Problematic Gnosis: Hesse, Singer, Lessing, and the Limitations of Modern Gnosticism

Author(s): Robert Galbreath

Source: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 61, No. 1 (Jan., 1981), pp. 20-36
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1202157
Accessed: 11/05/2009 16:26
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the
scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that
promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The
Journal of Religion.
http://www.jstor.org
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
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
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.
22
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
29
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
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
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
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
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
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
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