The Newer Gnostics
THE
COMMONWEAL
A W~ldy R~ ot IAt~, The Am, and PabUc Afla~n. Volume V New York, Wednesday, January 26, 1927 Number x2 CONTENTS The Newer Gnostics .................... Week by Week...
...We have seen dowager priestesses, arrayed in awesome robes, ascending mahogany staircases attended by their retinue of faithful souls, to hold forth in the most amazing jargon about the events of years to be...
...The poet who discerns eternity from the level of the present day is also a philosopher who can talk of truth...
...but he gathered so many disciples that he actually came to be regarded as a danger to the state...
...When a young French writer speaks of his generation as "one which has suffered the corrosive influences of Bergson, Proust and Freud," he is, therefore, the spokesman of a club rather than of the community...
...They have only to look abroad a little to discern the abnormal effects of their separation...
...335 THE NEWER GNOSTICS T HE recent spectacle of two popular demagogues in public debate about whether or not man is a machine may be termed a hopeful spectacle...
...329 323 The Quiet Corner...
...Is it ignorance...
...Is it all mere romanticism...
...For the merry buffoonery of this music is the symbol of modern unreason...
...Donald Attwater Lou Fdlibre d'Irlando..Charles Roger Miller Football and Philosophy...
...We do really need to be reminded again that man is a rational animal...
...But one has only to hurry back a little into the history of early Christianity to realize that 3to THE COMMONWEAL January 26, 1927 this situation involves a great and disturbing danger...
...John IIanlon Conditions in Palestine...
...The difficulties involved in combating the Gnostics were so great that if we possessed no other record of Augus- tine's activities excepting his campaign against them, we should still have to mark him as a man of almost incomparable mental energy...
...This twin necessity was demonstrated by nothing so well as the growth of that strange Gnostic body which insisted upon treating religious history and doc- trine not as historical and spiritual fact, but as a series of symbols which would reveal esoteric wisdom...
...It is logically next on the program...
...We must under- stand once more that the man whose spirit is hungry may not necessarily be able to distinguish the materials of disorder from the materials of sustenance...
...Honesty" is as yet a thing to which the crowd clings, not because it has developed the word out of its own consciousness or has realized its content, but because it has inherited it in the same way as a face or a farm is inherited...
...and if religion be permitted to live in a state of divorce from that life, it grows steadily more grotesque, more ~like the titanic meanderings and excesses of cosmic nature...
...In the United States, the wonder is not that seats are at a premium in the temple occupied by Aimee Semple McPherson (now fully restored to her rejoicing flock) but that cults as bizarre as the most forgotten of ridiculous heresies should blossom out again...
...328 3t7 Books...
...Getting Educated...
...Man without faith is arid, limited, uncreative...
...The crowd follows in a kind of awed stampede...
...What has happened is the same old story of allowing an idea, a truth, to cut one loose from human moorings...
...It is, therefore, not wholly a matter of chance that religious renaissance is, in our time, so generally also an intellectual renaissance...
...The next thing we know, the topic "Is man a machine...
...R. Dana Skinner, T.W...
...he circumstance that so many of these conquests have been preserved, that so many are still active forces in the shaping of life, is about the only reason why mankind has not battered out its brains...
...It indicated a fact that is far too frequently left unnoticed---the fact that the great majority of people have been practically immune to the wave of theory and counter-theory which, in the name of science or of philosophy, has swept down the universal academic avenue during recent years...
...Man without rea-son is a spiritual nomad who has forgotten even language...
...For the Gnostic imag- ination and curious interest in mystery are characteristic of human nature and its spiritual hunger...
...They are harder to deal with in the twentieth century than they were in Augustine's time, because they are harder to get at...
...The things which men were to believe had to be safeguarded against the excesses of unreason...
...A great many other things have entered into consciousness...
...The Russian Church and Reunion...
...To weld reason and faith, to do over again in mod- ern form the old synthesis which was the chief work of doctors and confessors, is dearly a difficult task...
...Ernest Sutherland Bates, Edwin 3x8 Ryan, George D. Meadows, Thomas 320 Walsh, FrancisA...
...Up until the time of Augustine, no problem was more important than stabilizing what may be termed the "intellectual content" of Christianity...
...Persons prominent in art, politics or affairs subscribe to the most outlandish mystical interpreta- tions of religion...
...Men know now, at least, that the two are not hostile elements...
...Or is it rather just a plain symptom of the fact that very many people are looking for some-thing they do not possess...
...Volume V New York, Wednesday, January 26, 1927 Number x2 CONTENTS The Newer Gnostics...
...Therein, it seems to us, lies a most important consider- ation for the Catholic Church in the United States which was once told that it had here an opportunity it would never seize...
...That they cannot be laughed out of the world, or argued away in an easy- going half-hour, ought to be sufficiently clear by now...
...European commentators were much struck recently by the growing prowess of an American Bible sect in various countries of the con- tinent...
...will be debated in the Santa Sophia...
...Each one of them means a spiritual conquest garnered from rev- elation and human experience and then passed on in convenient, practical form to all the members of sod- ely...
...There is really titanic meaning in the fact that somebody or other offered to turn Santa Sophia--the temple which above all others in the world was dedicated to divine intelligence--into a hall for jazz...
...Unknowable matters" are, indeed, the stock in trade of all this vast and peculiarly co6rdi- nated movement...
...The hero in one of Jacob Was- sermann's novels observes that the ethical vocabulary of most men and women is limited to 500 words, with the help of which they struggle to orientate them-selves...
...There are scenes in certain very discreet circles which baffle reporting--scenes in which the throng of devotees recites with a pathetic fervor incantations inherited-in a very bad translation--from erratic ancients like Averroi~s and Appolonios...
...James H. Ryan Monet: Prophet of Impressionism...
...John Mitterauer The Cliff Hamlet (verse...
...Both romantic fancy and ignorance lie at the source of the newer Gnosticism, it is true...
...It proved that a topic which speculative science has long since discarded as outworn is still enough of a popular novelty to draw a crowd...
...As a people we are now practically in the same mental state as the generality of the fol- lowers first gathered by the Apostles that is, we hold in about the same simple way to the same simple doc- trines, and we have got the same essential facts into our heads...
...Morton Zabel 3o9 Poems...
...From these on up through the more highly intricate systems of theosophy is only a short way...
...The things men were to do had to be connected with motives for act- ing...
...The slogan, "millions now living shall never die," claims to repose upon private information about how to read the future out of the Scriptures...
...Our own country is constantly being startled by similar outbursts of emotion...
...The Language of Men...
...Neatly printed books, obtainable for almost nothing, will introduce you to a code of thinking as remote from the actual world as the fantasies of Debussy...
...326 316 The Play...
...they could not cause the tremendous venture of faith that is involved...
...Barring the effect of a few mechanistic ideals like "success" and "comfort," the average citizen has drawn spiritual sustenance from nothing except the remnants of his heritage of Christian tradition...
...A survey conducted some weeks ago seemed to testify to the same thing, in so far as it supported the inference that belief in God and the fundamentals of Christian faith is as wide-spread in the United States as it ever was...
...But they are not of themselves creative...
...It seems to us that the last question is the only one that need be considered...
...Fortunately the first step has been taken...
...and num- berless simple Europeans appear to have taken it so seriously that the peace of communities is endangered...
...E. Merrill Root, Theodore 3xt Maynard, Josephine Emery, Elizabeth 314 Case, I.ouis Ginsberg, Mary M. Rooney 325 3 x 5 Communications...
...If this situation is real, the opportunity to develop a Christian code of living may justly be considered very promising...
...And so it is quite natural that our own time should be a peculiarly Gnostic time...
...The people who read them seem to be overwhelmed by the fact that they cannot understand...
...The Gnostic processes are difficult to define, but one can always find an appropriate explanatory analogy for them in such things as volcanic eruptions and deserts of whirling sand...
...After all, reason is the life of man...
...It is difficult to understand how any normally reasonable human being could believe in the chaotic doctrine of the German Rudolph Steiner, whose description of the universe in which we live was half garbled science and half Christianized myth...
...THE COMMONWEAL A W~ldy R~ ot IAt~, The Am, and PabUc Afla~n...
...We have not, one may respond to the satirical opinion of this hero, devoted enough attention to the remarkable significance of those 5oo words...
...Litz, Sister M. Eleanore, 32I Frederick H. Martens, Paul Crowley, T. C., J. M. Kenny, Jr., R. (;., A.F...
Vol. 5 • January 1927 • No. 12
