--Heraclitus

“Knowledge is virtue”

                                       --Socrates

"Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived."

                                                                                           --Baruch Spinoza  

At the end of the millennium, in the year 2000, a yearning for an age of freedom from the evils afflicting the world, the spirit of millenarianism, has returned as indeed it has so many times before. It is not a sect, a religion, a single organization, a science or a philosophy, it is not even a “conspiracy of hope,” as Ignazio Silone has aptly defined millennialism.

Paradoxically, while it claims to be new and original, it is far from being new as we will endeavor to demonstrate in this article. It is called a movement to indicate that it is a network of individuals and groups who share a world-view and a common desire to change the world. This so-called New Age movement is a cultural current that is by now global.

Christianity at its inception must have appeared the same kind of global movement among the religions tolerated within the  Roman Empire. As G.K. Chesterton points out in his famous book The Everlasting Man, new movements and heresies declaring Christianity moribund and an anachronism have repeatedly sprung up during the two thousand year old history of Christianity. Indeed, to many Jews of the first and second century Christianity itself must have appeared a sort of heretical movement, a sort of betrayal of one’s cultural identity. In the first years of Christianity most of its devotees were in fact designated by gentiles as “Christian Jews” practicing a sect of Judaism. Therefore, the latest of these break away movements is hardly something new. If one takes a careful look at the various heresies that arose within Christianity from its very beginning, it is logical and plausible to arrive at the conclusion that far from being original and unique, the New Age movement may well be a reinvention of the wheel.

When one in fact breaks apart and analyzes New Age thought and practices one realizes that it is  somewhat similar to second and third century Gnosticism. Astrologists today believe that what they call the Age of Pisces, 0 – 2000 A.D., has ended and that the Age of Aquarius, 2000 – 4000 A.D. is at hand. This is the age of Aquarius, sings the chorus in the famous musical “Jesus Christ Superstar.” In the historical wake of the events of the Renaissance and the Reformation, many are less inclined nowadays to obey external authority; they think of religion in a way that leads to the notion that the self is sacred and to an exaggerated idea of freedom, self-reliance, and authenticity. Organized religion is frowned upon as a source of corruption, if not the very root of all evil and faith in God is quite often abandoned, except perhaps as a tool for the self’s advancement. Voltaire with its vehement “enlightened” attacks on religion defined as superstition and ignorance is the perfect icon for this mind-set. One wonders if it ever occurs to those “enlightened” people declaring religion retrograde and superstition to be ostracized from the the public discourse in the agora, that the enlightenment may still have to enlighten itself.

Indeed, a society which has undergone a breakdown of faith in the Christian tradition and has substituted it with scientific Positivism, with what it considers the unlimited process and progress of science and technology, finds itself with the task of confronting this surprising return of Gnosticism, a compendium of cosmic religiosity, rituals, and beliefs which has never really disappeared since the third century A.D. This is especially surprising to the positivistic atheistic philosophers, with a positivistic mind-set, who don’t like fuzzy distinctions between religious language which they despise, belief in God, materialism, spirituality, science and religion. They like clear and distinct demarcation a la Descartes with no ambiguities and  gray areas in between.

Ancient Gnosticism has its origin in the pagan religions of Asia, Phoenicia, Egypt, Greece, and Babylon, as well as in astrology and Greek Platonism. Its basic tenet is the doctrine of salvation through knowledge. As Socrates put it: “knowledge is virtue,” to know the good is to do the good.  The New Age movement claims to be able to acquire this knowledge in an esoteric way through such methods as dream analysis, the medium of a “spiritual master,” or via contemplation of nature and the cosmos, just to mention three such methods.

The Christian interpretations is slightly different and based on the theology of St. Paul who informs us that he knows the good but he discerns in his members a tendency toward evil  and so ends up doing its contrary. Nevertheless man remains free to choose his ultimate destiny. This is the existential dread mentioned by Kierkegard. Human nature, within Christian doctrine, is good but it is flawed at its origins, and this flaw was not intended by God but willed by man who was created in God’s image with a free will.

The central question about the New Age movement is how it defines spirituality, a concept that more often than not is a substitution for the concept of religion (etymologically the word religion means to bind together), or, as Protestant German theologian Dietrich Bonheoffer put it, it is a reformulation of religion as a “religion-less religion.” For the New Age devotee, spirituality means the use of the powers of nature and of an imaginary cosmic “energy” to communicate with another world and to discover the fate of an individual, or to help to make the most of oneself. One’s self is key here since, unlike Judaism that believes that salvation is a collective enterprise in which all the people are engaged, New Age puts emphasis on the individual self where it locates even good or evil, if indeed good and evil are even postulated and conceived of.

New Age is certainly not an ecclesia or an assembly of the people of God journeying toward a transcendent destination; it is rather a Church or an assembly of one and its temple is nature or the cosmos. It is the preferred religion-less religion practiced by all those who have left the orthodoxy of the great global religions or have indignantly stormed out of  temples, synagogues or mosques, in protest of perceived injustices and to forcibly assert their individual freedom and independence. They find in New Age an umbrella under which it is possible to gather all the religions of the world, now considered an anachronistic cultural encrustation and simply call the whole “spirituality.” But this pan spirituality and  assertion of freedom is not so new either; it is as old as “if you eat of the tree of good and evil you shall be gods.” These rebellious break away “heretics” are usually in their teens tired of being forced by their parents and other authority figures to attend church on Sunday. They have never internalized what they were compelled to observe exteriorly and so they have mistaken the brick church or even the Vatican as the Church as the body of Christ. Sometimes they are older and more mature individuals, if not much wiser than teen-agers. They end up worshipping the idea of God rather than the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, which is clearly what the Scriptures call idolatry.

And there is after all a good logical reason for the substitution, given that Christianity, even more so than the other religions, invites its followers to look outwards and beyond, to the “new Advent” of the God who calls us to live in the dialogue of love. The New Age, on the contrary does not believe in a providential God who transcends His creation. If there is a dialogue it takes place within the self almost solipsistically, subjectively, in contemplation of the cosmos. It is a sort of cultish idolatry that fails to distinguish between God who created the universe and the universe He has created, thus ending up in pantheism or panentheism. It does not even believe in the objective reality of good or evil, has no room for judgment or blame, and holds that belief in evil is negative and causes only fear. This too is not as new as New Agers tend to claim: one may find it in ancient Epicurean atomistic philosophy and in Stoicism.

The movement has several characteristics or phenomenological expressions by which it can be easily identified. Let us briefly explore three of those characteristics. In the first place there are dreams or the dream world. For the past thirty years the works of psychologist Carl Jung have been used as a spiritual guide in the Catholic Church and other Churches throughout the United States and Europe. Sister Pat Brockman O.S.U., who trained at the Jung Institute in Zurich, explains that dreams act as our “personal scriptures.” She suggests “Dream Play” as a substitute for Catholic devotional practices such as the morning offering, acts of faith, hope, and charity, examination of conscience, and prayer before the Blessed Sacrament. The “Dream Play” that she recommends consists in naming, describing, interpreting, and dialoguing with the dream. She also holds that “Some think that the Church is the center of the world but we are really the center, the abode of God.” This resembles the Hindu belief that life is a dream and when we come out of this dream (at our death) we shall come face to face with reality, what Kant calls the “neumenon,” beyond time and space and beyond reason, as distinguished from the “phenomenon” which remains accessible to reason and science.

Secondly, there is the so called eco-spirituality. The theory behind this spirituality is that the divine is present in all creation (dubbed panentheism) and that we are to expand our love of “neighbor” to include the entire cosmos. It is somewhat related to the philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin and to evolutionary theology, one of whose advocates is John Haughey, S.J. and Thomas Berry. Eco-theologians hold that because humans are so intimately interconnected with the organic cosmos, they cannot come to completion without the cosmos, and that the universe is a single dynamic whole into which humans are imbedded.

All this may sound uncanningly similar to St. Francis’ love of nature and its creatures (brother sun and sister moon and brother wolf) but there is a crucial difference; St. Francis’ approach to the creatures and the cosmos brings one back to their Creator who may be immanent within them bur at the same time remains transcendent to it. On the contrary, New Age believes that the earth is self-organizing and self-transcending. Humans are a tool for the earth to explore itself; it is the cosmos becoming conscious of itself. This too is idolatry. Here Darwin’s evolution may come into play understood theistically or atheistically. We are told to abandon “value assignments and blind judgments” and choose actions which are “effective and appropriate” for the consciousness of the cosmos to come about. It is not man who needs God but vice versa it is the Cosmos, substituted for God, that needs man to arrive at full consciousness of itself.

Thirdly, one discerns what is called “Creation Centered Spirituality” which has great affinities with panentheism or eco-spirituality. Matthew Fox is its foremost advocate. He was a Dominican priest who in 1993 left in protest both the Dominican order and the Church; but he did not found his own heretical church or join the New Age movement, he simply moved into the Episcopal Church. What the official Catholic Church, or better, the Vatican’s Congregation of the Faith (at the time headed by Cardinal Ratzinger) objected to was Fox’s refusal to deny belief in panentheism (God is all and all is God), identifying humans as “mothers of God,” and calling God “our Mother.” Eventually this refusal put him outside the communion of Catholic doctrine and orthodoxy, which is the definition of heresy or apostacy.

Be that as it may, Fox simply disregards the harm done to creation by the sin of disobedience, borrows from Teilhard de Chardin and Jung substituting the more positive “original blessing” (“and He saw that everything he made was very good”) to the more negative “original sin.” To make this substitution he must simply disregard the problem of sin and must reject the very idea of personal sin and responsibility which is also a rejection of free will. He also fails to distinguish Creator from creature and good from evil, or to realize that the spiritual world is a battleground between God and the fallen angels. For him, God is interdependent with the cosmos for both His experience and His very being, an idea which is similar to that held by the proponents of evolutionary theology: as already mentioned, it is not man that needs God but god that needs man. Ultimately Fox substitutes a “Cosmic Christ” kind of Christianity, for a “personal Savior” kind of Christianity.

It worth mentioning here that many North American Native Peoples were and still are largely panentheistic but theirs is a peculiar kind of panentheism. Unlike the Western rationalistic approach they make no duality and are able to encompass the highest of paradoxes, that is to say, they conceive of God as both confined in God's existence in Creation but also transcendent from it. In other words, transcendence and immanence need not be mutually exclusive as we also learn from the concept of providence in Vico’s New Science.  North American Native writers have also translated the word for God as the “Great Mystery” or as the “Sacred Other,” a concept is referred to by many Native Americans  as the “Great Spirit.” Their religious beliefs have been thoroughly studied by the Christian Catholic theologian of the earth spirit Fr. Thomas Berry (see his The Dream of the Earth), who bases his theology on the philosophy of both Vico and De Chardin.

Also worth mentioning here is the historical philosophical fact that in ancient philosophy Plotinus taught that there was an ineffable transcendent "God" (The One) of which subsequent realities were emanations. From the One emanates the Divine Mind (Nous) and the Cosmic Soul (Psyche or in Junghian terms “the collective unconscious”). In Neoplatonism the world itself is God. This concept of divinity is associated with that of the logos, which had originated centuries earlier with Heraclitus (ca. 535–475 BC). The Logos pervades the cosmos, whereby all thoughts and all things originate, or as Heraclitus said: "He who hears not me but the Logos will say: All is one." The logos is the Word of the prologue to the gospel of St. John: in the beginning was the Word…essential to the doctrine of the Incarnation and the very identity of a Christian.

Baruch Spinoza later claimed that "Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived."  "Individual things are nothing but modifications of the attributes of God, or modes by which the attributes of God are expressed in a fixed and definite manner." Though Spinoza has been called the "prophet" and "prince" of pantheism, in a letter to Henry Oldenburg Spinoza states that: "as to the view of certain people that I identify god with nature (taken as a kind of mass or corporeal matter), they are quite mistaken" For Spinoza, our universe (cosmos) is a mode under two attributes of Thought and Extension. God has infinitely many other attributes which are not present in our world. According to German philosopher Karl Jaspers, when Spinoza wrote "Deus sive Natura" (God or Nature) Spinoza did not mean to say that God and Nature are interchangeable terms, but rather that God's transcendence was attested by his infinitely many attributes, and that two attributes known by humans, namely Thought and Extension, signified God's immanence.

There are several other, more esoteric, expressions of the New Age movement. The few that we have briefly examined are representatives of the more classical types of heresies from the orthodoxy and commonly held doctrines of Christianity, the Incarnation being the most important. By classical types of heresies I mean the ones that have recurred time and again since the birth of the Church on Pentecost day. Chesterton points them out thoroughly in the above mentioned book.

Indeed, as Chesterton persuasively renders it, what ought to be surprising to any objective observer, even one just arrived on earth from outer space, is not that Christianity and the Church, with its all-too-human failings and its recurrent heresies is about to crumble and die, that is not new and has in fact been predicted, prophesized and announced several times before, contrary to what those who have lost their faith and wish to justify their apostasy would like to believe; but rather the fact that despite it all this religion called Christianity and this Church called Catholic (that is, universal) is still around two thousand years later and, like a phoenix, it has always  resurrected from the ashes.

If history is any guide, those misguided new-agers with an ax to grind against religion and the Church mistaken for an institution rather than the body of Christ, who go around declaring “gothic” Christianity moribund and loudly prophesying its imminent dissolution are likely to be greatly disappointed. Voltaire would have been, had he lived in the 21^st century. They may in fact have a very long wait ahead of them, given the opposite claim by the same Church that it will hang around for quite a while more, in one form or other, (“upon this stone I shall build my Church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it”) as the Pilgrim Church here on earth journeying toward its final destination till the end times and history, only disappearing when it finally joins the saints of the Church triumphant beyond time and space.

The Jews had it right all along: salvation belongs to all the people and it is obtainable only with the people, not solipistically in the contemplation of a deterministic nature and cosmos and the escape from the self. That way lies the misguided delusion that one has somehow escaped history and the human condition here on earth. In truth, all that one has managed to escape is freedom and grace.