This is very good stuff but I do wonder, the older I get, whether the sense of the ancient world finding evidences of kindly gods and inherent order in nature isn’t something of a projection we’ve inherited from Roman (and to a lesser extent Greek) antiquity and a reflection more of wistfulness for a lost era of shepherds and forest oracles than of the somewhat more chthonic, certainly less Apollonian image we more often get from much earlier survivals, or even the remains of Celtic, German, Slavic paganism, etc. Not to mention the practically miserabilist cosmology of the Sumerians, for whom a forest is a nightmare realm crawling with scorpions and a god is a parasitic being that swarms over sacrifices like a fly on a dropping. I wonder if, in the west at any rate, our sense of alienation from nature isn’t very ancient, I guess. And our sense of being alienated from a nature to which we were formerly close is also pretty old, much older than we sometimes assume. But I’m probably just being a donkey about this.
Who said anything about the pagan world? The vinculum magnum entis is much more a Christian and Jewish and Muslim vision, with inly late antique pagan roots.
Oh man. I was afraid of that. You know I just tend to think of monotheism as a decadent fad that caught on for its elegance and one of these days we’ll remember that our natural inclination, as human beings, is really to throw gold into a bog now and then
This is simply lovely. To appreciate what all of these modern stories are after, while not fully embracing it—and to be able to appreciate it properly, because one doesn’t fully embrace it—is so illuminating. Perhaps you will give us a few more sentences on Harold Bloom at some point, who was likewise engaged with the gnostic current in our culture, but wasn’t able (as far as I can tell) to distinguish it from Platonism, so that he lacked the distance from the current that would have enabled him to understand it, rather than being swallowed up in it. I wonder, though, whether the summons of transcendence “_must_ come to as us something more mysterious, tragic, and terrible than it once was”? Certainly it does often come to us in that way; this is totally clear. And yet we have Gerard Manley Hopkins, Walt Whitman, and Mary Oliver, for whom it seems far from mysterious, tragic, or terrible. Rather, it’s the most manifest and embracing feature of their experience. I’m not sure that the “scale of shining mediations” is entirely absent, for them or for us.
Dr Hart describes the broadly Platonic vision thus: "There was a time, perhaps, when nature really did seem to speak with considerable eloquence of a good creator and a rational creation. Formal and final causes were everywhere visible, guiding material and efficient causes towards their several—yet harmoniously interwoven—ends." Or one could put it in terms of "participation": objects in the world, such as you and I, derive whatever reality we have from our participating in something that's higher than our world—from eternal Forms. Whatever the terminology, Platonism celebrates the world of passing things as in some sense embodying something that's higher than itself, and permanent. Gnosticism by contrast depreciates the world, as being infinitely distant from the only true and permanent reality, of which (because of this distance) we can have at best only an evanescent glimpse. So we have two contrasting readings, one celebrating and aspiring and one, largely, despairing, of the vertical axis of "higher than."
So the genius of Dr Hart's essay is that he identifies and celebrates the orientation, in modern gnostic literature, toward something higher, without necessarily embracing the despair that tends to accompany that orientation. Or so, at any rate, I think I understand him.
It seems to me that the loss of the transcendent has resulted in an inverted parody where human souls must navigate downward through echelons of ever increasing atomism in order to accommodate ever increasing demands of material particularization. We've become commodified to meet the needs of a social, cultural, and religious mechanization. All energy seems invested in maintaining one machine or other; hence there is no time to "love God with all we are, nor to love neighbor." And as you've said, our discernment of the loss has been all but obliterated.
The Little Prince and The Truman Show are two of my favorite things. The are both heartbreaking in the right way.
My grandmother gave me a copy of The Little Prince a million years ago. She and my grandfather were both agnostic and I was being raised semi-schismatic-Catholic(-ish), and she gracefully found common ground for us. She is one of the reasons I’m no longer an infernalist (another reason being TASBS) and am still Catholic, in spite of … everything. My agnostic grandparents were closer to God than anyone else I’ve ever met. Funny how these things work.
This piece made me feel morose, the pathos of The Little Prince. I have witnessed some events this week that have made me weep with despair. As Antonius Block says in The Seventh Seal, "Why can I not kill God within me? Why does He go on living in a painful, humiliating way? I want to tear Him out of my heart, but He remains a mocking reality which I cannot get rid of. "
On a different note, that picture of the charioteer (I assume from the Phaedrus?) hung in my home during my childhood. I had completely forgotten it until I saw it just now in your post.
It is one of the countless images of Phaethon that Odilon Redon painted. It was an obsession with him, apparently. Plato mentions the myth of Phaethon, as far a I recall, only in the Timaeus.
Would it be fair to say that one of the reasons the Gnostics believed in a God so transcendent that only apophasis was appropriate, was that the Christian community of that time had not yet learned (or was just learning) how to read the Hebrew Scriptures allegorically through the lens of Christ? And so their impulse was to appropriate the good they saw in the Christ/logos savior figure of Christianity while dispensing with the harshness they saw in God in the Old Testament. And then the Western Christian further fueled Gnosticism by insisting that the God of Jesus was also the God of eternal torment. And so maybe gnostic impulses continue partly because the Western Christian tradition has succeeded in powerfully implanting the persistent image of a God who does not apper to be good. So, it’s not surprising that we would want to just “escape all of it” to a realm of such transcendence that it can’t even really be described. Just some ramblings.
Well, in a sense many of the gnostics were the first fundamentalist scriptural literalists. We can deplore some of their hermeneutical crudity, of course. But we can also give them credit for having the moral intelligence—unlike our fundamentalists—to reject the God a literalist reading of scripture often yields. That said, there is no single explanation for their views.
Allegory can accomplish only so much. The Truman Show has a Beatrice figure in it who, to my mind, quite movingly represents a transcendent Beyond. And the protagonist in Gattaca quite literally ascends from the earth through the heavens at the end. A symbol is only a symbol.
I actually can’t stand the Matrix films, so say what you like.
You don't even like the first Matrix film? Would you be able to share your thoughts on it? BTW I watched Gattaca last after reading this article and was absolutely stunned. I'm a science fiction aficionado and am surprised this brilliant film escaped me thus far. It was one of the most beautiful and moving films I've seen in a while. Thank you for mentioning it.
The first film was the most promising. But somehow the gun-play as a solution to the dilemma was lacking in (let's say) a certain poetry. Gattaca, by contrast...
This is very good stuff but I do wonder, the older I get, whether the sense of the ancient world finding evidences of kindly gods and inherent order in nature isn’t something of a projection we’ve inherited from Roman (and to a lesser extent Greek) antiquity and a reflection more of wistfulness for a lost era of shepherds and forest oracles than of the somewhat more chthonic, certainly less Apollonian image we more often get from much earlier survivals, or even the remains of Celtic, German, Slavic paganism, etc. Not to mention the practically miserabilist cosmology of the Sumerians, for whom a forest is a nightmare realm crawling with scorpions and a god is a parasitic being that swarms over sacrifices like a fly on a dropping. I wonder if, in the west at any rate, our sense of alienation from nature isn’t very ancient, I guess. And our sense of being alienated from a nature to which we were formerly close is also pretty old, much older than we sometimes assume. But I’m probably just being a donkey about this.
Who said anything about the pagan world? The vinculum magnum entis is much more a Christian and Jewish and Muslim vision, with inly late antique pagan roots.
Oh man. I was afraid of that. You know I just tend to think of monotheism as a decadent fad that caught on for its elegance and one of these days we’ll remember that our natural inclination, as human beings, is really to throw gold into a bog now and then
Well, of course.
This is simply lovely. To appreciate what all of these modern stories are after, while not fully embracing it—and to be able to appreciate it properly, because one doesn’t fully embrace it—is so illuminating. Perhaps you will give us a few more sentences on Harold Bloom at some point, who was likewise engaged with the gnostic current in our culture, but wasn’t able (as far as I can tell) to distinguish it from Platonism, so that he lacked the distance from the current that would have enabled him to understand it, rather than being swallowed up in it. I wonder, though, whether the summons of transcendence “_must_ come to as us something more mysterious, tragic, and terrible than it once was”? Certainly it does often come to us in that way; this is totally clear. And yet we have Gerard Manley Hopkins, Walt Whitman, and Mary Oliver, for whom it seems far from mysterious, tragic, or terrible. Rather, it’s the most manifest and embracing feature of their experience. I’m not sure that the “scale of shining mediations” is entirely absent, for them or for us.
How would one best articulate the difference Platonism and Gnosticism in your opinion?
Dr Hart describes the broadly Platonic vision thus: "There was a time, perhaps, when nature really did seem to speak with considerable eloquence of a good creator and a rational creation. Formal and final causes were everywhere visible, guiding material and efficient causes towards their several—yet harmoniously interwoven—ends." Or one could put it in terms of "participation": objects in the world, such as you and I, derive whatever reality we have from our participating in something that's higher than our world—from eternal Forms. Whatever the terminology, Platonism celebrates the world of passing things as in some sense embodying something that's higher than itself, and permanent. Gnosticism by contrast depreciates the world, as being infinitely distant from the only true and permanent reality, of which (because of this distance) we can have at best only an evanescent glimpse. So we have two contrasting readings, one celebrating and aspiring and one, largely, despairing, of the vertical axis of "higher than."
So the genius of Dr Hart's essay is that he identifies and celebrates the orientation, in modern gnostic literature, toward something higher, without necessarily embracing the despair that tends to accompany that orientation. Or so, at any rate, I think I understand him.
(Sorry, I mistakenly posted this to your email.)
It seems to me that the loss of the transcendent has resulted in an inverted parody where human souls must navigate downward through echelons of ever increasing atomism in order to accommodate ever increasing demands of material particularization. We've become commodified to meet the needs of a social, cultural, and religious mechanization. All energy seems invested in maintaining one machine or other; hence there is no time to "love God with all we are, nor to love neighbor." And as you've said, our discernment of the loss has been all but obliterated.
Jeff
Show quoted text
Exquisite. Thank you.
The Little Prince and The Truman Show are two of my favorite things. The are both heartbreaking in the right way.
My grandmother gave me a copy of The Little Prince a million years ago. She and my grandfather were both agnostic and I was being raised semi-schismatic-Catholic(-ish), and she gracefully found common ground for us. She is one of the reasons I’m no longer an infernalist (another reason being TASBS) and am still Catholic, in spite of … everything. My agnostic grandparents were closer to God than anyone else I’ve ever met. Funny how these things work.
Good article, thanks.
De nada.
This piece made me feel morose, the pathos of The Little Prince. I have witnessed some events this week that have made me weep with despair. As Antonius Block says in The Seventh Seal, "Why can I not kill God within me? Why does He go on living in a painful, humiliating way? I want to tear Him out of my heart, but He remains a mocking reality which I cannot get rid of. "
On a different note, that picture of the charioteer (I assume from the Phaedrus?) hung in my home during my childhood. I had completely forgotten it until I saw it just now in your post.
It is one of the countless images of Phaethon that Odilon Redon painted. It was an obsession with him, apparently. Plato mentions the myth of Phaethon, as far a I recall, only in the Timaeus.
Interesting. I would always stare at that picture, wondering why both horses were white. Now it makes sense.
Would it be fair to say that one of the reasons the Gnostics believed in a God so transcendent that only apophasis was appropriate, was that the Christian community of that time had not yet learned (or was just learning) how to read the Hebrew Scriptures allegorically through the lens of Christ? And so their impulse was to appropriate the good they saw in the Christ/logos savior figure of Christianity while dispensing with the harshness they saw in God in the Old Testament. And then the Western Christian further fueled Gnosticism by insisting that the God of Jesus was also the God of eternal torment. And so maybe gnostic impulses continue partly because the Western Christian tradition has succeeded in powerfully implanting the persistent image of a God who does not apper to be good. So, it’s not surprising that we would want to just “escape all of it” to a realm of such transcendence that it can’t even really be described. Just some ramblings.
Well, in a sense many of the gnostics were the first fundamentalist scriptural literalists. We can deplore some of their hermeneutical crudity, of course. But we can also give them credit for having the moral intelligence—unlike our fundamentalists—to reject the God a literalist reading of scripture often yields. That said, there is no single explanation for their views.
Classic article. Interested to see what you add to it
Allegory can accomplish only so much. The Truman Show has a Beatrice figure in it who, to my mind, quite movingly represents a transcendent Beyond. And the protagonist in Gattaca quite literally ascends from the earth through the heavens at the end. A symbol is only a symbol.
I actually can’t stand the Matrix films, so say what you like.
You don't even like the first Matrix film? Would you be able to share your thoughts on it? BTW I watched Gattaca last after reading this article and was absolutely stunned. I'm a science fiction aficionado and am surprised this brilliant film escaped me thus far. It was one of the most beautiful and moving films I've seen in a while. Thank you for mentioning it.
The first film was the most promising. But somehow the gun-play as a solution to the dilemma was lacking in (let's say) a certain poetry. Gattaca, by contrast...
Thank you for the explanation. I see your point and agree that Gattaca was, by far, a better film.