This gnostic "monomyth," to borrow Joseph Campbell's term, was then populated with numerous colorful if not bizarre names and details. Gnosticism speaks the language of myth even as it helps one understand the modern fascination with myth. But the fundamental point is always the same: salvation is essentially inward or intrapsychic, and entails the possession of secret, saving knowledge. Its basic assumptions then are: 1. We are inwardly of a different nature from the surrounding evil world, in which we are entrapped through no fault of our own.
2. Salvation must come from a source outside the present evil environment, which cannot overcome its contradictions on its own terms.
3. Salvation is in the form of secret knowledge or gnosis.
The "secret" aspect meant that gnosticism was often taken to be, in the words of a modern authority, "a knowledge of divine secrets which is reserved for an elite." 5
Some gnostic schools taught that only certain humans had the divine light within; most held that only some were now ready to receive the fullness of wisdom. At the same time, an authority like Hans Jonas, in his classic The Gnostic Religion, stresses the universality at least of the gnostic quest, comparing the gnostics' desperate search for meaning in an alien world to that of existentialism in modern times. 6 The widely read scholar of gnosticism Elaine Pagels has emphasized gnosticism's compatibility with contemporary psychological and therapeutic thought. She quotes, for example, this strikingly modernsounding passage from the gnostic teacher Monoimus:
Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort. Look for him by taking yourself as the starting point. Learn who it is within you who makes everything his own and says, "My God, my mind, my thought, my soul, my body." Learn the sources of sorrow, joy, love, hate. . . . If you carefully investigate these matters you will find them in yourself. 7
Page 10
Such lines make the likelihood that modern gnosticism could come to us in the form of a combination of mythology and popular psychology appear not at all farfetched. Why is it that ancient gnosticism sounds both distant and contemporary? The thoughtworlds generally are different, despite the above, but the historical settings display similarities. In both, people experienced rapid change and some degree of progress. The Romans, for all their faults, had brought relative peace and prosperity to the Mediterranean world, and built their famous roads and spectacular cities. The "progress" of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries goes without saying. Enough progress had been experienced to suggest that someday, just past the cutting edge of the most advanced physics, we might learn the innermost secret of the universe and its manipulation—the ultimate gnosis.
Yet these were also times of anxiety and despair—Rome's routine cruelty and enslavement, modernity's wars and holocausts—suggesting that the secret was not in plain sight, but must be found through cunning, and needed a larger stage than the present. The new gnostics, like those of old, thus came to conclude that the great secret was not to be found within the same world that brought mixed progress and disaster in their hopelessly selfcontradictory entanglement. It could not be located in the same science, engineering, social science, or medicalbased psychology that made the roads and staffed the schools. It would need to come from sources far deeper and older than the onedimensionality of the present, even if such a message might be capable of reaching no more than an elite. This was the role that the modern mythologists, well aware of gnosticism and quite sympathetic to it, saw for ancient myths recovered by them.
Actually, for several centuries Europe and America have harbored a veritable gnostic underground of intellectuals ready to sabotage any too facile celebration of progress and materialism. Writers like William Blake, Herman Melville, and Friedrich Nietzsche are among the spokespersons of a gnostic strand in Western thought that is temperamentally antimodern. This current sought to undermine exoteric belief in the world's everincreasing technical knowledge with the help of secret but eternal wisdom.
Mainstream thinking, from Voltaire and de Condorcet to Herbert Spencer, believed that an age of rationality had dawned with the eighteenth century, bringing an end to superstition and injustice. Rational religion based on science would replace priestcraft, democracy would
Page 11
overthrow aristocratic tyrants, and in time vastly improved machines and medicines would bring a far better life to all. But the underground had its doubts.
Blake decried the emerging modern world's "number, weight, and measure." He was frankly gnostic in his exaltation of the eternal human Christ over against the tiresome old God called Urizen or Nobodaddy, he of the staunch loins and frozen scowl in Blake's drawings, who represented Enlightenment "reason" no less than patriarchal tyranny. Melville was also a gnostic who took for granted that this world was wrongly made by an incompetent spirit, and most of its quests like Captain Ahab's ultimately vain searches for white whales. Finally, nothing could be more at odds with modernity's essentialist view of progress and universal knowledge than Nietzsche's notion of eternal recurrence, in which all that we make is unmade and remade, over and over in a world without end, and all that is truly of worth is the eternal affirmation of the hero in the midst of change and decay.
Nor is the modern gnostic spirit necessarily precious or cultic. The literary critic Harold Bloom asserted: And the American religion, for its two centuries of existence, seems to me irretrievably Gnostic. It is a knowing, by and of an uncreated self, or selfwithintheself, and the knowledge leads to freedom, a dangerous and doomeager freedom: from nature, time, history, community, other selves. 8
The idea that American religion is fundamentally gnostic in structure, as unexpected as it may sound, is based on consideration of the importance of the conversion experience, the subjectivizing of religion that goes with religious freedom and separation of church and state, the prevalence of new revelations and inspirations, and the general importance of inner feeling and inner reward in the republic's religious life. The United States is indeed a wholly different religious environment, far more different than many Americans realize, from the religious situation almost anywhere else past or present since the Hellenistic age of the first gnosticism. Elsewhere one usually found only a single religious institution, a state church, or at the most two or three violently clashing bodies, dominating the situation. Here arises opportunity for rampant diversity, and with it the need to anchor faith not in a historic church, but above all within the depths of oneself. Though the inner self may also be shifting and elusive to the grasp, it
Page 12
is at least more firm a foundation than a myriad of sects. Together with this was the American theme, also addressed by Eliade, of return to the beginning, to the time of origins. Nineteenthcentury churches wanted to return to the New Testament, abolishing if possible the legacy of the many centuries between then and now.
Literature was full of the theme of reversing history and starting over in a new Eden. The mythologists, then, claimed to be bearers of stories direct from that time when the human world began. They said that, even if Eden cannot be rebuilt of modern brick, at least one can recover it in the inward places well known to American gnosticism. It is little wonder, then, that the gnosis of the mythologists, addressed to the self from out of time far behind either the modern puzzle or sectarian proliferation, was in the end especially well received in America.