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" These two movements in the history of Western thought, so-called gnosticism and so-called traditionalism, are again being revived variously to attack Islam and to revive awareness of its contribution to Western civilization. Oddly, the ancient form of deionization known as “gnosticism” is being revived by “Paleo-Conservatives,” also known as self-proclaimed “modern traditionalists,” in their efforts to combat both Islam and Neo-Conservatism as the two twenty-first-century threats to order, justice, and liberty. " Dr. Robert Crane
The Nature of Evil and
Mimetic Warfare Against Islam
“Gnosticism” and “Traditionalism” as Weapons of Disinformation
Dr. Robert D. Crane
A thousand years ago, the entire known world, i.e. from India to Morocco, was
convulsed with so-called Christian heresies. Allegedly the most vicious of them
all was known in Rome and Constantinople as “gnosticism,” which taught that each
individual person has access to God
without going through mediation and redemption by Jesus Christ.
Many centuries later, in the 18th century after Christ a movement arose in
England known eventually as philosophical “traditionalism” and in its political
expression as Whigism. Its roots go back to the Glorious Revolution of 1688,
when William of Orange and his wife, Mary, crossed the narrow seas between
France and England to eliminate the English King Charles II and his alleged
efforts to reimpose Vatican rule. It blossomed throughout the 18th century as
the “Scottish Enlightenment” and laid the philosophical foundation toward the
end of the century for the American Revolution and the American Constitution.
The Scottish Enlightenment was the opposite of the European Enightenment because
it served to revive a dying tradition of enlightened religion in human affairs
rather than to introduce “enlightened” rational thought as a means to destroy
the role of all religion in public life.
These two movements in the history of Western thought, so-called gnosticism and
so-called traditionalism, are again being revived variously to attack Islam and
to revive awareness of its contribution to Western civilization. Oddly, the
ancient form of deionization known as “gnosticism” is being revived by “Paleo-Conservatives,”
also known as self-proclaimed “modern traditionalists,” in their efforts to
combat both Islam and Neo-Conservatism as the two twenty-first-century threats
to order, justice, and liberty.
This complex phenomenon was raised but not addressed in a colloquium on The
Nature of Evil published in the April, 2005, edition of the online journal, The
American Muslim. This colloquium, in turn, triggered some emotional discussion
of probably the best presentation of Islamic traditionalism ever drafted. This
presentation, drafted by Shaykh Rashid al Ghanouchi, head of the illegal Nahda
party in Tunisia, and others who no longer wish to be identified, is known as
the platform of the Halaqa al Asala wa Taqadun (Circle of Tradition and
Progress). The complete text is available on pages 79-81 in the chapter entitled
“Ecumenical Justice Versus the Pagan Empire,” in my monograph, The Grand
Strategy of Justice, Islamic Institute for Strategic Studies, Policy Paper No.
5, April 2000, P.O. Box 303, Washington, Virginia 22747.
This statement referred to the two giants of traditionalist thought, Edmund
Burke and Russell Kirk, but included also Eric Voegelin and Gerhart Niemeyer as
examples of traditionalist thinkers. This raised a highly controversial issue,
because Voegelin is the most articulate modern thinker who condemns Gnosticism
as the greatest threat to traditionalist thought. Whereas the traditionalist,
Robert Strausz-Hupe, who is erroneously claimed by Daniel Pipes and other
Neo-Cons as their original mentor, regarded Islam more than half a century ago
as possibly America’s greatest ally against totalitarian systems, more recently
key intellectuals are condemning Islam in the world today as the re-emergence of
the deadly Gnostic pandemic.
In my follow-up emails to the colloquium on The Nature of Evil, I called
attention to articles published in the Winter 2005 issue of Modern Age, which
has been the intellectual mainstay of traditionalist thought in America ever
since Russell Kirk founded it in 1957. Two articles attempt to turn gnosticism
into a stalking horse as the opposite of traditionalism, when, in fact,
gnosticism as I understand it is quite compatible with traditionalism and in
many ways synonymous with it. These two are Michael Henry’s “Civil Theology in
the Gnostic Age: Progress and Regress,” and R. V. Young’s “Harold Bloom: the
Critic as Gnostic.”
My own writings on gnosticism have evolved over the decades, ever since I wrote
a dissertation at Northwestern University in 1955-1956, entitled, The Political
Origins of Heresy in the First Six Christian Centuries. My writings thirty and
more years ago ascribed the secular utopias of Communism, Nazism, and
Apocalyptic Zionism to a gnostic concept of human perfectability and to the
resultant rationale for creating perfection through social engineering on earth.
Further study,
however, suggested to me that this view is a direct descendent of the
third-century and fourth-century efforts of Christian orthodox theologians to
demonize those who denied the divinity of Christ. The charge was that these
people believed salvation can come from direct knowledge of God and submission
to God rather than only from joining the vicarious atonement of Jesus for one’s
sins. The charge further was that such heretics deny original sin and therefore
are vulnerable to utopian
dreams of perfecting the material world through their own intellect rather than
perfecting themselves through the grace of God.
The first charge is no doubt true, but the second charge does not accord with my
understanding of gnosticism. Gnosticism in history accords with what we now call
Sufism, and Sufis would be the last to reject transcendence in favor of
immanence and to seek the City of God on earth.
Young writes that, “Gnosticism is a religious conspiracy theory ... based
on a radical dualism ... that offers salvation on the basis of occult
knowledge.” He quotes Han Jonas’ critique of gnosticism: “The deity is
absolutely Tran mundane, its nature alien to that of the universe, which it
neither created nor governs and to which it is the complete antithesis; to the
divine realm of light, self-contained and remote, the cosmos is opposed as the
realm of darkness. The world is the work of lowly powers which though they may
mediately be descended from Him do not know the true God and obstruct knowledge
of Him in the cosmos over which they rule.” This charge may be true concerning
extremist elements in both Muslim Sufism and in the more generic phenomenon of
Gnosticism, but it is totally off base in describing their classical
expressions.
The evil nature of using the Gnostic analogy to demonize Islam is most
strikingly brought out, as I have discussed it in many of my articles, in
the assertion by Richard John Neuhaus, editor of the leading
Neo-Conservative religious publication, First Things, that Muslims can
have no personal relationship with God, that therefore they can have no
understanding of human rights, and that accordingly they can not even
understand what democracy is all about.
The Gnostic disease that has caused evil in the modern world, according to
anti-Islamic traditionalists (which should be recognized as an oxymoron),
consists in rejecting St. Augustine’s emphasis on personal sin separating
the person from God and repentance through the help of divine grace.
Instead, says Young, “The Gnostics’ teaching places the origin of evil, of
pain and suffering, in the conditions of the material creation; salvation
involves overcoming ignorance and escaping these external conditions by
finding divinity within.”
Young castigates Gnosticism further as follows: “The Gnostic finds the
beginning of the path to salvation in the realization that the world is
a great imposture, a prison of pain and frustration. His escape lies in
recovering the intrinsic good within himself, the principle of
illumination that he shares with other enlightened spirits. ... What makes
it possible for the self and God to commune so freely is that the
self already is of God.” Perhaps Young is confusing pane theism with
pantheism.
He continues, “The ancient Gnostics, Sigmund Freud, and Harold Bloom all
share a loathing of the Christian vision of reality, which sees mankind’s
willful disobedience and fallen nature as the principal source of his misery and
of the evil in a world created good. ... The alternative is the Gnostic
and Freudian view, ... [whereby] our hope lies not in acknowledging and
submitting to the moral reality of our situation, but in overcoming or
even transforming it.” He then goes on
to his paradigm-forming conclusion about the evils of the modern world:
“Marxism is a good example of the similarity between Gnosticism and many
modern ideologies.”
The impact on political thought of Gnosticism recreated as a bugbear of
conservatism, is discussed in the second article, “Civil Theology in the
Gnostic Age,” by Michael Henry, who teaches philosophy at St. John’s
University in New York (not the St. John’s in Annapolis and Santa Fe) and
is series editor of the Library of Conservative Thought of Transaction
Publishers. He defines Gnosticism as “a somewhat deformed version of
Christianity that seeks immanent salvation through human action in a
redivinized world in which humanity is the locus of the divine.”
Henry then develops his well-based traditionalist critique of Neo-Conservatives,
whose mission to perfect the world represents a “re-irruption” of Gnosticism in
the concept of “enlightened liberty [consisting in] an emphasis on personal
gratification and the isolation of individual desires rather than the community
of shared participation in transcendence. Americans came to see themselves as
the saviors of the world through their achievement of the most rational order
that
maximizes individual freedom and earthly happiness ... guaranteeing earthly
happiness through democracy.”
He then writes, quite soundly in reference to Neo-Conservatism but quite
erroneously in reference to Gnosticism, that, “As Voegelin has pointed out,
positivism is another variety of Gnosticism through its reduction of reality to
the immanent. ... If the public philosophy means that liberty is the possession
of rights determined by the citizens’ preferences, then order is merely the
absence of chaos but has no positive content or meaning. ... Having no
substantial truth in itself [democracy] worships freedom, which means that it
appeals to relativism and the related skepticism - which is quite the opposite
of Voegelin’s characterization of the nature of man as ‘openness to
transcendence’.”
Since the term “Gnosticism” is central to the apologetics of American
traditionalist savants, we, as traditionalists from the Islamic tradition,
should address what we have in common with the Christian traditionalists. This
does not include the deionization of Gnosticism, which suggests that we need to
use other terms that have less historical baggage.
Rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater, perhaps we should change
the bathtub. Whether we call the paradigm liberalism, conservatism, or neo this
or paleo that, is not as important as the content of the terms we are using. I
abandoned my self-description as conservative a long time ago, because most
people who like this term are simply reactionary. Facetiously, I call my self a
prolicon, as in lepracon, meaning progressive, liberal, conservative. But
actually I am
none of those.
Why abandon the term traditionalism merely because it has been hijacked by
people who do not understand it and have perverted it into a neo-traditionalism,
the way the neo-conservatives have perverted their origins? I have no problem
with “classical liberalism,” but only if we understand that classical liberalism
is similar to what I call classical traditionalism, which is quite the opposite
of modern libertarianism and its opposite, neo-traditionalism.
Libertarianism refuses to recognize any transcendent framework for either human
responsibilities or human rights. Classical liberalism, on the other hand, can
recognize freedom as both the purpose and product of transcendent justice. The
highest goal, however, as propounded throughout the Qur’an, is truth and
justice.
The weakness of the so-called traditionalism of Voegelin is that he seems to
reject anything similar in any religion other than Christianity, but at the same
time rejects Christianity as anything more than an imperfect expression of his
own ideas. His followers attack the triumphalism of the Neo-Cons but seem to
replace it with their own brand.
Perhaps we need a better word to describe what classical Islam and classical
Christianity share. Frithj of Schuon uses the term philosophic perennis, and
this has been translated as universal traditionalism because it is the substance
of what is traditional or enduring in all religions. My suggestion is that we
rescue the term traditionalism from those who would hijack it, rather than
surrendering to the hijackers.
We are engaged in mimetic warfare, which is the use of mimes in the form
of words or symbols, to capture the sub-conscious of others without them knowing
that they have been hijacked. The first rule of warfare is to know your
enemy. The second is to know his strategy. Only then can we know better the
nature of evil.
by courtesy & 2005 The American Muslim
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