Gnosis grants you acquaintance with a God unknown to, and remote from, this world

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>

> Harold Bloom, Omens of the Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams,

> and Resurrection, pages 1-24

> Paperback: 255 pages

> Publisher: Riverhead Books (October 1, 1997)

> Language: English

> ISBN-10: 1573226297

> ISBN-13: 978-1573226295

>

 

SUMMARY:

 

Elaborating themes first introduced in Kaballah and Criticism ,

Agon , and The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian

Nation , this " spiritual autobiography " explains Bloom's own

religious identity as a Gnostic. The book traces the history

of " Gnosis, or knowledge of the God within " from its roots in

Zoroaster through its early developments in Christian Gnosticism,

Jewish Kabbalism, and Muslim Shi'ite Sufism and then into modern

expressions in imaginative literature. The books is organized by

Bloom's argument that today's popular obsessions with angels,

prophetic dreams, and " near-death " transcendence as omens of the

millennium are actually debasements of ancient Gnostic images. His

discussion of primary Gnostic texts restores these images to their

ancient meanings and rescues their original spirituality from both

New Age commercialization and orthodox rationalization.

 

EXCERPT:

 

Gnosis

The experience of Gnosis is a varied phenomenon: your knowing may be

prompted by a moment of utter solitude, or by the presence of another

person. You may be reading or writing, watching an image or a tree,

or gazing only inward. Gnosis, though related both to mysticism and

to wisdom, is quite distinct from either. Mysticism, though it comes

in many kinds, by no means opposes itself to faith; perhaps indeed it

is the most intense form of faith. Wisdom, in the biblical sense, is

allied with the prophetic reception of a God who dominates our world,

which is seen having fallen away his original Creation. Gnosis grants

you acquaintance with a God unknown to, and remote from, this world,

a God in exile from a false creation that, in itself, constituted a

fall. You yourself, in knowing and being known by this alienated God,

come to see that originally your deepest self was no part of the

Creation-Fall, but goes back to an archaic time before time, when

that deepest self was part of a fullness that was God, a more human

God than any worshipped since.

 

Bloom's argument

This short book, Omens of Millennium, has been written in the ancient

conviction that " what makes us free is the Gnosis. " Spiritual freedom

answers an acute yearning at the end of an age, even if one does not

believe, as I do not, that particular catastrophes await the nation

and the world in the year 2000 or 2001. Our popular obsessions with

angels, telepathic and prophetic dreams, alien abductions, and " near-

death experiences " all have their commercial and crazed debasements,

but more than ever they testify to an expectation of release from the

burdens of a society that is weary with its sense of belatedness,

or " aftering,' a malaise that hints to us that we somehow have

arrived after the event.

 

angels

Whether we interpret them as God's messengers, or his warriors, or

even his administrators, angels are meaningless apart from God, even

when they are in rebellion against him. Palpable as this is, we are

wise to keep reminding ourselves of it. To an atheist or skeptic,

angels can have no reality, and yet the best of modern American

poets, the unbelieving Wallace Stevens, invokes what he calls " the

angel of reality " in his work. Avicenna, the great Persian physician,

mystic, and philosopher of the eleventh century, transfigured Koranic

angelology into a highly imaginative doctrine that has curious

affinities with twentieth-century secular poets who celebrate angels,

Stevens and the German visionary R. M. Rilke, in particular.

 

http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/bloom/excerpts/omens.html