Haven’t gotten that far in, need to return to it and also pick up the Hans Jonas book. What I’ve read thus far has been quite interesting.
DeConick makes the case for Gnosticism as not a religion per se, but as a more fundamental and inherently transformative religious orientation which influenced basically all of the religious and philosophical movements at the time – most notably early Christianity, but also the fascinating thought of the Neoplatonists that would continue to influence Christian mystical texts such as The Cloud of Unknowing and so on. Of course, there were many Gnostic religions (Mandeanism, Manicheanism, etc.) that had very little to do with Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism and so on.
She argues for a Gnostic ‘hermeneutic’, a new and transformative way of interpreting even canonical scriptures that constantly yields new insights. But the specifics are largely in parts I haven’t read.
It’s a powerful idea, to consider not thought per se, but a general way of transforming thought. The specific transformation perhaps inherent to Gnosticism is to strip common thought of its transcendental ‘givenness’ (understood in terms of the Demiurge) and thereby return to direct and unmediated experience – in other words gnosis – an awareness that seems necessary if one is to bring forth a new world and new structures of ‘givenness’. But when the new world has arrived, one has already left the Gnostic orientation. Hence, one may consider the Gnostic orientation as inherently or permanently countercultural, a site of “permanent revolution” that keeps finding new relevance in present times, especially insofar as these are times of crisis.
[Unfortunately, I do not read French, but I am very curious about modern “political” ramifications of the Gnostic orientation in the 1976 book, L’Ange by Guy Lardreau and Christian Jambet. This seems to be a book so obscure that it will likely never be translated, but I don’t know of any other that appears to take up the topic.]
Perhaps this the real contemporary relevance of Gnosticism – NOT so much the revival of a specific Manichean perspective taken up by the extropians/transhumanists (which anyway got distorted into pure Cartesianism; i.e. the simulation hypothesis, the anthropic principle, the “uploading” of minds), but the very ideas of resistance and transformation, of un-thinking or un-performing all dualisms (in the sense of, for instance the Thunder Perfect Mind) – not as a mere ontological dualism.
Anyway, hope this interests you in the book and thanks for reminding me I need to go back to it!
