Chuck Crabbe's Blog: The Harlequin - Posts Tagged "gnostic"
A Tragic Fire: Cormac McCarthy and Gnosticism in Blood Meridian, No Country For Old Men, and The Counselor
When I finished reading Blood Meridian for the first time it didn’t sit right with me. There was something silent, but fundamental, hidden between the words, and I had missed it. I opened it again and read the epilogue, cryptic and enraging as it was, three or four more times.
"In the dawn there is a man progressing over the plain by means of holes which he is making in the ground. He uses an implement with two handles and he chucks it into the hole and he enkindles the stone in the hole with his steel hole by hole striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there. On the plain behind him are the wanderers in search of bones and those who do not search… "(351)
Right. That’s just the beginning of the epilogue, and the rabbit hole only gets deeper. Finally, I put the book down, turned on my computer, and went looking for help. My vanity as a reader wouldn’t let me walk away.
I do not intend to argue here that Cormac McCarthy takes the myth of the Gnostics to be true in a literal sense. They didn’t take it literally themselves. Like all deeper understanding of myth the Gnostic story should be taken as a metaphor, a key to a mystery that is beyond the categories of human thought.
Gnosticism holds that the material world, including the bodies that hold us, is more or less a mistake, an aberration created by a tyrannical, ignorant God. For Gnostics all matter is corrupt and doomed, that’s its nature, and there’s not a thing you can do about it. Our flesh is a tomb and Jehovah’s world is a serpent swallowing its own tail, monster feeding on monster, and in the material realm, power is the only rule (The earth and humanity as they exist in McCarthy’s novel The Road could be seen as the world of matter approaching its natural, and only possible, end). Pretty bleak, and Gnosticism, like Buddhism, has been accused of nihilism, and were it not for the fire, the "spark of the alien divine" it might be a just accusation.
The myth plays out differently in different texts, but essentially: Things once existed in a state of perfection called the Pleroma. God existed in a fullness that can't be comprehended and the Gnostic Gospels describe him mostly in terms of negatives, or what he is not, much as the state of Zen or Satori is described. This is intentional. The Gnostic authors didn't want to give readers anything to hold on to and wanted, as much as was possible, to avoid reducing God to a concept, a mental idol.
continued at: http://www.chuckcrabbe.com/1/post/201...
"In the dawn there is a man progressing over the plain by means of holes which he is making in the ground. He uses an implement with two handles and he chucks it into the hole and he enkindles the stone in the hole with his steel hole by hole striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there. On the plain behind him are the wanderers in search of bones and those who do not search… "(351)
Right. That’s just the beginning of the epilogue, and the rabbit hole only gets deeper. Finally, I put the book down, turned on my computer, and went looking for help. My vanity as a reader wouldn’t let me walk away.
I do not intend to argue here that Cormac McCarthy takes the myth of the Gnostics to be true in a literal sense. They didn’t take it literally themselves. Like all deeper understanding of myth the Gnostic story should be taken as a metaphor, a key to a mystery that is beyond the categories of human thought.
Gnosticism holds that the material world, including the bodies that hold us, is more or less a mistake, an aberration created by a tyrannical, ignorant God. For Gnostics all matter is corrupt and doomed, that’s its nature, and there’s not a thing you can do about it. Our flesh is a tomb and Jehovah’s world is a serpent swallowing its own tail, monster feeding on monster, and in the material realm, power is the only rule (The earth and humanity as they exist in McCarthy’s novel The Road could be seen as the world of matter approaching its natural, and only possible, end). Pretty bleak, and Gnosticism, like Buddhism, has been accused of nihilism, and were it not for the fire, the "spark of the alien divine" it might be a just accusation.
The myth plays out differently in different texts, but essentially: Things once existed in a state of perfection called the Pleroma. God existed in a fullness that can't be comprehended and the Gnostic Gospels describe him mostly in terms of negatives, or what he is not, much as the state of Zen or Satori is described. This is intentional. The Gnostic authors didn't want to give readers anything to hold on to and wanted, as much as was possible, to avoid reducing God to a concept, a mental idol.
continued at: http://www.chuckcrabbe.com/1/post/201...
