Thank you for your excellent, informative essay/post, dear spirited!
RE: the italics at the top: I find it inexplicable that Thomas Molnar would regard Plato as a gnostic thinker. I don't think he is any such thing. Plato in his works describes a Great Hierarchy of Being, which consists of four "partners": God–Man–World–Society. God is the principal partner; the preeminent relation is between God and Man; relations to World and Society flow from the critical relation between God and Man. Plus Plato evidently believed in the necessity of divine Judgment of each and every human soul. He presents this idea in the Pamphyllian Myth, a/k/a/ the Myth of Er (i.e., a sort of "Everyman"), found in the Republic.
Er is a mortal man who descends alive to the underworld and witnesses the judgment of souls, according to divine justice — and then is somehow able to "come back" alive to the world to tell mankind what he had seen. Plato exhorts all men to prepare their souls for such Judgment, for the worst thing that can happen to a man is to face Ananke, the mediator of the judgment, with a soul full of punishable injustice....
That does not at all sound like the "gnostic attitude" to me.
As to what the "gnostic attitude" may be, Eric Voegelin describes it this way ["Science, Politics, and Gnosticism," in Modernity Without Restraint, Manfred Henningsen, ed., 2000; p. 297f]:
[1] It must first be pointed out that the Gnostic is dissatisfied with his situation. This, in itself, is not especially surprising. We all have cause to be not completely satisfied with one aspect or another of the situation in which we find ourselves.Generally, it will be found that magical operations are involved in [6] — as for instance, Nietzsche's "Death of God," or Hegel's self-divinization in the Phänomonologie.
[2] Not quite so understandable is the second aspect of the gnostic attitude: the belief that the drawbacks of the situation can be attributed to the fact that the world is intrinsically poorly organized. For it is likewise possible to assume that the order of being as it is given to men [wherever its origin is to be sought] is good and that it is we human beings who are inadequate. If in a given situation something is not as it should be, then the fault is to be found in the wickedness of the world.
[3] The third characteristic is the belief that salvation from the evil of the world is possible.
[4] From this follows the belief that the order of being will have to be changed in a historical process. From a wretched world a good one must evolve historically. This assumption is not altogether self-evident, because the Christian solution might also be considered, namely, that the world throughout history will remain as it is and that man's salvational fulfillment is brought about through grace in death.
[5] With this fifth point we come to the gnostic trait in the narrower sense — the belief that a change in the order of being lies in the realm of human action, that this salvational act is possible through man's own effort.
[6] If it is possible, however, so to work a structural change in the given order of being that we can be satisfied with it as a perfect one, then it becomes the task of the Gnostic to seek out the prescription for such a change. Knowledge — Gnosis — of the method of altering being is the central concern of the Gnostic. As the sixth feature of the Gnostic attitude, therefore, we recognize the construction of a formula for self and world salvation, as well as the Gnostic's readiness to come forward as a prophet who will proclaim his knowledge about the salvation of mankind.
Anyhoot, I am convinced that Plato had no truck with such thinking and general attitude toward the world and man's place in it.
The great symbol Dike — "Justice, order, law, right" — is divine, not man-made; it cannot be repealed by man; every man is eternally subject to it; no man can ever escape it.
Just some thoughts for your consideration, dear sister in Christ!
I find it inexplicable that Thomas Molnar would regard Plato as a gnostic thinker
Spirited: Molnar was not characterizing Plato as a Gnostic thinker, for he was no such thing, but rather demonstrating common points of departure between ancient pantheist nature religions and modern Gnostic movements, with ‘matter is evil’ being of primary importance.
Consider for example the modern Gnostic-Hindu-spiritist-pantheist worldview of Marxist Communism. Jehovah God is the evil demiurge, creator of the matter into which divine sparks have fallen. But because the Divine One Substance is within the consciousness of the Gnostic magician, then he is a man-god who creates his own world and meaning in every living moment out of his own consciousness. The Gnostic magus is a god who controls matter because he controls mind. The physical world then, is an illusion (maya) because reality is inside the divine mind.
This way of thinking is captured by George Orwell in his book, “Nineteen Eighty-Four” in which negation of the physical world (evil matter) is an integral part of the social and political philosophy of Big Brother and his despotic Party.
At one stage in the book, Winston stumbles upon the shocking realization that,
“…in the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later; the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy.” (Orwell, “The New Spirituality and its Hallmarks, Alan Morrison, SCP Journal, Vol. 30:4-31:1, 2007, p. 19)
When the Thought Police agent O’Brien (Gnostic magus)tortures Winston for “wrong thought” he states,
“We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation-—anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to….You must get rid of these nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature.”
Big Brother is a modern Gnostic-Hindu-spiritist pantheist magician or god-man in a long line of pagan magicians going back to Nimrod and the ancient Egyptian magus Hermes Trismegistus to the more recent Simon Magus, the Gnostic Valentinus, Eastern Tantric sages, Yogis, and god-men to Renaissance magicians such as Agrippa, Paracelsus and Pico della Mirandola.
Like all nature systems, Big Brother holds to the oneness of existence. This means that bodies (matter) and elements are mutually transmutable. This was announced as the Grand Principle of Hermes Trismegistus and found expression in the teaching that,
” …everything that is high is equal to what is low, and everything low is equal to what is high.” (God and the Knowledge of Reality, Thomas Molnar, p. 82)
Hermes formula means that there is an absolute although hidden unity, a Great Chain of Being, between the lower world of matter and the higher realm of the impersonal world soul(One Substance), the key of which (gnosis)lends to the magician incalculable powers when he learns how to acquire divine intellect.