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January 5, 2005
GNOSIS AT A TIME OF DISASTER
A Meditation on the Earthquake - Tsunami Catastrophe of December 26, 2004
On the day after Christmas of last year, a gigantic earthquake accompanied by a tsunami took the lives of thus far over 150,000 human beings in an area extending from Indonesia to Somalia. A natural catastrophe of unique scope visited humanity, and causes us to reflect on its possible meaning and implications. Questions are being raised by people of many faiths and of none. Most of these may be summed up in one word:
“Why?” In this brief meditation we shall indicate some answers to this question that might be offered from the vantage point of the Gnostic tradition.
In addition to the overall question there are observations and interpretations forthcoming from many quarters. Let us outline some of these here:
1. The Literalist Religious perspective: The disaster is God’s Will. The purpose behind this will is in all likelihood none other than punishment. The wrathful and punitive Deity of this religiosity has been offended by various sins of humanity and thus came to visit a frightful retribution upon the sinners.
2. The Literalist Quasi-Secular perspective: “When people cease to believe in God” said Chesterton, “they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything.” Some of this “anything” appears in our days as the earth, nature, the ecosystem, the planet. Voices are being heard that proclaim that we have “wounded the earth”, “broken mother earth’s bones”, and that the disaster is the reaction of earth to the injuries inflicted on her by humans. While the wrathful deity is replaced here by the wrathful earth, the result is identical to the one advanced by literalist religion: we are being punished for our sins.
3. The perspective of Inscrutability and Mystery: “God works in mysterious ways”. So declares this school of thought. “His designs are inscrutable.” The implications of this perspective often lead to the belief that such terrible events mysteriously serve God’s good ends. In this view, evil is but good masquerading in an unpleasant disguise.
4. The Naturalistic-Cosmic perspective inherited from the philosophy of the Enlightenment: This view declares that we live in a Newtonian clockwork cosmos wherein the principle of mechanical equilibrium predominates. Whenever this equilibrium is upset by circumstances of whatever provenance, a readjustment takes place, of which an earthquake is an example. The destruction of human and other kind of life resulting from such adjustments is in the nature of incidental results, a sort of cosmic “collateral damage”.
5. The Westernized adaptation of the notion of Karma: This perspective, which was first popularized in the 19 Century and has been incorporated into much New Age teaching, holds that “perfect justice rules the world”, and this justice is administered by the law of Karma. Thus, the individual Karma of the victims would in some mysterious way be synchronized and joined to the Karma of the nations and continents affected, and somehow all of this would be just and good. One can detect in this perspective, elements of perspectives 3 & 4 of our list.
What then is the specifically Gnostic perspective? The Gnostic tradition agrees with various authors who have suggested that there are three propositions that cannot be made to co-exist. They are:
- God is all-powerful and all-knowing.
- God is good.
- Terrible things happen.
Thus an all-powerful and all-knowing God could let terrible things, of the nature of the recent catastrophe, happen, but then He could not be good. On the other hand, a good God might have to let such horrors take place, but then He could not be all-powerful or all-knowing. In addition, a God who would visit such and similar disasters on His children would be not only not good, but a veritable fiend, the prototype of all monstrously abusive parents. That great figure of our culture, Harold Bloom, expressed this well:
If you can accept a God who coexists with death-camps, schizophrenia, and AIDS, yet remains all-powerful and somehow benign, then you have faith, and you have accepted the Covenant with Yahweh. . .If you know yourself as having an affinity with the alien, or stranger God, cut off from this world, then you are a Gnostic. (Omens of Millennium, p 252)
The Gnostic world view declares (using Bloom’s words) that the Godhead envisioned is indeed alien, a stranger by virtue of the fact that the world and the inhabitants of the world have become alienated from their Source, Who is God. This Source is benevolent and perfect in a spiritual sense, but owing to alienation does not exercise direct control over the world, wherein lesser spiritual beings and deities hold dominion. Thus the evils and catastrophic events in the world are in no way the result of the intentions of the true and good God. Punitive and malign intentions may at times manifest in cosmic and terrestrial events, but these are the products of the lesser deities involved with creation and its operations.
Is this position contrary to the Christian tradition? The answer is that while much contemporary theology that calls itself Christian contradicts the Gnostic world view, some of the most venerable, ancient theologies of Christendom are in agreement or near agreement with the Gnostic position. Thus we may study the following statements of a theologian of the (Eastern) Orthodox Church, David B. Hart:
The Christian understanding of evil has always been more radical and fantastic...for it denies from the outset that suffering, death and evil have any ultimate meaning at all. Perhaps no doctrine is more insufferably fabulous to non- Christians than the claim that we exist in the long melancholy aftermath of a primordial catastrophe, that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is the shadow of true time, and that the universe languishes in bondage to “powers” and “principalities” — spiritual and terrestrial — alien to God. (The Wall Street Journal, Friday, Dec 31, 2005, p wll)
These words, written especially with the recent great catastrophe in mind, indicate a most wonderful convergence of Gnostic and (Eastern) Orthodox views of the world and its evils. That the orthodox may attribute these conditions to the fall, while the Gnostic regards them as the consequences of the creation of the world by a lesser deity is true enough, but so is the virtual identity of the two visions.
Let us then briefly summarize our response to the five aforementioned perspectives:
The evils and horrors of this disaster (or of any disaster) are not reflective of the will of the true God, Whom Gnostics adore and address in prayer and liturgy. Neither is there even the remotest possibility that such disasters are a punishment meted out by the true God to his children. If there is a malice involved it originates with the lesser deities who in ignorance and wrath manage a good deal of this world. It is even more likely that disasters large and small are simply a part of the imperfect world, the sorrowful reality within which we find ourselves until we are liberated from it by Gnosis.
Neither is there any reason to believe that humankind is receiving some kind of a retribution from the earth, or some deity (Gaia) embodied in earth. The earth is subject to processes and events that are injurious to it and also to the living organisms on it. The earth is a blind creation of blind godlings and thus at times earthly forces blindly destroy those dwelling on this sorrowful planet. The anthropomorphisation of earth and of natural forces in the service of contemporary political agendas is but a regrettable and false mythology of our time.
While ultimate reality is indeed very mysterious and inscrutable when contemplated by our minds, this does not mean that we should use the concept of mystery as a cheap excuse for not facing the evils and grotesque horrors in this world. Once the reality of the imperfect gods creating an imperfect world in their own flawed image becomes evident to us, the mystery and the inscrutability regarding these matters vanishes.
In certain respects the universe may indeed resemble Newton’s well-oiled, machine-like model, but in other respects this image is dated and no longer valid. To the extent that horrible disasters are indeed the results of balancing and adjusting processes in the universe, these processes are part of the malign aspect of creation and of the intentions of the malign masters of creation.
The concept of Karma is the mental expression of some very complex and subtle principles that operate in our lives and possibly in the life of the universe as well. If Karma is in some way responsible for disasters such as these, that would only explain how such events come about, but it would not truly explain Karma is part of the prison system of this world that is ruled over by what might be Gnostically called “warden-archons”. The objective of all yoga and other disciplines of liberation is to be freed from Karma. Thus, Karma should not be used as a contrived “explanation” of the horrors we encounter in disasters.
Thus we are left with the eternal Gnostic realization: Only the liberating insight of Gnosis will ultimately lift us out of a reality where horrors of this kind prevail. In a Gnostic sense earthly life itself is a disaster. Like so many of the unfortunate men, women, and children who were living (or vacationing) in areas that were like Paradise and were then so cruelly deprived of their lives in the twinkling of an eye, so have we come forth once from the Fullness (Pleroma) and have been swept away by a dreadful torrent that carried us far away from the glories and beauty of our true home. Horrible as this realization strikes us, we must balance it with the afore noted recognition: There is a liberating insight, which we call Gnosis, that can reverse the process and take us back to our true dwelling place. In a very true sense, this is really all that matters. And until then, let us treat each other with compassion, let us extend such help and love as we may be able to offer. For while it is beyond our power to change this dark and violent reality, it is within our ability to shed some light on the path upon which we move toward our goal beyond this world.
+ Stephan A. Hoeller