[Issue #2, Spring & Summer 1998]
Omens of Millennium
By Harold Bloom
Riverhead Books, 1996
Reviewed by Bob Wake
Harold Bloom, well into his sixth decade, exudes a lifetime of literary
study and critical thinking, coupled with an irascible penchant for gnomic
generalizations and grumpy political asides. Omens of Millennium
-- his 22nd book -- manages to combine literature, religion, and politics
in sometimes brilliant, sometimes baffling ways, which is to say it's quintessential
Bloom. While casting a disdainful eye on New Age spirituality in America,
he presents us with a historical look at the rich religious traditions that
form the basis for our fascination with angels, near-death experiences,
and dream visions. Equally, Bloom defines his book as a "spiritual
autobiography," and interwoven throughout the text are references to
his personal odyssey, including a breakdown at age 35 ("I got very
wretched, and for almost a year was immersed in acute melancholia")
that first led him to study Gnosticism and find solace within its dark,
existential spheres.
Born in New York City in 1930, he began his teaching career in 1955 at Yale
(where today he is Sterling Professor of Humanities, in addition to a concurrent
position at New York University as Berg Professor of English), and published
his first book in 1961. Like Edmund Wilson before him -- whom Bloom most
resembles in his exuberant overreaching into subjects like religion and
political history that lie outside his more assured literary purview --
Bloom is often at his most interesting when making provocative, even outrageous
assertions. But of course those very qualities which make Omens of Millennium
quintessential Bloom are also those qualities which confound mainstream
book reviewers, and incite critics like Michiko Kakutani in the New York
Times to characterize the book as "an incoherent work -- discursive,
self-indulgent and a trial to try to read."
Omens of Millennium above all is an encomium to Gnosticism, the profoundly
heretical religious movement of the second century, C.E. So enraptured is
Bloom with Gnosticism's creative upturnings and reversals of traditional
Judeo-Christian tenets, that he finds within its nose-thumbing paradoxes
a sublime emphasis on individuality similar to Emersonian self-reliance.
Bloom has been mining this territory for several decades now -- the Gnosticism
inherent in our American character -- but Omens of Millennium goes
even further, with Bloom outing himself as a full-fledged Gnostic and closing
the book with a twenty-one page Gnostic "sermon," in which he
declares: " 'Thrown' is the most important verb in the Gnostic vocabulary,
for it describes, now as well as two thousand years ago, our condition:
we have been thrown into this world, this emptiness."
If the phrase "we have been thrown into this world" seems to echo
the existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger, there is good reason for
this: the book which inspired Bloom's Gnostic conversion 30 years ago was
The Gnostic Religion, originally published in 1934 by Heidegger's
pupil Hans Jonas. The thrust of Bloom's theology takes off from Jonas's
now famous epilogue appended to the 1958 edition of The Gnostic Religion
and titled "Gnosticism, Existentialism and Nihilism." A remarkable
synthesis of Gnostic thought with the philosophies of Heidegger, Nietzsche,
and Kierkegaard, Jonas's epilogue continues even today to influence readers
with its unique perspective, blending as it does cultural pessimism with
personal transcendence. It presents a far more radical interpretation of
Gnosticism than, say, Elaine Pagels's extremely popular, but sanitized and
New Age-ish The Gnostic Gospels (1979).
To the extent that an "essential" Gnostic philosophy can be distilled
from its many strains and off-shoots, it appears at heart to suggest a deep
distrust of religious and political institutions and authority. Gnosticism
preached that the God of Judeo-Christian tradition -- the God of the Bible
-- was an imposter, an insane "demiurge" who sloppily created
our false reality of flesh and sorrow, and who has no relation to the true
Supreme Being whose existence is distant and removed from our corrupt world.
Bloom believes that the Gnostic paradigm offers the only cogent explanation
for the existence of evil, which is described as stemming from the psychotic
demiurge who created our world, rather than the real God, the estranged
creator:
The transcendent stranger God or alien God of Gnosticism,
being beyond our cosmos, is no longer an effective force; God exists, but
is so hidden that he has become a nihilistic conception, in himself. He
is not responsible for our world of death camps and schizophrenia, but he
is so estranged and exiled that he is powerless. We are unsponsored, since
the God of this world, worshipped (as Blake said) by the names of Jesus
and Jehovah, is only a bungler, an archangel-artisan who botched the False
Creation that we know as our Fall.
Gnosticism encouraged the idea that within each of us is a divine spark
connected to this "alien" Supreme Being. The Gnostic mandate is
thus to reveal and nourish the divine spark and manifest our true spiritual
origins. The theme of "hidden truth" is common of course to innumerable
varieties of mysticism, alchemy, and Kabbala, as well as "secular"
enterprises such as Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis. New Age spirituality,
too, promises its adherents a glimpse into deeper, more "authentic"
realms.
Harold Bloom has little patience for the New Age, which he sees as a debasement
of religious and literary history. He appreciates the yearnings that give
rise to spiritual trends and fads, but he believes that Americans today
are seeking easy answers to difficult questions of faith. Our current obsession
with angels, for example, he finds particularly shallow:
To find your angel is not necessarily to find yourself,
though most quests for the angels seem nowadays to suppose that a guardian
angel is rather more like a dog or cat than like a husband or wife. You
acquire an angel in the expectation that this addition to your household
will give you perpetual and unconditional love.
Bloom wants to restore to us the terrifying grandeur with which angels,
as well as dreams and near-death experiences, have been portrayed in the
distant past. To this end, he guides us through complex Gnostic myths and
fascinating interpretations of Jewish, Islamic, and Christian literature,
as well as the works of John Milton and William Blake, both of whom he's
written on extensively over the years. Bloom is clearly revisiting some
well-trod paths of his previous books, but he is a master at reconceptualizing
his observations and placing them in fresh contexts. His life-long interest
in Freud forms the basis for the brilliant chapter, "Sigmund Freud's
Dream Book," which locates The Interpretation of Dreams within
a framework of mysticism and hermeneutics.
Is Omens of Millennium a great or essential book? Perhaps not. It
is, however, a fine showcase for one of our very best "readers."
Bloom's textual interpretations are always deft and enthusiastic, and he
is equally at ease with Shakespeare or Freud, the Book of Daniel or Paradise
Lost. The most damaging flaw of Omens of Millennium is the book's
lack of a bibliography and index, not to mention footnotes, all of which
would have been useful, and without which the book is rendered rather hopeless
as scholarship. There are dozens of intriguing sources that Bloom alludes
to or quotes from throughout his book, but the quotations -- sometimes lengthy
-- are minus citations of any kind. Bloom's arguments are never less than
fascinating, but Omens of Millennium has the slapdash feel of a project
written and published quickly to cash in on the very same rapacious New
Age marketplace that Bloom lambasts so vociferously in the pages of his
book.
__________
From Omens of Millennium
The New Age, an endlessly entertaining saturnalia of ill-defined
yearnings, is less a product of counterculture than it initially seems to
be; its origins are in an old mixture of occultism and an American Harmonial
faith suspended about halfway between feeling good and good feeling. Rock
music, the authentic mark or banner of counterculture, is something that
once was a new variety of indigenous American religion, however brief or
secular, momentarily akin to the outflarings that have engendered permanent
beliefs among us: Mormonism, Pentecostalism, Adventism. The moment passed,
probably in the winter of 1969-70, when spiritual intensity was at a brief
height, and when some of my most sensitive students would assure me that
the Jefferson Airplane, in concert, provided them with a mystical experience.
Doubtless it did, since they attended in high condition, heirs to what William
James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, called "Anesthetic
Revelation," provided for the pragmatic philosopher-psychologist by
nitrous oxide. The sorrow of the Anesthetic Revelation is that the music
stops, the drug wears off, and there is no spiritual aftermath, or at least
no awareness that can be put into words. That however is preferable to New
Age prose, which is of a vacuity not to be believed. [pp. 18-19]
[Order Omens
of Millennium from Amazon.com]
Other
titles by Harold Bloom.
_____________________________
Bob Wake is editor of the Cambridge Book Review and author of Caffeine
& Other Stories.
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