Sabbatical Post 4: Starting to think about transgression

I am starting to read more deeply into explanations and descriptions of transgression in various fields.  It is a topic with a good amount of literature.  While waiting for some sociological and anthropological studies to arrive from Amazon, I delved into Foucault's "A Preface to Transgression" written in 1963.

Foucault uses transgression as a new type of sacralness, representing the modern zone of human experience where the sacred has collapsed into the profane.   With the death of God, Foucault sees the goal of human experience to be constant transgression of our limits.  Every time we cross the limits, we see the limits, and we move the limit until we find ourselves face to face with the limit of our own being, in the experience of emptiness.  For Foucault, sexuality represents the totality of human experience and it is in its transgression that God is replaced. 

Is it just me, or is this a redeployment of traditional Christian mystical eroticism in a post-modern philosophical guise?  Maybe I am misunderstanding what Foucault is saying, but I seem to hear the echoes of the Christian mystics for whom the crossing of the ultimate boundary of being was sex with God or his/her representative. 

Some quotes I found intriguing for my work on the Gnostics and their transgressive esotericism.

"The limit and transgression depend on each other for whatever density of being they possess: a limit could not exist if it were absolutely uncrossable and, reciprocally, transgression would be pointless if it merely crossed a limit composed of illusions and shadows.  But can the limit have a life of its own outside the act that gloriously passes through it and negates it?  What becomes of it after this act and what might it have been before?" (Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice; edited by Donald F. Bouchard, 1977, 34).

"Transgression forces the limit to face the fact of its imminent disappearance, to find itself in what it excludes (perhaps, to be more exact, to recognize itself for the first time), to experience its positive truth in its downward fall?  And yet, toward what is transgression unleashed in its movement of pure violence, if not that which imprisons it, toward the limit and those elements it contains?  What bears the brunt of its aggression and to what void does it owe the unrestrained fullness of its being, if not that which it crosses in its violent act and which, as its destiny, it crosses out in the line it effaces?" (34-35).

Sabbatical Post 3: Why Mushrooms?

So your comments continue to inspire me.  The art of Adam and Eve and the mushrooms is suggestive on so many levels.  As I study these pictures, I am drawn into the moment.  Are we seeing Adam and Eve just before they eat the forbidden fruit, during, or after?  Is the forbidden fruit the mushroom, a hallucinogen that opens their eyes to a new reality?  Or does it represent the decay of the tree after they have eaten?  Or poison that killed them?  Or does the mushroom represent the diversification of knowledge, its continual dispersal through spores nourished by the forbidden tree?  Is the representation suggesting that what Eve started cannot be stopped?  Does the image represent the salve or healing properties of the mushroom, the mercy granted by God who did not actually kill them for their trespass but set in motion the act of redemption instead? 

The mushroom as a metaphor is very apt for me and my understanding of Gnostic spirituality, because of its multivalency.  Irenaeus uses the image in reference to Gnostics as harmful fungi that grow popping up here and there and everywhere with no sustained root.  But what of other valencies?  Not all mushrooms are poisonous.  Some are medicinal.  Some are hallucinogenic.  Some are just good to eat (as long as you aren't allergic to them as I am!).  The image of their growth through spore is wonderful.  The lack of centrality and organization in their growth patterns.  Their growth in rich soil or compost.  Their need for constant damp and low exposure to sun. 

Why is this multivalency important?  My understanding of Gnostic spirituality is characterized by the transgressive.  My definition of the Gnostic sees the Gnostic as transgressive in terms of his or her metaphysics and practices.  Now you may call be to task on this, wondering who do they transgress?  Early Christianity was diverse, as was early Judaism.  So we can not talk about a dominant tradition or interpretative strategy.  Doesn't transgression imply perversion?  Aren't you being polemical like Irenaeus?

First, I would say we need to pay attention to the sociologists and the anthropologists who have studied transgression for decades.  To transgress is not the same as being different or diverse.  There is still the normative even within diversity.  Or better, diversity can represent the norm and the status quo.  It doesn't have to be transgressive.  Every culture has its norms, and religious expressions are no different.  Religions in fact are conservative and tend to renew themselves by maintaining whatever is normative for them at all costs.  According to sociological studies, the transgressor is only known as a transgressor because he or she is labeled such by others in the community.  In other words, we only know what is transgressive through the response of the community to the one who transgresses.  This response helps us to identify the norm and the parameters of the acceptable, as well as the unacceptable.  What can be acceptable in one period, may become unacceptable in another time period, even periods as short as decades.

In modern terms, let me suggest an example.  Next time you are in an elevator turn around and face everyone else and stare at someone.  Watch the reaction of others in the elevator.  You will quickly know that you have transgressed the public norm for properly riding in elevators. 

The same is true of the ancient world.  It did not take long for Christians to begin to get kicked out of synagogues, and if Paul is correct, even captured and dragged before the Jewish religious authorities.  Why?  Because they were Jews who had transgressed what were considered commonly accepted Jewish norms of the time.  We can argue about what those norms were, but they were transgressed and the Jewish community responded by expelling the unacceptable and consolidating what it perceived as normative.  We might even say that the Christian transgression assisted the Jewish community in marking its boundaries even clearer.

How the Gnostics fit into this, well, that is one of the main goals of my book.

Image from The Canterbury Psalter

Sabbatical Post 2: Creating an Image

This morning I felt creative and so I played around with some images to represent the ideas I have forming in my mind about my new book.  So here is what I came up with.

I love the central image.  What is going on here?  Adam and Eve are parading before the tree of knowledge whose limb appears to be cut off and mushrooms have taken root from the central stem.  Eve is not eating an apple here, but a mushroom?

Mural painting from the apse of Sant Sadurní in Osormort

Second quarter of the 12th century

Museu Episcopal de Vic

Sabbatical Blog 1: Mushrooms

So my sabbatical project is to write as much of my book The Ancient New Age: The Birth of Christianity and the Triumph of Gnostic Spirituality as possible.  At the moment, I have been working on honing my abstract and table of contents.  So I want to share the abstract with you in this first post on the sabbatical.

Since I am going to be making my old subject contemporary with the analogy to the New Age, I have been thinking deeply about Gnostic(ism) and about its re-insurgence in the modern period.  I keep going back to Irenaeus' description of the Gnostics as mushrooms popping up from the terrain.  I rather like this metaphor and am thinking about structuring the book around it.  Besides there is great mushroom art from the medieval Christians.  Take a look at this Eden with the mushroom as the tree of knowledge (Plaincourault Fresco).

Abstract: Early Christianity was very radical in its approach to perennial questions about God and humanity because, DeConick explains, the Christian tradition was seeded with a Gnostic spirituality from the start. DeConick argues that Gnostic spirituality itself was a brand new concept in the ancient world, a new way of being religious that emerged in 1st c. Alexandria, and quickly was dispersed across the Mediterranean.  It reflected a subversive metaphysical outlook and included an understanding of humanity as divine.  Unlike early catholic Christianity which developed traditional Jewish teachings about the mortality of the human being created in God's image and subject to sin, the Gnostics framed their teaching along Platonic lines, understanding the essential human being to be an uncreated piece of God living in exile and suffering on account of this separation.  These 2 metaphysical outlooks were diametrically opposed to each other, competing for dominance from the start of Christian history to today.  While the catholic churches were able to sustain mass conversion and the western Gnostic churches ultimately perished, Gnostic spirituality did not die.  It survived as an underground religious current.  It remains today at the root of New Age and Self-help movements, and at odds with traditional forms of Christianity just as it was in the ancient world. The Ancient New Age focuses on the way in which Gnostic spirituality has triumphed.  Not only did it foster countercultural metaphysical or “New Age” movements in past, but it continues to do so in the present, where its message of the divine human thrives.

A Sabbatical Blog?

Well I am finally making it to my second sabbatical in my career.  Once I turn my grades in in May, I am considering myself to officially be on sabbatical.  It is much needed, believe me, and it will be for the entire next academic year thanks to the success of a Rice Individual Faculty Fellowship generously granted to me by the Humanities Research Center at Rice University which is funding the second semester.  My project?  You guessed it.  I will be writing my book The Ancient New Age: The Triumph of Gnostic Spirituality and the Birth of Christianity.

So I was wondering whether or not to start blogging about what I am doing while on Sabbatical?  It might be interesting to log my progress.  It might help me think through the tough spots, the blind spots and the discouraging spots.  And it would be a boon to get feedback from you on some of my ideas as I am in the process of writing.

Is this something that you would be interested in following?