For now we see through a glass darkly
1 Corinthians 13:12
St. Paul

Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be:
They are but broken lights of thee,
And Thou, O Lord, art more than they.

In Memoriam
Alfred Lord Tennyson      

Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise

Shakespeare                       

1. The Gnostic Temptation                   

We are living through yet another acute phase in the culture wars. The content does differ in many ways from previous ages however the means of engaging the hot button issues has a long line and lineage. The obvious and presenting issues tend to sharply divide the cultural Marxists, social justice warriors, woke ethos, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, street activists, progressive leftist leaning liberals and new atheists from the alt-lite-new right, reactionary right, free speech leanings and various types of traditionalists and nationalist conservatives. Those who would toss paint on historic statues and pull them down inevitably birth reactionary law and order types. One extreme births the opposite.  Although the issues priorized and interpreted bring both tribes into inevitable collisions, both clans assume the sheer rightness of their positions and tend to demean the other and, worse yet, rhetorical flame throwing is common and cancel culture dominates. This obstinate and committed position of uncritical and uncriticized certainty is at the heart of the gnostic temptation of the simplistic and ideological left and right (and can be found within many religious communities also past and present).

There is a tendency to think Gnosticism was only an early church heresy in which spirit was opposed to matter, mind to time, the higher and eternal the good, time and history to be transcended as being evil. There is some truth, of course, in such a historic read of Gnosticism as a  challenge to the early church, but deeper than the content is the gnostic way of interpreting our all too human journey. The Gnostics, like the Manicheans, reduced complex reality to black-white categories, interpretations were right-wrong, truth-falsehood, certainty-uncertainty was the way of deciding who was in-out in the tribe and inner ring. The simplistic dualism cannot be missed. The gnostic way of seeing and interpreting spiritual realities (they saw themselves as the enlightened ones, the church more subordinate and of lesser insights) was one of certain knowing (gnostic tends to mean knowing of a higher and more certain level) that cannot be doubted. It is this gnostic appetite and desperate need for certainty that very much dominates the newest scene and act in the ongoing human drama of contentious issues in the culture wars, political correctness the new secular creed and dogma, those who differ branded as heretics to “the Cause”.    

I will briefly linger, using Eric Voegelin as a guide, on how the gnostic way is as much with us today as it was in the early decades of the church, the content different, the need for certainty the same. When Gnosticism is secularized, the certainty theme remains even though the literal gnostics of history vanish. Voegelin, in his updated notion of Gnosticism, The New Science of Politics and his smaller yet nonetheless poignant missive, Science, Politics and Gnosticism can be a valuable pointer on clarifying much on the perennial nature of Gnosticism. But, let us briefly return to the Patristic and Creedal era of the early church and ponder how they deftly avoided the gnostic temptation as a way of knowing and being.