Gnosticism gets a lot of guff for seeing the material world as something to be escaped from.
I think that’s a caricature of gnosticism. Sure, the Used Car Salesman who created the world set up a lemon of a universe, but that doesn’t mean gnosticism has to be anti-body and anti-earth.
Even if many flavors of gnosticism are quite anti-body and anti-earth, we can put together a gnosticism that isn’t body hating. It’s not like there are gnostic police waiting to take us down for trying.
What would a “good earth gnosticism” look like?
A key mark of gnosticism is its mythology of creation. The Used Car Salesman who sold us the world was dumb or evil, or both. In spite of that, we have a divine spark within us that longs to return home to a perfect fullness from which everything—even the Used Car Salesman—comes from. We remain innately good and long for full goodness.
But what if we took from the Used Car Salesman most of the creative powers mainstream gnosticism1 gives him? What if we limited him to setting up the System, the Powers-That-Be, the Hologram, the Black Iron Prison? What if we just let him stand in as The Man?
If we keep him to that, and acknowledge that it’s all just a metaphor anyway, we can free up a lot of head space for the goodness and wonder of creation. We can embrace a fully naturalist view of the physical universe.
Or, better yet, a fully religiously naturalist view of the universe. We can see, we could say, that there is more to life than what the Used Car Salesman has sold us.
We would need to escape, then, not from the physical world but from the Hologram, from the Black Iron Prison, from Empire. It would be not only a spiritual Exodus but also a socio-economic and psychological Exodus.
And where would we be escaping to? Maybe to someplace like this.
- Is there such a thing?? [↩]
