Science, Politics and Gnosticism

Two Essays

Eric Voegelin

• Publisher: Gateway Editions
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781596983038
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Science, Politics and Gnosticism comprises two essays by Eric Voegelin (1901-85), arguably one of the most provocative and influential political philosophers of the last century. In these essays, Voegelin contends that certain modern movements, including positivism, Hegelianism, Marxism, and the "God is dead" school, are variants of the gnostic tradition he identified in his classic work The New Science of Politics. Voegelin attempts to resolve the intellectual confusion that has resulted from the dominance of gnostic thought by clarifying the distinction between political gnosticism and the philosophy of politics.

PART ONE

Science, Politics and Gnosticism

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I

INTRODUCTION

THE READER MAY well 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: (1) Böhme’s theosophy, (2) Schelling’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 und gründlichen Ketzergeschichte (Second 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 l’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. The movements deriving from Marx and Bakunin, the early activities of Lenin, Sorel’s myth of violence, the intellectual movement of neo-positivism, 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 confused state of science and the consequent impossibility of adequately understanding political phenomena lasted until well into the period of World War II. And for the general public this unfortunate situation still continues—otherwise, this preface would not be necessary. However, science has been undergoing a transformation, the beginnings of which go back some two generations. The recent catastrophes, which were centuries in the making, have not retarded, but accelerated it. And considering the extent of this change and the results already achieved, one can say that we are living in one of the great epochs of Western science. To be sure, the corruption persists; but if it does not lead to further catastrophes that put an end to the free existence of Western society, future historians may well date the spiritual and intellectual regeneration of the West from this flowering of science.

This is not the place, however, to go into the background and ramifications of this fascinating development. I can give only the briefest suggestion of recent scholarly work on ancient gnosticism and on the political expression of modern gnosticism.

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; Fourth Edition, 1955) by Hans Leisegang. Gilles Quispel’s Gnosis als Weltreligion (1951) is a concise introduction by one of the foremost authorities.⁶

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 (Second Edition, 1945) [The Drama of Atheist Humanism, trans. Edith M. Riley (1950)]. Jakob Taubes’ 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 to the sixteenth century is the extensive presentation of material in Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957; Second Edition, 1961). Finally, my own studies on modern political gnosticism may be found in The New Science of Politics (1952).

And now a word on gnosticism itself—its origins and some of its essential characteristics.

For the cosmological civilizations of Mesopotamia, Syria, and Egypt, as well as for the peoples of the Mediterranean, the seventh century before Christ inaugurates the age of ecumenical empires. 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. The collapse of the ancient empires of the East, 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, 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.”⁷ 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?” 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 which in the dialectical unfolding of consciousness proceeds from alienation to consciousness of itself; or through the assumption of a dialectical-material process of nature which 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 which 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. 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 the 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 which strove through loving action to revive the practice of the “serious play” (to use Plato’s expression) —that is, by Christianity.

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II

SCIENCE, POLITICS AND GNOSTICISM

I

POLITICAL SCIENCE, politike episteme, was founded by Plato and Aristotle.

At stake in the spiritual confusion of the time was whether there could be fashioned an image of the right order of the soul and society—a paradigm, a model, an ideal—that could function for the citizens of the polis as had paraenetic myth for the Homeric heroes. To be sure, fourth-century Athens afforded plenty of opinions about the right manner of living and the right order of society. But was it possible to show that one of the multitude of sceptic, hedonist, utilitarian, power oriented, and partisan doxai was the true one? Or, if none of them could stand up to critical examination, could a new image of order be formed that would not also bear the marks of a nonbinding, subjective opinion (doxa)? The science of political philosophy resulted from the efforts to find an answer to this question.

In its essentials the classical foundation of political science is still valid today...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Foreword
• PART ONE - Science, Politics and Gnosticism
• PART TWO - Ersatz Religion
• Copyright Page