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The Faith of Puppets
In the first centuries of our era, the Gnostics disputed with the Christians. They were annihilated, but we can imagine their possible victory.
Jorge Luis Borges, 'A Defense of Basilides the False'
THE FREEDOM OF THE MARIONETTE
A puppet may seem the embodiment of a lack of freedom. Whether moved by a hidden hand or pulled about by strings, a puppet has no will of its own. All of its movements are directed by the will of another - a human being who has decided what the puppet will do. Entirely controlled by a mind outside itself, a puppet has no choice in how it lives.
This would be an unbearable situation, if it were not for the fact that a puppet is an inanimate object. In order to feel a lack of freedom you must be a self-conscious being. But a puppet is a thing of wood and cloth, a human artefact without feeling or consciousness. A puppet has no soul. As a result, it cannot know it is unfree.
For Heinrich von Kleist, on the other hand, puppets represented a kind of freedom that human beings would never achieve. In his essay 'The Puppet Theatre', first published in 1810, the German writer has the narrator, wandering through a city park, meeting 'Herr C.', the recently appointed first dancer at the Opera. Noticing him on several occasions at a puppet theatre that had been erected in the town's market square, the narrator expresses surprise that a dancer should attend such 'little burlesques'.
Replying, Herr C. suggests that a dancer could learn a great deal from these puppet shows. Aren't marionettes - controlled from above by puppeteers - often extremely graceful in their movements as they dance? No human being can match the marionette in effortless grace. The puppet is:
incapable of affectation. - For affectation occurs, as you know, whenever the soul ... is situated in a place other than a movement's centre of gravity. Since the puppeteer, handling the wire or the string, can have no point except that one under his control, all the other limbs are what they should be: dead, mere pendula, and simply obey the law of gravity; an excellent attribute that you will look for in vain among the majority of our dancers ... these puppets have the advantage of being resistant to gravity. Of the heaviness of matter, the factor that most works against the dancer, they are entirely ignorant: because the force lifting them into the air is greater than the one attaching them to the earth ... Marionettes only glance the ground, like elves, the momentary halt lends the limbs a new impetus; but we use it to rest on, to recover from the exertion of the dance: a moment which clearly is not dance at all in itself and which we can do nothing with except get it over with as quickly as possible.
When the narrator reacts with astonishment to these paradoxical assertions, Herr C., 'taking a pinch of snuff', remarks that he should read 'the third chapter of Genesis attentively'. The narrator grasps the point: he is 'perfectly well aware of the damage done by consciousness to the natural grace of a human being'. But still he is sceptical, so Herr C. tells him the story of how he had fenced with a bear. A practised swordsman, he could easily have pierced the heart of a human being; but the animal, seemingly without any effort, avoided any harm:
Now I tried a thrust, now a feint, the sweat was dripping off me: all in vain! Not only did the bear, like the foremost fencer in the world, parry all my thrusts; when I feinted - no fencer in the world can follow him in this - he did not even react: looking me in the eye, as though he could read my soul in it, he stood with his paw lifted in readiness and when my thrusts were not seriously intended he did not move.
Humans cannot emulate the grace of such an animal. Neither the beast nor the puppet is cursed with self-reflective thought. That, as Kleist sees it, is why they are free. If humans can ever achieve such a state it will only be after a transmutation in which they become infinitely more conscious:
just as two lines intersecting at a point after they have passed through an infinity will suddenly come together again on the other side, or the image in a concave mirror, after travelling away into infinity, suddenly comes close up to us again, so when consciousness has, as we might say, passed through an infinity, grace will return; so that grace will be most purely present in the human frame that has either no consciousness or an infinite amount of it, which is to say either in a marionette or in a god.
The dialogue concludes:
'But,' I said rather distractedly, 'should we have to eat again of the Tree of Knowledge to fall back into the state of innocence?'
'Indeed,' he replied; 'that is the final chapter in the history of the world.'
Kleist's essay was one of the last things he wrote. Born into the Prussian military caste in 1777, he was temperamentally unsuited to any kind of conventional career. Pressed by his family to join the civil service, he saw himself as a writer but struggled to produce anything that satisfied him, travelling here and there across Europe, burning what he had written. At one point, seeming to have given up the struggle, he attempted to join Napoleon's army as it was preparing to invade England. Undoubtedly a writer of genius, he left seven plays, eight extraordinary stories and a number of essays and letters, and may have written a novel he destroyed before committing suicide in 1811. Congenitally restless, he could not find a place in the world.
With its teasingly enigmatic dialogue, the essay upsets everything modern humankind believes about itself. How could a puppet - a mechanical device without any trace of conscious awareness - be freer than a human being? Is it not this very awareness that marks us off from the rest of the world and enables us to choose our own path in life? Yet as Kleist pictures it, the automatism of the puppet is far from being a condition of slavery. Compared with that of humans, the life of the marionette looks more like an enviable state of freedom.
The idea that self-awareness may be an obstacle to living in freedom is not new. It has long been suspected that the ordinary mode of consciousness leaves human beings stuck between the mechanical motions of the flesh and the freedom of the spirit. That is why, in mystical traditions throughout history, freedom has meant an inner condition in which normal consciousness has been transcended.
In modern thinking freedom is not much more than a relationship between human beings. Freedom in this sense may come in a number of varieties. There is the freedom that consists in an absence of human obstacles to doing what you want or may come to want, sometimes called negative freedom; the kind that implies not just an absence of impediments, but acting as a rational human being would act; and the sort that you exercise when you are a member of a community or a state that determines how it will be governed. For Kleist and others who have thought like him, however, freedom is not simply a relationship between human beings: it is, above all, a state of the soul in which conflict has been left behind.
In ancient Europe, Stoics asserted that a slave could be freer than a master who suffers from self-division. In China, Daoists imagined a type of sage who responded to the flow of events without weighing alternatives. Disciples of monotheistic faiths have believed something similar: freedom, they say, is obeying God's will. What those who follow these traditions want most is not any kind of freedom of choice. Instead, what they long for is freedom from choice.
It is easy to dismiss those who yearn for this freedom as wanting to be ruled by a tyrant. After all, that is what many human beings have wanted in the past and continue to want today. Wanting freedom to choose may be a universal impulse, but it is far from being the strongest. It is not just that there are many things human beings want before they want this freedom - such as food to eat and a place to live. More to the point, if freedom means letting others live as they please there will always be many who are happy to be without freedom themselves.
In contrast, those who seek inner freedom do not care what kind of government they live under as long as it does not prevent them from turning within themselves. This may seem a selfish attitude; but it makes sense in a time of endemic instability, when political systems cannot be expected to last. One such time was late European antiquity, when Christianity contended with Greco-Roman philosophies and mystery religions. Another may be today, when belief in political solutions is fading and renascent religion contends with the ruling faith in science.
In late antiquity it was accepted that freedom was not a condition that could be established among human beings; the world was too unruly. Some of the mystical currents at work at the time went further: freedom meant escaping from the world. When Herr C. tells the narrator that he should read the third chapter of Genesis, Kleist points towards the most radical of these traditions - the religion of Gnosticism.
In the Genesis myth Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden having no need to work; but a serpent tempted them, promising that if they ate the forbidden apple of knowledge they would be like gods. They ate the apple. Having disobeyed God, they were punished by having to pass their lives in unending labour.
In a traditional reading eating the apple was the original sin; but, as Gnostics understood the story, the two primordial humans were right to eat the apple. The God that commanded them not to do so was not the true God but only a demiurge, a tyrannical underling exulting in its power, while the serpent came to free them from slavery. True, when they ate the apple Adam and Eve fell from grace. This was indeed the Fall of Man - a fall into the dim world of everyday consciousness. But the Fall need not be final. Having eaten its fill from the Tree of Knowledge, humankind can then rise into a state of conscious innocence. When this happens, Herr C. declares, it will be 'the final chapter in the history of the world'.
Herr C. invokes one of the most uncompromising demands for freedom that has ever been made. Believing humans were botched creations of a demiurge - a malign or incompetent deity, not the true God which has disappeared from the world - the ancient Gnostics viewed the experience of choosing as confirming that human beings are radically flawed. Real freedom would be a condition in which they would no longer labour under the burden of choice - a condition that could be attained only by exiting from the natural world. For these forgotten visionaries, freedom was achieved by storming the heavens in an act of metaphysical violence.
Many people today hold to a Gnostic view of things without realizing the fact. Believing that human beings can be fully understood in the terms of scientific materialism, they reject any idea of free will. But they cannot give up hope of being masters of their destiny. So they have come to believe that science will somehow enable the human mind to escape the limitations that shape its natural condition. Throughout much of the world, and particularly in western countries, the Gnostic faith that knowledge can give humans a freedom no other creature can possess has become the predominant religion.
If one of Kleist's marionettes were somehow to achieve self-awareness, Gnosticism would be its religion. In the most ambitious versions of scientific materialism, human beings are marionettes: puppets on genetic strings, which by an accident of evolution have become self-aware. Unknown to those who most ardently profess it, the boldest secular thinkers are possessed by a version of mystical religion. At present, Gnosticism is the faith of people who believe themselves to be machines.
THE FAITH OF PUPPETS
Going far back into the ancient world, recurring in cultures widely separated in space and time, surfacing in religion, philosophy and the occult, exercising a powerful influence in modern science and politics, Gnosticism has coexisted and competed with, secreted itself within and hidden itself from many other ways of thinking. There have been Gnostic strands in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Mithraism and Orphism, while Gnostic ideas established a powerful presence in Greek philosophy among some of the later followers of Plato.
The origins of Gnosticism have not been traced, but it seems to have emerged as a fully fledged world-view around the same time as Christianity. Like other Jewish prophets of the time, Jesus may have been influenced by Zoroastrian traditions that understood human life in terms of a war between good and evil. Christianity - the religion conjured from Jesus' life and sayings by St Paul - always contained Gnostic currents, though these were condemned as heresies that threatened the authority of the Church.
Gnostic ideas are far from being distinctively modern, but they emerged in more overt forms with the rise of the Renaissance. Revered by rationalists as the time when classical civilization was rediscovered, this was a period in which belief in magic flourished at the highest levels of the state. Alchemists and spirit-seers were regularly consulted at the court of Elizabeth, and even as older forms of religion were abandoned new types of magic were spreading. The seventeenth-century German astrologer and astronomer, mathematician and mystic Johannes Kepler is an emblematic Renaissance figure. While he believed in a cosmos governed by principles of order and harmony, Kepler set in motion a shift towards a world-view in which any laws that existed in the universe were mechanical and devoid of purpose. Other early modern scientists were similarly ambiguous. Isaac Newton was the founder of modern physics, but he was also a believer in alchemy and numerology and searched the apocalyptic books of the Bible for hidden meaning. The scientific revolution was, in many ways, a by-product of mysticism and magic. In fact, once the tangled origins of modern science are unravelled, it is doubtful whether a 'scientific revolution' occurred.
The novelist and poet Lawrence Durrell presented a modern version of the Gnostic vision in a series of novels, TheAvignon Quintet (1974-85). Akkad, an Egyptian merchant-banker who is also a latter-day Gnostic, preaches to small groups of European expatriates. At times plump and sluggish-looking, at others looking ascetic and haggard, at home in four capitals and speaking as many languages or more, sometimes wearing western clothes and sometimes traditional dress, Akkad offers to piece together the surviving fragments of Gnostic teaching, which the established religions had tried to destroy:
the bitter central truth of the gnostics: the horrifying realisation that the world of the Good God was a dead one, and that He had been replaced by a usurper - a God of Evil ... It was the deep realisation of this truth, and its proclamation that had caused the gnostics to be suppressed, censored, destroyed. Humanity is too frail to face the truth about things - but to anyone who confronts the reality of nature and of process with a clear mind, the answer is completely inescapable: Evil rules the day.
What sort of God, the gnostic asks himself, could have organised things the way they are - this munching world of death and dissolution which pretends to have a Saviour, and a fountain of good at its base? What sort of God could have built this malefic machine of destruction, of self-immolation? Only the very spirit of the dark negative death-trend in nature - the spirit of nothingness and auto-annihilation. A world in which we are each other's food, each other's prey ...
Seeing the world as an evil piece of work, the Gnostics advanced a new vision of freedom. Humans were no longer part of a scheme of things in which freedom meant obedience to law. To be free, humans must revolt against the laws that govern earthly things. Refusing the constraints that go with being a fleshly creature, they must exit from the material world.
While modern science might seem inhospitable to this Gnostic vision, the opposite has proved to be the case. As we understand it today, the cosmos is no longer ruled by laws that express any overarching purpose - benign or otherwise. In fact the world we live in may not be a cosmos at all. The seeming laws of nature may be regularities that express no abiding laws, and for all we know the universe may be at bottom chaotic. Yet the project of liberating the spirit from the material world has not disappeared. The dream of finding freedom by rebelling against cosmic law has reappeared as the belief that humans can somehow make themselves masters of nature.
The crystallographer J. D. Bernal (1901-71) illustrates how Gnostic ideas infuse modern science. At one time ranked among Britain's most influential scientists, a lifelong communist and proud recipient of a Stalin Peace Prize, Bernal was convinced that a scientifically planned society was being created in the Soviet Union. But his ambitions went beyond the rational reconstruction of human institutions. He was convinced that science could effect a shift in evolution in which human beings would cease to be biological organisms. As the historian of science Philip Ball has described it, Bernal's dream was that human society would be replaced by 'a Utopia of post-human cyborgs with machine bodies created by surgical techniques'. Even this fantasy did not exhaust Bernal's ambitions. Further in the future, he envisioned 'an erasure of individuality and mortality' in which human beings would cease to be distinct physical entities.
In a passage in his book The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul, Bernal spells out what he has in mind: 'Consciousness itself might end or vanish in a humanity that has become completely etherealized, losing the close-knit organism, becoming masses of atoms in space communicating by radiation, and ultimately perhaps resolving itself entirely into light.'
Bernal published his book in 1929, but ideas very like his are being promoted at the present time. Similar conceptions inform the vision of the Singularity of the futurologist and director of engineering at Google Ray Kurzweil - an explosive increase in knowledge that will enable humans to emancipate themselves from the material world and cease to be biological organisms. The subtitle of Kurzweil's book The Singularity is Near is When Humans Transcend Biology, and while the technologies involved are different - uploading brain information into cyberspace rather than using surgery to build a cyborg - the ultimate goal of freeing the human mind from confinement in matter is the same as Bernal's. The affinities between these ideas and Gnosticism are clear. Here as elsewhere, secular thinking is shaped by forgotten or repressed religion.
Whether ancient or modern, Gnosticism turns on two articles of faith. First there is the conviction that humans are sparks of consciousness confined in the material world. The Gnostics did not deny that order existed in the world; but they viewed this order as a manifestation of evil to which they refused to submit. For them the creator was at best a blunderer, negligent or forgetful of the world it had fashioned, and possibly senile, mad or long dead; it was a minor, insubordinate and malevolent demiurge that ruled the world. Trapped in a dark cosmos, human beings were kept in submission by a trance-like ignorance of their true situation. Here we come to the second formative idea: humans can escape this slavery by acquiring a special kind of knowledge. Gnosis is the Greek word for knowledge, and for Gnostics knowledge is the key to freedom.
As Gnostics see them, humans are ill-designed and badly made creatures, gifted or cursed with flickering insight into their actual condition. Once they eat of the Tree of Knowledge, they discover they are strangers in the universe. From that point onwards, they live at war with themselves and the world.
In asserting that the world is evil, the Gnostics parted company with more ancient ways of thinking. Ancient Egyptian and Indian religion saw the world as containing light and dark, good and bad, but these were a pair that alternated in cycles rather than being locked in any sort of cosmic struggle. Animist conceptions in which the world is an interplay of creative and destructive forces frame a similar view of things. In a universe of this kind the problem of evil that has tormented generations of apologists for monotheism does not exist.
The idea of evil as an active force may have originated with Zoroaster. An Iranian prophet who lived some centuries before Christ (the exact dates are disputed), Zoroaster not only viewed the world as the site of a war between light and dark but believed light could win. Some centuries later another Iranian prophet - Mani, the founder of Manichaeism - also affirmed that good could prevail, though he seems to have believed that victory was not assured. It may have been around this time that the sensation of wavering between alternatives crystallized into an idea of free will.
The idea of a demonic presence in the world emerged with dualistic faiths. It does not appear in the Hebrew Bible, where Satan features as an adversarial figure rather than a personification of evil. It is only in the New Testament that evil appears as a diabolical agency, and throughout its history Christianity has struggled to reconcile this notion of evil with belief in a God that is all good and all powerful.
A convert from the religion of Mani, Augustine tried to resolve the conundrum by suggesting that evil was the absence of goodness - a fall from grace that came about through the misuse of free will. But there always remained a strand in Christianity that saw good and evil as opposed forces. Composed in the early thirteenth century, the most systematic surviving work of Cathar theology, The Book of the Two Principles, asserts that along with the principle of good there is another principle, 'one of evil, who is mighty in iniquity, from whom the power of Satan and of darkness and all other powers which are inimical to the true Lord God are exclusively and essentially derived'. In support of this view, the Cathar tract goes on to quote Jesus saying (Matthew 7: 18), 'A good tree cannot being forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.'
However such sayings are interpreted, the Christian religion has always been compounded from conflicting elements. There is no pristine tradition at the back of Christianity, Gnosticism or any other religion. The search for origins ends with the discovery of fragments.
The idea of evil as it appears in modern secular thought is an inheritance from Christianity. To be sure, rationalists have repudiated the idea; but it is not long before they find they cannot do without it. What has been understood as evil in the past, they insist, is error - a product of ignorance that human beings can overcome. Here they are repeating a Zoroastrian theme, which was absorbed into later versions of monotheism: the belief that 'as the "lord of creation" man is at the forefront of the contest between the powers of Truth and Untruth.' But how to account for the fact that humankind is deaf to the voice of reason? At this point rationalists invoke sinister interests - wicked priests, profiteers from superstition, malignant enemies of enlightenment, secular incarnations of the forces of evil.
As so often is the case, secular thinking follows a pattern dictated by religion while suppressing religion's most valuable insights. Modern rationalists reject the idea of evil while being obsessed by it. Seeing themselves as embattled warriors in a struggle against darkness, it has not occurred to them to ask why humankind is so fond of the dark. They are left with the same problem of evil that faces religion. The difference is that religious believers know they face an insoluble difficulty, while secular believers do not.
Aware of the evil in themselves, traditional believers know it cannot be expelled from the world by human action. Lacking this saving insight, secular believers dream of creating a higher species. They have not noticed the fatal flaw in their schemes: any such species will be created by actually existing human beings.
Copyright © 2015 by John Gray
