Gnosisssss ‐ A response to Wouter Hanegraaff

The new sensibility does not threaten a regression from rationality to superstition; rather, it allows for expansion beyond the one-sided worldview that scientism has provided us over the last three hundred years. We should never forget how utterly unsophisticated the tenets of eighteenth-century rationalism have left us, believers and unbelievers alike, in that complex arena we blithely dub ‘spiritual’. Even as we see all too clearly the kitsch of much New Age religiosity and fear the rigidity of rising fundamentalism, we remain alarmingly blind to our own unconscious tendencies in this same direction.. We forget that Western culture is equally about Platonism and Aristotelianism, idealism and empiricism, gnosis and episteme, and that for most of this culture's history one or the other has been conspicuously dominant d and dedicated to stamping the other out.