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Wednesday, April 3, 2019

Doctor Faustus And The Lutheran Aesthetic Religion Essay

Doctor Faustus And The Lutheran aesthetic Religion Essay(187) In Renaissance Tragedy thither is endless(prenominal)ly ecumenic exclusivelyy a concluding termination-scene, the blooding ending a induction to happen. The sixteenth century was a time of growing agnosticism approximately the delivery patchian afterlife and an urgent need for present self- accreditedization. Finding a doughty dying would satisfy a lasting fame and tragedy offering cherish to a unconsecrated dry land.(188) Doctor Faustus is unitary of the tragedies of the time with much(prenominal) secular tendencies, the recreate rejecting the Heaven connects it to Luthers re newbornal of the mystery in afterlife, making death the more than inscrutable in its rhythm method of birth controls of despair and trustfulness which is inherent in Christian go by means of. at that place is a set of formal technique stressing such(prenominal) affinity surrounded by the two with the plays ambivalence towards Calvinistic predetermination and Faustus perennial mood-swings as a Lutheran response to inaccessibility of death. Lutherans scepticism regards the misadventure of containing philosophical speculation on afterlife in stable pieces of ism which for Faustus and Luther ends up in a restless ecstasy of mind.(189) The Calvinist ambit sack ups Faustus superior compelled in fear of immortals punishment and yet beingness otiose to repent and the inevitable otherness of the deity and the predestination of charitable action. Faustus has batchvass in Wittenberg where both(prenominal) Luther and Calvin taught and his sad force stems from the destruction of an idiosyncratic testament by the arbitrary power of the Calvinist deity.(190) Presently the general clear takes Faustus motivation in a balance view of both voluntarist and fatalist readings. The actual restlessness within the play dangles betwixt the extremes. Faustus is a sceptic his mind proceeds by the dialectic of question and desire to choose the void in his under geting through new dogmatic lay part he establishes a balance in the midst of competing doctrines. His dissatisfaction with stasis is hardly equal for his agonized unrepenance in Gods face of angriness.(191) II. The opening scene submits Faustus struggling to last what it can non. All kinds of knowledge be tossed aside as woefully shadowy when he rejects such systems of knowledge. He is acting on a conclusion he has long considered. His mood abruptly shifts on theology and its interchange teaching We must die an everlasting death followed by a sudden feeling of discouragement. The inevitability of death is not banished with confidence and thats why he turns to magic. At first its still his interest in bleak arts which is to resolve his death anxiety whollyowing him to be pull in with cynical abandon. til now the continuing obsession with death manifests in his talks with Mephistopheles the debates leaving him rel uctant to accept the replies he is given. He tacitly admits the experienceence of Hell imperativeness to find a fixed location and terminal determination stock-still to no avail. He finds Hell both present and removed, present in the existence of devils and absent in him not yet dead.(192) Faustus can peck save not comprehend what hes confronted with, so he resolves it using his skilful denial. He is continually encounters Hell by devils and be captures hopeless in such endless revolution, so he decides to be rid of the awargonness of sinning even off though escaping the thought is impossible. He breaks the cycle starting to depend close a wife, an mundane end. His scepticism manifests itself in the restless dispute which is rooted in his questionablety about the super graphic that cannot be compass through his earthly vantage. Its a post ever beyond his receive and also to well-nigh extent within Christian theology from Augustine to Calvin and when the elementar y elements of the afterlife is beyond ones grasp, repentance becomes almost impossible.(193) III. such was Luthers teaching confrontation with mortality as a fundamental source of spectral experience and his anxieties about death were the basis for his entire theology. gibe to Heidelberg we by temper wonder our will more than the will of God. We even hate him and Luther supposes that our record pushes us to avoid the otherness of death, yet our relation to God demands that we take on it. We can neer be freed from what we be. We ar constantly left grapple with our imagination. Luthers scepticism about coherence of adult male perspective is confusing and his impression in God sees dubious.(194) Generally the basis for the ideas of inwardness, plainness, and self-sufficiency be associated with Protestant thought.(195) Eucharist to him is authorized bread and real booze, where Christs flesh and blood be present man the formers remain still present. He insisted on the real presence of the Godhead as the meeting of two different perspectives the object of assurance, and trustfulness in itself. The first is outside the heart, presented to our eyes, in the blood and wine and the second in internal not externalized.(196) Luthers theology perceives an epistemological than an ontological difference betwixt the earthly and the churchman arguing that the single core group of the Eucharist is at once Christ and bread. The communion is therefore uncertain and destabilising and Luthers ecstasy cannot last permanently for the film of an unencountered future. To him too much faith is the sign of sinful pride, a comfort which terrifies conscience and the despairing rejection of the prophesy will struggling with renewed efforts at faith.(197) Eucharist produces a domain of incomplete satisfaction as an endless postulate to resolve a feeling of double vision, a mode of representation generating a special psychological pattern. In Luther, it is said that even in our destruction God is present with us, and in our death Christ our King liveth.(198) Luther speaking about death comes to life and comments on the horror of being trampled by death, the cycle of hope and despair Faustus is caught in. His views were not accepted by the Calvinist and the Anglican church service, yet his views on death were circulating in England.(199) Marlowe spent 3 years studying Protestant theology at Cambridge, and Faustus struggled with this uncertainty. His supernatural perspectives mother an apprisedness of a denied satisfaction attempting to deny the existence of this greater perspective. His final soliloquy is in the aforesaid(prenominal) dialectic pattern longing for the unceasing day and mean plot his soul to be dissolved in elements, desiring to make the afterlife and extension of his earthly perspective and also escaping it entirely. There ar baffling origins for Faustus to keep to his pact. He asks for a description of perdition fleck the answer he receives is dissatisfying. So he shifts the subject to having a wife substituting his questions with a feminized spirit. Mephistopheles explanation of astrology is freshmens supposition and the handwriting of spells seem incomplete to him and he takes a tour to Rome instead of Hell.(200) Faustus denied satisfactions for his earthly boundaries are offered to him through Lutheran readings. Anyhow he knows that everlasting death awaits him and is confronted with the unchangeability of death and thus starts his pattern of avoidance the fact. The pact promises secede from this helpless awareness offering mortality by forging his damnation. Faustus abolishes the perspective existing beyond his sustain turning godly power to his own or rendering God irrelevant by determining his small condition of death. In misery loves confederacy Faustus pays more attention to company than misery feeling tormented by his condition.(201) Misery is nothing new to him, but he seek s company and the fellowship with the devil bridges the hatchway in awareness with which he is burdened. except he sees that the view beyond his is not different than his own vantage- flush for devils condition is available to those benignants who are in hell. No matter what the perspective the resoluteness would be an evade from the feeling of being caught on one side of the double perspective. Faustus is ironi call iny caught in his own perspective for what the devil shows him is the re-exposition of his own view and there is no frame to validate the demons responses. So he keeps twisted guts and forth between doubt and certainty with sudden cry of consternation without being afraid of dying.(202) He has incessant change of voice referring to himself in first person and his meditations are dialogic dramatized in actual shifts of voice between confidence and doubt.V. Sense of doubleness finally takes Faustus to the extreme of avoidance distracting his mind from revolutions t o witching(prenominal) tricks contend on the Pope, a pompous knight, and a horse-dealer. These pranks show the young turns in the doctor.(203) His serious and satiric behaviours are both other attempts at avoidance. Unable to get satisfied intellectually he is reduced to practicing magic and mindless games to escape the revolutions of his thoughts. He feels trapped in the double perspective and thus tries to leave it off asking for a wife. Hell is characterized to him as a place for permanent dispute while he is aware of the limits of his understanding and thats why he turns back to earthly diversions to find pause in earthly companionship which is doomed all the same.(204) Bell, Book, and Candle as a parody of Catholicism is also one of Faustus own condition of being caught in endless loop of his thoughts. His interactions with the devils re-enacts the pattern of avoidance that Luther call the fundamental condition of mortality. The pact is an emblem of human state all coming from studies of divinity or concourse with devils. We are left with the knowledge that there exist a knowledge beyond our own, and the more we struggle to establish a satisfactory relation, the more avoid the inevitable limits of our human condition. Thats why Faustus never abandons his pact to rid himself of it would be meaningless unless freed from humanity.VI. Faustus of need to see past his humanness to find peace of mind always in the beyond.(205) Marlowe fuses two transparent methods of representation, psychological depictions of hell and human suffering, and multi-colour devils making threats of physical torture. Renaissance concern for subtleties of human experiences juxtaposed with knightly emphasis on the stratified order of values. This is an intentional parody which is less sophisticated than Faustus agonized description of his mental strife. At the end of answer II, Lucifer tries to quiet Faustus metaphysical doubts providing Seven Deadly Sins. Faustus finds someth ing satisfying in this allegory of hell more than the psychological description of hell.(206) Luther was usanceally an opposite of allegory believing that the on-key meaning of the scripture was lying in its literal superstar, and his rejection was help both by the Catholic Church and illuminate Protestants. The question regards the betterment of one particular allegory to other. Luther lashed out the Catholic church for ignoring the grammatical sense of the Eucharist.(207) Luther insisted upon the literal sense. For him there was never real distinction between the word of God and its earthly sign, they are exclusively two different ways of looking at the same thing. There is no way of moving from sign to signified and the dual matter of the sign is to bring the observer into the real presence of God while at the same time manifesting the infinite gulf of apprehension that exists between God and mankind. Faustus need to escape unknowing is answered by hell envisioned as th e collection of earthly forms, knowing that afterlife can be understood in earthly terms and momentarily relieving him from the doubleness. But fit to Luther such moments of forced resolution are not truly satisfying. Although Faustus turns to allegory, he remains aware that it doesnt actually bridge the gap. In the allegorical pageant, the certainty quickly turns to doubt, an inscrutability not dislodging his desire to know. The clarity of understanding is quickly rejected as being naive and Faustus struggle leads him to an isolating despair, the cycle of faith and doubt, alternating between allegorical clarity and psychological complexity never to resolve. We are not even sure in the end the doctor will be back with another performance.VII. Dryden signaled that death can some generation be the stuff of comedy, yet remaining a source of sad experience all the same.(209) In Faustus there is a sense of doubt and anxiety on death as an incomprehensible phenomenon that logic is not able to soothe. Faustus struggles endlessly against his unknowing, the struggle which expresss nothing but the incompleteness that makes human existence tragic.Theology of Marlowes The Jew of Malta(214) After Faustus, this play is the most juiceless one of his works. Jewishness is seen as a moral condition, and Jewish choice was the rejection of Christ, rejecting the take account in Heaven for the one on the earth. Jesus tells the Jews you are of your father the bait introducing them as the Antichrist.(215) Yet, the modern anti-Semitism of today cannot be applied to the times of Elizabeth and the interpret of the Jew at the time was more of a theological necessity than a alimentation person based on his historical image in the Old Testament. According to Medieval law, sexual relations between a Christian and a Jew were met with the penalty of death by fire. The reason is taken as the denial of Christianity rather than racial issues. Shakespeares Shylock and Marlowes Barabas we re more of a Medieval image as a word of general abuse bequeathed to the renaissance. Elizabethan England was a country bare of racial Jews and the satisfying frame rejected racial thinking.(216) The Anglican service was praying for all Jews, Turks, Infidels, and Heretics. According to Hunter, the Jew who falls into the caldron is the very one in the first bring with no reduction of the authors sympathetic identification with plenty of ironic counter-currents. The building of the concepts in the play are theological not racial, and the name as a type was fixed unless he ceased to be a Jew. In the put downning Barabas congratulates himself on his Jewish change stateity and Abrams happiness. Yet this is not so in Christianity and Abraham and other old patriarchs of the Old Testament cannot belong to the Jewish one and Jewish invocation of them is merely subversive and alien. There have been numerous treatises trying to remove the Old Testament from the Jews.(217) According to L uther the Jews practical application of Abrahams blessings are only carnal injuring the Scripture. They may be the children after the flesh, but Christians are the children of the promise, as Isaac was, of grace and faith. Barabas later on does such self-congratulation when he leads Don Lodowick to his doom.(218) It was believed that the promise was the very thing the Gentiles were given. So Barabas self-congratulation seems as the same original choice and his orthodoxy in saying the blessings promised to the Jews is no less that Faustus contentment in the paradise of the Seven Deadly Sins. An ironic contrast is do between the blueprint of Barabas and Job Marlowe citing from the Geneva version of the actual book of Job.(219) The reference to him is central to the self-coloured conception of Barabas. He is an Anti-Job characterized by his choice of revenge and impatience. This way he is also an Antichrist for Job was the greatest of the types of Christ found in the Old Testament , his descent into poverty mirroring Christs into flesh. Barabas career is a parody to Jobs, both beginning in prosperity and then losing their possessions both accused of justifying their deeds, both restoring their prosperity. Their frame of mind is different though. Barabas self-justification is from grievous egotism and Jobs is out of awareness that God is unanswerably just. Yet the latters voice break in the mouth of a revenger the pattern of all patience. The effort of Christian appropriation of Job was to distinguish between the action of a man whose vision of the human race was coloured by the awareness of the Redeemer living and the superficially similar action of the man whose vision was limited to this world.(220) Jewish observances are justifications of the mere flesh for their Religion represented earthly wealthiness, dignity, and prosperity as highly valuable. Barabas is a Jewish Job and the loss of his wealth is a physical disaster, not a spectral trial. The paro dy of Jobs spiritual Odyssey and Barabas view to treasure are different from what is recommended in Christianity. Barabas cannot serve both God and riches and the actions the Job denies are those in which Barabas rejoices as an Anti-Job.(221) Judas in Herberts represents such Jewish choice preferring thirty pieces of silver to serving his ennoble delighting in avarice. The Jewish usurer was a known contemporary understand in Marlowes days even if absent from England and his wealth represented a kind of spiritual hunger for the infinite. The path of infinite riches in a little room contains in itself the material by which we surmount and judge Barabas passion for treasure. In Miss Helen Gardners line also there is the notion of Immensity cloistered in thy dear wombe.(222) There is affinity between the two Marlowes line draws the persistent image of Christ in the Virgins womb and(223) Such wordings are repeatedly mentioned yet in different words from one text to another. In one s ame tradition the image expresses the paradox of infinitude in little space stretch before and after Marlowe. In another one Christs power is represented as infinite richness. The Virgins womb is litel space and yet also boundlessly rich in monetary sense. The comparison of Christ to jewels, gold, and silver are obviously shown in varied texts.(224) There is a natural handing over of Wisdom to the Virgin where she is infinitely rich by possessing Christ, her womb surgical process as a purse, mint, or an alms-box. The gold is coined in the image of God, being defaced in the womb of the Virgin, the vessel enjoying humility.(225) Thus the double paradox of Marlowes line is already present in a religious tradition, Christianity being contradictory to the flesh. The treasure/Christ is there for the use of others and again the contrast between the sterile treasure hoarded by man and the liberal treasure disbursed by God is shown to ransome great kings from captivity (64-67). But the only king Barabas ransoms is himself while his house is captured and converted into a nunnery, Abigail entering it as a father to dig up the treasure hidden. The contrasting values are played off the fruits of the spirit and those of commerce, one against the other. The pun on benefit in the Aside (574-76) is interpreted as benefit to mean as muchas apprehend is hid (577).(226) When Barabs teases the Governors son to his death he talks of the nuns and friars as still doing it reape some fruit in fulnesse of perfection (833-48). The variety of innuendos suggest the lechery of the nuns and friars with the fruit of bastardy playing on the idea of profit, spiritual, and financial. The austere life of Abigail leads to profit, by repaying the debt to God for her sinful past. Behind is the theory of monastic deprivation to appease Gods wrath by giving vicarious satisfaction. The nunnery in Barabas house is still a place of profit and Marlowes play on thesaurus is justified by the monet ary and financial imagery of the churchs power.(227) The vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience which the nuns have taken are works of supererogation (duty done more than expected) and the profit they produce is part of Marlowes treasure though not the kind Barabas is interested in. The doctrine of a inordinateness of merits is what lies behind the practice of selling Indulgences specifically talked about in thirty-nine articles as abhorrent to the Anglican Church, one of the most noxious (poisonous) of romish belief. The final twist of the ironic point is in Barabas instruction to his young lady (585-98).(228) The resurrection is not a spiritual one the profit is judged after the flesh. In (663-69) there is no wooden enactment of predetermined attitude, but a continuous fluctuation of sympathy backwards and forwards round the elaborate of Barabas while his religious status is never in doubt who fatally mistakes the nature of value functioning as the medieval emissaries of Hel l, taking us with him in his scorn of the other characters in the play. The Jew is admired in a way different from Faustus. He is place among Christians with the profession of policy, nuns of dubious chastity, and friars with irresolute carnality the Christianity itself is not attacked and neither is Jewishness approved. In Marlowes time Malta was being menaced by Turkish attacks, and such struggle was not between nations, but between faiths, God and the devil. Such prayers were commonly said in England in 1565.(229) Marlowe was referring to cauterize and dried moral issues by choosing Malta as the setting of his play. The Knights of Malta were no median(a) soldiers, but monastic ones vowed to poverty, chastity, and obedience. He chose his men to raise expectations of rectitude while his view of man was that of a fallen condition. The Christians are shown in a variety of cynical variations and inversions and the idealistic rhetoric of honour and piety is only a window-dressing wi th the reality of greed that the wind that bloweth all the world besides, / relish of gold (1422). The international relations are based on money or illusion and Malta buys its peace from the Turks while the occation of the Turks coming to the island is to sell Grecians, Turks, and Africk Moores. The only tangible sign of honour in Del Boscos words is Ile write unto his loftiness for ayd, (745) which is never materialized and finally scoffed at by Calymath.(230)Everyone has its price and Barabas pre summationes that it is a raft to acquire townes / By treachery, sellem by deceit (2330). The difference between a monarch and a thief is only a matter of degrees. Such a world is devoted to greed and Barabas in his self-interest is utterly adapted to his environment while still standing aside others. Their difference of opinion is a tiresome interruption in the real life of profit-making so that they would spare me, my daughter, and my wealth (189-92). At a personal he is in confli ct with Christians and thus makes a common cause with Ithamore as an individual Turk both villaines, / Both circumcised, we both hate Christians (978-80). His hatred to Christians is merely a reduplication of the Turkish hostility. In Act V it is more fat to sell the Turks than the Christians for the latter is currently living the Authority (2139-41). The Turks and Christians both are inconsistent in their self-interest but Barabas allows neither race, blood, faith, nor grandeur stand in his consistent monomania.(231) He is free from idealism or dependency upon others and the degree of admiration and sympathy shown in borne to better chance, / And framd of finer turn then common men (452) is a counterpoint over religious condemnation. The fate of Malta is a mere transaction but does not decimate the importance of the orthodox view, that self-interest is self-destroying, and Barabas lines are a rhetorical development of ever-narrowing range (189-192). The lines show a preference for private security in a Jewish alien. But there is not a whole progression where the daughter first is assimilated to gold and later is destroyed. Abigail is fraught with ironic overtones. In the Helen speech of Faustus the image of Semele as here Agamemnon was responsible for the alienate of Iphigeneia.(232) Barabas looks to the future in terms of gold (the barren breed of metal) (701-4) and the purchase of Ithamore in the slave-market is set against the sale of diamond Abigail to Lodowick (899) with cross-reference to real pay (983-1011). Abigail is both seen as gold and human investment and is drawn from circulation when requisite substituted by Ithamore. (1312-1344).(233) The trinity of me, my daughter, and my wealth is reduced to me and my wealth. Ithamore is also a irradiation and the descent from Abigail to Ithamore is through the ever-diminishing circles of personal freedom into depths of pettier criminality where the cut-purse and courtesan natural inhabitants. Such structure of decline takes place in Faustus, too. Both heroes begin with splendid assertions of individual will and in Act II and IV are carried to low-life clowning and frustrations. Yet Faustus ends splendidly while the Jews fate is not redeemed by a denouement and his psychological conditions are not discussed. Barabas temporarily defeats his enemies by pretending to die. Yet the Antichrist is not easily excluded. He returns through the towns sewers as a coup de theatre (a sudden event), a reminder of medieval pageants inheriting moral as well as physical structures, with the Heaven high up and the Hell underneath in the pit or the cauldron.(234) On such occasions as those of Barabas the cauldron could represent the traditional image of hell which was derived from the final chapters of Job where colossus and Leviathan both were pictured in details as hell-mouth of fearful monsters., a boiling cauldron was imagined in the open jaws of the monster.(235) Sometimes the cauldron repr esents hell itself, and sometimes it is a part of the setting. Definitely in Barabas end there are inevitable moral concerns with the final victory of Christians in Malta. Yet, Marlowe avoids the verificatory Second Coming of Christ and the survival of the Christians has no moral justification. In fact Marlowe has damned the Jew as a means of tormenting and exposing those who pride themselves on their Christianity. The arguments of the Governor are like those of Peter the olden urging the Jews to be forced to contribute to the cost of the Second Crusade.(236) At the time all wars against the Turkish infidels were seen as Crusades and the situation of Malta was the extension of the one that Peter Venerable was writing about. Marlowe implies that Barabas is against the Christ, yet his trial is conducted by figures that approximate to Pilate and Chief priest (331). Profession in the play means religious faith.(237) Barabas makes the Christian point that righteousness is not a tribal or racial possession, but an individual covenant (346-350). Therefore he has the right to live and prosper in this world and in terms of the Old Testament he seems to be justified. His extension of legal status in Malta to a conscientiously legality under the terms of the Jewish law, yet, does not fit in, with his claim to a personal covenant.(238) The righteousness in Barabas speech is a distinct and antithetical concept to that of the New Testament and a Christian earreach is expected to reject Barabas defence. In (351-355) profession means Jewish faith and for the Jew to claim individual covenant is a contradiction in terms. Barabas as the figure of Job attempts at futile self-justification and as an Anti-Job figure resorts to Machiavellian cunning (507). The last two line of the Governor (356) show that more than doctrinal correctness is involved.(239) Marlowe in saying all they that love not Tobacco and Boie were fooles? And to what? Such a statement is effective because of its power to upset our preconception, but it does not lead to anywhere. Marlowe identified himself with the rebels Tamburlaine, Barabas, Faustus, and Edward II, but that such identification blinded him to the immutable laws of God, society is improbable. His Cambridge background and social contacts suggest his contact with Calvinism and the strongest emotional effects in the writings of the reformers usually come from their sense of Gods infinite transcendence, and mans infinite debasement (Tamburlaine, 2893-2911). The speaker is passionately familiarity with the idea of Gods purity and transcendence and the betrayal of that purity in human nature.(240) He knew what it was like to worship transcendence, the power, and beauty beyond human comprehension. He was a God-haunted atheist being simultaneously fascinated and horrified by the self-sufficiency of the fallen world. We come to prefer the Jewish profession of Barabas to the falsehood of the Christians with Marlowe belabouring t he Christians. The world of Marlowe is completely a fallen one and so is the world of Calvin.The Spirit and the LetterMarlowes Tamburlaine and Elizabethan Religious Radicalism(125) Having conquered Babylon and outside the ruins of the city Tamburlaine asks about the Islamic holy books Now CasaneThey shal be burnt (2 Tam. 5.1.173-76). He cognize the futility of respecting anything but his own divinity. He taunts Mahomet in (2 Tam. 5.1.180-81) and identifies himself as the scourge of another higher God.(126) To him Spirit is bound by nothing unlike Mahomet whose sum of religion rests in the Koran (2 Tam. 5.1.191). He disdains religion codified in books and the letter of the law means nothing for he possesses a augur spirit throwing off his shepherds weeds to reveal the armour beneath persuading everyone he is not of flesh and blood subject to laws. Marlowe comments on issues of gnosis and inner discernment and the conflict between the spirit and the letter. Here the Koran is substi tuted for the Christian Scriptures and he is addressing Christian theology in transferring the defiant gesture to the distant world of Islam. In Tamburlaine the possession of a spiritual gnosis leads to a disregard for all laws where others are governed bodily by it. At the time the issues of election and predestination were hotly debated and there were an increasing number of people seeking unmediated contact with God from religious authorities or doctrinal codes. Marlowes plays are a part of a larger cultural exploration of the entailment of individual religious inspiration and the consequences of such inspiration for the body politic.(127) Marlowes plays indicate a sceptical attitude towards Gnostic transcendence. He offers a slender portrait of spiritual confidence gone mad and facilitates us with the perception of tensions in English Reformation thought.II. There is a Gnostic subtext in Marlowes plays as well as the presentation of anti-materialism.(128) As the opponents of the Gnostics, the early Church Fathers intended their work as a cautious displaying of heresy focalisation their attention excessive, outlandish belief and practices. Gnosticism is a negative religio-philosophical movement escaping from the tragic farce of material existence, loathing the body and material register as a central feature like many ancient philosophies. But in Neoplatonic circles, the theory of divine emanations proclaimed earthly things to bear the musing of the divine. In Gnostic thought the material world is not even the creation of the true God rather its the work of an inferior god, himself the result of an error in the divine realm.(129) The one, unknowable God causes distinct divine beings to appear, each representing one of his attribute. The materials of creation stem from a tragic sense of loss, abandonment, and perplexity. For the Gnostics the creation of the world is a tragedy. Nothing valuable inheres in the qualities and characters of materiality. To ex ist on earth signifies the depth of ones removal from the perfection and tranquillity of the divine. The Gnostics can overcome the overwhelming alienation of life on earth through the attainment of gnosis, the recognition of ones true origin the essence of gnosis is knowing that the ones true self is divine and body and the world are impediments to ones transcendental ascent.(130) Gnostic thinkers believe that only a few individuals possess the pieces of divinity. People are divided into three categories pneumatics (spirituals), psychics, and hylics, ones status being pr

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