David Bentley Hart’s novel Kenogaia introduces a world that is at once familiar and in other ways radically alien. The story opens with a father and son looking through a telescope at the vast machinery of the heavens. For the reader, it takes but a moment to realize that while these heavens may be like ours, they are not our own. The celestial spheres that whirl overhead in this world are made of crystal, and they operate through a system of gears that can be viewed by telescope. As the story progresses, the world is revealed to be a mechanical prison woven from the dreams of a captured princess, made by a sorcerer who has set himself up as the god of his machine cosmos, and it is from this machine and its false god that the characters must be liberated. The name of this false cosmos is Kenogaia, “empty-earth” in Greek.
The story is based upon Gnostic mythology and particularly on the Gnostic “Hymn of the Pearl,” a story about a prince descending into the dark land of Egypt to receive a pearl for the treasury of his father the king, only to forget his identity and nearly be lost in the mire of sensual illusion and corporeality. While Gnosticism itself is a rather contentious category, and many have argued that it cannot be identified as a singular, unified historical reality, certain common features can be traced and are generally included when one uses the term “Gnostic.”
Many Gnostic cosmologies begin with the Aeons, primordial spiritual beings generated from the one God, who exist in a world of descending degrees of participation in the divinity from which they emanate. One of these Aeons, Sophia, is described as having fallen away from the Pleroma towards the abyss of nothingness. Various explanations are offered for this, such as her desire to actualize her own creative potential or her desire to known the unknowable God. Whatever the reason, once having fallen away, she generates an evil deity that constructs a world hovering over the abyss, a world of half-truths, of only faint reality, and it is this world that human beings inhabit. This evil being, called the demiurge (Greek for “craftsman”) keeps the souls who inhabit his world in a state of ignorance, trapped in the gross material substance that is foreign to their true nature, convinced that the demon that rules the cosmos is the one true God. Those living on earth, trapped beneath the various heavenly spheres and their respective angelic rulers, must strive to recognize the sparks of divinity within themselves and rise out of this false cosmic prison to ascend to the Pleroma to join themselves to their divine origin, being stripped of the various “garments,” or false layers of materiality and soul, that encapsulate them. In Christian forms of Gnosticism, Christ is seen as coming from the true God above, sent into the world to break the illusions of the demiurge and free the souls who have been entrapped.
This is a rough sketch of the Gnostic worldview. It is, of course, one that cannot ultimately be harmonized with a Christian view of the world, in which all things are created by the one God and thus are ultimately good. Yet in using Gnosticism, Hart manages to craft a beautiful and compelling fantasy world that can illuminate our own reality without being a direct parallel. Because our own world and the currents of ideology and wickedness that exist in it in such vast quantities are reflected in Kenogaia, the judgements upon them remain relevant. By contrasting the heavenly realm from which one of the main characters, Oriens, comes with the machine cosmos into which he descends, our own reality is contrasted with the kingdom of heaven. Like Christ, Oriens stands as a judge of the world not because he is in a place of judicial authority over it but because he reveals in himself the standard by which the world is to be measured and thus makes plain the failure of the world to be truly good—by shining light, the shadows are made to show themselves; by knowing truth, falsehood is made plain.
The first element of Kenogaia that reflects our own world and that reveals itself as particularly dark throughout the story is the dominant ideology that has been promulgated by the demiurge and his minions. This ideology is one characterized by a blend of Gnostic cosmology, scientific materialism, and psychology, combined into a strictly enforced religion that is meant to form the boundaries of one’s entire reality. All things are understood as matter constructed by the grand artificer into precise and ingenious mechanisms from which arise consciousness, the cosmos, everything. The soul itself is understood as a carefully constructed machine, although it may nevertheless ascend to dwell in the various spheres after death. All behavior and thought is understood in mechanical terms, as “programming” or the correct operation of the human mechanism, and any aberrant thinking or behavior is deemed an illness to be forcefully corrected. Individuals who begin to question the orthodoxy of Kenogaia or to display behaviors out of keeping with the smooth operations of its society are sent to “therapy,” where they undergo various types of humiliation, brainwashing, or torture until they either submit or are entirely broken. All of this is supported by a psychological philosophy that attempts to dissuade people from believing in their own intuitions and experiences in favor of abstractions, especially statistics, all of which are fed to them by the powers that be until they are thoroughly internalized.
Hart’s distaste for this kind of “therapeutic” rationalism is on full display throughout the book, and it is ultimately revealed that such a worldview is little more than a tool of control, allowing the demiurge to keep entrapped souls in a state of ignorance regarding their true nature.
The history of Kenogaia mentions a transition into the “age of illumination,” a thinly veiled parallel to the Enlightenment, wherein “superstitious darkness” gave way to the light of rationalism, science, and technology. Also mentioned is an age prior to this shift in which people were able to fight against some of the demiurge’s servants using spiritual powers, some of which have descended from the kingdom beyond the mechanical cosmos. One might speculate, then, that the transition to rationalism was primarily a changing of tactic on the part of the demiurge. Rather than enforcing submission and ignorance through sheer power and fear, the inhabitants are made to disbelieve in their spiritual essence, in the possibility of anything beyond the mechanical and the spheres that entrap them. It is through the maintenance of such ignorance, of such forgetting, that the demiurge maintains control, and the act of remembering is a consistent theme throughout the book and serves as a weapon whereby the sorcerer’s powers are overcome. The implication that such rationalism and deism within our own world is a tool of wicked spiritual powers to keep humanity trapped in ignorance and slavery to sin (without denying the real benefits that science and technology have provided) is hard to miss.
In addition casting light upon the sinister nature of the world’s dominant ideology, the breaking of Oriens into Kenogaia reveals the baseness of much of the world’s day-to-day operations. Much of what is taken for granted as normal, even by the relatively enlightened main characters, is criticized by the standards that Oriens carries within himself, the knowledge of the world as it truly is. Simply by not taking the suffering and evil around him for granted, Oriens dismantles any attempts at its normalization, which reveal themselves as flimsy illusions that fall away the moment a higher perspective is offered. Throughout the book, the characters are confronted by social and spiritual issues: wealth inequality, drug addiction, the trapping of souls in cycles of suffering, belief in the sorcerer’s eternal power over the souls in his dominion. Some of these are taught as dogma, such as the economic principle that growth requires “winners” and “losers,” while others are rumors or religious beliefs fostered in the world by the priests of the demiurge. Oriens, unsurprisingly, is horrified by such ideas and realities, and takes them as indicative of the evil of the “god” that has created Kenogaia, and the reader is drawn into his perspective, one which attempts no justifications for suffering or evil, rather seeing it in the full light of authentic goodness.
Both the suffering inflicted and its justification are ultimately tools to keep the souls of Kenogaia trapped and unaware of their true home, to keep the rays of light within them and above from dispelling the shadows from which the demiurge has constructed his world. The suffering breaks individuals down, and the lies keep them ignorant and perpetuating said suffering, becoming participants in the cycles of deprivation that afflict those trapped in the machine. Many of his lies, moreover, harness the impulses and genuinely good internal movements of the soul for false ends, subverting instincts of freedom and feeding upon them. The desire for health is twisted into rigid conformity; the intuition of a spiritual world is redirected into a debased understanding of a mechanical soul ascending to perverse afterlives; the desire to worship and serve God is channeled into slavery to an idol.
As an illusion, the machine that the sorcerer has built can only function if those trapped within it believe that it is real. Should they awaken, mass rebellion would ensure, and the sorcerer would risk losing his grip. To a certain extent, then, the sorcerer’s machine is built within the consciousness of the trapped soul, just as it woven from the dreams of a trapped princess, and it is this that marks the deepest and most startling parallel with our own world that the book presents. For we are all to some degree inhabiting a machine, a world of false notions and twisted understandings that shapes our perception of reality and casts a veil over our spiritual sensitivities and impulses towards God. We all worship idols and allow them to feed upon our deepest energies and desires. We misconstrue God, we misconstrue creation, we misconstrue each other and our relationships, and it is from our ignorance and dreaming that our sins are born and the world embittered and corrupted. By showing us the truth, by revealing the kingdom from which he comes, Oriens, like Christ, dispels these illusions, revealing them as the small and fragile things that they are.
At the end of the book, it is noted that not only has every soul trapped in the sorcerer’s machine been rescued (indeed, even the ultimate redemption of the sorcerer is insisted upon), but the very landscape of Kenogaia has come to inhabit the previously desert areas of the true kingdom. It is here that Hart departs most forcefully from the Gnostic vision I described above. The world may be the construction of a wicked sorcerer, but the elements it is made from are still good; they are in need of redemption, not destruction. Despite all his efforts to the contrary, then, the sorcerer has indirectly worked good, for nothing that he ever built was truly his own. He may have been able to assemble and enslave a world, but he could not truly create one, and every genuinely created element belonged to the true world and thus found a home within it. His reality was not an essentially debased new entity, but the twisting of an essentially good entity born of the genuine reality of the true king.
So, too, may we find our own illusions when they are broken. Nothing real or good within them will be cast off, but transfigured. There is in the end nothing to fear because there is nothing to lose but what is already false. Our desires, our persons, our relationships, all will be lifted up into a higher reality, and what is discarded is only that which never was to begin with. As we wake from the machine, we see that the true world awaits us, a world that we already know through the daze of long forgotten but quickly returning memory, the light of Christ breaking through the gears and crystal spheres to usher us to our homeland.
As Hart himself says elsewhere,
for the most part, though, we pass our lives amid shadows and light, illusions and revelations, uncertain of what to believe or where to turn our gaze. Those who have entirely lost the ability to see the transcendent reality that shows itself in all things, and who refuse to seek it out or even to believe the search a meaningful one, have confined themselves for now within an illusory world, and wander in a labyrinth of dreams. Those others, however, who are still able to see the truth that shines in and through and beyond the world of ordinary experience, and who know that nature is in its very aspect the gift of the supernatural, and who understand that God is that absolute reality in whom, in every moment, they live and move and have their being—they are awake.1
David Bentley Hart. 2013. The Experience of God, 332. New Haven: Yale University Press.