Gnosticism in Contemporary Culture

Gnostic.

It’s one of those words that many people know, but few can define.  It has the whiff of mystery to it; of secrets kept in old tomes, and wizened scholars – perhaps of a dubious moral bent – who guard their secrets from the unwashed masses, those who’d rather enjoy the vulgar hoots of a carnival horn than the rarefied strands of an Elysium melody.  It appears as a ‘technobabble’ adjective in fantasy works (“The Hammer of Gnostic Strength”), and is used by psychonauts who promise personal enlightenment.  But despite its emotive and flavorful characteristics, it is a word with a precise definition: it is the designation of the heretical Christian mystery cults of the 2^nd to 7^th Centuries.  Furthermore, it refers to their particular worldview – a worldview which is distressingly common in contemporary culture, and just as much a threat today as it was then.  Gnosticism is no mere historical footnote: it is an extant worldview which is trying to sell itself to the masses, and which threatens to drag them down into self-destructive misery as surely as it did to the Manicheans and Valentians.

The purposes of this article are threefold: first, to provide a broad overview of what, exactly, Gnosticism is; second, to demonstrate some of the obvious consequences of such a world view; and third, to provide pop culture examples of gnostic philosophy.  Through this process a fourth goal should be achieved: demonstrating why Gnosticism is so threatening a heresy, while simultaneously providing the tools to identify it.

Gnosticism’s Metaphysical Errors

The first error of Gnosticism can be found in the word itself.  ‘Gnostic’ derives from the Greek word gnostikos – ‘having knowledge’; and in this sense it’s harmless enough.  Certainly there exist esoteric disciplines that require a lifetime of study to master, and attaining a level of expertise in them is a laudable accomplishment.  But the Gnostics aren’t simply referring to scholarship when they use the word.  Their focus is on secret knowledge; hidden knowledge; occult knowledge that which can only be attained through transcendent, intuitive means.  They assert that this knowledge is intentionally obfuscated against the world, though snippets of it can be detected in myths and scripture, once the dogma has been done away with.

How is this wrong?  As is usually the case, explaining why something is incorrect will take longer than describing the incorrect belief itself.  We’ll need to start with the basics.

Catholics affirm the manifested Logos: Jesus Christ, Son of God, and man.  To put this into ontological language, all logical systems are based upon axiomatic assumptions, and axioms need to be taken on faith.  Axioms themselves cannot be proven or disproven by the logical systems they produce; only accepted or rejected.  The embodiment of Christ is the axiom made manifest; explicit.  Our faith as Christians is in an absolute framework of reality, which gives us the confidence to state that 2+2=4, or that the behavior of another is unjust.  Absent this faith in the Absolute, all axioms become a matter of opinion – and through this, logical systems become subjective, rather than objective.  Every man’s opinion, no matter how foolish, becomes equally valid to all others.

With Logos we’re handed the Book of Nature – a metaphorical term from the Middle Ages which refers to the operations of the natural world.  All around us we see the words of the book made manifest, and while we might not know the language it is written in, we do know what the axiomatic truth underlying it is.  We know that there is but one Logos, and knowing that means that the book is translatable.  This is the origins of the scientific method.  The systematic investigation of nature, premised upon the faith that nature is consistent.  To the Gnostic – who rejects such axioms – science is no more useful than magic.

And what is magic?  Magic is that which, by abandonment of The Axiom, seeks to impose one’s own axioms upon the world – axioms which are arbitrarily established to justify one’s goals, and liable to change whenever convenience demands.  That is the high level definition: let’s provide some examples.

The Occultist and the Demon

The Church advises against studying the occult, partly because it can lead to temptation, but mainly because it is a waste of your time.  Nothing ‘discovered’ by the magicians over the centuries has proved to be of any practical use, and the goals which it promises to satisfy are usually (if not always) bad for one’s soul.  You get what you want but not what you need.  But even error can lead to truth, and in understanding the basics of the magical process we can reaffirm the scientific.

At the core of magic is the concept of ‘secret knowledge’.  The ‘Seals of Solomon’ or the ‘Keys of Cthulhu’ – some set of symbols, or words, or practices, which are utterly arbitrary – they completely lack any historical etymology – but which claim to be the building blocks of reality, and by using them powerful feats can be accomplished.  In a sense, this is similar to the scientist’s attempt to read the Book of Nature – to learn the letters and grammar which underlie reality – but unlike the scientist, the Occultist looks to inner revelation to reveal these secrets – to the particular, to their unique self – rather than trusting in the outside world and God’s universal revelation.

What is actually occurring is that the Occultist is in communication with the demonic.  Whatever trickster spirit he’s talking to is making up signs and rituals at random (one suspects that many of them may involve inside jokes, which only the demons understand).  In performing these rituals the Occultist is simply entertaining the demon – who then goes off and does whatever it is that they claimed the magic would do.  The ritual was never necessary; it was simply the price extracted by the demon.  The goal was directing your will towards an unworthy end, or to get you to perform evil acts in pursuit of a good end.  The absurdity of all of this is particularly evident to any who’ve made a historical study of magic, either in literature or in occult practice.  Present day stories, as well as present-day mystery cults, present magic as a form of pseudo-science.  There’s a certain logic underlying all of it.  The ‘difficulty’ of the spell is directly correlated to the ‘power’ of its effects.  Modern occult manuals prescribe the creation of expensive medallions and precise rituals, and modern stories do the same.  Medieval tomes and stories, meanwhile, seem to be utterly random to modern eyes.  “Rub some leaves and utter a cantation, and a flying steed will transport you to a castle in the sky,” claims one fifteenth century book of necromancy.  The cause and effect are as disconnected as the premise of a gingerbread house, or Orlando’s sanity being found on the moon.  There is no consistency in occult ‘revelations’; they are utterly dependent upon the culture of the day.

From Spell to Spiel

As C.S. Lewis noted in The Screwtape Letters actual witches and warlocks are rare these days.  At present, the demonic is more interested in pushing hyper-rationality than superstition.  So rather than spells, let us consider spiels; we live in the era of the Talking Head, and ‘finding myself’.

Where the magician makes a fool of himself by ignoring the Book of Nature, the rationalist makes a fool of himself by ignoring the fact that he’s rationalizing his own behaviour.  From Oprah, to Ann Landers, to divorce in contemporary fiction, behaviour is justified under the mantra of ‘personal growth’.  This is nothing more than personal Gnosis, writ large for the hoi polloi.  Broken promises, harsh words, hypocritical actions are all excused for the sake of ‘me time’.  The inner discovery is considered more important than objective standards of how one ought to have behaved.  Holding one to the latter reeks of the ‘primitive’ and the ‘patriarchy’; exploration and finding oneself is what’s viewed as heroic.  All of it boils down to word games – spiels – rhetoricized rationalizations which seek to impose the person’s will – their desires – and an ontological structure which justifies those desires – over and above God’s Word.  Where the magician had his spell, the modern has their spiel – their gibberish – inspired by personal revelation, and overriding the ‘truth’ of others.

The modern booby casts a spiel with their words, and if they can convince others they ‘deform’ reality into something which suits their petty goals.  They reject the objective, and declare their personal subjective reality to be the highest truth.

Gnostics and Dualism

The second major error of Gnosticism is dualism; the separation of the world and metaphysics into light/dark, good/evil, physical/spiritual.  Gnostics generally embrace a literalist version of Plato’s philosophy.

Note: while Plato identified a dual-aspect of reality – the intelligible and the sensible – Plato himself was not a dualist.  He viewed these two aspects as part of a greater whole, not a preference for the former over the latter.  Those who identify him as rejecting the material world (e.g. Nietzsche) are misunderstanding his philosophy.

The Gnostic cosmology, though it varies from sect to sect, always involves a creator who is absent from his creation; a clockmaker God who put things into motion, and who may or may not be watching, but who doesn’t intervene.  Far more relevant than the creator is the Demiurge: lower than God but higher than man, the demiurge is he who created this world, designing it as a trap for human souls.

On the surface, this sounds similar to the Christian worldview.  That the Earth is corrupted, ruled over by one of God’s rebellious lieutenants, that said lieutenant wishes to drag us down with him, and we are called to ascend to a higher realm.  But there are two important differences between the Gnostic and the Christian worldview.  First in the matter of degrees.

Most of our early philosophies had dualistic qualities.  We’ve already mentioned Plato; the Stoics were much the same, and fall into a similar, though less grievous, error.  The title of the third chapter of Cicero’s Stoic Paradoxes sums this up: “All the vices and all virtues are equal” – by which he means that error is error, and truth is truth; that it makes no sense to say that one error is not closer to truth than another.  This is extremely precise in a sense, which is why so many follow his words to this day; but nonetheless, while all evils are evil, too much strictness can prove a hindrance in spiritual growth.  Some sins are minor (though you still shouldn’t commit them), and it is good to enjoy the just rewards of an action well done.  John C. Wright describes it thusly:

The Christian view is more nuanced, and warns that while any of [the physical and emotional pleasures] might be used by sin to snare the soul (for any lesser good can be used to draw one away from the true and highest good, which is God) likewise every lesser good, if appreciated in the right way at the right time, can be sanctified and blessed and made into a promise of things to come. Any lesser good can be a step in a Jacob’s ladder leading to heaven.

None of this is to condemn Stoicism; it is a manly and forthright philosophy, well worthy of study in an era which has forgotten virtue.  It is highlighted merely to point out that simple dualism is insufficient.  In the case of Gnostics – because they knew of Christ – their impiety has them fall all that much further.

While Stoicism may be too pure a philosophy to fully capture the complexity of human spirituality, it was not a simplistic philosophy.  Virtue was understood to be both good in a metaphysical sense, and present in the material sense.  It was in this world, but not of this world. “Faith and works” is but another way of putting it.  The Gnostic takes his dualism to the ridiculous extreme.  To him, all must be categorized to the as either black or white (the term “Manichean” now literally means this).  Something cannot be both praiseworthy in one circumstance – aggressive behaviour from a soldier on the battlefield – and condemnable in another – aggressive behaviour from one spouse to the other.  To the Gnostic, each thing is either good or bad.

Bad: the Demiurge who traps men’s souls on this earth.

Bad: the physical world where we are trapped.

Bad: all physical things.

The Gnostic takes it so far that anything even remotely connected with the physical becomes evil in his mind.  Physical beauty?  An evil snare.  Wealth?  All of it is condemnable.  The pleasure of sharing a meal?  Vanity and distraction.  If nothing found in this world is good – since all of it was created by the demiurge, a snare to keep us in his prison – then what does the Gnostic have left?

The Gnostic and Christ

Every religion makes claims of supernatural events and miraculous occurrences, but Christianity is unique in that its central Mystery is completely beyond human comprehension.  Namely, that God became Man, and he was God and he was Man.  That an axiom was proven true, independent of any logical system.  This is not something we can ‘know’; it is merely something we can have faith in.

For obvious reasons, the depth of this Mystery caused endless debate, schism, and even heresy during the early days of the Church.  How could Jesus be both Man and God?  Did he have a dual nature?  Was he a being of pure spirit?  Was his flesh sinful, but his spirit pure?

The Gnostics believed – and given their love of simplicity over all things, this should be no surprise – either that Christ was entirely man, ergo nothing more than a great prophet; or that he was merely a spirit manifesting in flesh, ergo he could not have suffered.  But if Christ, admirable as he was, wasn’t the Son of God… then who was this God that Jesus followed??

According to the Gnostics, the God of the Old Testament was the Demiurge.

So now we come to the fullness of Gnostic belief.  The world is completely, absolutely, and irredeemably evil.  All things which come of this world – physical strength, erotic love, shared meals – are evil.  Everything physical is a snare to entrap man’s soul.  The God who demands obedience, but also showers us with love, is our jailer; and only through spiritual rebellion will we become free.  Christ is nothing more but the first of the rebels, and we can become like him by rejecting the Logos, and becoming our own gods.

The Fruits of Gnosticism

The goal of the Gnostic is to become an Illuminatus: one who is preferred above all others thanks to his secret knowledge.  One who throws off the shackles of this prison-world, who recognizes it as a grand lie, and who rises above the God/Demiurge which is trying to enslave him.  His attitude towards the physical is most interesting.  While priests take vows of celibacy, and the mendicant orders eschew personal wealth, they do this not because sex and wealth are bad things – but because they have chosen to devote themselves to a good which is even higher.

That reproduction and wealth are necessary goods for human survival should be self-evident (though many of today’s people seem to disagree, preferring fornication and handouts).

So how does the Gnostic solve this dilemma?  He needs the ‘evils’ of wealth and food as surely as any unenlightened peasant, but to acquire them would be to sully himself!  Different schools came up with different answers, opposite in nature but equal in extremity.

St. Augustine (354-430 A.D.) spent his early years following the Manicheans, and as he reported in his Confessions: “… if a fig was plucked by not his own but by another man’s wickedness, some Manichaean saint might eat it, digest it in his stomach, and breathe it out again in the form of angels. Indeed, in his prayers, he would assuredly groan and sigh forth particles of God, although these particles of the most high and true God would have remained bound in that fig unless they had been set free by the teeth and belly of some ‘elect saint’!” In other words, the Illuminatus was ‘above’ the vulgar necessities of the world, and it was up to his lowly followers to perform such damnable ‘sins’ as generating an income, and plucking fruit from a tree for him to eat.  Their lot was to serve, and be damned; his lot was to rule, and ascend.

If the hypocrisy of the Manicheans offends the Christian mind, the Valentinians were even worse.  When you start with the assumption that 1) the world is an ugly, meaningless prison, and 2) that Christ is a perfect divinity of redemption, then it naturally follows that 3) you should engage in every concupiscent pleasure of the body, to prove the redeeming ability of Christ, while thumbing your nose at the Demiurge who created such things.

At the core of Gnosticism is the belief that: “I am one of the elect, I am better than others, my personal revelations are sacred, others owe me fealty, and no – the rules don’t apply to me!” Such an attitude is contrary to justice, so it naturally breeds social friction.  Such an attitude is contrary to nature, so it naturally results in auto-genocidal asceticism or hedonism.  Such an attitude is contrary to science, so it naturally results in magic and ignorance.  Such an attitude is fundamentally antisocial, so it naturally leads to personal failure and envy.  Even Plotinus (204-270 A.D.), a pagan philosopher who was suspicious of Christianity, condemned Gnostics for their conspiratorial thinking and the resentment they fostered in their adherents.

Gnostic Attitude in Modern Culture

It would be amusing (if it weren’t so disquieting) just how prevalent self-righteousness is in our atheistic culture.  The examples of this Gnostic attitude are copious.  Examples include:

• Holden Caulfield: “Everybody else is a phony!” says the juvenile protagonist of Catcher in the Rye, while acting like a hypocrite and a fool; he wants to save others, while his actions prove that he’s incapable of saving himself.
• Postmodern Feminist Scholars: “Everything is sexist, everything is racist, believe all women!” They elevate themselves as priestesses holding secret knowledge, their argumentation is all jargon (spiel) and no substance, and what is good for the goose is most certainly not good for the gander.
• The Mary Sue: an increasingly prevalent trope in modern cinema, this female protagonist is given all of her power right off the bat; not through strife, but through entitlement; she is worshipped by all around her, not because of her virtue, but because of who she is. She is wiser than scholars, and more powerful than warriors (Rey from Star Wars, Dany from Game of Thrones).
• The Gary Stu: he’s the Chosen One, but nobody recognizes it. He’s envious of the dumb jocks, but when he gets his magical super powers, the jock’s girlfriend realizes that she always loved him (Neo from the Matrix, Harry Potter).

All of these characters are narcissists; individuals who privilege their own version of reality over objective reality.  The villains they oppose are utter evil, and utter fools; they never have to walk back a mistake, unless it’s the mistake in not fully believing in themselves.

To state that Gnosticism is philosophized narcissism may be too strong a claim; but it would be accurate to say that it’s a philosophy which allows for narcissism.  When one refuses to obey the laws of reality, to attempt and understand the perspectives of others, and to humbly admit error – then pride, envy, outrage, and resentment are the inevitable outcomes.

Gnostic Metaphysics in Dungeons & Dragons

If Gnosticism were merely the product of the narcissistic mind, then debating its merits would be a waste of time; one attacks the disease, not the symptom, and arguing with a schizophrenic about his delusions does nothing to cure him.  However, this is not the case.  Gnosticism is a metaphysical world view which induces narcissism; it is a heresy which leads its adherents astray; so it is important to be able to identify its manifestations, lest fictional universes lead us down the path to self-destruction.

One such prominent example is the universe of Dungeons and Dragons.  Not – it should be emphasized – because of the magical system it contains (which is more akin to modern-day science than magic) or because of the presence of demons in the universe (J.R.R. Tolkien included demons in his works).  The problems with D&D is its arbitrary moral system, and the arbitrary universe it inhabits.  We’ll examine both in turn.

When you create a character in D&D, there are a variety of attributes which you assign.  Their ‘Base’ physical and mental attributes.  Their ‘Class’ (which profession they follow – fighter, thief, or mage).  Their moral/personality ‘Alignment’ (a Cartesian plane which maps Law/Chaos on one axis, and Good/Evil on the other).  But the most important attribute of any character is the one that isn’t assigned, but earned: their ‘Level’.

While the concept of Character/Experience Level is widely understood by modern readers, D&D uses this attribute in a unique manner.  Unlike most other Role Playing Games, your Level in D&D is part of a finite set which follows the rules of narrative.  Levels 1-5 are the start, where your character is mostly useless (childhood).  6-10 are the beginning, where your character is establishing themselves in the world (young adulthood).  11-15 are the middle, where your character is respected and relied upon by those who command them (maturity).  And 16-20 are the climax and finality of the story, where your character has become a world-expert at their trade, who’s participating in the sort of struggles that will determine the future of their fictional world (seniority).  Expansions to the core rules allow levels higher than this, but at this point your character has achieved demi-god status; they’ve left the mortal coil behind them, and are participating in the metaphysical creation of reality.

‘Level’ is the ultimate moral framework of Dungeons & Dragons – not Character Alignment.  What matters is not whom you are but what you are.  A 20^th Level Paladin is equivalent to a 20^th Level Assassin; both are superior to a 5^th Level Saint.  And a 2^nd Level king is less important than a 20^th Level peasant.  You might choose to play a ‘good guy’, but nothing in the rule-book privileges Lawful Good over Chaotic Evil.  Both are equally valid.

The metaphysical nature of D&D also supports this – the importance of being important, rather than the importance of being good.  The D&D Universe originates with Ao – the creator god – who doesn’t intervene.  The gods which human know and worship are part of a created pantheon, and each of them represent different aspects of personality and alignment – the evil gods are not fallen angles, they’re siblings to the gods of justice.  At the centre of reality is the Prime Material Plane where all the adventures happen, but it’s surrounded by mystical planes, eight in total, one for each possible alignment.  When a good character dies, they get their eternal reward, and when an evil character dies, they get their eternal punishment – but – your level upon death determines how things are going to work out in the afterlife.  A petty thief will become a grub in the abyss… but a Hitler or a Stalin might ascend to be one of the greatest demons.  And surely such a man would prefer to become a head of a demonic legion, than eternity singing with the angels.

The D&D universe makes the questions of right and wrong, of obedience or rebellion, as insignificant as if one prefers the colour gold or green.  The prime purpose of life in that world is not to grow in wisdom or holiness, but in Level – to grow in importance.  Good and Evil are just outfits created by beings who were created as good and evil by an indifferent creator, and one can either please these Demiurges or suffer ignominy and be forgotten.

This isn’t to say one can’t enjoy playing a game of D&D with their friends, or that one can’t extract catharsis and moral lessons from a game (after all, over and above the laws of the rule book, the Dungeon Master is subject to God’s laws, as are all the players; it is inevitable that His reality will seep into the Gnostic reality of this fiction; typically, as a character gains in levels he will also mature morally).  But one should be aware of the stark metaphysical difference between our reality and the D&D fantasy world, and not mistake one for the other.  A 20^th Level character who acts like a teenager is not just possible, but common in this setting, and by the definitions of that world there’s no need for him to listen to a 2^nd Level character, even if he is an elder; his Level implies that he will have no wisdom to impart.

Gnosticism and Marvel Comics

For the past fifteen years we’ve been subjected to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as well as the grown men who obsess over its childish pretenses.  It is worth questioning what this universe is actually about.  To answer this we’ll look at one of the silliest aspects of its reality; the fact that, not only are all of the aliens humanoid (despite appearing on paper, rather than on celluloid – one must forgive the rubber foreheads of Star Trek because of budgetary restraints, but a comic writer is restrained by nothing other than his imagination – which in this case seems to have restrained the Marvel writers quite a bit) – but even Galactus, ‘eater of planets’, a god who flies through outer space without any obvious means of propulsion, brooding during these long flights until he finds a new planet to devour – is also shaped like a human!

As it turns out, the explanation for his appearance is less stupid than one might think.  From Marvel Directory:

Galactus is the sole survivor of the universe that existed prior to the creation of the current universe. Originally Galactus was a humanoid named Galan, a space explorer, who was born on the planet Taa….

However, this universe was in its final stages of collapse. Originally, this universe had been a “Cosmic Egg,” a primal sphere of disorganized, dense, compact primordial matter. The sphere underwent a “Big Bang,” an explosion that hurled the matter outwards, where much of it eventually condensed into stars and planets. This universe expanded in size for billions of years, and then contracted over the following billions of years. All of the matter of that universe was plunging towards a central point, where it was collapsing into a new “Cosmic Egg.”

Taa’s civilization was one of the last still in existence. Lethal radiation caused by the death of this universe was wiping out life on nearby planets. Galan… was dispatched to travel through the cosmos to find a means of saving Taa, but he found none [so he] proposed to the remaining survivors that they die gloriously by traveling in a starship straight into the “Cosmic Egg.” As the starship approached its destination, radiation killed all the passengers except Galan, who strangely found himself filled with new energy… The dying universe’s sentience contacted Galan, telling him that they both would die, but that both would be reborn, and that Galan would thus become Galactus, ravager of worlds. The “Cosmic Egg” absorbed Galan into itself.

…finally the “Cosmic Egg” underwent another “Big Bang,” thus creating the current universe. Eternity and Death, the ethereal embodiments of the new universe, were created in this “Big Bang,” and the being that had been Galan was simultaneously hurled outward in his recreated starship.

The nascent Galactus learned how to use his vast power, and created a suit of armor to help him regulate it. He then transformed the starship into a kind of incubation chamber, where Galactus spent centuries evolving into his current form.

Much like in the D&D universe, we see that a combination of willpower and luck defining the spiritual significance of the character.  Galactus was a famous space explorer, blessed by cosmic luck, and he – not any of the loving parents, or pious saints from his homeworld – got to become one of the callous gods of this new universe – because the storyteller made him important.

Or we could look at the central MacGuffin of the recent films, the Infiinity Stones:

Largely unknown to all but a few select beings is the origin of the gems. After discovering the true potential of the gems Thanos told the history of the gems to the Elder of the Universe, The Runner. The gems are the remains of a once omnipotent being named Nemesis whose domain was any and all realities. This great being was also utterly alone. This being attempted to create life forms, but the life forms lacked the concept of good or evil, and devolved into demonic beasts. Realizing its error the being destroyed its flawed creations. Once again alone and unable to bear the eternal solitude, the being committed suicide.

Here we find the original creator god; who, much like the god of the Gnostics, not only failed at his job (allowing monstrosities like the Demiurge), but is also uninvolved; though in this case, he’s dead.

The metaphysics of D&D grew out of the rules of D&D (since the rules existed prior to the wider universe), and likewise the metaphysics of the Marvel Universe grew out of the incipient power fantasy which is the core of its stories.  The Marvel heroes are special snowflakes; imbued with a secret power, which can be wielded by them and them alone; and although they protect the people, they are above the people, and above the law.  The most stand-out example of this is Ironman: his super power is a mechanical suit which he built for himself, and nobody else can replicate.  This makes about as much sense as Henry Ford inventing the car so that he could win at horse races, but for the fan of Marvel it fits, because being a hero in that universe is all about being an Illuminatus: one who is lifted above the common folks, who gets to be a demi-god directing reality, answerable to no-one.

Lord of the Rings: The Ring of Power

Let’s contrast the above two settings to that created by Catholic writer J.R.R. Tolkien.

Instead of an Ironman suit which nobody can replicate, you have the One Ring which nobody can replicate: an artifact of evil.  By possessing the One Ring you become a god, able to bend the minds of others to your will.  It is an embodiment of narcissism – the spiel, the spell – which twists reality from that created, to that desired.

Instead of the most important person being the self-important egoist, it’s the humble gardener.  It’s not Aragorn, King of Kings – or Gandalf, an angelic being – or even Frodo, a man of wealth and status – who saves the world.  It is Samwell, who through his steadfast loyalty sees Frodo to his destination.

Instead of secret knowledge, you have learned wisdom.  The magic in his world comes not from hording, but from understanding.  Beorn speaks with the animals through empathy.  The elves feel the waft and woft of the world, and know how to work with it.  The dwarves can smith such excellent metal because they understand the metal’s soul.  The only secrets in this realm – the only Gnostics – are Sauron and his lieutenants.

A Gnostic World

Much of our modern culture is empty power fantasy.  This can be the overt power of video games, or the covert power of celebrity worship.  Many aspire towards, not sainthood, but importance.  They want to believe themselves better than other people, special, selected, but rather than earning this through personal growth, and reliance upon God, they do it through narcissistic ego shells, spiels, and hypocritical manipulations.  Rather than lifting themselves up so that they can help lift up others, they do it so they can hold others down.

Instead of seeking knowledge people seek gnosis.  Knowledge is available to anyone; being able to fix your car doesn’t make you special.  While gnosis – whether of the spiritual variety, or simply obscure knowledge about an obscure topic (geek/snark culture) – makes one feel important.  They seek exception: demanding that the universe alter its standards to accommodate their behaviour (fat acceptance).  They abjure the physical: either the asceticism of laziness (Ironman never went to the gym), or they indulge the concupiscent desires without concern for the consequences.  Usually both.

Gnosticism is the philosophy of childish self-centredness; the inability to recognize that others have an existence of outside of one’s own, and that the rules of this universe are not arbitrary, that they’re there for good reason.  To what extent is Gnosticism an extant philosophical movement?  And to what extent is it simply a ‘low hanging fruit’ of an idea, which is easy to grasp for those who were never catechized?  Does it matter if it’s one or another?

So long as it drives you down egoistic, self-destructive paths, the Devil will be happy.  Be careful of what you watch; be careful of what fantasies you wish for.  You might just get them.