21% of Americans identify as "spiritual, not religious." That makes them competitive: nonreligious and nonspiritual 30%, Evangelical Protestants 23%, Catholics 19%, Mainline Protestants 11%, Black Protestants 5%.
When someone identifies as "spiritual, not religious," I have three responses. First, I respect here a searching spirit, someone yearning for the True, the Good and the Beautiful. I note that they have not seen this in established religion and hope that they might find something in my Catholic faith.
Second, I worry: they are isolated, atomized, alone, vulnerable, in danger; much like a small lamb wandering into a forest surging with mountain lions and wolves, defenseless against the world, the flesh and the devil.
I grieve that he/she is a gnostic.
Gnosticism is an umbrella term indicating religious patterns prevalent in the Mediterranean world of the 2nd-4th centuries. These various forms interacted with Christianity and competed as alternative religions. "Gnosis" means knowledge. Salvation from evil was here found not in simple faith, repentance and decision for God and the good, acceptance of Revelation, participation in the Church or communion with the Trinity; rather in special knowledge. This knowledge: the human soul is a spark of the divine, trapped in a body that is evil. Reality is dualistic: the deity is all good and purely spiritual; the countervailing evil power, the demiurge, is the source of physical reality, the flesh, which is inherently bad. And so the gnostic compulsion is to find release and happiness by escape from the body, the physical, the flesh. This dualism denies creation as good from a Creator; it seeks escape from the physical, from suffering, from sexuality, from history, from the Feminine, from the institutional, and from the Jew. It exults the inner, subjective, isolated, solipsistic, autonomous Soul or Self as the "spark of the divine."
From this primal contempt for the human body, many consequences follow:
Anti-Sexuality. Disparagement of sex goes in two extreme directions. There is disgust and avoidance of sex. We find this in the Shakers who all embraced celibacy and predictably died out a few years ago. A different manifestation is in the emergence of new sexual identities such as "asexual," "agender," "demigender," and so forth. On the other hand is licentiousness justified because sex is not expressive of the soul. So, "hooking up" is a casual, trivial thing as Hugh Hefner taught us. Sexual engagement is trivialized. A husband might minimize adultery with a prostitute: "It was just sex. It meant nothing to me." This is a strong factor in Catholic progressivism in its disparagement of "pelvic theology." When Pope Francis and Leo downplay sexual ethics in favor of social justice they are manifesting the gnostic impulse. They imply that the epidemic of porn addiction, marital infidelity, and homosexual behavior are trivial in comparison with issues like immigration, capital punishment and the environment.
Anti-History. History, tradition, and past revelation have no value for the gnostic who lives only in the present. The Cultural Progressive in his disparagement of the past as ignorant, unjust and hateful is gnostic: entrapped in the moment and dismissive of what is given.
Anti-Institution. The "spiritual not religious" detaches from human institutions into loneliness. Institutions of course bond us to the past and future as well as the present. They embody (however imperfectly) spiritual values and join us together in them. The gnostic sits in judgement of the weaknesses and failings of human institutions and maintains an illusory sense of private, moral superiority.
Misogyny. Karl Stern (Flight from Woman) showed how Descartes and his followers were systemically and profoundly hateful of the feminine and maternal. Indeed, modernity is in its essence a rejection of the feminine (virginal, bridal, maternal, receptive, contemplative) in favor of a depraved masculinity of abstraction, detachment, control, violence, egoism and abuse.
Antisemitism. The second century gnostic Marcion rejected the Old Testament as divine revelation. The Church of course renounced this in accepting those books as inspired. A deep hatred of the Jew mysteriously accompanies the gnostic impulse. The gnostic despises history, the particular, and the institutional. The Jew is all three. Carl Jung held leadership positions in Nazi organizations. Heidegger, the philosophical titan of 20th century European philosophy, the heir of the Cartesian turn to the subject, was an active Nazi. We are tragically suffering now in the USA a resurgence of antisemitism on the Left and Right both. There are a number of contingent, current causes for this. But deeper there is an undiagnosed gnostic, spiritual-ontological resentment and disgust for the Jew.
Suffering. For the gnostic, suffering is not the result of sin, an act of freedom; nor is it an occasion to turn to God or even share in the salvific suffering of Christ. Rather, it is an error caused by the mistake of the creation of the physical which is itself evil. Here there is no faith in the saving act of a suffering savior, rather there is search for the hidden knowledge that will bring relief.
The "gnostic compulsion" dominates the history of spirituality well beyond these early centuries and finds expression in many contemporary spiritualities. Let's consider some.
1. Enlightenment, Modern and Contemporary Philosophy. The very word "enlightenment" has a gnostic taste. It suggests salvation through some knowledge: in this case, the use of reason of the isolated individual as liberated from tradition, custom, authority, and the fleshly. Modernity is the turn to the subjective, the interior Self, the autonomous intellect...cut off from the real, Being, the body, history, sex/gender, tradition and transcendence. Descartes' starting point was the search for absolute clarity and certainty of thought by the solitary, individual intellect. He assumed absolute suspicion of anything not logically self-evident. He displaced trust in the body, the Church, tradition, the feminine, the received. He rejected as suspect all that is "given"...creation, community, revelation, tradition. He rejected the realistic epistemology and the ontology of being of St. Thomas. And so, the entire corpus of modern/contemporary philosophy insofar as it builds upon Descartes/Hume/Hegel is deeply gnostic. This applies also to the softer, subtle way of Transcendental Thomism (Rahner, Longergan) which futilely attempts to reconcile Catholicism to the Cartesian/Kantian gnostic turn to the Self and the disconnect with the Real.
2. Lucifer. Was the first, primordial Gnostic. No, he is not an evil Demiurge, a dark deity coequal with God, and himself the source of the physical world as a fall into corruption from the divine. Rather, he is himself a creature, the most brilliant and bright of all the angels, created good in himself. Ancient non-biblical Christian traditions (neither approved nor condemned by Tradition and the Magisterium) say that he revolted when he heard God's plan for a physical universe and that God would himself become flesh of a woman. He would have considered his angelic nature superior to the human and all flesh and refused to defer to a God-Man and his especially his fleshly, feminine mother. Satan was the quintessential Gnostic.
3. Triumph of the Therapeutic. Much of contemporary psychology is at least implicitly gnostic in that it considers the client in isolation and loneliness. This is lucid in Carl Jung who identified the religious as the interiority of the Self, as a subjectivity of archetypes, ideas, and intuitions. The subject does not relate to the real, the objective, the transcendent and eternal. There is no I-Thou. Rather, the individual goes deeply into the unconscious of confusion and chaos. The popular Joseph Cambell is more blatantly gnostic in his evident disdain for the historical religions, his antisemitism, and his infatuation with pagan, cyclical religions. Even a sane moral voice like Jordan Peterson remains a gnostic, however enlightened in a good way, by his inability to accept Revelation like a child. The therapeutic culture that took over elite society in the 1960s posited as absolute the "authentic" Self, the autonomous individual who defines himself, free of family, history, authority. The path to human flourishing was no longer found in loyalty to God/family/Church/community, but in sincerity and transparency, whatever that entailed. This is a retrieval of the Gnostic "inner flame" of the soul, freeing itself from the flesh of connections, duties, obedience and loyalty.
4. Contraceptive Sterilization of Sex and LGBTQ Crusade. The sexual revolution detached the "inner self" from sexual/gendered human flesh in all its consequences of intimacy, vulnerability, fertility, fidelity, and communion with creation, community, ancestors and descendants. This new "Self" is autonomous, isolated, self-determining, liberated from history, institutions, gender, and fertility. The consequence of this is the LGBTQ construct whereby a rootless, disconnected, sovereign Self chooses gender and identity, renouncing what is "given" by birth, nature and Providence.
5. Technology further isolates the self with phone, internet, and a mega-system that dwarfs the person, removes agency, and disparages the particular, the place, the immediate, the physical, the historical and the institutional. The breakdown of family, community and local Church leaves the individual atomized and defenseless against manipulation by giga-state and mega-corporation. The measured, proportioned, organic and fluid interaction of the person with immediate, concrete ambience and community is replaced by the matrix and the machine.
6. New Age and Eastern-type Spiritualities. Lacking a theology of Creation and Creator, these offer an alternative religious path that has gnostic characteristics. Christian Zen, for example, lacks the primal reality of creation but also that of sin, freedom, redemption by crucified Christ, incarnation of God, the redemptive value of suffering and resurrection of the body. Rather, it offers "enlightenment" (that word again!) This is not a free act of turning from sin, of acceptance in faith of God's initiative in Christ, of loyalty to Him within the Church. The gnosis that saves here is noncognitive and anti-intellectual: it is recognition of the illusion of suffering, of the ego or person. It is a mystical dissolution of a false consciousness and a restoration to primal peace and union. Creation and the physical are here not evil so much as illusory and deceptive. This is accompanied by an ethos of kindness, generosity, and serenity. It retains the core gnostic belief of the real self entrapped in a hostile apparatus of ego, intellectuality and social convention. Such spiritualities ordinarily carry with them a disparagement of religion as dogma, ritual, tradition, and authority.
7. Simone Weil. We find an extreme, even shocking case of "Christian-Gnosticism" in this young, Jewish, brilliant, philosopher-mystic who died "of compassion" in World War II. She identified so deeply with the Suffering Christ of the poor and tormented that she fasted in solidarity and contributed to her death by a spiritual anorexia. Along with a saintly intimacy with Jesus and a heroic charity, she e suffered a gnostic-type aversion to the body. She believed in Christ but refused baptism. So she inflicted upon herself a sacramental as well as a physical anorexia. She aspired to "decreation" as a radical annihilation of the self. She viewed the dogmatic and institutional aspect of the Church with contempt. She did not view the physical world as the all-good creation of a generous Creator, but as a corruption or a fall, just like the ancient Gnostics. She is at once a genuine mystic, a brilliant thinker and a deeply tormented spirit.
The Hylomorphic Communion of Body and Soul: Aristotle, Thomas, Stein, John Paul
Aristotle famously overcame the view of his mentor Plato that the soul is entrapped in an alien body. Attuned to biology, he advocated the "hylomorphic" (matter-form) that soul and body are essentially wed together to form a reality. This idea proved to be entirely compatible with the Bible's view of the human person as embodied-spirit (or "angimal" both spirit and animal in a unity). More recently, John Paul has renewed this awareness in his pivotal catechesis on the human body. Very close to his thought is that of St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein.) Stein is a striking contrast to Weil. A contemporary, she was a secular Jew who converted to Catholicism. She is again a brilliant philosopher and an authentic mystic. She is entirely Catholic all things but especially about the human body. She wrote and spoke eloquently about the "genius of woman" and herself died a martyr in the concentration camp. The contrast between Gnostic and Catholic is glaring in the anthropology of the human body.
Catholic Intuition: God's Passion to Incarnate
We know from our faith: not only does God love everything he has made in the physical universe, but he craves...madly, passionately, desperately...to incarnate himself, to become flesh, to penetrate and indwell us, in our very flesh.
He became flesh, lived, suffered, and died in Jesus. His flesh lives now eternally in heaven. But that was not enough. He wanted to remain with us, in us, in the flesh. So he is with us in the Eucharist, in every consecrated host on every altar and in every tabernacle.
He is in-fleshed, until the end of history, in the historical, institutional, hierarchical Church: the infallible teaching, the efficacious sacraments, the forgiveness of sins, the powers of the priesthood, the sanctity of marriage as a sacrament, the anointing of the sick and the dying, the holiness of saints, the repentance of sinners.
By virtue of his own crucifixion, he is present in the suffering: the martyrs, the persecuted, the disabled, the emotionally afflicted, the poor and the sick.
He craves to sanctify our sexual yearnings, our masculinity and femininity, with generosity, tenderness, heroism, fruitfulness, and holiness.
He is incarnate when heaven penetrates earth: miracles, healings, stigmata, levitation, bilocation, incorruption, the odor of sanctity, exorcism of evil spirits, sacramentals, devotions, pilgrimages, where two gather in his name, rosaries, scapulars, crucifixes, chapels/churches/cathedrals, religious vows, acts of mercy, asks for forgiveness, pardons, sacrifices, feasts and joyous celebrations.
Heaven is not separate from earth; it is not after earth; it is here, married to earth.
Iconoclastic and Pantheist Impulse
Many of the historic, monotheistic faiths are neither Gnostic nor Catholic, but iconoclastic. They affirm a transcendent, good Creator who has intervened in history. But to protect the transcendence, they refuse to associate the Divine so intimately with the fleshly. And so: they destroy icons; they deny the sacraments; they flee from the incarnation. This applies clearly to Judaism, Islam and most of Protestantism. Consider: is there anything more sterile, monotonous, annoying than an airport chapel or a Protestant Church. I would prefer a DMV office, a bus terminal, a YMCA gym or pool.
On the other hand we have pantheism. Here the transcendent is denied and the Divine is located in the earthly. This can come with militant feminism in its hatred of Fatherhood, even of God. It can come as nature mysticism, including a disordered obsession with the environment, not as beautiful creation but as an idol of its own.
Conclusion
Gnosticism is flight from the flesh: sexuality/gender, history, tradition, soul/body unity, creation, institutions, suffering, and the Incarnation.
Catholicism is surrender to God's love affair with the flesh: in sexuality, ritual, institutions, suffering, sacrament, miracles. icons/sacramentals, intimacy with the poor, and the Eucharist.
P.S. To his credit, Pope Francis addressed the dangers of neo-Gnosticism twice in 2018: in his apostolic exhortation Gaudate et Exsultate and a letter Placuit Deo. Also, Cyril O'Reagan, the renowned Irish, Balthasar scholar of Notre Dame (who sat on my son's dissertation defense) has written volumes on its manifestation in contemporary culture. This is to assure you, Dear Reader, that Fleckinstein is not a random, lonely anti-Gnostic ruminating in his solipistic blog-world. No. He is thinking with the Church!
