Book Review: Le programme d’éthique et culture religieuse : De l’exigeante conciliation entre le soi, l’autre et le nous

Abstract

to fate' in antiquity was rare'' and that, when used, it should be seen as ''part of a rhetorical strategy for demarcating and excluding one group from another. When we find it used, I suspect that it derives from those individuals who came to consider themselves outside the prevailing socio-religious system or ethos'' (28). She carries this task out in subsequent chapters devoted to discussing several Nag Hammadi writings (especially the Apocryphon of John, Eugnostos, and the untitled writing On the Origin of the World), Middle Platonist thought, Pauline letters, the Hermetic writings, and the thoroughly depressing Gospel of Judas, which comes the closest of any of the sources that Denzey Lewis mentions to living up to the gnostic predetermination cliché. In these discussions, she weaves her way carefully through related but not identical concepts such as ananke, heimarmene, and pronoia, showing the nuanced ways in which they interact in the systems of the various texts. Denzey Lewis's focus in these discussions is on the first and second centuries of the Common Era, which is unproblematic with regard to securely dated writings and figures, but which is less certain with regard to the gnostic writings, whose only sure attestations are from fourth or fifth century Egyptian sources. It is true that we do tend to date these sources to the second century; it is also true that we might be wrong in doing so, or at least overlooking major elements of the redaction histories of these texts.Overall, this slim volume presents a convincing and clear argument, not that the cliché of belief in astral fatalism needs to be jettisoned, but rather that it needs to be nuanced. Denzey Lewis shows that, as far as we can tell, true understanding or even perception of the problem only arose after one's resolution of the problem, so that ''cosmic enslavement exists but only as a state of ignorance for others'' (137). Ultimately, it comes down to the distinction between ''them''-who suffer from the reign of fate or the stars-and ''us,'' who do not. And this is so whether the ''us'' are the gnostics and other authors of the early Christian era who regard their contemporaries as ''them,'' or whether the ''us'' are modern scholars looking back at the ''them'' who populated late antiquity. My only complaint about the volume is that it is short; more expanded discussions of the issue would have been welcome, and no doubt will come, whether from Denzey Lewis herself or from those who take up her revaluatory task.