Monday, May 09, 2005
Jonas' Gnosticism
This is one of the mini-summaries I wrote to prepare for the Church
history exam. Some more detailed info may be present in other posts
(see the Topical Index).
Jonas' Gnosticism
This is more or less a summary of ideas found in the article Hans Jonas' construct "Gnosticism": Analysis and Critique, by M. Waldstein (2000).
Jonas: an existential interpretation of Gnosticism as the expression of a unitary "Spirit of Late Antiquity" defined by Entweltlichung (acosmism). This Entweltlichung got wide acceptance: it gave some way to unify systems that were lacking some clear unity, under a generic umbrella: the "existential attitude of human beings who created the systems."
But this view is now challenged, and a complete dismantle of the term "gnosticism" has been advocated; the "common features" of the various "gnostic movements" are deemed, according to this view, less important than the fact that it is not possible to superimpose unity without being artificial.
According to Jonas, there is a central existential principle in Gnosticism: and this is Entweltlichung, a radical and revolutionary aspect of anticosmism, an attitude which "negates, ultimately, all definite and ordered being and all definite moral norms". This reflects what Jonas calls the "Spirit of Late Antiquity", with its nihilism. This is to be contrasted with an hypotethical "Spirit of Antiquity", which was "an apotheosis of what exists" (das Gegebene).
In the East, where Gnosticism would have been born, Gnosticism was "the product of powerful vitality" and it "did not emerge in a social matrix of alienation or oppression". In the West, on the other hand, we had a declining world, and there Gnosticism functioned as expression of political and cultural decay. "The socially oppressed and marginalized, especially slaves and the poor, who were mere objects of power, were receptive to the Gnostic Spirit because “in the new order they became kings, absolute subjects.”".
As Williams summarizes, the Gnostic myth would clearly be distinguishable from others because gnostics had an attitude of protest, or revolt i.e., again, an anticosmic attitude. This attitude would have been shown:
So, the outcome of this article is that Jonas' view of Gnosticism, while handy, tends to misrepresent the actual history suggested by the Nag Hammadi texts.
Some further notes from Overcoming Gnosticism: Hans Jonas, Hans Blumenberg, and the Legitimacy of the Natural World, by B. Lazier (2003):
Jonas published the first volume of his Gnosis und Spätantiker Geist in 1934 as a dissertation under Martin Heidegger and Rudolf Bultmann. The guiding principle of Jonas' gnosticism has been das Fremde, i.e. the alien, the strange, the foreign, the other, the unknown. There is alienation of the man from himself, from a fully transcendent God, from the material universe: in other words, anti-cosmism.
Hans Blumenberg, in his Legimität der Neuzeit (1966), builds on Jonas' categories to argue for a "second overcoming" of gnosticism, which would have taken place at the end of the Middle Ages; at that time there was a gnosticism "revived by the nominalism and theological voluntarism of late medieval scholastic theology, a loose confluence of thought centripetally bound by the black hole of the deus absconditus or hidden god", and its overcoming (paralleled to the "first overcoming" due to Augustine) would be "the work of an ethos of human self-assertion best instantiated by the scientific program of Francis Bacon."
Lazier maintains that we can now speak of a "third overcoming". This implies that gnosticism has returned, and as examples he mentions Karl Barth's crisis theology and an epistemology challenging the normative modes of knowledge. There is an implicit reference to this way of thinking in Blumenberg's second edition of his Legimität (1983) when he wrote
Jonas' Gnosticism
This is more or less a summary of ideas found in the article Hans Jonas' construct "Gnosticism": Analysis and Critique, by M. Waldstein (2000).
Jonas: an existential interpretation of Gnosticism as the expression of a unitary "Spirit of Late Antiquity" defined by Entweltlichung (acosmism). This Entweltlichung got wide acceptance: it gave some way to unify systems that were lacking some clear unity, under a generic umbrella: the "existential attitude of human beings who created the systems."
But this view is now challenged, and a complete dismantle of the term "gnosticism" has been advocated; the "common features" of the various "gnostic movements" are deemed, according to this view, less important than the fact that it is not possible to superimpose unity without being artificial.
According to Jonas, there is a central existential principle in Gnosticism: and this is Entweltlichung, a radical and revolutionary aspect of anticosmism, an attitude which "negates, ultimately, all definite and ordered being and all definite moral norms". This reflects what Jonas calls the "Spirit of Late Antiquity", with its nihilism. This is to be contrasted with an hypotethical "Spirit of Antiquity", which was "an apotheosis of what exists" (das Gegebene).
In the East, where Gnosticism would have been born, Gnosticism was "the product of powerful vitality" and it "did not emerge in a social matrix of alienation or oppression". In the West, on the other hand, we had a declining world, and there Gnosticism functioned as expression of political and cultural decay. "The socially oppressed and marginalized, especially slaves and the poor, who were mere objects of power, were receptive to the Gnostic Spirit because “in the new order they became kings, absolute subjects.”".
As Williams summarizes, the Gnostic myth would clearly be distinguishable from others because gnostics had an attitude of protest, or revolt i.e., again, an anticosmic attitude. This attitude would have been shown:
- in the way they treated scripture, reversing all values
- in the way they viewed cosmos, rejecting it
- by the fact that the did not take any interest in sociey
- in the way they hated their bodies
- by the fact that they lacked ethical concern
- by the fact that salvation was predetermined for them, so again ethics was irrelevant.
So, the outcome of this article is that Jonas' view of Gnosticism, while handy, tends to misrepresent the actual history suggested by the Nag Hammadi texts.
Some further notes from Overcoming Gnosticism: Hans Jonas, Hans Blumenberg, and the Legitimacy of the Natural World, by B. Lazier (2003):
Jonas published the first volume of his Gnosis und Spätantiker Geist in 1934 as a dissertation under Martin Heidegger and Rudolf Bultmann. The guiding principle of Jonas' gnosticism has been das Fremde, i.e. the alien, the strange, the foreign, the other, the unknown. There is alienation of the man from himself, from a fully transcendent God, from the material universe: in other words, anti-cosmism.
Hans Blumenberg, in his Legimität der Neuzeit (1966), builds on Jonas' categories to argue for a "second overcoming" of gnosticism, which would have taken place at the end of the Middle Ages; at that time there was a gnosticism "revived by the nominalism and theological voluntarism of late medieval scholastic theology, a loose confluence of thought centripetally bound by the black hole of the deus absconditus or hidden god", and its overcoming (paralleled to the "first overcoming" due to Augustine) would be "the work of an ethos of human self-assertion best instantiated by the scientific program of Francis Bacon."
Lazier maintains that we can now speak of a "third overcoming". This implies that gnosticism has returned, and as examples he mentions Karl Barth's crisis theology and an epistemology challenging the normative modes of knowledge. There is an implicit reference to this way of thinking in Blumenberg's second edition of his Legimität (1983) when he wrote
The very people who were attempting to restore the radicalness of the original religious distance from the world and to renew theology’s declarations of transcendence “dialectically” could see in the massive evidence of the manifestation of the world as “worldliness” the advantage of its unmistakable character of immanence. [...] A theology of “division,” of crisis, had to be interested in making clear the worldliness of the world rather than in overlaying it with the sacred.(italics mine)
