One of the best images around. Whoever did the cover illustration had a brilliant moment.
One of the reasons for my appreciation of Gnosticism is that its mythology, while not solving the problem of evil, placed the responsibility for the suffering and death in the world on the Creator rather than laying that burden on the shoulders of humanity. In orthodox Western monotheism, Christianity most especially, the created world became a place of moral and physical pain as a result of creaturely choice. Because of creatures, the Creation fell, cracked, broke apart, was perverted from its pristine original order.
In the complex theological myths of the Gnostics, it was a conflict within the divine world which gave rise to a creation that was therefore flawed from its very inception. Creation happened not as the free thought of an all powerful, wise and loving One, but as the messy working out of an internal divine drama. In this world, there never really was a Paradise. Suffering, death and moral evil were all built into it prior to the emergence of man. Who did not wreck the world by his free choice, but found himself inside a system he had no hand in building, and yet, as part of it, had to cope with.
Which more accurately describes, I think, both psychologically and evolutionarily, the human predicament, dilemma and condition.
2 comments:
If there is a tragic view of history, Gnosticism is it. Yet it is quite common to find among contemporary devotees of the Gnostics an utterly romantic view of human nature. Somehow the Children of the Sixties need to turn everything into flowers, even though the path from Haight Ashbury's Summer of Love to the Hells Angels murders at Altamont is pretty direct.
I have little knowledge in these things, but I wonder what the Valentian etc explanation or explanations are for the eagerness of the Dark God to play the laid rôle in the psycho-drama and this right within the material realm that he is said to control.
Couldn't the Dark God by this time have arranged to shut out the God of Light from the dark, material realm? As it is, the Dark God takes the karmic blame for all the "necessity" "brokenness" "problems" etc that escapist Gnostic man confronts in terms of "coping."
... As Thrasymachos in the Republic is satisfy'd that the Socratic founding of wisdom-loving politics will employ his métier rhetoric for dominating obedient will-to-power, the biblical Satan is perhaps satisfy'd that his authority methods (ego-huffiness, upper-class contempt, lower-class ressentiment, slave revolt in morals, the oikoumene or mammon of mystery and miracle, etc) provide the spiritual path for getting God out of the jam resulting when He made man in His image male and female and the everything system was too beautiful as is for man to long for self-overcoming (Nietzsche, Ecce Homo re BGE ¶2 end).
I think Jung remarks that except for Satan the "sons of Elohim" don't amount to much. (Gabriel in Islam and in Christianity does seem rather a simple functionary.)
Why doesn't the Dark God of Gnosticism ask for the sort of consideration that the Bible and the Quran gives the Shaitan? ... Even Mick pleads, »So if you meet me, have some courtesy, have some sympathy, and some taste.«
Marxist materialism permits the 'base' to claim credit for the interestingness of the "superstructure."
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