EPILOGUE 795
the Italian renaissance the Poimandres was popularly published by Lorenzo de
Medici and later absorbed into the writings of the philosopher Giordano
Bruno (1548-1600), who for his opposition to traditional Catholicism and his
"cosmic theory of deity" was accused of gnostic perversions, among other
heresies, and burned at the stake in the Piazza dei Fiori. The German mystic
Jakob Boehme (1575-1624) was imbued with gnosticism. In his work he spoke
of the blemished but ever creating Sophia who fell from the pleroma (Valenti-
nos), the seven divine source spirits (Basilides' seven cosmic spheres), god as
nothingness (Basilides' nonexistent god), and god as abyss (Valentinos).
William Blake (1758-1827) is the only writer in English letters to create his
own complex gnostic system. His cranky and enlightened anger against cleri-
cal orthodoxy runs throughout the early Songs of Innocence and Experience. It
is in his long prophetic poems, however, that Blake ventures fully into gnostic
cosmogonies and theogonies. The god of Reason in The Book of Urizen re-
counts how in the prison of earth the mind is captive and has been deprived
of eternity and light:Forgetfulness, dumbness, necessity!
In chains of the mind locked up,
Like fetters of ice shrinking together
Disorganized, rent from eternity.In Goethe we find this mocker of convention and religion choosing Faust as
his wayward hero (Saint Augustine's Manichaean teacher was Faustus) and
retelling the Manichaean myth of the messenger and his distracting but re-
demptive angels. In a fantastic cosmos, Faust's soul is, at the end, appropri-
ately rescued from error and flown off to the realm of light.
The writer of gnostic themes, seeking inner knowledge in a condemned
world, persists widely into more recent times. Herman Melville's "Fragments
of a Lost Gnostic Poem" uses the words fragment and lost in the title to be-
speak the sad paucity in his day of original gnostic texts. Melville's allegorical
white whale may be seen as the monster of evil out of a gnostic dualistic bes-
tiary, while his alien figure Ishmael, an orphan tossed on a hostile ocean,
seeks knowledge of redemption as he clings to the wreckage of survival. The
gnostic revival in literature and philosophy is found in Nietzsche's nihilism
and the alienated hero of his Thus Spake Zarathustra, in Carl Jung's Seven
Sermons to the Dead, and in the existentialist philosophers to whom Hans
Jonas dedicates his chapter "Gnosticism, Nihilism, and Existentialism" in The
Gnostic Religion.