means “knowing hidden knowledge,” they will never understand it. We will always have to deal with the popular incomplete definition of the word, because, after all, “gnosticism” means to know. What is ideally needed is a replacement for “gnosticism,” a nice, simple, everyday word that readily conveys the idea, “radical dissatisfaction with and alienation from the world leading to the conviction that the world is evil, which leads to a desire for salvation from this evil world which is to be achieved by knowledge of its hidden structure and a practical program to change the order of being through human action in history.”

Hah! Obviously we’re stuck with the word “gnosticism,” which, after all, is what the early gnostics called themselves. And just as obviously, gnosticism is not a simple idea. It is a complex of ideas, and will always be difficult. But that doesn’t mean that it’s overwhelmingly difficult or too complex for ordinary discussion. It is understandable. But the trick is that in order to be understood, its several facets or phases must be presented together as a coherent unity, as you have done with your six point list. If gnosticism is only defined partially, it will remain a vague and not very useful concept.

Laura writes:

Though gnosticism suffers from its association with “knowing,” this is mostly a problem for intellectuals. There are many people who have no idea what it means. This offers the opportunity for its use as a fresh term by the general public for phenomena that are various but connected. I am excited about the possibility of its becoming more common because, if understood in its fullest sense, it gets at the different layers of liberalism and offers a break from the limitations of that word, which also has its own confusing history and different meanings for different people. Gnosticism strikes me as a term that serves a unique and necessary purpose now.

Laura adds:

At View from the Right, Mr. Auster has posted these comments:

“Rick Darby writes:

Yes, we need to find a replacement for the word “gnosticism” used in the sense that you and Voegelin do. Like all words with a long history, its meaning has been blurred and stretched. At its most basic, meaning a spiritual path involving inner knowledge rather than outer dogma or ritual, gnosticism is the seed and essence of religion. (I emphasize, though, I don’t mean gnosticism of the kind you refer to.)

Another problem with using the word as a contemporary philosophical-political term: Our present gnostics do not have a “radical dissatisfaction with and alienation from the world leading to the conviction that the world is evil, which leads to a desire for salvation from this evil world which is to be achieved by knowledge of its hidden structure and a practical program to change the order of being through human action in history.” They are decidedly unalienated from the world. They believe the material world is all there is. Therefore, it must be perfected by any means necessary. No one shall be permitted the hope and comfort of a spiritual reality: the immediate world must be destroyed and rebuilt as a kingdom of heaven on earth, even if the earthly paradise has no room for faith, liberty, freedom of thought and speech, and “irrational” local and national traditions.

LA replies:

Your point is similar to the point that often comes up about whether liberals are guilty or not. How can we say that liberals have liberal guilt, some commenters ask, when the liberals are so obviously in love with themselves? And the answer is that while liberals are in love with themselves, they feel that their society as a whole, the white race as a whole, is guilty. They love themselves because they personally are virtuous and do not participate in the general guilt. But the guilt is still the central focus of their relationship to their society.

In the same way, liberals are not alienated from their own world, the liberal world; they love that world. But the liberal world is part of a larger white world which is evil, and that larger world must be turned on its head and remade. So I think that my description of the etiology of gnosticism does apply to liberals.”

Justin writes:

I must object to the sloppy appropriation of the term gnostic. Gnosticism has a specific meaning in the history of religions. To broaden its meaning to include every social reform movement in the modern world is not helpful.

Why not simply use the well-understood terms “social reformer” or “social engineer”? A social engineer encompasses all six characteristics as you have listed them.

To be a gnostic had specific cultural, philosophical, and behavioral connotations in the ancient world. To color all modern liberal movements with those connotations is not an “analytical tool which can help us understand so many contemporary belief systems.”

Conversely, considering all modern liberal social engineering to be gnostic only obscures real Gnosticism, which was not just ancient liberalism (contra the impression given by Gnostic-popularizing scholars like Elaine Pagels). I guess as someone who knows a bit about Gnosticism, I object to watering it down and seeing it everywhere. It would be like a Chinese writer describing every social-welfare movement as “Christian,” no matter how unlike Christianity it was.

I am not pro-Gnostic, far from it. The ancient Gnostics were deviant frauds. But to use their moniker as a synonym for modern liberal social engineering is not a step forward.

Laura writes:

I am not well read in the ancient gnostics and may have an idiot’s view of the term. But, it seems “social reformer” doesn’t get at the religious zeal behind the drive to remake the world.

Some moderns revel in the term. The literary critic Harold Bloom proudly identifies himself as a gnostic in the ancient mold. According to R.V. Young in the journal Modern Age,” Bloom’s gnosticism is essentially a rejection of the West’s literary roots. Young writes:

The ancient Gnostics, Sigmund Freud, and Harold Bloom all share a loathing of  the Christian vision of reality, which sees mankind’s willful disobedience and fallen nature as the principal source of his misery and of the evil in a world created good.

A “social reformer” or “social engineer” could conceivably be Christian. The gnostic emphatically rejects the spiritual orientation of the Christian and Jew.

Lawrence Auster writes:

To Justin, whenever I discuss gnosticism I distinguish between the original, religious gnosticism and modern, political gnosticism. The idea of describing various modern ideologies as forms of gnosticism came, I believe, from Voegelin. It was his genius insight to see the fundamental analogy, and even the similarity of mood and psychology, between the two. In any case, the concept of political gnosticism is an important discovery in political science and it’s not going away.

The term social reformer would not be an adequate substitute, because the word gnosticism carries all kinds of specific meaning that the term social reformer does not, and also because social reformers are not necessarily gnostic.

Also, people who are uncomfortable with the term gnosticism (and I have indicated why such discomfort is understandable) need not worry that I’m going to treat it as an all purpose substitute for other terms. But I have been developing the idea lately for reasons I’ve explained and I think it’s been worthwhile to do so.

Here are some of my entries on gnosticism. All but the first were posted since late December.

Gnosticism defined [passage from Voegelin that provides a cogent and understandable definition of gnosticism, covering both religious and political gnosticism.]

We are seeing liberalism morph into totalitarianism [The first of my pieces in late 2009 describing the Obama-Democratic revolution as gnostic.]

Anti-climate change: the route to the global state

The left’s agenda: to unite us in a worldwide brotherhood of equal ruin

Are liberals mentally ill? And the leftist/gnostic view of the Tower of Babel

The left’s latest weapon in its gnostic rebellion against the universe: tort law

The insane asylum that is the liberal West, cont

Political correctness described–forty years before the term came into common use [quoting and discussing a passage from New Science of Politics about the prohibition of speech that challenges the gnostic orthodoxy.]

Lawrence writes:

Voegelin’s famous description of the goal of revolutionary leftism, “immanentizing the eschaton,” meaning to take the transcendent end of Christian salvation and turn it into a political event to be achieved on earth as the “end of history,” comes directly from his analysis of leftism as a form of gnosticism, that is, as a perversion of Christianity which translates transcendent, spiritual events into immanent, political events. This is just by way of pointing out that Voegelin’s analysis of modern radical ideologies as a form of gnosticism is widely accepted and deeply influential in modern conservative thought.

Lawrence adds:

As Laura said, what’s exciting about the concept of gnosticism is that it explains things from a deeper angle than the usual liberal/conservative divide.

Also, it complements my definition of liberalism and fits with it. Gnosticism rebels against the order of being. Ok, and what does liberalism do? It rejects the “vertical dimension” (relations of better and worse, lower and higher), and the “horizontal dimension” (relations of difference/similarity on the same level). The moral / cultural / spiritual / biological universe in which man lives is constituted of the vertical and horizontal dimensions. LIberalism denies the vertical and horizontal dimensions and says that if that you believe in them you are evil. So liberalism is a distinct sub-type of gnosticism, which is alienated from the order of being and which seeks to construct a new order of being without a vertical and horizontal dimension.

Also, there’s no point worrying about the inadequacies of the word gnosticism. That’s the word, and there’s no substitute for it, just as “conservatism” is inadequate, but it’s the word, and there’s no substitute for it. It’s a matter of our puttting better meaning into it.

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