A Defense of Basilides the False  

"In the first centuries of our era, the Gnostics disputed with the Christians. They were annihilated, but we can imagine their possible victory. Had Alexandria triumphed and not Rome, the bizarre and confused stories that I have summarized would be coherent, majestic, and ordinary. Lines such as Novalis' "Life is a sickness of the spirit,"* or Rimbaud's despairing "True life is absent; we are not in the world," would fulminate from the canonical books. Speculations, such as Richter's discarded theory about the stellar origin of life and its chance dissemination on this planet, would know the unconditional approval of pious laboratories. In any case, what better gift can we hope for than to be insignificant? What greater glory for a God than to be absolved of the world?

*That dictum-"Leben ist eine Krankheit des Geistes, ein leidenschaftliches Tun" owes its diffusion to Carlyle, who emphasized it in his famous article in the Foreign Review, 1829. Not merely a momentary coincidence, but rather an essential rediscovery of the agonies and enlightenments of Gnosticism, is the Prophetic Books of William Blake."--"A Defense of Basilides the False", Jorge Luis Borges