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Sep 21Liked by Roger’s Bacon

I'm not sure gnostics would enjoy art that much though. They thought the world was evil; and art, when it's not representing the world, at least exists in the world. It doesn't seem very compatible with extreme asceticism. Christians themselves are a good example according to their level of asceticism. Those catholics who build big cathedrals full of adornments and statues thought the world was good and should be made beautiful. But modern protestants think that "this world" (this material world) is not valuable and therefore build their churches like some ordinary building with no ornaments and no beauty at all.

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I partially disagree for a few reasons.

Not all gnostics practiced extreme asceticism. Some went the other way and were extremely licentious and transgressive, the attitude being something like, "this world and my body don't matter anyways, so if you want to drink and be merry then go for it". (I'll have much more to say about this and gnostic spirituality in future essays)

I see what you are saying though and my read is that Gnosticism would make a distinction between entertainment - very much of this world and oriented towards shallow pleasure - and Art - expressions of one's divine spark that represent gnosis and point others towards it. Although they weren't necessarily doing art for art's sake as we would now, they definitely were (as the final quote says) creating all kinds of religious literature and art as part of their devotional practice. I'll say more about this in my next post, but creativity and imagination were in many ways central to Gnosticism.

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Sep 22Liked by Roger’s Bacon

What if the gnostics and the corrupted world order fall into the same trap that caused the mess in the first place, namely, a separation of the intellect from the corporeal, the idea that our spirit is not this matter, a false dichotomy of subject and object, in a reality where mind, spirit, matter are all bound together in the generative tissue if the cosmos? Two worlds of any kind seems to be falling into the same trap to me.

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I have a lot more to say about Gnosticism in coming posts, but for now I'd say that the gnosis which they sought was fundamentally non-dual; my sense is that Gnostics would have affirmed these dualities while acknowledging a deeper unity in them, a paradoxical duality/non-duality in which neither is greater or higher than the other. Gnosticism was also highly diverse and some strains were less pessimistic and dualistic than others.

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