The New Gnostics: An Introduction
Patrick Pritchett, Harvard University
Why gnosticism? Why now?
One of the most difficult things in writing about the re-emergence of a gnostic poetics is having to continually backspace to override MS Word’s (MS Logos?) auto-correct function, which capitalizes Gnostic. I call it the small “g” problem since the new gnostic poetics I’m trying to describe has to do with enthroning the tyranny of the majuscule. That process entails some deliberate misprision or reframing of the term for this historical moment. Because Gnostic has become such an elastic term, used to describe such a wide swath of writers, often as different from one another as say, Poe and Emerson, that it threatens
to lose its usefulness as meaningful category.
Though Gnosticism’s heretical beliefs about an alien god and the struggle to attain spiritual knowledge was quashed by the 3rd Century C.E., its perturbing legacy continues to speak to a profound yearning for alternate modes of poetic epistemology. It has influenced modern thinkers and writers from Carl Jung to H.P. Lovecraft. For Harold Bloom, modernist gnosis includes writers as diverse as Kafka, and Hart Crane, while Hans Jonas finds strong affinities between Gnostic thought and Heidegger’s existential phenomenology. “Gnosis,” as religious scholar Elaine Pagels observes, “is not primarily rational knowledge … we could translate it as ‘insight,’ for gnosis involves an intuitive process of knowing oneself.”
This trend toward a contemporary gnostic poetics owes its origins to several distinct vectors: the dethronement of theology and its reconstitution through a poetics of dispersal and the trace; the linguistic turn and its emphasis on the materiality of language; and the continuing commitment of poets aligned with the tradition of high modernism and the New American Poetry to an avant-garde aesthetic.
The idea of gnosis persists because it offers a powerful tool for counter-acting the disenchantment and alienation of the world. It is a response to a specific historical moment that is less about reviving the tenets of an ancient and problematic heresy then about using the tropological resources of that heresy to produce a modernist gnostic horizon.
What stability the term retains, however wobbly, is sufficient to engage with a postmodern poetry that contains both avant-garde and spiritual commitments. The idea of a new gnostic poetics derives in part from the recognition that modernism was deeply invested in and reliant on heterodox spiritual systems (Yeats, Pound, H.D.) which have been consciously carried forward by postmodern poets like Duncan and Mackey, and in part on the idea of a post-secular religious turn, or the return of the theological repressed. It subscribes not only to the idea that, in Marjorie Perloff’s words, language has become “the new spiritus mundi,” but to the continuity of a strong visionary mode in American poetry, described by Peter O’Leary in his recent essay, “Apocalypticism: A Way Forward for Poetry”:
“Apocalypse and other forms of sacred expression unbind love from material desire, freeing it to embrace the unknown and the unspeakable … apocalyptic poetry, then, is language charged with the kerygmatic power to reveal sacred reality, in history and beyond it.” (http://humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/review/55-3%20OLeary.pdf)
The new gnostic poetics does not entail a wholesale rejection of the body and the material world, as the ancient Gnostics did, but instead delves more deeply into the spiritual potential of the immanent.
The new gnostic poetics is not a system then, much less a revival, but rather designates a group of fellow travelers committed to a poetic agon in which the articulation of spiritual values is integral to redeeming the ruins of history and the disjointedness of everyday life through a visionary experimental poetry.
Patrick Pritchett, Harvard University
Why gnosticism? Why now?
One of the most difficult things in writing about the re-emergence of a gnostic poetics is having to continually backspace to override MS Word’s (MS Logos?) auto-correct function, which capitalizes Gnostic. I call it the small “g” problem since the new gnostic poetics I’m trying to describe has to do with enthroning the tyranny of the majuscule. That process entails some deliberate misprision or reframing of the term for this historical moment. Because Gnostic has become such an elastic term, used to describe such a wide swath of writers, often as different from one another as say, Poe and Emerson, that it threatens
to lose its usefulness as meaningful category.
Though Gnosticism’s heretical beliefs about an alien god and the struggle to attain spiritual knowledge was quashed by the 3rd Century C.E., its perturbing legacy continues to speak to a profound yearning for alternate modes of poetic epistemology. It has influenced modern thinkers and writers from Carl Jung to H.P. Lovecraft. For Harold Bloom, modernist gnosis includes writers as diverse as Kafka, and Hart Crane, while Hans Jonas finds strong affinities between Gnostic thought and Heidegger’s existential phenomenology. “Gnosis,” as religious scholar Elaine Pagels observes, “is not primarily rational knowledge … we could translate it as ‘insight,’ for gnosis involves an intuitive process of knowing oneself.”
This trend toward a contemporary gnostic poetics owes its origins to several distinct vectors: the dethronement of theology and its reconstitution through a poetics of dispersal and the trace; the linguistic turn and its emphasis on the materiality of language; and the continuing commitment of poets aligned with the tradition of high modernism and the New American Poetry to an avant-garde aesthetic.
The idea of gnosis persists because it offers a powerful tool for counter-acting the disenchantment and alienation of the world. It is a response to a specific historical moment that is less about reviving the tenets of an ancient and problematic heresy then about using the tropological resources of that heresy to produce a modernist gnostic horizon.
What stability the term retains, however wobbly, is sufficient to engage with a postmodern poetry that contains both avant-garde and spiritual commitments. The idea of a new gnostic poetics derives in part from the recognition that modernism was deeply invested in and reliant on heterodox spiritual systems (Yeats, Pound, H.D.) which have been consciously carried forward by postmodern poets like Duncan and Mackey, and in part on the idea of a post-secular religious turn, or the return of the theological repressed. It subscribes not only to the idea that, in Marjorie Perloff’s words, language has become “the new spiritus mundi,” but to the continuity of a strong visionary mode in American poetry, described by Peter O’Leary in his recent essay, “Apocalypticism: A Way Forward for Poetry”:
“Apocalypse and other forms of sacred expression unbind love from material desire, freeing it to embrace the unknown and the unspeakable … apocalyptic poetry, then, is language charged with the kerygmatic power to reveal sacred reality, in history and beyond it.” (http://humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/review/55-3%20OLeary.pdf)
The new gnostic poetics does not entail a wholesale rejection of the body and the material world, as the ancient Gnostics did, but instead delves more deeply into the spiritual potential of the immanent.
The new gnostic poetics is not a system then, much less a revival, but rather designates a group of fellow travelers committed to a poetic agon in which the articulation of spiritual values is integral to redeeming the ruins of history and the disjointedness of everyday life through a visionary experimental poetry.