AN ENGLISH GNOSTIC.
SOME strange, rather striking, and very reckless papers, full of a sort of blasphemy—we use the word not to convey any censure of our's, but in its strict meaning,—which has scarcely been heard in any tone but that of rebellious passion since the conflict of Christian faith with Paganism first began, have appeared in the Reader during the last two weeks, purporting to be "Papers of a Suicide,"—and in the second of the series, termed "A Religious and Autobiographical Romance,"—reviving in lan- guage that reminds one rather vividly of one of the choruses in Mr. Swinburne's Atalanta, where the maidens address "that Su- preme evil God," one of the most curious and most utterly obsolete dreams of the oppressed Gnostic imagination. True, there is a hint that the papers are partly, if not altogether dramatic, and that they are supposed to be written by a man with a germ of in- sanity in his blood; but still this hypothesis would scarcely be resorted to, to give a colour of probability to a very strange form of evil dream, were there not a wish on the part of the writer to revive that intellectual nightmare of an age of religious nightmares, with express reference to the position of modern faith and unbelief. The Gnostic fancy to which we refer was,—that the Jewish Scriptures were inspired by an inferior and to some extent incapable god,—the demiurgos, as the Gnostics called him,— who was the instrument indeed of creating the earth, and of governing it when created, but whose power was altogether limited by the matter with which he had to struggle in the task. We remember a striking picture, drawn by one of these wild speculators, which represents the demiurgos as sitting in despair in the dust, and crying out the creative words in Genesis, "Let Light be," not with the .fiat of a divine will, but in the despairing shriek of entreaty to a superior power. In this conception of the Gnostics the Manager of the earth and of nature was in no sense infinite,— but a finite though powerful angel, unequal to prevent evil from creeping into his universe at every pore; and they proceeded to show how it might be subsequently removed thence by emanations and
manifestations of the superior divinities above him. It is the first part only of this grotesque conception which has been taken up in these strange "Papers of a Suicide." It is apparently taken up, we will not say with any serious intent to press it upon the world as true, but with a kind of reckless pleasure in throwing out a new suggestion that may swell the chaos of conflicting irreligious, and that the writer perhaps seriously thinks has as good a title to acceptance as any other. At all events, his view is urged with passion and vehemence, and hideous as it is, it does suggest a question of much interest on which it may be worth while to say a few words,—namely, why it is that in an age of religious anarchy like ours these old Gnostic dreams of deputy-gods, limited deities but half equal to their work, have so entirely vanished, and left no intermediate speculation in the great chasm between the most reverent Theism and blank Atheism. Of the latter there is only too much ; yet the marks of personality and design written upon the universe do not disappear when spiritual worship dies out of the heart, and it seems on the first glance strange that men who cannot perceive the divine love, should at once cast away with their belief in that, their belief in a personal power altogether. The imaginary suicide discriminates between the two, and in a passage of curious bitterness revives the old Gnostic theory :—
" But man cannot avoid hasty generalizations, and Religion is but one of them, after all. Man cannot suspend his opinion of the Designer, and passes from the Supreme Evil of the savage to the Supreme Good of the Jew and the Christian. What if God be as ignorant of the future as ourselves ? What if He sits in stupefaction at
the flame of life which He has kindled ? Let me speak of God as I think I have found Him. Let me say, for once, what is in the hearts of many. I find, then, a Designer wondrous powerful, but not omnipotent. I find Him more successful in dealing with matter than with life ; more successful with life than with mind. I find His incapacity more visible as the scale of creation ascends, until ;in man even the most religions mourns over the failure. I deduce the .conclusion that the maker of the Universe can be no Supreme Being. He seems to me One permitted to fashion the worlds out of a substance given to Him as clay to a child, subject to certain laws which He is incompetent to alter, and which He, like man, can only guide by obeying. I doubt if He foresaw the phenomena of life when he arranged the systems of what we call the Universe. I should feel sure of this were it settled that the earth is the only inhabited planet. Such a being might have power to interfere se that he did not disarrange his own cosmos ; he might be unable to make chaos come again. His Maker may possibly call him to account one day. Ourselves may be summoned to a greater Bar than even Christians deem of, to bear witness to the wrongs we have suffered at the hands of God. I trace in everything the faults of One who has attempted too much."
That is, in its way, startling enough, and yet we suppose no Western mind, at all events in Christian ages, unless it be the -writer's, has ever even glanced at such a view of the creator of -our world ;—nor, indeed, anybody at all who has found a reve- lation of any sort in the Old Testament, since the time of the -Syrian Gnostics. To suggest, as the stipposed suicide elsewhere does, that the Old Testament contains an account of a real revelation from Jehovah to the Jews, but from a Jehovah who, so far from being omnipotent, was compelled from inadequate rower to break many of his covenants, and then to find apologies in the conduct of his people for going back from his promises, —carries us off into the theosophic and dmmonological dreams of a vanished world. Why is this so? Why have all interme- diate speculations between a perfectly wise and self-existent God, and pure Atheism vanished so completely even from the fancies -of men ? Hume no doubt suggested that if God was to be regarded only as the cause of the universe, you must take Him to be a being of mixed good and evil, mixed qualities of every kind, like the effect; but though he threw out this paradox, he never seriously proposed to any one to believe in an imperfect and hampered God. Even the coldest deist is rather inclined in modern days to throw the blame of seeming failures upon either the human will or the human understanding, than to impute them to radical deficiencies in the power or plan of the Creator.
We ascribe the entire disappearance in modern times of all mediate forms of belief between pure theism and pure atheism in some slight degree to the growth of that unity of science which shows us that all matter is force, and that all forces are regulated by a coherent plan and are identical in essence. Thus we are driven to choose between force as itself original, and force as issuing directly from a living Will, the former being blank atheism, the latter omnipotence, or at least so far omnipotence that there are no con- ceivable external forces to limit the power of Deity which are not sprung from Himself. Thus much the growth of science has done,—it has cleared away all such intermediate conceptions as would attribute certain powers, and deny others, to a subordinate deity like the Gnostic demiurgos,—for it obliges us to trace back all powers to a well-spring of homogeneous power, and so contri- butes greatly to do away with all intermediale stages, all delega- tion, of the great natural forces which lie around the human will.
But this scientific growth of evidence, which sceptics are the first to admit, against any divided reign in the realm of nature and of natural power, would not necessarily exclude various inferences amongst deists as to the moral nature of God, or extinguish Hume's suggestion that to the cause of a universe showing mixed good and evil it would be only scientific to ascribe mixed good and evil qualities. But here a very much more powerful influence comes in. The Christian revelation, especially the Incarnation, has almost forced men to choose between two alternatives—to trace back all power to a divine background of holiness and love, —or to rest in power as itself final, and as vouchsafing no self- justification to finite beings of its righteousness. Until the world had its vision of the Son of God actually putting off power out of the depth of divine love in order to manifest that love in shame
and suffering, it was possible for the human imagination to attri- bute all varieties or shades of goodness to the ultimate ruler of the universe without any feeling of moral contradiction. But when once we had caught a glimpse of such graduation in the divine nature as puts love and righteousness infinitely beyond power,—the latter being, as it were, an accident that could be put off, the others an essence that followed even the divine Son into human conditions of existence,—and when once the thirst of man for God had been actually satisfied in such a life as our Lord's, it became impossible to play, as it were, with the attributes of God, and vary them in imagination. Men felt either that the very essence .of God was love and righteousness, and that His power, however great the mystery of this unintelligible world, was the mere arm of that love, and not His essence ; or if that faith was beyond their grasp, they gave up altogether thinking of moral distinctions as ultimate and infinite at all, and made no attempt to trace a moral character in the unsearchable fountain of existence. No mind which has ever leaped to the conviction that ineffable purity and love is at the origin of all things, could surrender it without surrendering all belief in the ulti- mate character of moral distinctions, without beginning to re- gard good and evil, love and malice, as human accidents which cannot properly be carried up to the source of life at all. The perplexities still exist,—and have been stated with horrid force of conception by this modern Gnostic,—which once induced men to attribute to the Creator mixed moral qualities and limited power to carry those qualities into the work of creation. But these interme- diate modes of thought between faith and atheism 'have been burned up by the mere brightness of the Incarnation. There is such an in- finite difference between the spring of the heart towards the God who was in Christ, and towards any other conception man can make for himself, that if, overpowered by intellectual perplexities, you reject the one, there is no inclination left to subdivide the fir- finite distance between the God incarnate in Christ, and the God whose essence is power, on whom the mere deist falls back. Of course we do not mean that all who reject the Incarnation fall back on such a God, for Christ has won over the greater part of our modern Theism to that type which the surrender by Christ of His power for the work of love first gave it. But however men call themselves, the Christian revelation has really forced us into the alternative between a worship of holiness and love as wielding the divine power, and the exchange of all true worship for mere acquiescence in immutable decrees. Between these two extremes there is now no resting-place for the mind. An interme- diate Gnosticism, such as the supposed suicide puts forth, could never be possible again, unless Christ could be forgotten.
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