From Basilides to Baudrillard…

[Mr Cheese]

One of the things that always strikes me as so amazing about the Gnostic tradition is its incredible dynamism, its incredible breadth, and its continuing ability to adapt to contemporary cultural milieu, even over what would seem to be the separation of almost two millennia. I’ve just been reminded of a great example of this during the past week in considering some of the deep connections and relationships between some of the most dynamic aspects of philosophical postmodernism in our own contemporary world and the traditional philosophical and ideological approaches of early classical Gnosticism. I’ve termed this the transformation of theory from Basilides to Baudrillard, simply because those two particular examples provide an especially compelling nexus for looking at the world around us and the human condition.


As many of you know, I am completing my graduate work in the American Studies Program at the College of William and Mary, where my research focuses on American religious history. This year I am teaching for both William and Mary and the University of Virginia, where my areas of interest include African-American religion, alternative and new religious movements in America, and contemporary apocalyptic religious expressions. This spring, however, I’ve been given the remarkable opportunity to design a special course at Virginia that will involve an exploration of major works in cultural theory from Marx through Baudrillard, with a focal lens of how these works of critical cultural theory can be understood in light of contemporary American culture and the larger world situation in the postmodern era. In preparing for this class, I’ve been having such a great time just in terms of selecting material that we will cover — I’m working through Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason and a collection “Critique of Instrumental Reason,” and focusing especially on Baudrillard’s masterpiece, “Simulacra and Simulation,” along with his slightly less-familiar Symbolic Exchange and Death. I am just bringing this all up because in working with Baudrillard, I’ve been struck by how many of his incredible theoretical insights are resonant with fundamental themes that were suggested by classical Gnostics millennia earlier. Baudrillard’s fundamental notion of the simulacra, in which culture functions as a “simulation” of itself and truth becomes virtually (in a literal and a figurative sense) indistinguishable from representation (which itself ceases to be “re-presentation” but becomes purely “simulation”) — this is very similar in many ways to the negative definition of cosmos that was so fundamental to classical Gnosticism’s understanding of the realm of the demiurge — and then, paradoxically, transformed itself into a negative definition of the divine — most famously in Basilides’ notion of God as “ouk on theos” or “Non-Being God” (”God-doesn’t-exist-God”). Basilides, and the sources from which he apparently drew, like the G. of Philip, is the most challenging of the early Gnostic writers precisely because he forces us to question all our presuppositions about the question of the divine. It is a question of total apophasis — total negation.


This is why the distinction between classical Gnosticism and Buddhism — or at least certain forms of Theravada Buddhism — is by no means as clearcut as it can at first sometimes appear. The divine — indeed the spirit as a force as a whole, including the spirit within us — is at one and the same time absolute being and absolute negation of being. This is because when we use the term “being” or employ the concept “existence,” we are creating material-cosmic allusions (”simulations,” to borrow Baudrillardian language) and illusions for that matter as well, which are always more incorrect than they are correct.
It is for this reason that the highest form of Gnostic spiritual writing, the highest and most challenging and most frustrating in many ways for the reader, is the apophatic/kataphatic contestation, of which the finest and purest example is found in Thunder Pefect Mind.


For I am knowledge and ignorance.
I am shame and boldness.
I am shameless; I am ashamed.
I am strength and I am fear.
I am war and peace.
Give heed to me.
I am the one who is disgraced and the great one.
It is only slightly, I would say, trailed behind by the Gospel of Philip itself. It holds the famous statement of Gnostic apophatic declaration:


Light and Darkness, life and death, right and left, are brothers and sisters of one another. They are inseparable. Because of this neither are the good good, nor evil evil, nor is life life, nor death death. For this reason each one will dissolve into its earliest origin. But those who are exalted above the world are indissoluble, eternal.


Names given to the worldly are very deceptive, for they divert our thoughts from what is correct to what is incorrect. Thus one who hears the word “God” does not perceive what is correct, but perceives what is incorrect. So also with “the Father” and “the Son” and “the Holy Spirit” and “life” and “light” and “resurrection” and “the Church (Ekklesia)” and all the rest – people do not perceive what is correct but they perceive what is incorrect, unless they have come to know what is correct. The names which are heard are in the world [...] deceive. If they were in the spiritual realm, they would at no time be used as names in the world. Nor were they set among worldly things. They have an end in the spiritual realm.

[Mr Cheese]

What could be a better description of this philosophy than to say it is a prefiguring, written in the mythological and spiritualizing language of the first centuries of the Gnostic era, of the postmodern philosophy of Baudrillard’s simulacrum? I think it is also relevant for us to consider the warning of Max Horkheimer, the Frankfurt School philosopher of the mid-twentieth century, that we as a society are advancing far faster technologically than we are in terms of our actual substantive enlightenment as human beings. There is a difference between the substance of reason in the sense of “reasonableness”, and the process of “rationalization” — but unfortunately we collapse the two into the concept of the “ratio.” Of course, Gnosticism has never allowed for such a collapse, because of its healthy skepticism about the ability of the ratio per se to provide the salvation of either the human person or of humanity as a whole. It is important for us to hold onto that skepticism. It is a skepticism that is not anti-scientific and anti-rationalistic per se. We are not talking about the kind of anti-scientistic frenzy that has taken hold of conservative Protestantism with its bizarre hatred of genuine scientific endeavor and progress. But we are talking about a recognition that our science and our technology is sometimes advancing well beyond our moral capacity to deal with that advancing process. This is why we face issues like cloning and stem-cell research on which human society seems to be incapable of engaging in real dialogue beyond shouting and screaming matches that actually jettison any kind of reasonable debate in favor of competing fundamentalisms. We can see that is a typical problem in many parts of human life today. We actually have competing fundamentalisms. One fundamentalism of the left, one of the right; one of the Christians, one of the anti-Christians; one of the sexually repressed, one of those who seem to have no sense of the need for any kind of sexual morality based on human diversity and respect for the individual’s sexual identity.


Anyway, I am very excited about the class and I wanted to share something about my thoughts and ideas. I would like to hear back from you about any other cultural theorists that you think might be relevant to a Gnostic approach toward modern philosophy. How do you think Gnosticism might be relevant to a discussion of Marx, Freud, Lacan, Jung, Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Debord, Baudrillard, etc etc?


From Basilides to Baudrillard… « The Vicar’s Corner