This article refers to Bloom's take on gnosticism as
the "American religion" and is worth reading in the
VLVL context, esp re Frenesi's gnosticism as well as
that of the neo-fascist government she can't help
serving. (The author also revisits the story of
Abraham and Isaac in a way that may interest readers
of Gravity's Rainbow.)
Smart Bombs, Serial Killing, and the Rapture: The
Vanishing Bodies of Imperial Apocalypticism
[...] III. Onward Gnostic Soldiers
[...] antinomian beliefs can be traced to the Gnostic
repudiation of the Decalogue as an instrument of
oppression devised by the tyrannical creator deity,
Yahweh, to keep human beings in a state of spiritual
bondage. [...] Early Christianity, to be sure, was an
apocalyptic sect; although Paul and the Apostles
believed that the Second Coming was at hand, they
discouraged speculation about when it would actually
occur. Instead, they stressed the responsibility of
the Christian to lead a moral life after he or she had
become converted, that is, had undergone the symbolic
death that leads the believer to a new life free from
the dominion of sin. The believer must now live in
the awareness of having died to sin, "but the life he
lives, he lives to God" (Rom. 6.10). Contemporary
premillennialism, on the other hand, is almost
entirely consumed by the specifics of end-time
speculation, and its central fantasy of the Rapture
amounts to a blithe denial of physical death [...]
The question thus emerges as to whether
premillennialism represents a deformation of Christian
orthodoxy, or if it springs from an entirely
different spiritual tradition. Let us recall here
Harold Bloom's thesis that Americans erroneously
believe themselves to be Christian, but are in fact
Gnostic without knowing it. In Bloom's view, the
exaltation of the self, the democratic--and
anti-intellectual--mistrust of external authority, the
vast spaces of the frontier, and the privileging of
experience over doctrine in the churches have given
rise to a kind of spirituality in the United States
that has little in common with historical
Christianity but is in fact a modern recurrence of
ancient heresies. Such religiosity extends as well
to the secular understanding of American nationhood,
as the insistence upon the exceptionality of America's
destiny likewise commands the zeal of a religious
devotion. For the ancient Gnostic as well as for the
American Religion, the individual self is the
irrevocable source of authenticity and truth, over and
against any actual or imagined collectivity:
urging the need for community upon American
religionists is a vain enterprise; the experiential
encounter with Jesus or God is too overwhelming for
memories of community to abide, and the believer
returns from the abyss of ecstasy with the self
enhanced and the otherness devalued (Bloom 27).
It is not repentance or brotherly love that is
the defining attribute of Gnostic salvation but
freedom--freedom from history, the cosmos, nature, as
well as from morality itself. Gnosticism holds that
the created world (and also the human body and soul)
was designed by the Demiurge as a prison to hold the
divine sparks, or pneuma, taken from the uncreated
abyss of light. The politically explosive, even
paranoiac character of Gnosticism in both its ancient
and latter-day manifestations can be deduced from its
account of the creation, which presents a cosmology in
the form of a conspiracy theory. The minions of the
tyrannical creator, the Archons, work to keep humanity
in a state of ignorance regarding its own true, alien
nature as well as the dark purpose of the created
world. Gnostic salvation thus comes in the form of a
liberating knowledge that awakens human beings to the
presence of a divine spark hidden deep within the
soul. The American Religion, Bloom argues, asserts
this harsh dualism between spirit and matter in its
"deepest knowledge," which is the conviction of
American Fundamentalists "that they were no part of
the Creation, but existed as spirits before it, and so
are as old as God himself" (57).
The Gnostic valorization of freedom at the
same time articulates an exceedingly vindictive
denunciation of the physical world, a condemnation
far harsher than any perspective found in Christian
orthodoxy. The radical dualism of Gnosticism means
that its adherents assume a drastically different
spiritual posture from that of the Christian believer;
whereas the latter experiences saving knowledge as
the increasing awareness of his or her sinful
condition in a divinely created cosmos, the Gnostic
sets out to regain his or her innocence in a world
that is the misshapen and unregenerate product of a
malign deity. Thus, Gnosticism, in order to sustain
its belief in the innocence of the uncreated spark,
must project all that is baleful and malevolent onto
the cosmos itself. The assertion of this insuperable
divide between one's inviolable self and the woeful
prison of matter generates an equally intractable
sense of indifference to one's actions in the world,
since such indifference, which is actively assumed out
of disdain and horror and thus not to be mistaken for
detached quietude, demonstrates the powerlessness of
the Demiurge to corrupt the divine spark within.
According to Bloom, the American Religion is likewise
defined by the conviction that the world and one's
actions in it are irrelevant to the purity of the
self: "If your knowing ultimately tells you that you
are beyond nature, having long preceded it, then your
natural acts cannot sully you. No wonder then, that
salvation, once attained, cannot fall away from the
American Religionist, no matter what he or she does"
(265). Furthermore, if the creation is truly
identical to the Fall, and the physical world reveals
the designs of an antagonistic deity, then the
sacrosanct self becomes defined according to its
hostility against the order of being. For the
American Religion's worship of freedom is at the same
time a war against otherness, which it understands as
"whatever denies the self's status and function as the
true standard of being and of value" (Bloom 16).
The premillennialist doctrine of the Rapture
is thus distinctly Gnostic in character, as its image
of mass ascent recalls not only the taking into
heaven of Enoch and Elijah in the Hebrew Bible (both
of whom are central figures in the Gnostic lore of
the Kabbalah) but also the crucifixion of the Gnostic
Christ, who, according to the heretical accounts, did
not suffer a shameful and agonizing death but was
instead transfigured by the bliss of illumination.
[...]
...read it all:
<http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/current.issue/14.1paik.html>
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