Three thoughts for the day
Regarding Dr McClymond’s horror at the idea of the salvation of Satan I note the following -
Regarding Dr McClymond’s connection that artists often have remembered the truth (about hell) that preachers sometimes neglect -
There are no extant depictions of hell (or of the devil) in Christian Art before the sixth century (although there is plenty of early Christina art still extant). When hell is first depicted it is in icons of the harrowing of hell with Christ releasing the prisoners kept therein. It is only in middle ages that the torments of the damned begin to be depicted in detail in Doom frescoes etc. In the East these are done with a certain restraint; in the West where Augustinian theology has predominated these often take on a pathological gloating and an obsession with horror, torture, deformity and terror. And the damned are often are depicted to include Jews, political opponents, those deemed as heretics etc and the depiction of the dammed was often used in the cause of stirring persecuting zeal. This should not be seen as virtuous.
**Regarding Dr McCylmond’s positing a link between universalism and totalitarianism **
I think we were all bemused by Dr McClymond’s attempts to link Universalism and totalitarianism in his lecture (apart from the invalid premise that the Gnostics were Universalists). There is only one primary source for this – at least in terms of a source we should take seriously; the writings of Eric Voegelin
Eric Voegelin was a Catholic intellectual and critic of totalitarianism thinking and systems. He wrote many books and academic paper son this topic. In these stresses the Platonic/Socratic insight of the limitations of human knowledge as being essential to philosophic and political sanity. Socrates is truly wise because he understands the limitations of his knowledge.
Voegelin contrasts true ‘philosophy’ with ‘philodoxy’ (a word Plato invented). Philodoxy is any human system of through that ignores the limitations of human knowledge and claims to grasped the scheme entire. And the philodoxer of modern times par excellence for Voegelin is Karl Marx whose total explanation of history and the forces of history and deterministic predictions of the future has underpinned many twentieth century totalitarian regimes. However, he also speaks of the 'cloud of new Christ descended on the Western world’ beginning with the French revolution – Saint-Simon, Fourier, Comte, Fichte and Hegel.
He draws a parallel between the ‘modern outburst of new Christs’ and the second century Gnostics. In both cases he finds a desire to dominate and control at work; seeking power through the promise of total knowledge; a grandiose secondary reality protected from the critical questioning by being located at a considerable theoretical remove from the individual disciple’s own limited experience, but nevertheless presented in each case as the one and true means of salvation. The only difference lies in the new this-wordiness of the post-French Revolutionary variants, their new application of gnosis to the worldly realm of social and political history which opens up the way to authoritarian and ideological nightmares (both Marxist and anti-Marxist). Such patterns are not unprecedented; they are found for instance in the thinking of Joachim of Fiore and in some sense in John Calvin and the other Reformers. But what is new is the way in which they have now moved centre stage (or at least had done so in the twentieth century).
It is important to note that Voegelin is making a very clear distinction between ancient Gnosticism which is essentiality world denying, and what he sees as modern Gnosticism which is essentially world transforming. Leaving aside the issue of whether or not Voegelin’s argument is valid (and many would say there is some validity in his thinking but he took his own system too far and was very unfair to Hegel and to Calvin) I note that what he is talking about as Gnosticism has nothing remotely to do with Christian universalism, nothing whatsoever.