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Gnosticism: A Brief Introduction

The fallacious character of an eidos of history [the belief that the whole course of history can be known–ed] has been shown on principle–but the analysis can and must be carried one step fur­ther into certain details. The Christian symbolism of supernatural destination has in itself a theoretical structure, and this structure is continued into the variants of immanentization. The pilgrim’s progress, the sanctification of life, is a movement toward a telos, a goal; and this goal, the Beatific Vision, is a state of perfection.

Hence, in the Christian symbolism one can distinguish the move­ment–as its teleological component, from a state of highest value–as the axiological component.1 The two components reappear in the variants of immanentization; and they can accordingly be classified as variants that either accentuate the teleological or the axiologi­cal component or combine them both in their symbolism.

In the first case, when the accent lies strongly on movement, without clarity about final perfection, the result will be the progressivist interpretation of history. The aim need not be clarified because progressivist thinkers, men like Diderot or D’Alembert, assume a selection of desirable factors as the standard and interpret progress as qualitative and quantitative increase of the present good–the “bigger and better” of our simplifying slogan. This is a conservative attitude, and it may become reactionary unless the original standard be adjusted to the changing historical situation.

In the second case, when the accent lies strongly on the state of perfection, without clarity about the means that are required for its realization, the result will be utopianism. It may assume the form of an axiological dream world, as in the Utopia of More, when the thinker is still aware that and why the dream is unrealizable; or, with increasing theoretical illiteracy, it may assume the form of various social idealisms, such as the abolition of war, of unequal distribution of property, of fear and want.

And, finally, immanentization may ex­tend to the complete Christian symbol. The result will then be the active mysticism of a state of perfection, to be achieved through a revolutionary transfiguration of the nature of man, as, for instance, in Marxism.

Blinded to an Elemental Fallacy

The attempt at constructing an eidos of history will lead into the fallacious immanentization of the Christian eschaton. The understanding of the attempt as fallacious, however, raises baffling questions with regard to the type of man who will indulge in it. The fallacy looks rather elemental. Can it be assumed that the thinkers who indulged in it were not intelligent enough to penetrate it? Or that they penetrated it but propagated it nevertheless for some obscure evil reason?

The mere asking of such questions carries their negation. Obviously one cannot explain seven centuries of intellectual history by stupidity and dishonesty. A drive must rather be assumed in the souls of these men that blinded them to the fallacy. The nature of this drive cannot be discovered by submitting the structure of the fallacy to an even closer analysis. The attention must rather concentrate on what the thinkers achieved by their fallacious construction.

On this point there is no doubt. They achieved a certainty about the meaning of history, and about their own place in it, which otherwise they would not have had. Certainties, now, are in demand for the purpose of overcoming uncertainties with their accompaniment of anxiety; and the next question then would be:  What specific uncertainty was so disturbing that it had to be overcome by the dubious means of fallacious immanentization?

One does not have to look far afield for an answer. Uncertainty is the very essence of Christianity. The feeling of security in a “world full of gods” is lost with the gods themselves;  when the world is de-divinized, communication with the world-transcendent God is reduced to the tenuous bond of faith, in the sense of Heb. 11: 1, as the substance of things hoped for and the proof of things unseen.

The Social Consequences of a Breakdown of Faith

Ontologically, the substance of things hoped for is nowhere to be found but in faith itself; and, epistemologically, there is no proof for things unseen but again this very faith.2 The bond is tenuous, indeed, and it may snap easily. The life of the soul in openness toward God, the waiting, the periods of aridity and dullness, guilt and despondency, contrition and repentance, foresakenness and hope against hope, the silent stirrings of love and grace, trembling on the verge of a certainty that if gained is loss–the very lightness of this fabric may prove too heavy a burden for men who lust for massively possessive experience.

The danger of a breakdown of faith to a socially relevant degree, now, will increase in the measure in which Christianity is a worldly success, that is, it will grow when Christianity penetrates a civilizational area thoroughly, supported by institutional pressure, and when, at the same time, it undergoes an internal process of spiritualization, of a more complete realization of its essence.

The more people are drawn or pressured into the Christian orbit, the greater will be the number among them who do not have the spiritual stamina for the heroic adventure of the soul that is Christianity; and the likeliness of a fall from faith will increase when civilizational progress of education, literacy, and intellectual debate will bring the full seriousness of Christianity to the understanding of ever more individuals . . . .

Gnosticism: The History of its Analysis

The reader will be surprised to see modern political thinkers and movements treated under the heading of “gnosticism.” Since the state of science in this area is as yet largely unknown to the general public, an introductory explanation will not be unwelcome.

The idea that one of the main currents of European, especially of German, thought is essentially gnostic sounds strange today, but this is not a recent discovery. Until about a hundred years ago the facts of the matter were well known. In 1835 appeared Ferdinand Christian Baur’s monumental work Die christliche Gnosis, oder die Religionsphilosophie in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung.

Under the heading “Ancient Gnosticism and Modern Philosophy of Religion,” the last part of this work discusses: (i) Bõhme’s theosophy, (2) Schilling’s philosophy of nature, (3) Schleiermacher’s doctrine of faith, and (4) Hegel’s philosophy of religion. The speculation of German idealism is correctly placed in its context in the gnostic movement since antiquity. Moreover, Baur’s work was not an isolated event: it concluded a hundred years of preoccupation with the history of heresy–a branch of scholarship that not without reason developed during the Enlightenment.

I shall mention only Johann Lorenz von Mosheim’s encyclopedic Versuch einer unparteiischen gründlichen Ketzergeschichte (2nd edition, 1748) and two works on ancient Gnosticism from Baur’s own day, Johann August Neander’s Genetische Entwicklung der vornehmsten gnostischen Systeme (1818) and Jacques Matter’s Histoire critique du Gnosticisme et de son influence sur les sectes religieuses et philosophiques des six premiers siècles de 1’ère chrétienne (1828).

It was well understood that with the Enlightenment and German idealism the gnostic movement had acquired great social significance. On this issue as on many others, the learning and self-understanding of Western civilization were not submerged until the liberal era, the latter half of the nineteenth century, during the reign of positivism in the sciences of man and society. The submergence was so profound that when the gnostic movement reached its revolutionary phase its nature could no longer be recognized.

No Tools to Grasp the Horrors

The movements deriving from Marx and Bakunin, the early activities of Lenin, Sorel’s myth of violence, the intellectual movement of neopositivism, the communist, fascist, and national-socialist revolutions–all fell in a period, now fortunately part of the past, when science was at a low point.

Europe had no conceptual tools with which to grasp the horror that was upon her. There was a scholarly study of the Christian churches and sects; there was a science of government, cast in the categories of the sovereign nation-state and its institutions; there were the beginnings of a sociology of power and political authority; but there was no science of the non-Christian, non-national intellectual and mass movements into which the Europe of Christian nation-states was in the process of breaking up.

Since in its massiveness this new political phenomenon could not be disregarded, a number of stopgap notions were coined to cope with it. There was talk of neopagan movements, of new social and political myths, or of mystiques politiques. I, too, tried one of these ad hoc explanations in a little book on “political religions.” The research on ancient Gnosticism has a complex history of more than two hundred years. For this development one should consult the historical surveys in Wilhelm Bousset’s Die Hauptprobleme der Gnosis (1907) and Hans Jonas’s Gnosis und spätantiker Geist (1934; 1954). For the problems of Gnosticism itself, see both these works and Die Gnosis (1924; 4th edition, 1955) by Hans Leisegang. Gilles Quispel’s Gnosis als Weltreligion (1951) is a concise introduction by one of the foremost authorities.3

Under the influence of a deepened understanding of Gnosticism and its connections with Judaism and Christianity, a new interpretation of European intellectual history and of modern politics has been developing. For example, Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Apokalypse der deutschen Seele (1937), the first volume of which was reissued in 1947 under the title Prometheus, helps to clarify German history since the eighteenth century. The parallel work on French history is L’Homme révolté (1951) by Albert Camus.

And the interpretation of intellectual history that forms the basis for my present essay has moreover been strongly influenced by Henri de Lubac’s Drame de l’humanisme athée (2d edition, 1945) [The Drama of Atheist Humanism, trans. Edith M. Riley (1950)]. Jacob Taubes’s Abendländische Eschatologie (1947) is important for reestablishing the historical continuity of Gnosticism from antiquity through the Middle Ages down to the political movements of modern times.

Indispensable to any attempt to understand political sectarianism from the eleventh century to the sixteenth century is the extensive presentation of material in Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957; 2d edition, 1961). Finally, my own studies on modern political Gnosticism may be found in The New Science of Politics (1952).

The Anxieties That Lead to Gnosticism

The collapse of the ancient empires of the East,4 the loss of independence for Israel and the Hellenic and Phoenician city-states, the population shifts, the deportations and enslavements, and the interpenetration of cultures reduce men who exercise no control over the proceedings of history to an extreme state of forlornness in the turmoil of the world, of intellectual disorientation, of material and spiritual insecurity. The loss of meaning that results from the breakdown of institutions, civilizations, and ethnic cohesion evokes attempts to regain an understanding of the meaning of human existence in the given conditions of the world.

Among these efforts, which vary widely in depth of insight and substantive truth, are to be found: the Stoic reinterpretation of man (to whom the polis had become meaningless) as the polites (citizen) of the cosmos; the Polybian vision of a pragmatic ecumene destined to be created by Rome; the mystery religions; the Heliopolitan slave cults; the Hebrew apocalyptic; Christianity; and Manichaeism. And in this sequence, as one of the most grandiose of the new formulations of the meaning of existence, belongs Gnosticism.

Of the profusion of gnostic experiences and symbolic expressions, one feature may be singled out as the central element in this varied and extensive creation of meaning: the experience of the world as an alien place into which man has strayed and from which he must find his way back home to the other world of his origin.

“Who has cast me into the suffering of this world?” asks the “Great Life” of the gnostic texts, which is also the “first, alien Life from the worlds of light.” It is an alien in this world and this world is alien to it. “This world was not made according to the desire of the Life.” “Not by the will of the Great Life art thou come hither.” Therefore the question, “Who conveyed me into the evil darkness?” and the entreaty, “Deliver us from the darkness of this world into which we are flung.”

The world is no longer the well-ordered, the cosmos, in which Hellenic man felt at home; nor is it the Judaeo-Christian world that God created and found good. Gnostic man no longer wishes to perceive in admiration the intrinsic order of the cosmos.

For him the world has become a prison from which he wants to escape: “The wretched soul has strayed into a labyrinth of torment and wanders around without a way out . . . . It seeks to escape from the bitter chaos, but knows not how to get out.” Therefore the confused, plaintive question asked of the Great Life, “Why didst thou create this world, why didst thou order the tribes here from thy midst?”

Ancient Gnosticism and its Contemporary Forms

From this attitude springs the programmatic formula of Gnosticism, which Clement of Alexandria recorded: Gnosis is “the knowledge of who we were and what we became, of where we were and whereinto we have been flung, of whereto we are hastening and wherefrom we are redeemed, of what birth is and what rebirth.” The great speculative mythopoems of Gnosticism revolve around the questions of origin, the condition of having-been-flung, escape from the world, and the means of deliverance.

In the quoted texts the reader will have recognized Hegel’s alienated spirit and Heidegger’s flungness (Geworfenheit) of human existence. This similarity in symbolic expression results from a homogeneity in experience of the world. And the homogeneity goes beyond the experience of the world to the image of man and salvation with which both the modern and the ancient Gnostics respond to the condition of “flungness” in the alien world. If man is to be delivered from the world, the possibility of deliverance must first be established in the order of being.

In the ontology of ancient Gnosticism this is accomplished through faith in the “alien,” “hidden” God who comes to man’s aid, sends him his messengers, and shows him the way out of the prison of the evil God of this world (be he Zeus or Yahweh or one of the other ancient father-gods). In modern Gnosticism it is accomplished through the assumption of an absolute spirit that in the dialectical unfolding of consciousness proceeds from alienation to consciousness of itself; or through the assumption of a dialectical-material process of nature that in its course leads from the alienation resulting from private property and belief in God to the freedom of a fully human existence; or through the assumption of a will of nature that transforms man into superman.

Within the ontic possibility, however, gnostic man must carry on the work of salvation himself. Now, through his psyche (“soul”) he belongs to the order, the nomos, of the world; what impels him toward deliverance is the pneuma (“spirit”). The labor of salvation,therefore, entails the dissolution of the worldly constitution of the psyche and at the same time the gathering and freeing of the powers of the pneuma. However the phases of salvation are represented in the different sects and systems–and they vary from magic practices to mystic ecstasies, from libertinism through indifferentism to the world to the strictest asceticism–the aim always is destruction of the old world and passage to the new.

Knowledge as the Instrument of Salvation

The instrument of salvation is Gnosis itself–knowledge. Since according to the gnostic ontology entanglement with the world is brought about by agnoia, ignorance,the soul will be able to disentangle itself through knowledge of its true life and its condition of alienness in this world. As the knowledge of falling captive to the world, Gnosis is at the same time the means of escaping it.

Thus, Irenaeus recounts this meaning that Gnosis had for the Valentinians:

“Perfect salvation consists in the cognition, as such, of the Ineffable Greatness. For since sin and affliction resulted from ignorance (agnoia), this whole system originating in ignorance is dissolved through knowledge (gnosis) . Hence, gnosis is the salvation of the inner man . . . .Gnosis redeems the inner, pneumatic man; he finds his satisfaction in the knowledge of the Whole. And this is the true salvation.”

This will have to suffice by way of clarification, save for one word of caution. Self-salvation through knowledge has its own magic, and this magic is not harmless. The structure of the order of being will not change because one finds it defective and runs away from it.

The attempt at world destruction will not destroy the world, but will only increase the disorder in society. The Gnostic’s flight from a truly dreadful, confusing, and oppressive state of the world is understandable. But the order of the ancient world was renewed by that movement that strove through loving action to revive the practice of the “serious play” (to use Plato’s expression)–that is, by Christianity.

Voegelin Reconsiders his Gnostic Analysis

maria andary: Do you group the Gnostics with the ideologists?

eric voegelin: No; there you get into the “isms” again. I paid per­haps undue attention to gnosticism in the first book I published in English, The New Science of Politics.

That was the time when the historic explosion of knowledge started with which we are living today. I happened to run into the problem of gnosticism in my reading of von Balthasar. But in the meantime we have found that the apocalyptic tradition is of equal importance, and the Neoplatonic tradition, and hermeticism, and magic, and so on.

If you read Frances Yates’s book on Giordano Bruno,5 you will find that the gnostic mysticism of Ficino is a constant ever since the end of the fifteenth century, going on to the ideologies of the nineteenth century. So there are five or six such items–not only gnosticism–with which we have to deal. If all new types have to be brought in, the simple doctrine is no longer very useful.

And something new may be found out tomorrow. Thorndike, an excellent historian at Columbia University, published, between the 1920s and 1950s, eight fat volumes on the history of magic.6 I have not yet been able to digest these materials and use them as they should be used for the understanding of the genesis of modern magic thought. Most of what we usually call “ideologies” are magic operations in the same sense that Malinowski uses magic of the Trobriand Islanders.

eric o’connor: In what sense are you using magic there?

eric voegelin: Magic means the attempt to realize a desired end that cannot be realized if one takes into account the structure of reality. You cannot by magic operations jump out the window and fly up–even if you so desire. If you try such things–for instance, producing a change in the nature of man by the dictatorship of the proletariat—you are engaged in a magical operation.

 

Notes

1. For the distinction of the two components (which was introduced by Troeltsch) and the ensuing theological debate, see Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prometheus (Heidelberg, 1947), 12 ff

2. Our reflections on the uncertainty of faith must be understood as a psychology of experience. For the theology of the definition of faith in Heb. 11:1, which is presupposed in our analysis, see Thomas Aquinas Summa theologica ii-ii.Q.4, Art. I.)

3. Since the original presentation of this essay, there has appeared a valuable comprehensive introduction to the whole subject by Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (Boston, 1958), 2d ed. (Boston, 1963).

4. [The Persian Empire] is followed by the conquests of Alexander, the Diadochian empires, the expansion of the Roman Empire, and the creation of the Parthian and Sassanian empires.

5. Frances Yates. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964,1991.

6. Lynn Thorndike. History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 Vols, New York: Columbia University Press,various dates and editions.

 

This excerpt is from Modernity Without Restraint: The Political Religions, The New Science of Politics, Politics, Science, and Gnosticism (Collected Works of Eric Voegelin 5) (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1999)

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Eric Voegelin (1901-85) was a German-born American Political Philosopher. He was born in Cologne and educated in Political Science at the University of Vienna, at which he became Associate Professor of Political Science. In 1938 he and his wife fled from the Nazi forces which had entered Vienna and emigrated to the United States, where they became citizens in 1944. He spent most of his academic career at the University of Notre Dame, Louisiana State University, the University of Munich and the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. More information about him can be found under the Eric Voegelin tab on this website.

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