Edward Feser On Gnosticism

In yesterday's post, I talked about Jordan Peterson's belated and puzzled response to the collapse of main line Protestant academic culture, something that took place largely in the 1960s and 70s. By concidence, I ran into an essay by the neo-Thomist philosopher Edward Feser that appeared this past January in Catholic World Report, The Gnostic heresy’s political successors. It talks about the academic side oif the culture that replaced main line Protestantism, gnosticism. Feser defines gnosticism as follows:

First, it sees evil as all-pervasive and nearly omnipotent, absolutely permeating the established order of things. You might wonder how this differs from the Christian doctrine of original sin. It differs radically. Christianity teaches the basic goodness of the created order. It teaches that human beings have a natural capacity for knowledge and practice of the good – the idea of natural law.

. . . Second, the Gnostic mentality holds that only an elect who have received a special gnosis or “knowledge” from a Gnostic sage can see through the illusory appearances of things to the reality of the incorrigible evil of this world.

. . . Third, the Gnostic mindset sees reality in starkly Manichean terms, as a twilight struggle between the sinister forces that rule this evil world and those who have been “purified” of it and armed with gnosis.

Feser expands on gnosticism's influence on current woke culture, and in my view it adds much perspective to a two-part YouTube presentation on gnosticism and New Age by Dr David Campbell that I referenced several times on the old blog. Part I:

Part 2:

Raised a not especially observant Presbyterian, I had no effective resources to fall back on as I watched main line Protestantism collapse around me while I was in college, brought down by the Pill, the Playboy Philosophy, and Viet Nam protests. What filled the gap in public culture at the time was the drug-hippie movement, which as Dr Campbell points out has morphed into New Age, all a form of gnosticism. This persists as well in the very pervasive Star Wars quasi-religion of Jedi, the sage Yoda, and the Force.

But Feser takes this farther. The political movement of the 1960s and 70s was the New Left, which was recognized at the time as nothing more than a rebranding of the Old Left. While New Age appealed to me in my youth, the New Left never did. Environmentalism in the early 1970s was something separate as well. Feser recognizes that the gnosticism that began as New Age religion has metastasized inmto intersectionality:

Other forms of woke Gnosticism have their own bogeymen – “patriarchy,” “heteronormativity,” etc. – which, like “whiteness,” are abstractions spoken of as if they were concrete demonic powers. And just when you thought you’d heard of every kind of “oppression” imaginable, the Critical Theorists come along with the notion of “intersectionality,” by which ever more exotic forms can be fantasized into being. For example, if you are a transgender lesbian woman of color, you suffer a special kind of oppression – one defined by the “intersection” of oppressions suffered by each of the groups to which you belong – that is different from the kind suffered by (say) a gay immigrant with disabilities. (Wokesters don’t play the victim card; they play a whole 52 card deck.)

this has all taken place in the vacuum left behind by the collapse of main line Protestantism, for which society as a whole is still struggling for a cure. Unfortunately, I think moderate or never-Trump Republicanism is nothing more than wishful thinking that some version of the main line Protestant consensus can be restored -- something like what the Bush family still tries to embody. I think Feser is more correct:

Gnostic woke madness will not be remedied by aping it. On the contrary, more than ever, what the times call for is conservative sobriety. And orthodoxy. Heresies not only aim to subvert the Church, but they fill the vacuum that opens up when the Church loses its self-confidence, its fidelity to its traditional teaching, and its sense of mission – and as a consequence, loses its attractiveness. The crisis of the West is the crisis of the Church. The West will not be restored to health until the Church is restored to health. And that is a project that requires us to see beyond election cycles, and indeed beyond politics.