God and the Knowledge of Reality
Bishirjian, Richard J.
Book Review/Richard J. Bishirjian Minerva and the Magicians Readers of intellectual magazines know Thomas Molnar for his regular contributions on topics of politics, history, and economics....
...It is the condition of being in which we perceive reality as it is, and attempt to convey that consciousness to those who wish also to know...
...Yet from out of this morass, Molnar has accomplished a feat of substantial proportions...
...Quoting Eric Voegelin, he writes, " 'In historical reality, a philosopher's truth is the exegesis of his experience: A real man participates in the reality of God and the world, of society and himself, and articulates his experiences by more or less adequate language symbols.' " This being the case, Molnar might have distinguished A and B as "positions," that is, willful decisions to ignore important features of reality, from C as something other, a term for which has yet to be coined...
...As a black humorist in Catch-22, Heller proved that man's spirit could survive in an absurd universe if he were willing to accept the fact of the absurdity, laugh at changing your address...
...Indeed, this is what he attempts when he speaks of true andfalse mysticism, and true and pseudo-philosophy...
...This position fundamentally reduces the divine reality to an unknown utterly transcendent being which cannot be properly the object of philosophy...
...He has a home in the suburbs, two cars in his garage, a middle-of-the-road position in his corporation, and even two and two-thirds children (one child is mentally handicapped, and therefore Slocum does not consider him a "whole" human being...
...That is not to say that Western philosophy is divorced from religion, because in fact Molnar is persuaded that philosophy is either theocentric or it is, put simply, bad philosophy...
...Throughout his lengthy, repetitive and very boring narrative, Slocum recreates events in his life in which positive action was necessary forsurvival of the spirit...
...No one understands that carrying on bravely was the easiest thingto do...
...He is suggesting that we should recognize the sentiment in modern philosophy that reality is unacceptable, and that the philosopher's purpose, what Molnar calls his "magic quest," should be to modify the constitution of being...
...The people in Slocum's life want someone to take command and reinforce their commitment to life...
...Part Two is divided into three sections: "The Magic Way to Perfect Knowledge...
...In Part Four of this work, "The Possibility and Limits of Knowledge," Molnar outlines the foundations of such a philosophic perspective, and Part Three, "The Ideal Society as the Framework for Absolute Knowledge," is an excursus on the political implications of contemporary subjectivist philosophy which Molnar earlier traced to its roots in a denial of God as transcendent and personal...
...There are other problems, however, which his division of the "God-problem" into three positions entails...
...I've got a jawbone that's deteriorating and someday soon I'm going to have to have all my teeth pulled...
...Heller has failed to recreate Yossarian's spirit: a spirit which can conquer the physical ;natter of man...
...It happened to Joseph Heller...
...In Yossarian we saw spirit defying the rot of the body, but in Slocum we see only the garbage, the ruin...
...But to aspire to construct such a system was in itself to become like God, a goal which is at the basis of the modern project, that is, to find a final solution, the ultimate reconciliation of the contradictions of existence...
...In doing so, he has perpetuated the absurdity...
...These problems are probably the necessary product of Molnar's admitted attempt to move from contemporary philosophy and its distortion into a new mode...
...In his powerful novel, Catch-22, Heller showed that man could survive midst the myriad inconsistencies of the so-called institutions...
...Stated throughout this latest work, that commitment has been "to save history from the grip of doctrine and to save philosophy from the destructive hybris...
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...or that there is no God, but man is as good a god as we need, a strain associated with Feuerbach and sometimes called "atheist humanism...
...The manner in which we perceive a supreme being, the way by which the divine reality is known, is a principal problem of philosophy, a problem which Molnar calls the "God-problem...
...Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy...
...He tells us repeatedly that he and his family and the people with whom he works are unhappy...
...By "real knowledge" Hegel meant the actualization of the divine in his own system...
...Epistemologically, Molnar sees three fundamental "positions" on the "God-problem," and he elaborates them in the first part of this book...
...If God is immanent, however, one is merely saying that same thing, that one's true self is God...
...It is the classical-Christian teaching, of course, that any such reconciliation is not possible within the limitations of political existence...
...As such it is anti-philosophic in tendency and texture, reducing human knowledge of the divine to the level of "secret" knowledge possessed by those who have the arrogance to assert that they possess such information...
...Thus, Molnar classifies as "magic" the aspiration in modern philosophy to change "the heterogeneities of the universe into a homogeneity, a way of transmuting the being of things into a new being...
...The Spirit gone, man is garbage...
...Not the least is Molnar's argument, after having shown their differences, that positions A and B are essentially identical...
...Molnar draws this conclusion from the analysis of his subject, and does so persuasively...
...Philosophy is not an endeavor by which we take upon ourselves the role of God in the affairs of man...
...Ernest Tuveson, Redeemer Nation...
...Yossarian is infinite...
...Yossarian fought, he kicked back at the system, and then he ran...
...I've got anxiety...
...By "philosophy," Molnar means the unending human quest for reality, which in the West has developed into a specific philosophic mode from which our civilization has taken its main insights...
...Nobody knows what I have done...
...And, having learned it, he refused to allow his spirit to take refuge in nonexistence...
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...Instead of the daring rebel he once gave us, Heller now gives us a snivelling slob...
...In each chapter he deals with a segment of this life (his work at his office, his wife, his children, and his own image of himself), but instead of triumphing over the physical wasteland he portrays, he sinks deeper and deeper into the muck of the absurd...
...he has merely learned to hide behind them...
...My own reading in this field indicates that the notion of the hidden God occurred in ancient Egypt, not in Mesopotamia, and then it was not similar to the hidden God of Gnosticism, but rather to the hidden God of the Gospels...
...Slocum has not accepted his responsibilities...
...Slocum is the epitome of the middle class...
...The position which Molnar himself holds (Position C) is that God is neither inaccessible nor immanent, that God is transcendent and personal, a formulation which recognizes that the difference between man and God is a difference of kind, not of degree...
...If the human mind can know extramental reality, then the act of knowing reality is not a "position" or a "postulate" because those terms connote on the one hand that the assertion that there is reality is irrational, and on the other that the conception of the existence of reality is willful, independent of any real knowledge...
...He can't quite fit Meister Eckhart or Spinoza into either A or B. But also because of the vastness and extent of the materials he has examined, Molnar tends to lump some doubtful examples into inappropriate categories...
...Everybody is impressed with how bravely I've been able to move into Kagle's position and carry on with the work of organizing the convention...
...I've got bad feet...
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...Readers who come upon his latest book, God and the Knowledge of Reality, will therefore recognize in its author a commitment of a special sort...
...But it is also unfortunate that Molnar refers to these alternative theological perspectives as "positions" or "postulates...
...But, despite the fact that.Slocum exists in the same bureaucratic absurdity as Yossarian, he is the embodiment of inactivity and indecision...
...There's nothing negative in running away to save my life...
...Enclosed is my check for $6.00...
...The Philosopher's Absolute Being and Absolute Knowledge...
...In German Idealism, especially, one finds a "philosophic" reworking and fine-tuning of the old alchemical and Gnostic apparatus into a full-blown intellectual system which, with Hegel, seeks to divert the philosophic enterprise from the love of knowledge and become real knowledge...
...Finally, in the last chapter, Slocum takes command, but only because he has given in to the system...
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...Molnar himself rejects such a connotation...
...Though to the Gnostics the true God was inaccessible, he was believed to be accessible after a process of purification occasioned by the acquisition of the special knowledge (gnosis) that man is God...
...Professor of French 'literature at Brooklyn College and Adjunct Professor of Intellectual History at Long Island University, Molnar is also known for his many books in philosophy and political thought—among them, The Decline of the Intellectual (1961) and Utopia, The Perennial Heresy (1967)—and he is presently at work on a study of the concept of authority in the West...
...To carry on seems to be the best thing to do, but it is merely a continuation of the system...
...I've got eight unhappy people working for me who have problems and unhappy dependents of their own...
...To engage in the pursuit of truth by means of writing books on the philosophic endeavor necessarily involves one in a perplexing flow of confusing and conflicting information...
...I'm not running away from my responsibilities, I'm running to them...
...Slocum is incapable of affirmative action to save himself...
...Book Review/Mary Jo Doyle Nothing Happens • • Something happened, but it didn't happen to Bob Slocum...
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...I've got an unhappy wife to support and two unhappy children to take care of...
...Molnar writes that the statement " 'God is personal' means that he is knowable and accessible to man but is not identical with him...
...He is Something Happened by Joseph Heller Knopf $10 unable to make decisions which will positively affect himself or his family...
...While Yossarian battled hypocrisy in a military situation, Heller has placed Slocum in the day-to-day business world which most of us face...
...It is unfortunate that in Part One Molnar uses the particular manner of identification of positions on the "God-problem" that he does, because the novice Molnar reader will certainly have difficulty keeping them straight in his mind...
...In Slocum, Heller has personified the stink of rancid decay...
...It will hurt...
...In the beginning of his account he tells us that he is "powerless to decide...
...In Part Two, Molnar makes a particularly cogent analysis of the contemporary philosophic dilemma, by way of his focus on Hegel as the prime intellectual representative of the assertion that the soul of man is divine...
...If the philosophic mode is distorted, therefore, its impact on Western civilization is not long in coming...
...The Philosopher's Magic Quest...
...Both Molnar and Voegelin argue that if one studies the history of philosophy in the West independently of the simultaneous development of magic, alchemy, theosophy, 30 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1975 Gnosticism, and Neo-Platonism, one will miss entirely the substance of the chief intellectual movements in contemporary philosophy...
...The variety of utopian aspirations which have literally wrought havoc with Western political order since the French Revolution, including the rise of National Socialism and the Communist movement, he argues, are historical extensions of medieval alchemical and religious experiments which wrought havoc in the medieval world (for a complementary analysis, see: Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium...
...For example, is the Sumerian creation epic (Enuma elfish) really representative of the position that God is inaccessible...
...Man is not God, nor is God so externally inaccessible that he cannot be known by man in rational fashion...
...Sometime during those 13 long years he spent writing Something Happened, he lost his faith in the ability of man to overcome catch-22 and all the other inane systems by which he is forced to live...
...He had learned the lesson of Snowden: "Man was matter...
...Molnar writes, "The nucleus of positions A and B is the divinity of the soul, although in one case this is assumed of it at once, in the other case, only after it has ascended to its 'true home' ." Because they are at their base the same positions, Molnar has difficulty finding typical representatives...
...To this reader Molnar seems to be arguing in favor of a view of God which is conventionally associated with the chief God and the Knowledge of Reality by Thomas Molnar Basic Books $10.00 monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and is thus attempting to recover a philosophic mode rooted in the religious experience of those religions...
...Another position which Molnar sees is that which argues that God is immanent (Position B): that is, that man himself is God, an aspect of the divine consciousness, as Hegel and the German Idealists believed...
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...Philosophy plays an interpretive role in the West which in other civilizations is primarily performed by myth or religion...
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...Those readers familiar with the recent essay by Eric Voegelin, "On Hegel—A Study of Sorcery," (Studium Generale 24: 335-368) will know the thrust of this section of Molnar's work...
...One position is that God is inaccessible (Position A), a position taken for the most part by the Gnostic movement of the first, second, and third centuries in our era...
Vol. 8 • June 1975 • No. 9
