Gnostic modernity

Shestov again, summarizing the implications of Kierkegaard’s insight that sin is an effort to shore ourselves up against our createdness: “The Nothingness that the tempter pointed out to our forefather prompted his fear before the unlimited will of the Creator; and he rushed to knowledge, to the eternal, uncreated truths, in order to protect himself from God. And so it has continued to the present day: we fear God, we see our salvation in knowledge, in gnosis. Could there be a more profound, more terrible Fall? It is amazing to see how much Dostoevsky’s thoughts about ‘stone walls’ and ‘twice two is four’ resemble what Kierkegaard has just told us. Confronted with eternal truths, men offer no resistance, but accept everything that they bring. When Belinsky ‘cried out,’ demanding an account of all those sacrificed to chance and history, the answer given him was that his words had no meaning, that one could not raise such objections to speculative philosophy and Hegel. When Kierkegaard contrasted Job, as a thinker, with Hegel, his words went unheard. And when Dostoevsky wrote about the ‘stone wall,’ no one guessed that there lay the real critique of pure reason: all eyes were fixed on speculative philosophy.”

Modern gnosis claims to see more deeply than the Creator Himself: “We are all convinced that a defect is concealed in Being itself, a defect which even the Creator cannot overcome. The ‘it is good’ which concluded each day of creation is evidence, to our way of thinking, that even the Creator Himself had not penetrated deeply enough into the nature of being. Hegel would have advised Him to taste of the fruit of the forbidden tree, so that He might ascend to the proper level of ‘knowledge’ and understand that His nature, like that of man, is limited by eternal laws and powerless to change anything at all in the universe.”