The Monstrosity of Gnosticism

“Milbank is perhaps correct, then, in seeing that Žižek is so heterodox in his reading that he has crossed the Rubicon into something detached from the stream of Christian thought.”

I feel I should start this article by offering an apology to Matt McManus; although we seem to share the same interests and read the same books (and I am a fan of his writing), I often find myself positioned on the opposite side of the argument. Therefore, I feel prompted occasionally by his generous output of academic work to voice dissent. This is the case with his most recent article, in which he reviews the book The Monstrosity of Christ and in doing so sides with one of the authors, Slavoj Žižek, against the second author, John Milbank, in arguing that modernism and postmodernism do not represent a strong departure from Christian thought but, instead, represent a continuation of the Christian position. In doing so, he suggests that conservative thinkers do not realize this contingency and that Slavoj Žižek’s own Hegelian reading of Christianity represents a sort of authentic Christian growth in comparison to Milbank’s tepid orthodoxy. As I read this, I can feel the presence of the ghost of G.K. Chesterton, imploring me to attack my keyboard and offer a riposte.

One of the central issues which I take with these arguments is that I believe that McManus (and Žižek whom he is drawing upon) conflates Gnostic paradigms of interpreting the world (which emphasize the collapse of the transcendent into the immanent, human experience) with Christian positions (which maintain a separation between a divine transcendence and everyday, immanent experience). This lack of differentiation in Žižek’s analysis between these two religious streams means that Žižek (and McManus), unfortunately, attribute the moments of the genesis of modernist and post-modernist thought to the cultural milieu emerging from Christianity itself, rather than the parallel, contemporary, and often competing religious stream of Gnosticism. This is far more suitable as a point of origin for these modernist and postmodern emergences into culture philosophically. Žižek makes a mistake in naming this as being a sort of “heterodox” natural outcome of taking the presuppositions of Christianity to their end. He does this instead of acknowledging that he has entered into the realm of an entirely different religion in his attempt to collapse the transcendent totally in favor of the immanent. Modernism and postmodernism undeniably draw upon and partly develop from Christianity; however, in their central philosophical tendencies and modus operandi they—generally—deviate strongly from this and are far more akin to this Gnostic paradigm, which emphasizes the collapse of the transcendent into immanence, self-creation through knowledge, and release from limitation. Žižek states:

“God’s manifestation in human history is part of his very essence. In this way, God is no longer a monarch who eternally dwells in his absolute transcendence—the very difference between eternal essence and its manifestation (the divine ‘economy’) should be abandoned.”