Gnosis, Narrative, and the Occasion of Repentance

Abstract

Abstract Among scholars and critics of “primary narrative,” it is widely recognized that the emergence to prominence of literary theory over “explication de texte” despite certain evident attractions, carries with it a disturbing proclivity to occlude the texts that were once, ostensibly, theory’s justification. One may confirm this readily in such theorizing as one now associates with figures as widely various in their focus as Gadamer, Barthes, Derrida, Eagleton, and Lacan. But it is important also to recognize that this general displacement is not unprecedented; it holds much in common with usurpation of authority from the narratives that traditionally bear it in other eras. One thinks here not only of Marxism, as one might recently have first imagined, but also more anciently, of Neoplatonist systems of all kinds. Embarrassment with biblical narrative and flight from its “shameful simplicities” (the phrase is Augustine’s) is highly visible in Philo Judaeus and Origen, for example, each of whose method of dealing with primary biblical narrative is antireahst, prophylactic, and cultivating of what we may call, in the informal sense, an elite gnosis. And it may be, as some would argue, that the reflex of allegorism in late antiquity and the Middle Ages is but one pulse of a historical dialectic for which we might find analogues in any textual tradition.