Is Modernity Haunted by Gnostic Ghosts?
Beatrice Institute, one of the sponsoring institutes of Genealogies of Modernity, produced this exciting Podcast episode. In this interview with Cyril O’Regan, Ryan McDermott and O’Regan engage metaphors of anatomy, haunting, and genealogical battles to hold a conversation ranging from poetry to ancestry to children’s literature, helping to illumine some of the places obscured by forgetfulness.
One of modernity’s many attributes is its ingratitude towards the past. Both through forgetfulness of pre-modern thought and ways of being (whether intentional or accidental), and also by reconfiguring pre-modern narratives to make them palatable to modern minds, a rupture is created between past and present. But what if these reconfigured or “misremembered” discourses in fact embody thoughts and ideas long dead and forgotten?
This is one of many intriguing ideas presented by Cyril O’Regan, theologian at Notre Dame University. By revealing the ways that Hegel, Blake, and others have adapted and distorted Christian doctrine through Gnostic lenses, he works to unveil “doppleganger” forms of Christianity that leave modern minds too comfortable, forcing us to the intellectual honesty of confronting ourselves as sinners in a world created by a God who is benevolent, but far beyond our comprehension.
Using the metaphors of anatomy, haunting, and genealogical battles, Cyril and Ryan engage in a conversation ranging from poetry to ancestry to children’s literature, helping to illumine some of the places obscured by the shadow of abandoned heresies and forgetfulness.
“Bad poetry is noxious; great poetry is disclosive”
While theological writing bears a sense of responsibility to help the larger community believe and behave better, poetry can “imagine even further those thoughts which are not translatable into good theology [...] the thoughts which are jagged, experimental”
One constituent of modernity is either an actual or willed forgetfulness of pre-modern discourses/modes of thought
Romantic thinkers like Blake and Shelley want to leave behind both Christianity and the unrealized promises of the Enlightenment
In taking what they want from the past and leaving behind what they don’t, these thinkers are performing “an act of misremembering”
“What I'm interested in are those discourses [...] which seem to be interested in negotiating with Christianity, but actually want to overcome it on narrative grounds”
Gnostic narratives are “doubly narrative” because they “overlay, digest, and consume” the Christian narrative to give it a different meaning
In many ways modern thought works similarly to Gnostic thought
Refiguring Christianity to make it more congenial to modernity has a behavioral cost
“Now we're looking at what looks like a doppelganger of Christianity, and we're set in that as if that actually is Christianity. I want to say, excuse me: it's not Christianity”
We can look at the multiple conditions of modernity, but cannot determine a single cause for it; conditions are not causes
“We do need to understand ourselves more, individually and socially, and a doctrine of sin and the various ways in which we have understood that might help us to understand ourselves more”
His work diagnosing the forms of Christianity that are simply repeating what modernity tells us is “a clearing house with respect to our own self-understanding as created and as sinners”
“Even if we got the right notion about who we should be as Christian [...] between that notion and the fact falls the shadow; and the shadow is sin”
Haunting: when ideas or narratives that didn’t have enough body to propagate whole and entire nonetheless appear in much later texts
Just as much of the best Catholic literature “renarratizes” Christianity by removing it several degrees from reality and reanimating it, so can Gnostic ideas and other philosophies be embodied in fantasy
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