The contemporary sexual revolution is thoroughly Gnostic, attacking the institution of marriage, thwarting the conception of children, and denying the differences between men and women “Temptation of Jesus Christ” (1901-03) by Ilya Repin [WikiArt.org] There is a tale, whose threads are too long to unravel here, of the meanderings of an idea through history—the idea that, as Nicolas Gómez-Davila parsed it, man is “a god imprisoned in the dull inertia of his flesh, or a god who elevates matter as his cry of victory.†This is the “knowledge†of both the old and the new Gnostics: We are not who...