Gnostic Insights

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. It’s been a few weeks since I recorded a live episode, and here I am. Now, I don’t have any particular Gnostic insights for you today. However, I do have some interesting news to share and a very strange experience I had a couple of days ago. So, let’s start with the news.

One of the reasons I don’t have a new episode for you this week, in particular a philosophical episode, is because I’ve been working on a stage play called A Midwife’s Trial. I wrote this play about 15 years ago, and I pulled it out of the drawer a couple weeks ago and decided to polish it and get it on its feet. I went with a friend to a little theater a few weeks ago, and they were putting on 12 Angry Men. Now, if you’ve never seen the movie 12 Angry Men, the original, there’s a newer movie, really bad, but the old classic movie starring Henry Fonda and 11 other very well-known actors of the black and white movie era—it’s a great movie. You should see it. It’s the story of the jurors in a deliberation room.

They’ve just watched a trial, and they’re in the deliberation room. The entire movie or play takes place around the deliberation table, and they are the 12 Angry Men, the jury.

My play is also a trial story, but it’s the trial side of it, so it makes like a nice bookend to 12 Angry Men. So, that’s why it reminded me to get my play back out and try it again. I had sent it around to play festivals and whatnot about 15 years ago. It made one final round, but didn’t win any prizes, so I put it away.

It’s based upon my doctoral dissertation, The Trial of a California Midwife, and it is an enactment of actual trial testimony from a couple of midwives, an obstetrician, and then the two attorneys, one for the prosecution and one for the defense, and of course the judge. Those are all the characters. And then it cuts back and forth to a reenactment of this difficult birth that is the subject of the trial. So, it’s a very interesting play. I think it’s fascinating personally, and I’m hoping that audiences will too.

I went ahead and contacted the creative director of the theater where I watched 12 Angry Men, and he says, yeah, sounds good. We’ll get you on the schedule for August. So, now it looks like I’m going to have a stage play staged in the town of Phoenix, Oregon. It’s between Ashland and Medford in southern Oregon. I’m going to produce and direct the play myself, which means that for the first time in my theater experience, I will have the power of casting, which is very exciting as well. Anyway, so that’s a little piece of exciting news for me, but it’s been taking up my mind and it’s been taking up my writing time. So, that’s my excuse for not having any new Gnostic Insights episodes for you. And if you live in the southern Oregon area or northern California, I do hope you will come and see the play.

I’m also in the process of having the Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic Myth children’s book turned into an animated video. That’s very exciting. I got together with a fellow on LinkedIn, and he’s done a great job of animating these still pictures that are in the children’s book. So, we’re in the final polishing stage of that also. That should be available before too long on YouTube or wherever I can figure out it should go.

Logos Falls
What I mainly want to tell you about today is a very strange experience I had this week, day before yesterday. In November, my insurance coverage changed, and my primary care provider was not going to be covered by the insurance company that I had been with. So, I had to look for a new primary care provider, and it just so happens I don’t live very far from the VA hospital in White City, Oregon.

It used to be an Army base in World War II, and then they changed it into a Veterans Administration hospital. And, by the way, part of the reason I linked into them, is because I actually live in one of the barracks from White City.

My historic home is two parts. Half of the house is an 1875 farmhouse. That’s a two-story farmhouse, and I rent out that part of the house as an Airbnb rental, and it can accommodate parties of six pretty easily. The other side of my house is a set of Army barracks that were stuck onto the farmhouse around 1949, after the war was over, and White City was disassembling itself as an Army base, and people bought the old barracks as scrap lumber. So, the man that lived in my house in the 1940s bought two Army barracks and stuck them on the side of this farmhouse, and I live in one of those Army barracks. The other barracks is the garage. I like living in the barracks. It’s a very nice space, very cabin-y feeling, built in the 1930s, all local wood.

So, I signed up with the VA to be my primary care physicians, and I have to tell you, very nice people. I’ve been to a chiropractor, an acupuncturist, and a primary care person there at the VA over the last couple of months. All three of them from other countries. That’s kind of funny to me. From Bulgaria, from Sri Lanka, and I didn’t even ask where the acupuncturist is from, but he sounds Eastern European. Very nice people and very competent care providers. Well, anyway, back to the weird part of the story.

Day before yesterday, I went out to White City, my first appointment with their chiropractor.

The VA hospital complex there, is made up of old two-story brick buildings. I think they probably replaced what must have been earlier wooden buildings when World War II was going on, and so these are really boring-looking boxes of brick buildings, two-story boxes, and they’re all right near each other and connected by corridors or breezeways. My appointment was in the upper floor of building 209, but you enter through the lower floor of 201, and there are like eight buildings you’ve got to get through to get to 209, and they’re all connected. That’s the way you get to building 209. The parking lot’s in front of building 201.

So, I had brought a book with me, a library book, a very good library book that I’m enjoying reading that my brother Bill had recommended. He’s loving it. It’s called Culpability, and it’s about a car crash and who was at fault. Very well written and philosophical at the same time, and it includes AI and all kinds of stuff, self-driving automobiles and whatnot. So, I wanted to bring the book with me to read in the waiting room.

Not that I’ve ever had to wait, because here’s the peculiar thing about this VA facility that I’ve been going to—I seem to be the only patient. It’s like I’m in one of those Reddit spaces called Mall World or Liminal Spaces, if any of you have ever been into any of those types of Reddit discussion groups, because there’s hardly any patients. Then the only people I see as I’m walking, and it takes, honestly, it takes about 20 minutes or a half hour to get from where I walk in to get back there to the chiropractor’s office. Maybe I saw three patients in all of that time.

Corridor after corridor after corridor with empty waiting rooms, and the only people you see is glancing into office rooms, on the right and left, where people are working at their computers on whatever the heck they’re working on, because I never see patients there. It’s very strange. So, that in itself is very much like this place called Liminal Space or Mall World on Reddit.

Anyway, I had brought my dog. He was waiting for me in the car. He’s a small dog, and so he has basically a high chair set up in the passenger seat, and he sits there to be able to see out the window as we drive along.

Well, I know he likes to get in the driver’s seat and lay down when I’m doing errands and out of the car, so I set my book down on the roof of the car and straightened out a towel on the driver’s seat, and then I went into the building.

Now, I lost the book somewhere. It’s a library book. I lost a library book. I don’t know if I left it on the roof of the car or if somewhere between 201 and 209. I did use a ladies room, and it had a couple of stalls in there, and it had a window with windowsill. I didn’t want to leave my purse out there on the windowsill, but I didn’t mind leaving the library book on the windowsill, so I took the purse into the stall with me, and then I came out. And by the time I got to the chiropractor’s office—of course, I was the only patient there—I didn’t have the book anymore.

At first I thought I’d left it on the roof of the car when I was straightening the towel for the dog, so I said to the corpsman who was helping the chiropractor, oh darn, I left my book on the roof of the car. I hope nobody steals it. When the appointment was over and I made my long way back to the car, there was no book on the roof of the car, so either someone had stolen it, I figured, or I had left it in the bathroom on the windowsill instead. I wasn’t sure whether I left it on… I know I set it on the roof of the car, but perhaps I picked it up and took it into the bathroom.

So I went back into the building and attempted to retrace my steps between 201 and 209 to look for, first, the stairwell I had taken—and that’s another thing that figures in these liminal spaces stories–stairwells. The stairwell I had taken from the first floor to the second floor in one of those buildings, I don’t know which one, had yellow daisies. It was a yellow flower motif painted on the stairwell walls. All of the stairwells have different motifs. So I was looking for the yellow stairwell that I took to the second floor and I couldn’t find it.

So I went back and forth all this time looking for that yellow stairwell, couldn’t find it, and I’m passing through these empty hallways, and when I say there were very few patients, the weird thing about White City VA, of course, is that it seems that most of the patients that I’ve seen there are Vietnam or Korean veterans because they’re very elderly and usually in wheelchairs or walkers. I myself am not a spring chicken, but I can walk pretty good. Well, anyway, so that’s the other weird thing about it. The only people you see are elderly.

So I’m looking for the yellow stairwell. I can’t find it, and I opened all those doors. I could not find the right ladies room, either, and I, of course, didn’t see the book. So I spent probably an hour and a half combing the hallways of 201-209 looking for a stairwell I couldn’t find and looking for a restroom I couldn’t find and looking for this book that I lost.

But here’s the weird thing about the whole experience—I mean, I spent all this time—it was just like a dream. I do have a repetitive dream where I’m searching for something that I can’t find. So I thought to myself, oh my god, this is just like my dream, only it was for real. And it’s true. I couldn’t find it. Here’s how I would characterize it: I lost an object day before yesterday in a very confusing place in a room that I could not locate accessed by a stairwell that apparently doesn’t exist. So that was one weird experience. I wanted to share that with you for some reason.

I figured, oh no, this is really going to trigger my dream, but I haven’t had that dream in the last two days. I just had the actual experience. If this prompts anything in you, please share it with us.

I’d love to hear back from you. God bless us all, and onward and upward.

Universal Salvation, part 4

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. I’m going to do my best to wrap up this review of David Bentley Hart’s book, That All Shall Be Saved, Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation. And I hope you understand, particularly those of you who are Christians that are listening to this, that I do all of this in the name of the Father. It’s not to tear down Christianity. It’s to uphold the mission of the Messiah, which has been lost over the past several hundred years of Christianity.

And so this talk of universal salvation is a necessary component of believing in the glory of God. Because universal salvation of all souls, not only all humans, but the dogs, the cats, the birds, the grasses, all living things, have to return to the Father, or else the Anointed loses power. The Father loses parts of himself.

Okay, let’s get back to David Bentley Hart. So we’re going to run through these four meditations that are the body of his book. The first meditation is, Who is God? He says,

The New Testament, to a great degree, consists in the eschatological interpretation of Hebrew Scripture’s story of creation, finding in Christ as eternal Logos and risen Lord, the unifying term of beginning and end.

There’s no more magnificent meditation on this vision than Gregory of Nyssa’s description of the progress of all persons towards union with God in the one pleroma, the one fullness of the whole Christ. All spiritual wills moving, to use this loving image, from outside the temple walls to the temple precincts, and finally beyond the ages into the very sanctuary of the glory as one.

Okay, let me jump in here to say, do you notice that the New Testament words, when you use the correct translations, are the same as the translations in our Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi? Logos is the eternal spirit of humanity and the risen Lord. The Fullness is the one pleroma, the whole Christ. And in this statement, it’s saying that all that is spiritual, which includes the spirits that reside within each of us, will all move as one into the pleroma of the Christ. That’s who Christ is to us. He’s the head of our pleroma. And when I speak of pleromas, I always picture that pyramidal shape, that hierarchical shape, and the capstone is the head.

We 2nd order powers are children of the 1st order powers. The 3rd order powers are the Army of Christ that have come to redeem us.

When Paul spoke of this, he was applying it literally to the temple in Jerusalem, where there were the walls of the temple, and most of the people were outside of the walls, and some of the people were in the temple precincts. And finally, the very sanctuary of the glory, where only the priests were allowed. These are the three parts that were mentioned, and these are archetypal of the movement of humanity, Hart is saying, from the outside of the pleroma of the Christ, into the pleroma of the Christ, and then into the very glory of God through the Christ.

On page 90, Hart says,

If one truly believes that traditional Christian language about God’s goodness and the theological grammar to which it belongs are not empty, then the God of eternal retribution and pure sovereignty proclaimed by so much of Christian tradition is not and cannot possibly be the God of self-outpouring love revealed in Christ. If God is the good creator of all, he must also be the savior of all without fail, who brings to himself all he has made, including all rational wills, and only thus returns to himself in all that goes forth from him.

And that’s the end of the chapter, Who is God? And that pretty much states my basic belief on why everyone is going to heaven, because we all come from the Father, and therefore we all must return to the Father because the Father cannot be diminished in any way. And if he lost us, he’d be diminished. Do you see?

The second meditation is, What is Judgment? And the subtitle is A Reflection on Biblical Eschatology. And eschatology, that’s one of those big theological words that just means the end times, the end of time. On page 93, Hart says,

There’s a general sense among most Christians that the notion of an eternal hell is explicitly and unremittingly advanced in the New Testament. And yet, when we go looking for it in the actual pages of the text, it proves remarkably elusive. The whole idea is, for instance, entirely absent from the Pauline corpus as even the thinnest shadow of a hint, nor is it anywhere patently present in any of the other epistolary texts.

There is one verse in the Gospels, Matthew 25-46 that, traditionally understood, offers what seems the strongest evidence for the idea, but then now Hart’s going to explain how that can’t be true. And then he says there are also perhaps a couple of verses from Revelation, and he says nothing’s clear in Revelation, so he’s not going to go there. But,

What in fact the New Testament provides us with are a number of fragmentary and fantastic images that can be taken in any number of ways, arranged according to our prejudices and expectations, and declared literal or figural or hyperbolic as our desires dictate.

It’s why people can make the case for eternal damnation, but you can also make the case for not eternal damnation, because it’s so metaphorical. On page 94, Hart says,

Nowhere is there any description of a kingdom of perpetual cruelty presided over by Satan, as though he were some kind of Chthonian god. On the other hand, however, there are a remarkable number of passages in the New Testament, several of them from Paul’s writings, that appear instead to promise a final salvation of all persons and all things, and in the most unqualified terms.

How did some images become mere images in the general Christian imagination, while others became exact documentary portraits of some final reality? If one can be swayed simply by the brute force of arithmetic, it seems worth noting that, among the apparently most explicit statements on the last things, the universalist statements are by far the more numerous.

And then he lists a number of verses from the New Testament that speak of universal salvation, over 20 of them at least, and I’ll give you just a couple.

Romans 5.18 says,

So then, just as through one transgression came condemnation for all human beings, so also through one act of righteousness came a rectification of life for all human beings.

And jumping in from the Gnostic sense, he doesn’t say the fall of one human, he doesn’t say through Adam, he says one transgression—and we would call that one transgression the Fall of Logos, the fall of the Aeon, which is a higher order being than we are.

Or Corinthians 15.22 says,

For just as in Adam all die, so also in the anointed Christ all will be given life.

I would say where it says for just as in Adam all die, it’s not because Adam ate the apple, it’s that we humans who are outside of the Christ, we’re outside of the walls of the temple, we are in the pleroma of Adam—we are in the pleroma of human beings. When you accept the anointed, then you move into the pleroma, or you nest up higher into the pleroma of the Christ. That would be the Gnostic way of saying that.

Second Corinthians 5.14 says,

For the love of the anointed constrains us, having reached this judgment, that one died on behalf of all, all then have died.

And of course that one is the Anointed, and He died on behalf of everyone.

Or even Romans 11:32,

For God shut up everyone in obstinacy, so that he might show mercy to everyone.

And there’s a long discussion in the chapter about how God’s chosen—the original elect, that being the Hebrew nation—has been obstinate about accepting Jesus of Nazareth as the Anointed. And so he’s saying that everyone is shut up in obstinacy, that’s the Hebrews, so that he might show mercy to everyone. And that is, they’re temporarily set up in obstinacy so that the message of the Anointed can be preached far and wide, before death and after death, we Gnostics would say, and not be just constrained to only the Hebrews. That’s why the Hebrews are set aside for the moment, so that those outside the temple walls can also come to Christ.

And then there are 19 more verses after this, and he lists them all between pages 96 and page 102. And if you are a theological scholar or a concerned Christian that wants to know if this is heresy or not, I really suggest you buy the book, That All Shall Be Saved, by David Bentley Hart, and read it carefully from cover to cover. Jumping to page 116, Hart says,

There are those metaphors used by Jesus that seem to imply that the punishment of the world to come will be of only limited duration. For example, “if remanded to prison, you shall most certainly not emerge until you pay the very last pittance.” Or, “the unmerciful slave is delivered to the torturers until he should repay everything he owes.”

And Hart says it seems as if this until should be taken with some seriousness.

Some wicked slaves, moreover, “will be beaten with many blows, while others will be beaten with few blows.”

Hart says, of course, everyone will be “salted with fire.” This fire is explicitly that of the Gehenna. But salting here is an image of purification and preservation, for salt is good. Gehenna is the Valley of Hinnom from the Old Testament, and that is where, outside of the city of Jerusalem, the refuse was burned, and even carrion and bodies were burned. And that is why it is considered to be a hellish place. And it has become a metaphor in the time of Jesus for the purging fire, the Aeonian chastening for the good.

Hart says we might even find some support for the purgatorial view of the Gehenna from the Greek of Matthew 25:46, which is the supposedly conclusive verse on the side of the Infernalist Orthodoxy, where the word used for the punishment of the last day is kolasis, which most properly refers to remedial chastisement, rather than timoria, which more properly refers to retributive justice.

So, the fire of the judgment. What is judgment? The fire is the chastening fire, the fire of personal guilt and remorse over the sins one has done, that causes one to repent and turn to redemption. Hart says,

It is not clear in any event that the fourth gospel, [and the fourth gospel, that’s the gospel of John, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John], it is not clear in any event that the fourth gospel foretells any “last judgment,” in the sense of a real additional judgment that accomplishes more than has already happened in Christ. To see His words as pointing toward and fulfilled within his own crucifixion and resurrection, wherein all things were judged and all things redeemed. The kingdom has indeed drawn very near, and even now is being revealed. The hour indeed has come. The judge who is judged in our place is also the resurrection and the life that has always already succeeded and exceeded the time of condemnation. All of heaven and of hell meet in those three days. . .

Hell appears in the shadow of the cross as what has always already been conquered, as what Easter leaves in ruins, to which we may flee from the transfiguring light of God if we so wish, but where we can never finally come to rest, for being only a shadow, it provides nothing to cling to.

And he attributes that concept of hell being only a shadow to Gregory of Nyssa, although we would attribute it to the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi which came before Gregory of Nyssa.

Hell exists so long as it exists only as the last terrible residue of a fallen creation’s enmity to God, the lingering effects of a condition of slavery that God has conquered universally in Christ and will ultimately conquer individually in every soul.

This age has passed away already, however long it lingers on its own aftermath, and thus in the Age to Come, [and that’s capital A, Age, which we would interpret as the Aeons to Come, the Aeonian Pleroma to Come], and beyond all ages, all shall come to the kingdom prepared for them from before the foundation of the world.

And that’s the chapter, What is Judgment? The third meditation or chapter of Hart is called What is a Person? A Reflection on the Divine Image. It says over and over in the Bible that we are made in the image of God. Man is made in the image of God. That is the divine image. On page 131, Hart says,

Christians down the centuries have excelled at converting the good tidings of God’s love in Christ into something dreadful, irrational, and morally horrid.

[And we covered that in depth in the previous three episodes, if you want to go back there.] On page 132, Hart says,

I suspect that no figure in Christian history has suffered a greater injustice as a result of the desperate inventiveness of the Christian moral imagination than the Apostle Paul, since it was the violent misprision of his theology of grace, starting with the great Augustine, it grieves me to say, that gave rise to almost all of these grim distortions of the Gospel.

Aboriginal guilt, predestination, (ante praevisa merita), the eternal damnation of unbaptized infants, the real existence of vessels of wrath, and so on. All of these odious and incoherent dogmatic motifs, so to speak, and others equally nasty, have been ascribed to Paul. And yet, each and every one of them, not only is incompatible with the guiding themes of Paul’s proclamation of Christ’s triumph and of God’s purpose in election, but is something like their perfect inversion.

Well, isn’t that interesting? Because we already know that the archons represent the inversions of the Aeons of the Pleroma. And so, although Hart doesn’t realize he’s implying this, to say that what has come down to us in Christian tradition through Augustine is the perfect inversion of what Paul was actually saying about universal salvation, which means, by definition, that it’s the demiurgic or the archonic version of salvation. Isn’t that interesting? I mean, that is what I have been implying, that what has been taken to be Christian tradition for the last couple of thousand years is actually a diminishment of the power of Christ and the power and love of the Father. By saying that people can be lost and condemned to eternal torture, that is sacrilegious to me. That is the heresy. And that is what Hart is saying here. He goes on to say on page 133,

This is all fairly odd, really. Paul’s argument in those chapters is not difficult to follow. What preoccupies him from beginning to end is the agonizing mystery that the Messiah of Israel has come, and yet so few of the children of the house of Israel have accepted the fact, even while so many from outside the covenant have.

And Paul wonders, how is the promised Messiah rejected by so many, yet so many outside the temple walls have accepted the Messiah? There are far more Christians than there are Jews at the moment. Why is that? Paul was wondering. Hart says,

Paul’s is not an abstract question regarding which individual human beings are the saved and which are the damned. In fact, by the end of the argument, the former category, [that is the saved], proves to be vastly larger than that of the elect or the called, while the latter category, [that is the damned], makes no appearance at all.

Jumping down the page, he says, “so then what if,” so now he’s going to go ahead and quote Paul here, Romans 9:19, Paul says,

So then what if God should show his power by preserving vessels suitable only for wrath, keeping them solely for destruction, in order to provide an instructive counterpoint to the riches of the glory he lavishes on vessels prepared for mercy, whom he has called from among the Jews and the Gentiles alike.

For as it happens, rather than offering a solution to the quandary in which he finds himself, Paul is simply restating that quandary in its bleakest possible form, at the very brink of despair. He does not stop there, however, because he knows that this cannot be the correct answer. It is so obviously preposterous, in fact, that a wholly different solution must be sought, one that makes sense and that will not require the surrender either of Paul’s reason or of his confidence in God’s righteousness.

Hence, contrary to his own warnings, Paul does indeed continue to question God’s justice, and he spends the next two chapters unambiguously rejecting the provisional answer, the vessels of wrath hypothesis, altogether, so as to reach a completely different and far more glorious conclusion—God blesses everyone. Romans 10: 11, 12.

And by the way, in Gnostic gospel, we would say the law is actually the Demiurge’s rules for human behavior, because our self-will makes us otherwise uncontrollable. Because to the Father above, the only law is love. When we act out of love, all else follows.

Going on, Hart says,

As for the believing remnant of Israel, [Romans 11:5], it turns out that they have been elected not as the limited number of the saved within Israel, but as the earnest through which all of Israel will be saved. They are waiting for the Anointed to come and take the place of the King of Israel, King of the Jews.

King of the Jews is one of the titles of the Messiah. That means the capstone of their pleroma. You see? It’s all of these pyramidal shapes that are first designed up there in the Fullness of God, the pleroma. What Paul is saying is that the Jews that are in the pleroma of Israel, it’s their remnant that makes them holy. It’s their remnant that is the spiritual part, the higher part, the called part, the elect part of the pleroma of the nation of the Hebrews. And it is through those elect that all of the Jews will be saved, ultimately.

Hart says,

For the time being, true, a part of Israel is hardened, but this will remain the case only until the ”full entirety” [that is the pleroma] of the Gentiles enter in. The unbelievers among the children of Israel may have been allowed to stumble, but God will never allow them to fall.

Hart’s just saying that Israel’s reluctance or slowness to believing that Jesus is the Messiah is just slowing down the progress of history to give everyone else a chance to catch up to it. Quoting Hart again,

We’re in Romans now, 11:11.

This then is the radiant answer dispelling the shadows of Paul’s grim what if in the ninth chapter of Romans. It’s clarion negative. It turns out that there is no final illustrative division between the vessels of wrath and vessels of mercy. That was a grotesque, all too human thought that can now be chased away for good. God’s wisdom far surpasses ours, and his love can accomplish all that it intends.

“He has bound everyone in disobedience so as to show mercy to everyone.” [That’s Romans 11:32.] All are vessels of wrath precisely so that all may be made vessels of mercy. . .

That Paul’s great attempt to demonstrate that God’s election is not some arbitrary act of predilective exclusion, but instead a providential means for bringing about the unrestricted inclusion of all persons, has been employed for centuries to advance what is quite literally the very teaching that he went to such great lengths explicitly to reject. . .

Yet this is still not my principal point. I want to say something far more radical. I want to say that there is no way in which persons can be saved as persons except in and with all other persons. This may seem an exorbitant claim, but I regard it as no more than an acknowledgment of certain obvious truths about the fragility, dependency, and exigency of all that make us who and what we are.

Oh, this is a very interesting portion. Okay, listen to this. Jumping to page 149.

No soul is who or what it is in isolation, and no soul’s sufferings can be ignored without the sufferings of a potentially limitless number of other souls being ignored as well. And so it seems if we allow the possibility that even so much as a single soul might slip away unmourned into everlasting misery, the ethos of heaven turns out to be “every soul for itself”—which is also, curiously enough, precisely the ethos of hell.

But Christians are obliged, it seems clear, to take seriously the eschatological imagery of scripture. And there all talk of salvation involves the promise of a corporate beatitude, a kingdom of love and knowledge, a wedding feast, a city of the redeemed, the body of Christ, which means that the hope Christians cherish must in some way involve the preservation of whatever is deepest in and most essential to personality rather than a perfect escape from personality. But finite persons are not self-enclosed individual substances. They are dynamic events of relation to what is other than themselves.

And then Hart summons up the idea of a single recurrent image, he says,

That of a parent whose beloved child has grown into quite an evil person, but who remains a parent nevertheless, and therefore keeps and cherishes countless tender memories of the innocent and delightful being that has now become lost in the labyrinth of that damaged soul. Is all of that, those memories, those anxieties and delights, those feelings of desperate love, really to be consigned to the fire as just so much combustible chaff? Must it all be forgotten or willfully ignored for heaven to enter into that parent’s soul? And if so, is this not the darkest tragedy ever composed? And is God not then a tragedian utterly merciless in his poetic omnipotence? Who or what is that being whose identity is no longer determined by its relation to that child?

[Skipping to page 153] Personhood as such is not a condition possible for an isolated substance. It is an act, not a thing. And it is achieved only in and through a history of relations with others. We are finite beings in a state of becoming, and in us there is nothing that is not an action, dynamism, an emergence into a fuller or a retreat into a more impoverished existence. And so, as I said in my first meditation, we are those others who make us. Spiritual personality is not mere individuality, nor is personal love one of its merely accidental conditions or extrinsic circumstances.

A person is first and foremost a limitless capacity, a place where the all shows itself with a special inflection. We exist as the place of the other, to borrow a phrase from Michel de Certeau. Certainly, this is the profoundest truth in the doctrine of resurrection. That we must rise from the dead to be saved is a claim not simply about resumed corporeality, whatever that might turn out to be, but more crucially, about the fully restored existence of the person as socially, communally, corporately constituted. Each person is a body within the body of humanity, which exists in its proper nature only as the body of Christ.

Well, that’s pretty neat. See, we are nested fractal hierarchies of the pleroma of the Fullness of God. And if you’ve been with me a while, you know what that long and complicated sentence means. Picture a pyramidal shape, picture every living part of your body as building up the pyramid, and your conscious self is the capstone of that pleroma that makes up your body. Now, you are then nested along with all other humans into the pleroma of humanity, the body of humanity, also called the body of Adam. Just the way our cells nest up into building us, we nest up into building the great body of humanity.

And then, Hart is saying this body of humanity exists in its proper nature only as the body of Christ, because when we then nest up and make Christ the king of our pleroma, we are nested into the Fullness of Christ. And that is what the final salvation resting point is. When we all finally pass through the final judgment and nest up into Christ, then we’re all nested up into the pleroma, we’re all nested up into the Son. And there we are. And we will still have our lives the way the Fullness has their lives. They dream together as one of paradise. And that’s where we’re headed.

Hart says,

Our personhood must truly consist not only in the immediate love of those close at hand, but also in our disposition toward those whom we, by analogy, care for from afar. Or even in the abstract, for the most essential law of charity, of love, when it is truly active, is that it must inexorably grow beyond all immediately discernible boundaries in order to be fulfilled and to continue to be active.

And all of those in whom each of us is implicated, and who are implicated in each of us, are themselves in turn implicated and intertwined in countless others, and on and on without limit. We belong of necessity to an indissoluble co-inherence of souls.

And I think that down here on the physical level, on the material plane, the demiurgic version of that shared coherence of all souls together is quantum entanglement. That’s the Demiurge’s material version of how we are implicated and intertwined with every other soul. And now he goes on to say something that’s very Gnostic. On the next page, Hart says,

There may be within each of us—indeed there surely is—that divine spark, that divine light or spark of nous or spirit or atman that is the abiding presence of God in us, the place of radical sustaining divine imminence, nearer to me than my inmost parts. But that light is the one undifferentiated ground of our existence, not the particularity of our personal existence, in and with one another.

Oh, hey, there it is. That’s what I’m always saying. This one spark, that’s what we call the big S Self. And the particularity of our personal existence is what we here at Gnostic Insights label as our Ego. So we are made up of the Self that we share with all others and that we share with the Son, but we are also our own individual existence. That’s why we can’t just blink out into nothingness and not be missed, because we have our particularity, and it has its own place in the hierarchy. Then Hart says,

But then this is to say that either all persons must be saved or that none can be. [He says,] God could, of course, erase each of the elect as whoever they once were by shattering their memories and attachments like the gates of hell and then raise up some other being in each of their places, thus converting the will of each into an idiot bliss stripped of the loves that made him or her this person, associations and attachments and pity and tenderness and all the rest. If that were the case, only in hell could any of us possess something like a personal destiny, tormented perhaps by the memories of the loves we squandered or betrayed, but not deprived of them altogether.

[Jumping to 157, he says], I am not I in myself alone, but only in all others. If then anyone is in hell, I too am partly in hell. . . For the whole substance of Christian faith is the conviction that another has already and decisively gone down into that abyss for us to set all the prisoners free, even from the chains of their own hatred and despair, and hence the love that has made all of us who we are and that will continue throughout eternity to do so, cannot ultimately be rejected by anyone.

Amen. And that’s the end of the third meditation. Now the fourth meditation, we just don’t even have time to get to. It’s called, What is Freedom? And if you want to hear the fourth meditation in depth, please text me in the comments and ask for more David Bentley Hart That All Shall Be Saved. But as for now, this treatise on what is freedom? I’ll actually just jump to the last page and skip all of the explanations.

The fourth meditation, What is Freedom? is all about free will. I guess I’ll include it in some future episode about free will and just quote Hart extensively in that episode. But to close it out, Hart says,

It would make no sense to suggest that God, who is by nature not only the source of being, but also the good and the true and the beautiful and everything else that makes spirits exist as rational beings, would truly be all in all if the consummation of all things were to eventuate merely in a kind of extrinsic divine supremacy over creation.

But God is not a god, [or as we would say, the God Above All Gods is not the Demiurge, is how we would put it in Gnostic terms]. And his final victory, as described in scripture, will consist not merely in his assumption of perfect supremacy over all, but also in his ultimately being all in all. Could there then be a final state of things in which God is all in all, while yet there existed rational creatures whose inward worlds consisted in an eternal rejection of and rebellion against God as the sole and consuming and fulfilling end of the rational will’s most essential nature? If this fictive and perverse interiority were to persist into eternity, would God’s victory over every sphere of being really be complete? Or would that small miserable residual flicker of Promethean defiance remain forever as the one space in creation from which God has been successfully expelled? Surely it would, so it too must pass away.

All right, that ends this long episode, because I was trying to wrap up the entire book, which I almost did. Write to me, tell me what you think of this sort of thing. I’d especially like to hear from people who used to be Christians, or who were raised in the church, and who fell away from the church because of some of these very problems and conundrums that we’ve been talking about for the last four episodes.

God bless us all, and onward and upward!

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Welcome back to Gnostic Insights. Today is part three of my book report on David Bentley Hart’s book called That All Shall Be Saved, Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation. The past two weeks we covered the beginning of his book, the Introduction.

I’m going to begin this section by reading out of his final remarks, because he does a good job of simplifying his arguments here at the end of the book. So we’ll start with that. Hart says on page 201,

It may offend against our egalitarian principles today, but it was commonly assumed among the very educated of the early church that the better part of humanity was something of a hapless rabble who could be made to behave responsibly only by the most terrifying coercions of their imaginations.

Belief in universal salvation may have been far more widespread in the first four or five centuries of Christian history than it was in all the centuries that followed, but it was never, as a rule, encouraged in any general way by those in authority in the church. Maybe there are great many among us who can be convinced to be good only through the threat of endless torture at the hands of an indefatigably vindictive god. Even so much as hint that the purifying flames of the age to come will at last be extinguished, and perhaps a good number of us will begin to think like the mafioso who refuses to turn state’s evidence because he is sure he can do the time.

Bravado is, after all, the chief virtue of the incorrigibly stupid. He goes on to say, I have never had much respect for the notion of the blind leap of faith, even when that leap is made in the direction of something beautiful and ennobling. I certainly cannot respect it when it is made in the direction of something intrinsically loathsome and degrading. And I believe that this is precisely what the Infernalist position, no matter what form it takes, necessarily involves.

And to remind you, if you didn’t hear the past two episodes, Infernalist refers to the notion that there is an unending hell of pain and torture for the unregenerate or the unrepentant. Further down page 202, Hart says,

I honestly, perhaps guilelessly, believe that the doctrine of eternal hell is prima facie nonsensical for the simple reason that it cannot even be stated in Christian theological terms without a descent into equivocity, which is equivocation, so precipitous and total that nothing but edifying gibberish remains.

To say that, on the one hand, God is infinitely good, perfectly just, and inexhaustibly loving, and that, on the other, he has created a world under such terms as oblige him either to impose or to permit the imposition of eternal misery on finite rational beings is simply to embrace a complete contradiction. All becomes mystery, but only in the sense that it requires a very mysterious ability to believe impossible things.

[Jumping down the page, he says,] Can we imagine logically, I mean not merely intuitively, that someone still in torment after a trillion ages, or then a trillion trillion, or then a trillion vigintillion, is in any meaningful sense the same agent who contracted some measurable quantity of personal guilt in that tiny, ever more vanishingly insubstantial gleam of an instant that constituted his or her terrestrial life? And can we do this even while realizing that, at that point, his or her sufferings have, in a sense, only just begun, and, in fact, will always have only just begun? What extraordinary violence we must do both to our reason and to our moral intelligence, not to mention simple good taste, to make this horrid notion seem palatable to ourselves.

And all because we have somehow, foolishly, allowed ourselves to be convinced that this is what we must believe. Really, could we truly believe it all apart from either profound personal fear or profound personal cruelty? Which is why, again, I do not believe that most Christians truly believe what they believe they believe.

So, what he’s saying here, what I’ve been talking to you about, is the idea that God, the God Above All Gods, what we call the Father in Gnosticism, would condemn people to everlasting torment, everlasting torment, with no other goal than to punish, because they’re never going to get out of it. That’s what everlasting means. And so it’s just punishment for the sake of punishment, and that that great, unlimitable God would impose this punishment on little, limited, finite beings who only lived a brief millisecond of time in the great span of time of God. That God would create these people for the purpose, basically, of condemning them to everlasting torment.

You see, that is not even rational. It doesn’t make any sense. Not if you believe God is good. It’s impossible. Now, if you think that God is evil, well, then that’s not God, is it? By definition, if you believe that God is cruel and vindictive and unreasonable, well, that’s not the God Above All Gods. And this should come as relief to those of you who think you can’t believe in God, because God is so cruel and vindictive.

Perhaps you were raised in an extremely cruel household with extremely vindictive parents, or schoolteachers, or somebody got to you and, in the name of God, inflicted cruelty upon you. Then you have come to accidentally transpose their human cruelty onto God, because they told you to. But that’s not God, by definition, you see? And when I say, by definition, that means, like, cold is not hot, by definition. Cold is cold. And if you’re going to start arguing, oh no, cold is hot, well, then you’re not talking about cold, you’re talking about hot. Do you see what I mean? And if you have been rejecting God, the God Above All Gods, because you have this view of God as merciless and vindictive, cruel, illogical, unfair, unjust, take comfort, because that’s not God you’re talking about.

Now, it may be the small g god of this world. It could be the guy whose best friend is Satan, because remember, that is a small g god of confusion. And its main job is to cause you to forget that you come from transcendent goodness, that you come from above, from the God Above All Gods, and that you do have freedom. You do have free will. You are meant to inherit joy. You are to do good works, and to be happy, and to be in love, and to love everybody else.

Don’t let some evil archon, or evil Demiurge, or evil human, redefine God in such a way that you reject God, because that’s the mistake. That’s a categorical error. And that’s why I say, take comfort, have joy, receive the love that was meant for you.

Throwing out the baby with the bath water means to reject the Good because you can’t sort it out from the bad. Refusing to accept God or Christ because you reject the flawed Christian Church is an example of throwing out the baby with the bath water.

Okay, back to the book. On page 205, Hart says,

It was not always thus. Let me at least shamelessly idealize the distant past for a moment. In its dawn, the gospel was a proclamation principally of a divine victory that had been won over death and sin, and over the spiritual powers of rebellion against the big G God that dwells on high, and here below, and under the earth. It announced itself truly as the good tidings of a campaign of divine rescue on the part of a loving God, who by the sending of his Son into the world, and even into the kingdom of death, had liberated his creatures from slavery to a false and merciless master, and had opened a way into the kingdom of heaven, in which all of creation would be glorified by the direct presence of big G God, [or the Father, as we call him in Gnosticism].

And by the way, this paragraph that I just read about early Christianity, is entirely consistent with this Valentinian Christianity that I share with you here. That is the entire purpose of we second-order creatures being sent down here below, to bring the good tidings of life and love and liberty to the fallen Demiurge, and now subsequently to all of the people who have been hoodwinked by the Demiurge and Satan into believing in the false god that does not incorporate love. Hart goes on to say,

It was above all a joyous proclamation and a call to a lost people to find their true home at last, in their father’s house. It did not initially make its appeal to human hearts by forcing them to revert to some childish or bestial cruelty latent in their natures. Rather, it sought to awaken them to a new form of life, one whose premise was charity. Nor was it a religion offering only a psychological salve for individual anxieties regarding personal salvation. It was a summons to a new and corporate way of life, salvation by entry into a community of love. Nothing as yet was fixed except the certainty that Jesus was now Lord over all things and would ultimately yield all things up to the Father, so that God might be all in all.

Now we’re going to go back into the earlier part of the book to explain some of these concepts in more depth. Hart has broken his book into four meditations, or four subjects we could call it.

The first meditation is, who is God? The second meditation is, what is judgment? The third meditation is, what is a person? And the fourth meditation is, what is freedom? A reflection on the rational will. So in the first meditation, who is God? Hart explains to us that,

The moral destiny of creation and the moral nature of God are absolutely inseparable. As the transcendent good beyond all things, God is also the transcendental end that makes every single action of any rational nature possible. Moreover, the end toward which He acts must be His own goodness, for He is Himself the beginning and end of all things. This is not to deny that, in addition to the primary causality of God’s act of creation, there are innumerable forms of secondary causality operative within the creative order. But none of these can exceed or escape the one end toward which the first cause directs all things.

And so what he is saying here is that the first causality is the expression of God’s goodness, the purity of God reaching out through the Son and into the Fullness of God—emanating. That is the principal causality. That is the prime mover of all things, what we call the base state of consciousness, the matrix.

But then there is a secondary causality that takes place subsequent to that. And I guess the first act of secondary causality was probably the fall, in that it was the first act of will prompted by ego that apparently deviated from God’s original plan, although the Tripartite Tractate does say we shouldn’t blame Logos because the fall was the cause of the cosmos which was destined to come about.

But whereas the Father is the prime mover and remains shielded in purity and fullness and goodness—you see, all the love emanates from the Father, evil doesn’t swim back upstream. It’s all emanating from the Father, and it’s all good.

But we do have secondary causality down here in the created cosmos, primarily due to the actions of the Demiurge and the never-ending war that runs amuck down here. Hart says, page 70,

First, as God’s act of creation is free, constrained by neither necessity nor ignorance, all contingent ends are intentionally enfolded within his decision. And second, precisely because God in himself is absolute, absolved, that is, of every pathos of the contingent, every affect of the sort that a finite substance has the power to visit upon another, his moral venture in creating is infinite.

One way or another, after all, all causes are logically reducible to their first cause. This is no more than a logical truism. In either case, all consequence are, either as actualities or merely possibilities, contingent upon the primordial antecedent, apart from which they could not exist.

In other words, all the things that happen down here in the cosmos couldn’t have happened without God giving it the first start, without the Father giving it the initial emanation. He goes on to say,

And naturally, the rationale of a first cause, its definition, in the most etymologically exact meaning of that term, is the final cause that prompts it, the end toward which it acts. If, then, that first cause is an infinitely free act emerging from infinite wisdom, all those consequence are intentionally entailed, again, either as actualities or as possibilities within that first act.

And so the final end to that act tends is its whole moral truth. The traditional definition of evil as a privation of the good, lacking any essence of its own, in other words, what we would call in Gnosticism, evil is the shadow of the good. Evil is the shadow of Logos. It’s not a thing in itself. It’s the absence of the love and the light of the Father. It is also an assertion that when we say God is good, we are speaking of Him not only relative to his creation, but as he is in himself.

All comes from God, and so evil cannot be a thing that comes from anywhere. Evil is, in every case, merely the defect whereby a substantial good is lost, belied, or resisted. For in every sense, being is act, and God, in his simplicity and infinite freedom, is what he does. He could not be the creator of anything substantially evil without evil also being part of the definition of who he essentially is, for he alone is the wellspring of all that exists.

Jumping down the page on 71, Hart says, “God goes forth in all beings, and in all beings returns to himself.” That’s how I describe as we all carry the Fullness of God within our being, and within every cell of our being. And since we are carrying the Fullness of God within us, we will have to return to the Fullness of God ultimately. We can’t be lost in everlasting torment, because we are the Fullness of God, and God cannot torment itself. Hart says,

God has no need of the world. He creates it not because he is dependent upon it, but because its dependency on him is a fitting expression of the bounty of his goodness.

Doesn’t that remind you of, in the beginning, the Father was alone, and he admired his goodness and beauty and love. He was full of love and beauty, and gave birth, so to speak—He emanated the Son. And the Son and the Father gave glory to one another. And in that giving of glory to one another, then the Son emanated the Fullness. And then in giving glory to one another in the Fullness and to the Son, the Fullness emanates us, the second order of powers.

And it’s all because you can’t love without having an object to love, even if it’s only in your own mind. Love requires an object of devotion, and giving glory is the reciprocal of love. We give glory because we were first loved. It’s a fitting expression of the bounty of goodness, as Hart puts it. Then he goes on to say,

This, however, also means that within the story of creation, viewed from its final cause, there can be no residue of the pardonably tragic, no irrecuperable or irreconcilable remainder left behind at the end of the tale. For if there were, this irreconcilable excess would also be something God has directly caused.

Now, in our Gnostic gospel, there is a remnant “left behind at the end of the tale.” And that is the shadowy archons that were never a part of the original creation because they did not come from the “first cause” discussed earlier. The shadows of the Demiurge did not come from the Fullness or the fallen Aeon, but are only the absence of the qualities of that Aeon, this is why they are referred to as shadows. They are figments that do not have a reality outside of the Deficiency. Therefore, they have no home to return to in the Fullness of God. They are not from the Fullness.

And he talks a bit about Hegel’s system and dismisses it, and I’m not going to go into it. Hart says,

The story Christians tell is of creation as God’s sovereign act of love, neither adding to nor qualifying His eternal nature. And so it is also a story that leaves no room for an ultimate distinction between the universal truth of reason and the moral meaning of the particular, or for any distinction between the moral meaning of the particular and the moral nature of God.

Only by insisting upon the universality of God’s mercy could Paul, in Romans 11.32, liberate himself from the fear that the particularity of that mercy would prove to be an ultimate injustice, and that in judging His creatures, God would reveal Himself not as the good God of faithfulness and love, but as an inconstant God who can shatter His own covenants at will.

Hart reminds us that down through the centuries,

Christians have again and again subscribed to formulations of their faith that clearly reduce a host of cardinal Christian theological usages, most especially moral predicates like good, merciful, just, benevolent, loving, to utter equivocity, and that by association, reduce their entire grammar of Christian belief to meaninglessness.

[On the next page, 75, he says], consider, to begin with the mildest of moral difficulties, how many Christians down the centuries have had to reconcile their consciences to the repellent notion that all humans are at conception already guilty of a transgression that condemns them justly to eternal separation from God and eternal suffering, and that in this doctrine’s extreme form, every newborn infant belongs to a massa damnata, hateful in God’s eyes from the first moment of existence.

Hart loves to throw in Latin. Massa damnata obviously means that the masses would be damned.

The very notion of an inherited guilt is a logical absurdity, rather on the order of a square circle. All that the doctrine can truly be taken to assert, speaking logically, is that God willfully imputes to innocent creatures a guilt they can never have really contracted out of what, from any sane perspective, can only be called malice. But this is just the beginning of the problem. For one broad, venerable stream of tradition, God, on the basis of this imputation, consigns the vast majority of the race to perpetual torment, including infants who die unbaptized.

And may I point out that in Gnostic Christianity there is no inherited guilt at all because the Fall was not caused by the first humans, Adam and Eve, but occurred at the Aeonic level. Christianity carries a remnant of that understanding forward when it refers to “fallen angels,” but it does not connect the dots to realize their culpability in original sin.

And then the theology of grace grows grimmer, for according to the great Augustinian tradition, since we are somehow born meriting not only death but eternal torment, we are enjoined to see and praise a laudable generosity in God’s narrow choice to elect a small remnant for salvation, before and apart from any consideration of their concrete merits or demerits, and this further choice either to predestine or infallibly to surrender the vast remainder to everlasting misery. So it is that, for many Christians down the years, the rationale of evangelization has been a desperate race to save as many souls as possible from God.

The time has really gotten away from us, and we’ve only touched the first meditation, so I hope you are enjoying this theology. It’s theology, and I know that’s difficult slog, but I’m sharing with you these thoughts because they comprise basically the sum total of Christian theology for the past 2,000 years, and it has gone through changes here and there. David Bentley Hart is a scholar of Eastern Orthodoxy and a scholar of religion and philosopher and so forth, and I think that he has very clear sight.

So we’ll pick this up one more time next week, and I promise we’ll wrap it up. Onward and upward! God bless us all!

This book gathers the essential insights of gnosis into a clear, approachable form. Gnosis can be as simple or as intricate as you choose to make it, but its heart is always accessible. A Simple Explanation guides you through the often tangled vocabulary and shifting landscapes of Gnostic thought, offering a path that is both illuminating and easy to follow.

The glossary alone is a treasure—an indispensable reference for anyone exploring ancient Christian mysticism, the Nag Hammadi texts, or the deeper layers of spiritual philosophy.

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God is loving and merciful, not judgmental and cruel

Welcome back to Gnostic Insights and the Gnostic Reformation on Substack. Last week I began sharing with you what is essentially a book report on the book called That All Shall Be Saved, Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation by David Bentley Hart, and he’s the translator of the New Testament that I’ve been using. So, last week we got up to page 21 out of this book, and now I’m all the way up to page 85, so we’ll see what happened in this latest round of reading.

Now, David Bentley Hart’s style of writing may not be for everyone. It’s very academic, very high-minded and educated and erudite—difficult to follow if you’re not accustomed to reading scholastic writing. But I believe his heart’s in the right place, and I agree with pretty much everything he says. I will do my best to reinterpret what he is saying in simpler words, in case you’re interested in the content, but not in its delivery method.

So, picking it up on page 21, Hart says,

And what could be more absurd than the claim that God’s ways so exceed comprehension, that we dare not presume even to distinguish benevolence from malevolence in the divine, inasmuch as either can result in the same endless excruciating despair? Here the docile believer is simply commanded to nod in acquiescence, quietly and submissively, to feel moved at a strange and stirring obscurity, and to accept that, if only he or she could sound the depths of this mystery, its essence would somehow be revealed as infinite beauty and love. A rational person capable of that assent, however, of believing all of this to be a paradox concealing a deeper, wholly coherent truth, rather than a gross contradiction, has probably suffered such chronic intellectual and moral malformation that he or she is no longer able to recognize certain very plain truths, such as the truth that he or she has been taught to approve of divine deeds that, were they reduced to a human scale of action, would immediately be recognizable as expressions of unalloyed spite.

And he’s talking about the idea that most everyone and everything is going to hell and will suffer eternal torment. That is an interpretation or misinterpretation of the word brought about by incorrect translation of the original Coptic. Most of our Bible translations come off of old Latin Vulgate translations, and then they’ve been modernized. But that’s how errors are brought forward. And what Hart has done in his New Testament translation is go back to the original, very oldest transcripts, still in Greek, before they were translated to Latin. And he did what he called a pitilessly accurate translation, where Hart was not trying to make the words that are being translated fit into a predetermined doctrine, like everyone going to hell, or like the Trinity, or eternal damnation.

These things we’ve been taught to believe are in the Scripture, but when you actually go back to the original Scriptures prior to the Latin translations, they are not in the Scripture. And so this book that I’m doing the book report on here, That All Shall Be Saved, this is about universal salvation, and doing away with the idea. And he says in this section I just read you, that it is a malevolent idea, unalloyed spite, unalloyed meaning pure spite on the part of God, that’s going to send everyone to hell that doesn’t get it.

And that we have been commanded by the Church over the last 2,000 years to just nod our heads and say, oh, well, it’s God’s will, or oh, well, how can I presume to distinguish benevolence from malevolence, good intention from bad intention on the part of God, because God is so great and good. We’re supposed to be docile believers, to acquiesce, that is, to go along with, to quietly and submissively accept that we don’t get it, that we don’t understand the depths of the mystery, and someday we will, and that God is good, and God is just, and therefore everyone’s going to hell, except for those few preordained elect from before time began. So this book is entirely against that proposition.

So moving on, what I did was I read the book through, and I’ve highlighted the parts that seem worth sharing or very interesting. Now we’re jumping to page 35, where he says that certain people,

of my acquaintance who are committed to what is often called an intellectualist model of human liberty, as I am myself, [he says], but who also insist that it is possible for a soul freely to reject God’s love with such perfect perpiscuity of understanding and intention as to merit eternal suffering.

And we can tell from the context that perpiscuity means you get it. So he’s saying, how is it even possible for a soul to freely reject the love of God and consign oneself into eternal torment? It just doesn’t work. It’s not possible. He says,

this is an altogether dizzying contradiction. In simplest terms, that is to say, they, [that is, the intellectualists], want to assert that all true freedom is an orientation of the rational will toward an end that the mind takes in some sense to be the good, and so takes also as the one end that can fulfill the mind’s nature and supply its desires. This means that the better the rational will knows the Good, and that’s a capital G, Good, for what it is, the more that is that the will is freed from those forces that distort reason and lead the soul toward improper ends. The more it will long for and seek after the true good in itself, and conversely, the more rationally it seeks the good, the freer it is.

He says that in terms of the great Maximus the Confessor, who lived from 580 to 660,

the natural will within us, which is the rational ground of our whole power of volition, must tend only toward God as its true end, for God is goodness as such, whereas our gnomic or deliberative will can stray from him, but only to the degree that it has been blinded to the truth of who he is and what we are, and as a result has come to seek a false end as the true end. In short, sin requires some degree of ignorance, and ignorance is by definition a diverting of the mind and will to an end they would not naturally pursue.

So, in other words, we all want what’s best for ourself, even in the most selfish sense, even in the most egoic sense. The ego wants what is best for this person that it is part of, that that is the rational end of the ego’s striving, what is best, and that there is a thing called good in the absolute sense, and if we realize that, then we would strive toward the good, by definition. Carrying on, page 37,

I’m not saying that we do not in some very significant sense make our own exceedingly substantial voluntary contributions to our estrangement from the good in this life.

And, see, he’s just saying we all screw up. Even if we are seeking the good, we often fall backwards into the bad, okay?

Up to a certain point, [he says], it is undeniable, but past that point it is manifest falsehood. There is no such thing as perfect freedom in this life, or perfect understanding, and it is sheer nonsense to suggest that we possess limitless or unqualified liberty. Therefore, we are incapable of contracting a limitless or unqualified guilt. There are always extenuating circumstances.

Well, in a sense, that’s true of all of us and all of our circumstances. We are a product of our environment, to some extent. But don’t forget that in the Gnostic view, we also contain the pure goodness of God, the capital S Self, that reflects the Fullness of God. So we do know what goodness is, even if we are surrounded by badness.

Quoting Hart again, page 40,

Here though, I have to note that it is a thoroughly modern and wholly illogical notion that the power of absolutely unpremised liberty, obeying no rationale except its own spontaneous volition toward whatever end it might pose for itself, is either a real logical possibility or, in any meaningful sense, a proper definition of freedom.

See? He’s saying it’s thoroughly modern and wholly illogical to think that we have complete freedom of will, and that we can choose to follow any unethical or immoral end that we wish to, because what’s it matter? One choice being pretty much the same as another, you see. He goes on to say, in page 40,

A choice made without rationale is a contradiction in terms. At the same time, any movement of the will prompted by an entirely perverse rationale would be, by definition, wholly irrational. Insane, that is to say. And therefore, no more truly free than a psychotic episode. The more one is in one’s right mind, the more that is that one is conscious of God as the goodness that fulfills all beings. And the more one recognizes that one’s own nature can have its true completion and joy nowhere but in Him, and the more one is unfettered by distorting misperceptions, deranged passions, and the encumbrances of past mistakes, the more inevitable is one’s surrender to God, liberated from all ignorance, emancipated from all the adverse conditions of this life, the rational soul could freely will only its own union with God, and thereby its own supreme beatitude.

We are, as it were, doomed to happiness, so long as our natures follow their healthiest impulses unhindered. And we cannot not will the satisfaction of our beings in our true final end, a transcendent good lying behind and beyond all the proximate ends we might be moved to pursue. This is no constraint upon the freedom of the will, coherently conceived. It is simply the consequence of possessing a nature produced by and for the transcendent good, a nature whose proper end has been fashioned in harmony with a supernatural purpose. God has made us for Himself, as Augustine would say, and our hearts are restless till they rest in Him. A rational nature seeks a rational end, truth, which is God Himself.

The irresistibility of God for any soul that has been truly set free is no more a constraint placed upon its liberty than is the irresistible attraction of a flowing spring to fresh water in a desert place to a man who is dying of thirst. To choose not to drink in that circumstance would not be an act of freedom on his part, but only a manifestation of the delusions that enslave him and force him to inflict violence upon himself, contrary to his nature.

Do you follow the reasoning there? That boils down to simply saying it is logical. Even Mr. Spock would find it logical for a human to pursue the good in its own best interests, and that it is illogical, illogical all the way to insanity, to refuse the good, to refuse what is best for you. It’s a manifestation of insanity, to refuse the love of God. How’s that for laying it out? I really appreciate logic, you know, because this is a logical universe.

If the laws of physics and chemistry didn’t hold true to logic, and that includes math, you see, 2 plus 2 equals 4, etc., all the way through all the difficult math, the quantum physics, and the string theory, and so forth, this is a logical universe based upon the Aeon known as Logos, logic. And so, therefore, to reject logic, it’s not smart, it’s not clever, it’s not freedom. And, by the way, this is about the level of pushback I see in, for example, YouTube comments that reject the gospel. They’re pretty much on the order of, oh, yeah, I can die of thirst if I want to, so F off. Okay, well, good luck with that, right? Carrying on, page 43.

None of this should need saying, to be honest. We should all already know that whenever the term justice and eternal punishment are set side by side as if they were logically compatible, the boundaries of the rational have been violated. If we were not so stupefied by the hoary and venerable myth that eternal damnation is an essential element of the original Christian message, and then he says in parentheses, which, not to spoil later plot developments here, it is not, we would not even waste our time on so preposterous a conjunction. From the perspective of Christian belief, the very notion of a punishment that is not intended ultimately to be remedial is morally dubious, and he says in parentheses, and I submit anyone who doubts this has never understood Christian teaching at all.

But even if one believes that Christianity makes room for the condign imposition, [and condign means proper or fitting], imposition of purely retributive punishments, it remains the case that a retribution consisting in unending suffering, imposed as recompense for the actions of a finite intellect and will, must be by any sound definition disproportionate, unjust, and at the last, nothing more than an expression of sheer pointless cruelty.

And of course, I do find that attitude on the part of Christians I talk to and try to explain the idea of universal salvation being Christ’s true mission, that all shall be redeemed, every knee shall bow. They’d much rather send people to hell, and when you see their faces as they’re saying it, it’s not, oh, you know, I’m so sorry that it’s this way and my heart breaks, but I’m afraid they’re all going to hell. It’s not like that at all. It’s like, damn straight, they deserve to go to hell. Now, you take that kind of anger and cruelty when you consider that they are advocating unending, excruciating pain and punishment, and then you try to say that that is God’s will, that goodness incorporates unending punishment.

And Hart’s saying, indeed, especially unending punishment that isn’t for remediation, isn’t to make them a better person, but simply to make them hurt. And who are you punishing? Finite beings with limited time and intelligence and ability to reason with things that happened in their past. Maybe they were brought up by someone very cruel who taught them cruelty, and so they carry on cruelty. And then that the God of all love and the God of all justice would send them to hell for eternal torment. And up until quite recently, even babies who were unbaptized would be sent to hell for eternal torment. And then someone came up with the idea of a baby purgatory where unbaptized babies never get to go to heaven, but they’re not going to be eternally punished either. They’re just going to go to a baby land where they’re held apart from the rest of the redeemed. Well, really? That’s hardly any better. I mean, it’s somewhat better, but why shouldn’t these pure babies who pretty much incorporate the Fullness of the Self and love of God, why wouldn’t God want them back? You see, it doesn’t make any sense.

And if you’re a Christian listening to me today who has had niggling doubts about certain things, and one of them being this idea of grandma being in hell and in the midst of eternal torture now because she wouldn’t listen to your preaching, you can relax about it. Because we are the sower of seeds, but we are not the harvester. It is Christ who harvests the souls, who brings them all home.

Back to Hart here again. On page 47, he says,

Once more, not a single one of these attempted justifications for the idea of an eternal hell actually improves the picture of God with which the infernalist orthodoxy presents us.

And he uses the word infernalist for like the infernal torments of hell. So an infernalist is someone who believes folks are going to hell for eternity. So he says,

Once more, not a single one of these attempted justifications for the idea of an eternal hell actually improves the picture of God with which the infernalist orthodoxy presents us. And it is this that should be the chief concern of any believer.

All of these arguments still oblige one to believe that a benevolent and omnipotent God would willfully create rational beings destined for an endless torment that they could never, in any rational calculus of personal responsibility, earn for themselves. And to believe also that this somehow is essential to the good news Christianity brought into the world.

Isn’t it true? When you’re in church and you hear the preacher preaching a very nice, very good message about relationships or about moral virtue, and then there is a plea and a threat at the end that if you are sitting in the congregation and you have not accepted Christ as your personal Savior, you may go out and die this afternoon and go to hell. It’s not right. It’s contradictory. It is not the pure will of God. Page 47 goes on to say,

In the end, there is only one logical terminus toward which all these lines of reasoning can lead: When all the possible paths of evasion have tapered away among the weeds, one has to stop, turn around, retrace one’s steps back to the beginning of the journey, and finally admit that, if there really is an eternal hell for finite spirits, then it has to be the case that God condemns the damned to endless misery not on account of any sane proportion between what they are capable of meriting and how he chooses to requite them for their sins, but solely as a demonstration of his power to do as he wishes.

Now, by the way, when I read the Old Testament, I see that that is often the attitude that Jehovah has towards his subjects. He commands things because he can, and he wants obedience because he wants obedience. Remember, the Demiurge controls through strong strings. He does not approve of willpower. Willpower is messy. Willpower means not obeying the will of God, and he wants to be the sayer of our souls. But the God Above All Gods, the Gnostic God, outranks the Old Testament God. The God Above All Gods is the Father who begat the Son.

The Demiurge keeps chaos at bay by forbidding free will in his subjects

And so when Jesus says, I and my Father are one, he’s not talking about the Old Testament God. He’s talking about the God Above All Gods, the originator of consciousness, of love, of life, of free will. And we are all fractals of that Father. Through the Son, through the Fullness of God, we are fractals of all of those powers of the Father–stepped down, because we’re smaller fractals. So we all have to return to the Father in the end.

When we loose these mortal coils and we’re no longer bound to the material that deludes us, then we can finally return to the Father again. So onward and upward is not a trap. Onward and upward is freedom. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

So back to this idea of the Old Testament God enjoying his omnipotent sovereignty. On page 48, Hart is talking about Calvin and predestination. And he says, in book three of Calvin’s Institutes,

he even asserts that God predestined the human fall from grace, precisely because the whole of everything, creation, fall, redemption, judgment, the eternal bliss of heaven, the endless torments of hell, and whatever else, exists solely for the sake of a perfect display of the full range of God’s omnipotent sovereignty, which for some reason absolutely must be displayed.

He goes on to say he doesn’t know how to respond to that, because,

I know it to be based on a notoriously confused reading of Scripture, one whose history goes all the way back to the late Augustine, a towering genius whose inability to read Greek and consequent reliance on defective Latin translations turned out to be the single most tragically consequential case of linguistic incompetence in Christian history. In equal part, however, it is because I regard the picture of God thus produced to be a metaphysical absurdity, a God who is at once supposedly the source of all things, and yet also the one whose nature is necessarily thoroughly polluted by arbitrariness.

And no matter how orthodox Calvinists might protest, there is no other way to understand the story of election and dereliction that Calvin tells, which would mean that in some sense he is a finite being, that is God, in whom possibility exceeds actuality, and the irrational exceeds the rational. A far greater concern than either of these theological defects, either the deeply misguided scriptural exegesis or the inept metaphysics of the divine, it is the moral horror in such language.

So that’s as far as we’re going to go today. In next week’s continuance of this train of thought, Hart will talk about the difference between the God Above All Gods, essentially, even though Hart’s not calling himself a Gnostic. When he speaks of God, or Goodness with capital G, he is speaking of the God Above All Gods. And when he contrasts it with the God of Calvin and Augustine in the Old Testament, that is the Demiurgic God.

I’ve noticed that many modern people seem to think of God as a yin-yang type of completion, that is, where evil balances good, where darkness is necessary to balance light, where the purpose of humanity, or what happens here in humanity, is that we are instantiating strife and struggle and evil for the teaching of God, for the completion of God. That is not right. That’s wrong theology, folks. Our God is all goodness, and there is no evil that emanates from God. Well, where did evil come from then? It’s merely the absence of good. So evil is the absence of goodness.

The archons are the shadows of the Aeons. And when the light fully comes and fills all of space, the shadows will disappear, and the light comes along with the love. And so that’s our job, to realize that universal and ethereal love, and to so let our light shine and our lives shine with love, that the Demiurge will be eventually won over. And as for the shadows, every time we bring light into the world, we’re diminishing the power of the Demiurge. We’re shining light onto a shadow and evaporating it.

Next week, we’ll pick this up for part three of That All Shall Be Saved by David Bentley Hart.

Let me know what you think of this. Send me some comments.

Onward and upward. God bless us all.

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I thought today I would share with you a book by David Bentley Hart. Hart wrote that translation of the New Testament that I’m very much enjoying, because it mirrors the same language that the Gnostic gospel uses in the Nag Hammadi codices, particularly the Tripartite Tractate, which is what I share with you here at Gnostic Insights.

David Bentley Hart is extremely eloquent and erudite. His prose puts me to shame. He is a great writer and a brilliant mind. He’s an Eastern Orthodox scholar of religion and a philosopher. And the deal is, he does seem to love God. So his philosophy and his theology goes through what seems to me to be a very Gnostic heart and orientation on his part. So I’m reading this book now called, That All Shall Be Saved, Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation, because I could tell from reading the footnotes in his New Testament that he and I agree on this universal salvation. I seem to be coming at it from a different place than he does.

My major reason why everyone and everything that’s living now will return to heaven is that everything comes from heaven. So if everything doesn’t return to heaven in the end, if most of it, as a matter of fact, was thrown into eternal fires of torment, well, God itself would be lessened. The Father would be less than he was at the beginning, and that’s an impossibility, because the Father was, is, and ever shall be the same. He is not diminished by the love and consciousness and life that flows out of him. But if that life, love, and consciousness winds up in a black hole at the bottom of an eternal pit of torment, well, there’s so many things wrong with that statement, just absolutely wrong.

And that’s what David Bentley Hart’s book is all about, and he has several ways he’s going to explain why that can’t be so. The reason I say it can’t be so is that all consciousness, life, and love come from the Father. So in the big roll-up, if we accept the proposition that there will be an end to this material existence, which is what all Christians and Jews profess, and if everything that emanated from the Father in the beginning, beginning with the Son, which is the first and only direct emanation, and then everything else emanates through the Son, well, if it doesn’t return at the end of material time, then the Father and the ethereal plane would be diminished, because it poured out all of this love and consciousness into this material realm, and it all has to return.

The Tripartite Tractate says that everything that existed from the beginning will return at the end of time. In verses 78 and 79 of the Tripartite Tractate, it’s speaking about the shadows that emerged from Logos after the Fall, and it says,

Therefore their end will be like their beginning, from that which did not exist they are to return once again to the shadows.

“Their end will be like their beginning,” in that they didn’t come from above—they were shadows of the fallen Logos. And so when the light comes and shines the light, the shadows disappear. Furthermore, in verses 80 and 81, the Tripartite Tractate says,

The Logos, being in such unstable conditions, that is, after the Fall, did not continue to bring forth anything like emanations, the things which are in the Pleroma, the glories which exist for the honor of the Father. Rather, he brought forth little weaklings, hindered by the illnesses by which he too was hindered. It was the likeness of the disposition which was a unity, that which was the cause of the things which do not exist from the first.

So these shadows didn’t exist in the Pleroma; they were shadows, they were imitations of the unity which existed from the first, and that unity is the Fullness of God—the Aeons of the Fullness of God. And it is only these shadows that will be evaporated at the end of time, that will not go to the ethereal plane. All living things will, because we’re not shadows of the Fall. We are actually sent down from the unity, from the Fullness of God, with life, consciousness, and love. And so all of that has to return to the Father.

So that is where I’m coming from, that God can’t be lessened, made less than it was at the beginning. So everything will be redeemed and returned. And of course, practically all of Christianity nowadays believes that most everything that was emanated from the beginning will be destroyed, or put into a fire of torment for all eternity. Anyone who wasn’t baptized, or anyone who didn’t come forward to profess a belief in Christ—and that’s most of the other cultures and people of the world.

The conventional Christian church doesn’t even realize that animals are going to heaven. I often comfort people whose pet has just passed away, and they’re missing them so badly, and they love them so much, and it hurts so much, and I say to them in comfort, “Well, your pet is waiting for you in heaven, and you’ll be reunited when you cross over, and then you’ll have them again, and you’ll all be very happy forever together.” That’s my basic approach.

franny and zoey sunset
As a matter of fact, I’m waiting for my pack—that’s who I expect to greet me. I’m not waiting for my dead relatives, or my late husband. I’m not expecting them on the other shore waiting for me, although perhaps they will be. Who I really am looking forward to seeing are my dogs and cats, every dog and cat I’ve ever had. And I figure they’re all up there together as a big pack, playing on the beach. So that’s what keeps me comforted, and keeps me looking forward. I’m very happy to imagine that that will be what greets me when I cross over.

So this morning, what I’d like to share with you are some of Hart’s writing that he shares in his introduction that’s called, The Question of an Eternal Hell, Framing the Question. So this is before he even gets into his various apologetics of how it is that everyone will be saved. But I really wanted to share this with you. Hart writes in a very high-minded manner, so I’ll attempt to translate it for us all.

So on page 16, Hart says,

And as I continued to explore the Eastern Communions as an undergraduate, I learned at some point to take comfort from an idea that one finds liberally scattered throughout Eastern Christian contemplative tradition, from late antiquity to the present, and expressed with particular force by such saints of the East as Isaac of Nineveh, who lived between 613 and 700, and Silouan of Athos, who lived between 1866 and 1938. And the idea is this, that the fires of hell are nothing but the glory of God, which must at the last, when God brings about the final restoration of all things, pervade the whole of creation. For although that glory will transfigure the whole cosmos, it will inevitably be experienced as torment by any soul that willfully seals itself against love of God and neighbor. To such a perverse and obstinate nature, the divine light that should enter the soul and transform it from within must seem instead like the flames of an exterior chastisement.

That’s pretty interesting. He’s saying that after the final roll-up, the glory of God, or the light of God, will fill all of space and eternity, and that we will be able to see it and experience it. We will stand before the glory of God. But anyone who is hiding from God, or that is a hateful person, will experience that same glory as flames of fire that torment. And so that will be their punishment. But it’s not coming from God. God’s bringing glory and love and light. But they, because they are resistant, they will experience it as those flames of hell.

So Hart goes on to say,

This I found not only comforting, but also extremely plausible at an emotional level. It is easy to believe in that version of hell, after all, if one considers it deeply enough, for the very simple reason that we all already know it to be real in this life, and dwell a good portion of our days confined within its walls. A hardened heart is already its own punishment. The refusal to love, or to be loved, makes the love of others, or even just their presence, a source of suffering and a goad to wrath.

And isn’t that true? That a hateful person views everything that’s going on around them, and anything that someone else says, to be irritating, and worthy of punishment, or worthy of disdain, because it doesn’t agree with their own opinion. He goes on to say on page 17,

and so perhaps it makes perfect sense to imagine that a will sufficiently intransigent in its selfishness and resentment and violence might be so damaged that, even when fully exposed to the divine glory for which all things were made, it will absolutely hate the invasion of that transfiguring love, and will be able to discover nothing in it but terror and pain. It is the soul, then, and not God, that lights hell’s fires, by interpreting the advent of divine love as a violent assault upon the jealous privacy of the self.

Now, we’ve talked about that a lot here on Gnostic Insights, and I cover that in my discussions of Overcoming Death. My argument about Overcoming Death primarily comes from the Tibetan Buddhist book known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and in that book it describes this passage after life. And, by the way, it’s not only when the whole entire cosmos melts away, it’s every time we die. When your body passes away, suddenly you’re in that non-material state. Your ego goes forward without the attachment of the body, and in that state of not being attached to the material world, it is like, at the end of time, when the entire cosmos goes through the same process and is no longer attached to the material world. At that point, delusion drops away, the confusion of this cosmos and the confusion of our culture and the demiurgic culture that we are surrounded with, as well as the pulls of the material upon our bodies. It’s gone, it’s lifted, it’s no longer there, and your spirit is able to see with clear eyes. As Paul said in the first letter to Corinthians, chapter 13,

For we know partially, and we prophesy partially. But when that which is complete comes, what is partial will be rendered futile. When I was an infant, I spoke like an infant, I thought like an infant, I reckoned like an infant. Having become a man, I did away with infantile things. For as yet we see by way of a mirror, in an enigma, but then we will see face to face. As yet I know partially, but then I shall know fully, just as I am fully known. But now abide faith, hope, and love, these three, and the greatest of these is love.

And in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, it talks about these things called bardos, which are levels of hell, basically, or levels of purgatory that people go through as they are learning to get rid of the mistaken notions that they picked up here during the lifetime. The samskara is stripped away. I would call the samskara the confounding memes that we cling to. We pick up these meme bundles from the people and from the things we read and learn and are indoctrinated into in school and then through the media.

Those are memes, meme bundles, and they have to be let go of. You have to drop them in order to get past the ego that’s holding on to those memes and rediscover the purity of the Father and the Son in the ethereal plane—rediscover the purity of your true Self. And the longer someone holds on to those memes after death, the more difficult is their passage into purity. And that’s explained in depth in the Overcoming Death episode. Well, that Tibetan description of the fires of hell very much resemble the fires of hell that were talked about from these ancient saints of the Christian tradition.

By the way, this idea that most everyone and everything is going to hell rather than going to heaven, that is a relatively recent addition to Christianity, but it has been grasped so firmly with the great assistance of the Catholic Church and their doctrines that by now most Christians think that most people won’t go to heaven. So even the Protestants who protest Catholicism—that’s what the word Protestant means, one who protests—they’ve lost the original thread of universal salvation that Jesus was teaching. The Anointed came to save everyone, it says, over and over in the New Testament.

And in Hart’s translation, which comes directly from the original writing rather than down through the Latin that had already been filtered by the Catholics, you don’t find the eternal torment of hell. Remember, the word Aeon, which we in Gnostic belief generally translate as ethereal beings or part of the Fullness of God above, Aeon is also translated as a period of time, and throughout most of the translations of the New Testament, which derive from the Latin Vulgate, Aeon is translated as a period of time.

And so when it says eternal torment, it’s really saying aeonic torment. And in my opinion, it’s the torment people bring upon themselves when they return to the aeonic realm. The Aeons aren’t the punishers. God is not the punisher. It’s our own grasping onto our past lives and the demiurgic culture and the demiurgic memes that we hold onto after death that are experienced like burning flames. But no one’s imposing it upon us. It’s our own lack of willing to give it up and turn and face the light. The eternal fires of hell are actually the aeonic reckoning that comes at the end of each lifetime and will come at the end of time itself when the material cosmos passes away. At least that’s what I think.

So when Hart says on page 17 there that “a will, a personal will, sufficiently intransigent in its selfishness and resentment and violence,” intransigence means not giving up, stubbornness, “might be so damaged that even when it comes face to face with glory, it will experience it as torment.” Now, for those of us who have accepted the anointing of the Christ and have come to true gnosis, (that is a remembrance that we come from above and will happily return to the above, that’s all you need to know), we will not cling onto this material world.

We will not be clinging onto those demiurgic memes that keep us from coming face to face with our aeonic parents in the Fullness of God. We will happily cross over. We will joyfully meet with those who are on the other side, be they family, spouses, or pets, because the grasses and the flowers, the butterflies, the birds, everything that is alive down here on earth will be alive in heaven because all life comes from above. We will not be experiencing that chastening fire—that coming to grips with the lies that we’ve been holding onto. That’s the painful part, coming to grips with our own lies and the harms we have done to other people. If we’re not repentant of those harms we have done to other people, we will have to come face to face with those harms after we cross over, and we will see from that other person’s point of view what we did to them and how much we hurt them, and that will come back to us. We will experience their pain, and that is the pain and suffering of death, but it’s not being imposed by the Father or the Son or our aeonic parents above.

On page 18, Hart says,

Because Christians have been trained at a very deep level of their thinking, to believe that the idea of an eternal hell is a clear and unambiguous element of their faith, and that therefore the idea must make perfect moral sense. They are in error on both counts, as it happens, but a sufficiently thorough conditioning can make an otherwise sound mind perceive even the most ostentatiously absurd proposition to be the very epitome of rational good sense.

You know, there’s some big words in that sentence, but I think you can tell by the context what they mean, right? Ostentatiously means open, flaunting. Epitome means the highest. So he’s saying that because the Church has taught that everyone’s going to hell except those very few, which is an ostentatious point of view, you see, ostentatiously absurd proposition, yet they have been taught that it is the very highest of good sense, and you can’t go against it.

And so people are conditioned not to question it. And what this book, That All Shall Be Saved, is, is a very thorough and deep description and rationale of how that cannot be true, of how everyone must be going to heaven. I covered my version of why everyone’s going to heaven in this episode. Further episodes, I think I’ll do a series here, further episodes will each cover chapters in Hart’s book, and we’ll hear what his rationale is for why everyone is going to heaven. But returning to this page 18 again, he says,

In fact, where the absurdity proves only slight, the mind that has been trained most thoroughly will, as often as not, fabricate further and more extravagant absurdities in order to secure the initial offense against reason within a more encompassing and intoxicating atmosphere of corroborating nonsense.

In other words, you’ll have to spin a bunch of nonsensical rationalizations and excuses about why everyone’s going to hell, just to make the story float. Quoting again,

Sooner or later it will all seem to make sense, simply through ceaseless repetition and restatement and rhetorical reinforcement.

As I’m reading this, of course he’s talking about religious ideologies here, but I’m seeing these mechanisms at play in media bias. Do you see that? Just through sheer repetition, over and over, it doesn’t matter if things are true or lies. If you say it often enough, people will begin to accept it unquestioningly. And you can see that going on in the politics, can’t you?

Hart goes on to say,

The most effective technique for subduing the moral imagination is to teach it to mistake the contradictory for the paradoxical, and thereby to accept incoherence as profundity or moral idiocy as spiritual subtlety. If this can be accomplished with sufficient nuance and delicacy, it can sustain even a very powerful intellect for an entire lifetime. In the end, with sufficient practice, one really can, like the White Queen (of Alice in Wonderland), learn to believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

In my limited attempts to discuss Gnosticism face-to-face with people, I discover this continually, that if I present them with the absurdity of everyone going to hell, for example, they will say, Well, it’s a mystery. We can’t know the mind of God. It’s a mystery. Who are you to presume? And this is the way they cover up that it doesn’t work, by just shunting it off to God’s incomprehensibility. But our God is rational. Our God is logical. Our God doesn’t say one thing and do another. Our God doesn’t lie. Our God doesn’t say it’s all about life and living and love and then enslave and slaughter. That is not the God of Gnosticism. The Father that Jesus spoke of is not that God.

Going on with page 19, Hart says,

Not that I am accusing anyone of consciously or cynically seeking to manipulate the minds of faithful Christians. The conspiracy, so to speak, is an entirely open one, an unpremeditated corporate labor of communal self-deception, requiring us all to do our parts to sustain one another in our collective derangement. I regard the entire process as the unintentional effect of a long tradition of error, one in which a series of bad interpretations of Scripture produced various corruptions of theological reasoning, which were themselves then preserved as immemorial revealed truths and, at last, rendered impregnable to all critique by the indurated mental habits of generations, all despite the logical and conceptual incongruities that this required believers to ignore within their beliefs.

He writes with big words. The gist of this entire paragraph was that the church didn’t set out to be deceptive. Well, it may have with the Nicene Council when they stripped the Gnosis out, but from about 600 A.D. onward, it’s just become such an ingrained thought that by now it’s unassailable. By now you can’t even question it. But that’s what we’re doing here at Gnostic Insights.

So stay with me for the next few episodes, and we’ll go into depth concerning hell, resurrection, salvation, and the ultimate redemption of all living things by the Christ, the Anointed, that will return us all to that paradise above.

With love, onward and upward, and God bless us all.

This book puts all of this gnosis together in a simplified form. Gnosis is as easy as you want it to be, or as complicated as you desire. This Simple Explanation will guide you through the often confusing terms and turns of gnostic thought and theology. The glossary alone is worth having on your bookshelf. Now available in paperback, hardback, and ebook/kindle, and an audio book narrated by Miguel Conner.

Available at amazon.com or through your local independent bookstore.

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