THOMAS HOLLWECK is Associate Professor of German at

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Bloom’s most acute insight into the essence of Gnosticism
comes toward the end of his chapter „Lying Against Time.“
Gnosticism is a mode of belatedness, or the unwillingness to
accept the Christian order of „a second chance“ or, as I would
put it, redemption through Christ’s death on the Cross.
Gnosticism won’t have anything to do with this second
chance, it rather „insists upon the First Chance alone“. 24 He
continues: „Hating time, Gnosticism insists upon evading time
rather than fulfilling time in an apocalyptic climax, or living in
time through substitution [i.e. the sacramental life in the
community of the Church, as I would interpret what Bloom is
saying here].“ 25
If failed prophecy becomes apocalyptic, and failed apocalyptic
becomes Gnosticism, as Bloom correctly argues, then the
question must be raised: What does failed Gnosticism
become? Bloom’s logical answer is: Gnosticism never fails,
because its fulfilment is by definition beyond the cosmos
where there is no failure. Failure is, after all, only within the
cosmos. The conclusion Bloom draws from these thoughts is
as persuasive as it is seductive. By evading cosmic fate and
denying the historicity of existence , in other words, by lying
against time, Gnosticism was able to bring mythology back to
monotheism. „Evasion“, as only a master of revisionism of
Bloom’s caliber could see it, „on the rhetorical level, is always
misinterpretation or misreading, and in such revisionary
hermeneutic, Gnosticism was the great innovator.“ 26
Literature, or as Bloom would call it, poetry, then, has become
24 Bloom, Agon, 67.
25 Bloom, Agon, 67.
26 Bloom, Agon, 67.