I admit that I have, in respect to mystical philosophies, only an unambiguous interest, analogous in practice to that of an uninfatuated psychiatrist toward his patients; it seems to me rather pointless to put one’s 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 undoubtedly represents, even if imperfectly, one of materialism’s most virulent manifestations.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I will leave it to Henry-Charles Puech to explain here, in future articles,2<\/a><\/span> 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 by 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 Christianity, and in an almost bestial way, no matter what were its metaphysical developments, introduced a most impure fermentation into Greco-Roman ideology, borrowed from everywhere, from the Egyptian tradition, from Persian dualism, from Eastern Jewish hetero\u00ad doxy, 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 theol\u00adogy and Hellenistic metaphysics.<\/p>\n It is not surprising that the protean character of this agitation has given rise to contradictory interpretations. It has even been possible to represent Gnostic\u00adism as a strongly Hellenized intellectual form of a primitive Christianity too popular and indifferent to metaphysical developments, a kind of superior Christianity elaborated by philosophers who had broken with Hellenistic speculation and rejected by the uncultivated Christian masses.3<\/a><\/span>\u00a0Thus, the principal protagon\u00adists of Gnosticism- Basilides, Valentinus, Bardesanes, Marcion- appeared to be great religious humanists and, from the point of view of traditional Protes\u00adtantism, great Christians. Their bad name, the more or less suspect character of their theories, were supposedly explained by the fact that they were only known through the polemics of the church fathers, their violent enemies and obligatory slanderers.<\/p>\n The writings of the Gnostic theologians were systematically destroyed by the orthodox Christians (with few exceptions, nothing remains today of a consider\u00ad able literature). Only the stones on which they engraved the figures of a provoc\u00adative 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 modern exegesis admits, moreover, that the abstract forms of Gnostic entities evolved out of very crude myths, which corre\u00adspond to the crudity of the images represented on the stones.4<\/a><\/span>\u00a0It establishes above all that Neoplatonism or Christianity must not be sought as the origin of Gnosticism, whose real foundation is Zoroastrian dualism.5<\/a><\/span>\u00a0A sometimes dis\u00ad figured 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 organi\u00adzations, never assumed the role of State religion).<\/p>\n In practice, it is possible to see as a leitmotiv of Gnosticism the conception 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 degradations 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 pes\u00adsimism, 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\u00ad 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 heresiological 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.<\/p>\n 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 exis\u00adtence of a sect of licentious Gnostics and of certain sexual rites fulfills this ob\u00adscure 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.<\/p>\n 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 pessimistic meaning. But it is more or less useless to take these appearances into account, and only the troubled con\u00ad cession to evil can in the end determine 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.<\/p>\n Thus it appears all things considered Gnosticism, in its psychological 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 arms 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 psychological 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 ex\u00adtent that one recognized the helplessness of superior principles.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The interest of this juxtaposition is augmented by the fact that the specific re\u00adactions 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 over\u00ad whelming lack of respect, permits the intellect to escape from the constraints of idealism. In the same way today certain plastic representations are the expres\u00adsion of an intransigent materialism, of a recourse to everything that compro\u00admises the powers that be in matters of form, ridiculing the traditional entities, naively rivaling stupefying scarecrows. 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.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/substackcdn.com\/image\/fetch\/$s_!jd1t!,w_424,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep\/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe672319d-5a93-42d9-81ef-ab158557e937_387x290.png)
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