/lit/ - Literature

>>18757480
Gnosticism is driven by the problem of suffering, or compassion for those who suffer, and tries to absolve God of responsibility for this state of things. Sometimes it says the God of the Bible was put to sleep, or imprisoned himself, or that he is bound with chains of adamantine and kept in a cage, and that a usurper took his place. Other times it says that the God described in Genesis isn’t the real God, but a demiurge, and the real God sent his emissary Jesus to overturn the rule of this demiurge. There are many variations, and some interject not one demiurge, but ninety-nine, all to remove responsibility from the Godhead for the creation of this world of evil. They should have just become Buddhist or Hindu and stopped trying to save the mythology of Canaan! Maybe in its beginnings the Christian faith was the same as the Buddhist, and this is now lost in the confusions of hateful sects that distort history. It’s easy to think that this is the religion of a hopeless age, that it’s a byproduct of the decay of the Roman Empire and the symptom of despair or suffering. It’s much worse than that! The problem for man as for other animal isn’t stress or suffering, but the feeling that one can’t escape: the despair and panic of exhaustion and entrapment. Beyond the borders of the known inhabited world, the oikoumene, there lay uncrossable oceans, including the great earth ocean of the steppe, and the Sahara in the other direction. China and India were known, and trade existed, but this was only a vague knowledge that could have, in theory, stimulated the sense of conquest and adventure. There were, in other words, plenty of possible sources for the feeling that beyond the known world still remained the unexplored. The same unknown that called the enterprise and spirit of the Portuguese, Spanish and other Europeans who set out on a colonial mission of world-conquest and discovery, all of this existed in late Roman times.