Gnosticism, Individuality, and Freedom. The Imaginary Religion of Harold Bloom

Abstract

The dominant element of the prophetic religious traditions of the West is historical-institutional and dogmatic. In these traditions, for Harold Bloom, God embodies absolute transcendence and something radically external to the individual. An alternative way has existed and survives in a pluriform form in these same traditions, under the guise of their mystical manifestations, “the way of gnosis”. This gnosis, which has survived for two thousand years, can be defined as the acceptance and knowledge of the God within the human being. Our objective in this paper is to critically approach this Bloomian conception of gnosis and its application, as a hermeneutic model, to his interpretation of “American religion”, the “American religious faith”, a ‒supposed‒ syncretic, millenarian and delay faith, where the divine medium merges into the everyday life of the individual, into the very liberating interiority of the self.