Secrets and Obsessions

Long before The DaVinici Code revived our obsession with the esoteric, Umberto Eco wrote "Foucault's pendulum", and took a very different approach to understanding the impact of these latter Gnostics and their claim to posses the secrets of the universe. Eco's book is spectacular and well written, and has some insightful claims about humanity's endless drive to make sense out of our history.

The book revolves around a group of three men who are professional publishers and free lance historians and amateur linguists. They're tasked with accumulating and publishing wildly popular occult books about a myriad of mystical things, usually relating to the secret knowledge obtained from Christ by the Knights Templar and speculation on their demise. Through their interactions with the diabolical authors, the protagonists begin developing their own story about what happened, which includes and makes sense out of all the other stories they've been given. Initially as a game, and later as an obsession, they strive to fit each peace of the puzzle together to explain how the Knights Templar survived their persecution in France and how their secrets are divided today.

Through their conclusions and interactions, Eco explores the insane drive of mankind to relate the events in our lives to a deeper meaning and see order, a plan, in the things that happen to us, individually or collectively. In the end, the occultists and diabolicals are unmasked as the lunatics they are, so obsessed with uncovering secret knowledge they'll sacrifice good sense and wisdom to obtain it. Eco concludes that the only secret worth possessing is one that's never known, as a known secret quickly becomes trivial, and that the ultimate secret is one that is meaningless - that, like an onion, is all layers with no center:

"A plot, if there is to be one, must be secret. A secret that, if we only knew it, would dispel our frustration, lead us to salvation; or else the knowing of it in itself would be salvation. Does such a luminous secret exist? Yes, provided it is never known."

He continues with commentary on Christianity, and the role it's played at the center of so many esoteric cults:
"Yet someone had just arrived and declared himself the Son of God, the Son of God made flesh, to redeem the sins of the world. Was that a run-of-the-mill mystery? And he promised salvation to all: you only had to love your neighbor. Was that a trivial secret? ...And yet they, who now had salvation wittin their grasp -- do-it-yourself-salvation--turned deaf ears. Is that all there is to it? How trite. And they kept on scouring the Mediterranean in their boats, looking for a lost knowledge, of which those thirty-denarii dogmas were but the superficial veil, the parable for the poor in spirit, the allusive hieroglyph, the wink of the eye oat the pneumatics. The mystery of the Trinity? Too simple: there had to be more to it."

The wild popularity of The DaVinci Code, a perfect publishing candied for Eco's literary protagonists, only proves that this is still true today. Mired in skepticism, we refuse to believe the truth if it's too simple, regardless of how well addresses our issues. We want codes, we want secrets. We want lies, treachery, deceit, confusion; we want esotericism, because secrets mean knowledge, and power, and that we can save ourselves into a state where we rule over those less informed. Salvation for everyone? Bah - only we elite cynics truly deserve it.

The early Gnostics were enemies of the early church who infiltrated it's branches and had a strong impact on driving it's doctrines. Early church history is filled with accounts of battles against Gnostic heresy to keep Christ's central and universal message from being destroyed by the quest for secret knowledge. I think this mindset, for better or worse, has infiltrated a lot of our western society, and contributed to modernity's spin towards nihilism. Many of our attempts to systematize relational and spiritual concepts comes from our innate desire to control through understanding. Many Church traditions, from Calvinism to Marianism, display our bizarre tendency to try and explain the mechanics of the ineffable through doctrines regarding how the conception of Mary took place to the election of the saints to the salvation of angels.

Eco's advice, like many of modernism's critics, is to stop questing. To stop desiring to discern the absurd, and instead focus on the material, the practical, and the world at hand by relating to others and nature. Knowledge is never bad, but the real wisdom of life is that our knowledge is limited, and that it's our relationships and actions that provide meaning to our lives, and not simply the things we know. Knowledge and understanding may sometimes be part of the path of Salvation, but they are not the purpose of it, nor the end of it, and we lose more than we gain when we sacrifice relationship for understanding.