THOMAS HOLLWECK is Associate Professor of German at

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it does it again in its activist or literary revivals in the modern
age. Let us call this aspect of the Gnostic imagination
syncretistic allegory.
On the other hand, the point of origin of this Self, the utterly
transcendent beyond of the alien God-Man, unutterably
different, to be sure, must somehow be accessible to the gnosis
that will rejoin the two parts of the pneumatic Self, the God-
Self and the Man-Self. This is the mirror-world of Mannerist,
Symbolist art and poetry, for the only symbolic way in which
this union can be represented is that of the narcissistic Self.
One has to be very careful here not to confuse the Gnostic
„Void“, the Emersonian „Abyss“ with the experiences of
transcendence that gave rise to the theologia negativa,
although the boundaries are often blurred, as we saw earlier in
the discussion of Harold Bloom’s work. And there is, as Jacob
Taubes noted in a conference paper entitled „Noten zum
Surrealismus“, the modern „beyond“ of the Surrealist work of
art, hermetically closed against the world. By emphasizing the
Gnostic experiences over what could be called Gnostic topoi
or motifs, Taubes’ analysis stays away from the kind of
intellectual history that relativizes such experiences. For him
the Gnostic and Hermetic motifs that have been handed down
to our time are nothing but derivative products that are found
in the rubble of tradition and that cannot form the basis for a
unified structural interpretation.
What remains is the insight that „the nihilistic a-cosmism of
the Surrealist experience ‘repeats’ the nihilistic a-cosmism of
the Gnosticism of late antiquity in our modern world“. The
„repetition“ occurs under seemingly changed conditions if one
is to say that the ancient cosmos and the world of the modern