by Kater Moggin

In October 2007, following his two-part critique of Corbin's treatment of the Valentinians, Kater Moggin posted a further analysis of the same essay: Henri Corbin's "The Dramatic Element Common to the Gnostic Cosmogonies of the Religions of the Book." This continuation focuses on Corbin's discussion of Kabbalah, particularly the Sabbatian movement and its most antinomian figures, Abraham Miguel Cardozo and Jacob Frank.

Moggin argues that Corbin — drawing largely on Gershom Scholem's scholarship — omits the figure who most closely approaches Gnosticism within Kabbalah: Jacob Frank, whose theology explicitly rejected the Makers of the world in favor of a higher God. He also argues that Corbin misreads Cardozo's most revolutionary idea: not the merger of the God of Israel with the transcendent God of goodness, but the radical separation of Yahweh from the Aristotelian First Cause.

Moggin closes with a broader challenge to Corbin's framing of Gnostic "pessimism," insisting that Gnostic optimism — if it can be called that — consists in faith in the world's destruction, and with a final observation about the "Almighty": that to worship the Lord of Hosts is to deify power and violence, while Gnosticism refuses that worship on principle.

[Henri Corbin, "The Dramatic Element Common to the Gnostic Cosmogonies of the Religions of the Book"]

For the most part Corbin's discussion of the Kabbalists is simply a paraphrase of Scholem, but there are one or two things to add. His comparison of Kabbalists and gnostics stops at Cardozo, leaving out Frank, who represents by far the closest approach of Kabbalah to gnosticism. Having seen Corbin play fast and loose with the Valentinians I'm none too surprised by what he does here. In Scholem's description Frank is Kabbalah's equivalent to Marcion (my analogy), reasoning that this evil world isn't the work of a good God and rejecting its Makers in favor of a higher deity: the theme Corbin dislikes in ancient gnosticism and chooses not to mention while discussing Luria's disciples.

Corbin also makes a hash out of Cardozo (or more precisely out of Scholem's summary), mistakenly assigning him the "great achievement" of turning gnosticism upside-down. Easy to see why Corbin would like that idea: he's allied with Creator-worship and offended by "vituperation" against "the God of the Bible." But he's misreading. Corbin claims the Sabbatians revived gnosticism yet were "inverting its sense" by considering "the God of Israel" identical with "the transcendent God of goodness." Not the story told in the texts he cites (Scholem's The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Sabbatai Sevi), where nothing is new or unusual in "the claim of both Jews and orthodox Christians that the God of Israel who created the world and the transcendent God of goodness were one and the same." Rather than an innovation of medieval Kabbalists, that was the position gnosticism already confronted during antiquity.

Scholem does see an inversion of gnosticism in Cardozo's form of Kabbalah, but not the one Corbin names. The revolutionary idea in Cardozo, he says, is the division between the God of Israel and the God of the philosophers, the Aristotelian "First Cause." Cardozo assigns goodness to Yahweh rather than to the deus absconditus, an impersonal abstraction, rejecting the "transcendent God" in favor of the personal one, Elohei Yisrael. (This is from "Redemption Through Sin" 4, Messianic Idea 104–6.) And by the way, where Corbin talks about "an effort common to the religions of the Book, a moving attempt to go beyond the paradox inherent in all monotheism," Scholem refers directly to the Kabbalists' "violent denunciations of Christianity" and contends that their "faith in paradox reigned supreme." Corbin maybe should read more closely.

Last thing. Corbin asks if it's right to speak about "the pessimism of Gnosis," arguing that to do so requires forgetting what gnostics struggle for and what the outcome will be. "This outcome," he says, "makes it clear that if gnosis despairs of this world it is in the form of a desperatio fiducialis, a confident desperation." But if gnosis can truly be called optimistic about this world, then that optimism consists in faith in its destruction — the consummation devoutly wished even by the Valentinians, Corbin's favorites by virtue of their conservatism, who look forward to a final and all-consuming fire. Irenaeus, AH 1.7.1.

One more last thing. (Sorry.) Corbin says the lightworld "absolutely must not resort to the evil desire for power in order to ensure its victory over the darkness" (his own opinion as well as a reference to Tolkien). But the Bible-God he defends is called El Shaddai, God Almighty, identified as the Lord of Hosts — i.e., the God of armies or wars — and depicted imposing his will on numberless occasions. To worship the Almighty implies deifying both power and evil. By contrast, gnosticism rejects the Almighty along with his claims to supreme divinity, refusing to participate in the power-worship orthodoxy is based on. Granted that the gnostics don't always live up to the ideal. (The Valentinians do especially badly, possibly because of their effort to remain in the Church.) Yet as a matter of principle gnosis stands opposed to the Almighty's evil-doing, while orthodoxy makes him its object of worship.

Colophon

Written by Kater Moggin and posted to alt.religion.gnostic, October 2007. Message-ID: <[email protected]>.

This post is the third in Kater Moggin's series analyzing Henri Corbin's essay "The Dramatic Element Common to the Gnostic Cosmogonies of the Religions of the Book." The two-part critique of Corbin's treatment of the Valentinians is also archived. Moggin's central argument here concerns omission: Corbin's comparison of Kabbalists and gnostics stops at Cardozo but ignores Jacob Frank, who in Scholem's own account represents the closest Kabbalistic approach to genuine Gnosticism — the antinomian streak in Jewish mysticism that rejected the Makers of the world. Moggin's identification of Frank as "Kabbalah's Marcion" is one of his sharpest formulations of what separates Gnosticism from the Creator-affirming esotericism Corbin favors.

Gershom Scholem's works cited: The Messianic Idea in Judaism (Schocken, 1971) and Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah (Princeton UP, 1973). The specific passage on Cardozo is from Scholem's essay "Redemption Through Sin," Messianic Idea, pp. 104–106.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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