Ross Douthat responds to David Bentley Hart’s essay on Jung:
I agree with parts of this diagnosis, but I think it’s slightly incomplete, because I think that much of modern Gnosticism is less disenchanted and post-metaphysical than Hart implies. Having spent a fair amount of time reading the various manuals of therapeutic spirituality for my recent book on American religion, I came away convinced that the Deepak Chopras and Eckhart Tolles and Elizabeth Gilberts are, indeed, enchanted “with the self in its particularity” — but that they’re also eager (desperately so, at times) to reconcile this enchantment with the God Within with the traditional monotheistic quest for the God Without, rather than treating one as a substitution for the other.
Hart’s essay can be found here.
January 11th, 2013 | 4:26 pm
If I understand Douthat correctly, I think he’s saying these modern Gnostics are enchanted with the idea of being God.
But there’s no enchantment there because enchantment involves a wonder with something that is beyond all human knowing.
January 11th, 2013 | 5:43 pm
The “God from within” new-Gnosticism represents a perversion, if not mainly a misunderstanding of St. Irenaeus’ affirmation, “the glory of God is man fully alive.” As Patrick Henry Reardon articulates in a recent Touchstone essay, Irenaeus taught nothing resembling the self-absorbed self-fulfillment of the “God within” new-Gnosticism. Rather, Iraneaus thought that in receiving the Alive Man, the Triune God revealed in the Son, a man becomes a manalive, a new creation.
Nonetheless, we ought to remember that God, although an objective reality beyond the human person, is never something alongside or outside of human travail. In receiving the Eucharist, one is transubstantiated into the body of Christ–He is born in all who receive him and thus all who receive him are born anew in him, members of the body of Christ.
Nonetheless, and this where the “God from within” strain fails, in order for God to truly dwell among, with and in us, we are provoked to decrease so that he might decrease. The answer to the human heart’s greatest and most noblest desires is answered in a total gift of self that is at once a reception of the greatest Gift. The self-absorptive perversion of Christian inferiority crowds out space for Christ to truly dwell among, with and in.
A disincarnate, disembodied anthropology links the old and new Gnosticisms and is the central disenchanting element of both. Essentially, all forms of Gnosticism perversely view spirituality in terms of a bodily escape–a dualism that separates the body from the person defines Gnosticism.
Most clearly, this superstitious dualistic-disembodied superstition is evident in the reductions of the person and human sexuality to subjective constructs. As we know, this disembodied-deconstructive anthropology, in its consequences on incarnate life, proves destructive and far from enchanting.
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