796 EPILOGUE
To this list of modern gnostics who, having rejected orthodoxy and its cre-
ator god, chose acosmic solutions and transcendence, we can add many major
figures, as Richard Smith does in his afterword to The Nag Hammadi Library
in English, including "the good alien Superman battling forces of evil," whom
Umberto Eco sees as clearly reflecting "Manichaean incontrovertibility"; Her-
mann Hesse's novels embodying the allegory of Jungian archetypes; and the
alienated Beat Generation of Kerouac on the road and Ginsberg's outsider at-
tack on convention as in his "Plutonian Ode," where he chants a fitful gnostic
dirge, using Valentinian and Sethian epithets: "I salute you... Ialdabaoth,
Aeon from Aeon born ignorant in an Abyss of Light." The leading contempo-
rary critic Harold Bloom tells us in The Anxiety of Influence (1973) that au-
thors must extinguish their literary fathers in order to find voyage. For Bloom
the Kabbalah is his spiritual home, and Kabbalah's ally gnosticism is his "reli-
gion of belatedness."
The figure who everywhere shares qualities of gnosticism—probably by
coincidence or knowledge of the unorthodox—is Franz Kafka. His castle is the
domain of the unknowable god, and his climber antihero is, as in all of Kafka's
novels, a humorous, depressed, skeptical orphan, without hope of fulfillment
on earth, who must climb forever seeking, but not finding, an interior light
that lies still concealed in dark error.
THE CHANGING FACE OF GNOSTICISM
For many centuries "Manichaean" was an abusive term applied indiscrimi-
nately to all gnostic sects, and often to any dualistic heresy. But the Enlighten-
ment—its very epithet means "entering light"—changed all that. It welcomed
gnosticism as a powerful weapon against orthodoxy. It had its secular
Voltaires and Humes who used a gnostic lexicon to trash conventional reli-
gion. For the irascible skeptic Hume, whose An Enquiry into Human Under-
standing (1748) by its name commends knowledge, religious convention was
erroneous, dark, and ignorant. He summed up religion as "Stupidity, Chris-
tianity, and Ignorance." In that century, which had science and reason as well
as Blake's "Self-annihilation & the grandeur of Inspiration" (Milton), Hume
was simply drawing from an arsenal of gnostic charges to battle received tra-
dition and its prevailing theologies.
For most of the last century, however, gnosticism may be seen not merely
as a secret doctrine discovered by writers to bring the esoteric into their work
or as an instrument to counter convention, but as a developing field with its