The Agnostic a Gnostic
One can only
attain what one can apprehend of the knowledge of truth, that is, the
knowledge of the Unity of God Who embraces in an undivided
all-inclusive unity the whole existence beyond which nothing else
exists... This degree is determined by the individual’s preparedness and
capacity, and by what the conditions of time and society will allow. By
acquisition of the individual’s degree of knowledge, which differs from
one person to the other and from one time to the other, each individual
then attains an ever-lasting happiness “which no eye has ever seen and no
ear has ever heard, and which has never occurred to the mind of a human
being.” (Sami Nasib Makarem, The Doctrine of the Ismailis,
quoting Imam Prince Karim Aga Khan)
We impart a
secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our
glorification. None of the archons of this age understood this, for if
they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory. But, as it is
written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man
conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him,” God has revealed
to us through the spirit. (1 Corinthians 2:7-9)
We know what the
word “agnostic” means and probably also what the word “Gnostic” means. The
one denotes a claim not to know what most people think they know,
the other a claim to know what most people do not dream of knowing. They
might sound far distant from one another, even polar opposites. But this
morning I mean to suggest that they are one and the same.
For consider what it
is the common person imagines himself to know. First, he “knows” that
there is a creator God whose will alone supplies the grounds for moral
behavior, and that this God has revealed his laws to their custodians, the
accredited princes of institutional religion. This faith seems to the
believer as sure as the likelihood of the sun’s rising on the morrow, for
does not everyone know it is true? Everyone he knows, or cares about
anyway. Others are troublemakers who ought to know better, and indeed
do secretly know better, which is why they are going to hell.
Do you want proof
that the Babbitt believers believe in salvation by works notwithstanding
their claims to believe, Catholics and Protestants alike, in salvation by
faith? Simply that if you say your cannot believe their gospel, they think
you must be putting up a smoke screen--that you would believe it,
or better, admit you do deep down believe it if you weren’t so determined
not to repent of your favorite sins. And that is why you are going to
hell-your refusal to stop sinning, not strictly speaking a mere refusal to
believe a proposition offered to you.
This creed is the
ostensible “knowledge” that the agnostic rejects. The agnostic I am
thinking of is not the sophomoric agnostic, but rather the one who has won
his way to relativism by taking what Cupitt calls the Leap of Reason, by
attaining the cognitive escape velocity needed to rise high enough above
the fray to be able to see the surface of the vast ocean in which his
fellow human beings ever swim without knowing there is an ocean at all.
This the agnostic did not know either until an encounter with philosophy
or psychology or the sociology of knowledge yanked him out like a fish
flapping on the wooden boards of the boat. But now he knows, she knows.
The agnostic knows,
though perhaps he wishes he did not, that the creator God was himself
created as a stop-gap measure by human inquisitiveness that had no way of
ascertaining the facts, and is held onto by those too lazy to learn the
facts of science once they are available. Now he knows that this God was a
reification of human society, a scare-figment to get people to internalize
the all-seeing eye of peer approval and disapproval so as not to dare to
break the laws, and to fear eternal hell even if he should commit the
crime and evade human scrutiny. Now she knows that this fairy tale seems
true to the mass of humanity for poor psychological reasons, the mass
mentality of the herd to which we delight to belong because we dread
thinking for ourselves and the alienation we know it would bring.
The seasoned and
well-informed agnostic knows that this whole system of beliefs, trumped up
and pumped out long ago like an artificial atmosphere on an airless moon,
is the artful creation of vast socio-political-commercial interests that
dwarf human proportions. Once upon a hypothetical time mere humans like
ourselves created these corporate entities (these religions, multinational
corporations, media conglomerates, military-industrial complicities). But
over time they have come to assume a life and a leaden weight of their
own, rendering them invulnerable to the reforming impulses of individuals
and concerned coalitions alike.
Of course, one and
one’s fellow soccer moms may form a committee and win the right to
temporarily rearrange some sticks of furniture on the deck of the Titanic,
but even that illusion is part of the trick. It is a pathetic sop cast one
by the unsuspected masters. And this maya-muzak is perpetuated by
means of entertainment, bread and circuses hyped up into equal importance
with world events and eternal meanings. The result is a public that knows
quite well who Regis Philbin is, but has never heard of Hegel. Who knows
and worships Oprah but has already forgotten the name of Albert
Schweitzer. All this the agnostic knows precisely because he does not
“know” what the mass knows, what the herd believes. He is an elitist,
perhaps proud of it, but no doubt sad at the thought.
And the agnostic
shares this knowledge with the Gnostic. The main difference, as I hope to
show, is one of terminology, and of mythology. The ancient Gnostics,
claimers of esoteric knowledge, could not yet escape the mythic form of
consciousness, but they did manage to do the next best thing. They escaped
the gravity of the dominant myth. They managed to snap out of the
collective delusion that I have just described, the supposed knowledge of
the masses, of the pew potatoes.
As Valentinus,
self-proclaimed disciple of Theodas, disciple of Paul the Apostle, said,
there is above and beyond the Creator God, the Law-giving God of the
Church and Judaism an Unknown Father. Even the Divine Sophia, Lady Wisdom,
could not gaze upon the face of this One from whom all worlds flee away.
But this Unknown Father did not create the world. He did emanate from
himself like rays from the sun, a whole host of light-beings whom
collectively formed the Pleroma. The last of these was Sophia, who wanted
not to be last and by a forbidden virgin birth brought forth the
bungling Demiurge, the ill-starred Creator who made a dreadful material
world and populated it with lifeless husks. All stood thus inert till one
day the Creator and his angelic henchmen, the archons, or rulers,
kidnapped some of the sparks of divine light from the Pleroma. This they
used as a kind of DNA, or, as the ancients said, spermatikoi logi,
seeds of reason, to provide self-replicating order for the material world
which had hitherto been a stagnant swamp of unmoving matter.
The Demiurge was, of
course the God of the Bible. He was just after a fashion. To guide his
hapless creatures, from whom he vainly demanded cringing worship, Jehovah
provided laws and commandments, appropriate to life in the world he had
created. This system was neat and tidy and worked quite well for most of
the Demiurge’s unsuspecting subjects. It plied them with easy answers,
indoctrinated into each new generation of sheeplike believers who wanted
it just that way, as the Grand Inquisitor understood. There was seeming
safety in numbers, security in tacit belief, at ease in a Zion of blissful
ignorance.
Bentham and Mill,
fathers of Utilitarianism, debated whether the more refined pleasures of
the intellect were superior to beer and the World Wrestling Federation.
Bentham reasoned that one ought not to be a snob, that pleasure was
pleasure, equally good if one were Socrates or a swine. Mill thought not.
For Socrates is able to see it from either side, and he knows the
pleasures of the mind are best, i.e., best added to those of the body.
The ancient Gnostic
was like John Stuart Mill. He felt like the Prodigal Son suddenly “coming
to himself” and realizing he was where he did not belong: amid a herd of
pigs. Instead of envying the pigs for being more easily satisfied than he,
as he had done hitherto, he realized he had to return to his proper home.
For the Gnostic, that was the Pleroma. He had to throw off the yoke of
allegiance to traditional religion and traditional assumptions. And whence
his dissatisfaction with what to others was a heaven, if only a hog
heaven? It was the terrible suspicion that the conventional God was not
the highest truth, that there was higher knowledge, and that knowledge was
the gnosis they celebrated. It was, among other things, the knowledge of
their own higher identity, and therefore of their higher destiny.
On this point, let
me refer you to Huston Smith’s fascinating book Forgotten Truth. He
shows how Western religions all seem to consider the goal of immortality a
summum bonum of highest bliss, the pleasure dome of Xanadu. Not physical
pleasure, granted, but what’s the difference? As Zooey Glass says in
Franny and Zooey, it’s hard to see how heavenly treasure is in
principle much different from earthly. By contrast, Eastern religions
make the highest goal that of knowledge and being: Sat-Chit-Ananda.
See what I mean? The
Gnostic knows that the world system the average believer takes for granted
is a sham, a scheme, a show, and like the agnostic, he no longer wants to
be grist for the mill of the Powers that rule this age, who count on his
loyal allegiance to keep the scam going. What the Gnostic knows and what
the agnostic knows is identical. Only the agnostic has managed to get
beyond mythic consciousness. He can only honor his Gnostic predecessor and
be amazed that he got so far. The agnostic views the Gnostic as Derrida
views Heidegger. He was still an onto-theologian, but even his blindness
relative to what we can see enabled him to see far beyond what was seen
before, and it enabled us to see farther than he himself could.
Beyond his x-ray
vision scrutiny of the false-world system, what did the Gnostic really
know? The depths of God? The Unity of God with all things? And what
knowledge is that? It is, I think a grand tautology. A microscope
magnification magnified to so great a degree that we can no longer
recognize anything. Place a slide with an amoeba on it beneath the
microscope and you see what you couldn’t see before, the amoeba being too
small for the naked eye. But magnify it that much more and your vantage
point is too good, too close! You are smaller than the amoeba! Like on
that Star Trek episode, where the Enterprise is caught in they know
not what, until they can get a distant enough perspective to see it is a
huge unicellular organism that has them mired. As it was at the start--you
can see nothing! The Gnostic, when we get to his claims of knowledge
beyond this world, knows nothing. And he will admit it-- no thing! Neti
neti. His theology is apophatic. It is a knowledge of a cloud of
unknowing.
Tillich said that
the atheist is right to reject the God of theism, for this God is an idol
unless, as Tillich said, we know that the God of theism, the one the five
proofs point to, is a symbol for God. And what is that God? Eckhardt said,
it is “the desert of the Godhead where no one man is at home.” The
agnostic suspects that no one is at home there period, and that the
supposed post-theistic God is simply a name for dissociative experience.
But however that may
be, my point is that even here the agnostic and the Gnostic are one, for
the Gnostic claims to know not only the unknown but the unknowable.
Tillich says the revelation to the Gnostic is not a solution of the
mystery, but the revelation of that mystery as a mystery. One does
not decode it; rather, one basks in it. That is something some people
experience. Ontological or not, it is ontic. But at any rate it is not
discursive knowledge. It is of such knowledge that the Te Tao Ching
warns, “Those who know don’t say. Those who say don’t know.”
When we get to this
point, I think we are only saying that an esthetic appreciation separates
the agnostic from the Gnostic. Go whichever way you want from that
crossroads. What I think is so important this morning is what unites the
agnostic and the Gnostic, what makes the agnostic a Gnostic. The Gnostic’s
privileged knowledge is really the same as the agnostic’s: it is that,
vis-a-vis the beliefs of the mass, the Gnostic knows better, and so
does the agnostic. The Gnostic has no more information about a higher
realm than the agnostic does. Nor does he claim to! No, the claim
to superior knowledge means one understands this world all too
well.
Gnostic and agnostic
alike, we know that the “knowledge” of the mass society is all a sham. And
because we know this, we know too that meliorism is a sham. That is, the
solution to which our energies may profitably be put is not to make things
a wee bit better here on the Titanic. To redecorate the strange land in
which we are strangers. It is rather, first, to know keep mindful, as
unpleasant as it is, of the fact that we are aliens. It would be nice to
be at ease in Zion, but we are in a sick society, as Kierkegaard saw, and
it is to be sick to be well-adjusted to a sick society.
Then we may emulate
our predecessors, the ancient Gnostics. They knew that to broadcast their
message indescriminantly would be to cast pearls before swine, and that if
they tried it, they might wind up being trodden underfoot, persecuted. The
goal was not to change the world, an impossible task, as the endless
disappointments of electoral politics and peoples’ revolutions alike make
clear: “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” No, the goal is to
spread the word, to be there to assure others, just awakening to their
alienage, that they are right. There is a truth higher than God, that
there is another world of truth they may attain to. It may sound elitist,
but then who says who is and is not among the elite? Only each individual.
The mass may scoff or get mad, but through argument and paradox and essay
and comedy we must raise our questions and it will be reward enough to see
another Prodigal come to himself and snap out of the illusion that he
belongs among the pigs.
Robert M. Price
April 29, 2000
Copyright©2005 by Robert
M Price
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