– The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism (1992)
Yet, as Richard Smith perceptively noticed, Harold Bloom is today the only author of both essays and fiction who consciously identifies himself with the gnostics, both as a literary critic and a writer. In The Anxiety of Influence (1973) Bloom asserts that every act of creation is ipso facto an act of destruction toward tradition and believes that the gnostic Valentinus has set the example for such an operation, in so far as he “is troping upon and indeed against his precursor authorities, to reverse his relationship to the Bible and to Plato, by joining himself to an asserted earlier truth that they supposedly have distorted.” And in Agon (1982) Bloom praises Gnosticism as “the inaugural and most powerful of Deconstructions because it undid all genealogies, scrambled all hierarchies, allegorized every microcosm/macrocosm relation, and rejected every representation of divinity as non-referential.” With the expert eye of the literary theorist, Bloom has indeed discovered that Gnosticism signals a reversed exegesis of the Scriptures that runs right up against tradition.
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