Stranded Hearts, by Mark Leela, translated by Tang Yingqi, The Commercial Press, June 2019, 186 pp. 55.00 yuan
Chronicles of the Sinking of Gnosis: A Review of Mark Leela's Stranded Mind, by Lin Guohua, The Commercial Press, June 2019, 233 pp., 55.00 yuan
Our fathers, who are inferior to our grandparents, give birth to us, and we are soon going to have worse offspring.
- Horace
Lin Guohua's book, Titled "The Chronicle of the Sinking of Gnosis," is a review of "Stranded Hearts" by Mark Lilla, a humanities professor at Columbia University. Lin Guohua's writing is not only longer than Lila's, but also has its own highly constructive exposition ideas. He vividly dissected various thinkers with "Gnosticism" as the main line, and made a "thorough reappraisal" of the deep drive of Western political thought with innovative positioning terms such as "canon" and "negative canon". This makes it inevitable for readers who have read the second book to wonder: "Gnosis" does not appear many times in "Stranded Minds", and Lila only focuses on it when commenting on Voegelin, and rarely discusses it in other chapters; then, since he wrote a review of "Stranded Mind", what is the reason for Lin Guohua to write with the theme of "Gnosis"? Why are these characters discussed by Lila—Rosenzweig, Voegelin, Strauss, Badio, and even Paul—related to gnosis? To answer this question, we have to look at what gnosis really is and why it is so important that it has been so "actively" involved in the entire history of Western thought in Lin Guohua's writings.
Gnosis as a structure of experience
For gnosis, a religion born at the beginning of the era, some thinkers in Western academic circles have long elaborated on it. The Protestant theologian Ferdinand Christian Baur, who studied the history of Christianity from the perspective of Hegel's philosophy of history, developed the academic approach of gnosis as early as 1835 with his book Die Christliche Gnosis Oder die Christliche Religious-Philosophie in Historical Development ihrer Geschichtlichen Entwicklung) is a milestone in the study of gnosis. The twentieth-century German philosopher Hans Blumenberg, who regarded gnosis as the great enemy of the Western spirit, noted in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age that "gnosis, the old rival of Christianity, does not come from outside Christianity, but lies in the danger of having a clearly more coherent systematization of biblical premises." (MIT Press, 1983, p. 126) Blumenberg's intellectual motivation was to justify "modernity," in part because another German, Karl Löwith, questioned the legitimacy of modernity in Meaning in History. In Blumenberg's view, the legitimacy of modernity is inseparable from gnosis, and modernity has a task left to Western thought since the birth of Christianity, namely, how to overcome gnosis, because it is so thorough that it conceives the whole world/universe (cosmos) as a prison. This idea of not leaving any "chance" for the world is too repressive, and Blumenberg believes that man's "self-assertion" in modernity justifies man's own name, as well as the name of the universe. Another German political philosopher (who is also the subject of Lin Guohua and Lila's book), Eric Voegelin, simply wrote the history of Western political thought in terms of gnosis, unlike Blumenberg, who believed that modernity was outright gnosticism because he believed that the spirit behind modernity was a deformed version of Christianity, a "political religion." The contemporary French philosopher Paul Ricoeur also said that the perception of evil that gnosis brings is crucial, because the evil that gnosis talks about is not an evil action or evil thing, but an internalized destiny. For gnosis, evil is not a symbol, but a reality, the world itself, the "physicalization" of evil or the "realism of evil." The result is that evil is "something" and the "myth" about evil becomes "epistemology." This kind of gnosis eliminates human responsibility, and christian theologians beginning with Augustine are trying to pull evil from reality back to the fallen, original sin person himself (The Conflict of Interpretations, translated by Mo Weimin, The Commercial Press, 2017, pp. 331-354).
Although the above scholars have different emphases, their interpretive paths to gnosis share the premise that their analysis is not limited to the whimsical mythological texts of the ancient gnostics, but rather sees gnosis as a "psychic structure" or "experiential structure." Because if you plunge into those specific ancient myths, you will find that their importance is only so important, they can only be regarded as ancient "stall literature", they cannot enter the mainstream vision, and they are not eligible to become participants in the artery of the entire Western intellectual history. Lin Guohua clearly understood the importance of this interpretive path, "the original purpose of gnosis is not a ritual religious practice, but a highly philosophical path of reason" (p. 20), so in his view, the most important person for gnosis is Marcion, not the Valentines, Manichaeans, Bogmillers, and others. For it was in Marcien that the gnostic system of "dualism" was truly constructed. As he put it, "[Marcion] went to the top and laid the principle of righteousness for the gnosis tradition" (ibid.). In other words, it is thanks to Marcion that gnosis has entered philosophy from mythology, and its ideological construction is comparable to the transition of ancient Greece from Homeric epics to philosophical contemplation, and since then gnosis has its own "metaphysics", with a way that can be used to philosophically express its spiritual experience, and this significant "renewal" has a significant historical effect, because henceforth a contemporary who is not an ancient gnostic can also find his own "mirror" in gnosis. In this sense, how can modern man possibly have this "gnostic experiential structure"? Lin's discussion of the "modern astronomical revolution", a unique event in the history of science, and the connection with gnosis, is undoubtedly the insight that the "rupture" of the "physical celestial sphere" in the astronomical revolution and the opening of the hole in the infinite universe are the most powerful echoes of the earth-shaking action of ancient gnosis to break the "moral celestial sphere". In the most fundamental sense, as a post-astronomy revolution, we are all faced with the same situation as Pascal, experiencing a gnostic situation of life: we turn around and find that the prescriptive background has disappeared, we are in infinite space/nothingness, and if we do not do something, we are nothing (in this sense, the human mind shifts from theory [theoria] to practice [praxis], From the knowledge of contemplation to the knowledge of action and manipulation, man himself has changed from a contemplative contemplator of nature to a possessor and master of nature.) The humanistic significance of the astronomical revolution is that we are hollowed out by the given nature/nature, we are "thrown" (to borrow Heidegger's term) into the world and find ourselves nothing, and we need to define ourselves by "learning", through "history", and even by "progress".
Gnosis's intellectual history orientation
Gnosis was philosophicalized or metaphysically made in Marcion, thus moving from the imaginary mythological vision to the main thread of Western thought. But systematic equipment is not enough to make a doctrine the protagonist of Western thought, and if gnosis can really be regarded as the protagonist, then there must be some unique experience in it that permeates the human psyche. Gnosis cannot do this without confronting directly the two "pillars" of Western thought, Greek civilization and Hebrew civilization. In this way, the collision between gnosis and the "two Greeks" tradition, which represents Western civilization, becomes the criterion for testing the depth of gnosis. Therefore, we must examine the relationship between gnosis and ancient Greek cosmology, and its relationship with Judeo-Christianity, in order to understand how gnosis as a structure of experience can have extraordinary influence.
The core ideas of the ancient Greek tradition can be summarized as a combination of "nature-universe-morality-politics". This is a complete and utter monism. Nature or the universe itself has normative significance, and they provide guidance on how people should live. The universe is an object to be observed, a sample of the Supreme Order. Aristotle's exposition in the first volume of Political Science that "man is a city-state animal by nature" most fundamentally expresses the intrinsic relationship between political life and nature: the city-state (politics) is natural, it is the natural result of the satisfaction of a series of natural desires of man. So this kind of city-state politics, which develops from man's natural needs, is also a product of nature. The Stoic school, on the other hand, simply draws an equivalence between the universe and God, which is vividly embodied in Cicero's Second Volume of De Natura Deorum.
Judeo-Christianity, on the other hand, transcends nature and the universe in a sense, because on top of the goodness of nature, the purpose of nature in ancient Greece, they also propose higher goodness, higher purposes: the universe is transcended because of the God who transcends the universe; nature is transcended, because of the supernatural that rests above nature and guides it. Nevertheless, since the universe/world was created by God and nature is also regarded as a skill of God, the Judeo-Christian reduction of nature's status ultimately does not erase the moral significance of nature, but rather incorporates it into the theological system. Nature, the universe, and the world are still good to some extent, although no longer supremely good. The supernatural and the natural do not necessarily constitute a counter-issue, but can be coordinated and tolerated. From the point of view, the mainstream Christian thought process in the Middle Ages can be seen as a movement to find a connection between the supernatural and nature, to seek a system of integration. Around the thirteenth century, Aristotle's philosophy was rediscovered in the Middle Ages, and numerous theologians and thinkers wrote commentaries or creatively interpreted them. At this time, how to reconcile Aristotle's doctrines—his doctrine of political naturalness, his doctrine of potential and realization, his doctrine of the eternity of the world, his doctrine of form and matter, his doctrine of soul and body, and so on—with the theology of medieval Christianity became the direction of the unremitting efforts of these theologians and thinkers. Thomas Aquinas is the master of this lineage, and if you read the Theologica, it is difficult to distinguish which of Aquinas's own views and which were borrowed from Aristotle. In Aquinas's view, supernatural grace does not cancel nature, but "perfects nature." Aquinas's attempt to reconcile the two traditions is consistent in his writings, and the radical dualism of gnosis is clearly a possibility that the "Angel Doctor" must eliminate. Aquinas followed Augustine's view of "the absence of evil is the absence of good," supplemented by the Aristotle system, to critique dualism. In verse 3 of question forty-ninth in the Theological Compendium, Aquinas confronts a key "gnostic proposition"—whether there is one evil as the cause of all evil. In his view, the occurrence of evil does not arise from the nature/natural necessity, but from "chance", and we cannot find the "first principle" of evil, the first principle is only good, and evil is attached to the entire hierarchy with good as the first principle (The Complete Works of Theology, Vol. II, Translated by Zhou Keqin et al., Biyue Society, 2008, pp. 72-75). In the context of our discussion, this idea can be seen as the exclusion of gnosis by borrowing ancient Greek philosophy. However, getting too close to the pagan traditions of ancient Greece has always been a threat to Christianity. Inspired by Bonaventure, many theologians began to realize the need to limit Aristotleism. Thus, in 1277, Pope John XXI appointed Tempier, then Bishop of Paris, to investigate Aristotle's writings and commentaries on Aristotle, and finally assembled two hundred and nineteen propositions to condemn Aristotleism one by one. Although these condemnations appear to be primarily directed at Aristotleism or Aveiroeism based on Aristotleism, there is evidence that some of these condemnations point directly at Thomas Aquinas, the "Angel Doctor" who sought reconciliation between Christian theology and Aristotleism ([[English] John Ma Renbang: Medieval Philosophy: An Introduction to History and Philosophy, translated by Wu Tianyue, Peking University Press, 2015, pp. 280-281).
Aquinas
Therefore, in the history of Western thought, the ancient Greek tradition represents a tradition of "justifying the name" for the world, for the universe, and for nature, or in Lin Guohua's terminology, the so-called Western "canon". Judeo-Christianity, on the other hand, brings in the dimension beyond nature and achieves a reconciliation in Christianity: Christ's "incarnation" means that a God beyond the world actively relates to the world, and that he remains in relation to the world while transcending the world.
From a gnostic point of view, the situation is very different. Gnosis constitutes a radical subversion of the ancient Greek tradition, because everything cherished by the ancient Greek tradition—nature, the universe, the world—is defined as the negative role of gnosis. The doctrinal core of gnosis could not be more appropriately described as anti-natural, anti-cosmic, and anti-world. If the Stoic cosmological theology reached the highest distillation of the spirit of the ancient Greek tradition, then the first thing gnosis did was to dismantle that god-universe union. The implementation of this dualistic task is rather "crisp and neat", because gnosis not only makes the supreme god completely detached from the world (the universe), but also does not hesitate to use a "secondary god" to explain the world's implication. The creation of the world was brought with it "original sin" because the world came from a secondary evil god. At this point, the Supreme Good God not only has nothing to do with the world, but also circumvents the "theodicy" dilemma: it is the secondary God, not the Supreme Good God, who is responsible for the sins and sufferings of this world. Or, in Blumenberg's words, gnosis does not require "theism" at all. At this point, the contemplation and imitation of the universe in the ancient Greek sense became no longer possible, because the "cosmic logos" has now become the "heimarmene", the oppressive cosmic destiny.
From a gnostic point of view of Judeo-Christianity, then the strong legalistic tendencies of Judaism are seen as unnecessary—for an evil world needs no control, let alone the Fact that the Bible compiled by Marcion discards the Old Testament and proves in the New Testament that mankind must and has been delivered from the hands of the ruthless Father of God; Christ incarnated in the world as an "illusion"— Because the Most Good God, who has nothing to do with this world, does not so actively establish a rather positive connection with the world, the dirty flesh can never be used to accept the full purity of the Most Good God. The Christian effort to "reconcile" between God and the world is, in Marcien's view, an "incompleteness." As Lin Guohua's analysis points out: "Massion severely denies the crucifixion, he believes that it is a great blasphemy to let the most high God die in the lowly flesh of the flesh." This position necessarily leads to 'phantom theory'. As mentioned earlier, I think this heretical theory represents the highest degree of spiritual purity that human beings can attain, it is true dualism, and its existence is the highest negation of the 'incarnation', pseudo-dualism. (p. 82)
The historical background of Western thought after the birth of Christianity will help us to further position gnosis. The dualistic treatment of Christianity between the spiritual order and the earthly order is the constant core problem consciousness of Western thought, and how to deal with the relationship between the two, as well as their various representations in politics and history, can be regarded as the convergence point of Western thought since the birth of Christianity. We can see not only the Augustinian "Twin Cities Theory" and the great unified theory of Dante and Marsilius as a violent touch on the thinker's nerves, but we can also find the importance of this question from the founders of modern politics such as Hobbes and Rousseau. Therefore, this is far from an outdated problem, but until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it still influenced the theoretical construction of modern Western politics and modern states. Hobbes's keen awareness of the question of "dual power" or "double representation" also undoubtedly hints at the cruciality of the issue. The persistence of the problem of dualism means that the political problem in the history of Western political thought has always been a "political theological problem." Gnosis, on the other hand, can be seen as the ultimate version of political theology, which implies the complete triumph of spirituality over the world, and the complete abolition of politics by theology. In gnostic political theology, the most crucial thing is "hostility", in other words, the focus of its career is not to think about politics in a theological way, let alone to reflect theology in politics, but to attack politics with theology, and politics-theology is the theological resolute struggle against politics.
Apostles John (left) and Marcien (right), eleventh century.
The Inner Logic of Gnosis: Inevitably Breaking Into the World?
Marcion's gnosis is indeed conducive to our positioning of gnosis as a whole, because it provides the purest version of gnosis, so that we are most likely to principle or theorize gnosis, thus placing gnosis in the context of the entire history of Western thought. And, at the same time, Marcion's theory is also a very clear expression of the most coherent version of gnosis, and he adheres to the idea of dualism to the end. But can gnosis avoid getting involved in the world and carry Marcion's cause through to the end? From Lin Guohua's argument, he clearly emphasizes the deadly advice of Massionism, namely, that "the route that flies down toward the world is dangerous" (p. 96). Both Taubes's historical eschatology and Badio's secular universalism are fatal betrayals of Marcion. One of the most exquisite clues in Lin's writings is the distinction between Marcionism and its betrayal, or rather, his investigation of the self-destructive process of gnosis: the scene of disaster from "flying off earth" to "hitting earth". What we need to examine here is, why does gnosis have such a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn?
Indeed, if we examine the actual role of gnosis in the history of Western thought, especially in the history of Western political thought, the situation is not as construed by Marcion's gnosis father. Does a radical dualism— which warns us not to crave and get involved in the world— really keep people as "spiritually clean" as ever? Historical facts clearly give a negative answer. Why does a religion that rejects the world inevitably eventually erupt into a powerful political force? We must look for this internal logic in Marcion's extreme dualism.
We can find some hints in the gnosis itself of the abandonment of the earthly world. By this, the "hostility" inherent in gnostic political theology (or the theological struggle against politics) inherent in gnosis is itself politically inclined or a tendency to struggle. For hostility can develop into an uninvolved involvement in the world, or it can easily develop into a thorough struggle against the world—and even the temptation may be much greater.
However, this reason is only superficial. What it shows is simply the inability of our mental structure to withstand extreme dualism, which we need to look for in the most fundamental relationship of god and man in gnosis, in terms of the political effects of the doctrine of dualism itself.
We all know that gnosis has a "mystic" dimension, which lies not in the mystery of the mythological story it constructs, but in Gnosis itself, in this so-called "secret knowledge." This mystical dimension of gnosis implies a strong tendency to internalize because it completely surrenders God's relationship with man to the "heart." What effect will this have?
First, this favors the development of psychology, or rather, tends to shift the investigation of God's relationship with man from theology to psychology. This step is crucial, as Leela mentions in The Stillborn God that Hobbes was able to implement the so-called "Great Separation" because he changed the "subject": Hobbes believed that man was talking about God when he was talking about his own experience, and that religion became a phenomenon that belonged entirely to man. God is born of psychological effects, born of our sense of fear (The God Who Died Prematurely, translated by Xiao Yi, Nova Press, 2010, pp. 46-50). So when we say that there is a certain relationship between God and man, we are talking about man's expression of his own psychological feelings. God has become the dispensable part of this study, it is only a general term for the object of our fear or the unknowability, it may even be something else, something that can have the same effect on man - the sovereign, the state, the leader, etc. - in fact Hobbes did, and he let a sovereign with supreme authority intimidate the people and free them from the quagmire of war.
More importantly, this tendency to internalize has far-reaching political connotations. The reality of evil or the cosmopolitanism and internalization are two sides of the same coin, and together they lead to the fact that the connection between God and man is no longer mediated. How do people communicate with God? No longer through the intermediary of the world, no longer through the intermediary of the universe, no longer through the intermediary of nature, and at the same time, no longer through the intermediary of the organization of politics and the church. The premise of this proposition is a negative evaluation of the world, the universe, and nature. And this means that man is thrown into a position where he finds himself alone in the face of God, and he must experience God from within himself. If we look back at the ideological changes from the Middle Ages to the Reformation and humanism, we can see more clearly how important the consequences of this internalization tendency are. Medieval Christianity placed great emphasis on "intermediaries", which manifested themselves not only in the intermediary function of the Catholic Church, but also in ceremonies such as the Communion. Martin Luther's most important approach was to remove the intermediary and internalize the faith, which manifested itself in "Sola fide" (faith alone) and the consequent "priesthood of all men." The political consequences of this claim are "unexpected", because when it actually abolishes the intermediary function of the church, the demand for intermediaries among the people does not disappear, and it is thus possible for secular power to seize this opportunity. Indeed, judging by the humanism and the rise of the nation-state after the Reformation, the Reformation to some extent promoted a dramatic increase in secular power. Although post-Reformation Protestantism never changed the perspective of the relationship between God and man (i.e., from theology to psychology) as we have previously said—Protestantism still emphasized the pre-existent position of Theism and Christology over anthropology—the Reformation did intersect with humanism from the perspective of internalization, differing only in that the Reformation made people meet God from within, while humanism simply made people invent God from within or in themselves. Thus, from a humanistic point of view, internalization is actually a "great opportunity." For the remoteness of God and the disappearance of intermediaries provide sufficient facilities for man's self-sufficiency.
Martin Luther
From the point of view of yes, extreme dualism leads to the abolition of mediation, and man faces God directly—in gnosis, that is, to an unknowable, unfamiliar, and unconcerned God who has no concern for the world, which actually provides an opportunity for humanism or secularization. This dualistic theology has had considerable influence on the formation of the modern world or modern politics. Blumenberg's assertion that late medieval nominalism is a gnostic version of the "eve of the modern day" is justified because the theological view of William of Ockham and others in Occam does replicate this gnostic doctrine and illuminates a series of problems: the will of God is infinitely magnified, and the world is not only unable to act as a god-man intermediary, but even the order of the world is conceived as an order that can be overthrown at any time (Quentin Skinner, in Quentin Skinner, in The Coherence of Occam-Gabriel Biel-Luther in The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, see The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Vol. II: The Reformation, Translated by Schreessen and Yafang, Translation Lin Press, 2011, pp. 3-96). The hypothesis of "taking away the world for the time being" cannot be understood merely as a fiction, but implies the most radical aspect of modern politics: the modern world is a world on which no order can be relied upon, and the concept of the "state of nature," which was popular in the early modern period, already implies that it is inevitable that people will be thrown into disorder at any time. In Hobbes, in particular, the state of nature is a "quasi-theological state": in which everyone unleashes his divinity, each person himself is the "ultimate arbiter", a "man of God" with absolute rights and freedoms who can exert arbitrary will on the world. Thus the era of humanism or secularization is not a theological absence, but a more radical and uncompromising version of theology. And the political violence that follows the disengagement from the "shackles of theology" seems to remind us that Massionism seems to have to endure the fate of betrayal, and that the "supreme bystander" is often reduced to a fiction in history, which instead provides a reason for people to become involved in the world, or rather, an excuse for people to care only about earthly affairs. So, how to deal with this potential paradox of gnosis?