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Socialism,
The Soul
and
Subversive
Spirituality
Society and the Soul
Both social identity and soul identity are collective or group identities. Just as a people or ‘Volk’ is a multiplicity of persons and the body an organic multiplicity of cells so is the soul of the individual a unique and in-divisible multiplicity of selves – an organic ‘society’ of selves. This is what makes it so easy for people to identify their spiritual individuality with the ‘soul’ of a people or ‘Volk’ - understood as a living social ‘organism’. And just as the body is seen by science as having to defend itself against pathogens – ‘foreign bodies’ – in the form of microorganisms or toxins, so is the body of a people then seen as something in need of protection from ‘foreign bodies’ of a different sort – foreigners. Xenophobic nationalism and racism are forms of identity politics. Identity politics is in turn an expression of the mass psychology of identity which finds expression in religions and their god-concepts. The history of religion and its god-concepts is the history of society and its identity-concepts or self-concepts.
Judaism and other monotheisms are the historic source of a god-concept which reflects a concept of identity or selfhood as something innately bounded by the body of the individual, the borders of the nation, the biology of a race, or the blood ties, culture and values of a people or Volk. From this developed the modern culture of ego-identity as such, the ego being the mental boundary we place on our bodily sense of self, and the mental borderline we place between ‘me’ and ‘not-me’. Together with the monotheistic belief in One God, goes beliefs in One and only one Self, One Body (no reincarnation), One Reality, One Law for all, One Nation, One ‘Son’ of God…or One Fuhrer. But any ‘One’ implies the reality of Others. The very concept of monotheism - the idea of God as a single being, even a supreme being, is atheistic – implying as it does that the divine is merely one being among others rather than the divine source of all beings. Judaism and Aryanism were both identity religions generating mirror-image forms of identity politics, whether Nazi or Zionist.
How is it then,
that Nazi ideologists were nevertheless able to promote the idea of an
age-long and world-historic struggle, not only between Aryan and Jewish
identity, but between Aryan and Jewish religiosity and ‘spirituality’ as
such? That is because it falsely identified the Aryan ‘race’ with an
Indo-European and Asian religious tradition that does indeed
stand in diametric contrast to all monotheistic religions. This is not
simply because they are ‘polytheistic’ religions which recognise many
gods. Nor is it simply because they recognise that the individual too
has not just one but many selves - many lives and many bodies. It
is because they implicitly reject the foundational concept of theism
as such (whether monotheism or polytheism) - the concept of individual
beings as bounded identities – and with it the concept of both
gods or ‘God’ as bounded beings.
The Enduring Tradition of Gnosis
The ancient spiritual tradition known as gnosticism was the most politically subversive spiritual movement ever to emerge and challenge the ruling gods of the day and their earthly priests and bishops. The ‘Gnostic Gospels’ discovered at Nag Hammadi are ample evidence of this iconoclasm. The gnostic movement arose in the centuries around the beginning of the first millennium supplanting the ‘New Age’ style ‘pick-and-mix’ of religious cults and philosophies that had sprung up within the Alexandrian empire. Weaving together elements of esoteric Judaism and Christianity, and giving new expression to ancient mystery traditions in the language of Greek philosophy, the gnostics forged a new and radically dualistic religious philosophy, characterised by five fundamental distinctions:
1. Between the egotistic and genocidal god of the Old Testament and that deeper spiritual source and reality which it arrogantly denied (“No other gods before me”).
2. Between the outer human being that is ‘in the world’, and the inner human being – a being that is not ‘of’ this world at all, and gives each individual direct access to spiritual reality through inner knowing or gnosis .
3. Between holy scriptures and symbols that merely represented spiritual reality and gnosis – the direct inner cognition of that reality.
4. Between distorted ideas of salvation through struggle against sin, self-sacrifice, martyrdom and death on the cross, and salvation through struggle against spiritual ignorance or agnosis.
5. Between the seed of Cain and Abel, symbols of an unending war of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, and the seed of Adam’s third son Seth – the bearer of authentic inner knowledge.
Gnosticism survived
repression by the Roman Church, to leave traces in the mystical
traditions of the Eastern Church, Judaism and Islam. It re-emerged in
Europe in the heretical theology of Meister Eckhart and Jakob Boehme.
Just as gnostic spirituality had first found expression in the language
of Greek philosophy – whilst at the same time imbuing that language with
an otherwise missing dimension of spiritual passion and depth – so did
the resurgent gnosis now find expression in the language of
German and German-Jewish philosophy and poetry. Whilst the heretical
‘Gospels’ discovered at Nag Hammadi provided decisive evidence of the
early gnostic spiritual movement, the ‘Gnostic Gospels’ of our own
time remain largely unacknowledged. Karl Marx’s profoundly spiritual
critique of the false gods of capitalism is but one example of the
re-emergence of an underground stream of wordless inner knowing or
gnosis that has, in the last two centuries, been finding expression
in entirely new frameworks of thought. Examples of latter-day gnostic
philosophies are those of the twentieth-century German thinker Martin
Heidegger, his Jewish counterpart Martin Buber and the ‘spiritual
scientific’ thinking of Rudolf Steiner. More recently, gnostic thinking
has found indirect expression in the experiential psychology of Eugene
Gendlin, the writings of Peter Sloterdijk and above all in the SETH
books of Jane Roberts – SETH being a name with deep resonance and
significance in the history of gnosticism. As we enter the first years
of the third millennium AD, humanity finds itself in a similar position
to that which it faced in the first centuries of the first millennium.
Our New Age spirituality co-exists with the rampant religious and
political egotism of a New Rome – US imperialism – whose only god is its
own global economic and cultural hegemony.
As Marx long ago predicted in the Communist Manifesto, the march of
corporate capitalism would inevitably result in its globalisation,
creating a global secular culture which would economically trample and
militarily terrorise all traditional, regionally rooted spiritual
cultures – whilst arousing in the process the most violent forms of
reaction from them. In Europe and Russia this reaction to global
capitalism took the form of racist Nazi militarism and Stalinist
industrial feudalism. In China it took the form of a religiously
enthused ‘Cultural Revolution’. It now takes the form not only of
Islamic fundamentalism, but of reactionary Christian and Jewish
fundamentalism. Now however, the underground tradition of gnosis
and gnostic spirituality is destined to once again surface and fulfil
its subversive mission – that of undermining the false gods of global
capitalism, scientific materialism, religious fundamentalism and New Age
eclecticism. The New Gnosis will once again be a subversive Sethian
gnosis – one which
challenges a whole host of false gods worshipped in our time. ‘Globalisation’,
‘energy’ and the ‘eternal gene’ are just some of the clay-footed idols
worshipped religiously in the current ideologies of global capitalism.
These include economic hegemonism and competitive
egotism, as well as the scientific and philosophical ideologies of
genetic, energetic and linguistic reductionism – all of which
constitute a new form of spiritual-scientific ignorance or agnosticism.
These ideologies are not only in the high-tech temples of the global
finance markets and bio-tech corporations – dedicated to the worship of
Mammon or the Human Genome – but also in the healing sanctuaries of Neo
Age ‘energy medicine’, in Neo-Nazi politics and Neo-pagan religions and
in ‘narrative’ psychotherapy.
Under the title “A World Revolution of the Soul”,
The Nag Hammadi
Gospels were first published in Germany by Peter Sloterdijk, one of few
contemporary thinkers to acknowledge the extraordinary significance of
the gnostic tradition for our age. Commenting on Sloterdijk’s work, Wim
Nijenhuis writes:
This [Gnosis] is a path followed by many
philosophers and artists…Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche,
Heidegger, Cioran, Beckett and Baudrillard. Without exaggerating, we may
say that a discussion is underway regarding the dissidence potential of
the language of Gnosis in the post-historical media age. Within this
debate Sloterdijk's position is that a new 'epoch-making' revolution is
possible, and that, analogous to Gnosis in the past, it must come from
an individual revolution of the soul….Sloterdijk's thesis on
unworldliness is that, for the first time in history, Gnosis has
formulated a dualistic principle which makes it possible to live in this
world without being of this world. The Gnosis investigation provides
Sloterdijk with a set of instruments for making a diagnosis of our age
which demonstrates that our culture displays signs of a sort of
neo-Gnostic turn. After two hundred years of attachment to the world,
many people are now turning away from it and thereby spontaneously
following the second path of Gnosis.
Gnosticism as an Unacknowledged World Religion
Far from being reducible to a set of obscure ancient sects or doctrines
that sprang up in the Near East at the turn of the first millennium,
gnosticism was and remains an unrecognised world religion – the
only world religion that is not a sectarian cult, reliant on
institutional structures. Gnosticism has become an unrecognised world
religion because it is the underground stream of spiritual knowing or
gnosis from which all religions spring. There has always been a gap
between individual spiritual awareness and the symbols provided for it
by institutionalised religions. Today this gap grows ever wider, leading
to ever more desperate and fanatical attempts to bring the individuals
back into the fold of dogmatic communal fundamentalisms. It remains an
underground world religion because it is not a communal ‘faith’ but a
form of spirituality that gives precedence to individual spiritual
awareness – an awareness that is above all an awareness of our
own spiritual individuality. Gnostic spirituality is ‘gnosis’
– a knowing awareness of our own innermost spiritual identity. This
spiritual identity is both individual and inviolable – eternal. And yet
it is capable of infinite expansion. For, it is not an unconscious
‘part’ of the everyday self we identify with in this life, but the very
source of that self and of countless selves and countless lives. The
life of our innermost spiritual being is not bounded by birth and death
but is the source of such boundless potentialities of being as can never
be fully embodied in any one life. It is the self that is never fully
born or ‘actualised’. A self that is already ‘dead’ – for it has never
ceased to dwell in the spiritual world. It is the self that is “in the
world but not of the world”. Gnosticism is a form of spirituality
that can be named in a word but not ‘defined’ in words. It cannot be
defined, because its basis is gnosis – the wordless inner knowing
that links each individual to their innermost spiritual being.
The Theo-Political History of Gnosticism
In his book subtitled
“The message of the alien God and the beginnings of Christianity”, Hans
Jonas presented an account of the subversive, socialistic religious
tradition known as gnosticism, and of the historical background and
cultural preconditions of its emergence. This is a story which offers
remarkable parallels to our times. It begins with the decline of
regional state religious cults such as those of the Assyrians,
Babylonians, Persians and Jews. War and conquest and the expatriation of
ruling elites starts to separate regional religious cults from
their urban centres of state power. Mass migration of peoples leads
these regional cults and religious cultures to not only spread
geographically but eventually to transform themselves into global
ideologies and world religions. Thus according to Jonas, the
Egyptian exodus and Babylonian exile of the Israelites led to the
emergence of monotheism as a world religion, the conquest of Babylon by
Persia led to the spread of astrological fatalism, and the fall of the
Persian empire led to the spread of magic and religious dualism from its
erstwhile regional locus in what is now Iran.
To begin with, therefore, we have a migratory melting pot of ethnic
cultures and religious cults detached from their regional soil. At the
same time, however, another force is at work. Greece transforms itself
under Alexander into a great imperial power which conquers the
Near East. Through the Greek language and Greek philosophy it imposes
its own Hellenic culture – a cosmopolitan culture in which
individuals, no matter what their origins, are seen not only as citizens
of a local polis or city state like Athens but of a grand
rationally ordered cosmos. Greek language and Greek philosophy
offer the older spiritual traditions of the Near East a powerful new
language in which to conceptualise themselves. Thus the Hebrew
Yahweh cult found expression as a universal philosophical and ethical
monotheism. But along with the Hellenisation of Judaism went a general
revival of all the old spiritual traditions of the Near East. The
sophisticated and subtle Greeks begin to take an interest themselves in
‘the wisdom of the barbarians’. The result was a ‘New Age’ style
marketplace of ancient mystery cults and religious philosophies – but
all couched in the common currency of Greek concepts. What was missing
in this marketplace however, was any concept of individual
spirituality and spiritual individuality. The inner self was
identified with the outer self or ego, and the monotheistic God of the
Jews served as a divine superego, needed to keep man’s unruly libidinal
nature under control.
The central message of Christianity was designed to correct this
god-concept, to remind individuals that they were fleshly embodiments of
their innermost spiritual being. This gnostic message soon gave way to
something quite different - an identification of each
individual’s divine essence or spiritual individuality with a single
divine or divinely inspired individual – first Jesus and later Mohammed.
Alexander’s conquest of the East, however, not only prepared the ground
for the Hellenic ‘New Age’ but gave birth, under the Roman empire, to a
new Christian gnosis - one that would ‘heretically’ reject the
dogmas through which Christianity itself was eventually turned into an
imperial state religion of Rome. The gnostic ‘heretics’ rejected both
Graeco-Roman cosmos idolatry and what they perceived as the false god of
orthodox monotheism – a Supreme Being that, like the Big Bang of today’s
cosmologists – was the ‘cause’ (arche) of everything in the
cosmos and its dominating power (archon) but had itself no deeper
source or origin. The dogmas that the gnostics rejected however, were
not as important as the gnosis that they affirmed – the inner
knowing that is the heritage of each individual, re-linking them to
their own inner being and to an entire spiritual world of beings. This
spiritual world was not conceived as an astrological cosmos of planets
and stars but as an inner universe made up of planes and spheres of
awareness. The Greek language was rich enough to not only provide a
medium of intelligent discourse and dialogue but also to resonate with a
deeper type of knowing or gnosis – the “wordless knowledge within
the word”. This was not the case with Latin. Through Latin translation
Greek theosophical language lost all its inner senses and resonances.
Hence people can still speak today of ‘gnosticism’ as a dualistic world
outlook which treats the material world as an abomination,
forgetting that the Greek language had no word for ‘matter’.
Gnosticism and Global Geo-Politics
With the expansion of the Roman
empire and the Latinisation of Christian thought, the culture of the
Greek ‘West’ became sidelined – except in Russia - as a new Roman ‘East’
– leading to the split between the Roman and Byzantine church.
Similarly, today’s European West, together with Russia, is no more than
an ‘Eastern’ frontier to the new ‘West’ of the American global empire.
Within this global culture wars continue to rage between religious and
racial, ethnic and national particularism, on the one hand, and
an ethical and economic universalism or ‘globalism’ on the other
– the latter now taking the form of an Americanised capitalist culture
in which, as Marx long ago predicted, all genuine qualitative values
give way to a single quantitative value – the dollar. In this war of
universalist vs particularist identities and values there
is, despite the much vaunted ‘individualism’ of the West, no room for
the individual, no spiritual understanding of individuality and the
nature of individual values. Today’s Western ‘individualism’, dominated
by the imperial culture of American global capitalism, is a spiritual
sham. All deep spiritual values have been subsumed by superficial
symbolic values attached to material commodities. And like commodities,
individual identity has become private property – an identi-kit
assembled from the global marketplace of brands and commodities, ethnic
and ethical values. Coca Cola can be swapped for Mecca Cola, tee-shirts
bearing the cross for those with a crescent or six-pointed star.
Participation in the rat race can be alternated with periods in a
Buddhist retreat or Ayurvedic health centre – at a price. In this way
all sub-cultures are ultimately forced to prostrate themselves before
the dominant global culture of technologisation and commercialisation,
and indeed forced to partake of them – to brand and market themselves in
order to ‘compete’. Not all the forces of Islam, either in the form of
regional state religions or international religious movements, will be
able to resist the imperial forces of global capitalism. For, like all
of the other world religions it has not room for a deep individual
spirituality of a new sort – one that cannot be reduced to a shared
communal spirit or culture, religious or secular, regional or
international, racial or ethnic. An authentic individual spirituality
can only have its source in our own deeper spiritual individuality
– the inner being we each bear within us and whose spiritual embodiment
we are. The same constellation of circumstances that gave birth to a
gnostic spirituality in the centuries just preceding and following the
birth of Christianity, are reflected in our contemporary world as we
move into the third millennium AD. In place of a Hellenic
cosmopolitanism and Roman imperialism we have scientific cosmos worship
and American imperialism. In place of a Christian sacramental culture of
communion we have a secular culture of commodification,
commercialisation and consumerism. In place of the Assyrian, Babylonian
and Persian East we have Syria, Iraq and Iran. In place of the ‘Near
East’ we have the ‘Middle East’ – where Judaism has regressed to the
status of a regional state-backed religion and where the Palestinians
have become the new Jews of the ‘Holy Land’. In place of the revival of
interest in ancient spiritual traditions that constituted the Hellenic
‘New Age’ we have our own – a mix-and-match marketplace of
second-hand spiritual knowledge lacking any philosophical or
spiritual depth – sold through the symbolic allure of ancient
traditions or given a pseudo-scientific gloss in the jargons of
quantum-physics.
From New Age to a New Gnosis
In the centuries immediately preceding and following the birth of
Christ, a multi-cultural mix of races co-existed under the political
sway of the Roman empire and its vassals, along with a medley of
spiritual mythologies and theologies – a medley mirrored in today’s New
Age pick-and-mix assortment of ancient spiritual traditions and new
fangled therapies. Then, as now, the main concern of the ruling powers
of the day was only to ensure that no coherent spiritual movement
emerged which in any way challenged their political authority or the
military hegemony. But the spiritual key word of the day was not
‘therapy’ or ‘healing’ however, but ‘redemption’. This word did not mean
salvation from sin but freedom from slavery to the ruling
military-political powers and their religious servants – the so-called
‘archons’. Thus it was that in closest secrecy, small circles of
initiates formed covert spiritual ‘cells’ whose purpose was to quietly
educate others in a new and coherent religious philosophy. This
philosophy, unlike the ‘New Age’ style medley of gods and religions that
preceded it, was indeed spiritually and politically subversive. Its
sheer spiritual power was a covert challenge to the ruling
military-political powers. For, it was capable of restoring a sense of
authentic spiritual communion between individuals that transcended those
ethnic, class and cultural divisions on which those powers rested. One
outcome of the work of these initiates was the birth of a ‘Christianity’
which very soon deformed itself into a personality cult of saviour
worship and redemption from ‘original sin’. Another, less visible
outcome was the continued survival of a powerful underground
spiritual tradition – the so-called ‘gnostic’ tradition. This tradition
had begun with the secret cells of subversive spiritual teachers who
taught that the key to ‘salvation’ lay neither in political rebellion
nor in redemption from ‘sin’, but rather in overcoming spiritual
blindness and ignorance. In place of this ignorance they offered
knowledge or gnosis – not in the form of dogmas but in the form
of direct spiritual experiences undergone by individuals through
initiation. For those in the business of creating a new structure of
spiritual-political and cultural-communal authority – the Church –
gnostic Christianity became subversive heresy. The ‘official’
canon of Christian gospels were carefully selected to remove as many
traces as possible of the gnostic message or ‘gospel’ that Christ had
been chosen to publicly enunciate and embody. Direct knowledge of
spiritual reality through individual experience was regarded as
inherently suspect and replaced by official rites or ‘sacraments’ which
merely symbolised the knowledge obtainable through initiation -
direct subjective knowledge of a spiritual world of soul.
Science is the new religion.
Martin Heidegger
In today’s world however, ‘knowledge’ is something identified solely with academic studies and science, whereas religion is seen as a matter of ‘belief’ or ‘faith’, ‘culture’ or ‘community’. All claims to knowledge that fall outside its officially sanctioned sources – science and academia – are deemed to be ‘unscientific’ rather than ‘heretical’. Nevertheless, the very idea that there is such a thing as subjective knowledge is of course sheer scientific heresy in modern scientific terms. The fact that we no longer see any scientific truth in direct subjective experience – not least spiritual experience – is testament to the spiritual ignorance or a-gnosticism fostered by centuries of institutionalised Christianity. The official churches fulfilled the function of nurturing and sustaining a communal spirituality based on personal faith and sacramental rites. The underground ‘anti-church’ of traditional gnosticism focused on the enlightenment of the individual through initiation in secret societies.
The New Socialism as Social Gnosticism
The New Socialism
is also a new gnostic critique of the ruling secular and social
gods of our era, and of the economic cultures and scientific cults that
support them. It calls into question the supreme god of capitalism – The
Market. It also questions its subordinate gods - gods of ‘energy’ or
‘the eternal gene’. The New Socialism is a New Gnosis - a
theo-political spear aimed at the foundations of global neo-conservatism
and neo-imperialism, and challenging all four faces of its famous
pyramid – the dollar, the idolatry and ‘i-dollartry’ of new
technologies, the politically illiterate platitudes of New Age
‘spirituality’, and the historically illiterate ‘literalism’ of
Christian fundamentalist bible-worship or bibliolatry – which now sees
its own face reflected in the deathly clash of Islamic and Zionist
fundamentalisms. In the words of Karl Marx, through theo-political
critique “the critique of heaven is transformed into the critique of
earth…the critique of theology into the critique of politics.” In New
Gnostic theo-politics the critique of politics becomes once again a
critique of old and new theologies and god-concepts. This particular
work of theo-political critique, like those of Marx, does not take the
form of a theoretical treatise produced as an academic end in itself.
Rather, as Marx put it: “Its subject is its enemy…It no longer
acts as an end in itself but only as a means. Its essential
emotion is indignation. Its essential task is denunciation.”
The “enemy” of gnosis is not a group of persons or an economic
class, nor is it some social or spiritual power of ‘evil’. It is quite
simply spiritual ignorance or agnosis – whether this takes the
form of supposed scientific ‘knowledge’ or religious ‘agnosticism’. Far
from being reducible to a set of obscure ancient sects or doctrines that
sprang up in the Near East at the turn of the first millennium,
gnosticism was and remains an unrecognised world religion – the
only world religion that is not a sectarian cult, reliant on
institutional structures. Gnosticism has become an unrecognised world
religion because it is the underground stream of spiritual knowing or
gnosis from which all religions spring. There has always been a gap
between individual spiritual awareness and the symbols provided for it
by institutionalised religions. Today this gap grows ever wider, leading
to ever more desperate and fanatical attempts to bring the individuals
back into the fold of dogmatic communal fundamentalisms.
The New Gnosis and the Global ‘World’
The mythology regarding gnosticism
has it that the gnostics rejected the material world. In fact what they
rejected was the identification of reality with an artefact of the
‘demiurge’ – a ‘world’ posited and projected, manufactured and
materialised by the ego. We know this ‘world’ all too well today – the
artificial world of the global media and global markets. In this modern
world it is no longer the gods but material commodities that are imbued
with human qualities (‘Real Chocolate, Real Feeling’). Vedic and
Buddhist religious philosophy – theosophy - saw the material world as
‘maya’ – a spiritual illusion. Like Marx however, the gnostics
recognised that spiritual illusions can take on a worldly material
reality of their own. In the past all authentic human qualities were
projected on and personified by the gods. Today they are not projected
onto but materialised as commodities – “Real chocolate.
Real feeling”. In the past, relations between human beings were seen as
dominated by relationships between the gods or cosmic bodies such as
planets and stars. Global capitalism, as Marx anticipated, would replace
such fatalism with something far more fatal. Human beings would become
subservient to their own material products. Relations between
beings would become dominated by relationships between things – global
markets and consumer commodities. Technology has created a ‘virtual’
world of media images, designed to sustain, through clever marketing,
the idolisation of the commodity. The global media construct a
‘world’ in which images substitute for immediate lived experience.
Instead of astrologers seeking ‘signs’ in the movements of the planets
and stars, shareholders look for ‘signs’ in movements of market prices
in the stock exchanges of the world. Science, having supposedly
vanquished superstition, has become the servant of global corporations
all of which have the basic character and structure of religious
cults, each with its own spurious corporate ‘cultures’,
‘philosophies’ and ‘values’. None of this can disguise the fact that
within these corporate sects all the real human qualities of the
employee are valued only in so far as they generate purely
quantitative values. Valued only as a means to an end, all
individual qualities are fundamentally devalued – valued only to
the extent that they can be materialised as material commodities
and measurable economic values – profit. The aim is not individual value
fulfilment but “maximising the value of human capital”. In place of the
Invisible Spirit of the gnostics is the invisible hand of the Market. In
place of the gospel of gnosis, of inner self-discovery, we have
the gospel of the marketeers: “Rediscover the real you with Radox”.
In the beginning God created human beings. Now, however human
beings are creating God. Such is the way of this world – humans invent
gods and worship their creations. It would be better for such gods to
worship humans.
These are not the words of the ‘atheist’ Karl
Marx, but instead come from the Gospel of Phillip. By ‘world’ the early
gnostics did not mean the natural world but the social world fashioned
by the human ego. Like the ancient ‘world’ of the gnostics, the modern
‘world’ of global capitalist society is identical neither with the earth
and natural world, nor the world of soul and spirit. ‘World’ today means
only the worldwide, global market. The earth and its beings have been
reduced to a worldwide stock of raw materials and exploitable
‘resources’ – human and animal, vegetable and mineral. The sea is seen
as no more than a vast fish farm; animals are herded into concentration
camps for processing into food; trees are merely raw materials for the
timber industry. Human beings themselves are disposed of as a stock of
human ‘resources’, of exploitable skills and labour power. The work of
human beings in capitalist society consists in creating purely
quantitative material values rather than giving creative expression to
their innermost qualitative spiritual values – their innermost soul
qualities. The values of global
capitalism are purely symbolic values – brand values, monetary value and
market value. It is not beings but brands that are honestly regarded as
having ‘souls’ by marketeers. Everything of deep spiritual value in the
soul life of human beings, and all deeply valued human soul qualities
are perverted by advertising into hollow, flat-screen images of
themselves – identified with material commodities which serve as empty
symbols of those soul qualities. As Marx pointed out, the defining
character of capitalism is the way in which relationships between human
beings become transformed into relationships between things –
commodities. All the unique inner qualities that individuals
materialise in their creative labour are put into the service of
producing standardised commodities – and valued only according to the
market value of those commodities. This society is not ‘secular’ in any
way – its basis is a religious idolatry of the commodity.
Marx recognised in capitalism an imperial and inherently
self-globalising economic culture – one in which all ethical values
would be subsumed by ‘market values’, all relationships between human
beings would be dominated by relationships between things – commodities
and their prices – and in which obligatory wage slavery would be
sanctified by the owners of capital as the highest form of social
‘freedom’.
The New Gnosis and the Nature of ‘God’
In The New Socialism neither theism nor atheism is an
option, for it is not a question of believing or disbelieving in God’s
reality as an actual being. Monotheisms of the sort that
would have us believe in the One God as an actual being, are
actually a disguised form of polytheisms since they imply the
possibility of other gods.
I am a jealous god and there is no other god beside me. But by making this announcement he suggested to the angels that there is another god. For if there were no other God, of whom would he be jealous?
The Secret Book of John
Any ‘monotheistic’ god that is seen as one actual being reduces God to one being among others. Such a god cannot be a ‘true’ God – the divine source of all beings XE "beings" . Theisms that would have us believe in God as an actual being are thus also a form of disguised atheisms. In gnostic theology, a-gnosticism XE "gnosticism" is not an option either. The term ‘agnosticism’ has come to refer to the belief that the existence of God can neither be proved nor disproved. Gnosis makes the question of God’s existence or non-existence irrelevant. The fact that God does not ‘exist’ as an actual being in no way means that God lacks reality. Reality is not actual existence, for all actualities and all actual beings have their source in an infinite field of potentiality. This field of potentiality was known by the gnostics of the past as The Fullness or pleroma. For God’s ‘non-actuality’ or ‘non-being’ is no mere void or empty lack of being. Instead it is an unimaginable fullness, consisting of limitless potentialities of being and infinite potential beings. Potential reality by its very nature is nothing actual or objectively verifiable. Potentialities have reality only subjectively, in awareness. Gnostic theology is no arrogant claim to ‘know’ God’s reality as an actual being. It is the understanding that God is gnosis – a knowing awareness of potentiality that is not the awareness of any actual being but the source of all actual beings. For this knowing awareness of potentiality consists of those infinite potentialities of awareness which are actualised as individualised consciousnesses or souls.
The New Gnosis and the Geo-Politics of ‘Energy’
It was Aristotle who first asserted
the primacy of the actual over the potential, of being over becoming, of
material actuality or ‘energy’ over creative spiritual
potentiality – the true meaning of ‘power’.
Obviously then, actuality (energeia) is prior to both
potency (dynamis) and to every principle of change.
In his essay entitled Dynamis vs Energeia,
Jonathon Tennenbaum of the Schiller Institute has exposed the scientific
and geo-political consequences of this philosophical principle – a
principle which obscured the very essence of energy (energeia) as
self-actualising potentiality or power (dynamis).
Aristotle
denies the possibility of a self-developing, or self-actualising
potential that which Nicholas of Cusa later called the posse-est (posse
corresponding to Plato’s dynamis).
The principle of the posse-est posits the reality of a domain of unbounded potentiality. Energeia is the self-actualisation of this domain – the principle of formative and transformative activity through which all things undergo continuous creation and are changed. Since Aristotle however, energeia has been identified only with ‘actuality’. The result is that what science now calls ‘energy’ is itself seen as an actual ‘thing’ or as a product of such actual things (for example oil). Seen as a product of the actual, ‘energy’ is necessarily limited by the ‘laws’ of thermodynamics and is therefore treated as a scarce resource to be fought over through geo-political wars. Tennenbaum recounts how, in the lead-up to the American Civil War, along with the advent of materialism “a scientific cult was launched by Lord Kelvin and the Thomas-Huxley-Herbert Spencer ‘X-club’ circles…” Around the turn of the nineteenth century this found expression in the “Energeticist Movement” of Willhelm Ostwald, which “advocated a World Government based on the use of ‘energy’ as the universal, unifying concept not only for all the physical sciences, but also for economics, psychology, sociology and the arts.” The so-called ‘laws of thermodynamics’ are in essence a theo-physical construct which represents the cosmos as a closed system comparable to a machine. This ‘dynamics’ negates the very essence of dynamis as the dynamic self-actualisation or ‘emanation’ (hypostasis) of an open and unbounded realm of potentiality (dynamis) – the pleroma of the gnostics. Dynamis – the autonomous self-actualisation of this realm – is not the working or effect of a pre-existing agent or ‘cause’ of action. The attachment of the Catholic Church to Aristotelian doctrine was necessary to justify the idea of God as a pre-existing agent of action in the form of a single actual being. The conceptual reduction of dynamis to energeia, of potentiality to actuality, went hand in hand with the scientific reduction of the cosmos to a closed system of ‘energies’, and the religious reduction of God to an actual being – a person or ‘trinity’ of persons.
The New Socialism and ‘New Age’ Spirituality
What essentially is our
contemporary ‘New Age’ culture? It is a commodified and commercialised
‘spirituality’ that has replaced the spiritual powers and charismata of
gnostic Christianity with the ‘charisma’ of scientific and/or esoteric
symbols – whether the symbols of quantum physics or the I-Ching,
or ‘tachyons’ or Tarot cards. The gods it worships are impersonal cosmic
energies. Its sacraments are healing ‘technologies’. Its religions are
‘therapies’. Its ‘word’ is the marketing of holistic health products and
services. Its festivals are trade fairs of ‘Body, Mind and
Spirit’. It replaces the unction of the spirit with aromatherapy,
sacraments with the rites and rituals of different healing practices,
the baptism of water with colonic irrigation, the innate vitality of
spirit with vitamin supplements, the speech or logos of the
psyche with arid scientific theories of psychology. Just like orthodox
medicine it identifies the psychic and spiritual inwardness of the human
body or soma with the flesh or sarx - its outermost
physical skin. It promises to raise individuals to a ‘higher’
spiritual level, in tune with ‘higher vibrations’ - instead of helping
them descend into the rumbling depths of their being. It seeks to
‘cleanse’ them of toxins and empty them of ‘negative’ emotions - whilst
fearing the fullness of this depth - the pleroma. Its slogan is
self-actualisation - a contradiction in terms – for what is ‘self’ if
not the autonomous self-actualisation of a primordial field of
potentiality, one that can never be fully actualised in any identity or
‘self’. It sees ‘energy’ as the medium of inter-relatedness between all
things – forgetting that in doing so it acknowledges relatedness as
something more primary than any thing – including ‘energy’. As
subversive social gnosticism, The New Socialism rejects the
agnosticism of New Age ‘energeticism’ in a most fundamental way –
recognising that it is not ‘energy’ that connects things but
connectedness that energises – the connectedness not of
bodies in space but of beings. It is beings and not brains that think;
beings that see and hear, not eyes and ears alone. Gnosis is
knowledge of beings, not of things. For beings themselves have their
source in a knowing awareness of potentiality that transcends all
the actualities and certainties of the word and its scientific
‘knowledge’.
The New Socialism as Spiritual Anarchism
New Gnostic
theosophy distinguishes between the realm of non-being or potentiality –
that which the ancient gnostics called the pleroma – and the
realm of being or actuality – known as the kenoma. At the same
time it is non-Aristotelian - for it acknowledges the primacy of
dynamis over energeia, the potential over the actual. It
recognises all actualities as the autonomous self-actualisation
of a primordial field of potentialities – the pleroma. From this point
of view, action itself is essentially autonomous – it has no ‘first
cause’. The Greek word arche, translated into Latin as causus
– implied something independent of action that can be an initial
starting point or ‘cause’ of action, and that therefore dominates and
rules action. The notion of arche is an expression of human
ego-identity, the ego being that part of us that experiences itself as
an independent cause or initiator of action, whilst not knowing
itself as one expression of action. This is an illusion, since all
identifiable events or phenomena – all identities – consist of
structures or patterns of action, and are the autonomous
self-actualisation of a primordial field of potentiality. Since all
action is self-multiplying, creating further possibilities of action,
all structures or patterns of action – all identities – are inherently
mutable and subject to transformation. The Greek verb archein
means to rule or dominate, and the term archon is used frequently
in the gnostic gospels to denote dominant political, social and
spiritual powers – powers which seek to rule human action through laws
and structures whilst regarding themselves as ‘first causes’ that are in
some way above action and above the very laws and structures they impose
– laws and structures designed to preserve the status quo. Ancient
gnosticism on the other hand was political, social and spiritual an-archism
– opposing the self-arrogated power of the archons and worship of
an archigenitor. That is because gnosis undermines the
very principle of arche – rejecting the idea of a ‘first cause’
of action, and rejecting all theologies which gave God the attributes of
an archon and archigenitor – a supreme ruling power and ‘first
cause’. In place of this Archigenitor they spoke of
Autogenes, a name which suggests the principle of autonomously
self-generating action or autogenesis – the ‘self-begetting’ and
‘self-begotten God’, and the autonomous, free and self-creating Self.
The New Socialism as a “World Revolution of the Soul”
Religion and politics have always been and remain inseparable.
The supposed separation of spiritual and secular power, ‘church and
state’, merely sanctifies that other unrecognised world religion – that
of the global money markets. The economic military and media power
wielded by this religion is unparalleled. It makes a complete mockery
of democracy, a term which means nothing in societies in which it is not
elected parliaments but unelected corporate managements that have the
most impact on people’s everyday working lives. The gnostics of old
struggled against worldly power of both church and state. They did not
do so through parliamentary or extra-parliamentary action, martyrdom or
mass demonstrations, militancy or armed revolution, communal
mobilisation or media campaigning. They did so by recognising the innate
spiritual power of each individual to ‘change the world’ by changing
themselves – learning to be in ‘in the world but not of the world’. But
a spiritual world revolution, a “world revolution of the soul” (Sloterdijk)
is in essence neither an individual nor a social revolution. Fundamental
social changes, economic and political, can only come about through a
revolution in a third realm transcending the individual and the social.
This is the ‘Third Realm’ of immediate human relations between
individuals which Martin Buber called the ‘inter-human’. The spiritual,
mental, emotional and physical health of both the individual and society
are all inseparable from the health of human relations within society
and between individuals. A revolution in human relations however, can in
turn only come about through the way in which we ourselves relate to
other individuals. It demands that as individuals, we take unconditional
responsibility for the manner in which we relate to other human beings,
not relegating this responsibility to some ‘thing’ – whether our genetic
programming, neurological functioning or childhood upbringing. It
demands re-ligion in the most essential sense of this word – the
capacity to re-link with our innermost spiritual self. For, only in that
way can we knowingly re-link with the innermost self of other
individuals. The New Gnosis is a ‘Third Evangel’ whose aim is to
usher in a ‘Third Age’ in which neither the individual nor the
collective but the ‘Third Realm’ – the realm of immediate human
relations between individuals – creates the foundation of The New
Socialism.
‘Third Realm’, ‘Third Age’ and the ‘Third Reich’
According to the political scientist and
historian Eric Voegelin, it was the Pauline metaphor of the church as a
collective spiritual body that laid the foundation for a hierarchical
church organisation with the Pope as ‘head’ of this body. In his view
however, it also created a prototype for Reformatory mass movements such
as Puritanism, for intellectual movements such as Enlightenment thinking
or German idealism, and for political mass movements such as Marxism and
National Socialism – both of which Voegelin understood not as secular
movements but as political religions. His essay “The Political
Religions” was published in Vienna one month after the Nazi annexation
of Austria. In a lecture entitled ‘Science, Politics and Gnosticism’
delivered at the University of Munich in 1938, Voegelin once again put
forward the central thesis that religion and politics were inseparable.
Above all he argued that the entire intellectual and political history
of Europe, not least Germany, could not be understood without reference
to one of its central religious undercurrents – gnosticism.
The idea that one of the main currents of European, especially of German, thought, is essentially gnostic sounds strange today, but this is not a recent discovery. Until about a hundred years ago the facts of the matter were well known…On this issue, as on many others, the learning and self-understanding of Western civilisation were not submerged until the liberal era, the latter half of the nineteenth century, during the reign of positivism in the sciences of man and society. The submergence was so great that when the gnostic movement reached its revolutionary phase its nature could no longer be recognised. The movements deriving from Marx and Bakunin, the early activities of Lenin, Sorel’s myth of violence, the intellectual movement of neopositivism, the communist, fascist and national-socialist revolutions – all fell in a period, now fortunately part of the past, when science was at a low point. Europe had no conceptual tools with which to grasp the horrors that were upon her…There was no science of the non-Christian, non-national, intellectual and mass movements into which the Europe of Christian nation-states was in the process of breaking up.
This, according to Voegelin was due to a
failure to recognise their gnostic essence as ‘inner-worldly’ religions
– not religions of man’s psychic ‘inner world’ but religions that
demanded world revolution as a means of spiritual redemption from this
world. For since according to gnostic tradition it is through his psyche
that man is bound to the established world order, spiritual salvation
must lead to the dissolution and transformation of this order. Its
revolutionary spiritual mission can be guided neither by worldly
exoteric knowledge nor by any God of this world, but only by a knowing
that comes from man’s innermost spiritual being - that ‘Alien God’ of
the gnostics that is not of this world and is the only means of
overcoming man’s alienation from his inner being.
Voegelin, like the well-known scholar of gnosticism Hans Jonas, saw this
gnostic ontology (from the Greek ontos – being) reflected not
only in the communist political philosophy of Marx but in the
conservative thinking of the twentieth-century philosopher Martin
Heidegger, who for a brief time was a member of the Nazi party. Like the
heresiologists of the past, Voegelin took it upon himself to not only
describe but expose and excoriate these representatives of modern
gnosticism - as if to shield Catholics from their influence and warn of
the enduring but subversive historical undercurrent that gnostic heresy
represented. What he ignores is the central role played by a distorted
Pauline Christianity in this history – one which found expression in
both the Eastern orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. At the same time
Voegelin’s studies of European religious history reveal a quite
different picture of gnostic spirituality and politics than the one he
was so keen to paint. They do so by identifying one central figure in
this history: Joachim of Flore.
Joachim was a Cistercian abbot and mystic who was born in 1132 at Celico, near Cosenza, Italy, and died in March 1202 at San Giovanni in Fiore, Calabria. According to the Catholic Encyclopaedia, Joachim wrote of a trinity of world ages or ‘realms’ corresponding to the three Persons of the Blessed Trinity.
In the first age the Father ruled, representing power and inspiring fear, to which the Old Testament dispensation corresponds; then the wisdom hidden through the ages was revealed in the Son, and we have the Catholic Church of the New Testament; a third period will come, the Kingdom of the Holy Spirit, a new dispensation of universal love, which will proceed from the Gospel of Christ, but transcend the letter of it, and in which there will be no need for disciplinary institutions. Joachim held that the second period was drawing to a close, and that the third epoch (already in part anticipated by St. Benedict) would actually begin…in 1260.
A third and "Eternal Evangel" – the evangelium aeternium of John’s Apocalypse – would arise, one in which the ‘spirit’ would prevail over the letter of the Word. In this sense a new gnosis, understood as the “wordless knowledge within the word”, would be born.
As Voegelin describes it:
The Third Age of Joachim, by virtue of its new descent of the spirit will transform men into members of the new realm with sacramental mediation of grace. In the third age the church will cease to exist because the charismatic gifts that are necessary for the perfect life will reach men without administration of sacraments. While Joachim conceived the new age concretely as an order of monks, the idea of a community of the spiritually perfect who can live together without institutional authority was formulated in principle.
For Voegelin, this principle belongs also to
the very essence of what he calls “the Marxian mysticism” of the
withering away of the state and the ideal of a communist society based
on authentic individual freedom and fulfilment - one in which according
to Marx, “the free development of each is the condition for the free
development of all.” Voegelin notes that “The basic pattern of a
religious interpretation of history already was provided by the Pauline
classification of world history into three areas: the heathen lex
naturalis, the lex mosaica of the Old Testament, and the third,
the Christian empire.” He also notes how the basic idea of a threefold
or trinitarian classification of historical ages is reflected in
Marxism, with its division of history in a primordial era of ‘primitive
communism’, an era of class societies culminating in capitalism, and
third-stage return to communism at a higher level of social, cultural
and industrial development. The national-socialist idea of a Third Age,
and with it a third stage of human society or Third Realm - the ‘Third
Reich’- was in fact a late literary borrowing by the Nazis from a tract
with that name published in 1923. It derives from a long tradition of
theo-historical thinking, and one that long preceded Christianity
itself. It found expression also in a Russian Orthodox understanding of
Moscow as the spiritual centre of a Third Rome. In reality it is
Washington - the Third Rome of the corporations – that has
become the concrete
capitalist shadow of a Russian spiritual capital.
Third Age, Third Realm, Third Reich,
Third Rome. What have these to do
with today’s ‘New Age’ spirituality? An equivalent to the ungrounded and
uncentred spiritual eclecticism that characterised the Hellenic New Age,
preceded the birth of Christianity and with it, the Roman Christian
Empire. A Germanic equivalent of this New Age culture also flowered in
the last decades of the nineteenth century, preceding the birth of
National Socialism. This was not a neo-gnostic movement but a neo-pagan
political religion - rooted in the worship of mythological Nordic gods.
Under Hitler, himself health obsessed, vegetarian and a vehement
anti-smoker, German New Age ‘holistic medicine’ became the national
health policy of the Nazi state. The belief in ‘cleansing’ the bodily
organism of toxins, foreign bodies and pathogenic genes was transferred
to the diagnosis and ‘treatment’ of the social organism - the body of
the Volk – through ethnic cleansing, racial hygiene, eugenics and
genocide. Modern genetic medicine did not begin with Mendel or with
Crick and Watson but with those German physicians and biologists. For it
was they who proposed their own eugenically sanctioned murder of
psychiatric patients as an ideal medical model for the ‘Final Solution’.
Historically it seems, the different ‘New Ages’ have always laid the
basis for something to follow – proving a womb for either a new gnosis,
or for new more insidious expressions of spiritual ignorance. According
to Joachim each age is heralded by a prophet like John the Baptist and
becomes focused around a spiritual leader and teacher – the first of
these having being Abraham, the second being Jesus. Joachim took upon
himself the role of prophet of the Third Age he anticipated. His
historical dating of the birth of this age – 1260 – also just ‘happens’
to coincide exactly with the birth of the German mystic and social
theologian Meister Eckhart, whose teachings did indeed constitute a new
gnostic gospel, do indeed bear a timeless validity and carry a deep theo-political
message.
…there can be no love where love does not find equality, or is not busy creating equality. Nor is there any pleasure without equality. Practice equality in human society. Learn to love, esteem, consider all people like yourself. What happens to another, be it bad or good, pain or joy, ought to be as if it happened to you.
Humanity in the poorest and most despised human being is just as complete as in the Pope or in the Emperor.
We are all in all, as God is all in all.
Meister Eckhart,
translated by Mathew Fox
The New Socialism and the German Spiritual Underground
The geo-political
conditions for the continued endurance of a gnostic tradition in Europe
were laid in 9AD by what was perhaps the single most important battle in
European history: the defeat in the dense Teutonburg forest of three
entire Roman legions under Varus by the Germanic tribes led by Armenius
or ‘Hermann’. This defeat not only established the Rhine as an
unbridgeable geographical boundary of the Roman Empire. It also created
an enduring linguistic, cultural and spiritual division between Europe’s
Romanised West and its Germanic East. With the Christianisation of Rome,
Latin became the dominant language of Roman Christianity, in contrast to
the Greek of the Eastern church and German in the European East. This
was significant, for Latin was an abstract, literalistic and
rationalistic language entirely unsuited to communicating spiritual
knowledge. The Germanic languages, on the other hand, had a spiritual
nature closer to that of Greek - capable of evoking the sort of deep
inner resonances necessary to communicate a “wordless knowledge within
the word”. It is no accident that it was through the translation of the
Bible into German that the Reformation took hold, and that the greatest
of European Christian mystics – Meister Eckhart – wrote and preached in
German. With the decline of ancient
Gnosticism therefore, the spiritual centre of the gnostic tradition
moved from the Near East to the European East, from Greece to Germany
and Russia. The philosophy of Martin Heidegger and the theosophy of
Rudolf Steiner can be considered the culmination of a long tradition of
gnosis in Germany. The climate for this was fostered by the
empire of Frederick the Great, who relinquished the crusade against
Islam, was accused of heresy by the Pope, and whose court included
Jewish and Islamic scholars. Gnostic religiosity found its clearest
expression in the ‘heretical’ theology of Meister Eckhart (1260-1329).
But it also permeated the poetry and music of German romanticism. Its
historical significance can be seen in the circle that gathered round
the mystical anti-Nazi poet Stefan George. Called ‘Secret Germany’ its
most ardent disciple was Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, an aristocratic
descendant of the Hohenstauffen dynasty of Frederick the Great – and key
figure in the July 20th plot to assassinate Hitler.
The Gnosis of Stefan George and Rainer
Maria Rilke
Let me stand at your verge
Chasm, and not be dismayed!
Where irrepressible greed has
Trampled down every inch of
Earth from equator to pole and
Shamelessly wielded relentless
Glare and mastery over
Every nook of the world,
Where in the smothering cells of
Hideous houses, madness has
Just found what will poison
All horizons tomorrow:
Even shepherds in yurts,
Even nomads in wastes -
…There in the sorest of trials
Powers below pondered gravely,
Gracious celestials gave their
Ultimate secret: the altered
Laws over matter and founded
Space – a new space in the old
Stefan George Secret Germany
However vast outer space may be,
yet with all its sidereal distances it hardly bears comparison with the
dimensions, with the depth dimension of our inner being, which does not
even need the spaciousness of the universe to be within itself almost
unfathomable…To me it seems more and more as though our customary
consciousness lives on the tip of a pyramid whose base within us (and in
a certain way beneath us) widens out so fully that the farther we find
ourselves able to descend into it, the more generally we appear to be
merged into those things that, independent of time and space, are given
in our earthly, in the widest sense, worldly existence.
Rainer Maria Rilke
The Gnosis of Friedrich Schelling
Gnosticism in general allowed detailed investigation of the ideational world – and allowed philosophemes about God’s Being in general which…are no longer permitted, banning the spirit to the confines of literalistic systems and a theory of divine being put together from crass human conditions.
Friedrich Schelling
The Gnosis of Meister Eckhart
I have often said that
God is creating the entire universe
Fully and totally
In this present now.
Every creature is full of God
And is a book about God.
Every creature is a word of God.
All creatures flow outward, but nonetheless remain within God. Everything that is in God, is God.
God is a being beyond Being and a Nothingness beyond Being.
God’s being is my being
And God’s primordial being
Is my primordial being.
Because this Word is a hidden Word.
It comes in the darkness of the night.
To enter this darkness put away
All voices and sounds
All images and likenesses
In stillness and peace
In this unknowing knowledge
God speaks in the soul.
Meister Eckhart, translated by Mathew Fox
The Gnosis of Friedrich Nietzsche
Zarathustra’s address to the ‘working class’:
Poor, cheerful and
independent – that is possible together. Poor, cheerful and a slave –
that is possible too.
Phew! To believe that higher pay could abolish the essence of their
misery – I mean their impersonal serfdom! Phew! To be talked into
thinking that an increase in this impersonality, within the machine-like
workings of a new society, could transform the shame of slavery into a
virtue! Phew! To have a price for which one remains a person no longer
but becomes a gear!
Are you co-conspirators in the current folly of nations, who want above
all to produce as much as possible and to be as rich as possible? It
would be your affair to present them with the counter-calculation: what
vast sums of inner worth are thrown away for such an external goal. But
where is your inner worth when you no longer know what it means to
breathe freely, when you no longer have the slightest control over
yourselves, when you all too often become sick of yourselves, as of a
stale drink, when you listen to the newspapers and leer at your rich
neighbour, made lustful by the rapid rise and fall of power, money and
opinions, when you no longer have any faith in philosophy, which wears
rags….?
Friedrich Nietzsche Thus Spake Zarathustra
Marxism and the Gnosis of Martin Heidegger
Both science and religions offer
accounts of reality which suggest a pre-given order of things, divine or
natural, an order consisting of already existing things or beings.
Heidegger, in contrast, raised the darkest and most profound
philosophical question of all – why any ‘thing’ or ‘being’, be it a god
or energy, spirit or matter, is at all. The ability to question -
in wonder, awe and terror - the very fact that things are opens
up an abyss of nothingness, for the beingness or is-ness of things is of
course no-thing in itself, no being, human or divine. Heidegger
saw in the fact that human beings feared or felt no need to confront the
fundamental question of Being as a form of pathology - the expression of
a loss of reverence for the essential mystery of their own being and
other beings. The question and the mystery do not go away but leave
human beings with a basic anxiety in the face of death. Distracting
themselves from this anxiety through everyday dealings with what is
present and actual in their lives, deprives them of what the prospect of
death itself can help recall them to. That is their own innermost
potentialities of being - indeed their very potential to be
rather than to merely exist.
For Heidegger, genuine relations to other human beings of the sort
suggested by Martin Buber are unthinkable if, as human beings, we no
longer know who we are – if we lack an authentic self-relation.
To be a self however, did not for Heidegger mean ‘having’ a self which
belongs to us but belonging to that self – belonging to the being
who we most essentially are. By ‘knowing who we are’ Heidegger did not
mean possessing a secure personal identity – an identity or ‘self’ that
we ‘have’ or ‘own’ in the same way we have or own a car or a computer.
Nor did he mean being able to represent who we are in thought, to
describe or define ourselves in words or, in ‘post-modern’ terms, to
construct an identity, invent or reinvent ourselves through a life story
or ‘narrative’. For Heidegger, knowing ourselves was inseparable
from being ourselves – thus the moment we take it for granted that we
already ‘are’ ourselves we cease to know ourselves, for we lose sight of
our innermost potentialities of being.
Self – does that not mean that we…already have ourselves in view and have the right feel for ourselves, are at home with ourselves? By what means and how is a human being certain that he is at home with himself and not merely with a semblance and a surface of what is his ownmost? Do we know ourselves – as selves? How are we to be ourselves, if we are not our selves? And how can we be ourselves without knowing who we are, so that we are certain of being the ones we are?
Heidegger understood ‘knowing’ itself not as a capacity to represent the truth correctly but as a specific relation to the truth. The question of what it means to ‘know ourselves’ becomes a question of what sort of relation it is that constitutes knowing. Is it for example, a relation in which we try to take an ‘objective’ stand outside ourselves and turn our own being or selfhood into a conceptual object or ‘It’? Heidegger, like Buber, thought otherwise:
Knowing is a relation in which we ourselves are related and in which this relation resonates through our fundamental bearing.
Heidegger was not unaware of the ‘heretical’ religious implications of this type of knowing or gnosis and distinguished it sharply from ‘faith’.
…faith, especially in its open or tacit opposition to knowing
– means holding-for-true that which withdraws from knowing.
Gnosis, which Heidegger termed “essential knowing” or “knowing awareness” - does not mean holding something to be true but rather holding oneself within the truth – letting it ‘resonate’ through and within us. Knowing is not a relation in which we ‘grasp’ for essential truth in concepts, appropriating and claiming it as private property in the form of representational concepts and propositions. It is a relation in which we ourselves are grasped or gripped by essential truth. We find ourselves in the grip of truth, and allow ourselves to be claimed, appropriated or ‘enowned’ by it.
The ‘gnostic gospel’ of Martin Heidegger was set out in a long unpublished manuscript called Contributions to Philosophy, and subtitled ‘From Enowning’. The word enowning is a translation of the German Ereignis. Ereignis in German means an ‘event’ but the verb ereignen comes from the German words eigen and eignen – ‘own’ and ‘to own’. Heidegger’s use of the term Ereignis is variously translated as “appropriation”, “the event of appropriation” or “enowning”. By the use of the word he did not mean that ‘we’ as human beings ‘own’ or ‘reown’ who we are – our essential being - but rather surrender to being fully reappropriated or ‘enowned’ by it. For, as Heidegger emphasised “a relation to the essential can have its origin only in the essential.”
For Marx, the alienation of individuals from their own creative essence was a result of its exploitation and expropriation as labour. In a capitalist economy the employee’s labour power is merely a commodity to be bought and sold according to its market value. Its products are not the property of the employee but of the employer. According to Marx, freedom from the alienation of modern wage slavery could only come about through a social-economic revolution in which the means of production ceased to be the private property of the owners of capital, and the products of labour were made freely available according to need. Only by reappropriating their labour power could individuals fulfil their creative potentials freely and not as wage slaves. For Marx, the alternative – communism – was not collectivism but a fulfilled individualism no longer hampered and determined by collective economic forces. Hence his definition of communism as a society in which “the free development of each was the condition for the free development of all.”
For Heidegger on the other hand, no revolutionary transformation of human relations, economic or political, social or cultural, scientific or spiritual, could take place without a more fundamental event (Ereignis) occurring – an event of ‘appropriation’ or ‘enowning’. Through enowning individuals would come to know themselves and others in an entirely new way. Instead of experiencing their own and other people’s identities as private property – a possession of their ego or “I”, they would themselves be ‘appropriated’ or ‘owned over to’ their innermost being. Heidegger understands gnosis – knowing - as enowning. Enowning is itself an ‘enknowing’ of our being. But gnosis, as enknowing and enowning, is not a goal that can be achieved through calculated spiritual action, but something we give ourselves over to and let ourselves into. Enowning is something we submit to and undergo in the movement of awareness which Heidegger, following Nietzsche called going under – that movement of submergence which the gnostics called the ‘baptism of truth’.
The era of ‘The New Gnosis’ is for Heidegger an epoch of “going-under”. Christians and agnostics of all sorts can only quake at this era and see it as an ‘End Time’ or Apocalypse.
The epoch of going-under is knowable only to those who belong. All others must fear the going under… For to them going under is only a weakness and a termination.
In the Contributions Heidegger writes of those who belong to this era – the knowers or gnostikoi as “The Ones to Come”, describing them as:
…the stillest witness to the stillest silence, in which an imperceptible tug turns the truth back, out of the confusion of all calculated correctness…” In a language steeped in gnostic tradition Heidegger writes of their ‘god’ as the “The Last God. The totally other in relation to gods who have been, especially in relation to the Christian God.
They reside in masterful knowing, as what is truthful knowing.
Whoever attains this knowing awareness does not let himself be computed or coerced.
Peter Wilberg