Autor: Walsh, David

Buch: The Third Millenium

Titel: The Third Millenium

Stichwort: Gnosis: moralische Indifferenz; Augustinus' Erfahrungen (Confessiones)

Kurzinhalt: ... incapable of detecting our own drift downwards into the abyss of indifference and self-satisfaction; Augustine's Confessions contain one of the classic analyses of the process by which the Gnostic position

Textausschnitt: 213a Nothing betrays the mendacity of the Gnostic position more than its indifference to the moral struggle.1 In many respects, Gnosticism is developed to avoid or overleap the conflict between good and evil within us. But the desire to jump into another condition does not materially affect our situation. Without attention to the rigors of resistance against evil, we do not magically leap into a state of perfection, but instead leave ourselves more vulnerable than ever to the blandishments of selfishness, cruelty, and vice, which we are no longer even able to recognize. The situation could hardly be worse. Having lost sight of the growing realization of goodness as the imperative outweighing all else, we have simultaneously become incapable of detecting our own drift downwards into the abyss of indifference and self-satisfaction. It is no wonder that Gnostic movements eventually wreak havoc on themselves and their world. In some sense, this is their intention. They wish to invert the entire established order of things. But they do not wish to extend the process into the destruction of their own spiritual selves. In this last bastion of connection with the world of ordinary experience we behold the irrationality of the Gnostic conviction, precisely at the point at which it cannot quite close off the awareness of itself. The Gnostic mindset knows that it has not attained the spiritual perfection it claims. Rather, a cosmic aggrandizement of power has been mistaken for the goodness to which it is irrelevant. (Fs) (notabene)

214a Perfection, as St. Augustine understood, is the Achilles heel of Gnosticism. He should know, having spent years under the influence of one of the most powerful ancient forms derived from the monk Mani. Augustine's Confessions contain one of the classic analyses of the process by which the Gnostic position, so seemingly impregnable against all obvious objections to it, nevertheless cannot quite avoid the inner crumbling of its certainty. The expansiveness of Augustine's personality could not be contained within the confines of a system, no matter how peerlessly consistent. He recounts the major attractions of the Manichaean outlook. It answered the questions of suffering and evil in existence that remained insoluble under all other perspectives, including the Christian. But its signal attraction was that it provided initiates with a sense of infinite superiority to all merely cosmic realities and simultaneously relieved them of the burden of the moral struggle by which we and the world are improved. Convinced of the absolute purity of the true inner sense and cognizant of its detachment from all external reality, including our own physical and social existence, the Manichaeans were left with nothing to do but contemplate their superiority to the unrelievedly evil regime around them.1 It was a quintessentially dualistic system of good and evil realities, with all of the benefits and defects inherent in such a construction. Impervious to all objections posed from outside it, since all such resistance must come from the evil morality of this world, the unravelling could only occur from within the hermetic closure of the system itself. Augustine recognized the static nature of the faith in which he lived. It allowed for no possibility of progress, since neither intellectual nor moral advance was possible within this world. The attraction might have remained firm for lesser minds, but not for the omnivorous restlessness of an Augustine. A faith in which limitless spiritual and intellectual development was impossible simply could not answer the deepest longing of his nature. The transcendent fulfillment that Gnosticism sought to grasp with such premature eagerness proved incapable of enclosure within the fixity of determined revolt. Intimations of transcendent Being eventually broke down the walls of incarceration in illusion. (Fs) (notabene)