Following the line of argument in the essay "Mere Literature and the Lost Traveller" by Allen Tate (1899-1979)-fellow southerner, poet-critic, and convert to Roman Catholicism-Finlay searched for, detected, and then subjected to an analysis both passionate and dispassionate certain Gnostic beliefs concerning the relationship between God (as the detached and absent Deus absconditus), the human mind, and the natural world. Finlay discovered this sometimes-hidden presence of Gnosticism not only in self-consciously modern writers such as Flaubert, Val