The Gnostics among us
Garvey, John
The usual explanation of this phenomenon is one word: bureaucracy. But that only suggests that reality. It is not individuals defending their perquis- ites which frustrate the programs of...
...Thomas Christians are a monophysitic Eastern church which to my knowledge has nothing to do with the Gospel of Thomas...
...Gnosticism is important to William Irwin Thompson's The Time Falling Bodies Take To Light (St...
...The conclusion of The Gnostic Gospels raises problems which have not been given enough consideration by institutionalized Christianity...
...A large corps of public information officers promotes its point of view...
...But Thompson would defend the historian's right to exercise a kind of poetic license where facts are so thin that some imagining is necessary if we are to say anything about the period at all...
...Falis is a desperate, sad, and moving book which reveals needs and hopes ordinary religion does not deal with in any adequate way...
...Each was founded with a purpose, a line of business, something it is supposed to do--collect taxes, run national parks, guarantee loans for low-income housing, build dams or highways, issue regulations to ensure safety in factories, publish pamphlets on home-canning, count the number of black people in basic industries, keep lists of dangerous radicals, maintain the price of cotton, buy desks and chairs, design bombs and missiles...
...At the end of her book Elaine Pagels raises a question which gnosticism poses: "What is the source of religious authority...
...That may not be fair to Adam, but it has too often been the response of orthodox Christianity to a que~ tion which exists as the tormenting center of many lives...
...Barfing a change of heart-and what words could achieve that?--it will go on doing what it does until it meets something bigger than itself...
...Underlying all of these experiences is a fierce demand that God show his face...
...The MX missile has been in some stage of design or development since the 1960s...
...Gnosticism was a rich system of thought, one finally antithetical to orthodoxy...
...If anyone doubts its effect over the long term he need only conduct an inventory...
...much of our experience tells us that whatever rules the universe is not good...
...One implication of this is that deception must be built into the fabric of the universe itself...
...Dick is one of the best science fiction writers...
...Where does evil come from, and why...
...Other cells of the Pentagon want to build Trident submaxines, new tanks, tactical aircraft, nuclear weapons in a wide range of yields, sophisticated communications gear, and so on...
...Gnosticism compares the ordinary human condition to a state of dreaming or drunkenness...
...Conze is indeed a respectable source, but I think he is wrong here...
...The International Institute for Strategic Studies in London does this every year, not only for the United States...
...Gnosticism has been called a perennial heresy, a natural turn taken by the questing mind...
...This is where orthodox Christianity and Judaism most clearly parted ways with gnostic systems of thought, which taught that the god responsible for creation was Commonweal: 300 fallen, deranged, or downright evil...
...The Pentagon offers a particularly strong example of this single-minded autonomy...
...This is the saving gnosis which the Gnostics sought...
...In The Gnostic Gospels (Vintage, $2.95) Elaine Pagels quotes Tertullian on "the questions that make people heretics": Where does humanity come from, and how...
...BMO, the Air Force, and the Pentagon want to build a new missile, and now, after years of false starts and transient indifferertce in high places, it looks as if they are going to build it...
...Gnosticism is the major theme of Philip K. Dick's Valis (Bantam, $2.25...
...he is particularly good at revealing the ways in which their scientism is a primitive form of myth, a reversal on the theme of rationalists who take myth to be a primitive form of science...
...It was named for the teaching that one must be initiated into a gnosis, a knowing, in order to share the divine life...
...The question of genuine religious authority is at the center of all the books discussed here...
...Thompson is an engaging writer whose excitements and insights take in whole millennia...
...Some are able, some duffers...
...Arrayed against the Pentagon is a tiny handful of frail groups, funded on comparative shoestrings, with an alarmed sense that the Pentagon, having prepared for war on such a stupendous scale, is eventually going to get it...
...When one of them suffers a crisis of faith, as sometimes happens, he does not last long...
...The usual explanation of this phenomenon is one word: bureaucracy...
...The great questions are the ones conventional believers and non-believers are often relaxed about...
...In reviewing Karl Adam's The Spirit of Catholicism George Orwell wrote that Adam hurried by the problem of evil the way a man hurries past a creditor's doorway...
...These are only ripples on the surface...
...What evidence do We have for a loving God --for that matter, what evidence is there that God is even vaguely decent...
...JOHN GARVEY 22 May 1981:301...
...All of these books manifest a need which is not being met by conventional religion...
...It has well-established relations with Congress which not even the White House can interrupt...
...Martin's Press, $14.95...
...One Congress balloons their funding, While another cuts it back...
...Some of his interpretations of prehistoric religion and culture stretch imagination about as far as it can go...
...The basic work is highly compartmentalized, and each sub-office displays the single-minded autonomy of the whole...
...The popularity of Pagels's book is an indication of that...
...It has been doing this, under one name or another, for twenty-five years...
...The heresy which worried Tertullian was gnosticism, which is suddenly of interest again, largely because of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library, a collection of gnostic writings which has now been translated and is available in English (The Nag Hammadi Library, James M. Robinson, Harper & Row, $16.95...
...Like the gnostics he stresses the need for initiation into the knowledge that will save us...
...A central perception of this esoteric approach to Christianity is that the way most people see things is illusory...
...We live in a universe which makes it possible for many people to believe that whoever is responsible for our being here is deranged...
...And creation is a language and nothing but a language, which for some inexplicable reason we can't read outside and can't hear inside...
...In one sense it is shielded from direct physical interference by the entire armed might of the United States, which in turn is funded by a quarter of the national budget generated from heavy taxes on the world's largest economy...
...The angels remain with God the Father and do not fall into an animal body in physical time and space, but when a human being is able to liberate his consciousness from that physical entrapment and reascend to the heavenly realm he is honored almost above the angels...
...Thompson simply assumes that orthodox Christianity has little to say to his concerns, a point on which I think he is wrong...
...it is, perhaps, too close to home...
...In the process he does a nice job of showing up the narrowness of such thinkers as Carl Sagan and E. O. Wilson...
...There is no other road to salvation...
...The turnover in the uniformed personnel is extraordinary...
...What has made gnosticism suddenly interesting to people looking for answers...
...but it is a profoundly religious need, and the questions which are involved matter deeply...
...There's much to be said for this point of view, but much to be said on the other side as well, and legions to say it...
...And like the gnostics he sees the ordinary existence of human beings as a form of delusion and imprisonment: "The Resurrection of the Body means that one is able to carry into the heavenly realm the wisdom of the Fall into time...
...But The Gnostic Gospels is, on the whole, an exciting book, and it makes sense for Pagels to point out the connection between gnosticism and later people who wrestled with the meaning of Jesus's life and death, people like Blake, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky...
...but he didn't reach that point without help from orthodox Christianity...
...Its purpose is shared by many large corporations, which are Of several minds: John Gamey I THE GNOSTICS AMONG US WHY IS THIS HERESY SUDDENLY SO INTERESTING...
...The basic work goes on...
...Elaine Pagels's The Gnostic Gospels won the National Book Critics Circle Award, was serialized in the New York Review of Books, and was attacked by several orthodox reviewers -- what more could you want...
...themselves well-seeded with alumni of the Pentagon...
...Thompson uses myth to illuminate culture and sexuality, and tries to make out the pattern of the age ahead of us...
...In a strange appendix Dick offers an interpretation of the world which is decidedly gnostic: "We did not fall because of a moral error...
...Since the universe is actually composed of information, then it can be said that information will save us...
...One can respond to this terrible bind by giving up on the question, but plainly a lot of people have not...
...It is not his best novel...
...Another reason for the attraction of gnosticism could be its answer to the mystery of evil...
...The Ballistic Missile Office of the Air Force designs missiles at Norton Air Force Base in San Beruardino, California...
...In this sense Madalyn Murray O'Hair and Jerry Falweil have a lot in common...
...He loves finding the patterns in history which a sensitive reading of myth can illuminate...
...A gnostic God finally does, using a rock group, ancient conspiracies, a divine child, and a movie so loaded with gnostic significance that it looks like a schizophrenic's picture of the universe, where everything works together to prove the madman's point: "In Valis nothing was a coincidence...
...Much of the book is based on Dick's own experiences with dope, failed marriage, the deaths of friends, and suicide...
...Pagels cites Edward Conze, a Buddhist scholar, who writes, "Buddhists were in contact with the Thomas Christians ('that is, Christians who knew and used such writings as the Gospel of Thomas) in South India...
...Our hearts tell us that God must be good...
...It could be that orthodox Christianity seems too much at ease with itself, in a time when ease is not called for...
...a veteran of three years is considered an "old head...
...The final, broadest and deepest line of Pentagon defense is the belief, several thousand years old, that arms provide security...
...There are problems with the book: Pagels acknowledges the fact that gnosticism was more elitist than orthodoxy, but does not seem to find this terribly problematic.' And she makes a mistake in a discussion of the possible influence of Buddhism on gnostic thought...
...so do Pascal and Camus...
...This was a question raised by gnosticism, and it has recurred periodically...
...But the turnover does not interrupt the continuity of BMO's work...
...But it is equally well-protected from indirect threats...
...THOMAS POWERS W E ORDINARILY make a sharp distinction between belief and non-belief, perhaps allowing for gray territories in between...
...What they report is a lot of everything...
...Is it any wonder that mere words only ping off the carapace...
...Its job is to purchase weapons and maintain a standing army, navy and air force...
...For the Christian the question takes more specific form: what is the relation between the authority of one's own experience, and that claimed for the Scriptures, the ritual, and the clergy...
...Thompson acknowledges his fascination with gnosticism...
...Secretaries of Defense pay strict attention one year, ignore them the next...
...in fact he loves this so much that he may spot a few patterns which aren't there at all...
...Most of his allusions to Jesus and to scripture are to the gnostic Jesus and to such gnostic works as The Gospel of Thomas...
...Consider how well-defended is the Pentagon...
...we fell because of an intellectual error: that of taking the phenomenal world as real...
...Like the other institutions of society, the organs of government find it difficult to keep more than one idea at a time...
...The individuals passing through these cells are sometimes passionate, sometimes tepid...
...enlightenment is a process of waking, or sobering up...
...Does the fact that we are alive matter...
...Maybe the division should be done differently, between those who are easy in their belief or non-belief, and those who see agony in either place...
...It is not individuals defending their perquisites which frustrate the programs of presidents and cabinet secretaries, but the very organs of government themselves...
Vol. 108 • May 1981 • No. 10
