Gnostic Identity in the Therapeutic Age

“Gnosticism” is invoked often in postmodern discourse, sometimes haphazardly but sometimes with deeper understanding. Eric Voegelin famously referred to various ideologies as “Gnostic” in 1952, setting off a minor cottage industry on how his “speculative systems” compare to our understanding of ancient Gnosticism, somewhat missing Voegelin’s real point. The purposes of this essay are to bring some clarity to Voegelin’s invocation of “Gnosticism,” and to apply it to the therapeutic worldview, Voegelin’s Gnostic “psychoanalysis.”

The Tragic Sense

We all feel a tragic sense, owing to awareness of mortality, and of evil, and of our own part in evil. Though we revere human life in the abstract, we’re intensely aware of the moral imperfections of humanity. We know justice is real, and so we know judgment is real, even if we don’t experience it immediately within this finite life in the body. We know we’re going to die, and this is difficult to reconcile with the weighty significance we attach to human life, especially our own.

We also know, even if we attempt to avert our eyes in the moment, that there is a moral structure to our existence, and that it is not of our own invention, individually or collectively. That structure means that what we do and fail to do in this life is consequential. It results in the heaviness of being that many find unbearable, tempting one to adopt in its place the fiction that good and evil are merely words we attach to what we collectively like and don’t like. The tragic sense springs from our awareness of moral significance, and from our moral failings, and our mortality, and the reality of justice. It is the seed of faith, but it can also motivate corrupted visions of reality, as with early Gnosticism and postmodern ideologies that Voegelin correctly identified as “Gnostic.”

Gnosticism

We can rightly consider the tragic sense to be of primordial origin, a tension contributing to a fearful heaviness of being that motivates but can also enervate. Sacrifice is a partial answer to this tragic sense. In pre-Christian times, it was a powerful motivator in pagan societies; more so than we tend to appreciate now.

The history of the Jews as a people commences with the departure from human sacrifice conducted as a means of buying one’s way out of the oppressive, tragic sense. Christianity exploded into the wider world because it was the sacrifice to end all sacrifices; the crucifixion brought redemption for all time, and thereafter, sacrifices (like charity, study, saving money, and disciplining children) bring blessings and joy rather than loss and never-fully-atoned guilt. For hundreds of years, mankind in the West grew into a fuller understanding of reliance on God, taking Him to be the Author of every good thing, as was the world He declared “good,” contrary to the vision of the Gnostics.   

Still, this understanding seemed incomplete; for many, perhaps too good to be true. “Faith” replaces sacrifice, but what is “faith?”  Here is how, in his The New Science of Politics, Eric Voegelin described the sense religion leaves us with even after the Resurrection:

Uncertainty is the very essence of Christianity. The feeling of security in a “world full of gods” [i.e., the pagan world] is lost with the gods themselves; when the world is de—divinized, communication with the world-transcendent God is reduced to the tenuous bond of faith, in the sense of Hebrews 11:1, as the substance of things hoped for and the proof of things unseen. Ontologically the substance of things hoped for is nowhere to be found but in faith itself; and, epistemologically, there is no proof for things unseen but again this very faith. The bond is tenuous indeed, and may snap easily. The life of the soul in openness toward God, the waiting, the periods of aridity and dullness, guilt and despondency, contrition and repentance, forsakenness and hope against hope, the silent stirrings of love and grace, trembling on the verge of a certainty which if gained is loss—the very lightness of this fabric may prove too heavy a burden for men who lust for massively possessive experience.  

These kinds of observations are attributable to many other thinkers, including but not limited to Philip Rieff, a seminal thinker on the impact of the rise of the therapeutic mentality. Voegelin is particularly relevant here, however, because he invoked “Gnosticism” to explain the advance of “speculative systems,” ideologies that supplant religious faith. As he suggests in this passage, the worldview of faith is perhaps a too-light undemanding burden; airy compared to the heavens teeming with pagan gods that preceded it. It is a relief to mankind, but it does not eliminate the tragic sense and requires much social reinforcement.

Directly upon Christ’s Ascension, there was a certain plasticity to developing Christian belief that is difficult for believers today to apprehend. Christ was the Way, not a system of belief, but the Way, to be accepted in faith, had also to be accepted in reason. Theology had to provide answers to questions, perhaps none more pressing than the continued existence of evil in the world. Gnosticism seemed to provide an answer:  God was good, but the world was evil, therefore the creation of the world was not directly at the hand of the good but far-off transcendent God, but rather at the hand of some other semi-divine but evil demiurge. The world itself, therefore, is evil. Gnosticism meant perceiving God by esoteric, inwardly-received knowledge, and repudiation of this world of evil. It was transgressive of the world-as-it-is. Gnosticism thereafter has been marked by this transgressive sense, which correlates in the postmodern era to the disposition to doubt, to philosophical hermeneutics of suspicion, to Nietzschean “ressentiment,” and to a recurring Marcusean liberationist or revolutionary impulse.       

Gnosticism has re-emerged from time to time as an attempt to explain the coexistence of both good and evil in the world. In its ancient form, the basic idea was that only the spiritual world has significance, and material things (including the human body) are of no consequence or are even illusory. Early Gnostics often lived at extremes of asceticism or hedonism, for this reason. The “real” reality is behind this flawed immediate bodily presence. We have a remnant divine spark emerging from the detritus of evil material. By it we acquire gnosis—knowing—of our true spiritual essence, and, importantly relevant in this age of the therapeutic:  gnosis is felt within. The transgressive element of early Gnosticism is retained in the impulse to subvert proper critical thinking to a presumption of bad faith and reaffirmation of ideological “speculative systems.” Thus, the transgressive instinct of early Gnosticism survives into (or is revived in) this postmodern era.

Voegelin identified the elements of postmodern Gnosticism that departs from the ancient form, in particular its materialist and historical aspects. Ancient Gnosticism theorized a spiritual source of gnosis:  the remnant divine spark in the soul. The new Gnosticism of “psychoanalysis” is material:  the psychologically divided self absorbs its gnosis from the social zeitgeist out there in the world, rather than from transcendent Source.

The new Gnosticism is “historical” in that it imports the historicist Hegelian dialectic by which a sense of meaning and purpose is generated socially and temporally: in Becoming rather than Being.  This facilitated the chief departure of modern Gnosticism from the ancient:  what Voegelin identified as the contemplated perfection of the world as a materialist phenomenon, not spiritual, consistent with the dialectical materialism of Marx.

William James spotted the resurgence of Gnosticism in Hegel, in his 1896 essay Will to Believe. He equated Gnosticism to process, by which the being-ness of things is ruled “out of court” so that the system must be allowed to stand on its own. Voegelin would call these “speculative systems,” the product of “intellectual swindlers” like Marx. For Voegelin, it is so obvious that we encounter the world as well-ordered, that to deny this starting point for truth is to suspend in mid-air, so to speak, the whole resulting ideology. Our ability to apprehend orderliness discloses to us an ordered Mind to create and superintend the ordered universe. But, as Voegelin wrote, “Gnostic man no longer wishes to perceive in admiration the intrinsic order of the cosmos.”

Importantly for understanding the therapeutic worldview (Voegelin’s “psychoanalysis”) as a Gnostic system, we must observe that disregarding this ordered feature of existence is a departure from the Judeo-Christian understanding that disorder comes from within, in the form of original sin. It is also a departure from the pagan, Hellenic understanding of the logos, the active contemplation of the orderliness in the world. This is a fundamental shift in thinking that is important to understanding the therapeutic worldview:  that our angsty, tragic sense originates not in our own nature but in the corrupted world out there, just as with the Gnostics. A necessary corollary is that the self is pure, but vulnerable to the corruption of the world. In this way, the chickens of Rousseauan romanticism come home to roost, enabling psychological man to conceive gnosis as a god-spark within, emerging from the liberated and unique and morally pure inner being.   

Following James, Voegelin’s critique of Gnosticism necessarily encompasses not just Hegel’s dialectic, but all process philosophies which dominate the Godless postmodern era, including those identified by Voegelin (non-exhaustively) as “progressivism, positivism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, communism, fascism, and National Socialism.”  These have in common a rejection ab initio of transcendence, and consequent collapse into process production of propositions, and relativism in morals.

The essence of Voegelin’s “progressivism” is the idea that history is formative, rather than formed; that it is moving us toward some more perfect society. There’s no fixed goal, no ultimate Being, no Christian apocalypse (or “unveiling”). There’s only the dynamism of history itself to explain who and what we are. This immanentizing flow still had a spiritual element with Hegel, but then along came Marx to strip historicism of spiritual impulse. History itself replaces God. The temporal replaces the eternal.

Voegelin’s various “Gnostic philosophies” are overlapping, such that the historicist “progressivism” is included within the other Gnostic speculative systems he identifies. He traces to Auguste Comte (1798-1857) the “positivism” he refers to. Comte theorized an empirically-based (or “scientific”) system for evolution and maintenance of society. Comte’s positivism influenced many thinkers who also came to value the underlying premise of human management of society. The trouble with this, for Voegelin, was that it necessarily means deference to an inhuman construct—an abstraction—untethered to empirical foundationalism. The logos and Platonic ideals and moral structure sponsored by sacred order are inevitable casualties. Resulting man-made systems are coherent only within the systems themselves. In this general sense of allegiance to man-made systems, positivism is implicit in the disastrous constructs of Marxism, communism, fascism, and National Socialism, also among the “speculative systems” Voegelin condemned. All of these are “Gnostic” in that they artificial; man-made; human-managed; and oblivious of a need for natural grounding in the realism of truth, and morality, and even of beauty.

“Psychoanalysis”

In his short list of examples of ideological Gnosticism, Voegelin included “psychoanalysis” without a significant explanation of what makes psychoanalysis Gnostic. Because he was writing on ideologies rather than particular practices of psychology, his “psychoanalysis” as Gnosticism should be understood as the therapeutic mindset more generally, as it was later developed by thinkers like Philip Rieff, most notably.  

The therapeutic worldview emerges in public discourse from time to time as an attempt to explain certain troubling cultural developments. These developments include victimhood mentality, entitlement, sexual permissiveness, family breakdown, identity politics, and, underlying them all, personal subjective identity formation. Thinkers who go beyond the superficial descriptors of “the therapeutic” begin to perceive in it a weltanschauung, a comprehensive way of thinking about reality. Hence “worldview.” 

The therapeutic worldview has been long in the making. The work of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) is an important marker for its development, but even more significant was the decline in belief in God, in Western civilization. That decline does not produce an obvious tipping point at which we can say that historically the West became post-Christian. Philip Rieff suggested 1882, the year of publication of Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, containing his famous words “God is dead,” because “we” have killed Him. Rieff published his seminal The Rise of the Therapeutic in 1966, and returned to explicate the therapeutic in several books published just before and after his death in 2006. Others have approached it from different angles, most notably Christopher Lasch, Alisdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Carl Trueman. William Batchelder IV and Michael Harding recently compiled (and contributed to) a published collection of essays explicating Rieff, titled The Philosophy of Philip Rieff.      

A distillation of the worldview as expressed by such writers would include, most pertinently, a sense of personal emancipation, the liberationist or sensuous impulse in place of the form impulse, and an emotivist outlook whereby “truth” is derived through sentiment or feeling rather than rational judgment or abstract reasoning, and a resulting sense of vulnerability and victimization. Over the course of the last century, a new priestly class has arisen to administer this worldview, the army of secular therapists whose very existence reinforces the therapeutic way of looking at the world. Psychology supplants religion; syndrome supplants sin. The break from the sacred foundation for society’s interdicts means that all law is positivist, and social mores alone are authoritative, supplanting divine injunction.  Secularist therapy is grounded in social mores of the moment rather than ultimate right and wrong, thus reinforcing on a personal level the Gnostic therapeutic worldview.     

The therapeutic is not a philosophy so much as a deference to inner emotive responses to one’s environment. The result is conceiving a “true” and unique self within, one’s authentic self, rather than looking outward to objective ideals so that the self forms naturally and unselfconsciously in interaction with the external world. This inner turn, this preoccupation with one’s own psychology, erodes self-confidence and empathy. It produces a sense of vulnerability, victimhood, and entitlement. It is a centering of one’s own psychological well-being ahead of seeking virtue and avoiding vice—psychology superseding morality as one’s touchstone for how to live a life.

The therapeutic worldview shares with the other ideological “speculative systems” identified by Voegelin the rejection of foundation in the natural order, being a human-generated stand-alone set of abstractions about what a person is. For psychological man, self-understanding and -actualization in the Gnostic sense is the aim of life, not reconciliation with the tragic sense that tells us good and evil run through every heart. More so even than in Voegelin’s time (mid-twentieth century), there is an operative assumption in the culture that psychological self-understanding trumps psychological resilience in every situation because it is an end unto itself rather than a means to becoming a better person morally. It is corrupted pragmatism applied to the self-centered self. It produces self-absorbed and morally obtuse people who can nonetheless be readily incited to instant moral outrage when their Gnostic system is challenged.

The therapeutic tendency to rely on felt emotional response—emotivism—instead of credal interdicts has a religious aspect, even as it subverts sacred order by its turn inward for Gnostic discernment rather than outward to the real, structured logos. Although the cultural ramifications are observable and undeniable, it begins with entire subjectivism. What is real, true, and significant manifests within, to be projected outward. It is meaningless, in this paradigm, to debate whether something immaterial is “real,” like mathematics, categorical differentiations, love, truth, and moral hierarchy. What is “real” must originate within; it codes real because it is emotionally felt. To say, for example, that truth/falsity or right/wrong is objective is to imply they are real unto themselves, apart from how I feel about it. The perceptions of reality are incommensurable, as between the therapeutic worldview and the logos worldview.

Corresponding to logos objectivity is subjective agency:  the exercise of conscious volition toward a self-determined goal; the conscious intentionality in how we live our lives. Human beings choose evil or good, knowing them to be such. If, in our imaginations, we have shifted to a horizontal, social- and process-oriented generation of meaning and purpose, we should understand also that it comes at the cost of agency. Our agency is God-breathed, and there is a sense of responsibility for how we exercise it. Our lives are consequential, and the unfolding of history is a product of the innumerable agentic decisions of individuals. We make the world.

If, however, I am a being navigating the world on the basis of my inner psychology informed by social norms instead of deference to moral realism, my own agency is rendered illusory. Instead of acting according to a universally operative architecture of virtue and vice, psychological well-being becomes paramount, and this means attending to progressive social movements, so as to cede one’s agency to them. The self-care focus of the therapeutic mindset makes us vulnerable to ideological capture, the embrace of a flawed but totalizing system of Gnosticism that departs from reality, beginning with rejection of moral realism.  

Materialist Esotericism

Therapeutic man is Gnostic because meaning seems to emerge unbidden from the vibrant inner being. But that meaning is a product of a divided mind. One division is set at a remove from active consciousness, thereby subconsciously imbibing prompts of the zeitgeist to which he is newly open. The other navigates the being-ness of the world, using the acquired language of objectivity to which he does not actually subscribe. Alisdair MacIntyre explained how this is so: 

The modern radical [psychological man] is as confident in his moral expression of his stances and consequently in the assertive uses of the rhetoric of morality as any conservative has ever been. Whatever else he denounces in our culture he is certain that it still possesses the moral resources which he requires in order to denounce it. Everything else may be, in his eyes, in disorder, but the language of morality is in order, just as it is.

This ability manifests the instrumentalist feature of emotivism. As MacIntyre further wrote, “[w]hile emotivism can come in the guise of emotion, it often works in service of or as a cover for calculated self-interest.” Emotivism means one’s entire purpose is satisfaction of self-interest. In politics, all are assumed to vote and otherwise engage politically on the basis of self-interest rather than principle. Individually, self-interest means using others instrumentally, in unceasing manipulation, and an expectation of being manipulated in return. This bleak vision results in never being released from the vicious cycle of instrumental interactions with others and with society. And it is reinforced in therapy, because moral right and wrong are eschewed in this environment. Principle can never overcome self-interest, and therapy begets therapy, a self-reinforcing, imprisoning cycle.

All of the “speculative systems,” ideologies Voegelin rendered “Gnostic,” are instances of pragmatism, sophistry employed to serve the simple idea that ends justify means. The ends are invariably some form of gnostic transgression against the given-ness of things, starting with the ground of all being, the creator God of the universe. All follows from there: the (Gnostic) disappointment with how the world is, and the misguided belief that the social dialectic will, in time, fix it. Transgression in its various ideological specifics—progressivism, Marxism, Stalinism, National Socialism, positivism, psychoanalysis—is oriented to transgression in the general sense of rejection of God, or what Philip Rieff called “sacred order.”  Gnostic transgressive systems exist to obscure our perception of the transcendent.     

All of these anti-religion “progressive” systems of belief have within them immune systems of sophistry to deflect criticism of the system, detaching the system from reality. Hence, Voegelin’s description of the ideology-creators as “intellectual swindlers.”  The ideology in this way is believed to stand on its own, ungrounded in Being itself, and therefore not sustained but rather continuously regenerated in the movement and flow of the Becoming of postmodern process philosophies, the progeny of Rousseau, Comte, and Marx.        

Gnosticism helps to explain the ongoing partnership between the therapeutic worldview and radical politics. Upon rejecting God, there is still an instinct for the transcendent with no way to satisfy it, other than to look to the this-life immanent for higher purpose. Progressivist ideology is thought to be divined from the ether and therefore self-evidently true. This is the esoteric source of the self discovered within; of “Identity” as that word is now used. It is materially derived, rather than spiritually. It replaces the spiritual esotericism of ancient Gnosticism.  The perception of inner-formed Identity is really just garbled digestion of transgressive social messaging.

To say transgressive Gnosticism is substantive ideology is not to say necessarily that one studies textual propositions of a modern Gnostic system and becomes persuaded by the truth of the system. It is more likely felt than propositionally accepted. As one might expect, this is likely especially true for the ideology of the therapeutic worldview (Voegelin’s “psychoanalysis”), its emphasis being on emotivism rather than moral reasoning. It would need scant reinforcement if one is predisposed to it emotionally.

The axioms for the Gnostic system might lie not in analytical, rational propositions, but in a feeling of frustration or simmering anger or alienation; revulsion at the world-as-it-is. Voegelin himself seemed to recognize as much, in his The Ecumenic Age, written in 1974, long after his early forays into modern Gnosticism. Michael Franz commented, in an article for VoegelinView titled The Concept of Gnosticism and the Analysis of Spiritual Disorder:

Voegelin’s mature analysis locates Gnosticism in the consciousness of particular individuals who fail to bear up under the tensions of existence . . . and who react aggressively against the uncertainties and limitations of creaturely existence by seeking to abolish them through gnosis.

This suggests not so much ideological persuasion, as a lack of the resilience that might have been formed in love, as against the tragic circumstances of evil and death and hate and indifference, rendering one especially susceptible to the oppressive weight of the tragic sense no longer tempered by religion. The individual falls prey to ideological presumptions without even recognizing the system of which they are a part. So, for example, if you puzzle over how a rational person could reason to sex malleability rather than sex differentiation as an ontological feature of existence, the truth might be that they haven’t worked it out rationally. Instead, they may succumb to the ideology as a way to overcome “the uncertainties and limitations of creaturely existence” in a seemingly logical, seamless explanation of the world, a therapeutic “speculative system.”    

“Identity” as gnostic subjectivity pushes against the moral realism of religion, and into the bargain repudiates the “uncertainty [that] is the very essence of Christianity” in favor of seeming unbounded personal control.  That desire for control can be expressed in throwing over ontological boundaries to one’s essence, including even the given-ness of male/female differentiation. But that leaves one’s essence afloat in infinite boundlessness, an unreality of oceanic feeling. One turns to a conception of “identity” as delivered esoterically. And as with the Gnostics of antiquity, this registers internally as a spontaneous inner knowing.

The Discovered Self

In the therapeutic worldview, the conception of self occurs passively; it is discovered rather than formed in the active exercise of agency. Identity derives from this discovered self. In the logos worldview, by contrast, the conception of self might be called the “negotiated self.”  The negotiated self is integrated rather than divided within itself. I push against the world, and it pushes against me. I form a conception of my place in that world through participatory interaction with it. The resulting sense of self is, in this sense, “negotiated.”  With that sense of self, we have integrity, in that we place ourselves in active communion with the world rather than at reflexive enmity with it.

The negotiation with the world entails putting oneself on the line, so to speak, morally. It means accepting responsibility for what one does and doesn’t do. To fully grasp this, we must first grasp the reality of a moral structure to the world, and leave behind a materialist presumption concerning it. In the materialist view, good and evil have no independent existence; they are religious terms applied to what are really just preferences or social norms, some of which may be codified into law. Implicit in the materialist worldview is a deterministic presumption that we move through the world mechanistically. People may have complex interior mental lives, but ultimately, there’s no real agency. And therefore no moral responsibility. Agency corresponds to the reality of the moral structure. We decide to act, and act, on our own volition because we live inside a moral structure. Every act or omission undertaken by us in that intersection between the interior consciousness and the exterior world is a moral act. Of course, the structure is hierarchical, so not every act (or omission) is of equal weight.

But suppose I desire to avoid moral responsibility for what I do and don’t do?  This desire becomes acute if I have rejected God, because the tragic sense again looms large, unmediated by religion. There is a felt need to disregard also His moral structure to reality, because that moral structure inheres in the conscience, and so continues to indict; it creates a dissonance in my simplistic atheism. The self being formed in this process is not the result of a negotiation between me and the exterior world. It is instead formed in my interior being.

Here’s how this can occur psychologically. We can fairly easily adopt multiple “selves.”  In fact, we all do this in relatively innocuous ways. Suppose you make a resolution to eat better and get fit. There is the “you” doing the resolving, and the “you” that is expected to keep the resolution. Or perhaps you set your watch forward five minutes to try to be more punctual. You’re engaged in the self-delusion of a divided self:  the you who sets the watch forward, and the you who decides to believe the incorrect time even though you know it’s incorrect.

This division of self can take less innocuous forms. The psychologist R.D. Laing considered the division of self in “schizoid” personalities, whereby the true self develops a distinct, contrived front that conforms to the world’s repressive expectations. Laing’s thesis is interesting, especially coming as it does from a Marxist perspective that seconds the Marcusean liberationist impulse. If the self can become dangerously divided by society’s repressive demands to conform, surely it can similarly be divided by society’s embrace of unreal Gnostic ideology.

Instead of having an integrated, single point of consciousness of self, a me formed in thinking and interacting agentically with the external world, I may develop a habit of processing world-facts on distinct platforms of self, which we can call “host” and “identity.”  I passively receive and internally process the (presumed amoral) facts of the external world, and interact with the world on what I understand to be its expectations:  a reality of objective truth and moral values. In doing so, I speak the lingua franca of logos, just as Alisdair MacIntyre pointed out, but without embracing it in my emotivist true inner being. My outward-facing self is a passive point of interchange with the harsh world. It hosts the true Gnostic inner being, which discerns and is formed by the gnosis of progressivist ideology. That vulnerable inner being is my true Identity.

This is an outsourcing of the agency of the “I” of consciousness, leaving self-as-host the passive spectator of what the esoterically charged inner being does in the exercise of its conscious agency. For those captured by the ideology of the therapeutic, the social geist is the esoteric but unacknowledged source of the inner knowing.  

Denial of moral responsibility comes at the cost of personal agency. Self-as-host passively receives an Identity that seems to well up unbidden from the depths of the subconscious. Identity formation is a rejection of abstractions of universal moral value in favor of embodied, subjective reactions to the world. This seems to be felt, not chosen. We come to believe we don’t choose our Identity, as that would be an act of moral agency, part of a reality we wish to avoid. Rather, self-as-host prophetically discerns a stirring in the inner being, which emerges as Identity, manifested rather than chosen. Identity is the discovered self.    

But in reality, identity only seems to emerge. The dynamic of choosing—agency—is veiled in the dissonant two-dimension host/identity formations of self. The affirmative moral choices of the negotiated self are replaced with passive and amoral recognition of emerging identity. This is a roundabout form of self-deluded moral evasion. To admit to oneself that this is actually a purposeful activity kept just under the surface of the active consciousness would be to cancel the magic; to expose the affirmative choosing rather than continue the illusion of passive reception. It is necessary to maintain the mystique of esotericism to hide from self the agentic choosing, and thus the reality of the moral universe in which we participate, by choosing.     

We don’t actually receive identity passively, so as to “identify as” gay or trans or dysphoric or asexual or traumatized or dissocial. We choose those things, and our choosing is, as with all our acts of agency, a moral choice. Undertaken in a moral universe. There is no escape from the world God created, into a cramped little interior space safe from His omniscience. Try as we might, we can’t hide from God in a psychological turtle-shell of our own making.

To come out from the darkness of this false reality, we must return to the intersection where we made the first wrong turn. “Men have forgotten God, that’s why all this has happened,” Solzhenitsyn said. His observation applies more broadly than the disaster of Soviet communism. It also applies to the creeping therapeutic that has so bent minds that, in the name of inviolable autonomy, we scurry to totalitarianism. Our attempt to replace the sacred with psychology only brings ruin. We should heed Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

The most experienced psychologist or observer of human nature knows infinitely less of the human heart than the simplest Christian who lives beneath the Cross of Jesus. The greatest psychological insight, ability, and experience cannot grasp one thing: what sin is. Worldly wisdom knows what distress and weakness and failure are, but it does not know the godlessness of man. And so it also does not know that man is destroyed only by his sin and can be healed only by forgiveness.

NOTE: Portions of this paper are excerpted from the author’s The Discovered Self/Identity in the Therapeutic Age, New English Review Press 2025. 

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