A critical review of the book of Harold
Bloom, Omens of Millenium.The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams and Ressurrection. London, Fourth Estate, 1996.
The
impression that remain with us at the end of reading the book, with so many approaches and references to Angels, is that the author,
an university professor, an american jew and a great admirer of the Mormon efabulation (that he sees as a return of the old gnosis),
althought having made a very good research on the history of the Angeology in
religion and literature and trying to convey to us that what he is sharing is the correct view from sufis, kabbalists and gnostics (and, why not, yogis?), and
that the commum source of all these angeologies is the persian Zoroastrism, in fact the exploration, even if well written and based in good references, sometimes is a bit manipulated, and not so true or neither enlightening in pratice.
Indeed,
he has collected facts about the evolution of the
understanding of Angels, coming from Iran and Babilony and from Zoroastrism and Kervanism into Judaism, Christianity, Gnosticism and Kabbalism, mostly related to the Bible and around it, and makes a good
contrast with the New Age superficial theory of Angels, sharing with
wit or humour some interesting aspects of American religionism ("the New Age prose, which is of a vacuity not to be believed") for
which he is surely well equipped, as he has written a book on The American
Religion in 1992.
The emphasis in the Millennium, and the new prophets, natural in USA, as he wishes and writes: "a nation whose quasi official high priest is the Reverend Billy Graham, author of Aproaching Hoofbeats: The four Horsemen, is rather clearly more likely than most other countries to have strong intimations of Millenium. Our Southern Baptists and Mormons, our Adventists, Pentecostals, and other indigenous faiths all have particular end-time prospects in view, and I have seen these as parts of this book's subject...».
But with the
passing of the border line of 2001 without anything special happening in the world, and with the
evolution of Mankind in ways not so much according to his millenium's wishes and
profecies (like the one at the end of the book that Mormons will greatly expand), gives today to the book and title a bit a flavour of
failure, or of the so used apocalyptical trend, that is
made mostly of fears and expectations, human and messianic, but not truly spiritual and divine, even if at the end of the New Testament was aded the spurious Apocalipse, made by a imaginative christian zelot and atributed to S. John the evangelist, that had a long history of being taken seriously by generations and generations of zealots, scaremongers, believers, theologians and professional esotericists, and surely also by good mystics and theologians.
Anyway, Bloom is very keen in drawing the evolution of the theological thoughts about Angels and Satan, arriving to the Apocalipse and then being superseded by S. Paul's suspicion or even hate of angels, fallen and unfalen (Ephesians 6:11-12) and after by S. Augustine narrative of an envious and prideful Satan already being or existing from the beginning of Creation.
After reading the book of Harold Bloom (1930-2019), if our objective was a better, clear or more active view of the Angels, we will be provided with much information about their evolution in the history of religions but we may feel a bit disapointed as he enters, for example, too much in the efabulations of the great Archangels and how men can become angels (specially in chapter IV), much based on late Testament productions of Enoch and other imaginatives authors-prophets and sources, notably the modern one "Joseph Smith doubtless by now is a ressurrected angel, another god-man, working for the welfare of the world's 10 milions or so Mormons."
In fact in the Introduction he recognizes that «the angels scarcely play independent roles until the very late Book of Daniel, written about 165 B. C.E., the time of the Maccabean rising against the Syro-Hellenes. In earliest biblical narrative, the Yahwist or J strand of the tenth century B.C.E., most of the angels are surrogates for Yahweh himself, and probably were added to the text by the Redactor at the time of the return from Babylon or soon afterwards. There is a wry Talmudic adage that "The angels' names came from Babylon" and I suspect that more than their names came from east of the Jordan. / The angelology of Daniel, and of the Books of Enoch after it, is essentially Zoroastrian rather than Israelite. Norman Cohn, an authority upon millenarium thinking, traces its origin to the Iranian prophet Zoroaster, who cannot be precisely dated, but who may go back to 1500 B. C.E., half a millenium before the Yahvist.»
For the pratical aspect of knowing the Angels the author has no experience and even doesn't consider so much possible that, giving little or no value to the modern testimonies of awareness and vision of Angels. So, apart from John Milton and Emmanuel Swedenborg, he only accepts or sees Joseph Smith, the founder of the sect of Mormons, «the greatest, and most authentic of American prophets, seers and revelators», recognizing out of these only some sporadical literary expressions, like the ones in Raine Marie Rilke, in fact probably arising more by sensibility and poetic creativity than by true angelic experience.
His understanding of the valuable work of Henry Corbin, that he praises highly, sometimes is not good, as when Bloom characterizes the subtle or imaginal world, between the literal and the intelectual, «for a religious believer, whether normative or heterodox, this middle world is experienced as the presence of the divine in our world», what is not the case and gives value to a very superficial and not experienced vision of God, happening in mostly of the believers. But his apreciation of Aldous Huxley's anthology Perennial Philosophy is important and is in line with the apology made by him of the need of reading good books instead absorbing superficial new age and digital fantasies.
Already in the second chapter, about Dreams as omens of spiritualiy or of Millenium or of the capacity of
prophecy, Bloom presents very well the angeology of the main kabbalists of Saphed, like Luria and Cordovero,
and their view of the voice of the angel that answers in the dreams
the queries made in vigil. For Harold Bloom, "the Answering Angel (maggid) remains the
most shocking innovation in the entire history of angelology, as he
and others like Rabi Zwi Wer Blowsky sees him like a man-made angel.
Hayim Vital is also called or quoted, in one of the typical exagerations of kabbalists and messianics: “for every word that is uttered
creates an angel”.
These
aspects about the power of the words and sounds are indeed important but should be correct and not mystified. We could say better that some words
and sounds uttered with more awareness, power, significance and consequences can attract some
angelic blessings, or some not so good entitities or energies, or affect our different bodies and levels...
And we should say that the possibility of the spiritual or angelic anwers to our prayers or queries before entering into sleep is something generalized in many traditions and not created by the kabbalists. We can say that either the spiritual self, or the guardian Angel, or the ancestors, guides or Masters, or the Unified field of energy conscience and information, the Logos or the Buddhi of the Yogis, that entangles all minds and souls, can indeed inspire anyone who merits or needs it, specially if prayer is done before sleeping.
The kabbalists are prone indeed to mystify, to exagerate, and they could be well called mystagoges, althought Harold Bloom prefers to give that title to Giordano Bruno, a so valuable humanist, or to the french philosopher Lacan...
On
that chapter Dreams, on the subchapter On the Nature of Dreams, he mentions some interesting teories, like the ones of
Lehman and Koukkou, that in dreaming we are revising childhood's conceptions with the latter ones, and one of Francis Crick that we are then unlearning the
irrelevant material of the day, and so counseling us to forget them and not remember, as Freud wanted. I prefer to see that kind of dreams as a processing and development of the relevant material of the lasts days or even a preparation for the next day.
Harold Bloom confesses, what is not so so good about his sensibility, that “I am not more a mystic
or a normative believer than Freud ever was” and he agrees that Freud
doesn't give an adequate account of the nature of dreams, and considers him the great
blocking agent to find omens of the milenium on dreams, as Freud was
all his life avoiding profecy, ocultism, telepathy, saying exactly
in 1934 to his disciples: “Psychoanalysts are fundamentally unreconstruted mechanisst and
materialists, even thought they refuse to strip the mind and soul of their as yet understood qualities. They study occult material only because they hope that this would enable them to eliminate once and for all the creations of the human wish from the realm of material reality”. And then Bloom points «that it is just on some other researchers opposed to Freud
that we can see some light on dreams, like Wendy Doniger, Dreams
Illusions and Other realities, a specialist on Indian tradition,
or Ludwig Wittgenstein critics of Freud's theories...», but Carl G. Jung, «masqueraded as a gnostic», was not at all apreciated by Bloom...
Harold Bloom tends to value two lines on dreams: that we are dreamed by others. Or even by the Angel, and goes to say: "What the Shekinah, or Fatima or the Angel of Christ gives in the dream ultimately is the image of the astral body, a man or woman all light". But this broad comparativistic identification of Angel of Crist, Fatima wife of Ali, 1º Shia Imam, and the Kabbalist Shekinah as being the some, seems also a bit just an intelectual afirmation by someone who has not such experience, and so it is weak, because only by inner experience can we know what level of reality or of imagination is being shown to our dream consciousnesse or even to spiriritual eye. But to claim that some spiritual entities or ideas they can give only the image of astral body (although is not the lower conception of the theosophists but the one of the Greek-Romans classics - ochema- and Gnostics), is reductionist because much more can happen and we should also attain that unification and vision of our spiritual entity by our own efforts, pratices and love.
The debasement, or downgrading, or materialization of the spiritual realities and experiences is typical of the USA's consumist and imperialist civilization and mindset, where Harold Bloom lives and we can see that by the incredible optimistic idea that «for at least two centuries now most Americans have sought the God within rather than the God of European Christianity». Within the soul, with the Baptists, Mormons, Protestants, free churchs?
Anyway, beyond these exagerated nationalistic and kabbalist valorizations exhibited in the book and in these two first interesting chapters I - Angels, and II - Dreams, both in 90 pages, Harold Bloom enters still in a III - Not Dying, where in the 1º subchapter is very critical of Raymond A. Moody, Kenneth Ring and of the industry (research, books and workshops) of Near-death experience, and in the 2º subchapter - Shamanism, following sometimes Mircea Eliade's wrong understandings on Shamanism, as we can say that more than dreams, spiritual visions were essential; or still the mystifying affirmation that the shamans went to all Heavens and Hells, when in reality they only entered or had some acess to the energetic and astral levels which are acessible generaly to mediuns, sorcerers, magicians. And then Harold Bloom sees and affirms Jesus as the universal shaman, considering the legend of descent to the hells and the 40 days as ressurrected on Earth as true shamanic accomplisments, much more than the near-death experiences and astral travels of the New Age.
In the chapters IV - Gnosis, with five subchapters, on Hermetics, I, and Christian gnostics, II, he defends mostly the hebrew roots of Hermeticism and Gnosis (what is not true) and of Gnosticism, but gives a fair approach to Valentinus gnosis and to the Gospel of Truth and Gospel of Thomas, from the Nag Hammadi texts. In Sufism, III, he quotes mostly Henry Corbin and Sohrawardi about Hurqalya and the imaginal world but mixes that with Ibn Arabi visions, sometimes loosing the right path to understand, at least rationally, what has to be lived and seen by the inner eye. In the subchapter Metraton he gives details of the weird speculations about this imaginative entity, like being Jahve, the angel of Exodus, Jahoel, Enoch, Shekinah, Shadai, etc.
And in the subchapter Isaac Luria, he expresses one more time his own division between the normative orthodow Jew and the adept of kaballa, and enters into the subject of the doctrines of the transmigration of souls, and concludes with the confession that the Shi'ite sufism, despite its imaginative boldness, neverthless conveys a more unified image of ressurrection than the wilder Kabbalh could accomplish. And he finishes with V chapter - Millenium, with two subchapters, American Centuries, and Gnosis of the World to come, where valuable but sometimes not correct statements or, better, conclusions are provided. In this last chapter, may be a bit manipulative or even cunningly, Bloom reaffirms the dependence of the Western world from Zoroaster dual conceptions and writes about the ethos of USA: «our agressive millenarism has verry little to do with Christian humility, and can be interpreted as a throwback more to the ancient Iranian sense of being the Chosen People than to the biblical sense of election. It was, after all, Zoroaster, and not the Hebrew prophets, who invented Western ideas of Hell and of the Devil, and so it is Zoroaster who is the ultimate ascestor of the full range of recent American millenarians, from the now-benign national icon, Billy Graham, all the way to such nativist groups as the Aryan Nation and the Pose Comitatus, unknowing heirs of the ancient Persians».
In this direction of repudiating dualistic concepcions, there is a discarding of the Millenarism at the end of the book, pointing that there can be no Gnosis of the world to come, but only the Gnosis of the perennial innmost self, as Aldous Huxley so well had given so many examples in the true spiritual teachings of many traditions, in its classical anthology Perennial Philosophy, that personally I had to read with my first guru in India, in Riskikesh, Swami Kaivalyananda, an Advaitic Vedantic..
In a last apendix, a Gnostic Sermon, he shows the division of choice between the follower of the God of the covenant of the three religions of the Book, and the gnostic being, seeing these ones exemplified better in Valentinus and his followers, and giving to the gnostic an incorrect interpretation:«If you know yourself as having an affinity with the alien, or stranger God, cut of from this worlds, then you are a gnostic», as there is no alien's God affinity but only spiritual and divine reunification. He may say that this is a definition of gnostic negation of the material worlds and bodies, but the gnostic is mostly called with that name because he knows, or he has a gnosis about himself as a spiritual being,,,,
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