– The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism (1992)
By reversing the anthropic principle and negating ecosystemic intelligence, gnostic doctrine achieves an excessive anthropological optimism. Likewise, the gnostic experience of the world does not entail radical denial of it. On the contrary, even those Manichaeans in whom scholarship was eager to see the champions of pessimism would submit the world to a constant testing process meant to discriminate between what in it belongs to Darkness and what to Light. All in all, their experience of the world was probably a happy one, for at every moment they saw sparks of superterrestrial Light in every little herb and bud. For the gnostic, as for the Platonist, the world is a chiaroscuro: there are enough traces and signs of a superior presence to make it bearable.
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