– The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism (1992)
If nihilism is the state that ensues from the “unbuilding” of transcendence and the attitude that pursues transcendence in order to “build it down,” then we are entitled to notice that Gnosticism is the obverse of nihilism, for being the champion of transcendence. It has become apparent that one of the most relevant characteristics of Gnosticism and of all other trends of Western dualism is the extreme and extremistic affirmation of transcendence at the expense of the physical world. If we persist in calling these trends nihilistic, then we must define their nihilism as the most powerful metaphysical nihilism in the history of Western ideas. Modern nihilism, by contrast, is antimetaphysical.
Here, nevertheless, a circumstance intervenes that makes the two Gnosticism and modern nihilism-closely resemble each other: the fact that, for purposes that are the inverse of each other, the two actively “build down” the same transcendence, namely, the Jewish-Platonic one as embodied in nearly two millennia of Christianity. For Western dualism this is the false transcendence that has to be unmasked and demolished in order to proclaim the true transcendence; for modern nihilism this transcendence is equally false, because it is a mental construct that shielded us from the hard fact of nihilism for well over two millennia; it likewise has to be unmasked and “built down.” This accounts for many traits that the two inverse forms of nihilism-the metaphysical one and the antimetaphysical one-share, the most conspicuous being their constant attack on the Christian Scriptures, the embodiment, for both of them, of a fallacious transcendence.
Consequently at the outbreak of modern era, the system of inverse biblical exegesis was once again activated and continues to produce solutions according to the same rules of the game (see chapter 10), almost as if there were no interruption between the ancient gnostics and Romanticism. This explains the impressive analogies between dualistic mythologies and Romantic mythical narratives. From a systemic viewpoint, we may add that the game of modern nihilism starts from a rule that is the extreme opposite of the rule that produces dualistic scenarios, but it reaches conclusions that are formally identical in so far as it recognizes the need to anate the current (Christian) concept of “value.” Thus the two systems differ by their first and foremost option-affirm versus deny transcendence; yet the first alternative is more complex, in so far as the affirmation of transcendence goes together with a denial of the common concept of transcendence, the Christian Jewish-Platonic) one.
If the system of modern nihilism starts with a powerful substitute for transcendence, which is belief in Reason, it discovers sooner or later that there is no value if there is no metasystem in which value is defined. This is the experience of the existentialist philosophers and is again the mirror equivalent of the dualistic experience, in so far as both recognize the necessity of transcendence; but dualism affirms it and existentialism complains about its complete absence. A writer like Albert Camus would make constant use of gnostic dualistic metaphors in the titles of his major works: Exile and Kingdom, The Stranger, The Fall.
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