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Alien

quinta-feira 25 de janeiro de 2024

  

THE "ALIEN"

“In the name of the great first alien Life from the worlds of light, the sublime that stands above all works”: this is the standard opening of Mandaean compositions, and “alien” is a constant attribute of the “Life” that by its nature is alien to this world and under certain conditions alien within it. The formula quoted speaks of the “first” Life “that stands above all works,” where we have to supply “of creation,” i.e., above the world. The concept of the alien Life is one of the great impressive word-symbols which we encounter in gnostic speech, and it is new in the history of human speech in general. It has equivalents throughout gnostic literature, for example Marcion’s concept of the “alien God” or just “the Alien,” “the Other,” “the Unknown,” “the Nameless,” “the Hidden”; or the “unknown Father” in many Christian-gnostic writings. Its philosophic counterpart is the “absolute transcendence” of Neoplatonic thought. But even apart from these theological uses where it is one of the predicates of God or of the highest Being, the word “alien” (and its equivalents) has its own symbolic significance as an expression of an elemental human experience, and this underlies the different uses of the word in the more theoretical contexts. Regarding this underlying experience, the combination “the alien life” is particularly instructive.

The alien is that which stems from elsewhere and does not belong here. To those who do belong here it is thus the strange, the unfamiliar and incomprehensible; but their world on its part is just as incomprehensible to the alien that comes to dwell here, and like a foreign land where it is far from home. Then it suffers the lot of the stranger who is lonely, unprotected, uncomprehended, and uncomprehending in a situation full of danger. Anguish and homesickness are a part of the stranger’s lot. The stranger who does not know the ways of the foreign land wanders about lost; if he learns its ways too well, he forgets that he is a stranger and gets lost in a different sense by succumbing to the lure of the alien world and becoming estranged from his own origin. Then he has become a “son of the house.” This too is part of the alien’s fate. In his alienation from himself the distress has gone, but this very fact is the culmination of the stranger’s tragedy. The recollection of his own alienness, the recognition of his place of exile for what it is, is the first step back; the awakened homesickness is the beginning of the return. All this belongs to the “suffering” side of alienness. Yet with relation to its origin it is at the same time a mark of excellence, a source of power and of a secret life unknown to the environment and in the last resort impregnable to it, as it is incomprehensible to the creatures of this world. This superiority of the alien which distinguishes it even here, though secretly, is its manifest glory in its own native realm, which is outside this world. In such position the alien is the remote, the inaccessible, and its strangeness means majesty. Thus the alien taken absolutely is the wholly transcendent, the “beyond,” and an eminent attribute of God.

Both sides of the idea of the. “Alien,” the positive and the negative, alienness as superiority and as suffering, as the prerogative of remoteness and as the fate of involvement, alternate as the characteristics of one and the same subject—the “Life.” As the “great first Life” it partakes in the positive aspect alone: it is “beyond,” “above the world,” “in the worlds of light,” “in the fruits of splendor, in the courts of light, in the house of perfection,” and so forth. In its split-off existence in the world it tragically partakes in the interpenetration of both sides; and the actualization of all the features outlined above, in a dramatic succession that is governed by the theme of salvation, makes up the metaphysical history of the light exiled from Light, of the life exiled from Life and involved in the world—the history of its alienation and recovery, its “way” down and through the nether world and up again. According to the various stages of this history, the term “alien” or its equivalents can enter into manifold combinations: “my alien soul,” “my worldsick heart,” “the lonely vine,” apply to the human condition, while “the alien man” and “the stranger” apply to the messenger from the world of Light—though he may apply to himself the former terms as well, as we shall see when we consider the “redeemed redeemer.” Thus by implication the very concept of the “alien” includes in its meaning all the aspects which the “way” explicates in the form of temporally distinct phases. At the same time it most directly expresses the basic experience which first led to this conception of the “way” of existence—the elementary experience of alienness and transcendence. We may therefore regard the figure of the “alien Life” as a primary symbol of Gnosticism. [Hans Jonas  ]