Word: gnostics
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...18th century Gnostic activists became openly anti-Christian.* The French Revolution, crowning a Goddess of Reason in Notre Dame and proclaiming man's ability to achieve his salvation on earth, established Gnosticism as the religion of a large part of Western intellectuals and people...
Thereafter, Gnostic influence on thought snowballed. Auguste Comte (1798-1857), whose mark still lies heavily upon the social sciences, set up a system of three states of knowledge; in his Third Realm, called positivism, the scientists would take over "the general direction of this world." Intellectuals who advanced the world toward perfection would achieve immortality in the memory of mankind. Providence was the "Great Being," not God, but a personification of humanity. (A great and in some ways typical 20th century positivist was H. G. Wells, who believed that man was progressing through science to Utopia; Wells's last...
...Another Gnostic, Nietzsche, went a step further than Comte. Said Nietzsche: "Love yourself through grace. Then you are no longer in need of your God, and you can act the whole drama of Fall and Redemption to its end in yourself." Nietzsche's extravagant tone and his "fascism" repel many "liberals" who do not recognize the essential similarity in idea and historical origin of Naziism and Communism. Harold Laski, a Socialist with a great influence on "liberals" and "progressivists," summed up the Russian Revolution in a political translation of Nietzsche...
...resemble a sorcerer rather than a psychiatrist. He loves to sprinkle his writing with scholastic terms from the Middle Ages. His home is filled with strange Asiatic sculptures. He wears a curious ring, ornamented with an ancient effigy of a snake, the bearer of light in the pre-Christian Gnostic cult. When hard at work, he often disappears for days into a towered, castlelike hideaway across the Lake of Zurich, where he does his own cooking, and diverts himself by chopping wood and carving esoteric inscriptions on large blocks of granite. Jung has long since given up his psychiatric practice...
...Unitarian theology. The current issue of the Unitarian Christian Register carries an example of the Parkian unorthodoxy that may be expected to continue coming from his typewriter. Writing on the Apostles' Creed, he claims it is a present day anachronism composed expressly to combat the medieval Gnostic heresy that the world was not created by God, but by a lesser, coarser deity, and that Christ, the Incarnate Word, did not truly live, suffer and die like a man, but only seemed to do so. He calls it a "Bill of Spiritual Rights, claiming for man the privilege of . . . establishing...