Introduction:
The last piece in this series was on the challenge of Christian faith. The flip side of this challenge is a temptation toward unbelief. Because many people (including myself) have been pulled into gnostic ways of thinking that do not really understand the gnostic nature of their patterns of thought, I will write this second piece on the temptations to unbelief before defining gnosticism in the third installment of this series. In this way, we can imagine ourselves falling away from faith before drifting towards the siren song of the gnostics. I believe many (perhaps most) lapsed Christians of my generation have or are currently engaged in this precise sequence of weakness in faith leading to atheism and then gnosticism (often with the middle step cut out).
To summarize a few main points of the last post, Christian faith requires that we believe in something beyond our understanding; we are called to accept reality as real and fundamentally good; and a vibrant community life based in faith gives us institutional support when our spiritual stamina fails.
Pride and Rejection of God
“If there were gods, how could I endure not being a God! Therefore, there are no gods.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra
“A being regards itself as independent only when it stands on its own feet; and it stands on its feet only when it shows its existence to itself alone. A man who lives by the grace of another considers himself a dependent being. But I live by the grace of another completely if I owe him not only the maintenance of my life but also its creation: if he is the source of my life; and my life necessarily has such a cause outside itself if it is not my own creation.”
– Karl Marx, Private Property and Communism
“man cannot become God. If he tries, in the process of self idolization he will become a demon willfully shutting himself off from God.”
– Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics, and Gnosticism
“But the snake said to the woman: “You certainly will not die! God knows well that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods”
– Genesis Chapter 3, verses 4 and 5
Chief among the temptations towards unbelief is pride – once described by St. Gregory the Great as the queen of all sins. Christianity is frequently demeaned as a form of wish fulfillment (or an opiate in the case of Marx), but the way faith (or lack thereof) is lived out today, atheism fulfills more wishes than Christianity does. Without God, you can be the center of your own universe, even if you don’t think of yourself as an ‘independent being’ as Marx did. You don’t need to get up early on Sundays and drag yourself (and your family) to Church. There are no dietary restrictions. You are free to sleep around! Drugs are not inherently bad! As an ad campaign in Britain put it, “stop worrying and enjoy your life.”1 Sounds like a well-tailored fulfillment of wishes in an age with medicalized anxiety at an all time high.
Primarily, with God out of the picture, one need not humble oneself in prayer to a superior person. While not known as a theologian, Malcolm X captures the psychological element of prayer brilliantly in his autobiography:
“The hardest test I ever faced in my life was praying. You understand. My comprehending, my believing the teachings of Mr. Muhammad had only required my mind's saying to me, ‘That's right!’ or ‘I never thought of that.’
But bending my knees to pray -- that act -- well, that took me a week.
You know what my life had been. Picking a lock to rob someone's house was the only way my knees had ever been bent before.
I had to force myself to bend my knees. And waves of shame and embarrassment would force me back up.
For evil to bend its knees, admitting its guilt, to implore the forgiveness of God, is the hardest thing in the world. It's easy for me to see and to say that now. But then, when I was the personification of evil, I was going through it. Again, again, I would force myself back down into the praying-to-Allah posture. When finally I was able to make myself stay down -- I didn't know what to say to Allah.”
Avarice and Knowledge
A second temptation towards unbelief relates especially to people in the material sciences. One of the popular tropes that propelled the new atheism movement in the early 2000’s was the idea that smart people are atheists and dumb people are religious. Richard Dawkins went so far as to coin the term ‘Bright’ to refer to atheists (sounds awfully gnostic when put in writing). I use avarice instead of greed here not only because I like finding words with latin roots, but because avarice has a connotation with medieval Catholic philosophy. This phenomenon of ‘new atheism’ is not really a product of the internet age, but of man’s basest impulses.
Imagine yourself as a scientist – perhaps you are one. If you’re a good scientist, you want to work and progress in your work. Through this work you learn more and more. ‘Know-it-all’ may be a childish put-down, but if you’ve made the physical sciences your life’s work, why wouldn’t you want to know everything? Moreover, it would take some humility to acknowledge that another being superior to yourself is all knowing and you are not, in spite of your best efforts.
This greed for knowledge accurately sums up Sam Harris’ idea that science can now, or will in the future, teach us ultimate truth (Descartes shared this view). Any scientific statement that is not gnostic could be preceded by the phrase ‘the data indicates,’ ‘as far as I know,’ etc. A gnostic statement would begin with a phrase like ‘the science is settled.’ Bas Van Fraassen’s book ‘The Empirical Stance’ uses the question of physics to unravel this scientific claim to truth. Is Aristotelian physics true? No, it was superseded by Cartesian physics. Was this true? No, it was superseded by Newtonian Physics. Was this true? No, it was superseded by Einsteinian physics… Science then is a series of approximations of the truth which become more and more accurate based on observable phenomena, but never actually contain the truth itself. Thus, we can use science as an approximation for truth in areas where truth has not been revealed to us without confusing what is actually true with what is only apparently true. The greed (avarice) to possess ultimate truth for oneself is a powerful temptation that many (like Sam Harris) have fallen prey to.
“Philosophy springs from the love of being; it is man’s loving endeavor to perceive the order of being and attune himself to it. Gnosis desires dominion over being; in order to seize control of being the gnostic constructs his system. The building of systems is a gnostic form of reasoning, not a philosophical one.”
– Voegelin in ‘Science, Politics, and Gnosticism’
From this quote, one could substitute any subject with the word ‘philosophy.’ I have spent tens of thousands of hours studying and practicing music in my life, and as I coast towards middle age, the realization (something Mark Turner once said in a workshop I attended that stayed with me) that we have a limited amount of time on this planet, and one can’t learn everything becomes clearer and clearer. Limiting discussion to certain aspects of melody and harmony, I may wish to develop a pentatonic, intervallic, lydian dominant, octatonic, or nonatonic language of improvisation, but I can never truly master all of these on a deep level. Instead, I work on what I can with the understanding that I am ‘attuning myself’ to the world of music – I am not its master.
Like the archetypal scientist above, I have a desire to be a ‘play-it-all,’ but for better or worse, I’ve realized that I am not, and can never be. No matter how systematized my approach to practice and playing becomes, there is always a point at which I just ‘use your ears, bro,’ or as Charlie Parker said, “forget all that bullshit and just play,” or, as St. Thomas Aquinas said, “I have seen things that make my writings like straw.” These three sentiments all illustrate that at some point, human nature reaches a limit, but truth does not.
Rejection of Reality
“The will to power strikes against the wall of being, which has become like a prison. It forces the spirit into the rhythm of deception and self-laceration… To rule means to be God; in order to be God gnostic man takes upon himself the torments of deception and self-laceration.”
– Voegelin in ‘Science, Politics, and Gnosticism’
The temptation to reject reality is the flip side of accepting the goodness and givenness of being described in the first post of this series. Today, this phenomena is most obvious in the movements of transhumanism and transgenderism, but it is still clearly evident in earlier movements related to the sexual revolution. In the case of transgenderism, Voegelin’s ‘self-laceration’ is not only spiritual, but also physical.
Again, the appeal of rejecting reality cannot be denied. With technology and practice we frequently manipulate reality, why can’t we rule it? Why must sex be related to procreation? Why must we die? The second wave feminists proclaimed that ‘biology is not destiny!’ This may be true in that we still have free will, but biology is a reality we all contend with. Our bodies, and our organs, have natural purposes which, when frustrated, can damage us physically, hormonally, mentally, emotionally, psychologically, and most of all… spiritually.
“Whoever reduces being to a system cannot permit questions that invalidate systems as a form of reasoning.”
– Voegelin in ‘Science, Politics, and Gnosticism’
This systematic thinking which denies reality often pops up in the study of history. Marxist conflict theory is appealing because it provides a rubric through which any historical event can be systematized and graded. This rubric provides the illusion of clarity and catharsis to impenetrable or impossible historical questions. While a classical Marxist emphasis on class has become unfashionable in popular discourse, critical theory and critical race theory – Neo-Marxist intellectual movements – do the same job cutting through complex historical events and reducing them to a level of simplicity, even below that of a children’s fairy tale – Hansel bears partial responsibility for his misfortunes unlike the protagonists of Nicole Hannah Jones’ fictional works.
This issue of complexity, systematic thinking, reality, and human nature became clear to me last year. As I was reading Dostoyevsky’s ‘Brothers Karamazov,’ a family member remarked “Wow, that is a big book! What’s it about?” I found that I couldn’t sum up the book in any meaningful way. The beauty of the Brothers K is that it does capture so much of the human experience, and in doing so, it also defies any system imposed upon it. The eternal human questions studied by the humanities nag at us because their answers are an ‘uncertain truth.’ We are tempted to decapitate reality in order to fit it into a system of ‘certain untruth.’
In one of his first appearances on Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson describes ideology as a ‘low resolution map of reality.’ This is essentially what systematic thinking is. For example, the theory of class conflict may be a helpful way of organizing facts relating to labor disputes like the early 20th century West Virginia mine wars, but it will never fully encapsulate the complexities of those events. Individual characters with their personality quirks (did Sid Hatfield shoot first?), the culture of the time (many miners were married — something Marx described as Bourgeois), and overarching cultural trends (how did WWI service affect the willingness and tactics of the miners?) all defy categorization. Because of this, it can never rightfully be considered THE definitive approach to these, or any other set of historical events.
Afterword
“When men stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything.” – G. K. Chesterton
“A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything.” – Malcolm X
Separating mere unbelief from real gnosticism has been a difficult challenge in this piece, and I realize that I veered off into gnosticism several times, but just know that I was trying as hard as I could to stay in my lane. Without doing extensive research for this post, I couldn’t help thinking of examples of people and institutions one would expect to be pillars of secularism and/or cold, calculating capitalism not only dive directly into gnosticism in the merely philosophical sense that Voeglin frequently refers to, but full-on hermeticism, occultism, and mythology.
For example, regarding ‘new atheism,’ in Neil Degrasse Tyson’s first episode of ‘Cosmos’ he presented Giordano Bruno as a martyr of science when in fact he was a hermetic gnostic martyred not for science, but occult practices. Regarding a rejection of reality, the company G.D. Searle, the first manufacturer of the birth control pill, would send out little statuette paperweights of the Greek goddess Andromeda painted gold.2 Instead of being chained to a rock before her rescue by Perseus, as she is in the traditional Greek myth, she is instead breaking free from her chains herself with the word ‘unfettered’ inscribed on her back. This is eerily similar to Voegelin’s discussion about the ‘victory of Prometheus’ I will explore in upcoming posts. I wouldn’t expect a massive pharmaceutical company (which was later sold to Monsanto by Donald Rumsfeld – go figure) to be in the business of distributing statutes as commentary on the Greco-Roman foundations of our Civilization, but as Chesterton and Malcolm X correctly figure above, the journey from unbelief to gnosticism is very short.
In the next piece of this series, I hope to explore the nature of gnosticism and why people are attracted to it. Thanks for reading!
https://humanists.uk/campaigns/successful-campaigns/atheist-bus-campaign/
https://www.catholicherald.com/article/columns/the-legacy-of-humanae-vitae-at-50-years/