Editorial Note
This is the first part of a multipart series. It gives the 4 letters exchanged by Eric Voegelin and Marshall McLuhan in 1953. Other parts of the series (some of which appear with this first part) include:
- The background to the letters as regards McLuhan’s connections with the astonishing group scholars at LSU immediately following WW2
- McLuhan’s 1947 Proposal to Robert Hutchins, the Chancellor of the University of Chicago, for a community of scholars focused on the ‘inter-relations’ of their fields (and, by extension, of individuals in society, of societies in nations, and of nations among themselves)
- The reactions of John Nef in Chicago and Harold Innis in Toronto to McLuhan’s ideas on the foundations of education
- A reading of the letters as regards the workings of what has come to be known as the ‘deep state’
- A reading of the letters as regards McLuhan’s ideas on ‘gnosis’
- A reading of the letters as leading to McLuhan’s proposals later in the 1950s for another sort of community of scholars, now not to be founded on their physical presence and conversational exchange, but on a shared focus available to scholars and students everywhere: “the medium is the message”
The 4 Letters[i]
McLuhan to Voegelin, June 10, 1953
Dear Voegelin,
Ever since we met via Cleanth Brooks in Baton Rouge [in 1945] I have been looking forward to your work on political thought. When I visited Cleanth recently he read me some passages from The New Science and I got a copy on returning here. Naturally I find it of great interest. For the past two years my own studies in esthetics and criticism have opened up a great deal of the role of Manichean doctrine in the arts. I had previously had no inkling of the Manichean postulates of the major secret societies, on the one hand, nor of the role these societies played in the manipulation of the arts and of philosophy and criticism on the other. Long and detached familiarity with the work of P. Wyndham Lewis should have made these matters clear to me years ago, since he has been engaged in a life-long campaign to expound these relationships. But all is clear now. Except what to do!
The best account of modern gnostic doctrine I think is H.N. Frye’s Fearful Symmetry, a book on Blake. Frye I know. He is a Jungian. Most of Bergson would seem to be naively gnostic too. You have seen Victor White’s book on gnosticism called God and the Unconscious (Harvest Press, London, 1952)? White is a Dominican. Now I assume that your own program of activity includes illumination of these secret relationships which have so long masked the power politics of the modern world. Since the arts in a very special way are the focus of all the esoteric speculation of the cults, I am baffled to know what attitude to take up toward them. For me, of course, art is no channel of grace or gnosis, but an activity of making – analogous to the act of cognition itself. As such, art is a humanist, not a religious, affair. But I should much welcome any reading suggestions you could give me that would clear up some of the historical relationships between the arts and the cults, as for example you do apropos of Hooker in suggesting that he was quite aware that puritanism was the re-emergence of the pagan cults.
E Gilson’s recent Métamorphoses de la Cité de Dieu is curious in omitting Joachim of Flora [sic] and Thos More, and Marx. In fact, Gilson ducks the gnostic tradition. Would you say that the gnostic is EASTERN, neo-platonic and that the opposite cult is WESTERN, platonic? This split occurs everywhere in the techniques of the arts. It seems to divide Gilson and Maritain.
In rewriting my doctoral dissertation I am going to include a history of Senecanism as the opponent of Ciceronianism. Can you suggest any available research done on Senecanism beside Zanta?[ii] Seneca is the way of gnosis. Cicero of expression. Senecans stress connatural, irrational knowing via the passions. Use of the passions [or not] as a way of knowing seems to divide the cults of every age.
I look forward immensely to the appearance of your complete study.
Cordial good wishes….
Voegelin to McLuhan, June 29, 1953
Dear McLuhan,
Your letter of June 10th was forwarded to me, here in Los Angeles, where I am giving few lectures for two weeks. Hence, the delay in answering.
This was really a pleasant surprise to her from you — though I have a dark remembrance that my negligence in correspondence is the cause of the longer interruption.[iii]
You are quite right. Gnosis is an all-pervasive phenomenon in the modern age, and perhaps in the arts even more than in politics — though I do not feel competent to talk about the arts. I only have marked out such men as Blake, Swedenborg, Kant (the Swedenborg criticism), and the Swedenborgian works of Balzac for my closer attention. Since I know too little about the Gnostic problem in the arts, I am afraid, I cannot supply you with new literature on the subject; but, on the contrary, I am grateful for some of the hints which you have distributed in your letter.
Still, on a few points I might say something. The question of East and West in Gnosis seems rather unclear at the moment. The best work on the subject-matter is Simone Petrement’s which I used in the “New Science”. The difficulty seems to arise from the fact that, on the one hand, the dualism of Gnostic speculation is a legitimate philosophical problem, pervading Plato deeply; and that, on the other hand, the main geographical area for developing this sort of speculation has been the Near East. The exact origins are difficult to ascertain, because the authorities are contradicting each other on the dates for the literary documents of the centuries immediately preceding the Christian era. Hence, for my own work, I am using as a working hypothesis a “hunch” that has its background my general knowledge of political history and the human reactions to a state of political crisis. The “hunch” is the following:
The Gnostic conception of the world as a prison, constructed by evil forces, in which the sparks of the spirit are held captive until liberated by the activity of the knowing, originates in the establishment of empires that relegate the individual to complete privacy and ineffectuality. It is a situation similar to the contemporary [one] of the individual caught in the net of interdependence in an industrialized society. The natural reaction is the esoteric doctrine of secret societies, without public status, creating a realm of meaning outside the unshakable public sphere. In this reaction, I believe, I can discern three stages:
- the simple complaint about victimization through politics that is enacted over the heads of the subjects, as one can find it even in the third millenium B.C. in Egypt, during the Time of Troubles after the breakdown of the Old Kingdom;
- the aggressive response, operating with the conception of two “worlds”, a new world to take the place of the evil old one, as it is to be found in the early Zoroastrian apocalypse, the subsequent Isrealitic apocalyptic literature and the Gnostic literature proper;
- the Hellenistic and Christian reactions which tend to understand the evil as immanent in the world, but do not expect salvation from the creation of “new world” in history, but from a conduct within life that prepares for salvation in transmundande perfection after death.
Into this sequence of increasingly “rational” responses to the situation of political crisis would have to be fitted the various intermediate forms; especially the series of intermediate forms in the work of Plato from the early angry rebellion in the Gorgias to the late withdrawal from the world in the Laws.
Assuming that this historical picture of the problem is on the whole true, the theoretical point of more immediate interest that emerges is the following. Gnosis is a type of salvational experience which has broken with the solid cosmological conception of world-order as we find it in early Egypt or China, but has not quite broken through to an understanding of transcendent divinity, as we find in the development from Xenophanes to St. Paul; it is a soteriological speculation in cosmological symbols . As such it can appear whenever the surrounding “world” has become senseless to the men who live in it, but the responsive spirituality is not vital enough to put up with the evil of the world and to find order in new communities outside the prevalent political order, as in the early Churches.
You would probably get more information on specific points from one of the great authorities on Gnosis, Hans Jonas, who is not far from you in Carleton College, Ontario.
With regard to Bergson I cannot quite agree with you. In his later work (the Deux Sources) B. has developed considerably beyond the innocence of this youth. And his last conversations, as reported by Sertillanges in his Avec Bergson, reveal a Christian attitude that was acceptable even to a Thomist like Sertillanges.
Please let me know more about your present work. You can imagine that it interests me profoundly; I know entirely too little about literature. The only references I myself can give you to the relation between art and the cults, are references to Greek tragedy. I have profited greatly from the essays by Bruno Snell, especially on Aeschylus, in the book that I quoted in the “New Science”.
With all good wishes for a pleasant summer, I am,
Very sincerely yours…
McLuhan to Voegelin, July 1953
Dear Voegelin,
Your letter was most gratifying. Over and over again I have written to persons who seem to be in good faith in adopting an attitude of objective analysis towards the sectarian activities of the cults in art and literature. Not once before your letter have I ever received a reply that displayed a frank or dispassionate mind. Very few people, I gather, are innocent of any hook-up with these cults and secret societies. They explain that nobody can get anywhere unless he is initiated. And this is strictly true.
I wish that 15 years ago I had known that it was impossible to get a hearing for one’s ideas unless one was an initiate. Such being the state of Catholic culture on this continent, it has never occurred to me to seek a hearing among my fellow Catholics except in the classroom. But in the past year or so I have changed my ideas on this matter. However, there is no hurry. And I don’t suggest that had I known sooner that I would have become initiated.
It was only last summer, while doing some work on S.T. Coleridge that I discovered the complete rapport between the arts and the secret societies. I was flabbergasted. Coleridge has directed me to Porphyry, apropos of The Ancient Mariner. At the same time T.S. Eliot’s essay on Byron had hinted at a hook-up between Byron’s The Giaour and Coleridge. Those two bits of evidence served to ignite a great quantity of material which had lain about in my mind for 20 years. There were no more secrets. All was plain as day.
The entire technique of the “secret” societies is to conduct their controversies as if the terms of reference were historical. Historical scholarship and criticism (in the arts) is as much their field of present battle as the news, poem, play, novel, painting or musical composition.
I hardly know where to begin to suggest to you how the arts are involved in the theology of modern paganism. They are split East and West in a technical sense, of course. The West is Platonic-Eleusinian. Pound’s entire prose work is an attack on Eleusinian mystery. Dante’s Inferno XIV presents Eleusinian cult as “Enemies of God, Nature and art” under figure of The Old Man of Crete. Eleusinian cults permit Sodomy and usury and regard the arts not as a means of knowledge or vision but of strengthening the will. Matthew Arnold is ultimate version of this position in the arts. West is non-cognitive in art theory. But it claims to be rationalistic as opposed to [the] irrational, emotional, primitivism of Romantic, Eastern art form. Everything represented by Romantic-gnostic use of emotions as “stained glass windows of the soul” — i.e. single poem as single emotion, single emotion as means of connatural union with specific aspect of the Real. West prefers exoteric art form. Art is for common people. A form of deceit like the system of future rewards and punishment taught as basis of society in ancient world.
(You might very well find useful matter in Bishop William Warburton’s Divine Legation of Moses. This 18th century work was a full-dress attack on the revived pagan cults of that period, and Warburton is mainly concerned with the Lesser and Greater Mysteries as the ground-plan of the subsequent Doctrine of the Double Truth. He has much incidental light to shed on the relation of Mysteries and the Arts.)
Eastern art (not in geographical sense merely) is relatively esoteric, cryptic, discontinuous. It sees not catharsis (see Matthew Arnold’s preface to Poems 1853 and G.R. Levy’s Gate of Horn section on catharsis in Aristotle) but illumination. Gnosis. The mind is to be flooded with a particular quality in experience (see Eliot’s essay on Hamlet). Johnson The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry (1950 or 1951) gives a good account of the reason-emotion dichotomies in Victorian poetry.
But both East and West regard the arts as the highest level of practical religious experience. Art is the sole means of grace in our fallen state (see pp. 440 ff. of Warburton vol I ed. 1846) e.g. Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Milton’s Paradise Lost are popular histories of Manichean providence. Existence as fallen state can only be retraced to our previous paradisal condition by means of Ariadne Thread of art experience. The fanatic cult of art, East and West, is religious in inspiration and significance.
Cassirer’s Essay on Man distinguishes these East-West matters in terms of “epic” and “dramatic” modes of experience and art. Drama is discontinuous, dynamic. Epic is narrative and continuous[iv]. Little epic of Alexandria represented direct presentation of East rituals. Same as Wasteland.
Wilhelm Meister is a ritual presentation under guise of educational novel. As such it has had 100s of imitations. See Howe — W. Meister and His English Kinsmen.
W.B. Yeats says only art form possible for a Catholic since the Renaissance is satire. See Donne’s 1st and 2nd Anniversaries as satires of solar cycle. Year daimon etc. See Alexander Pope’s Dunciad as direct use of Masonic ritual as satire of the cults. And P.W. Lewis The Apes of God as satire of the cults in modern Bloomsbury. Entire esthetic of symbolists and of Joyce, Eliot, Pound is “East”, Theosophical. Jane Harrison’s Themis excellent on daimon culture. But such books I had always read as merely archaeological accounts. Now I know that these matters are accepted as living Theological truths. Modern anthropology is a battleground of the cults. In psychology Freud is West. Jung is East. In USA Republican theory and jargon is West. Democratic jargon is East. Pardon my haste and starkness of characterization. I’m really very tentative in my mind about these things though I sound dogmatic. In poetry I really know the ground in detail. But a person feels like an awful sucker to have spent 20 years of study on an art which turns out to be somebody else’s ritual. To have studied it as an art is to have been taken in by the vulgar or exoteric facade.
For the gnostic there are no autonomies in art, life, politics or anything else. A Christian cultivates these things as particular disciplines having a limited importance. There are it seems, no such limits in the gnostic world. Everything is everything else.
When I said I wish I had penetrated these matters 15 or 25 years ago I meant that there are strategies which need to be adopted in these affairs. And I’m floundering at present.
A recent book on Melville’s Quarrel With God by Thompson reveals the ritual diabolism followed quite mechanically in Melville’s novels. Yes, it is the banal mechanism of the cult rituals which stares at one from literature and the arts. As for example in last section of the Waste Land compare with the rite of exorcism as managed in crystallomancy according to E.M. Butler’s Ritual Magic (Cambridge Univ. Press 1949 p 245).
I would say apropos of Bergson’s Deux Sources that (a) it is largely popularized stuff compared with the same doctrines in Rimbaud, Mallarmé or Valéry. Bergson looks amateurish in their company or that of Joyce. Eliot’s prose repeats most of him. But, most of his ideas belong in an esthetic context from which he has not too skillfully extracted them.
Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf are the most significant exponents of gnostic linguistic theory in modern anthropology. They have some remarkable insights.
Need I say that a great deal that is involved in gnostic speculation appears to me as quite valid? That it should flourish side by side with diabolism, the secret sectarian organization of intellectual life, and the falsification of the entire linguistic currency — that is the deplorable thing. Secrecy and power seem to be intertwined. Also the very conditions of gnosis postulate secrecy, an Elite, and a vulgar [mass] who are to be swamped with lies. That the cynical contempt for the bulk of mankind should co-exist and even be expressed by fanatical assertions of universal benevolence, does not appear to them as disturbing. Thompson on Melville is best on this point.
Most sincerely yours…
Voegelin To McLuhan[v], July 17th, 1953
Dear McLuhan:
Thanks for your long letter with its most interesting, even if tentative, classifications of the main cults in the arts. You will understand that I cannot say much about the validity of your types, because I know too little, but from what I know, your characterizations sound sensible. Considering the complexity of such matters, with which I am familiar from the field of politics, I should doubt, though, that one could catch the whole crop in the dichotomy of East and West. Distinctions will probably become necessary, when you go deeper into the problems.
What interests me most is the fact that you have hit on the problem at all. And I respond to your excitement and bewilderment of the moment with feelings that are mixed of compassion and grim amusement. I would not complain too much about the time lost. We all lose time, for we have to disengage ourselves from the creeds of a dying world (I have lost more years than I care to remember with Neo-Kantianism and Phaenomenology, before I dropped the nonsense): and I am not so sure that the time is really lost, for if you have found the right way yourself you are much surer of it than you would be if somebody had placed you on it right from the beginning. Nor would I be too much impressed by the problem of “getting” anywhere, and especially of “getting a hearing”. You probably will soon find that you have more company in our time than you would have suspected (though not among your colleagues in the profession). Besides, the world in which you would get a “hearing” is a dying world — and who wants to be dead? Moreover, worlds are always dying — life begins with the Exodus from the civilizational realm of the dead, and the beginning begins with the discovery of the world as the Desert — if I may use well-known symbols. Your situation at the moment may be somewhat awkward; but I am afraid I cannot pity you; you will come out allright.
Nevertheless, you are right with your remark about “strategies”.
The over-all strategy in this situation is a rather simple one: to know so much more, in a plain technical sense, than the others that they will be afraid to molest you. In detail, you will probably soon discover what I have discovered, that it is a lot of fun to bait the ungodly when they get impertinent. Fortunately, they are men just like us; and they have a conscience, though a bad one; and if one knows the touchy points of their conscience, one can make them hopping mad. You will find the touchy points soon.
There is a point that interests me. You speak quite frequently of “secret” cults or societies. I wonder what is secret about them. In politics at least, the various ideological groups are quite well discernible; their members can easily be identified by the contents of their publications, once the criteria are known; in brief: everybody knows who they are, except the State Department. Should it be so very different in the arts?
I enclose the reprint of a little controversy I had recently, that will illustrate what I meant by having “fun” with the ideologues. The good lady who was the subject of my critique was so disturbed by it, that she wrote a whole article clarifying her point after a fashion in a more recent issue of the same periodical.[vi]
With all good wishes,
Sincerely yours…
Addendum
Voegelin to Robert Heilman, July 17th, 1953[vii]
In recent weeks I had two letters from McLuhan. Rather touching — because apparently he too has found out about the all-pervasive Gnosis in literature, and runs into the difficulty that the vast majority of his colleagues does not care in the least about his discovery. He seems to be rather isolated; and has not yet adjusted himself to the consequences of being more intelligent than other people. He wails about the twenty years of his life that he has wasted in the pursuit of wrong ideas. I must write him a comforting letter that he is not the only one to whom it happens; and that a life is not wasted if one sees the light in the end.
