In the first centuries of our era, the Gnostics disputed with the Christians. They were annihilated, but we can imagine their possible victory.
Jorge Luis Borges, ‘A Defense of Basilides the False’
A puppet may seem the embodiment of a lack of freedom. Whether moved by a hidden hand or pulled about by strings, a puppet has no will of its own. All of its movements are directed by the will of another – a human being who has decided what the puppet will do. Entirely controlled by a mind outside itself, a puppet has no choice in how it lives.
This would be an unbearable situation, if it were not for the fact that a puppet is an inanimate object. In order to feel a lack of freedom you must be a self-conscious being. But a puppet is a thing of wood and cloth, a human artefact without feeling or consciousness. A puppet has no soul. As a result, it cannot know it is unfree.
For Heinrich von Kleist, on the other hand, puppets represented a kind of freedom that human beings would never achieve. In his essay ‘The Puppet Theatre’, first published in 1810, the German writer has the narrator, wandering through a city park, meeting ‘Herr C.’, the recently appointed first dancer at the Opera. Noticing him on several occasions at a puppet theatre that had been erected in the town’s market square, the narrator expresses surprise that a dancer should attend such ‘little burlesques’.
Replying, Herr C. suggests that a dancer could learn a great deal from these puppet shows. Aren’t marionettes – controlled from above by puppeteers – often extremely graceful in their movements as they dance? No human being can match the marionette in effortless grace. The puppet is:
incapable of affectation. – For affectation occurs, as you know, whenever the soul … is situated in a place other than a movement’s centre of gravity. Since the puppeteer, handling the wire or the string, can have no point except that one under his control, all the other limbs are what they should be: dead, mere pendula, and simply obey the law of gravity; an excellent attribute that you will look for in vain among the majority of our dancers … these puppets have the advantage of being resistant to gravity. Of the heaviness of matter, the factor that most works against the dancer, they are entirely ignorant: because the force lifting them into the air is greater than the one attaching them to the earth … Marionettes only glance the ground, like elves, the momentary halt lends the limbs a new impetus; but we use it to rest on, to recover from the exertion of the dance: a moment which clearly is not dance at all in itself and which we can do nothing with except get it over with as quickly as possible.
When the narrator reacts with astonishment to these paradoxical assertions, Herr C., ‘taking a pinch of snuff’, remarks that he should read ‘the third chapter of Genesis attentively’. The narrator grasps the point: he is ‘perfectly well aware of the damage done by consciousness to the natural grace of a human being’. But still he is sceptical, so Herr C. tells him the story of how he had fenced with a bear. A practised swordsman, he could easily have pierced the heart of a human being; but the animal, seemingly without any effort, avoided any harm:
Now I tried a thrust, now a feint, the sweat was dripping off me: all in vain! Not only did the bear, like the foremost fencer in the world, parry all my thrusts; when I feinted – no fencer in the world can follow him in this – he did not even react: looking me in the eye, as though he could read my soul in it, he stood with his paw lifted in readiness and when my thrusts were not seriously intended he did not move.
Humans cannot emulate the grace of such an animal. Neither the beast nor the puppet is cursed with self-reflective thought. That, as Kleist sees it, is why they are free. If humans can ever achieve such a state it will only be after a transmutation in which they become infinitely more conscious:
just as two lines intersecting at a point after they have passed through an infinity will suddenly come together again on the other side, or the image in a concave mirror, after travelling away into infinity, suddenly comes close up to us again, so when consciousness has, as we might say, passed through an infinity, grace will return; so that grace will be most purely present in the human frame that has either no consciousness or an infinite amount of it, which is to say either in a marionette or in a god.
The dialogue concludes:
‘But,’ I said rather distractedly, ‘should we have to eat again of the Tree of Knowledge to fall back into the state of innocence?’
‘Indeed,’ he replied; ‘that is the final chapter in the history of the world.’
Kleist’s essay was one of the last things he wrote. Born into the Prussian military caste in 1777, he was temperamentally unsuited to any kind of conventional career. Pressed by his family to join the civil service, he saw himself as a writer but struggled to produce anything that satisfied him, travelling here and there across Europe, burning what he had written. At one point, seeming to have given up the struggle, he attempted to join Napoleon’s army as it was preparing to invade England. Undoubtedly a writer of genius, he left seven plays, eight extraordinary stories and a number of essays and letters, and may have written a novel he destroyed before committing suicide in 1811. Congenitally restless, he could not find a place in the world.
With its teasingly enigmatic dialogue, the essay upsets everything modern humankind believes about itself. How could a puppet – a mechanical device without any trace of conscious awareness – be freer than a human being? Is it not this very awareness that marks us off from the rest of the world and enables us to choose our own path in life? Yet as Kleist pictures it, the automatism of the puppet is far from being a condition of slavery. Compared with that of humans, the life of the marionette looks more like an enviable state of freedom.
The idea that self-awareness may be an obstacle to living in freedom is not new. It has long been suspected that the ordinary mode of consciousness leaves human beings stuck between the mechanical motions of the flesh and the freedom of the spirit. That is why, in mystical traditions throughout history, freedom has meant an inner condition in which normal consciousness has been transcended.
In modern thinking freedom is not much more than a relationship between human beings. Freedom in this sense may come in a number of varieties. There is the freedom that consists in an absence of human obstacles to doing what you want or may come to want, sometimes called negative freedom; the kind that implies not just an absence of impediments, but acting as a rational human being would act; and the sort that you exercise when you are a member of a community or a state that determines how it will be governed. For Kleist and others who have thought like him, however, freedom is not simply a relationship between human beings: it is, above all, a state of the soul in which conflict has been left behind.
In ancient Europe, Stoics asserted that a slave could be freer than a master who suffers from self-division. In China, Daoists imagined a type of sage who responded to the flow of events without weighing alternatives. Disciples of monotheistic faiths have believed something similar: freedom, they say, is obeying God’s will. What those who follow these traditions want most is not any kind of freedom of choice. Instead, what they long for is freedom from choice.
It is easy to dismiss those who yearn for this freedom as wanting to be ruled by a tyrant. After all, that is what many human beings have wanted in the past and continue to want today. Wanting freedom to choose may be a universal impulse, but it is far from being the strongest. It is not just that there are many things human beings want before they want this freedom – such as food to eat and a place to live. More to the point, if freedom means letting others live as they please there will always be many who are happy to be without freedom themselves.
In contrast, those who seek inner freedom do not care what kind of government they live under as long as it does not prevent them from turning within themselves. This may seem a selfish attitude; but it makes sense in a time of endemic instability, when political systems cannot be expected to last. One such time was late European antiquity, when Christianity contended with Greco-Roman philosophies and mystery religions. Another may be today, when belief in political solutions is fading and renascent religion contends with the ruling faith in science.
In late antiquity it was accepted that freedom was not a condition that could be established among human beings; the world was too unruly. Some of the mystical currents at work at the time went further: freedom meant escaping from the world. When Herr C. tells the narrator that he should read the third chapter of Genesis, Kleist points towards the most radical of these traditions – the religion of Gnosticism.
In the Genesis myth Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden having no need to work; but a serpent tempted them, promising that if they ate the forbidden apple of knowledge they would be like gods. They ate the apple. Having disobeyed God, they were punished by having to pass their lives in unending labour.
In a traditional reading eating the apple was the original sin; but, as Gnostics understood the story, the two primordial humans were right to eat the apple. The God that commanded them not to do so was not the true God but only a demiurge, a tyrannical underling exulting in its power, while the serpent came to free them from slavery. True, when they ate the apple Adam and Eve fell from grace. This was indeed the Fall of Man – a fall into the dim world of everyday consciousness. But the Fall need not be final. Having eaten its fill from the Tree of Knowledge, humankind can then rise into a state of conscious innocence. When this happens, Herr C. declares, it will be ‘the final chapter in the history of the world’.
Herr C. invokes one of the most uncompromising demands for freedom that has ever been made. Believing humans were botched creations of a demiurge – a malign or incompetent deity, not the true God which has disappeared from the world – the ancient Gnostics viewed the experience of choosing as confirming that human beings are radically flawed. Real freedom would be a condition in which they would no longer labour under the burden of choice – a condition that could be attained only by exiting from the natural world. For these forgotten visionaries, freedom was achieved by storming the heavens in an act of metaphysical violence.
Many people today hold to a Gnostic view of things without realizing the fact. Believing that human beings can be fully understood in the terms of scientific materialism, they reject any idea of free will. But they cannot give up hope of being masters of their destiny. So they have come to believe that science will somehow enable the human mind to escape the limitations that shape its natural condition. Throughout much of the world, and particularly in western countries, the Gnostic faith that knowledge can give humans a freedom no other creature can possess has become the predominant religion.
If one of Kleist’s marionettes were somehow to achieve self-awareness, Gnosticism would be its religion. In the most ambitious versions of scientific materialism, human beings are marionettes: puppets on genetic strings, which by an accident of evolution have become self-aware. Unknown to those who most ardently profess it, the boldest secular thinkers are possessed by a version of mystical religion. At present, Gnosticism is the faith of people who believe themselves to be machines.
Going far back into the ancient world, recurring in cultures widely separated in space and time, surfacing in religion, philosophy and the occult, exercising a powerful influence in modern science and politics, Gnosticism has coexisted and competed with, secreted itself within and hidden itself from many other ways of thinking. There have been Gnostic strands in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Mithraism and Orphism, while Gnostic ideas established a powerful presence in Greek philosophy among some of the later followers of Plato.
The origins of Gnosticism have not been traced, but it seems to have emerged as a fully fledged world-view around the same time as Christianity. Like other Jewish prophets of the time, Jesus may have been influenced by Zoroastrian traditions that understood human life in terms of a war between good and evil. Christianity – the religion conjured from Jesus’ life and sayings by St Paul – always contained Gnostic currents, though these were condemned as heresies that threatened the authority of the Church.
Gnostic ideas are far from being distinctively modern, but they emerged in more overt forms with the rise of the Renaissance. Revered by rationalists as the time when classical civilization was rediscovered, this was a period in which belief in magic flourished at the highest levels of the state. Alchemists and spirit-seers were regularly consulted at the court of Elizabeth, and even as older forms of religion were abandoned new types of magic were spreading. The seventeenth-century German astrologer and astronomer, mathematician and mystic Johannes Kepler is an emblematic Renaissance figure. While he believed in a cosmos governed by principles of order and harmony, Kepler set in motion a shift towards a world-view in which any laws that existed in the universe were mechanical and devoid of purpose. Other early modern scientists were similarly ambiguous. Isaac Newton was the founder of modern physics, but he was also a believer in alchemy and numerology and searched the apocalyptic books of the Bible for hidden meaning. The scientific revolution was, in many ways, a by-product of mysticism and magic. In fact, once the tangled origins of modern science are unravelled, it is doubtful whether a ‘scientific revolution’ occurred.
The novelist and poet Lawrence Durrell presented a modern version of the Gnostic vision in a series of novels, The Avignon Quintet (1974–85). Akkad, an Egyptian merchant-banker who is also a latter-day Gnostic, preaches to small groups of European expatriates. At times plump and sluggish-looking, at others looking ascetic and haggard, at home in four capitals and speaking as many languages or more, sometimes wearing western clothes and sometimes traditional dress, Akkad offers to piece together the surviving fragments of Gnostic teaching, which the established religions had tried to destroy:
the bitter central truth of the gnostics: the horrifying realisation that the world of the Good God was a dead one, and that He had been replaced by a usurper – a God of Evil … It was the deep realisation of this truth, and its proclamation that had caused the gnostics to be suppressed, censored, destroyed. Humanity is too frail to face the truth about things – but to anyone who confronts the reality of nature and of process with a clear mind, the answer is completely inescapable: Evil rules the day.
What sort of God, the gnostic asks himself, could have organised things the way they are – this munching world of death and dissolution which pretends to have a Saviour, and a fountain of good at its base? What sort of God could have built this malefic machine of destruction, of self-immolation? Only the very spirit of the dark negative death-trend in nature – the spirit of nothingness and auto-annihilation. A world in which we are each other’s food, each other’s prey …
Seeing the world as an evil piece of work, the Gnostics advanced a new vision of freedom. Humans were no longer part of a scheme of things in which freedom meant obedience to law. To be free, humans must revolt against the laws that govern earthly things. Refusing the constraints that go with being a fleshly creature, they must exit from the material world.
While modern science might seem inhospitable to this Gnostic vision, the opposite has proved to be the case. As we understand it today, the cosmos is no longer ruled by laws that express any overarching purpose – benign or otherwise. In fact the world we live in may not be a cosmos at all. The seeming laws of nature may be regularities that express no abiding laws, and for all we know the universe may be at bottom chaotic. Yet the project of liberating the spirit from the material world has not disappeared. The dream of finding freedom by rebelling against cosmic law has reappeared as the belief that humans can somehow make themselves masters of nature.
The crystallographer J. D. Bernal (1901–71) illustrates how Gnostic ideas infuse modern science. At one time ranked among Britain’s most influential scientists, a lifelong communist and proud recipient of a Stalin Peace Prize, Bernal was convinced that a scientifically planned society was being created in the Soviet Union. But his ambitions went beyond the rational reconstruction of human institutions. He was convinced that science could effect a shift in evolution in which human beings would cease to be biological organisms. As the historian of science Philip Ball has described it, Bernal’s dream was that human society would be replaced by ‘a Utopia of post-human cyborgs with machine bodies created by surgical techniques’. Even this fantasy did not exhaust Bernal’s ambitions. Further in the future, he envisioned ‘an erasure of individuality and mortality’ in which human beings would cease to be distinct physical entities.
In a passage in his book The World, the Flesh and the Devil: An Enquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul, Bernal spells out what he has in mind: ‘Consciousness itself might end or vanish in a humanity that has become completely etherealized, losing the close-knit organism, becoming masses of atoms in space communicating by radiation, and ultimately perhaps resolving itself entirely into light.’
Bernal published his book in 1929, but ideas very like his are being promoted at the present time. Similar conceptions inform the vision of the Singularity of the futurologist and director of engineering at Google Ray Kurzweil – an explosive increase in knowledge that will enable humans to emancipate themselves from the material world and cease to be biological organisms. The subtitle of Kurzweil’s book The Singularity is Near is When Humans Transcend Biology, and while the technologies involved are different – uploading brain information into cyberspace rather than using surgery to build a cyborg – the ultimate goal of freeing the human mind from confinement in matter is the same as Bernal’s. The affinities between these ideas and Gnosticism are clear. Here as elsewhere, secular thinking is shaped by forgotten or repressed religion.
Whether ancient or modern, Gnosticism turns on two articles of faith. First there is the conviction that humans are sparks of consciousness confined in the material world. The Gnostics did not deny that order existed in the world; but they viewed this order as a manifestation of evil to which they refused to submit. For them the creator was at best a blunderer, negligent or forgetful of the world it had fashioned, and possibly senile, mad or long dead; it was a minor, insubordinate and malevolent demiurge that ruled the world. Trapped in a dark cosmos, human beings were kept in submission by a trance-like ignorance of their true situation. Here we come to the second formative idea: humans can escape this slavery by acquiring a special kind of knowledge. Gnosis is the Greek word for knowledge, and for Gnostics knowledge is the key to freedom.
As Gnostics see them, humans are ill-designed and badly made creatures, gifted or cursed with flickering insight into their actual condition. Once they eat of the Tree of Knowledge, they discover they are strangers in the universe. From that point onwards, they live at war with themselves and the world.
In asserting that the world is evil, the Gnostics parted company with more ancient ways of thinking. Ancient Egyptian and Indian religion saw the world as containing light and dark, good and bad, but these were a pair that alternated in cycles rather than being locked in any sort of cosmic struggle. Animist conceptions in which the world is an interplay of creative and destructive forces frame a similar view of things. In a universe of this kind the problem of evil that has tormented generations of apologists for monotheism does not exist.
The idea of evil as an active force may have originated with Zoroaster. An Iranian prophet who lived some centuries before Christ (the exact dates are disputed), Zoroaster not only viewed the world as the site of a war between light and dark but believed light could win. Some centuries later another Iranian prophet – Mani, the founder of Manichaeism – also affirmed that good could prevail, though he seems to have believed that victory was not assured. It may have been around this time that the sensation of wavering between alternatives crystallized into an idea of free will.
The idea of a demonic presence in the world emerged with dualistic faiths. It does not appear in the Hebrew Bible, where Satan features as an adversarial figure rather than a personification of evil. It is only in the New Testament that evil appears as a diabolical agency, and throughout its history Christianity has struggled to reconcile this notion of evil with belief in a God that is all good and all powerful.
A convert from the religion of Mani, Augustine tried to resolve the conundrum by suggesting that evil was the absence of goodness – a fall from grace that came about through the misuse of free will. But there always remained a strand in Christianity that saw good and evil as opposed forces. Composed in the early thirteenth century, the most systematic surviving work of Cathar theology, The Book of the Two Principles, asserts that along with the principle of good there is another principle, ‘one of evil, who is mighty in iniquity, from whom the power of Satan and of darkness and all other powers which are inimical to the true Lord God are exclusively and essentially derived’. In support of this view, the Cathar tract goes on to quote Jesus saying (Matthew 7: 18), ‘A good tree cannot being forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.’
However such sayings are interpreted, the Christian religion has always been compounded from conflicting elements. There is no pristine tradition at the back of Christianity, Gnosticism or any other religion. The search for origins ends with the discovery of fragments.
The idea of evil as it appears in modern secular thought is an inheritance from Christianity. To be sure, rationalists have repudiated the idea; but it is not long before they find they cannot do without it. What has been understood as evil in the past, they insist, is error – a product of ignorance that human beings can overcome. Here they are repeating a Zoroastrian theme, which was absorbed into later versions of monotheism: the belief that ‘as the “lord of creation” man is at the forefront of the contest between the powers of Truth and Untruth.’ But how to account for the fact that humankind is deaf to the voice of reason? At this point rationalists invoke sinister interests – wicked priests, profiteers from superstition, malignant enemies of enlightenment, secular incarnations of the forces of evil.
As so often is the case, secular thinking follows a pattern dictated by religion while suppressing religion’s most valuable insights. Modern rationalists reject the idea of evil while being obsessed by it. Seeing themselves as embattled warriors in a struggle against darkness, it has not occurred to them to ask why humankind is so fond of the dark. They are left with the same problem of evil that faces religion. The difference is that religious believers know they face an insoluble difficulty, while secular believers do not.
Aware of the evil in themselves, traditional believers know it cannot be expelled from the world by human action. Lacking this saving insight, secular believers dream of creating a higher species. They have not noticed the fatal flaw in their schemes: any such species will be created by actually existing human beings.
With its Gnostic interpretation of the Genesis story, Kleist’s essay fascinated generations of writers and poets. One of the most gifted to have taken up Kleist’s story, and by far the most original, was Bruno Schulz, the Polish-Jewish writer and artist. In ‘Treatise on Tailors’ Dummies’, subtitled by Schulz ‘The Second Book of Genesis’, the narrator tells of ‘a series of most interesting and most unusual lectures’ given by his father, a ‘metaphysical conjuror’. According to these speculative disquisitions, offered to an audience of young women at an evening sewing session, everything that lived was the work of a demiurge. But the demiurge in question was matter itself, which was neither lifeless nor set in fixed forms:
‘The Demiurge,’ said my father, ‘has had no monopoly of creation, for creation is the privilege of all spirits. Matter has been given infinite fertility, inexhaustible vitality, and, at the same time, a seductive power of temptation which invites us to create as well … The whole of matter pulsates with infinite possibilities that send dull shivers through it. Waiting for the life-giving breath of the spirit, it is endlessly in motion. It entices us with a thousand sweet, soft, round shapes, which it blindly dreams up within itself.’
In Schulz’s version, the demiurge – blind, senseless, creative matter – gives birth to beings imbued with a similar impulse of creation. Once they are conscious, these creatures want to be the demiurge themselves:
‘We have lived for too long under the terror of the matchless perfection of the Demiurge,’ my father said. ‘For too long the perfection of his creation has paralyzed our own creative instinct. We don’t wish to compete with him. We have no ambition to emulate him. We wish to be creators in our own, lower sphere; we want to have the privilege of creation, we want creative delights, we want – in one word – Demiurgy.’
In Schulz’s retelling, humans act the part of a demiurge in a material world in which they find themselves by chance. The accidental product of an impersonal process, they cannot claim to be the purpose of creation. Yet a tendency to some kind of conscious awareness might almost seem to be innate in matter’s workings, and humans appear bent on developing this tendency to the utmost degree. Human beings are like the tailors’ dummies in his fabric shop, the narrator’s father suggests:
Figures in a waxwork museum … even fairground parodies of dummies, must not be treated lightly. Matter never makes jokes; it is always full of the tragically serious. Who dares to think you can play with matter, that you can shape it for a joke, that the joke will not be built in, will not eat into it like fate, like destiny? Can you imagine the pain, the dull imprisoned suffering, hewn into the matter of that dummy which does not know why it must be what it is, why it must remain in that forcibly imposed form which is no more than a parody?
Humans have long been possessed by the dream of creating superior versions of themselves: the homunculi and golems of medieval legends; in modern times, thinking machines that are far better calculators than humans could ever be and potentially also more self-aware:
‘The Demiurge was in love with consummate, superb, and complicated materials; we shall give priority to trash. We are simply entranced and enchanted by the cheapness, shabbiness and inferiority of material … In one word,’ Father concluded, ‘we wish to create man a second time – in the shape and semblance of a tailors’ dummy.’
With ‘esoteric solemnity’, the narrator’s father – ‘the inspired Heresiarch’ – expounds his version of the Gnostic myth. The Demiurge:
was in possession of important and interesting creative recipes. Thanks to them, he created a multiplicity of species which renew themselves by their own devices. No one knows whether these recipes will ever be reconstructed. But this is unnecessary, because even if the classical methods of creation should prove inaccessible for evermore, there still remain some illegal methods, an infinity of heretical and criminal methods.
Translated from the language of Gnostic religion, this is a vision that animates much of modern science.
In Schulz’s incomparably subtle tale, the narrator’s father articulates the vision implicit in much of modern science: humankind may be a sport of nature, but having chanced into the world the human animal can use its growing knowledge to recreate itself in a higher form. Embodied in a cult of evolution, it is an unwitting version of demiurgy.
At once lyrical and ironic, Schulz’s treatise reflects the character of its author. Schulz produced a large body of work in which magic is revealed in the most mundane things: the interior of a shop can be an entire world, its cheap and shoddy goods forming a sublime landscape; the story of a family can have the qualities of an ancient saga. It was through myth, Schulz believed, that human life was best understood. In an essay, ‘The Mythicization of Reality’, written in 1936, he wrote: ‘Not one scrap of an idea of ours does not originate in myth, isn’t transformed, mutilated, denatured mythology.’
In the myth that inspires Schulz’s writings, individuality is a type of theatrical display, in which matter assumes a temporary role – a human, a cockroach – and moves on. Demiurgy is a continuation of this process. When humans pursue the dream of creating higher versions of themselves they obey matter’s imperative, and their creations will be different from anything they can imagine.
Born in 1892 into a merchant family in the small town of Drohobych in the Galician province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Schulz spent his life at the epicentre of twentieth-century European barbarism. Attracted to art but unable to make a living from it and inheriting a family obligation to support ailing relatives, he became a teacher in a local school. Taking time and energy from his creative work, he found the job frustrating. An engagement to a woman to whom he was deeply attached, a Jewish convert to Catholicism, fell through. But though his outward life may have been unsatisfying, Schulz continued to produce work – stories, paintings, drawings – of radiant power.
Now in Ukraine, his birthplace was occupied during the Second World War by both Soviet and Nazi forces. During the Nazi period Schulz lived in the ghetto, but was for a time employed by a Nazi officer, who in return for painting murals on the walls of the playroom of his child gave Schulz food rations and a degree of protection. Aware of the deportations and executions of Jews that were under way, Schulz deposited parcels of his work with non-Jewish friends. On 19 November 1942, not long after finishing the murals, Schulz was shot dead by another Nazi officer while walking back to the ghetto carrying a loaf of bread. Schulz’s protector had killed a Jew who was under the other officer’s control, and the officer felt entitled to murder Schulz in return. ‘You killed my Jew,’ he was reported as boasting, ‘so I killed yours.’
There is evidence that at the time he was murdered Schulz was preparing his escape, collecting money and false papers from friends in Warsaw. He may have been planning to flee Drohobych that very night (though where he would have fled is unclear). Much of Schulz’s work has vanished without trace. The murals were discovered, some sixty years later, in what had become the pantry of the house where the Nazi officer had lived. Schulz’s luminous spirit lives on in stories such as ‘Tailors’ Dummies’, a playfully mocking rendition of a pervasive modern myth.
LEOPARDI AND THE SOULS OF MACHINES
In Kleist’s essay humans are caught between the graceful automatism of the puppet and the conscious freedom of a god. The jerky, stuttering quality of their actions comes from their feeling that they must determine the course of their lives. Other animals live without having to choose their path through life. Whatever uncertainty they may feel sniffing their way through the world is not a permanent condition; once they reach a place of safety, they are at rest. In contrast, human life is spent anxiously deciding how to live.
Not long after Kleist wrote his essay, another view of what it means for humans to be free was presented by the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi. Remembered as the author of exquisitely melancholy verse, Leopardi has been seen as belonging in the Romantic Movement. But his view of humans and their place in nature is in practice at the opposite extreme from that of the Romantics. Romantic thinking tends towards a cult of the infinite, whereas for Leopardi finitude and constraint are necessary for anything that can be described as civilized life. The sickness of the age, he believed, came from intoxication with the power given by science together with an inability to accept the mechanical world that science has revealed. If there was a cure for this malady, it required the conscious cultivation of illusions.
Apart from his verse, only a few short essays and dialogues of Leopardi’s were published during his lifetime. A full version of his diagnosis of the modern malady did not appear in Italian until 1898, the centenary of his birth, while a complete translation into English was published only in 2013. Composed in secret and comprising some 4,500 handwritten pages, Leopardi’s Zibaldone – a ‘hodgepodge of thoughts’ – was meant as a series of memos to himself. Ranging across ancient history and philology, the critique of religion and a new version of materialism, the Zibaldone is a methodical dissection of the belief that scientific knowledge can be the instrument of human liberation.
Much of the Zibaldone was written when Leopardi was in his early twenties in the library of his family home in the hill town of Recanati, a backwater in the Papal States, where his old-fashioned father still wore the sword showing he belonged to a princely caste. Developing poor sight and a hunchback from the long days he spent crouched in the library, where he taught himself Greek and Hebrew, Leopardi was frail and sickly most of his life. Forming few human attachments apart from an unsuccessful involvement with a married Florentine woman and suffering several long spells of poverty, he spent his last years living in Naples with a close male friend.
The delicate poet was also a merciless critic of modern ideals. He could not take seriously the modern idea that the human animal is improving. Some civilizations are better than others, he accepted, but none of them marks out a path for humankind. ‘Modern civilization must not be considered simply as a continuation of ancient civilization, as its progression … these two civilizations, which are essentially different, are and must be considered as two separate civilizations, or rather two different and distinct species of civilization, each actually complete in itself.’ Between these two Leopardi’s sympathies were with the ancient world, whose way of life he believed was more conducive to happiness. Yet he never imagined that that world could be revived.
In Leopardi’s account, modern civilization is driven by the increase of knowledge. Knowing more than any previous generation, humanity has cast off the illusions of the past – including religion. But this refusal of religion is itself partly a by-product of Christianity, and the result is to spawn illusions that are even more harmful.
The polytheistic cults of ancient times might be no more than products of the human imagination; but they helped humans live in a world of which they were ignorant and did not pretend to contain any universal truth. With its claim to be a revelation for all the world, Christianity undermined this tolerant acceptance of illusion. But the ancient world already contained the germ of its dissolution in philosophy. The habit of sceptical inquiry had produced a paralysing condition of uncertainty, which Christianity offered to heal. Christians believe their faith showed the ancient world the truth, and saved it from doubt.
For Leopardi, this was back to front:
What was destroying the [ancient] world was the lack of illusions. Christianity saved it, not because it was the truth but because it was a new source of illusions. And the effects it produced, enthusiasm, fanaticism, magnanimous sacrifice, and heroism, are the usual effects of any great illusion. We are considering here not whether it is true or false but only that this proves nothing in its favour. But how did it establish itself amid so many obstacles…? No one understands the human heart at all who does not recognize how vast is its capacity for illusions, even when these are contrary to its interests, or how often it loves the very thing that is obviously harmful to it.
The advance of reason has the effect of weakening illusions that are necessary to civilization:
there is no doubt that the progress of reason and the extinction of illusions produce barbarism … The greatest enemy of barbarism is not reason but nature. Nature (if properly followed, however) provides us with illusions that, in their right place, make a people truly civilized … Illusions are natural, inherent to the system of the world. When they are removed completely or almost completely, man is denatured, and every denatured people is barbarous … And reason, by making us naturally inclined to pursue our own advantage, and removing the illusions that bind us to one another, dissolves society absolutely and turns people to savagery.
According to Leopardi the rise of Christianity was a response to an excess of doubt. Many of the ancient philosophers were inspired by visions of an invisible order of things. Pythagoras, Plato and their disciples believed a hidden harmony lay beyond or beneath the flux of human events. But the systematic doubt these philosophers practised proved more powerful than their mystical visions, and the result was a state of inner chaos that required a new and more potent illusion. In modern times this interplay has recurred in another form. Just as Christianity was a response to scepticism, secular faiths are a reaction against the decay of Christianity. Struggling to escape from the world that science has revealed, humanity has taken refuge in the illusion that science enables them to remake the world in their own image.
A feature of Leopardi’s view of the world is his uncompromising materialism. Everything that exists is a type of matter, he believed, including what we call the soul. We are reluctant to give up the distinction between matter and mind because we cannot imagine matter thinking. But, for Leopardi, the fact that we think shows that matter thinks:
That matter thinks is a fact. It is a fact because we ourselves think; and we do not know, we are not aware of being, we are not capable of knowing, of perceiving anything but matter. It is a fact because we see that the modifications of thought depend entirely on sensations, upon our physical state, and that our mind fully corresponds to the changes and variations in our body. It is a fact, because we feel our thought corporeally.
It is usually thought that a materialist such as Leopardi must reject religion, but this was not his view. Certainly religion was an illusion, but he knew that humans cannot live without illusions. He criticized Christianity, but his objections were not so much intellectual as moral and aesthetic: he attacked the Christian religion because of its impact on the quality of life.
Devaluing the natural world for the sake of a spiritual realm, Christianity could not be other than hostile to happiness: ‘man’, Leopardi wrote, ‘was happier before Christianity than after it.’ He was not what people today call a moral relativist – someone who thinks human values are just cultural constructions. He insisted on the constancy of human nature and its corollary, the existence of goods and evils that are universally human. What he rejected was turning these often conflicting values into a system of universal principles. Whether in Christianity or its secular successors any such project is bound to result in tyranny, since it is an attempt to suppress the irresolvable contradictions of human needs.
In Leopardi’s view, the universal claims of Christianity were a licence for universal savagery. Because it is directed to all of humanity, the Christian religion is usually praised, even by its critics, as an advance on Judaism. Leopardi – like Freud a hundred years later – did not share this view. The crimes of medieval Christendom were worse than those of antiquity, he believed, precisely because they could be defended as applying universal principles: the villainy introduced into the world by Christianity was ‘entirely new and more terrible … more horrible and more barbarous than that of antiquity’.
Modern rationalism renews the central error of Christianity – the claim to have revealed the good life for all of humankind. Leopardi described the secular creeds that emerged in modern times as expressions of ‘half-philosophy’, a type of thinking with many of the defects of religion. What Leopardi called ‘the barbarism of reason’ – the project of remaking the world on a more rational model – was the militant evangelism of Christianity in a more dangerous form.
Events have confirmed Leopardi’s diagnosis. As Christianity has waned, the intolerance it bequeathed to the world has only grown more destructive. From imperialism through communism and incessant wars launched to promote democracy and human rights, the most barbarous forms of violence have been promoted as means to a higher civilization.
For all his attacks on Christianity, Leopardi did not welcome its decline. ‘Religion’, he wrote, ‘is all we have to shore up the wretched and tottering edifice of present-day human life.’ Yet there is no reason to think he derived any consolation from the faith he had inherited. Brought up by his father to be a good Catholic, he became an atheist who admired polytheism. Realizing that the more benign faiths of ancient times could not be revived, he defended the religion of his own time as the least harmful illusion. But he was incapable of surrendering to that illusion himself. Instead, he made a life from disillusion.
For Leopardi the human animal was a thinking machine. This is the true lesson of materialism, and he embraced it. Humans are part of the flux of matter. Aware that they are trapped in the material world, they cannot escape from this confinement except in death. The good life begins when they accept this fact. As he wrote in one of his most celebrated poems:
… I recall the eternal,
And the dead seasons, and the present one
Alive, and all the sound of it. And so
In this immensity my thought is drowned:
And I enjoy my sinking in this sea.
Here Leopardi is at the furthest remove from the Gnostics, and yet his conception of the universe has something important in common with theirs.
Mind was not for Leopardi (as it was for the Gnostics) injected into matter from somewhere beyond the physical world. Matter was itself intelligent, constantly mutating and producing new forms, some of them self-aware. As a child Leopardi had written an essay on ‘the souls of beasts’, and he is clear that consciousness is not confined to humans. The difference between beasts and human beings is not that humans are self-aware while beasts are not. Both are conscious machines. The difference lies in the greater frailty of the human soul, which produces illusions of which beasts have no need.
In his superb ‘Dialogue between Nature and an Icelander’, published in 1824, Leopardi has Nature responding to the question whether it made the world ‘expressly to torment us’. Nature asks the Icelander:
Did you really think that the world was made for your sake? You need to understand that in my works, in my ordinances, and in my operations, with very few exceptions, I always had and still have in mind something quite other than the happiness or unhappiness of men. When I hurt you in any way or by any means, I am not aware of it, except very seldom; just as, usually, if I please you or benefit you, I do not know of it; and I have not, as you believe, made certain things, nor do I perform certain actions, to please you or to help you. And finally, even if I happened to exterminate your whole race, I would not be aware of it …
… Obviously you have given no thought to the fact that the life of this universe is a perpetual cycle of production and destruction, the two connected in such a way that each continually serves the other, to ensure the conservation of the world, which as soon as one or the other of them ceased to be would likewise disintegrate. So the world itself would be harmed if anything in it were free from suffering.
For Leopardi evil is integral to the way the world works; but when he talks of evil he does not mean any kind of malign agency of the sort that Gnostics imagined. Evil is the suffering that is built into the scheme of things. ‘What hope is there when evil is ordinary?’ he asks. ‘I mean, in an order where evil is necessary?’ These rhetorical questions show why Leopardi had no interest in projects of revolution and reform. No type of human action – least of all the harlequinade of politics – could fundamentally alter a world in which evil was ordinary. It is not that Leopardi lacked human sympathy. Rather, he affirmed the irresponsibility and innocence of humankind. Understanding the necessity of evil, he thought, leads to compassion: ‘My philosophy not only does not lead to misanthropy, as might seem to anyone who looks at it superficially, and as many accuse it of doing … My philosophy makes nature guilty of everything, and by exonerating humanity altogether, it redirects the hatred, or at least the complaint, to a higher principle, the true origin of the ills of living beings.’ Human vices – greed, cruelty, deception – are natural. Nature is neither malign nor benevolent, but simply indifferent. Humans are machines that through a succession of random chances have become self-aware. Inner freedom – the only kind of freedom possible, he believed – is achieved by accepting this situation.
Leopardi did accept it. He would not have been surprised that much of his work was for so long unknown. Realizing that the human mind may decay as human knowledge advances, he did not expect his way of thinking to be appreciated or understood. Nor did he try to escape the end that comes to everything that lives. Immortality, he wrote in one of his most lovely verses, ‘The Setting of the Moon’, would be ‘the worst of all our ills’. Calmly dictating the poem’s closing lines as he lay dying in Naples, he seems to have seen his short life as complete in itself.
With its faith that humankind can emancipate itself from natural limits by using the power of increasing knowledge, Gnostic thinking informs much of modern science. But a similar refusal of limitation can be found in currents of thought that are hostile to science. The Romantic Movement also asserted that humankind can remake the world – though not by using the power of reason. It was human will that would enable humankind to prevail over its natural condition. If the will was strong enough, even death could be conquered.
One version of this Romantic tradition is expressed in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Ligeia’ (1838). The epigraph to the tale is a quote attributed to the seventeenth-century writer Joseph Glanvill: ‘And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigour? For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.’ The passage Poe cites has never been found, and it may be one he invented. If so it was an astute intuition that led him to attribute his invention to Glanvill.
A thoroughgoing sceptic as well as a pious clergyman, Glanvill (1636–80) used a method of doubt to demolish the hierarchical cosmos that medieval thinkers had built from ideas inherited from Greek philosophy. In one of his main works, Scepsis Scientifica, or Confest Ignorance: The Way to Science (first published as The Vanity of Dogmatizing in 1661), he argued that human beings can never have knowledge of cause and effect. All we have are impressions and beliefs, which give us the sense that the world follows an orderly course. We puff up these sensations into a system of rational principles that tells us that some things are necessary and others impossible. In truth we cannot know: ‘We may affirm, that things are thus and thus, according to the Principles we have espoused: But we strangely forget ourselves, when we plead a necessity of their being so in Nature, and an Impossibility of their being otherwise.’ Like the eighteenth-century Scottish sceptic David Hume, Glanvill denied that the human mind can know the causes of the events it observes. Unlike Hume, who used his sceptical philosophy to attack religion, Glanvill used doubt to defend faith – not only in the existence of God but also in witchcraft. In each case he asserted that faith was based in human experience.
Glanvill’s sceptical doubt was one of the earliest expressions of modern empiricism and one of the most radical. As an epigraph to another of his stories, ‘A Descent into the Maelström’ (1841), Poe used a genuine quote from Glanvill, slightly altered, which reads: ‘The ways of God in Nature, as in Providence, are not as our ways; nor are the models that we frame any way commensurate to the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, which have a depth in them greater than the well of Democritus.’ Poe was an admirer of Democritus, who believed that we live in a boundless universe made of atoms and the void. For the ancient Greek materialist philosopher, truth lies at the bottom of a well, the water of which serves as a mirror in which objects are reflected. But the addition of one word to the quote – ‘unsearchableness’ – suggests a closer affinity with Glanvill. For Poe, human reason could never grasp the nature of things. The world that we know is a work of the imagination – and none the worse for that, since what is fashioned by the human mind may have a greater perfection (Poe believed) than anything in the natural world.
Poe explored this thought in ‘The Domain of Arnheim’ (1842). Telling of a young man of great wealth who aimed to create a landscape ‘whose combined vastness and definitiveness – whose united beauty, magnificence and strangeness, shall convey the idea of care, or culture, or superintendence, on the part of beings superior, yet akin to humanity’, the story shows the gardener in the position of ‘an intermediary or secondary nature – a nature which is not God, nor an emanation from God, but which is still nature in the sense of the handiwork of the angels that hover between man and God’. The artist-gardener is a demiurge crafting a scene more beautiful than any in the natural world.
In ‘Ligeia’, human artifice has an even greater role. The unnamed narrator describes a series of events in which he marries a woman of beauty, knowledge and intellect, who guides him into regions of ‘metaphysical investigation’. Ligeia dies, the narrator remarries, only for his new spouse Rowena to die as well. But he keeps watch over her body, and during the vigil sees life returning and a familiar face – not that of Rowena, but instead that of Ligeia. As the quote from Glanvill hinted, death was annulled by human will.
Poe’s life reveals no such will. It may be that – as a sympathetic biographer has it – he was ‘fated to die in ignominy … darkness was always rushing towards him.’ Born in 1809 and orphaned a year later, unable to find any steady source of income or settle into a career, founding magazines that failed and remaining extremely poor for most of his life, suffering many kinds of mania and obsession and seeking relief from them in drink, this inordinate genius was found wandering the streets of Baltimore, wearing someone else’s clothes, incapable of coherent speech and unable to explain how he had come to this desperate pass. He was taken to a hospital, where he died on 7 October 1849.
‘Ligeia’ illustrates a Gnostic vision of a highly unusual kind. The narrator’s reference to ‘metaphysical investigation’ may point back to alchemy, but might just as well refer to the practice of mesmerism that was so popular when Poe wrote. For Poe as for Glanvill, however, it was not modern science or hermetic wisdom that opened up the possibility of the will triumphing over the flesh but the most radical kind of doubt.
THE GOLEM AND THE CIRCULAR RUINS
The idea that humans might fashion a higher species surfaced repeatedly throughout the nineteenth century. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) explores what it would be for a human being to act as a demiurge. Publishing the book while Leopardi was writing the Zibaldone, Shelley recognized that any such homunculus could only be a monstrous embodiment of human pride. (The two writers coincided in Italy for a time and had common acquaintances but did not meet, and it seems neither read the other.) Later in the nineteenth century, the Symbolist Villiers de L’Isle-Adam produced Tomorrow’s Eve (1886), a novelistic account of the creation of a female ‘android’ – a term the writer coined. When humans take the place of the demiurge in these tales, things always end badly. Creating an artificial human being was an attempt to defy natural law – a modern version of the alchemist’s dream.
Using ideas borrowed loosely from Kabbalah, the Austrian occultist writer Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem (1915) is another fiction in this genre. According to J. L. Borges, Meyrink’s book was ‘the story of a dream; within this dream there are dreams, and within those dreams (I believe) other dreams.’
Fashioning a higher humanity is a dream whose absurdity goes unnoticed until reality, or another dream, dissipates the imaginary being. Even when they are explicitly designed to eliminate human flaws, artificial humans cannot escape the limitations of their creators. Fastening on features of the human animal they deem to be good, modern secular thinkers believe humankind can be recreated in a higher form that possesses only those features. It does not occur to these sublime moralists that in human beings the good and the bad may be intermixed. Knowing little of the world or themselves, they are unaware that the human good is not a harmonious whole; gracious and lovely ways of life may be the offspring of tyranny and oppression, while delicate virtues may rely for their existence on the most sordid human traits. Eradicating evil may produce a new species, but not the one its innocent creators had in mind. Humans have too little self-knowledge to be able to fashion a higher version of themselves.
Borges pursued the idea that a new humanity might be dreamt into being in one of his richest fictions, ‘The Circular Ruins’. The story describes a travelling magician who finds a place to sleep in a burial niche in the ruins of the sanctuary of the fire god. ‘The purpose which guided him was not impossible, though it was supernatural. He wanted to dream a man: he wanted to dream him with minute integrity and insert him into reality.’ The magician knows the difficulty of the task: ‘He comprehended that the effort to mould the incoherent and vertiginous matter dreams are made of was the most arduous task a man could undertake, though he might penetrate all the enigmas of the upper and lower orders: much more arduous than weaving a rope of sand or coining the faceless wind.’
The magician succeeds in dreaming a man into being; but in the dream the man is asleep, and cannot act or exist by himself. The magician finds himself in the position of a failed demiurge: ‘In the Gnostic cosmogonies, the demiurgi knead and mould a red Adam who cannot stand alone: as unskilful and crude and elementary as this Adam of dust was the Adam of dreams fabricated by the magician’s nights of effort.’ The magician dreams the man he has dreamt into wakefulness. In order to conceal from the man, whom the magician now thinks of as his son, the fact that he is only a dream, he instils into his creation an invincible ignorance of his origins. ‘Not to be a man, to be the projection of another man’s dream, what a feeling of humiliation, of vertigo!’
The magician dreams that only he and the fire god know that his son is no more than a dream. But then, in what seems like a conflagration that has happened many times before, the fire god’s sanctuary is itself consumed by fire. First the magician thinks of escape; but, reflecting on his labours and his old age, he walks into the flames, which consume him without any pain. It is then that the magician understands that he too – like the man he had dreamt – ‘was a mere appearance, dreamt by another’.
Less perceptive than the shaman, those who aim to fashion a higher humanity with the aid of science think they are bringing purpose into the drift of matter. In fact they are themselves driven by matter’s aimless energy. As in Borges’s story, the modern scientific shaman and a new human species are both of them dreams.
Seemingly conscious, certainly alive, the vast water-covered planet of Solaris is engaged in a continuous process of self-transformation. In the Polish writer Stanislav Lem’s 1961 novel Solaris, what motivates this self-transformation remains in doubt. The book has been read as an exploration of the impossibility of understanding an alien mind. In another reading – which is not inconsistent with the first – Lem’s novel may be a parable of the search for God. Some such interpretation is hinted in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris (1972).
The psychologist Kris Kelvin, who arrives on a research station floating above the watery surface, is one of several generations of scientists who travel to Solaris in order to study the planet. Once they find they are dealing with a living intelligence, the scientists try to make contact with it. You might think they want to engage with a non-human mind, but one of the scientists doubts that this is the motive: ‘We don’t want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos … We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds.’ In seeking to enter the mind of the planet, the scientists may be trying to understand themselves.
The sentience of the planet was not accepted from the start. (There were some who never accepted it.) Circling around two suns, one red and one blue, Solaris maintained an orbit that, according to the laws of gravitation, ought to be inherently unstable. This led to the discovery that the ocean was capable of exerting an active influence on the planet’s orbital path, and what had been the established scientific world-view was threatened. It was attempts to probe further into the ocean using specially designed electronic instruments that led many scientists to conclude that the ocean was sentient.
The planet took an active part in the investigation by remodelling the instruments as they were operating. How it intervened in their experiments, and for what reason, could not be known. No two interventions were the same; sometimes there was total silence. But over time, it became possible to classify the planet’s responses into what seemed to be intelligible patterns.
The vast inhuman mind was not only cogitating. It was constantly creating new forms, a teeming diversity of shapes and structures, a few of which the scientists were able to classify: ‘tree-mountains’, ‘extensors’, ‘fungoids’, ‘mimoids’, ‘symmetriads’ and ‘asymmetriads’, ‘vertebrids’ and ‘agilus’ … The ocean’s creativity proved to be even more astonishing when it began fashioning a succession of visitors – simulacra of human beings – for the scientists who came to study it. Why it did so would never be known.
The visitors included Rheya, Kelvin’s late wife, who had committed suicide after a quarrel with her husband. Fully conscious but with no memory of the past, or any understanding of how she came to be in the research station, Rheya is puzzled, and then distressed. So is Kelvin, who tries to rid himself of her by tricking her into a shuttle and firing it off into space. But Rheya – or another likeness of her – returns. More troubled than before, she kills herself.
Kelvin is left alone with the mystery of the ocean. He would like the Rheya he knew and loved on Earth to return, but accepts that this is impossible: ‘We all know that we are material creatures, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and not even the power of all our feelings combined can defeat those laws. All we can do is detest them.’ He does not believe the ocean would respond to the tragedy of two human beings. Descending to the ocean’s surface and landing on a soft, porous island that resembles the ruins of an ancient town after it has been devastated by an earthquake, Kelvin asks himself whether he must go on living on this inscrutable planet. ‘I hoped for nothing. And yet I lived in expectation … I knew nothing, and I persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past.’
Solaris views the human world with a serene lack of concern. A part of the impulse to make contact with the ocean comes from the belief that it must have goals like those of humans. But while the ocean has capacities for self-awareness and intentional action – possibly greater than those of any human being – it lacks the needs these capacities serve in humans. If it finds pleasure in playing with the scientists, there is nothing to suggest that it welcomes their attentions. It shows no sympathy for the anguish of the human simulacra it creates. It wants nothing from humans. If they depart or disappear, it will feel no loss. The process of self-transformation will go on.
Tarkovsky’s film ends with Kelvin finding himself walking through woods past a pond towards his father’s wooden house. A dog runs towards him, which he greets warmly. Looking through the window of the house, he sees his father in a room through which rain is pouring. He walks around the house to a back door, where he meets and embraces his father. At that point the camera pulls back, and the viewer sees that the house and its surroundings are breaking up and vanishing into the ocean foam.
Like any true myth, Lem’s Solaris has no single meaning. But one possible interpretation is that humans live already in a world like that of Solaris. Wherever they look, humans see forms and structures; but these shapes may be deceptive. The human world may be like the home Kelvin sees on the island – an insubstantial makeshift that is forever tumbling and falling away.
THE REVELATION OF PHILIP K. DICK
It would be hard to find a more striking statement of a Gnostic world-view than this:
Behind the counterfeit universe lies God … It is not a man who is estranged from God; it is God who is estranged from God. He evidently willed it this way at the beginning, and has never since sought his way back home. Perhaps it can be said that he has inflicted ignorance, forgetfulness, and suffering – alienation and homelessness – on Himself … He no longer knows why he has done all this to himself. He does not remember.
Having undergone a succession of experiences in which he seemed to gain access to another order of things, Dick found himself feeling at once liberated and oppressed. He recognized that these seemingly paranormal experiences might be accounted for by personal factors, including heavy drug use over many years, and did not deny that they involved a departure from conventional norms of sanity. Yet he remained convinced that he had been granted a glimpse of another world from which, along with all other human beings, he had been immemorially exiled:
Within a system that must generate an enormous amount of veiling, it would be vainglorious to expostulate on what actuality is, when my premise declares that were we to penetrate to it for any reason, this strange, veil-like dream would reinstate itself retroactively, in terms of our perceptions and in terms of our memories. The mutual dreaming would resume as before, because, I think, we are like the characters in my novel Ubik; we are in a state of half-life. We are neither dead nor alive, but preserved in cold storage, waiting to be thawed out.
A brilliantly original writer of science fiction who used the genre to question what it means to be human, Philip K. Dick never came to terms with the upheaval that he suffered in the months of February–March 1974. He struggled with the experience for the rest of his life.
If the circumstances of his life led him to the experience, they also ensured that it would remain painfully enigmatic. Born prematurely along with his twin sister Jane in December 1928, Dick suffered states of what seems like metaphysical horror from his early years. Jane died six weeks after she was born, an event that troubled him throughout his life. He was terrified when his father put on a gas mask to illustrate stories of his time in the war: ‘His face would disappear. This was not my father any longer. This was not a human being at all.’ In 1963, he had a vision that harked back to this early terror: ‘I looked up in the sky and saw a face. I didn’t really see it, but the face was there, and it was not a human face; it was a vast visage of perfect evil … It was immense; it filled a quarter of the sky. It had empty slots for eyes – it was metal and cruel and, worst of all, it was God.’
Episodes such as this appeared in his fiction – the metal face in the sky became Palmer Eldritch, for example. They also pulled Dick in the direction of Gnosticism. As his biographer comments, for Dick ‘the Gnostic view that our world is an illusory reality created by an evil, lesser deity was utterly compelling. It could account for the suffering of humankind, as well as for startling phenomena such as a vision of “absolute evil” (the Gnostic god’s true visage!) in the sky.’ This Gnostic vision resonated deeply with some aspects of Dick’s personality, while other parts of him were just as deeply repelled by it.
Dick was always prone to paranoid fears, not always without reason. In late 1953 he and his then girlfriend were visited by FBI agents, who showed them surveillance photographs and appear to have offered them expense-free places at the University of Mexico if they agreed to spy on their fellow students. Such approaches were not unusual at the time. Overshadowed by the Cold War and McCarthyism, early Fifties America was a time of suspicion. Many years later, Dick discovered through a Freedom of Information request that a letter he had written to Soviet scientists in 1958 had been intercepted by the CIA. Surveillance of this kind was routine in these years, but it is unlikely that American intelligence agencies had any special interest in Dick. He had no access to sensitive information, and the costs of monitoring him would have been prohibitive. Even so, for the rest of his life Dick believed he was under surveillance – if not by the FBI then by the KGB or (perhaps worst of all) the Internal Revenue Service.
In late 1971 his house was burgled and his files removed – a break-in he attributed to Watergate-type Federal agents or possibly religious fundamentalists, among others. Neither explanation was entirely fantastical – this was the time of Nixon, and Dick had been involved in the late Sixties with James A. Pike, the Episcopal Bishop of California, in seances in which the bishop had attempted to make contact with his son, who had committed suicide. At the same time, neither explanation was realistically plausible. (Some among Dick’s friends suspected he may have staged the break-in himself, perhaps to foil an anticipated IRS tax audit.) Following his mental upheaval in early 1974 he believed that his personality was being taken over by US Army Intelligence. He called the local police to tell them ‘I am a machine’, and wrote to the FBI in an attempt to dispel any doubts as to his loyalties. Such episodes suggest full-blown paranoia.
In the aftermath of his mental upheaval, Dick medicated himself with drugs, alcohol and vitamin preparations, while consulting a number of therapists. Yet he could not shake off the sense of confinement imposed on him by the revelation he had experienced. Instead of ascending to a realm where he would be free from danger, he saw himself ever after as being surrounded by evil forces. Fantasies of conspiracy – political or cosmic – dominated Dick’s view of the world up to his death, some weeks after he suffered a stroke, in March 1982.
Dick’s propensity to paranoia was exacerbated by his style of life – not least his excessive use of amphetamines. But his was paranoia of a peculiar kind, one that articulated an entire world-view – a highly distinctive version of Gnosticism. With its vision of the world as being ruled by an evil demiurge Gnosticism is, in effect, the metaphysical version of paranoia. Paranoid delusion is often a reaction against insignificance – the sense, often well founded, of counting for nothing in the world. Dick’s paranoia was of this kind. By seeking a sense of significance, he became familiar with the dark side of a world where nothing is without meaning.
Dick’s achievement as a writer came from detaching science fiction from speculation about the future and linking it with perennial questions about what can truly be known. In many of his novels and short stories he explored the dizzying possibility that the universe is an infinitely layered dream, in which every experience of illumination proves to be one more false awakening. This was the theme of novels such as The Man in the High Castle (1962), a novel of alternate history in which Axis forces are imagined as having won the Second World War and the chief protagonist ends unsure which history actually occurred; The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), where an evil entrepreneur markets an alien hallucinogen that destroys the ability to distinguish the real from the unreal; Valis (1981), in which it appears that the central character is being helped to uncover the truth of things by an alien space probe; and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982), a posthumously published volume, dealing with the struggle of a renegade bishop to make sense of recently discovered Gnostic texts.
These novels reflected and sometimes anticipated experiences in which the author was unable to say what was real and what not. Often the life and the work were images of one another: Timothy Archer is an avatar of Bishop James Pike, for example. It was not just reality and illusion that were intertwined. So were fact and fiction. Dick could not accept that his life was shaped by a succession of random events – the death of his twin sister, a routine visit by the FBI, a commonplace break-in. He looked for design in everything that happened to him – above all his mental breakdown. Fearing he could not make sense of his experience, he turned it into a book.
The book was The Exegesis, a massive manuscript of over eight thousand pages and around two million words, mostly handwritten and not meant for publication, in which he tried to comprehend what he had undergone. The editors of the published version, which appeared in 2011, describe it as:
visionary and fractured, at once coming apart and striving heroically, in the only way a novelist can strive for such a thing, to keep himself together as a life nears its end in shambles, haunted by a dead twin sister whose own life was a month long, and defined by bouts of psychosis, a diorama of drugs, five marriages, suicide attempts, and financial destitution, real or imagined stalking by the FBI and IRS, literary rejection at its most stupid (which is to say destructive), and a Linda Ronstadt obsession.
Invoking early Christian teachings and a number of esoteric traditions, especially Gnosticism, Dick struggled to persuade himself that what he had experienced was an authentic revelation. Having been unhinged from reality for large parts of his life, he wanted to believe he was now on the way to being truly sane.
Though it was marked out by his own traumas, Dick trod a path that has been followed by many before him. Like human beings in every age he wanted to believe that the events of his life formed part of a pattern. So he created a story in which his life was shaped by secret agencies, some of them from beyond the human world. But a world in which nothing happens by chance is an enclosed space that soon proves maddening. Dick found himself stuck in such a place – not the radiant, meaning-filled cosmos he was looking for, but a dark prison. Scrawled on the walls were messages, some of which would appear later in the pages of his books.
The Exegesis is rambling, fragmented and often wildly speculative. The synthesis of personal experience with hermetic tradition at which he laboured was never achieved. Yet he succeeded in bringing together Gnostic themes that, unnoticed or repressed, shape much of modern thinking.
Dick summarized what his experiences had led him to believe:
1 the empirical world is not quite real, but only seemingly real;
2 its creator cannot be appealed to for a rectification or redress of these evils and imperfections;
3 the world is moving towards some kind of end state or goal, the nature of which is obscure, but the evolutionary aspect of the change states suggests a good and purposeful end state that has been designed by a sentient and benign proto-entity
In this cosmogony the visible world is the work of ‘a limited entity termed “the artifact”’. The ‘artifact’, or demiurge, may be ignorant, or else (Dick sometimes speculated) demented. But it is not malevolent, simply doing what it can to free humans from delusion. This is a view that has something in common with Kabbalah, as Dick acknowledges:
Probably everything in the universe serves a good end … The Sepher Yezirah, a Cabbalist text, The Book of Creation, which is almost two thousand years old, tells us: ‘God has also set the one over against the other; the good against the evil, and the evil against the good; the good proceeds from the good, and the evil from the evil; the good purifies the bad, and the bad the good [Dick’s italics]; the good is preserved for the good, and the evil for the bad ones.’
Underlying the two game players there is God, who is neither and both. The effect of the game is that both players become purified. Thus the ancient Hebrew monotheism, so superior to our own view.
An interplay between good and evil in which each is necessary to the other is at the heart of many mystical traditions. If he had stuck to this view, Dick might have exorcized the demons that possessed him. But he needed to know, beyond any possibility of doubt, that the scheme of things was good. In 1975 he wrote: ‘This is not an evil world, as Mani supposed. There is a good world under the evil. The evil is somehow superimposed over it (Maya), and when stripped away, pristine glowing creation is visible.’
The idea that evil is a veil covering the good is an old one. But it leaves unresolved the questions, why and from where did the veil appear? If it originated in some divine mind, the world must have been made by a creator that is itself partly evil. This creator may be only a lesser god, one of many. But how did this ambiguous demi-god come into being, if the true God is all good? Why must humans spend their lives struggling against illusion?
These are questions Dick could not answer. In Gnosticism evil and ignorance are one and the same; when gnosis is attained, evil vanishes – at least for the adept. In this type of illumination there can be no uncertainty. Dick’s experience was nothing like this. The illumination he experienced was the trigger for a process of psychological disintegration. There was no way the revelation he had received could be seen as the end of his search. This may be why he introduced the idea of evolution into the system of ideas he was struggling to put together. Invoking a process of evolutionary change that is alien to Gnostic thought, Dick believed a transformation was under way that spanned vast tracts of human history and cosmic time. Believing that the human mind becomes gradually more enlightened, he was applying a near-universal modern assumption. In many respects an antinomian figure, he was also a product of his age.
A belief in human advance through time is built into the modern world-view. For Plato, the Gnostics and the early Christians, there was no question of the shadow-world of time moving towards any better state. Either time would literally end – as Jesus, the apocalyptic Jewish prophet who came to be seen as the founder of Christianity, appears to have believed – or else time and eternity coexisted in perpetuity, as Plato and the Gnostics thought. Either way there was no expectation that any fundamental alteration in human affairs could occur in the course of history. Taken for granted in the ancient world, this view of things is nowadays close to being incomprehensible.
The modern world inherits the Christian view in which salvation is played out in history. In Christian myth human events follow a design known only to God; the history of humankind is an ongoing story of redemption. This is an idea that informs virtually all of western thought – not least when it is intensely hostile to religion. From Christianity onwards, human salvation would be understood (at least in the west) as involving movement through time. All modern philosophies in which history is seen as a process of human emancipation – whether through revolutionary change or incremental improvement – are garbled versions of this Christian narrative, itself a garbled version of the original message of Jesus.
Dick wavered between accepting that history is ruled by chance and believing it obeys a secret design. In 1980 he considered writing a novel of an alternate world, ‘The Acts of Paul’, which would have explored the radical contingency of history. In ‘The Acts of Paul’, Christianity – the faith that more than any other affirms that history has meaning – would have been clearly just a spin-off from random events. Sadly, the novel was never written.
The belief that evolution is advancing towards some desirable end is ubiquitous, and Dick could not help being influenced by it. Above all, he was attracted to the idea of evolution because it promised that his epiphanies might someday make sense. If the mind evolved through time, his confusion need not be permanent. Dick wrote: ‘What happened … is that I woke up to reality. But it has these counterfeit accretional layers over it. Our sense of time – of the passage of time – is the result of our scanning the changes of appearance … I merely passed over from unconscious messenger to conscious…’
Some months before he died Dick wrote a letter enclosing a one-page ‘final statement’ of The Exegesis. Under the guidance of a ‘hyper-structure’, a new species with a higher level of awareness than humans was evolving. He insisted this was not ‘mere faith’. But for him it had to be true. He could not live without the belief that his disorienting experiences were phases in a continuing process of enlightenment. Desperate for any kind of meaning, Dick needed a fantasy of evolution in order to avoid being left with mystery.
We like to think that if another intelligent species were to visit the Earth it would do so in order to interact with us – if not to communicate with us or study our behaviour, then at least to exploit or destroy us. In H. G. Wells’s canonical tale of alien invasion War of the Worlds (1898), Martians invade the Earth because it is younger and warmer than their own planet; they aim to wipe out humanity in order to clear the way for themselves. In Michel Faber’s subtle exploration of an alien view of humans, Under the Skin (2000), an extra-terrestrial assuming the form of an attractive young woman captures hitchhikers in order that their flesh can be prepared as meat and consumed as a delicacy by her fellow aliens. In each of these classics, humans have some value and significance for the alien visitants – even if that value is negative and their significance no more than instrumental. But what if alien visitors to the planet had no interest in humans at all?
A scenario of this kind is presented in Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic. First published in 1972 in a heavily censored and mutilated form as a series of stories in the former Soviet Union and turned by Andrei Tarkovsky into the film Stalker (1979), the novel tells of an alien Visitation to six places. Later labelled by scientists as ‘Blind Quarters’ and ‘Plague Quarters’, these are dangerous sites in which the laws of physics seem not to apply. They also contain artefacts that have become prized booty for ‘stalkers’ – illegal scavengers who risk their lives by entering the Zones in order to remove the objects and sell them on. How the artefacts work is unknown – as is the reason for the alien visitation.
But suppose the aliens had no special reason for visiting the Earth, and what they left behind was simply litter left over from a casual stop-over. One of the scientists studying the Zones speculates that this may in fact be the case:
A picnic. Imagine: a forest, a country road, a meadow. A car pulls off the road into the meadow and unloads young men, bottles, picnic baskets, girls, transistor radios, cameras … A fire is lit, tents are pitched, music is played. And in the morning they leave. The animals, birds and insects that were watching the whole night in horror crawl out of their shelters. And what do you see? An oil spill, a gasoline puddle, old spark plugs and oil filters strewn about … Scattered rags, burnt-out bulbs, someone has dropped a monkey wrench. The wheels have tracked mud from some godforsaken swamp … and, of course, there are the remains of the campfire, apple cores, candy wrappers, tins, bottles, someone’s handkerchief, someone’s pen-knife, old ragged newspapers, coins, wilted flowers from another meadow …
Among the alien artefacts are a black stick that produces unlimited energy with which to power machines, a ‘death lamp’ that destroys everything living around it, ‘sprays’ and ‘needles’ whose uses cannot be identified and a ‘golden sphere’ that grants all wishes. The ‘stalkers’ who risked death by entering the Zones in search of such items were not disturbed predators of the kind the word denotes in English. Boris Strugatsky tells us that when he and his brother were writing the book they took the Russian version of the word from a pre-revolutionary translation of Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky & Co. (published in England in book form in 1899), a copy of which one of them picked up in a flea-market. When they used the word to describe the ‘prospectors’ who sought out valuables in the Zones, they meant to call up someone ‘streetwise … a tough and even ruthless youth, who, however, was by no means without a certain boyish chivalry and generosity’.
When they ventured into the Zones, the stalkers were looking for something that would change their lives. The objects they found were unusable and often inexplicable. That did not diminish their worth. Quite the opposite: it was the fact that they could not be understood that made the objects so valuable. If they were intensely sought after, it was because they could not be grasped by the human mind.
For the majority, the alien visitation changes nothing. As the scientist puts it:
We now know that for humanity as a whole, the Visit has largely passed without a trace. For humanity everything passes without a trace. Of course, it’s possible that by randomly pulling chestnuts out of this fire, we’ll eventually stumble on something that will make life on Earth completely unbearable … Humanity as a whole is too stable a system, nothing upsets it.
Even the stalkers hold back from what the aliens have left behind. In Tarkovsky’s film, for which the Strugatsky brothers wrote the screenplay, the visitors have left a Room that has the power to realize anyone’s most cherished dreams. Led through a wasteland by a stalker-guide, a writer and a professor reach the Room’s antechamber. Along the way they talk of what they want when they enter the Room. The writer confesses that he covets a Nobel Prize, the professor says he has come to destroy the Room because it is too dangerous for humankind, while the guide claims all he wants is to help those who are looking for the Room. The guide tells of another stalker, from whom he learnt everything he knows of the Room – a man called Porcupine, who used it to get rich and ended by hanging himself. When they reach the Room the professor decides it is no longer a threat and dismantles the explosive device he has brought with him. The three of them sit together in the antechamber, and after a while rain begins to seep through the ceiling. The film leaves open whether what the aliens have left behind has any human meaning at all. Perhaps the Room reveals what humans most want, and that is why it is so dangerous. Or perhaps the Room is empty. In any event, no one goes in.
‘One would think almost that at the bottom of the well of being one may discover, instead of a mighty God, only the cap and bells of a mad fool.’ The idea of a madcap God appears in Unclay, the story of how God’s messenger John Death is sent to ‘scythe’ or ‘unclay’ two of the inhabitants of the small village of Dodder. Losing the parchment on which their names are written, Death decides to pass the summer in the village. A gay, wanton figure, he passes his time in sexual encounters with village women and rejoicing in his mission of bringing release to suffering humanity. ‘Perhaps I am an illusion,’ Death ruminates near the end of his stay. ‘But, whether real or no, I am no enemy to man.’
Published in 1931, Unclay was the last novel of T. F. Powys and brings together many of the central themes of the reclusive Dorset writer’s work. A profoundly religious man, Theodore Powys lived without the consolations of faith. ‘I am without a belief,’ he wrote. ‘A belief is too easy a road to God.’ When asked why he went so often to the church next to his cottage, it is said he replied, ‘Because it’s quiet.’ When he was dying he declined to receive communion.
Born in 1875 the son of a clergyman and one of three brothers who became writers – the others were John Cowper Powys and Llewelyn Powys – Theodore married a local girl and lived most of his life in a series of remote villages. Refusing to travel and after some years as a farmer devoting himself to writing, he subsisted on a small inheritance from his father. His life was not always as reclusive as he may have wished. As his stories attracted the attention of some in the Bloomsbury Group, he received a stream of literary visitors. For a time he was almost famous. Today he is almost forgotten.
The village life that Powys chronicled was no rural idyll. Like figures in a medieval woodcut, his villagers enact universal passions and endure the sorrows of human beings everywhere. In the human world as Powys saw it, nothing lasts; but neither does anything really change. It was a world he loved, and also wanted to leave behind.
Moved by these conflicting impulses, he turned orthodox religion upside down. Whether conceived as everlasting life in another world or an exit from time into eternity, immortality is the ardent hope of believers. Powys, on the other hand, cherished mortality. Far from death being the supreme evil, it lightens the burden of life. Nothing could be worse, he believed, than living for ever. Even God might come to yearn for the oblivion of death.
Powys’s masterpiece Mr Weston’s Good Wine (1927) tells how a wine merchant arrives in an old, mud-spattered Ford van on a dull November evening in the village of Folly Down. Accompanied by an assistant called Michael, Mr Weston is a short, stout man dressed in an overcoat and wearing a brown felt hat under which his hair is ‘white like wool’. He has come to the village to sell his wines. The wine merchant ‘had once written a prose poem that he had divided into many books’, only to be surprised when he discovered ‘the very persons and place that he had seen in fancy had a real existence in fact’.
Visiting the world he has unknowingly created, Mr Weston wishes he could share the brief lives of human beings. He has come with two wines to sell – the light white wine of love and the dark wine of death. Asked if he drinks the dark wine himself, Mr Weston replies: ‘The day will come when I hope to drink of it … but when I drink my own deadly wine the firm will end.’ He longs for final death, the complete extinction from which the religion established in his name has promised to deliver humankind.
At the end of the story, having dispensed his wines in the village, he has Michael drive him to the summit of Folly Down hill, where the engine stops and the car’s lights go out. He and Michael talk awhile, with Michael mentioning Mr Weston’s ‘old enemy’. Mr Weston asks, ‘don’t you think he would like to be a serpent again – a smaller adder?’ Michael answers: ‘I fancy … that he would prefer to disappear in his own element – fire.’ Mr Weston is delighted.
‘And so he shall!’ cried Mr Weston. ‘Will you be so kind, Michael, as to drop a burning match into the petrol tank?’
‘And we?’ asked Michael.
‘Shall vanish in the smoke,’ replied Mr Weston.
‘Very well,’ said Michael sadly.
Michael did as he was told. In a moment a fierce tongue of flame leaped up from the car; a pillar of smoke rose above the flame and ascended into the heavens. The fire died down, smouldered and went out.
Mr Weston was gone.
More subversive of established religion than any of the humanistic pieties of contemporary atheism, Powys’s story portrays a God whose devoutest wish is to cease to exist. This self-annihilating God appears in a story Powys published in the same year as Unclay. The Only Penitent tells of the Reverend Hayhoe, a country vicar who asks his parishioners to come to him and confess their sins. Never doubting that they will welcome the opportunity to repent, he is puzzled when no one comes to confess and begins to doubt his faith. But then a solitary penitent turns up – a mad old man called Tinker Jar, of whom it was said that ‘when the tinker wasn’t walking upon the everlasting hills, he would use the storm clouds as a chariot.’ Kneeling humbly before Mr Hayhoe, Tinker Jar tells him:
‘I am the Only Penitent … I have come to confess my sin to you.’
‘Can I give you absolution?’ asked Mr Hayhoe, in a low tone.
‘You can,’ replied Jar, ‘for only by the forgiveness of man can I be saved.’
Jar bowed his head and confessed his sins:
‘I crucified my son…’Twas I who created every terror in the earth, the rack, the plague, all despair, all torment … all pain and all evil are created by me.’
Mr Hayhoe responds by reminding Tinker Jar of the beauty of life – the love of a woman and the joy of those the tinker leads to dance in green pastures. The old man is unmoved.
‘I destroy all men with a sword,’ said Jar. ‘I cast them down into the pit, they become nothing.’
‘Hold!’ cried Mr Hayhoe. ‘Is that last word true?’
‘It is,’ answered Jar.
‘Then, in the name of Man,’ said Mr Hayhoe boldly, ‘I forgive your sin; I pardon and deliver you from all your evil; confirm and strengthen you in all goodness, and bring you to everlasting death.’
If Theodore Powys believed in any God – which is doubtful – it was not that of Christianity. A demiurge baffled and saddened by its creation, Powys’s God is filled with remorse at having created a world containing so much sorrow.
The picture Powys presents of the Jewish prophet who came to be seen as the founder of Christianity is touched with Gnostic themes. A rebel against God who was disowned by humanity, Jesus came to destroy what Powys described in an early book, Soliloquies of a Hermit (1918), as ‘our old happiness, our old Godhead, our old immortality’. Jesus tells us to forget any thought of immortality: by accepting our own extinction, we escape a world ruled by death. With this paradox at the heart of his work, Powys may seem like a Gnostic Christian. Yet he says nothing of any gnosis. It is the patient old Earth that endures and consoles. We may vanish from the scene, but the cycle of light and dark continues without end.