Pessimism, Nihilism, Dualism, and Hope

Just within a day or two last week I encountered the words pessimism, nihilism, and dualism applied to old Gnosticism by two authors—Henry Corbin and Hans Jonas. Jonas also applied the words to existentialism. Corbin was inspired by Heidegger’s phenomenological approach. He studied Heidegger for a while but went beyond that philosopher’s conclusions. Jonas came out of Heidegger’s school directly and also remained an existentialist throughout his life. Jonas’ essay, the concluding chapter of his The Gnostic Religion, makes the point that Gnosticism arose in the same historical circumstances as existentialism, namely a cultural disaster. Gnosticism, as Jonas saw it, was one answer to the collapse of the Graeco-Roman social system, a system based on a faith in a Cosmic Order, thus the belief in coherent relations between parts and the whole, the governed and the ruler. That order was in trouble, and minorities reacted. Existentialism was inspired, if “inspired” is the word to use, by the collapse of religious faith under the onslaught of modern science. I found Corbin’s comments in a presentation on comparative religion reprinted in The Voyage and the Messenger; that book holds a miscellany of his writings. Corbin uses the word pessimism by way of echoing the common characterization of Gnosticism, but then he parenthetically inserts the word dualism as a qualifier; in his view the Gnostic position was only pessimistic about this dispensation, not about Reality taken as a whole.

Dualism, in this context, is a technical term. It refers to systems of thought in which Good and Evil are both active and almost equivalent forces, thus Gnosticism, Manichaeism, and Mazdaism. The Gnostics, most assertively, dismissed the entire cosmos as the product of an incompetent demiurge, hence they were the most pessimistic about this world. As, indeed, the existentialists are too. The Gnostic believed in a very distant sort of God who had no active involvement in this world—and certainly did not create it.

Corbin and Jonas were both men of my father’s generation. Corbin died as a charismatic, almost mystical figure. Jonas went on from his study of Gnosticism to develop an elevated ethical doctrine which, ultimately, is a refined form of existentialism. Reading his later books I felt the cold airs of Stoic endurance—a genuinely sincere conviction, high moral courage, but also the absence of anything that resonated with anything within me—somewhat like watching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos: A Personal Journey, in which we are invited by the displayed emotions and the tone to worship—but to worship what amounts to a lot of suns and nebulae.

Interesting times I’ve lived in. Thinking about this, it occurred to me that our times have not yet genuinely felt the pessimism (dualism—as Corbin might remark in parentheses) that the Gnostics felt. Why? The answer is wealth. In our culture throughout the last century and continuing to this day, the social order has not yet begun to show its cracks as deeply as it did in the days of ancient Greek and Rome. Hence existentialism was/is a minority reaction to a change in culture on the part of those inclined to embrace the spirit of the times while, at the same time, sensitive to what it portends. Progressivism is the modern expression of hope. The real pessimism-dualism will appear when the infrastructure of modern life begins to manifest our one-sided emphasis on the material in more obvious ways. And that is still in the future unless—as in the case of Henry Corbin—we make the transition to a more comprehensive understanding of reality before the old one really begins to fall apart.

In Praise of Maps

On a visit to Leningrad some years ago I consulted a map to find out where I was, but I could not make it out. From where I stood, I could see several enormous churches, yet there was no trace of them on my map. When finally an interpreter came to help me, he said: “We don’t show churches on our maps.” Contradicting him, I pointed to one that was very clearly marked. “That is a museum,” he said, “not what we call a ‘living church.’ It is only the ‘living churches’ we don’t show.” [First paragraph of E.F. Schumacher’s A Guide for the Perplexed]

It has been a while since I have praised maps and their makers, but maps came into focus the other day—and last night again in the highest context—so I thought I would sink another benchmark in this survey. The first reminder came when we were slightly disoriented in Roseville, MI. We discovered that we had maps of the State of Missouri, of the cities of Quebec in Canada, Traverse City in Michigan, and Lake George in New York quite handy, but to find the map of this area led to frantic clawing. At last, here it was—South-East Michigan! And what a relief it was!

The other polarity of today’s inspiration was a set of diagrams in my edition of the Divine Comedy. I was looking at them last night in my by now out-of-breath ascent of the peak of Paradise. The thought came then, falling asleep, that great works all have the quality of maps. In Dante, one is always keenly aware of his own quite serious intent on producing an accurate cosmic map—the depths, the earth, the heavens. For Henry Corbin, that obscure but admirable philosopher of the invisible, orientation is a constant concern. Schumacher quite consciously set out to make a philosophical map in the work cited above. And my own life-long interest in the cyclic historians is anchored in my determination to see the big picture before I worry about the small.

Obviously map-making is not a peculiarly modern urge, although the really great advances in earth-measurement are modern. I was fascinated a while back by the figure of Colin MacKenzie (1754-1821); I encountered him in a show on PBS. He turned heaven and earth upside down in his attempts to survey India, and I became aware of the difficulties of this kind of work. I have a fine book, The Measure of All Things, by Ken Adler. It documents the labors of Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre (1749-1822), Pierre-François-André Méchain (1744-1804), and Joseph-Jérôme Lalande (1732-1807) who, in the midst of the French Revolution, and working right through it, in effect finessing and ignoring it, working with both sides in the conflict, mapped and measured the meridian that runs from Dunkerque through Paris to Barcelona in efforts of establish the length of the meter, defined as one-ten-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the equator. Such heroic work underlies all of our maps. We fold them any-which-way and toss them into drawers whereas, if we but knew the underlying labors, we would place them reverently high up on our shelves.

Back in Minnesota days I used to take Winnie (yellow Lab, a notable canine Ghulf) on his walk. We followed the tracks of Burlington Northern from the edges of suburban settlements into the wilds. One of my stops was a bridge across a creek. Winnie would run down the near-vertical drop off to forage along the shore and drink water. And down there, each time he descended, he passed a survey stone. As I became more knowledgeable about the art and science of earth measurement, that stone, initially just a grey thing with a mark, took on the character of a monument to a tribe of people too much neglected in the world’s history—while we make destroyers and powerful madmen famous.

Maps of all kinds—and obscure figures working away to perfect them. They deserve a nod and the occasional recognition. Was lost, but now, with their assistance, I am found.