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St. John and apocalyptic Gnosticism
Note: the following was
written in 1993 and reflects concerns of that time. I had abandoned
Traditionalism, and was studying history, myth and religion from a
critical, human rights perspective. I had studied religion from the inside
for long enough. I did not know in 1993 that the apocalyptic ideologies of
Christianity and Islam would clash after 2001 and cause the Iraq war, a
war which has left over 100,000 dead. For more on apocalyptic ideology see
chapter four and five or my book Empire of the Intellect here:
www.naturesrights.com/knowledge%20power%20book/Table%20of%20Contents.asp
Chapter four is partly a study
of apocalyptic ideologies in Hitler, Himmler and their relation to
Hinduism. Chapter five looks at apocalyptic ideology in relation to
science, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Robert Oppenheimer, John von Neumann and
Atomic weapons: The Spiritual Fascism of René Guénon is studied here, with
some inquiry made into the promotion of apocalyptic ideology by the
traditionalists:
www.naturesrights.com/knowledge%20power%20book/guenon.asp
Mark Koslow
The Apocalypse of St. John is usually
ascribed to the author of the Gospel of John, the so called "Beloved
Disciple", who was told by Christ, when he was on the Cross, that he
would henceforth be the adopted son of the Virgin Mary. The books ascribed
to John were disputed as to their authenticity even as far back as the 2nd
century, according Paul Johnson's History of Christianity.(pg.55). The
Apocalypse is generally thought to be the production of a person later the
John. But these facts are of no concern to a Church whose primary interest
is the preservation of a doctrine which they claim transcends history. The
Churches concern for textual authenticity was often sacrificed when it came
to a contest between the metaphysical and political interests of the Church
as opposed to the authenticity of a document. Thus, for at least eighteen
centuries, it was erroneously and perhaps conveniently, thought that the
John of the Apocalypse and the John of the Gospel are one and the same. The
reason for this is clear; since the deepest mystical and gnostic doctrines
of both the Orthodox and the Catholic Churches, such as the doctrine of the
individual's possibility of Deification, the doctrine of the Logos or Word
and its Incarnation, as well as the most important doctrines that justify
the Eucharist and the Trinity, are all justified primarily by John.
Christianity in its essence is from John, even though its social aspect
derives from Peter and Paul. Peter is the rock "on whom I will build
my Church". But nevertheless, the essential metaphysical justification
of the central doctrines of the social institutions derives from John.
One
note before I proceed
further: John is a gnostic, that is one who desires total
knowledge of the mythic Beyond,
and I do not use the word gnostic to refer to the heretical sects of that name, though they are gnostics in
the sense I mean as well. Gnosticism,
in my meaning, is the idea that reality exists beyond or behind this world,
and that man is alienated from this knowledge. All the main religions are
gnostic in this sense, as are Plato, Marx and modern science, in various
complex ways which I won't try to explain here.
Given the centrality of John to the
Christian message, one must ask,
what is the nature of the knowledge
that John's writings offer? One begins with the doctrine of salvation,
which is necessary because man is supposed to be lost in a "fallen
world" of sin. The Incarnation
is the answer to this fall. Christ embodies the Knowledge or
"gnosis" of the return to the supposed purity that existed before
the fall. This knowledge is to be re-instilled in man by the Eucharist, the eating of
the body and blood of Christ. What then is the Eucharist? John informs us,
in the words of Christ, that "except you eat of the flesh of the Son
of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. For whosoever eateth
my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life and I will raise him on
the last day". The image is jarring and even shocking. Eat his flesh? Drink his Blood? Christ implies that
those that do not do as he says will get damnation if one does not drink
the blood and eat the flesh. This is a horrifying way to talk. But, for the
sake of thoroughness and to be generous toward Christianity one can suspend
one's judgment, and assume that one is ignorant of the meaning of the
symbols involved here. Perhaps the body that we are supposed to eat is only
a metaphor, as is indicated by other texts in John. In various places John
states that Christ is "bread", "meat", and
"drink". Christ is supposed to be the essential substance of
things, and this is what one is supposed to eat and drink. But a nagging
question remains. Why are these images of cannibalistic eating of flesh and
drinking of blood necessary?
But then the Crucifixion occurs, and one
learns that the bodily metaphors are quite literal. Christ wanted the
sacrifice of his body, like the sacrificed Lamb. The symbols are literal
and the blood is real. Before the Crucifixion there comes a progress of
wounds, thorns, whippings, public mockery, and finally, nailing to the
Cross, Christ is speared and he dies.
The Victim has become a food offering to the Invisible God for the
atonement of sin. This food offering specifically an offering of human
flesh and blood is then offered by Christ in the Christian Mass. How is one
to accept this? For my own part I
can't accept this eating of the flesh and blood of a dead man, even if
others can. I can see how others might fall for the twisted symbolism. But
it would be one thing if the flesh and blood were merely symbolic or
ceremonial, as is the case, somewhat ambiguously, in some protestant
churches. But much more is claimed. The Eucharist is claimed to be an
actual man with a "real presence". It is also claimed he is the Son
of God and that his flesh and blood are really present at each Eucharistic
offering. The blood and flesh are "real". For John, the communion must be total,
not merely a commemorative ceremony. John is relentless and the Gospel is
not enough. He writes the Apocalypse.
In the Apocalypse the shock one felt in the
ritual offering of Christ's flesh to eat and his blood to drink takes on a
new and terrible meaning. The man that died was God, and he is angry. But
not just angry, the Victim has turned into a bloodthirsty tyrant, who wants
vengeance, even world destruction. The Victim has become Victimizer. The
rapture of Christ's resurrection is no longer a victory for the man of
peace, but an announcement for an orgy to come that will bring universal
war. The indulgence one felt towards John's book of love, his Gospel of
peace, and of turning the other cheek, now turns into scepticism and then
horror. What is John actually saying in the Apocalypse?
If the violent images of the Apocalypse are
considered quite as they appear, without pious or esoteric sophistry, they
are psychotic, and involve a will to power that has identified itself with
the totalistic concept of the universal Logos. One begins to see how the
doctrine of the Logos or the sacrificed Word of God is related to the
destruction of the world that John predicts. John's vision on the island of Patmos is an explosion of anger and
hatred against the world that cannot conform to John's gnostic ideal of the
perfect man. The Christ of the Apocalypse is a horrible person, who
despises the world and lives on hate. He is a bigoted man who has a
bottomless need of revenge.
The presumption of "deification"
involved in John's gnostic ideal is based on a notion of the created world
as fundamentally corrupt, and which only an elite can survive, the rest
being so fundamentally evil that they must be destroyed and cast into the
most sadistic of hells, trampled over by the four horseman, seduced by a
harlot riding on a beast, sent plagues and demons and tortured in a sadistic orgy of revenge.
Even the fishes and trees are ruthlessly
burned; the sun and moon blacked and turned to blood. Christ announces he has taken
possession of the "keys of hell and death". Like the Pharaohs of
Egypt, all power is with Christ, since he who controls death controls life.
He threatens to kill children of a woman Jezebel, of whom he disapproves.
He says he hates the Nicolatians, and that out of his mouth goes a "sharp
two edged sword" towards them.
He says that "He that overcometh (the world) shall inherit all
things"....but the rest shall
"have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and
brimstone". Here we have it; those who obey will be given infinite
power, those who do not will be infinitely chastised. The Victim has become
the death dealing power-broker of the fortunes of souls. Christ is a Cult
Leader, or more than that, a universal tyrant. The man of love has become a
man of huge bloodthirsty hate.
The doctrine of the Logos upon which the
doctrine of the Incarnation rests leads inexorably to this apocalyptic
explosion of hatred. God becomes man in order to save a few
"elect" souls in order that he might kill all other living things
with fire and plagues. This is the mentality of a murderous tyrant and
serial killer. One cannot but wonder why people would believe in such a
horrendous fiction.
The Apocalypse of John is certainly one of
the most fatal and destructive books ever written, in terms of its eventual
effect upon history. This unrelenting fantasy of revenge erects hatred of
the world into a universal principle. It is indeed a work of art, but one
so densely crafted of simultaneous symbols of transcendent perfection and
sheerest cruelty that the mixture is both suffocating and infectious. This
close congruence of transcendent knowledge and terrible cruelty is what I
mean by the term "knowledge power. In the Apocalypse of John symbol
upon symbol of power and cruelty is built up and contrasted with ultimate
wealth and exaltation. Horror and
purity are mixed in a conglomerate vertigo meant to oppress all rational
argument in a terrorist's appeal to transcendent truth.
The effort to spiritualize Christ's
crucified flesh in the Gospel has in the Apocalypse become an orgiastic
dismemberment of the very fabric of the created world. One is in the midst of a psychotic
episode where each symbol, good or
evil, becomes saturated with lightning and a will to power that combines
the stasis of diamond with the terror of a scream. Even the heavenly city
of Jerusalem
seems to be made of a diamond like malice, with endless halls of oppressive
gold, and floors of sadistically perfect sapphire. Transcendence is
geometricized into a sterile architecture of tyranny. God's glory is
imposed with such excess that one doubts the divinity of a God who needs
such cruel and pompous jewelry for his perpetual adornment. The exquisitely
crafted and precious malice of this book indicates a pathology so
totalitarian that it makes Hitler and Stalin, Sade, Dante and Genet look
like schoolboys in the art of torture. These sterile hallways and polished
sapphire floors do not compensate for the billions dead, trampled under the
feet of the four horseman. This frozen, theocratic city of deadly gnosis
and transcendent cruelty does not make up for the universal horror of
Christ's revenge.
No one asked for Christ's offering of his
flesh and blood as food for our souls. Why then must the world be revenged
for not sufficiently recognizing his glory when he was on earth? And what
kind of glory was it, which offers a gift of ultimate love, and when
rejected, must destroy everything in a petulant and universal fury? What was the purpose of John's writing
the hymn to Christ's goodness and loving-kindness in his Gospel, when this
kindness ends up turning pearls to blood and promises of peace to sadistic
sword brandishing? Had John become
poisoned by his own perfection? His otherworldly sanctity has erupted in a
diseased and self righteous hatred.
No religion could be true that could canonize such a book. I say this knowing that this malicious
text ends with the cultish threat that any man who questions these
prophecies "God shall add unto
him the plagues that are written in this book." This form of spiritual
blackmail is common in many religions and cults. This is the way of a mafia
or an Inquisition. I cannot submit
myself to a saint who needs to
resort to blackmail
to convince me. Indeed
this last psychological strategy is
so offensive that any indulgence I might
have had towards John is gone.
To write a book that destroys the world in the name of love, and
then to seek to blackmail anyone who objects is beyond reason, indeed it is
reprehensible.
These are some of the reasons why I chose,
in 1991, to no longer associate myself with Christianity or to consider
myself a Christian.
With these general considerations in mind
it is possible to generalize about the meaning of apocalyptic gnosticism. I
call it apocalyptic gnosticism because the pattern that is visible in the
outline of the Christian message according to John involves a theory of
knowledge or gnosis based on the idea of the Logos as intermediary between
heaven and earth. This intermediary, which also goes by the name of the
Intellect in the Christian Fathers and Consciousness or Atma in the Hindu
metaphysic, or Primordial Awareness in the Buddhist --- this concept of
knowledge is accessible only outside
or behind the world, a world which
Christians consider fallen and which Buddhists and Hindus consider samsara or maya, the illusory play of maya and its myriad
forms. The denigration or reduction of the world to a lesser reality of
symbolic constructions whose meaning is to be found only in higher truths
is the natural result of these beliefs. As a consequence of this lessening
of the world, salvation or liberation from the lower realm of the world
becomes a necessity. Priesthood or an institution such as the Russian,
Greek or Catholic Church becomes the self serving vehicle of this
'salvation'.
The apocalypse is an application of the
ideal of salvation to the universal and cosmological world. The apocalyptic
idea is thus a form of spiritual blackmail, meant to keep followers of a
given religion in fear of the power of the religion. John's Gospel and his
Apocalypse are extreme but typical forms of the apocalyptic gnostic idea.
It is important to realize that apocalyptic gnosticism follows a distinct
pattern where it appears. This pattern always involves the destruction of
what is conceived to be lesser in view of a totalistic assimilation of that
which thought to be greater. Apocalyptic gnosticism is therefore both a
theory of knowledge and a theory of power. With this understood, then it is
possible to see why Platonism, for
instance, was almost immediately recognized, by Clement of
Alexandria, Origen, Augustine, and Dionysius the Areopagite, as compatible
with John's conception of the Logos.
The totalitarian concept of the theocratic Christian state naturally
results from the conception of Christ as the Incarnate Logos because the
Emperor-Pope, such as Constantine, is the
bridge between Christ and man, since
he is head regent of the
government which in the
"next world" will be the City of God. The Christian state is necessarily
an apocalyptic state, thriving on fear of blood and fire. This is already
clear in the writings of Paul, who organizes the early Church in
expectation of the end of the world. The apocalyptic idea, and with it the
idea of a gnostic or totalistic ideal of transcendent knowledge is the
basis of the Christian totalitarian government that followed the Roman Empire. Theocratic gnosticism had been the basis of both the
Egyptian, Sumerian and Roman Empires, but the addition of the
apocalyptic ideal by
the early Christians
consolidated theocracy into a much more
powerful and universal conception. The spread of western culture all
over the globe is largely the
result of the gnostic will to power extending itself because of the
apocalyptic urgency. The roots of colonialism, slavery, and environmental
degradation on a world scale are thus to be found largely at the doorstep
of Christianity.
In this larger context it is possible to
see why the Apocalypse of John had to be considered as written by the same
author as the Gospel, even if there cannot have been written by the same
man. The combination of the
apocalyptic terrorism of John, with the gnostic explanatory power of
Aristotle and Plato created a theory of knowledge that was infinitely and quickly
expandable to the four corners of the earth. The marvelous plasticity of
the apocalyptic gnostic ideal made it adaptable to entirely new
circumstances. Francis Bacon, for instance, would adapt a form of
apocalyptic gnosticism to the expansionist ambitions of 16th century England. Bacon conceived that "knowledge is power", and that
John's new Jerusalem must be America. For Bacon the Augustinian City of God,
which was a development of John's Jerusalem,
was conceived to be buildable in the "new" world. The French
Revolution continued expanding on this myth, even to the point of actually
creating a new calendar, beginning at the year zero. The shadow of John's
gnostic terrorism would make itself felt in the apocalyptic bloodbaths of
the revolution and the Napoleonic campaigns that followed. Religions as
well as quasi-religious political systems are not about truth, but about
mental conformity to a system of social controls.
Indeed, the shadow of John's apocalyptic
gnosticism can be discerned in most of the terrorist and revolutionary
movements of the last three centuries. The Marxist system is also a gnostic
theory of apocalyptic power achieved through radical change. Marx merely changed the equation of the
apocalyptic gnostic pattern. Instead of God as the end of history, Marx
replaces god with man, "Man is
God for man", he declares in his essay "The Jewish
Question". The result of the
Marxist effort to follow John, and create "a new heaven and a new
earth", is well known. Lenin,
Stalin, and Mao unleashed an horrendous bloodbath of murders committed for
the cause of righteousness. The shadow of St. John seized all of Russia and
millions died. The same thing
happened in Germany
under Hitler, where the apocalyptic gnostic pattern of destruction in the
name of ultimate knowledge killed millions in order that the "new
Jerusalem", this time called the Third Reich, might come about. In
Chinese history, we read of a
similar effort to initiate
the golden age, or the "New
Age", during the Taiping Rebellion of the19th century, where a self
proclaimed prophet, calling himself
the "son of Christ", as John did, participated in the murder of an
estimated 30 million people in the hope of bringing about the millennium.
Even more recently, the government of Pol Pot in Cambodia killed at least a
million people in an effort to begin the world over again at the beginning.
And the United States
killed 2 or 3 million people in Vietnam to save them for
"freedom".
The sterile glory of John's Jerusalem is
reflected in the glass towers off our modern cities, and not by accident.
John's vision of glory is a form of aesthetic fascism. The Protestant
interpretation of the gnostic kingdom of God was consciously developed by
European Protestants from Calvin to Luther, Wesley and Huss. Those whom Calvin called the "elect", echoing John's elect, the 144,000 mentioned in the Apocalypse
that would survive
Christ's vengeance, ----these
worthy people came to America with the protestant idea
that the good deserved the
special fruits of God's pleasure in their devotions. They felt
they had the right to murder and destroy the native tribes and steal their
land, in the name of god. Many Republicans, to this day, echo the sentiment
that God fearing capitalists deserve the rewards of the "new
world", that is to say, its wealth. The effects of this attitude on
the environment alone have been devastating. Indeed, the whole battle
between the communists and the capitalists, which spread itself around the
globe, has been the battle of two different interpretations of the
apocalyptic gnostic idea. The fatal consequences of John's idea of
transcendent terrorism have long since left the realm of John's psychotic
imagination, and have been realized in the most concrete terms from Vietnam to Siberia and from Nagasaki to Mexico City and Berlin. The idea of the supremacy of man's
consciousness, and the enthroning of
this consciousness in apocalyptic drives for power and dominion have
threatened the earth itself, as modern science, too, when combined with
political drives for conquest and oppression, has employed a gnostic and
apocalyptic ideology. But my purpose
here is only to indicate something of the extent of the will to power
through apocalyptic knowledge systems that is consequent upon John's ideas,
but not to pursue these other matters further here.
The will to power contained in mythological
constructions such as John created needs exposition. It is no longer
possible to say that religion and science somehow exist in a moral vacuum
and that the responsibility of the corruption of scientific ideas occurs
because of misapplications by a few bad individuals. Such individuals
exist; but the primary motives of cultures do not arise because of
individuals, but because of deep ideological and mythical structures which
organize whole populations around key ideas. The key ideas generate a logic
in history which cannot be stopped unless the logic is analyzed and
uncovered. The myths are the means to power, as they organize human consciousness
around primal goals and ambitions. I have briefly analyzed the ideas of St. John, in this
light, but one could equally well begin with Plato or Christ, Muhammad or
the Buddha. Metaphysical claims are power claims. Reality is not
metaphysical and the facts of existence precede imaginary essences. The
apocalyptic gnostic ideal is an ideal that has failed. The myths that
support it cannot be taken seriously any longer. The world, the earth, and
the creatures upon it are all that we have, such as they are, and they need
taking care of.
© Mark Koslow
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