Democratic Gnosticism: The American Religion?

Abstract

This book will offend many historians, and for different reasons it will also offend many kinds of believers. It is unabashedly subjective and sometimes wrong-headed, and its sweeping generalizations invite attack. It is also brilliant and original. In places, its lightning flashes illuminate and alter a familiar landscape. Historians interested in American religion-and that should mean all historians interested in American society-will do well to read it and think about what it says. The American religion, Bloom dramatically asserts, is not Christianity or Protestantism but a democratized Gnosticism. By this he means that it is centered on a close relation-almost an identification-between individual spirit and God. The self is an uncreated spark of God, totally isolated from and older than created world. Knowledge and experience of God can be achieved only through some sort of special revelation. Gnostic American religion lacks anything that can accurately be called a theology, and it is not much interested in ecclesiastical forms. In its passionate and sanctified individualism, it is profoundly uninterested in problems of society. American history, a lively and growing subject, has usually been written by insiders or ex-insiders, either by Christians or by people who have been brought up in Christianity and rejected it. Harold Bloom is, he repeatedly insists, an extreme outsider. He describes himself as a nonbelieving Gnostic Jew. One of boldest, most controversial, and most prolific of our literary critics, Bloom here assumes character of a religious critic. Literary critics, he asserts, cannot deal adequately with their subject by reducing it to history or social science, but must also take account of the irreducible effect of aesthetic. Similarly, Bloom insists, critics must take account of an irreducibly spiritual element, and must finally understand religion as an effort to triumph over death. As a critic, Bloom seeks to