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Problematic Gnosis: Hesse, Singer, Lessing, and the Limitations
of Modern GnosticismAuthor(s): Robert GalbreathSource: The Journal
of Religion, Vol. 61, No. 1 (Jan., 1981), pp. 20-36Published by:
The University of Chicago PressStable URL:
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Problematic Gnosis: Hesse, Singer, Lessing, and the Limitations
of Modern Gnosticism* Robert Galbreath / University of Wisconsin
-Milwaukee
In the history of philosophy are doctrines, probably false, that
exercise an obscure charm on human imagination: the Platonic and
Pythagorean doctrine of the transmutation of the soul through many
bodies, the Gnostic doctrine that the world was created by a
hostile or rudimentary god.'
That gnosticism exercises an "obscure charm" on the modern
imagina- tion, as Borges aptly puts it, can scarcely be doubted;
that the fascination rests primarily on the idea of a world
fabricated by a hostile deity is less apparent. Cosmic
estrangement, as Hans Jonas has argued,2 seems to be a necessary
condition for the emergence of gnostic thought, but it does not
constitute a sufficient explanation of its alleged manifestations
today.3 Although a less common term than "apocalyptic" or
"utopian," "gnostic" has like them attained a certain prominence in
the vocabularies of cultural and literary criticism and moral
judgment. As an attitude or mode of thought, modern
*An earlier version of this paper, with the title "Modern
Gnosticism: The Persistence of Myth," was read at the International
Conference on Gnosticism, Yale University, March 28-31, 1978.
'Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions, 1937-1952, trans. Ruth
L. C. Simms (1964; reprint ed., New York: Simon & Schuster,
n.d.), p. 37.
2HansJonas, The Gnostic Religion, 2d ed. (Boston: Beacon Press,
1963), pp. 322-31, 338-40. 3Throughout this paper, I distinguish
(although the sources I quote may not) between
"Gnosticism" and "gnosticism." Capitalized, the term refers to
particular currents of thought, visionary experience, and
mythopoesis of the second and third centuries A.D. which Jonas (p.
32) characterizes as constituting a "dualistic transcendent
religion of salvation" based on the attain- ment of saving
knowledge (gnosis). Uncapitalized, the term refers to modern or
universal
? 1981 by The University of Chicago.
0022-4189/81/6101-0002$01.00.
20
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Problematic Gnosis
gnosticism is said to be found in existentialist nihilism, in
mass political movements, in significant currents of Romantic and
Modernist literature, and in the quest for enlightenment. At the
1978 International Conference on Gnosticism at Yale, three of the
four keynote speakers (among them, Harold Bloom) addressed
themselves to modern gnosticism and found it nearly
everywhere-Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Jung, Joyce, Proust, Kafka, et
al. Another conference, on Gnosticism and Modernity, organized by
disciples of the historian and political theorist Eric Voegelin,
was held the same year at Vanderbilt.4
The proliferation of studies which purport to uncover gnosticism
in the intellectual and institutional structures of the past 100
years prompted Altizer to comment as long ago as 1962 that "there
is a sense" in which one can finally say, "Modern Gnosticism is
simply modern experience, and a catalogue of the role of Gnosticism
(as here defined) in our world would involve modern life and
thought in its entirety."5 Altizer's conclusion seems inescapable
if one combines the two most familiar analyses of modern
gnosticism, Jonas's discussion of parallels between ancient Gnostic
and modern existentialist modes of alienation and Voegelin's
argument for the gnostic nature of"progres- sivism, positivism,
Marxism, psychoanalysis, communism, fascism, and national
socialism."6 Whatever the charms of so protean a term, the
obscurity is undeniable. One is in fact tempted to replace
"gnostic" with "gnosticoid," van Baaren's tongue-in-cheek neologism
which, he
manifestations of value structures and concepts which
significantly parallel those of ancient Gnosticism, without
necessarily imputing or implying historical connection, either as
survival or as revival (cf. "Documente finale" in Le origini dello
gnosticismo, ed. Ugo Bianchi [1967; reprint ed., Leiden: Brill,
1970], p. xxvi). "Gnosis" refers to both the concept and the
experience of saving knowledge, whether in ancient or modern
contexts.
4Selected proceedings of the Yale conference are to be published
as a supplement to Numen and those of the Vanderbilt conference by
Louisiana State University Press. One of the Vander- bilt papers
has.been published separately: Gerhart Niemeyer, "Loss of Reality:
Gnosticism and Modern Nihilism," Modern Age 22 (Fall 1978): 338-45.
Harold Bloom's approach to modern gnosticism can be examined by his
Poetry and Repression (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1976), pp. 11-16 (general), 208-34 (Yeats). Since the Yale
conference, he has published a gnostic novel, The Flight to
Lucifer: A Gnostic Fantasy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
1979), and his critical work, An American Gnosis (New York: Seahurv
Press), at this writing is scheduled for summer 1980
publication.
5Thomas J. J. Altizer, "The Challenge of Modern Gnosticism,"
Journal of Bible and Religion 30 (anuary 1962): 21-22.
6Jonas, pp. 320-40; Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics and
Gnosticism (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1968), p. 83.
21
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TheJournal of Religion
says, is "quite frankly a word to hide our ignorance whether
something is gnostic or not."'
In this context, the "problematic gnosis" of my title
intentionally carries a double reference. It refers, first of all,
in a general sense to the problematic status of "modern gnosticism"
as an interpretative framework for understanding modern
intellectual history. If it has, or can be made to have, any
cogency, modern gnosticism clearly cannot serve as a synonym for
the whole of modern thought. The senses in which it is either
useful or accurate to speak of the gnostic nature of, or gnostic
tendencies in, existentialism, nazism, cosmology, post- modernism,
occultism, or literary theory need to be specified.8 The
specificity must refer to features which are contextually
significant and which continuously inform the text, movement, or
phenomenon in question. Such features naturally must parallel or be
derived from the major structures (usually binary) of traditional
Gnostic thought: the radical dualism of matter and spirit, light
and darkness, good and evil; the opposition between this-worldly
imprisonment and other- worldly salvation; the linking of
psychology, ontology, and soteriology in the paired categories of
sleep/awakening, forgetting/remembering, ignorance/knowledge
(gnosis). Failure to observe the criterion of structural
parallelism (not to speak of historical accuracy) vitiates, for
example, Voegelin's contention that the "gnostic attitude" includes
the belief that the wretched condition of the world will evolve
historically through human action into a better condition, a thesis
which miscon- strues or ignores the antihistorical, atemporal,
nonmeliorative character of Gnosticism.9 A related failure is the
tendency of some writers to indulge in what Fischer has called the
"fallacy of the perfect analogy," the erroneous inference from "a
partial resemblance between two entities . . . to the false
conclusion that they are the same in all respects."10 Thus, the
statement in Time that Gnosticism surfaces
7Th. P. van Baaren, "Towards a Definition of Gnosticism," in
Bianchi, ed., p. 177. 8Some representative works include
Jean-Michel Angebert, The Occult and the Third Reich,
trans. Lewis A. M. Sumberg (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co.,
1974); Scott Charles Croft, "The Gnostic Imagination" (Ph.D. diss.,
Emory University, 1976), pp. 59-154; Josephine Campbell Donovan,
"Gnosticism in Modern Literature: A Study of Selected Works of
Camus, Sartre, Hesse and Kafka" (Ph.D. diss., University of
Wisconsin-Madison, 1971); Maurice Friedman, To Deny Our
Nothingness: Contemporary Images of Modern Man (New York: Delacorte
Press, 1967), pp. 135-87 (Weil,Jung, Hesse); Ihab Hassan, "The New
Gnosticism: Speculations on an Aspect of the Postmodern Mind," in
Paracriticisms (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), pp.
121-47; Raymond Ruyer, La Gnose de Princeton. Des savants a la
recherche d'une religion (Paris: Fayard, 1974).
9Voegelin, pp. 86-88. 'lDavid Hackett Fischer, Historians'
Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York:
Harper & Row, 1970), p. 247.
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Problematic Gnosis
today in "such classics of existentialist despair" as Camus's
The Stranger rests on the unproven assumptions that existentialism
and Gnosticism are sufficiently defined by despair, that the
despair is identical in both, and, for that matter, that The
Stranger is in fact a novel of existentialist despair.11 A similar
example is the familiar practice of describing the modern
literature of alienation as ipso facto gnostic, as though
"alienation" possesses an invariant meaning, regardless of cultural
context. The presence of a single feature, extracted from its
traditional framework, is insufficient justification for
classifying any cultural phenomenon as "gnostic."12
The problematic nature of modern gnosticism involves more,
however, than a conceptual imperialism, intentional or not, arising
from linguistic imprecision and fallacious analogies. Nor is it set
right by a rigid insistence that modern gnosticism, to be worthy of
the name, must adhere to its presumed prototype in every detail.
The far more interesting problem concerns the ways in which
recognizably Gnostic structures function in modern contexts to
produce conclusions and perspectives that diverge markedly from
those of early Gnosti- cism. The heuristic value of modern
gnosticism as an interpretative category must lie in its ability to
identify both the significantly Gnostic and the characteristically
modern qualities of its referents. As a specific case in point, I
wish to devote the remainder of this paper to a consid- eration of
the role of gnosis itself- the concept and the experience of saving
knowledge-in modern gnostic texts. It is my contention that gnosis
enjoys a problematic status in these works - hence, the second and
more specific meaning of "problematic gnosis"-and that the
uncertainty and ambiguity with which it is imbued constitutes its
distinctively modern quality.
I have selected three twentieth-century novels for analysis,
Hermann Hesse's Demian (1919), Isaac Bashevis Singer's Satin in
Goray (1955), and Doris Lessing's Briefingfor a Descent into Hell
(1971). All three are significantly gnostic in the sense that they
are centrally concerned with gnosis as the awakening to or
remembering of saving
""The World-Haters," Time (June 9, 1975), pp. 46-47. '2Altizer
(pp. 19-20) is aware of the problems but does not altogether avoid
them. Donovan's
"Gnosticism in Modern Literature" is explicitly concerned with
alienation and gnosis, but still emphasizes the former at the
expense of the latter and tends to identify gnosis with mysticism.
See also Croft, passim; Bruce Henricksen, "Heart of Darkness and
the Gnostic Myth," Mosaic 11 (Summer 1978): 35; Voegelin, p. 9. A
reading ofJonas's discussion of alienation in Gnostic texts (pp.
49-51, 65, 68-69. 76, 78-79) indicates that it is in fact a highly
ambiguous concept, so much so that it is difficult to determine
whether alienation is the condition, the content, or the
consequence of gnosis. It is certainly an elusive characteristic on
which to pin definitions of modern gnosticism.
23
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TheJournal of Religion
knowledge and in the further sense that they treat gnosis as a
component of the binary structures typical of traditional Gnostic
thought. Only Demian, admittedly, refers to Gnosticism explicitly.
But Satan in Goray draws heavily from Lurianic Kabbalism, which
Scholem has shown to possess numerous and substantial parallels
with Gnosti- cism, and Singer himself ascribes Gnostic origins to
the Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism.13 Briefing for a Descent into
Hell is the most Gnostic of the three in its overall structure. It
also makes considerable use of Gnostic features - the alien
messenger, the prison house of existence, sleep and awakening as
metaphors of the human condition-which Lessing may have derived
from Idries Shah's Sufism, to which she is generally indebted and
for which Shah claims Gnostic roots.14 Each of the novels is set in
a period of historical crisis tantamount to the sense of cosmic
estrangement of which Jonas speaks. Demian culminates in the
apocalyptic bloodbath of World War I; Satan in Goray is situated in
the Jewish communities of seventeenth-century Poland in the wake of
the Chmielnicki massacres and the apocalyptic expectations of a new
Messiah; Briefingfor a Descent into Hell reflects the late 1960s
"bomb culture" and Aquarian consciousness, and its plot, on one
level, contains the possibility of the imminent destruction of the
earth. The fortunes of gnosis in these contexts of crisis, as we
shall see, are of more than individual significance.
Although the novels are significantly gnostic, their tone and
ambiance, as well as the conclusions which emerge from them, are
quite different from those of early Gnosticism. These are, after
all, works of the twentieth century. For them gnosis is
problematic. All three fictions, as might be expected, rely heavily
on dreams, visions, and myths in dealing with gnosis. But each also
associates gnosis
"3Gershom G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 3d rev.
ed. (1954; reprint ed., New York: Schocken Books, 1961), pp. 117,
175 (early Kabbalism a Gnostic system), chap. 7, esp. pp. 267,
279-80 (Lurianic Kabbalism); and Kabbalah (1974; reprint ed., New
York: Meridian Books, 1978), pp. 5, 74-76. For Singer, see
"Interview," Inner Space 1 (November 1970): 8.
141 know of no evidence that Lessing is directly familiar with
Gnosticism. On Sufism, see Nancy Shields Hardin, "Doris Lessing and
the Sufi Way," Contemporary Literature 14 (Autumn 1973): 565-81;
Idries Shah, The Sufis (1964; reprint ed., Garden City, N.Y.:
Anchor Books, 1971), pp. 29, 55, 419-20. Lessing quotes from the
Sufi poet Rumi on sleep/awakening in her earlier novel, The
Four-gated City (1969; reprint ed., New York: Bantam Books, 1970),
p. 448. The sleep image for the condition of modern alienated man
is also found in R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience
(Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1967), p. 24, a work
which has long been considered a direct source for Lessing's novel.
But Roberta Rubenstein, The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing:
Breaking the Forms of Consciousness (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1979), pp. 179, 196-97, n. 7, where Lessing is reported as
saying that she had not read Laing at the time of writing the
novel. On her general relationship to Laing's ideas, see Marion
Vlastos, "Doris Lessing and R. D. Laing: Psychopolitics and
Prophecy," Publications of the Modern Language Association
ofAmerica (PMLA) 91 (March 1976): 245-58.
24
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Problematic Gnosis
with the possibility or actuality of mental disturbance, from
severe emotional upset (Demian) to schizophrenia (Briefing) and
possession (Satan in Goray). Each is also self-consciously aware of
the demonic potential of gnosis; the titles alone give us "demon"
(from "daimon," whence "Demian"), "Satan," and "Hell." Gnosis is
presented as an experience or condition which cannot always be
differentiated from or avoid falling into delusion, mental
disorder, and the demonic. Far from being the self-authenticating
experience it appears to be in traditional Gnosticism, gnosis
enjoys no privileged status of impera- tive clarity in these modern
fictions.
"Problematic gnosis" takes on additional meaning when it is
viewed from the perspective of those interpretations of modern
gnosticism which emphasize the immanentization and psychologization
of the metaphysical framework of ancient Gnosticism. In his
influential essay on "Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism,"
Jonas writes that he was struck by the "reciprocal illumination"
provided by his studies of Heideggerian philosophy and ancient
Gnosticism, particularly with regard to their common sense of
cosmic estrangement. Even so, he does not claim that existentialism
and Gnosticism are identical in all respects or that the sense of
cosmic estrangement is the same. The decisive difference is that
the nihilism and alienation of Gnosticism were still located within
a metaphysical framework which gave intrinsic meaning to the drama
of cosmic conflict and ascribed divine origin and destiny to
humanity. 5 Through gnosis the meaning of the alienated human
condition and the process by which it could be transcended were
revealed. Disorientating as the revelation of truth would no doubt
be, it would also give new assurance and new direc- tion. Gnosis
and alienation are inextricably coupled in a soteriology which
insists on the existence of absolute truth and the possibility of
knowing it. The very act of coming to know the truth effects an
ontological transformation in the individual from a state of
ignorance to one of saving knowledge (gnosis).16 Gnosticism thus
insists on a
15Jonas, p. 335. It is questionable whether Jonas gives
sufficient emphasis to the point (cf. Roland Crahay, "Elements
d'une mythopee gnostique dans la Grece classique," in Bianchi, ed.,
pp. 323-25; and Edward Conze, "Buddhism and Gnosticism," in
Bianchi, ed., p. 666, n. 3). Jonas also tends to equate
"estrangement" and "alienation"; the former should not, therefore,
be confused with "estrangement" as it is used by Brecht and recent
critics of science fiction in the sense of "defamiliarization" (see
Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction [New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1979], pp. 3-15).
'6Jonas, pp. 34-35, 45, 68-73, 80-86; George MacRae, "Sleep and
Awakening in Gnostic Texts," in Bianchi, ed., pp. 496-507; Mircea
Eliade, "Mythologies of Memory and Forgetting," in Myth and
Reality, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper & Row,
1963), pp. 114-38, esp. pp. 126-34.
25
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TheJournal of Religion
series of correspondences between metaphysics, cosmology,
episte- mology, and soteriology. Commentators on modern gnosticism,
whatever their other differences, largely agree that in the post-
Nietzschean world the radical dualism of traditional Gnosticism-the
radical separation in origin and essence of humanity and the world,
the world and God-has been displaced from the metaphysical to the
immanent. In this view the death of God signifies that the
dualistic opposition between humanity and an "indifferent" universe
cannot originate in intrinsically opposed metaphysical principles
of spirit and matter, good and evil, light and darkness. Instead,
the polarization is said to be immanent within the historical
process (Voegelin), the psyche (Jung, Quispel), or the human
condition (onas). The Gnostic prison house is no longer the cosmos,
the handiwork of an inimical demiurge; it is now our own minds,
where the polar opposites func- tion as categories for states of
consciousness and degrees of knowledge: ignorance/knowledge,
sleep/awakening, forgetting/remembering, alienation/enlightenment
(gnosis).
The psychological or subjectivist interpretation is by no means
confined to modern forms of gnosticism, as readers of Jung,
Quispel, and Grant know. Grant's conclusion that "the Gnostic
approach to life is . . . a 'passionate subjectivity' which counts
the world well lost for the sake of self-discovery" is applicable
to ancient and modern gnosticism alike. 17 The psychological
approach has the merit of calling attention to the centrality of
self-recognition in gnosis, while simul- taneously suggesting the
crucial point of difference between ancient and modern gnosis. In
traditional Gnosticism, gnosis is recognition, not only
linguistically but also literally: a regaining or relearning of
knowledge once known but subsequently forgotten or repressed in the
prison house of matter and flesh. It is self-knowledge of the self
in its universal aspect, its origin and essence, its plight and
purpose. Gnosis entails diagnosis and prognosis, but always within
a metaphysical framework. Without this supporting framework, modern
gnosis appears to be more aptly described as self-cognition, a
knowing for the first time. In an immanent cosmos, there is no
ontologically prior divine source to be known, no universal inner
essence (pneuma) to do the knowing. What then is cognized in modern
self-gnosis? In the
17Robert M. Grant, Gnosticism and Early Christianity, rev. ed.
(New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966), p. 9. Cf. Bloom, Poetry and
Repression (n. 4 above), p. 11; and the modern French gnostic,
Jacques Lacarriere, The Gnostics, trans. Nina Rootes (New York: E.
P. Dutton, 1977), p. 128. See also Gilles Quispel, "Gnostic Man:
The Doctrine of Basilides," The Mystic Vision, Papers from the
Eranos Yearbooks, vol. 6 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1968), pp. 235-46.
26
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Problematic Gnosis
absence of metaphysical certainty, how can there be confidence
in the authenticity of gnosis and the validity of its revelations?
Can gnosis be distinguished from delusion, dream, and madness, or
are these the forms gnosis now takes? These questions are
consciously posed by Demian, Satan in Goray, and Briefingfor a
Descent into Hell. 18
Demian, Hesse's first novel following his Jungian analysis in
1916-17, teems with Gnostic allusions. The most familiar are
Demian's well-known reinterpretation of the Cain story (pp. 24-27;
GD, pp. 124-28) and the god Abraxas, one of several symbols of the
coincidentia oppositorum (pp. 76-78, 84, 93-94; GD, pp. 184-87,
194, 203-4). Ziolkowski notes that "an elaborate study could be
written on Hesse's interest in Gnosticism and on the historical
significance of Abraxas, of which Hesse was aware."'9 His Gnostic
interests perhaps originated during his analysis with the Jungian
Josef B. Lang (Pistorius in Demian). Jung remembered Lang as being
"particularly interested in Gnostic speculation. He got from me a
considerable amount of knowledge concerning Gnosticism which he
also trans- mitted to Hesse. From this material he [Hesse] wrote
his Demian."20 Quispel has speculated that Hesse derived his
conception of Abraxas from Septem sermones ad mortuos, Jung's
gnostic vision of 1916, which is written in the persona of
Basilides and contains the same bipolar Abraxas. Neither this
Abraxas nor the teachings of Jung's Basilides correspond, Quispel
shows, to the teachings of the historical Basilides.21 But a
recently discovered letter by Jung to Hesse in appreciation of
Demian rather cryptically hints at a secret connection betweenJung
and Demian: "I could tell you a little secret about Demian of which
you became the witness, but whose meaning you have concealed from
the reader and perhaps also from yourself." Little light has been
shed on this statement so far, but the editors of Jung's
correspondence believe, because of further comments in the same
'8Editions of the novels used are Demian, trans. Michael Roloff
and Michael Lebeck (1965; reprint ed., New York: Bantam Books,
1966) (German text in Hesse's Gesammelte Dichtungen, 6 vols.
[Berlin and Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1952], vol. 3 [cited as GD]; Satan
in Goray, trans. Jacob Sloan (New York: Noonday Press, 1955);
Briefingfor a Descent into Hell (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.,
1971). Page references to these editions will be cited
parenthetically in the text.
'9Theodore Ziolkowski, The Novels of Hermann Hesse (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 110; Donovan (pp.
149-52, 177, 271-82) does not achieve this in her often inaccurate
discussion of Demian.
20C. G. Jung, Letters, I: 1906-1950, ed. Gerhard Adler and
Aniela Jaffe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973),
pp. 551-52 (letter to Emanuel Maier, March 24, 1950); Ziolkowski,
p. 126.
21Gilles Quispel, "Hesse, Jung und die Gnosis: Die 'Septem
Sermones ad Mortuos' und Basilides," in Gnostic Studies, 2 vols.
(Istanbul: Nederlands Historisch-Archaeologisch Instituut te
Istanbul, 1975), 2:241-58, esp. pp. 241-43.
27
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The Journal of Religion
letter, that Jung may have enclosed a copy of the Septem
sermones with it. They also call attention to Jung's mandala
painting of 1916, which contains the figures of Abraxas and a
winged egg reminiscent of the symbolism in Demian (p. 76; GD, pp.
184-85).22 One wonders if Hesse had in fact seen either the
painting or the manuscript of the Septem sermones before writing
his novel.
Demian recounts the story of Emil Sinclair from the age of ten
to about twenty, his coming into awareness of the conflicting
worlds of light (his parents' home) and darkness (the outside
world, danger, sex, the shadow), his increasing torment as he
struggles to reconcile the opposites at war within himself, and his
journey toward the Nietz- schean condition of existence beyond
opposites. The goal is symbolized for Sinclair in his numerous
dreams, his art, and his life by the successive images of Beatrice,
Abraxas, and his friend Max Demian and Demian's mother Frau Eva.
After a literally apocalyptic experi- ence on a Flemish battlefield
during the First World War (pp. 138-39; GD, pp. 254-55), he
achieves this state by discovering his friend, master, and savior
Demian as his inner self (daimon). Overall, then, the story is not
Gnostic. It moves through the Jungian archetypal realm, without
portraying the external world as evil or inimical, although any
deep affinity with it has been lost, and instead moves toward the
position of accepting both good and evil as encompassed within the
larger totality of the self. Moreover, Sinclair's apocalyptic
rebirth is explicitly placed in an evolutionary, historical context
in which the birth of a new humanity is also occurring (pp. 115-16,
122- 25, 131, 135, 138-39; GD, pp. 227-29, 236-39, 247, 250-51,
254-55).
Gnostic material is framed, therefore, by an antignostic evolu-
tionary philosophy; yet it is significant that Hesse uses
gnosticism at all and that he radically internalizes it into a
psychological and spiritual quest. Hesse's comments on the Cain
episode are revealing in this connection. As far as he knew, the
Cain story in Demian was entirely his own creation, yet he later
wrote to a correspondent, "I could well imagine that something
similar might be found in the
22Jung, pp. 573-74 (letter to Hesse, December 3, 1919). See also
C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (ed. AnielaJaffe, rev.
ed. [New York: Vintage Books, 1965], pp. 189-91, 195), for his
account of the writing of the Septem sermones (which are printed as
app. 5, pp. 378-90) and his first mandala painting. During the
International Conference on Gnosticism at Yale in 1978, Quispel's
reproduction ofJung's mandala painting was on display in the
Beinecke Library. The display card stated that it was painted after
Jung completed the Septem sermones. The painting is reproduced in
color as the frontispiece to Jung's The Archetypes and the
Collective Unconscious, 2d ed. (Collected Works, vol. 9, pt. 1)
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968), and to his
paperback collection from the same publisher, Mandala Symbolism
(1972).
28
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Problematic Gnosis
Gnostics. What in those days was called theology is more like
psycho- logy for men of today, but the basic truths are the
same."23
One such "basic truth" for Hesse is the daimon, the higher self,
which functions in Demian as the pneuma vis-a-vis the ordinary self
(psyche). Max Demian, whatever his status as an independent person,
is Sinclair's daimon; his face is timeless, androgynous, and
daimonic (pp. 33, 43, 69-70, 103; GD, pp. 135, 146-47, 176-78,
215). It is Demian who tells him, "It's good to realize that within
us there is someone who knows everything, wills everything, does
everything better than we ourselves" (p. 72; GD, pp. 180-81), and
it is Demian, whom Sinclair regards as friend, liberator, savior,
and master (pp. 36, 141; GD, pp. 139, 257), who tells Sinclair at
the end, "If you call me then I won't come crudely, on horseback or
by train. You'll have to listen within yourself, then you will
notice that I am within you" (p. 140; GD, p. 256). The daimon is
the only god, the inner self. In Plato, the daimon is intermediate
between man and the hidden gods,24 but for Hesse, the diamon is the
hidden god, in the form of the potentially knowable inner self. The
task is arduous and apparently undertaken only by an elite. In the
final stage, it becomes an urgent matter of life and death: World
War I, the death of Demian, the rebirth of Sinclair. The gnosis or
recognition of the inner self is harsh; the price is great. With
the next novel, the price is too great.
For Isaac Bashevis Singer, who believes in God as the universal
plan and in the existence of demons and spirits,25 the higher
powers do not reveal themselves easily either. But in his allegory
of obsession and possession, the people of Goray are bemused by
Messianic expectations and respond with fervent antinomianism. The
controlling themes of their lives are homelessness and restoration,
pollution and purification. Their physical existence is precarious
in the aftermath of the 1648 massacres by the Ukrainian Cossacks.
Their mental universe is their general sense, as Jews, of
uprootedness and exile. It is rein- forced by the Lurianic
Kabbalistic (Gnostic) doctrines of the unknow- able infinite
(En-Sof), which contracts into itself to make room for
23Ziolkowski, p. 122. On Cain, seeJonas, pp. 94-96. 24See Plato
Symposium 202D13-203A6, and discussion in E. R. Dodds, Pagan and
Christian in
an Age ofAnxiety (1965; reprinted., New York: W. W. Norton Co.,
1970), p. 37. 25Interviews in Irving Malin, ed., Critical Views of
Isaac Bashevis Singer (New York: New York
University Press, 1969), pp. 22-23, 41-42. Singer's personal
belief in transcendence does not invalidate the immanentist
interpretation presented here. The point of the novel does not
depend upon the actual existence of demons and angels, and the
testimony of the only character in the novel to have intercourse
with such beings cannot be relied upon and simply strengthens
Singer's point about the delusional and psychotic tendencies of
obsession.
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TheJournal of Religion
creation, and of the breaking of the vessels and the scattering
of the divine light. There is also the superstitious dread of the
dibbuk, the homeless or exiled soul of an unrighteous person which
seeks victims to possess. But there is the additional sense that
restoration of the light is possible, that it may be accelerated by
the righteous person, and that it will be consummated by the
Messiah, with whom the redemption of all things takes place. The
1648 massacres are interpreted kabbalistic- ally as the beginning
of the final battle for redemption; the 1665-66 explosion of
Sabbatian Messianism marks the coming of the final days; and
Sabbatai Zevi's own antinomian behavior is widely accepted as
exemplifying the right path for redeeming a polluted world.26
In Goray the people hunger for salvation and news of the
Messiah. The Sabbatians soon dominate the community. Gnostic
inversion of custom and law is openly performed. The town's
obsession literally leads to possession. We are told that with the
Sabbatians come "the others," that is, demons, who defeat the good
rabbi and infect the populace (pp. 105, 114; cf. p. 90). The only
individual in the story who may be said to experience a gnosis of
sorts is possessed by a dibbuk and impregnated by Satan-or so she
believes. This is Rechele, successively the wife of two leading
Sabbatians. Her "call" comes from the Angel Sandalfon, lord of the
seventh heaven in the Zohar and opponent of Samael (Satan), who
reveals to her that her prayers "have penetrated the seven
firmaments." She is to proclaim to the people that full redemption
will come at the new year. The Angel also praises Reb Gedaliya,
kabbalist and Sabbatian leader of Goray, as a "saintly" and "godly"
man, "worthy, like Elijah, to behold the face of the Divine
Presence" (pp. 154-55). But the "worthy" Reb Gedaliya is later
denounced as a denier of the faith, an apostate, and even, for
some, Samael (Satan) himself (pp. 227, 238).
Apostasy and demonism are linked in Rechele too. She is visited
nightly by angels and prophets, among them Elijah, until news is
received of Sabbatai's conversion to Islam. Those who remain
faithful to Sabbatai Zevi divide themselves, much as in Jonas's
account of Gnostic morality,27 between world-denying ascetics who
believe that final redemption can come only when every individual
is pure, and nihilistic libertines who believe that the last
generation must be fully guilty before redemption can take place.
It is the latter group that prevails in Goray. Upon hearing the
news, Rechele begins to experi-
26Scholem (n. 13 above), chaps. 7-8, passim; Jacob Sloan,
"Translator's Preface," Satan in Goray, pp. vii-xi.
27Jonas, pp. 46-47.
30
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Problematic Gnosis
ence struggles between "the Sacred and the Profane" (the title
of chap. 11 in pt. 2) within herself, with the Profane growing ever
stronger, until as Satan it rapes her. Her announcement that she is
pregnant by Satan and carries a dibbuk within her awakens the
townspeople to their condition. The narrative abruptly switches
form in the final two chapters to that of a folktale which
admonishes the people to return to God's ways. It recounts in
gruesome detail the purification by exorcism of Rechele and the
restoration of Goray to the right path. Pollution by the profane
has been overcome. The tale's moral is that none should attempt to
force the Lord, who will act in his own good time to send a Messiah
and end the exile (p. 239). In Satan in Goray, the awakening is
deceptive and the Messiah false. Gnostic Kabbalism, when carried to
obsessive antinomian extremes, leads only to demonic possession, an
allegorical conclusion about the nature of group obses- sions which
may also apply for Singer to Nazi Germany and possibly to the
witch-hunting trials of McCarthyism (recalling in this connec- tion
another contemporary work, Arthur Miller's The Crucible [1953]), in
progress when the novel was written.
The third novel I wish to discuss, Doris Lessing's Briefingfor a
Descent into Hell, illustrates almost perfectly Jonas's description
of the alien stranger (the Gnostic Messenger) who finds this world
incompre- hensible:
Then it suffers the lot of the stranger who is lonely,
unprotected, uncompre- hended, and uncomprehending in a situation
full of danger. Anguish and homesickness are a part of the
stranger's lot. The stranger who does not know the ways of the
foreign land wanders about lost; if he learns its ways too well, he
forgets that he is a stranger and gets lost in a different sense by
succumbing to the lure of the alien world and becoming estranged
from his own origin.... The recollection of his own alienness, the
recognition of his place of exile for what it is, is the first step
back, the awakened homesickness is the beginning of the
return.28
So it is, on one level of this complex novel about illusion and
reality, for Charles Watkins, professor of classics, mental
patient, and--just possibly-Gnostic Messenger.29 Lessing skillfully
employs alternating
28Ibid., pp. 49-50. 29The gnostic nature of the novel has not
been noticed by most critics. Douglass Bolling does
refer to it once in his "Structure and Theme in Briefingfor a
Descent into Hell" (Contemporary Literature 14 [Autumn 1973]: 556);
and Mary Ann Singleton (The City and the Veld: The Fiction of Doris
Lessing [Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1977], pp.
144-56, 214-18) draws on alchemy, as well as Sufism, Jung, and
Laing. To these Rubenstein adds the teachings of Gurdjieff in the
best analysis of the novel to date (n. 14 above) (chap. 7).
31
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The Journal of Religion
viewpoints to keep open the question of Watkins's "sanity" until
the end of the book. Found wandering in an amnesiac state, Watkins
is first seen through the hospital reports of Drs. X, Y, and Z and
through his own fragmented fantasies of sailing Odysseus-like over
a strange ocean. He is clearly disturbed. Then we are plunged into
a lengthy, coherent, and absorbing first-person account by Watkins
of his adven- tures upon landing on an unknown island. From a
Jungian or Laingian perspective, his account holds the greatest
interest, for it is apparent that his is a journey through the
psyche, a self-healing journey which depends upon encountering
repressed portions of himself. (In the introductory matter of the
book, between the dedica- tion and epigraph pages, Lessing has
inserted an additional page which reads: "Category: Inner-Space
Fiction. For there is never anywhere to go but in.") When Watkins
progresses to the requisite level of understanding, he is carried
away by a crystal disc from the mandala-center of a deserted city
and transported to a meeting of the Olympian gods. From their
briefing report, we learn that the earth is moving into a severe
crisis which can have disastrous cosmic conse- quences. But
humanity, living in a poisoned atmosphere (both meteorological and
mental), refuses to understand its plight. Mentally restricted by
the religion of science, earthlings are oblivious to the cosmic
harmony which they are disrupting. The danger requires the
Olympians to attempt once more to send messengers down into the
poisonous hell of earth to awaken some at least to the peril at
hand and call them back to cosmic harmony. Yet the danger of the
poisoned atmosphere is great; messengers may easily succumb to it,
falling asleep and forgetting their origin and their
assignment.
The reader is by now convinced that Watkins is one of these
messengers. We see him next, in fact, as an infant, struggling to
stay awake but eventually accepting the need to sleep to please his
parents; then he appears as the hospital patient whose restlessness
requires heavy sedation. Is he struggling toward gnosis (memory),
or are his "memories" really drug-induced hallucinations? There
follows a lengthy selection of letters from individuals who know
him as Watkins-his wife, his mistress, friends, colleagues. Their
accounts of his life shed new light. Some of his real-life
activities now appear to be fabrications on his part, while some of
his fantasies clearly have roots in real-life experiences. Doubts
about his sanity briefly reassert them- selves. Yet one
correspondent at least regards Watkins as enlightened and claims
that she was "stung awake" by one of his lectures (p. 182). Perhaps
then the discrepancies between the reports of others and his own
are indicative, not of a mental problem, but of his honest struggle
to extract higher truths and memories from the poisoned sleep
that
32
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Problematic Gnosis
is his (and our) normal existence. Finally, with the reader now
sharing Watkins's urgent sense that time is running out, Watkins
risks electric shock treatment in the hope that he will fully
remember. The outcome, not surprisingly, is that he is "cured,"
that is, he is restored to his old personality, his worrisome
fantasies a thing of the past. He is normal, which is to say dull
and, in effect, doomed (pp. 305-6). Lessing's message is clear: our
"sanity" is really "insanity," and that which we diagnose as mental
illness may represent true sanity. Watkins's final decision to rely
on mechanistic science to achieve full consciousness is as fateful
as it is expressive of the modern condition.
Lessing uses the Gnostic metaphors of sleep/waking and the
prison house of existence effectively. Wakins is strongly aware
that the unawakened life is like a prison: "it was a life so heavy
and dismal and alien to me," he says during the island episode,
"that to go to sleep was like entering a prison cell" (p. 69; cf.
pp. 241-42). While drugged in the hospital and outwardly asleep,
inwardly he is still fighting toward memory. When he is aroused
from sedation, he can only tell the doctors that this is not really
being awake at all-"Awake is asleep" (p. 165)-and that he has never
slept less in his life (p. 68). But he must continually struggle
against the drugs:
In mental hospitals where the millions who have cracked, making
cracks where the light could shine through at last, the pills are
like food pellets dropped into battery chickens' food hoppers,
SLEEP, the needles slide into the outstretched arms, SLEEP, the
rubber tubes strapped to arms drip, SLEEP.
SLEEP, for you are not yet dead. I must wake up. I have to wake
up. [P. 154]
The role of the doctors reveals a startling reversal of Gnostic
cosmology. The cosmos is not hostile or alien, but a harmony from
which humanity has divorced itself. Gnosis is intended to bring
humanity back into the cosmos, not help humanity to escape from it.
The archons, therefore, are not the Olympian gods of the planetary
spheres, but Drs. X, Y, and Z, who keep Watkins trapped in their
prison-hospital with consciousness-lowering drugs and dehumanizing
science. In Lessing's cautionary tale, gnosis has no chance at
all.
Hesse, Singer, and Lessing have each explored a different aspect
of gnosis in their novels, with different results. In Demian we see
gnosis as the culmination of an arduous, painful growth toward
awakening the pneuma, an eventuality which only a few can hope to
realize. Satan in Goray depicts Gnostic cosmology and antinomianism
as the framework for a false awakening, an obsession that becomes
posses- sion. Emil Sinclair manages to find his path and his
daimon; the
33
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TheJournal of Religion
villagers of Goray stray from the lawful path and find only
demons. Briefingfor a Descent into Hell shows the plight of the
Gnostic Messenger, struggling between sleep and waking, ultimately
surrendering to forgetfulness. From the evidence of these fictions,
gnosis is difficult to attain, its consequences are unforeseen and
often undesirable, and its revealed "truths" may be highly
ambivalent, so much so that delusion and enlightenment no longer
seem self-evident opposites.
That the experience of gnosis is problematic in these texts
under- scores the problematic status of the concept of modern
gnosticism in contemporary historical and cultural analysis. Modern
gnosticism cannot be defined usefully without specifying the
components which constitute its modernity and its gnosticism. I
have argued that the gnostic quality must encompass, parallel, or
derive from the major structures of early Gnostic thought. It
cannot isolate a single feature from the larger Gnostic context
that includes its binary.30 Alienation without enlightenment, for
example, is not gnostic, ancient or modern. This criterion alone
invalidates or limits much that is written about modern gnosticism.
But this is not to say that the alienation and the enlightenment of
modern gnosticism must be identical with their prototypes of the
second and third centuries. Modern gnosticism is not ancient
Gnosticism in the twentieth century. The modernity of modern
gnosticism is not a chronological property, but a function of the
displacement of recognizably Gnostic structures from an ontology of
metaphysical transcendence to a psychology of immanence, rela-
tivity, and imputed rather than inherent meaning. It is not
psychologi- zation per se that is distinctive of modern gnosticism,
since the exploration of the psyche was explicitly a religious
quest for some ancient Gnostics and a variety of modern thinkers
since the Romantics have situated the drama of redemption in the
imagination, uncon- scious, or psyche of the individual.31 The
distinctive feature is instead the effect of the displacement upon
the traditional Gnostic message. Without the supporting framework
of a metaphysics, psychologized gnosticism loses its orientation.
Gnosis itself is transformed from a condition of saving
enlightenment to one of troubling uncertainty.
In this connection, Friedman is certainly correct in pointing
out that a modern gnostic like Jung does not literally believe in
the ancient Gnostic myths but interprets them instead as symbols of
psychic
30Cf. van Baaren (n. 7 above), pp. 174-76. 31Elaine Pagels, The
Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979), pp. 122-23,
134-35;
M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution
in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton Co., 1971), pp.
117-22; Franklin L. Baumer, Religion and the Rise of Scepticism
(New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1960), pp. 230-92.
34
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Problematic Gnosis
processes. Yet Friedman argues that Jung did believe in the
validity of his own myth and its power to liberate and redeem the
modern individual.32 The crucial point, however, is not that a
modern gnostic may substitute a psychologized myth for a
transcendental one, but rather the difficulty of establishing a
basis for the validity of gnosis itself. Friedman does not allow
for the possibility of problematic gnosis. His twofold
classification of modern gnostics into those who follow a
traditional Gnostic emphasis upon a hidden, transcendent God not
connected to this world (Simone Weil, Nicolas Berdyaev) and those
who replace the transcendent God with a more modern emphasis on the
divinity found within the self (Jung, Hesse) fails to bring out
that it is precisely the difficulty of knowing or finding
transcendence and divinity which troubles them.33 The certainty
that the self contains divinity or that self-knowledge is
equivalent to knowledge of God (salvation) is itself in doubt. The
equation is broken. The radical dualism of Gnosticism, when
internalized, creates self-division and uncertainty. Nor does there
seem to be confidence that a solution can be found. Of the three
novels, only Demian approaches the question of divinity within the
psyche. It is revealing that Hesse equates the hidden god within
with the daimon in the literal sense of an inter- mediate being, at
best a guiding genius or guardian angel, not a true deity; further,
that the final revelation of the daimon must be legiti- mized by
occurring within the context of an evolutionary, historical
philosophy coupled with an apocalyptic vision of the birth of a new
humanity. The validation of gnosis in this instance requires an
appeal to historical and religious authority. That even Jung's
considerable effort to place the individuation process, which he
saw also as a redemptive process, on a nonsubjective basis has not
won wide accept- ance simply reinforces the conclusion that gnosis
as a psychological category of salvation has become in the modern
context an object and a vehicle of uncertainty.
The oxymoron "problematic gnosis" does directly continue at
least one traditional gnostic characteristic; reversal or
inversion. The reversed meaning of gnosis in the modern context
represented by the novels of Hesse, Singer, and Lessing parallels
the Gnostic inversion of Christian and Jewish belief about the
nature of the world and God. Jung introduces the Heraclitean term
enantiodromia in his essay on "The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man"
to describe the modern turn away from the external world toward the
unconscious and the psyche, a
32Friedman (n. 8 above), pp. 148, 152. 33Ibid., pp. 135-36,
146-47.
35
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The Journal of Religion
development reflected by the interest in depth psychology and
the popularity of occult currents which he associates with
Gnosticism.34 By extension, this "conversion toward the opposite"
may also cover the reversal of gnosis from certainty to
uncertainty.
Although upon analysis modern gnosticism has proven to be an
ambiguous concept, it is possible to see that an essential
component of its modernity is the ambiguity of its gnosis. Green
has argued the need for more precise definitions to guide motif
studies of ancient Gnosticism;35 in the case of modern gnosticism,
motif and thematic studies may help clarify the definition. In the
texts examined here, the theme of problematic gnosis is crucial.
Gnosis in effect becomes diagnosis. It is less a condition of
saving knowledge than a modern metaphor of the contingent human
condition, vulnerable alike to doubt, delusion, and the
demonic.
34C. G. Jung, "The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man," Collected
Works, vol. 10, Civilization in Transition, 2d ed., trans. R. F. C.
Hull (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 82-84
(originally published 1931).
35Henry A. Green, "Gnosis and Gnosticism: A Study in
Methodology," Numen 24 (August 1977): 121.
36
Article Contentsp. 20p. 21p. 22p. 23p. 24p. 25p. 26p. 27p. 28p.
29p. 30p. 31p. 32p. 33p. 34p. 35p. 36
Issue Table of ContentsThe Journal of Religion, Vol. 61, No. 1
(Jan., 1981), pp. 1-126Front MatterThe God beyond God: Theology and
Mysticism in the Thought of Meister Eckhart [pp. 1 - 19]Problematic
Gnosis: Hesse, Singer, Lessing, and the Limitations of Modern
Gnosticism [pp. 20 - 36]Traditional Religion, Modernity, and
Unthinkable Thoughts [pp. 37 - 58]Two Phases in Wieman's Thought:
Wieman's Concept of the Divine [pp. 59 - 72]Review ArticlesArt,
Experience, and Augustinian Intelligence [pp. 73 - 80]Gifts of
Grace: Lewalski on English Protestant Poetics [pp. 81 - 87]On
Interpreting Kierkegaard [pp. 88 - 93]
Book Reviewsuntitled [pp. 94 - 96]untitled [pp. 96 - 99]untitled
[pp. 99 - 101]untitled [pp. 101 - 102]untitled [pp. 102 -
104]untitled [pp. 104 - 106]untitled [pp. 106 - 107]untitled [pp.
108 - 109]untitled [pp. 110 - 111]untitled [pp. 111 - 113]untitled
[pp. 113 - 115]untitled [pp. 115 - 117]untitled [pp. 117 -
119]untitled [pp. 119 - 120]untitled [pp. 120 - 122]untitled [pp.
122 - 123]untitled [pp. 123 - 125]untitled [pp. 125 - 126]
Back Matter