TITLE: KENOGAIA
AUTHOR: DAVID BENTLEY HART
WHEN THE DREAMING PRINCESS AWAKENS
It looks like our world, but then it doesn’t. This is a world where werewolves roam the woods, where people who challenge reality are whisked away to the city for re-education. People live in a daze, drugged and convinced that this world is the only reality. Looking through a telescope at stars, Valentine Ambrosius’s sees cogs and wheels, mechanisms that make the world work.
He focuses on a star that gets larger every night. One night wolf-people come to the house, arrest him for forbidden thoughts and take him away. It remains for his son Michael and his childhood friend Laura to keep watch on the approaching star. It lands in the forest as Prince Oriens who was sent from beyond the stars to redeem the clockwork world. All the powers of the world and demons of the underworld are loosed against him, but Michael and Laura are able to protect him. They hear how long ago Oriens’s sister Aurora, strayed into a forest of dreams where she fell under the spell of a magician. This world, which from the higher world resembles a metal sphere in a desert, is a result of her dreams.
While she is asleep in a fortress in the underworld, the magician who created the clockwork world weaves her dreams into this world, believing that he is God and that there is no other God but he. Michael, Laura and Oriens set out on a dangerous journey to the underworld to find and awaken the sleeping sister. Will her awakening result in the undoing of the world? This is certainly a concern.
If this story feels familiar, it is because it is a retelling of the second century poem, “The Hymn of the Pearl”, possibly the work of the Syrian poet Bardaisan. David Bentley Hart who tells the present story is a professor of theology at Notre Dame University, the author of hundreds of articles and several books on theology and philosophy, as well as a translator of the New Testament. He obviously has a profound understanding of early Christian Gnosticism. Kenogaia lays out gnostic teachings in the form of a compelling story and makes those teachings accessible to all “who have ears to hear.” Prince Oriens quotes liberally from the Gospel of Thomas and other gnostic texts.
The Hymn of the Pearl tells of the quest of a prince from the East to recover a pearl from a noisy serpent in Egypt, and to bring it home. The prince ends up in an inn, where under the influence of heavy food and drink he falls into a deathlike stupor. In Kenogaia, our heroes are captured by eating drugged confectionary, and then imprisoned. However, Michael and Laura remain awake and are able to awaken Prince Oriens. The rulers that hold them captive are all powerful, and it is only with the help of magical jewels brought by Oriens from the real world, that those rulers can be challenged, and that Oriens can continue his search for his sister.
To avoid more spoilers, I can only add that the climax of the story involves gnostic themes such as the Harrowing of Hell, the liberation of Sophia – a central theme of the gnostic text Pistis Sophia, the origin of evil and the ultimate redemption of the cosmos. Those are difficult themes that all philosophers struggle with. Secular philosophers admit that the world is broken, that it lacks integrity, but insist that it can be repaired through social action. Most religions generally reject the notion that all souls can be saved and would consign many to eternal punishment. David Bentley Hart rejects this view, in his book, “That All shall be saved”, much criticized by Christian theologians. Kenogaia also emphasizes universal salvation. He also presents the vision of an atemporal fall, where the origin of evil lies in a cosmic catastrophe that predates human beings and where human beings are more the victims rather than the cause of evil.
Kenogaia also contemplates the end of all things, the final resolution of the catastrophe in which we find ourselves. When Jesus’s disciples ask him, in the Gospel of Thomas, how the world will end, He replies, “Have you considered the beginning that you inquire about the end? For where the beginning is, there shall be the end. Blessed is he who shall stand at the beginning, and he shall know the end and shall not taste death.”
Hart’s vision of the Pleroma, a condition of blessedness experienced in the real world, forms the conclusion of this Gnostic tale.