Liveblog at the End of the Universe

tom van dyke in reply to Robert Cheeks says:

RC, this very good discussion has clarified yr use of “gnosticism,” in short, a “knowing” that is inside man, not outside him, not “transcendent, etc. [And if man does not know x yet, he will eventually figure it out, hence the notion of “progress.”]

If man has all the necessary knowledge “locked” inside him—a necessary premise for gnosticism—then revelation is unnecessary, even God is unnecessary for any and all practical purposes.

Only man is necessary; God is redundant.

Therefore, “immantizing the eschaton” is man’s task, not God’s, not even nature’s. [Technology, man’s mastering of nature, also being a component of much modern thought.] The “perfecting” of man is to be accomplished by man’s will alone, via eugenics or technology or philosophy or politics or all of the above.

[Yes, “natural selection” could be said to play a part in the more perfected future that will be populated by the “new men” fit to live in it. However, natural selection is contingent upon adaptation to particular environmental conditions, and it will be man’s will that creates this new social environment that the “new man” must adapt to or die.]

Again, the question returns to whether man is the necessary being or a “contingent” one. The classicals—and certainly classical theism—see man as a contigent being; modernity sees him as the necessary one, so as such the measure of all things, for only man can do the measuring!Report

tom van dyke in reply to Robert Cheeks says:

Just trying to hep, RC. Voegelin’s “Gnosticism” can work without the Manichaeanism, I believe. It merely substitutes man’s desires for his telos, or in its “benevolent” form, humanism or utilitarianism for teleology. What it means for man to “flourish” is recharted. [Benedict of course, notes that “freedom” becomes its own end, not a means to “flourishing.”]

As for the critique of modernity and its “immantizing” project, I believe I’m consistent with EV, or so the internet tells me.

When Voegelin writes that impatience to immanentize the eschaton constitutes the essence of Gnosticism, he refers to the petulant dogma that one need not wait, without schedule, to be translated into Paradise, but that one can, by his own self-salvaging activity, realize Paradise in this world. The skeptical claim that such a work is impossible is more of a focus for the Gnostic than the Gnostic’s own claim that such a work is actualizable because the first, the standing, the intuitive and plausible claim is what blocks and scandalizes the Gnostic’s own project. From this mis-priority of arguments stems the desperate nastiness of the Gnostic towards those who criticize or disagree with him. What does it mean, however, when Voegelin asserts that, “on the basis of this fallacy, Gnostic thinkers, leaders, and their followers interpret a concrete society and its order as an eschaton; and, insofar as they apply their fallacious construction to concrete social problems, they misrepresent the structure of immanent reality”?

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/3984

BTW, is the opposite of a gnostic an agnostic? No matter. ;-D

The Manicheanism of your approach [hell, you’re talking about Satan so that’s at least demonization!] risks duplicating “the desperate nastiness of the Gnostic towards those who criticize or disagree with him,” per the above.

I think that’s an unfair ascription of motivations. If there is no god, no natural order of good and evil to speak of, if man’s NOT busying himself with immantizing the eschaton, he’s just a lazy sybarite.

So give the existentialist some credit. Absent a “divine” teleology, human progress is the only worthy thing to labor upon. Success in achieving it is secondary or irrelevant. The means is its own end.Report

tom van dyke in reply to WardSmith says:

Aargh, Mr. Likko, the dreaded laundry list of religion’s crimes!

To which the reply must be communism, most of man’s bad ideas all rolled into one [even if you count religion, which was rolled out!].

The Inquisition[s] were politically motivated, BTW. King Ferdinand, not the pope, started the Spanish one. The state had much better luck co-opting the church than vice-versa. The pope has no divisions, at least not for quite awhile now.

As for “massive violence” from the “human-centered” Greeks, I believe Rufus and Thucydides might have something to add.

About the same time the Melians again took another part of the Athenian lines which were but feebly garrisoned. Reinforcements afterwards arriving from Athens in consequence, under the command of Philocrates, son of Demeas, the siege was now pressed vigorously; and some treachery taking place inside, the Melians surrendered at discretion to the Athenians, who put to death all the grown men whom they took, and sold the women and children for slaves, and subsequently sent out five hundred colonists and inhabited the place themselves.Report