13

Base Materialism and Gnosticism

If one thinks of a particular object, it is easy to distinguish matter from

form, and an analogous distinction can be made with regard to organic
beings, with form taking on the value of the unity of being and of its
individual existence. But if things as a whole are taken into account,
transposed distinctions of this kind become arbitrary and even unintel
ligible. Two verbal entities are thus formed, explicable only through their
constructive value in the social order: an abstract God (or simply the idea),
and abstract matter; the chief guard and the prison walls. The variants of
this metaphysical scaffolding are of no more interest than are the different
styles of architecture. People become excited trying to know if the prison
came from the guard or if the guard came from the prison; even though
this agitation has had a primordial historical importance, today it risks
provoking a delayed astonishment, if only because of the disproportion
between the consequences of the debate and its radical insignificance.
It is nevertheless very remarkable that the only kind of materialism that
up to now in its development has escaped systematic abstraction, namely
dialectical materialism, had as its starting point, at least as much as onto
logical materialism, absolute idealism in its Hegelian form. (There is no
need to go back on this method: materialism, whatever its scope in the
positive order, necessarily is above all the obstinate negation of idealism,
which amounts to saying, finally, of the very basis of all philosophy.) Now
Hegelianism, no less than the classical philosophy of Hegel's period, appar
ently proceeded from very ancient metaphysical conceptions, conceptions
developed by, among others, the Gnostics, in an epoch when metaphysics
could still be associated with the most monstrous dualistic and therefore
strangely abased cosmogonies. 1
I admit that I have, in respect to mystical philosophies, only an un
ambiguous interest, analogous in practice to that of an uninfatuated
psychiatrist toward his patients; it seems to me rather pointless to put one's

The text is from Visions of Excess: selected writings, 1 927-1 939, ed. Allan Stoekl, te. Allan Stoekl
with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis,
MN, 1 985), pp. 45-8. 'Le bas materialisme et la gnose' was published in Documents, second
year, 1 ( 1 930). See DC, I, pp. 220-6.
 Base Materialism and Gnosticism 161

trust in tendencies that, without meeting resistance, lead to the most pitiful
dishonesty and bankruptcy. But it is difficult today to remain indifferent
even to partly falsified solutions brought, at the beginning of the Christian
era, to problems that do not appear noticeably different from our own
(which are those of a society whose original principles have become, in
a very precise sense, the dead letter of a society that must put itself
in question and overturn itself in order to rediscover motives of force and
violent agitation). Thus the adoration of an ass-headed god (the ass
being the most hideously comic animal, and at the same time the most
humanly virile) seems to me capable of taking on even today a crucial value:
the severed ass's head of the acephalic personification of the sun undoub
tedly represents, even if imperfectly, one of materialism's most virulent
manifestations.

I will leave it to Henry-Charles Puech to explain here, in future articles,2

the development of such myths, so suspect in this period, hideous as
chancres and carrying the germs of a bizarre but mortal subversion of the
ideal and of the order expressed today be the words 'classical antiquity' . Yet
I think it would be neither vain nor impossible to simplify things extremely,
first of all, and indicate the meaning that must be given to the mythological
and philosophical disorders which at that time affected the representation
of the world. Gnosticism, in fact, before and after the preachings of Chris
tianity, and in an almost bestial way, no matter what were its metaphysical
developments, introduced a most impure fermentation into Graeco-Roman
ideology, borrowed from everywhere, from the Egyptian tradition, from
Persian dualism, from eastern Jewish heterodoxy, elements that conformed
the least to the established intellectual order; it added its own dreams,
heedlessly expressing a few monstrous obsessions; it was not revolted, in its
religious practices, by the basest (and thus most upsetting) forms of Greek
or Chaldeo-Assyrian magic and astrology; and at the same time it utilized,
but perhaps more exactly it compromised, newborn Christian theology and
Hellenistic metaphysics.
It is not surprising that the protean character of this agitation has
given rise to contradictory interpretations. It has even been possible to
represent Gnosticism as a strongly Hellenized intellectual form of a
primitive Christianity too popular and indifferent to metaphysical develop
ments, a kind of superior Christianity elaborated by philosophers who had
broken with Hellenistic speculation, and rejected by the uncultivated Chris
tian masses. 3 Thus the principal protagonists of Gnosticism - Basilides,
Valentinus, Bardesanes, Marcion - appeared to be great religious hu
manists and, from the point of view of traditional Protestantism, great
Christians. Their bad name and the more or less suspect character of
their theories were supposedly explained by the fact that they were only
1 62 Heterology

known through the polemics of the church fathers, their violent enemies
and obligatory slanderers.
The writings of the Gnostic theologians were systematically destroyed by
the orthodox Christians (with few exceptions, nothing remains today of a
considerable literature) . Only the stones on which they engraved the figures
of a provocative and especially indecent Pantheon permit one to comment
at length on something other than diatribes: but they precisely confirm the
bad opinion of the heresiologists. The most consistent modem exegesis
admits, moreover, that the abstract forms of Gnostic entities evolved out
of very crude myths, which correspond to the crudity of the images
represented on the stones.4 It establishes above all that Neoplatonism or
Christianity must not be sought as the origin of Gnosticism, whose real
foundation is Zoroastrian dualism. 5 A sometimes disfigured dualism,
doubtless following Christian or philosophical influences, but a profound
dualism and, at least in its specific development, not emasculated by an
adaptation to social necessities, as in the case of the Iranian religion (on this
subject, it is essential to observe that Gnosticism, and to the same degree
Manicheanism, which in a way derived from it, never served any social
organizations, never assumed the role of state religion).
In practice, it is possible to see as a leitmotiv of Gnosticism the concep
tion of matter as an active principle having its own eternal autonomous
existence as darkness (which would not be simply the absence of light, but
the monstrous archontes revealed by this absence), and as evil (which would
not be the absence of good, but a creative action) . This conception was
perfectly incompatible with the very principle of the profoundly monistic
Hellenistic spirit, whose dominant tendency saw matter and evil as degra
dations of superior principles. Attributing the creation of the earth, where
our repugnant and derisory agitation takes place, to a horrible and perfectly
illegitimate principle evidently implies, from the point of view of the Greek
intellectual construction, a nauseating, inadmissible pessimism, the exact
opposite of what had to be established at all costs and made universally
manifest. In fact the opposed existence of an excellent divinity, worthy of
the absolute confidence of the human spirit, matters little if the baneful and
odious divinity of this dualism is under no circumstances reducible to it,
without any possibility of hope. It is true that even within Gnosticism things
were not always so clear-cut. The fairly widespread doctrine of emanation
(according to which the ignoble creator god, in other words the cursed god
- sometimes associated with Jehovah of the Bible - emanated from the
Supreme God) responded to a need for a palliative. But if we confine
ourselves to the specific meaning of Gnosticism, indicated both by here
siological controversies and by carvings on stones, the despotic and bestial
obsession with outlawed and evil forces seems irrefutable, as much in its
metaphysical speculation as in its mythological nightmare.
 Base Materialism and Gnosticism 1 63

It is difficult to believe that on the whole Gnosticism does not manifest

above all a sinister love of darkness, a monstrous taste for obscene and
lawless archontes, for the head of the solar ass (whose comic and desperate
braying would be the signal for a shameless revolt against idealism in
power). The existence of a sect of licentious Gnostics and of certain sexual
rites fulfils this obscure demand for a baseness that would not be reducible,
which would be owed the most indecent respect: black magic has continued
this tradition to the present day.
It is true that the supreme object of the spiritual activity of the
Manicheans, as of the Gnostics, was constantly the good and perfection:
that was the way in which their conceptions in themselves had a pes
simistic meaning. But it is more or less useless to take these appearances
into account, and only the troubled concession to evil can in the end
detennine the meaning of these aspirations. If today we overtly abandon
the idealistic point of view, as the Gnostics and Manicheans implicitly
abandoned it, the attitude of those who see in their own lives an effect
of the creative action of evil appears even radically optimistic. It is
possible in all freedom to be a plaything of evil if evil itself does not
have to answer before God. Having had recourse to archontes, it does
not appear that one has deeply desired the submission of things that
belong to a higher authority, to an authority the archontes stun with an
eternal bestiality.

Thus it appears - all things considered - that Gnosticism, in its psycho

logical process, is not so different from present-day materialism, I mean a
materialism not implying an ontology, not implying that matter is the thing
in-itself. For it is a question above all of not submitting oneself, and with
oneself one's reason, to whatever is more elevated, to whatever can give a
borrowed authority to the being that I am, and to the reason that anns this
being. This being and its reason can in fact only submit to what is lower, to
what can never serve in any case to ape a given authority. Also I submit
entirely to what must be called matter, since that exists outside of myself
and the idea, and I do not admit that my reason becomes the limit of what
I have said, for if I proceeded in that way matter limited by my reason
would soon take on the value of a superior principle (which this servile
reason would be only too happy to establish above itself, in order to speak
like an authorized functionary) . Base matter is external and foreign to ideal
human aspirations, and it refuses to allow itself to be reduced to the great
ontological machines resulting from these aspirations. But the psycho
logical process brought to light by Gnosticism had the same impact: it
was a question of disconcerting the human spirit and idealism before
something base, to the extent that one recognized the helplessness of
superior principles.
1 64 Heterology

The interest of this juxtaposition is augmented by the fact that the

specific reactions of Gnosticism led to the representation of forms radically
contrary to the ancient academic style, to the representation of forms in
which it is possible to see the image of this base matter that alone, by its
incongruity and by an overwhelming lack of respect, permits the intellect to
escape from the constraints of idealism. In the same way today certain
plastic representations are the expression of an intransigent materialism, of
a recourse to everything that compromises the powers that be in matters
of form, ridiculing the traditional entities, naively rivalling stupefying scare
crows. This is no less important than general analytic interpretation, in
the sense that only forms specific and meaningful to the same degree as
language can give concrete and immediately perceptible expression to the
psychological developments determined through analysis.

Notes

Since the Hegelian doctrine is above all an extraordinary and very perfect system of
reduction, it is evident that it is only in a reduced and emasculated state that one finds there
the base elements that are essential in Gnosticism.
However, in Hegel the role of these elements in thought remains one of destruction,
just as destruction is given as necessary for the constitution of thought. This is why, when
dialectical materialism was substituted for Hegelian idealism (through a complete over
throw of values, giving matter the role that thought had had), matter was no longer an
abstraction but a source of contradiction; moreover, it was no longer a question of the
providential character of contradiction, which became simply one of the properties of
the development of material facts.
2 [See H.-C. Puech's 'Le Dieu Besa et la magie hellenistique', in Documents, 7 (1 930),
pp. 4 1 5-25. TR.]
3 This interpretation has been developed in France by Eugene de Faye (cf. Introduction a
/'etude du gnosticisme (Paris, 1903), taken from Revue de I'hiSlOire des religions, vols 45 and 46,
and Gnosliques el gnoslicisme. Elude critique des documents du gnoslicisme chrelien aux II' el III'
siecles (Paris, 1 9 1 3), in Bibliolheque de l'Ecole des Haures Eludes, Sciences religieuses, vol. 27).
4 Wilhelm Bousset, Hauplprobleme der Gnosis (Gottingen, 1907).
5 Ibid., ch. 3, 'Der Dualismus der Gnosis'.