Strange Fantasies
Everyone loves the Gnostics. Reading Gibbon the other day I came across this:
The Gnostics were distinguished as the most polite, the
most learned, and the most wealthy of the Christian name… (The
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volume One)
Years ago I had a discussion with a friend who argued that
no mean or self-centred purpose lay behind Gnostic beliefs. Their ideas, he said, were a sign of
intellectual purity; for what material reason could cause people to believe
something so obviously otherworldly and good?
The Gnostics were ugly. Their bodies dominated by terrible sores, scabs, bruises and
defective body parts.
Wealthy? Yes. Learned? Yes. But ultimately a social eyesore, best locked away in
the libraries of distant villas, on the borders of the empire.[i]
Wouldn’t it be natural for them to believe that goodness
is within, that it is materially invisible, and that only they, in their secret
cults of ugliness, can fathom and explore it? And so begins their ideological war, removing the beauty from life; pulling out teeth and hair; scratching the rich fine cheeks of young
women, mutilating the men and tattooing them with obscenities… Not that they recommend these
actions. Oh no. They are far too good, too pure and
nice, too cultured and civilised, for that. Rather, it is their influence, the atmosphere their
teachings create, that leads the beautiful people to deface themselves; to rip
their clothes and smear their faces with muck and dirt; those once fashionable
signs of mystic grace.
Gnosticism: the repulsive’s sect.
Or here’s another theory: the Gnostics were the refined intellectuals
of their day. Gibbon, influenced
by the ideas of his time, particularly Montesquieu, ascribes their beliefs to
the climate:
… their principal founders seem to have been natives of Syria
or Egypt, where the warmth of the climate disposes the mind and the body to
indolent and contemplative devotion.
The Gnostics blended with the faith of Christ many sublime but obscure
tenets, which they derived from oriental philosophy, and even from the religion
of Zoroaster, concerning the eternity of matter, the existence of two
principles, and the mysterious hierarchy of the invisible world. As soon as they launched out into that
vast abyss, they delivered themselves to the guidance of a disordered
imagination; and as the paths of error are various and infinite, the Gnostics
were imperceptibly divided into more than fifty particular sects…
What we have here is a description of a specific kind of
intellectual, who loses himself in metaphysical speculation; and which the
Enlightenment, of which Gibbon was a major part, was opposed – everything must
succumb to the experimental method; all will be science or it will be
nonsense. David Hume, in his more
generous mood, as we have seen,[iii] was more circumspect, recognising the need for metaphysics, but wary of its
dangers; its vast emptiness; suggesting instead that we pay attention only to what
we can know of reality; those tough and often impenetrable facts.
But Gibbon may give us a clue to a certain kind
intellectual, of which we see more and more, particularly in the humanities departments of our universities, that other warm climate, whose entire thought
is pure metaphysics; though dressed in the latest fashionable materialism –
Post-modernism.
In the Eastern part of the Roman Empire the wealthy and
cultured would have a vested interest in distancing themselves from the reality
around them: don’t look too closely at the source of your wealth, the means by
which your leisure is secured, their newly minted Christian conscience would have said.
Whatever you do, do not stare facts in the face! And how easy it all becomes, to lose
oneself within one’s own labyrinths of thought, of which only other cultured
minds can enter…
In our universities over the last generation the radical
academics talk of the power of the text, and of how language ensnares us: they
become, or so they believe,[iv] just like everyone else, victims of the capitalist system, just like the
cleaners and bar attendants earning less than the minimum wage. How easy it is not to see! Even when they clean your computer and
office floor… Better to explain
life away, with invisible gods and forces that are beyond our control; the market
and globalization…
The complexity of the metaphysics inevitably attracts and compels
their attention – only the initiated can understand their ugly jargon and
disabled sentences.[v] And the excitement! A mind racing
around its abstractions can reach speeds that a field worker or laboratory
assistant will never master: facts, such boring things, act as necessary breaks
on our imaginings; they are a check on our reason; but they are mundane, and
often boring; and their accumulation can be time consuming and slow. Too
slow for the busy academic; racing around town on his Vespa.
How extraordinary, when you think of the natural
proclivities of intellectuals, is the rise of the modern world; of Descartes,
Locke and Hume. They had a certain
modesty about the world, a scepticism about their own ideas. They are intellectuals that ultimately
cast a doubt on reason; that most mystic of all faiths. How was that possible? Where did they come from?
How is it they could see the beauty of the world, and want to question
it…
"[Who
was] scarred by scrofula, partially blind and deaf, afflicted by obsessive
thoughts as well as a constitutional melancholy which he claimed made him ‘mad
all his life, at least not sober’, prone to compulsive movements, rituals and
vocalisations (some have recently diagnosed him with Tourette’s syndrome)…" (Helen Deutsch, Pay Me For It)
[ii] Memoirs
of a Gnostic Dwarf captures
something of this idea. Be warned,
though, it is a poor novel.
[v] See the Graham Clarke quote in my Is
There Beauty in Hegel?, and surrounding
discussion. Contemporary Art
History is a rich field if you want to find a lot of this stuff.
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