Customer Reviews

Gnostic Return in Modernity

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O'Regan's project is amazing, even thrilling. Unfortunately, he buries it in some of the most bloated academic prose I've ever encountered. He ties so many qualifying phrases to virtually every sentence that he gives new meaning to Anthony Flew's famous phrase, "the death of a thousand qualifications." What gets lost are a clear structure and a clear sense of major options. After reading several pages on FC Baur, for instance, I'm still pretty clueless as to what is really at stake in preferring his approach (with qualifications, of course!) to that of others; in fact, I'd have a pretty hard time stating what Baur's approach really is. There's a "gnostic" character to the book itself. If you don't already know certain things, O'Regan offers little help. Seems like he's writing only for those already in the club. What a pity, because what O'Regan is attempting is clearly important, even revolutionary. It doubtless has import for a whole bunch of people working in several different academic fields. His editors need to help him give sharp focus to those hopelessly convoluted sentences of his. Time after time, his points get buried in verbal rubble. Too bad O'Regan isn't co-authoring his seven (projected) volumes with someone who could take his astonishing learning and translate it into reader-friendly language. Academic writing can be much better than this.

This book, more than any other I've read, changed the way I understand western intellectual history in general and modern Christian thought in particular. O'Regan presents and justifies his use of narrative analysis in order to show how it is possible to trace the (non-identical) return of Valentinian Gnosticism in the early modern era and continuing into the present. This volume constitutes a thorough explanation and defense of O'Regan's thesis and the methodology he employs. He carefully engages the most compelling objections in ways that are thoughtful and persuasive. O'Regan's presentation of various (including opposing) viewpoints is irenic and provocative. He doesn't so much directly challenge other scholars as take the work of a multitude and brilliantly cast it in a new light. In his conclusion, O'Regan makes explicit the exciting implication of his judicious study, which is best left unsaid until the reader has read his preceding groundwork in the book. This volume (and the forthcoming volumes in the project) is must reading for historians of the modern west, theologians, philosophers, literary critics, and anyone else who is interested in the network of relations between ideas past and present, especially between orthodox Christianity, Gnosticism, modernity, and postmodernity. Revolutionary.

As my title indicates, I find Prof. O'Regan's work fascinating, his method well thought out, his vision extensive. Nevertheless, his prose is so achingly twisted, so heavily encrusted with needlessly complex diction, grammar, and syntax, that I find it hard to read him for very long. My first thought is that this is what happens to scholars who spend too much time with Hegel, whose language is so tortuous--even in German--that it is said German students sometimes read an English translation before approaching him in their own language! As I say, I'm tempted to think that O'Regan has drunk to deeply from the Hegelian well--and yet Charles Taylor manages to write well enough.

All this said, I'm still going to finish the book. The thing that keeps me reading is the tremendous importance of his project: there are not many thinkers interested in writing about modern gnosticism from an orthodox point of view. I am very happy to have found someone who is not only aware of the return of gnosticism, but can define it.

This book is for professionals!! I was hoping for a better understanding of the influence of gnosticism on modern thought, especially New Age thinking. Instead this is an introductory volume for a large number of highly detailed, thoroughly researched future books. In the intro. the author spends most of his time justifying the authors he will site in future volumes. There is little explanation of the intellectual roots of gnosticism or how it plays out in the current stream of culture. I have tried to stay with the reading but it has not been fun or truly enlightening. Read this if you are going to teach a Ph.D. course.