Mark Moore's List: Gnosticism

• The first I should like to call the Gnostic model, the other the Christian model. I see the common core of Gnosticism, in all its different forms and versions, as the repudiation of creation.
• Voegelin identified Gnosticism as the central pathology of modern political thought.
• Marxist utopianism serves as a prime example of gnostic modernism

  • utopianism and modernism go together; gnosticism has other connotations
• Benedict has improved on this thesis by identifying repudiation of creation as the heart of gnosticism.
• The doctrine of creation presented in the Book of Genesis tells us that the world is good, that human beings receive this world as an undeserved gift, and that this makes them dependent upon their creator and bound in humility to acknowledge this gift with gratitude. Central to that gratitude is acknowledgment of a responsibility to “till and keep” the earth given to us and not to abuse it. (See “Crunchy Pope, Part One.”)

  • gratitude is the key.
• The fundamental Christian attitude is one of humility, a humility of being, not a merely moralistic one: being as receiving, accepting oneself as created and dependent on “love.”

  • humility grows from gratitude; the opposite of gratitude is the feeling of entitlement.
• Only if the being of creation is good, only if trust in being is fundamentally justified, are humans at all redeemable.

  • Not sure if I follow the logic here; Shiffman echoes this in the last sentence of this paragraph.
• If we do not recognize the created order as harboring a goodness that comes to us from outside and makes claims upon us, we can recognize nothing as good except what is said to be so by our own act of valuing.

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