The
Gnostic God
There is an old saying: “God is
forgiving; Nature, not so much.” Nature can, indeed, be very unforgiving.
This is likely why Gnostics, ancient and modern, have always
opposed the God of the Old Testament. The God of the Old Testament created
Nature and promulgated the Law. He doesn’t let me do what I want without
consequences. He’s the God who created human beings male and female and told
them to be fruitful and multiply; the God who warned human beings that,
although their freedom was wide-ranging, this freedom had to stop short of
trying to take control over good and evil. Humans should not seek to “become
like God” and try to create “good” and “evil.” Their calling is, rather, to discover the goodness inherent in the world God created and act
accordingly; not presuming to try “make” something good “because I say so.”
The problem with “values clarification” is that it suggests things
in the world have the value I give them. But if that’s true, then the reverse must also be true. If I
don’t “value” something, it has no value. This mistake is just as easily made,
depending on the ideology of the individual, about old-growth forests as it is
about unborn children. If I choose to “value” it, it can continue to exist. If
I don’t, then it’s acceptable to clear-cut the one or terminate the other.
People increasingly feel convinced that governments exist precisely to “free”
us in this way to set aside the constraints of Nature, so my act of personal
will can take its place.
For similar reasons, many people prefer the Gnostic god of
“spirituality” to the bothersome Old Testament Creator-God of Nature and the
Moral Law. And yet is the rule of this “god” better, especially for the poor,
the weak, the widow, and orphan? How well are these cared for by the engines of laissez-faire capitalism or the modern bureaucratic state? How well are they
faring under the regime of lifestyle liberalism?
I suggest that we can learn a
great deal about contemporary Gnostics by examining their earlier forebears.
Ancient Gnostics, thinking the body unimportant and valuing only the “spirit,”
often engaged in stringent punishment of their bodies. Their modern
counterparts often engage in similarly stringent diets of a specificity and
relentless rigor that makes the simple Catholic Lenten fast look like a
banquet.
The similarities to certain
parts of the Christian message was precisely what made ancient forms of
Gnosticism so dangerous, and why the early Church Fathers spent so much of
their energy arguing against them, carefully clarifying how orthodox
Christianity differed from what these Gnostics were selling.
Of the many fronts in this
battle, the first was to insist that Christ was both the Word made flesh and
the Word through whom God created the world; that the God of the New Testament
could not be separated from the God of the Old; and that the “spiritual”
teaching of the Sermon on the Mount could not be separated from the moral law
of Mount Sinai. All of these were expressions of one divine will.
Moreover, the way the Church Fathers chose to enter the struggle
with the spiritual elite who claimed to be the bearers of a greater “knowing”
was with solid arguments – with logic (from the Greek logos). As Pope Benedict XVI often emphasized, it was not without
reason (literally) that God revealed Himself in the Gospel as the Logos, as the ultimate ground of reason.
The Fathers did not battle the
Gnostics by trying to “one-up” their sentimental appeals; they formulated the
best arguments they could muster, and in doing so became the true heirs of the
best Greek and Roman philosophers. The patrimony of Aristotle, Plato, and
Cicero lived on in Fathers like Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and
Augustine of Hippo. And having preached the words, the Fathers showed their
truth by acting in integrity with them – to the point of being willing to give
their lives in witness to it.
What sort of formation do we
owe our young people today to counter the many purveyors of modern Gnosticism?
May I suggest it should be like the one offered by the Church Fathers. It
should be devoted to explicating the goodness of creation, showing how the
sacramental character of material things allows them to realize their true
nature as instruments of God’s selfless love. So too it should renew our
appreciation of the “natural law” as revealed in and through the Decalogue. And
it should affirm, in union with the Fathers and Popes John Paul II and Benedict
XVI, the importance of human reason and logic.
Can we not now see how defenseless we have left the young, having
stripped from Catholic education regular courses in the Philosophy of Nature,
the natural law, and logic, in favor of “soft” courses in “Religion and
Spirituality”? It has left us a generation “lost in the cosmos,” as novelist
Walker Percy called it, having no natural place, not even in our own bodies, no longer capable of discourse or
dialectic: disembodied ghosts without a meaningful world or words.
In a virtual world dominated by
Facebook fantasies and internet illusions, Christian parents and educators
should promise young people nothing less than a true encounter with full-bodied
reality. Anything less would be just another media gimmick, unworthy of the
Word made flesh.
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