Gnostic due process

Abstract

The essay offers an interpretation of Justice Douglas's opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut as a Gnostic text. This interpretation yields a surprising meaning to Douglas's famous claim that "[S]pecific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance. Various guarantees create zones of privacy." Christian Gnosticism, which flourished in the Hellenistic world and which left traces throughout our culture, connects a number of Griswold's themes: emanation, shadow, impeded procreation, hidden meanings and equally hidden precincts of marital bedrooms. Read as a Gnostic writing, Griswold is the story of a failed effort to emanate the text of liberty, to realize publicly its hidden redemptive meaning and promise. In the spirit of Gnosticism, the author aspires to redeem Douglas's fallen emanation, taking as his model William Blake's attempt to bring John Milton to a complete imaginative reintegration with his (Milton's) poetic vision. The essay tests the adequacy of such a rescue attempt on Christian terms, and locates the effort within competing traditions in American constitutionalism.

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