THOMAS HOLLWECK is Associate Professor of German at

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Platonic notion of time as the „moving image of eternity“.
Where Plato’s demiurge attempts to copy eternity in the image
of time, the demiurge of the Gnostic Valentinus deliberately
misreads and thus misrepresents eternity by creating time.
Time as the lie about eternity becomes for Valentinus the
reason why he in turn must lie about time or rather against
time. Bloom’s perceptiveness recognizes in this lie against
time the Nietzschean will’s resentment against the „it was“ of
time. The demonic temporality, as Bloom calls it, which
perhaps no one understood better than Shakespeare, thus is
ultimately the mark of the Gnostic’s negative theology that
cannot have a God who works in history. The series time,
catastrophe, belatedness, Gnosis, modernism is now
established. As Bloom sums it up:
„What a Gnostic or strong poet knows is what only a strong
reading of a belated poem or a lie against time teaches: a
freedom compounded of three elements, and these are:
negation, evasion, extravagance. It is the mutual audacity of
belated religion or Gnosis, and of belated Poetry or Petrarch
and after, to create a freedom out of and by catastrophe.“ 21
Bloom’s own strong reading of Gnosticism brings to light
what is missing in most of the readings that focus too
exclusively on Gnosticism’s redemptive claim. What makes
Gnosticism interesting, even attractive to „intellectuals“ is
neither its logical consistency nor the zealousness with which
some Gnostics try to identify the labyrinthine mechanisms of
the evil demiurge’s cosmos. What makes it interesting is what
might be called its psychic potency. This is what Bloom sees
when he speaks of negation, evasion, and extravagance.
Having once accounted for the unde malum that haunts the
Christian, the Gnostic can throw himself into the dialectics of
21 Bloom, Agon, 59.