Gnosticism from a Non-Voegelinian Perspective, Part IBy Thomas F. BertonneauCreated 2010-05-27 23:44

The trend of politics in the Western nations since Eric Voegelin’s death in 1986 has made his work increasingly relevant to any philosophically rigorous conservatism or traditionalism. In particular, Voegelin’s argument that liberalism and its Leftwing metastases constitute an evangelical religious movement, mimicking and distorting Christianity, has gained currency. The pronounced irrational character of the “Global Warming” cult and the obvious messianism of Barack Hussein Obama’s presidency have together sharpened the perception that contemporary Leftwing politics shares with history’s specimen-type doctrinally intransigent sects an absolute intolerance for dissent, even for discussion, along with a conviction of perfect certainty in all things. The sudden experience of Leftwing triumph attests that, indeed, utopian radicalism draws its strength from a deep well of resentment that puts it in conflict, not merely with those whom it regards as heterodox, but also with the inalterable structure of reality. Voegelin argued – in The New Science of Politics (1952), Science Politics & Gnosticism (1965), and throughout Order and History (1957-65) – that the rebellion against reality was a recurrent affliction of civilized life; he pointed to the acute anticosmic sects of Late Antiquity as offering a paradigm of the phenomenon and expanded the scholarly designation of them as “Gnosticism” to cover insurgent ideological doctrines of the modern period, particularly Marxism and National Socialism.

Thus Lawrence Auster, creator and supervisor of the View from the Right website, explicitly links his understanding of the Left and his idea of his own conservatism to Voegelin’s argument that modernity is essentially Gnostic. A somewhat less focused acknowledgment that the Left is cultic in its behavior has surfaced now and then at The American Thinker and the name Voegelin has occurred in that venue. Again, nationally syndicated columnist and radio-host Dennis Prager, while not citing Voegelin, has nevertheless in a recent essay declared explicitly that Left-Liberalism is a religion and can be understand in no other way. In my own contributions to The Brussels Journal and in various print articles (for example, in a recent Modern Age essay on V. S. Naipaul) I have frequently invoked Voegelin, often quoting his pithy sentences, as a rich and clairvoyant explicator of our straitened times. Are we certain, however, that Voegelin’s disapprobation of Gnosticism is valid? And might Voegelin’s insistent parallelisms of the ancient and the modern be a result of an idiosyncratic view?

The topical literature is fortunately large. It reaches back to the Late Antique primary texts of Gnosticism – such as the Valentinian Gospel of Truth (ca. 150) – and the accompanying critical and anti-heretical discourses of the philosophers and the Church Fathers; and it embraces a rich scholarly investigation beginning in the early Nineteenth Century, continuing to the present. What do the ancient sources tell us about Gnosticism? And what does the scholarship of Voegelin’s Nineteenth-Century precursors, his contemporaries, and his successors tell us about it?

I. Let us begin with two writers from the period of Roman Imperial decline, a phase of Mediterranean history that one might justly describe as a factory – working on double-shift – of apocalyptic ideas and eclectic religious innovations. Both Plotinus (204-270) and Augustine (354-430), the former an adherent of the Platonic School of philosophy and the latter a Platonizing Christian who had belonged for ten years to the most organized of the Gnostic sects, commented extensively on the Gnostics. Plotinus’ treatise, Against the Gnostics, bears appositely on its object in that Gnostic writers like Valentinus (100-160) ransacked elements of the original Platonism in building their syncretic systems, while at the same time attacking basic tenets of the original, positive Platonism; it is likely that Plotinus had the Valentinians particularly in mind in making his discussion. The zenith of Valentinian Gnosticism, considered as an active movement, indeed coincides with Plotinus’ activity as a teacher in Rome. Augustine, a driven religious seeker, sojourned among the Manichaeans as an auditor during the decade from 374 to 384; but he later rejected Manichaeism on the basis of Platonic argument and eventually, Platonic logic being his way station, he converted to Roman Catholicism.

The texts of Plotinus and Augustine tell us that Gnosticism remained peculiarly and tenaciously implicated in the fabric of Late Antique society, against whose existing institutions and convictions the devotees of Gnosis (“Secret Knowledge”) nevertheless pitted themselves in an often fanatically gainsaying manner; and this was the case whatever forms their organization took or whatever the specific tenets of their sect. There is something noticeably parasitic about Gnosticism, which plagiarizes from what it condemns. Plotinus and Augustine also interest us as sources for Gnosticism because Plotinus, for his part, harbored intense suspicion about Christianity, in respect of which, like his contemporary Celsus, he reserved no friendliness or comity; therefore when the Plotinian judgment of Gnosticism parallels the Augustinian, after the Saint’s conversion, the similarity indicates an objective, a true, or let us say, at least, a plausibleassessment of the thing at issue.

Remarkably, Plotinus associates Gnosticism with economic resentment, attributing to the sectarians the disposition that, “Wealth and poverty, and all the inequalities of that order are made ground of complaint.” Plotinus notes by way of sane counterargument that, “This is to ignore that the Sage demands no equality in such matters,” because “he cannot think that to own many things is to be richer or that the powerful have the better of the simple.” (Mackenna’s translation, as throughout) The Gnostics, in Plotinus’ description, ascribe to certain kinds of difference an evil character, interpreting those differences as signs that the maker of this world must have created it through an intention evil in itself, hence also supremely reprehensible and a fit object of rebellion. In condemning Creation, the Gnostics likewise condemn the Creator. Plotinus therefore refers to the Gnostics as “those… that censure the constitution of the Cosmos” and who “do not understand what they are doing or where this audacity leads them.”

Logically, seeing that they belong to the universe, if the Gnostics judged the universe wicked, the judgment would implicate them. But Gnostic thinking evades logic. The Gnostic sees in himself a radical self-legitimizing exception, a rare instance of positive difference tantamount to election.

Plotinus, like his revered Plato, understood the natural order as hierarchical. The cosmos for Plotinus is thus intelligible because it corresponds to an intelligent design, implying in turn an intelligent – hence also a morally benevolent – designer. Plotinus emphatically equates the intelligent, that is to say the articulate and self-consistent, with the good, and he insists on the unity of existence. In the Plotinian formula: “The Good, the Principle, is simplex, and, correspondingly, primal”; and “it is an integral Unity.” The cosmos being one and whole, it cannot be in a state of war with itself, or in a state of deficiency; and likewise the divine principle being one and whole, it cannot be in a state of war with itself, or in a state of deficiency. Nor can the cosmos, because it derives from the divine principle, be in a state of war with the divine principle. Once again in the formula: “When we speak of the One and when we speak of the Good we must recognize an identical nature.”

In making these assertions, Plotinus remains in consistency with the fundamental law of logic and ontology: Namely that a thing cannot simultaneously both be and not be; and that a thing cannot simultaneously both be what it is and not be what it is.

Plotinus judges Gnostic discourse to be willfully pleonastic in its procedures – it multiplies principles unnecessarily so as to circumvent identity – and thus also to be an insuperable logical scandal. Yet Plotinus objects to Gnosticism just as much on esthetic grounds as on purely logical ones, the Gnostic systems appearing to him as grossly inelegant precisely because of their constant recourse to “superfluous distinctions.” These latter, the “superfluous distinctions,” belong to Gnostic censure of the cosmos in that they express the sectarian’s “grudge of any share with one’s fellows,” even where it concerns normative agreement about objective matters. It follows that the Gnostic is relentless in his “pursuit of advantage” over those who fault his premises or point out flaws in his reasoning. In this last observation Plotinus ascribes to Gnosticism the antinomian character remarked by all commentary subsequent to his own.

The illuminatus, in Plotinus’ words, “Carps at Providence and the Lord of Providence.” So too the illuminatus “scorns every law known to us,” while of “immemorial virtue and all restraint” he “makes… a laughing stock, lest any loveliness be seen on earth.” The doctrine of the illuminatus, making use of sarcasm and denunciation, “cuts at the root of all orderly living.” As Plotinus says of the illuminati, “They know nothing good here,” for to acknowledge goodness would be to disavow total moral superiority.

Plotinus notices that the Gnostics avoid giving definitions or explanations. Thus while the Gnostics claim moral superiority to other people, they disdain any discussion of virtue: “We are not told [by the illuminati] what virtue is or under what different kinds it appears; there is no word of all the numerous and noble reflections upon it that have come down to us from the ancients.” If anyone were to inquire directly of the Gnostics about these matters, the Gnostics would reply with their cryptic, “Look to God.” The Gnostic exclusion of the literary archive is particularly striking. In addition to being antinomian and anticosmic in their disposition, the Gnostics, as Plotinus describes them, are also anti-historical. The phrase, “Look to God,” irritates Plotinus because God, in his understanding, is rational and provides definitions and explanations, at least by indirection through his works. Plato’s dialogues are famous for Socrates’ insistence on defining terms precisely.

II. When Gnostics say, “Look to God,” they are invoking the knowledge-without-experience, the special knowledge, that the word Gnosis denotes. Such proprietary knowledge they specifically refuse to share with outsiders because possession of it – or the claim to possess it, for that is all that the outsider has – is what differentiates the illuminati from the vulgate. Thus by virtue (so to speak) of their special knowledge, the Gnostics consider themselves elect. They are an extreme in-group phenomenon. Under this conviction, they “proceed to assert that Providence cares for them alone.” When the Hidden God abolishes the corrupt world, only those whose being has been transfigured by secret knowledge will remain, and they, too, shall be as gods. Compared to those in whom the secret knowledge does not reside, and who are therefore not transfigured, the illuminati are already gods. They may thus mock and revile their ontological inferiors.

We have remarked that Plotinus discerns in the Gnostic disposition several types of resentment: Envy of standing and wealth in the social order, with a concomitant and hypocritical advantage seeking; jealously against the structure of existence, and disdain for the past and for its inheritance in the present. Correlated with “despising the world and all that is in it,” as Plotinus remarks, is the Gnostic orientation to a post-apocalyptic future in whose realization all attitudes contrary to the Gnostic attitude shall be humiliated and banished while the Gnostic antipathy to tradition will be justified in a triumph. Plotinus writes of the Gnostics that, “All they care for is something else [than the structure of existence in the present] to which they will at some future time apply themselves.”

It might surprise modern readers that Plotinus, a mystic of the Neo-Platonic school, should defend the goodness of the material world, but this surprise would stem from an unfortunate modern misconception about Plato and Platonism. For Plato, as for Plotinus, existence has distinguishable aspects – the sensible and the intelligible – but these aspects belong to a unitary whole. Platonism is not dualism, nor is it world-rejection, despite what Friedrich Nietzsche claims in The Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ.

Addressing the Gnostic loathing for physical reality, Plotinus poses rhetorically, “Who that truly perceives the harmony of the Intellectual Realm [the Ideas] could fail, if he has any bent towards music, to answer to the harmony in sensible sounds?” Likewise, Plotinus asks, “What geometrician or arithmetician could fail to take pleasure in the symmetries, correspondences, and principles of order observed in visible things?” Plotinus claims that the Gnostics harbor hatred even for the cosmetic beauty of comely individuals: “Now if the sight of beauty excellently reproduced upon a face hurries the mind to that other Sphere [the Intellectual Realm], surely no one seeing the loveliness lavish in the world of sense – this vast orderliness, the Form which the stars even in their remoteness display – no one could be so dull-witted, so immovable, as not to be carried by all this recollection, and gripped by reverent awe in the thought of all this, so great, sprung from that greatness.” Reviling beauty, which Plotinus ascribes to the Gnostics, would be consistent with their attitude of “censure.”

One remarks the elevation of the commonplace implicit in Plotinus’ words – even the ordinary participates in the cosmic order and therefore justifies the contemplation of it. A certain intellectual democracy is also implicit in the same words, for according to the gist of them non-philosophers, when they respond to cosmetic beauty or the sublimity of nature, respond indeed to the same supernal order as that studied in a more sophisticated way by the philosopher. The ground of philosophy consists in the average person’s openness to reality, his vulnerability to beauty: “The very experience out of which Love arises.” In spurning that experience, and that openness, the illuminati exhibit, as Plotinus puts it, “the perverse pride of despising what was once admired.”

According to Plotinus, Gnostics argue that, “They see no difference between beautiful and ugly forms of body.” It should strike no one, therefore, as unexpected that Gnostics also, in Plotinus’ words, “make no distinction between the ugly and the beautiful in conduct.” This remark communicates with the other, earlier remark in Plotinus’ treatise on Gnostic evasiveness about virtue. To deny beauty in one aspect of existence, the corporeal, is, in principle, to deny it in all other aspects of existence, as for instance in the moral aspect. To equivocate about quality and degree is, moreover, to attack the connection between hierarchy and order, while at the same time establishing a new, crude hierarchy. In this reactionary conception of hierarchy, one difference alone is paramount: The election of the minority elites, guaranteed by their special knowledge, over against the damnation of the majority-preterit. Plotinus need not be referring to the bearing of individuals, but merely to the doctrine in and of itself, when he invokes the word “arrogant” as a label appropriate to Gnosticism.

Although Plotinus never directly remarks the aggressiveness of the illuminati, the existence of his treatise implies it. Plotinus ran a type of school or college, in whose precincts he lectured on the Platonic philosophy. In the Third Century, Platonism functioned in many ways like a religion or as a coherent ethical system, as did also Stoicism and (increasingly) Christianity. In Against the Gnostics, Plotinus is apparently responding formally to disputatious Gnostic infiltration of his lectures, with disruptive objections and derailing pseudo-inquiries during the question-and-answer.

We can understand such aggression as belonging to the inherent intolerance of Gnostic believers for any belief other than their own, an intolerance made worse by the lack of originality in Gnostic doctrine, which appropriates elements of established doctrine and crudely reverses them. By obliterating the model, the sectarian may better advertise his derivative as original.

Plotinus employs an elaborate metaphor to sum up the hypocrisy, as he sees it, of Gnostic anticosmic complaint. It is as though, he writes, “two people inhabit one stately house,” the house, of course, being the cosmos itself. One of these inhabitants, grumbling about the house, “declaims against its plan and against its Architect, but none the less retains his residence in it.” In doing so, “the malcontent imagines himself to be wiser” than his co-dweller; and he thinks of his inability “to bear with necessity” as a higher wisdom. Plotinus’ word, “necessity,” means the structure of existence, as it is given. The grumbler execrates “the soulless stone and timber” out of which the house is constructed. As for the co-dweller, he “makes no complaint,” but rather he “asserts the competency of the Architect.” Plotinus attributes to the disgruntled inhabitant a type of dissimulated envy, “a secret admiration for the beauty of those same ‘stones,’” whose supposedsoullessness and degraded materiality he so volubly and inveterately deplores.

III. To move from Plotinus to Augustine entails the elision of complex chapters in the history of Mediterranean civilization. Repeated crises of civil war and cataclysms of the economy led to Diocletian’s drastic reform of the Empire. Diocletian (reigned 284-305) divided the Empire into a Latin western half and a Greek eastern half – which included Syria, Egypt, and Anatolia – each of which was ruled by its own “Augustus” or emperor. Diocletian greatly expanded the administrative bureaucracy and attempted a universal price-freeze to combat inflation of the currency. When new civil wars destroyed the viability of Diocletian’s arrangement, governance of the whole empire shifted to the East, a process accelerated when Constantine the Great (like Diocletian of Balkan origin) made himself sole emperor in 324. During this same politically turbulent period the movements of the German tribes began in earnest, requiring constant military operations along the Rhine and Danube and in Gaul.

During the lifetime of Plotinus, the public religiosity of the Roman upper classes West and East took the form of syncretism, as typified by the eclectic piety of the emperor Alexander Severus(reigned 222-235). Alexander maintained a private chapel in which he displayed – quoting from John Ferguson’s Religions of the Roman Empire (1970) – “a series of statues which included the defied emperors, revered spirits like Apollonius of Tyana, Christ, Abraham, Orpheus and all the others of that character.” According to Ferguson, Alexander “wanted to build a temple to Christ and enthrone him among the other gods.”

If syncretism, which Alexander’s chapel so paradigmatically bodied forth, were a seeming mélange, then the same syncretism in its generous plurality, its willingness to see divinity in all its many and differing guises,

would also point to increasingly thematic monotheism, the other great trait of Late Antique religiosity. It is not so much a paradox as it appears to be. Even before the Christianizing reign of Constantine, who became on his deathbed the first (putatively) Christian Emperor, the Imperial Cult showed signs of constituting itself a type of pagan monotheism, with the one god being emblematized as a solar divinity, Sol Invictus. Personal religion meanwhile began to focus on the ideas of spiritual redemption and establishing a direct, I-Thou relation to the deity. The proliferating “Mystery Cults” and the singular salvation-cult of Christianity give main expression to this religious development during the period.

Augustine of Hippo, otherwise Saint Augustine, born in the North African city of Thagaste, came to maturity in an age of religious innovation amidst the dissolution of many old forms of spirituality and against the background of political and social turmoil in the West. Augustine would die, a victim of plague, during the Vandal siege of Hippo, North Africa, where he was Bishop, in 430. Augustine appears in his self-account, the Confessions, as a wastrel who gradually grew aware of his own degraded status and began to seek the redemption of his soul. He ignored the influence of his Catholic mother, the saintly Monica, and at first, in his early twenties, attached himself as a lay follower to the then dominant form of Gnostic dualism, the synthetic religion known as Manichaeism, after its Iranian founder Mani (216-276).

Manichaeism appealed to Augustine – as Valentinian Gnosis had appealed to intellectuals of the previous century – in part because of its doctrinal complexity. Baroque pseudo-veracity, offering itself as a system to be mastered, exercises attraction of the type on person who wants, as Augustine says of himself, “to be thought elegant and urbane.” Augustine remarks that his reading of Cicero’s Hortensius had awakened in him an interest in philosophical systems. Philosophy, Augustine reminds his readers, means the love of wisdom. Nevertheless many intellectually unformed people, in hoping to be taken for philosophers, mistake doctrine for wisdom. There are gurus (so to speak) who “seduce through philosophy… using it to color and adorn their own errors.” Such were the teachings of Mani to the young and ambitious student of rhetoric and law in Carthage. The Bible, known to Augustine through the influence of Monica, appeared to him at the time, in contrast to philosophical discourse, to be deficient in style, a mere “sort of aid to the growth of little ones.”

Yet oddly the names of Jesus Christ and the Paraclete figured prominently in the treatises of the Manichaeans, who promised to reveal the secret meanings of such figures to initiates. The Manichaeans claimed uniquely to possess “Truth, Truth,” as Augustine writes, “and were forever speaking the word to me.” Even more than did Valentinian Gnosis, Manichaeism borrowed profligately from already-existing systems – from Judaism and Christianity, to be sure, but also from Platonism, Zoroastrianism, Mithraism, Buddhism, the various Mystery religions, and the old Babylonian theology. Mani, like Mohammed a few centuries later, claimed status as final prophet whose visions put all previous revelations in their proper, purely subordinate place. “Glowing fantasies,” “the fantasies of the Manichaeans,” and “tedious fables”: Augustine uses these terms in The Confessions to classify the contents of the “numerous and vast books” that constituted Manichaean scripture.

Plotinus discerned in the Valentinian Gnostics and their writings the traits of an anticosmic attitude as well as of an obsessive antinomianism; he also grasped that Gnosticism was unoriginal, borrowing from established schools while simultaneously denouncing the sources from which it borrowed. Augustine makes similar observations, using a rhetorical structure resembling Plotinus’ parable of the house with two dwellers. Augustine notes that the Manichaeans constantly addressed the Old Testament, not in admiration, but for the sake of condemning the Patriarchs. If a Patriarch had many wives, then the Manichaeans (who abhor procreation) would revile him; if another Patriarch were at first willing to offer human sacrifice, then the Manichaeans would revile him, even though he relented, as God commanded, and afterwards foreswore the practice. For the Manichaeans any goodness save their own is intolerable. Only the revelation of the final prophet can constitute a precedent.

Augustine writes: “It is as if a man in an armory, not knowing what piece goes on what part of the body, should put a grieve on his head and a helmet on his shin and complain because they did not fit. Or again, as if, in a house, he sees a servant handle something that the butler is not permitted to touch, or when something is done behind the stable that would be prohibited in a dining room, and then a person should be indignant that in one house and one family the same things are not allowed to every member of the household.”

IV. Augustine’s plausible representations of the Manichaeans in The Confessions indicate of those sectarians the same hatred of inherited custom and established social hierarchy that Plotinus attributed to his Gnostics, the Valentinians. The devotees of Valentinus regarded the material world as intrinsically and inalterably corrupt. They fervently desired that world’s abolition, after which the pure of heart would be reunited in a kingdom of supernal light known as the Pleroma, or “Fullness.” Augustine would like to see the world improved, but he knows that human behavior is stubborn and that it takes historical ages for a new moral order to take hold. Before he heard differently from God, for example, Abraham would have understood the offering of a child in sacrifice as ordinary religious practice, which it was in the Bronze Age almost everywhere. The Manichaeans, by contrast, exhibit hysteric impatience both with secular recalcitrance and with the crooked timber of humanity. There is one dispensation, theirs, and not holding to it can be charged against an individual even though he had the misfortune to live before the dispensation could be published. The Manichaeans agitated for apocalypse now, the fundamental transformation of a way of life, to coin a phrase.

In addition to describing Manichaean resentment against moral models from the pre-Manichaean past and Manichaean irritation over the refusal of existence to transform itself, immediatement,according to the sectarian program, Augustine also describes the emphatically hierarchical structure of the Manichaean church, with its laity, its lower elite, and its higher elite. Hierarchy is evil when it is someone else’s hierarchy, but good when it is one’s own. To the Manichaean laity, to the auditores among whom Augustine belonged, indeed fell the obligation to support the lower elite and the higher elite of perfecti or “saints.” The practice required the auditores, for example, to feed the lower and higher elites. Now belonging to the Manichaean anticosmic attitude were the tenets that this world is unsalvageable in its wickedness and that all human activity (not only procreation) is evil. Thus Manichaeism condemned the simple act of harvesting wheat or gathering fruit as intolerable violence. Yet the perfecti must eat. How then should they acquire their meals?

As he embraced further the Manichaean view of existence, making their eccentric custom his own, Augustine, as he writes, “was led on to such follies as to believe that a fig tree wept when it was plucked and that the sap of the mother tree was tears.” Augustine continues: “Notwithstanding this, if a fig was plucked, not by his own but by another man’s wickedness, some Manichaean saint might eat it, digest it in his stomach, and breath it out again in the form of angels. Indeed, in his prayers, he would assuredly groan and sigh forth particles of God, although these particles of the most high and true God would have remained bound in that fig unless they had been set free by the teeth and belly of some elect saint.”

Augustine famously argued a point that would become Catholic dogma, namely that evil is not a substance. Augustine formulated this principle in consequence of his sojourn as a Manichaeanauditor, for according to Manichaeism matter as such is inherently and inalterably evil. This thesis, that evil is not a substance, stems from the Platonic (also the Biblical) conviction that existence, the creation of a divine Creator, is good. Since matter belongs to creation, matter is likewise good; and the body, material in its basis, is also good. For the Manichaeans, in common with other Gnostics, the material world is the false creation of an inferior usurper-god who sabotaged the perfect immaterial creation of the actual unseen God. When the sabotage occurred, some “particles” of light from the disrupted immaterial world became imprisoned in the false, material world.

Thus during his Manichaean phase Augustine thought of the God-man relation in this way: “I still supposed that thou, O Lord God, the Truth, wert a bright and vast body and that I was a particle of that body.” It was surprisingly through the study physics and astronomy that Augustine came to reject the Manichaean theory of matter: Science explained the character of the physical world better than theosophy did; science also proclaimed a beautiful order in the material realm, which one sensible of beauty could not but admire. On this basis, by a long chain of intermediate syllogisms, Augustine could at last reconcile himself with existence and repudiate the anticosmic attitude: As “whatsoever is, is good,” it follows that “evil, then, the origin of which I had been seeking, has no substance at all; for if it were a substance, it would be good.”

Augustine’s skepticism concerning Manichaean doctrine began to develop halfway through his decade as an auditor. The break with the Manichaeans came when a renowned Manichaeanperfect named Faustus made a visit to Carthage. Other auditores promised Augustine that Faustus would be able to put to rest the many

questions that he had stored up over the years with respect to doctrine. We recall that Plotinus criticized the Gnostics for their evasiveness in response to specific questions about their creed, refusing to give explanations or definitions. What Augustine says about Faustus gains interest in connection with what Plotinus remarks. At first, Augustine took some pleasure in the eloquence of the speaker: “Yet it was a source of annoyance to me that, in his lecture room, I was not allowed to introduce and raise any of those questions that troubled me, in a familiar exchange of discussion with him.”

Augustine exposes the fraudulence of the lecturer in a charitable way, stating that personally he liked Faustus who “had a heart.” Faustus was not, after all, “ignorant of his own ignorance.” Faustus “modestly did not dare to undertake the task,” of answering Augustine’s questions, “for he was aware that he had no knowledge of these things and was not ashamed to confess it.” Augustine writes, “The zeal with which I had plunged into the Manichaean system was checked.”

The accounts of Gnosticism – in its Valentinian and Manichaean varieties – as given more than a century apart by Plotinus and Augustine show numerous similarities and are generally convergent. In both accounts, the Gnostics appear as radically alienated from existence, a mood or tone that expresses itself in anticosmic dogmas and revilement of norms. Both accounts represent the Gnostics as constituting an aggressive cultic in-group that defines itself through relentless denunciation of received custom and traditional belief. Both accounts mention the reluctance of the convicted to allow questions, even while the same illuminati demand that adherents of settled custom and traditional belief justify their positions. Both representations also call attention to the attitude of haughty superiority of the illuminati with respect to the out-group. In a subsequent essay I will examine the extent to which the Gnostic documents, themselves, confirm these characterizations.

Gnosticism from a Non-Voegelinian Perspective, Part IIBy Thomas F. BertonneauCreated 2010-06-05 21:32

Part I of this series posed the linked questions whether Eric Voegelin’s characterization of Gnosticism in his various books on the topic was valid – and whether, as Voegelin asserted, modernity, in the form of the liberal and totalitarian ideologies, could be understood as the resurgence of ancient Gnosticism. The purpose of Part I was not to furnish definitive answers to those questions, but rather to explore two critiques of Gnostic doctrine from Late Antiquity. These were the essay Against the Gnostics by the Third-Century Neo-Platonic philosopher Plotinus and the discussion in Saint Augustine’s Confessions (Books III, IV, and V) of the Manichaean religion, a late variant of Gnosticism. The exposition concluded that the two accounts of Gnosticism although written more than a century apart (Augustine being subsequent to Plotinus) were convergent and largely similar. The prose did not state vigorously that Plotinus and Augustine, in their critiques, anticipate Voegelin, but readers might justly have inferred that as a tacit thesis. Readers might also have registered, as they read the various critical descriptions of Gnostic belief, many parallelisms between ancient cultic doctrine and modern political ideology – particularly the prohibition of questions. I refrained from drawing such parallelisms myself partly so as not to burden the exposition with them but also because I wrote in full confidence that informed readers would find their own way to those same parallelisms.

The present essay addresses Gnosticism by examining it in its own terms. It is certainly provocative that two ancient writers, separated by a tumultuous century-and-a-half should have arrived at essentially the same assessment of Gnosticism. Nevertheless, this similitude in the judgment might be because both authors are prejudiced in the same way; thus their agreement could erroneous or bigoted. After all, as the father of modern Gnosticism-scholarship, Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860), averred, the Gnostics were formidable thinkers, masters of confabulation, and connoisseurs of a wide variety of religions, including but by no means confined to Judaism and Christianity. Elements of Gnosticism likely became incorporated in Christian theology (think of Revelations) even as Patristic writers systematically anathematized what they regarded as heresy.

What follows concerns itself with details of four Gnostic documents: The Tri-Partite Tractate, usually attributed to Heracleon, a follower of Valentinus; The Origin of the World, of anonymous authorship; The Gospel of Truth, by Valentinus; and Zostrianos, also of anonymous authorship – all of which come from the so-called Nag Hammadi documents and all of which belong to the mid-Second Century or slightly later. Zostrianos likely influenced Mani (216-276) when he was writing his own scripture in the Third Century.

I. It would not be surprising if the manifestos of an anticosmic religious movement exhibited an obsession with cosmology, as the Gnostic texts emphatically do, for such is the nature of mimetic antipathy. This fact is significant in that an observable trend in mythic narrative – beginning say with Enuma Elish, the Babylonian “Creation,” or Hesiod’s Theogony and ending say with Genesis – is to elide or entirely eliminate the many prehuman phases of creation, while concentrating on anthropogenesis and its sequels almost exclusively. One might hazard the thesis, even, that when myth relinquishes its engagement with the details of physical creation and begins to focus on anthropology – hence also on ethics and other things specifically human – it ceases to be myth and rises to the level of real religion in the higher, reflective sense. Otherwise it remains myth. Thus Enuma Elish devotes nine tenths of its eight hundred or so lines to recounting how determinate nature acquired its form through the archetypal combat of Marduk, a male principle of the second divine generation, with Tiamat, a female principle of the first divine generation; and how, on slaying Tiamat, Marduk used her dismembered body to establish the structure of familiar existence. Man, called Adapa or Adama, does not appear in the narrative until the seventh tablet, but then only as a wretched temple-servant of Marduk and the younger gods.

In Genesis, by contrast, the business of physical creation demands only a few lines. The author obviously considers the details of physical creation relatively unimportant; the basic gestures are all that he finds necessary to record. Ninety-nine per cent of Genesis has to do with Adam and Eve and their offspring, with us, the crooked timber of humanity. Gnostic discourse, in reacting to the cosmological minimalism of Jewish and Christian creation-narrative, represents therefore a distinct throwback, not a speculative or philosophical advance, as modern apologists of Late-Antique religious reaction maintain. Consider The Tri-Partite Tractate and The Origin of the World, two texts from the Nag Hammadi cache that are related to Valentinian Gnosticism.

A novice reader coming to either The Tri-Partite Tractate or The Origin of the World for the first time would likely react to the text with bewilderment and confusion, states of mind that would be justified. The Tri-Partite Tractate largely employs allegorical abstractions; The Origin of the World invokes a plethora of proper names, Greek and Semitic, arranged by genealogy and by spiritual rank, many of them exotic sounding, as though plundered from a variety of separate sources with the deliberate aim of baffling eclecticism.

The Tri-Partite Tractate devotes its first part to the figure called the Father. The Tractate also defines the Father’s relation to two other figures, the Son and the Church. Because these terms have a provenance in the New Testament, the novice reader might suspect that he is addressing a Patristic text. That certain other references seem to be to Platonic cosmology, as articulated in the dialogue Timaeus, would not necessarily squelch the suspicion since Platonism and Christianity began their reconciliation early in writers like Clement of Alexandria (150-215) and Justin Martyr (103-165). Careful interpretation of the Tractate’s language will reveal, however, that these allusions are consistently antithetic and hostile. In this wise, the Tractate insists on the solipsism, the total self-sufficiency, of the Father, whom the author eulogizes in the vocabulary of what is known as negative theology. The Father is “unbegotten, nameless, unnamable, inconceivable, invisible, incomprehensible.” Elsewhere: “He alone is the good”; and “he alone is the one who knows himself, as he is.”

The Father emanated his realm, the Pleroma, which is identical with him, and he brought forth the Son and the Aeons, to be with him in the Pleroma. But, as the Tractate says, “nor is there a primordial form which he uses… nor is there any material set out for him from which he creates what he creates.”

The Tractate’s Father explicitly never deigns to create the material world, which the text deprecates, when once it is accidentally formed, as a corrupt mockery of the Pleroma removed from it by many degrees. This disinclination to create a physical world differentiates the Tractate’s Father from the God of Genesis and the Father, also so-called, of the Gospel. Nor should one confuse the Tractate’s Son with the Son of Man of the

Gospel. The former never leaves the presence of the Father, but exists to distinguish the uniquely “unbegotten” from the singularly “begotten,” which, in resembling the Father, remains unlike anything else that is “begotten,” and so furnishes the benchmark for increasing stages of distance from absolute primordial self-sufficiency. The references to “a primordial form” and “material… from which he creates” intentionally distinguish the Tractate’s Father from Plato’s Demiurge, or World-Creator, as described in Timaeus. There is a World-Creator in the Tractate: He is the last-emanated Aeon, archly named “Logos,” who in envy of the Father has the “arrogant thought” to emanate his own Pleroma. The material realm stems from the wicked Aeon’s rebellion, which triggers a catastrophe in the Pleroma.

The Origin of the World offers a wild roster of dramatis personae: Adonaios, Astaphaios, Chaos, Eloai, Pistis (Faith), Sabaoth, Sophia (Wisdom), Yaldabaoth or Yao, and finally, after exhausting the alphabet, Zoë, with others in between too numerous to list. Here again a Gnostic author represents the creation of the world as a catastrophe and evaluates matter, in which human beings body forth, as toxic. The author begins by contradicting an accepted truth: “Since everyone – the gods of the world and men – says that nothing has existed prior to Chaos, I shall demonstrate that they all erred.” The demonstration is a parody of logic: If Chaos were darkness, as everyone says, then it would be a shadow; a shadow is the shadow of something; therefore Chaos is ontologically after something else – something really real of which Chaos is merely a privation. Finally, anything subsequent to Chaos, this world for example, would be the privation of a privation, hence doubly counterfeit. What normative religion represents under the label of Creation, The Origin of the World represents, by rhetorical reversal, as de-creation: “A likeness called ‘Sophia’ flowed out of Pistis. She wished that a work should come into being which is like the light which first existed.”

As does the “arrogant thought” of the last-emanated Aeon in The Tri-Partite Tractate, Sophia’s attempt to match the glory of “the light which first existed” disrupts the unity of the pre-creational realm. The result, which The Origin of the World likens to “afterbirth” and “miscarriage,” is this world. A being, Yaldabaoth, emerges in this toxic mess under the delusion that it represents the sum and total of existence and that he is its creator and master. The Origin of the World then parodies Genesis, ascribing the separation of the waters and the fashioning of the land, and finally the bringing forth of humanity, to the deluded Yaldabaoth, who is the Hebrew Yaweh by a variant of the Biblical name. Yaldabaoth has a son, Sabaoth; the son comes to have acquaintance of Pistis, the male being who is prior to Sophia. Illuminated by knowledge from Pistis, Sabaoth, who is a Gnostic type of Jesus, rebels against his father: “He hated his father, the darkness, and his mother, the abyss.” Hatred is the proper attitude to existence.

Both The Tri-Partite Tractate and The Origin of the World agree that humanity belongs to the degree of being (or perhaps of non-being) at the farthest (most despicable) remove from the self-sufficient Father; but they both also agree that some few human beings differ from the rest by being attuned to the Pleroma and therefore by having a sense of their alienation in the world of matter. The Tractate refers to the elect as “the spiritual race” or pneumatics and to all others as “the material race” or hylics. As long as the conditions of matter obtain, “the material race” persecutes and oppresses “the spiritual race.” When the botched creation is redeemed through its destruction, the hylics will perish and the pneumatics will be assimilated to their real home, the Pleroma.

II. In addition to cultivating relentlessly the mythic elaboration with which Genesis and Timaeus largely dispense, both The Tri-Partite Tractate and The Origin of the World exhibit theanticosmic and antinomian traits discerned in Gnostic discourse by Plotinus and Augustine, whose critiques the previous article to this one summarized. The anticosmic disposition is stronger inThe Origin than in the Tractate, especially in the obstetric metaphors of “afterbirth” and “miscarriage.” A misogynist attitude belongs to the general Gnostic outlook in that, insofar as matter is evil and insofar as procreation sustains or prolongs the realm of matter, then women, through giving birth, are more blatantly complicit in the prevailing misery than men. In the words of The Origin: “The man followed the earth, the woman followed the man, and marriage followed the woman, and reproduction followed marriage, and death followed reproduction.” Readers should also pay attention to the attitude towards the Old Testament revealed in The Origin. The Biblical God who creates from benevolence becomes in the Gnostic pseudo-Genesis a tyrant-oppressor against whom the enlightened son must rebel.1

In the Tractate and in The Origin, keeping track of cosmological devolution requires a scorecard. The Father emanates Aeons and “Totalities,” as does the Son; and the Aeons emanate additional subdivisions (“Totalities”) within the Pleroma. When the Pleroma suffers its disruption, many layers of toxic matter spill downward from the offense, each containing its own separate “powers,” “archons,” and demonic entities. What attracted people to tales of this sort? A combined sense of alienation from the world and superiority to it is an inescapable answer; but reverting to a single word, one might simply say, resentment. One might remark that elaborate anticosmic narrative and the know-it-all posture play a role in modern popular culture, as in Star Wars, on the one hand, or in the old “Firesign Theater” comedy album Everything You Know Is Wrong on the other. The relation between Sabaoth and Yaldabaoth in The Origin oddly anticipates the relation of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader in Star Wars.2

The entirety of Leftwing antinomian rhetoric meanwhile resumes itself in the phrase, “everything you know is wrong,” a variant of the bumper-sticker slogan, “Question Authority,” related also to the supercilious verbal ploy, “they just don’t get it.” The author of The Origin begins by iterating words to the effect that, “everything you know is wrong,” and that the benighted many “just don’t get it.”

Some Gnostic prose expresses itself with fewer multiplications of agency and rank and with more lexical subtlety than the Tractate and The Origin. On its surface, and in comparison with those two documents, Valentinus’ Gospel of Truth seems altogether sophisticated and benevolent. Like The Tri-Partite Tractate, The Gospel of Truth ransacks items of New Testament theology and borrows, to put it so, from the Alexandrian or Christian-Platonic vocabulary. As in the Tractate, we read of the Father, of Jesus, of the Logos, and of the wickedness of those who, acting in error, persecute the bearers of the veracious doctrine and prevent the restoration of the Pleroma.3 The document has the ring of a normative evangelical appeal about it: “The gospel of truth is a joy for those who have received from the Father of truth the gift of knowing him, through the power of the Word that came forth from the Pleroma – the one who is in the thought and the mind of the Father, that is, the one who is addressed as the Savior.”

The Tri-Partite Tractate posits God as a totally self-sufficient and self-regarding entity: So too does The Gospel of Truth although concessions to New Testament theology make that element of this particular Gnostic text difficult to see at first. There is in The Gospel of Truth a “Word,” elsewhere a “Shepherd,” and elsewhere a “Christ,” that “became a body,” or who anyway “came by means of fleshly appearance.” The qualification resides in the terminal noun, “appearance,” which contradicts the New Testament’s insistence on incarnation.4 The Gospel of Truth’s “Son” takes on no flesh; its Father intends no physical creation, but rather “the spaces” that arise from “his emanations” have a purely immaterial and luminous character, “light with no shadow.” Such untainted luminosity is ontologically incompatible with matter or “darkness” or “ignorance” or “error.” The Gospel of Truth represents the material world as a “fall” from the Pleroma. Neither does The Gospel of Truth’s Father act to redeem physical nature, once it falls, unless one identifies redemption with abolition. Valentinus writes, “The deficiency of matter has not arisen through the limitlessness of the Father.”

According to The Gospel of Truth, this world arose despite the self-sufficiency of the Father through a catastrophe, the details of which remain obscure. Thus, “Ignorance of the Father brought about anguish and terror” until “anguish grew solid like a fog so that no one was able to see.” The story tells how “error,” exploiting the solidification of “anguish,” “fashioned its own matter foolishly” and “set about making a creature.” A further detail of the exposition, one that differentiates this version of the catastrophe from the version in the Tractate, is that these events happen somehow in the Father. Despite the minor difference, the outline remains the same as in the Tractate. The Gospel of Truth’s “error” is the equivalent of the rebellious Aeon in the Tractate or of Sophia in The Origin of the World. The “creature” of the narrative although grammatically singular seems to designate humanity, or perhaps the Adam from which humanity stems. Thus humanity as a whole is not the creature of the Father, as in Genesis, but the creature of the wicked agent who works in ignorance or envy of the Father.

According to The Gospel of Truth, however, all human beings are not equal. Some – the text implies a minority, who would therefore have the status of election – possess the capability of receiving the “Truth,” that is, the knowledge concerning the privative character of material existence, its nullity, and the justice or non-enormity of its abolition. “If one has knowledge,” as The Gospel of Truth puts it, “he is from above” and

“having knowledge, he does the will of the one who called him.” By contrast, “he who is ignorant until the end is a creature of oblivion” who will vanish with the material realm when the reception of knowledge by the elect cancels the “error” of the “fall.” As the text says: “The deficiency came into being because the Father was not known,” so that “when the Father is known, from that moment on the deficiency will no longer exist.”

III. The Gospel of Truth proclaims that when the light of knowledge abolishes the darkness of matter, or “form,” perfection will have been restored throughout the Pleroma “in the fusion of Unity.” At that moment the foreordained recipient of knowledge “will attain himself… he will purify himself into Unity, consuming matter within himself like fire, and darkness by light, death by life.” The theme of Unity, the antithesis of “form,” looms large in The Gospel of Truth, as it does again in The Tri-Partite Tractate and The Origin of the World. Unity is related in these texts to unanimity; unity also stands apart, in all three documents, from such traits, identifiable with material creation, as (leaving off the quotation marks) envy, strife, darkness, disturbance, instability, blood, what you have vomited, worms, sickness (The Gospel of Truth); likenesses, models, phantasms, disobedience, rebellion, ambition, lust, offspring, fighters, warriors, troublemakers, apostates, lovers of power (The Tri-Partite Tractate); envy, wrath, impiety, jealousy, weeping, sighing, mourning, lamenting, bitterness, quarrelsomeness, transgression, and molded bodies (The Origin of the World). The last of those, the molded bodies, are identical with what The Gospel of Truth, using its vocabulary of abstraction, calls “form,” or what in philosophy goes by the nameprincipium individuationis.

Unity and unanimity belong exclusively to the undisrupted Pleroma. The Gospel of Truth says, “The perfection of all is in the Father” and “we must see to it above all that the house will be holy and silent for the Unity.” The second of the two phrases means that dissent and complaint needlessly prolong the disruption of the Pleroma. Putative knowledge that fails to correspond with thesecret knowledge that the Father sends forth in his “word” or his “living book” amounts only to obstreperous false knowledge. Accepting the “word” means “to cease laboring in search of” truth. In these assertions, the Gnostic doctrine of The Gospel of Truth presents itself as a closed system. Normative religiosity and normative philosophy by contrast define authentic living as a continuous quest. The Jesus of the Gospel rarely makes a direct assertion. He speaks by preference in parables, which require the listener to reach his own conclusion according to his best lights. Socrates taught, not by prohibiting questions or claiming the matter settled, but rather by open-ended conversation. A noteworthy feature in normative philosophers like Plutarch and Seneca (the former an adherent of the Platonic school and the latter of the Stoic school) is the frequent concession to the rival school. Plutarch or Seneca will write that we prefer the Platonic answer but let us not forget what the Stoics say, or vice versa.

Normative religiosity and normative philosophy also both begin by accepting as an axiom that existence exists. This axiom provides the condition for the entire remainder of knowledge, the pursuit of which no searcher can exhaust. Gnosticism begins by denying that existence exists; Gnosticism indeed asserts the non-existence of a merely apparent existence. Gnosticism declares that what the ordinary person takes for his consciousness of reality is but false consciousness. Gnosticism would silence the false consciousness, which offends its of claiming priority by antithesis.

These remarks take us closer to another shared connotation of unity and unanimity in their Gnostic usages and to a rendezvous with the point made earlier in the argument that Gnostic discourse represents, not an advance to some new level of speculative sophistication, but rather a throwback to religious primitivism. Consider the imagery of unanimity in The Tri-Partite Tractate and The Origin of the World. In the Tractate we read that the Aeons, who proceed from the Father, acknowledged and honored the Father “in a song of glorification,” in which devotion “they were drawn into a mingling and a combination and a unity with one another.” They constituted “the pleromatic congregation.” The crime of the rebellious Aeon (“Logos”) consisted in his trespassing “the boundary set to speech in the Pleroma” when he attempted “to grasp the incomprehensibility.” The “boundary on speech” functions then as a boundary on inquiry. Crossing the boundary generates “sickness,” afflicts the trespasser with a “female nature,” and separates him from the Pleroma in the afterbirth-world of his sub-creation. The last and lowest degree of this sub-creation, the hylic or material race, is doomed to destruction when truth abolishes error.

In The Origin, Yaldabaoth behaves in an even more blatantly criminal manner than does the rebellious Aeon in the Tractate. The Origin deploys terms more specific and more recognizably mythic and symbolic than those in the Tractate. Readers learn of Yaldabaoth’s arrogance, tyranny, lechery, and destructiveness directly and in proper detail. Yaldabaoth’s fate in the apocalyptic conclusion of The Origin issues from the judgment of a female Aeon who assumes the role to “drive out the gods of Chaos whom she had created together with the First Father.” The avenger “will cast them down in the depths” where “they will be wiped out by their own injustice.” The label “First Father” refers here, not to the primal Father, but to the false creator, to Yaldabaoth himself. At that moment of “justice” the Pleroma will be healed and the knowers of secret knowledge will ascend into light.

In both the Tractate and The Origin we have paradigmatic scapegoat-myths, of the type identified by René Girard as quintessentially mythic and as representative of the ritual violence of sacrificially organized societies. Enuma Elish offers as good an example any. Tiamat, the Primal Mother, behaves monstrously, tyrannizing her children and preventing any semblance of order. Marduk consults the elder gods, Tiamat’s first born, and they tell him that they are powerless against the monster, but that he is the hero who will subdue her. Marduk fights and kills Tiamat; he uses the dismembered parts of the slain body to create the regions of the world – the land, the sea, and the sky, and all other features. The other gods hail Marduk as their king. Order, as Girard would observe, emerges in the myth from the slaying, which the story depicts as productive of peace and proper rank (preferable to chaos) in the form of unanimity minus one, the excluded, polarizing party being the victim. In Hesiod’s Theogony, Zeus’ establishment of order requires the violent suppression of the Titans, after which Zeus becomes king in heaven. Tiamat is a monster; so are the Titans in their behavior. Oedipus, whose expulsion restores order in Thebes, is “guilty” (as the myth would have it) of stereotypical polluting crimes charged against victims.5

IV. I draw my quotations of Gnostic theology and cosmology from The Nag Hammadi Library, a compendium edited by James M. Robinson and first published in 1978. Robinson’s Introduction includes passages that now strike one’s sensibility as dated to the point of embarrassment. These same passages nevertheless tell us something about the allure of the Gnostic texts, with their cosmological science-fiction-like plots and exotic personae. Robinson notes that the individual texts of the Nag Hammadi cache although differing from one another markedly in detail nevertheless belonged to the ecclesiastical library of a unified community. The reader-possessors of the texts must have found in the variety of them a single coherent point of view. This point of view consisted, as Robinson writes, of “estrangement from the mass of humanity” and “an affinity to an ideal order that completely transcends life as we know it.” Robinson adds this: “As such, the focus of [the Nag Hammadi library] has much in common with primitive Christianity, with eastern religions, and with holy men of all times, as well as with the more secular equivalents of today, such as the counter-culture movements coming from the 1960’s.” Like their Gnostic precursors, participants in the “counter-culture movements” find unity through “sharing an in-group’s knowledge both of the disaster-course of the culture and of an ideal, radical alternative not commonly known.”

Robinson characterizes Gnosticism as benign, pacifistic, withdrawn, unworldly, and immaculately non-involved in politics, society, or the market. Yet the “counter-culture movements coming from the 1960’s,” which Robinson likens to the Late Antique sects, were anything but benign, pacifistic, and non-involved; they proved to be extremely aggressive, their constituents inserting themselves into institutions with the fixed plan of imposing their peculiar view of existence on the society as a whole, not excluding the use of coercion to do so. The benign withdrawal invoked by Robinson describes Les soixante-huitards quite as inaccurately as it does the Second Century “knowers” to whom Robinson advocatively compares them. A good word for capturing the essence of Gnosis is the Latin noun superbia, with its moral connotation of haughtiness, pride, and spiritual self-inflation. A fine example of Gnosis as superbia comes in the text calledZostrianos. This tract purports to record in the first person the elaborate initiation or “baptism” by which one of the pneumatics recognizes his superior status and acquires the secret knowledgeappropriate to his “race.” Zostrianos becomes “a messenger of the perfect male race.”6

As in The Tri-Partite Tractate, The Origin of the World, and The Gospel of Truth, in Zostrianos we find extreme disapprobation of existence and intense execration of humanity. During his illumination, while Zostrianos rises through the levels of being above terrestrial non-being, he marks every new altitude with

refrain-like phrases such as “I ascended to the Transmigration which really exists” and “I ascended to the Repentance which really exists” and “I stood there having seen a light of the Truth, which really exists from its self-begotten root.” The Zostrianos-writer equates creation, so-called, with non-existence or delusion – but always with a toxic non-existence or a wicked delusion. The Zostrianos-author glorifies everything uncreated or “self-begotten,” the highest degree of which is “the Self-Begotten God.” The trope of a cosmic ascent goes back to Parmenides of Elea (born 540 0r 515 BC), who made use of it in his poem On Nature; such an ascent also figures prominently in Plato’s dialogues Symposium and Phaedrus. Zostrianos parodies all of these.

The emphasis on maleness in Zostrianos should not surprise us: The Origin of the World uses a misogynistic vocabulary of female effluvium to deprecate the material world; a pronounced antipathy to procreation furthermore pervades Gnosticism right through to its Medieval reassertion in the Paulician and Cathar religions. Paulicianism seems to have a root in Manichaeism, viathe Bogomil sect, as does also Catharism. I remarked in my earlier summary of Augustine’s commentary on the Manichaeans (see Part I of this essay) that the ideal of Manichaean discipline was absolute continence. The perfection of the “Self-Begotten God” in Zostrianos consists in his non-contamination by any particle of the female – the birth-giving – principle as well as in his absolute self-sufficiency. Indeed, as a result of the “baptism” in the “self-begotten water,” Zostrianos himself becomes one of “the Self-Begotten Ones,” a realized pneumatic. A female figure inZostrianos, “Barbelo,” whose name means “virgin,” is spiritually “male” due to her “knowledge of the Triple Powerful Invisible Great Spirit,” presumably a title of the Father. It remains an admonition, however, to “flee from the madness and bondage of femininity, and choose for yourself the salvation of masculinity.”

The theme of unanimity also makes an appearance in Zostrianos. The realized pneumatic “comes into being with reference to the knowledge of others.” Before the “baptism,” the aspirant is “speechless because of the pains and limitlessness of matter… He is made living [a bad thing] and bound always within the cruel, cutting bonds through every evil breath, until he acts again and begins again to come into being through himself.” The unanimity of the pneumatics reflects the unanimity of the Aeons in their relation to the Father: “All of them exist in one since they dwell together and are perfected individually in fellowship and have been filled with the Aeon he really exists.”

Zostrianos, like The Tri-Partite Tractate and The Origin of the World, deploys a large lexicon of exotic and intimidating names, each of which designates a particular agent within the complicated salvation-scheme of the epiphany. Among these are: Doxomedon, Sethus, Antiphantes, Seldao, Elenos, Armedon, Phoē, Zoē, Zēoē, Zēooo, Zēsen, Ēooooēaēē, Harmozel, Orneos, Euthrounios, Oraiel, Arros, Daveithe, Laraneus, Epiphanios, Eideos, Eleleth, and Kodere – to quote the litany from a single paragraph.7 The exoticism is no doubt deliberate, constituting an arbitrary difficulty in mastery of which the initiate becomes identifiable as a member of the in-group. The in-group’s palaver has the effect of baffling everyone in the out-group and so too of forming an impassable membrane between the in-group and the out-group.

Given the provocative weirdness and outright inhumanism of the Gnostic texts, the criticism that such writers as Plotinus and Augustine direct at Gnosticism actually seems tame. Most disturbing in Gnostic doctrine, as the sample-texts cited above attest, is the prominence of unanimity as the supremely desirable state, with silence validated as preferable to volubility in so-called error. (“The debate is over,” as some people like to say.) I have suggested that this unanimity represents the resurgence in Gnosticism of sacrificial thinking since its practical function is to sustain in-group solidarity by identifying the slightest hint of dissent so as to make it eligible for expulsion. In a subsequent third essay, I will examine the status of Gnosticism in the work of Hans Jonas, Kurt Rudolph, Giovanni Filoramo, and one or two others. I hope, in a fourth essay, to revisit the discussion of Gnosticism in the work of Eric Voegelin.

Footnotes:

[1] Gnosticism is anti-Platonic and anti-Christian but it is also and even more so anti-Semitic. Manichaeism begins, for example, in the repudiation by its prophet of his Jewish-Baptist (Elchasaite) origins; and in Mani’s writings, antipathy to the Old Testament operates like a structuring principle.

[2] One could say the same about the relation of the James Dean to the Jim Backus character in Rebel without a Cause (1957).

[3] It is always useful to recall, in respect of Gnosticism, that the restoration of the Pleroma is equivalent to the annihilation of the material world.

[4] A Christian-Gnostic hybrid, the Marcionite Doctrine (after Marcion of Sinope [85-160]), in addition to rejecting the Old Testament, argued that Christ endured Crucifixion in appearance only.

[5] The Gospel tells a scapegoat-story too with the difference, as Girard points out, that its narrative denies the stereotypical charges, declares the victim innocent, and generally unmasks the subterfuges required by sacrifice in order that it should be successful. The Gospel, concludes Girard, is therefore not a myth but an anti-myth; the Gospel is also in this way the foundation for all subsequent non-sacred – and non-sacrificial – thinking in the Western continuum. Sir James G. Frazer anticipated Girard in many ways in The Golden Bough although Frazer saw no significant difference between the Gospel narrative and mythic narrative, with its basis in sacrifice.

[6] The presumptive word in the presumptive Greek original of Zostrianos would be genos (Latinized as genus); the language of the Nag Hammadi cache is Coptic (Egyptian), but Greek is the hypothetical original language, a conclusion based on parallel passages in Gnostic texts quoted by the heresiologists and their pagan contemporaries, such as Plotinus and Porphyry.

[7] It is only my wise-guy imagination that adds, “Manny, Moe, Jack, and Cthulhu.” In reading through the Nag Hammadi documents I have never once come across so much as a scintilla of humor.

Gnosticism from a Non-Voegelinian Perspective, Part III (Gnosticism in Modern Scholarship)By Thomas F. BertonneauCreated 2010-06-15 16:57This is the third in a series of articles exploring the phenomenon of Gnosis or Gnosticism from a “Non-Voegelinian Perspective.” Eric Voegelin (1901-1986) in The New Science of Politics(1952), Science Politics & Gnosticism (1965), and elsewhere used the term “Gnosticism” to refer to the “closed” or ideological-totalitarian systems that, for him, expressed the essence of modernity. Voegelin was a critic of modernity, just as he was a critic of the ideological-totalitarian systems, and in his usage the term Gnosticism (taking it out of quotation-marks) always carried a strong pejorative connotation. In Voegelin’s view, as expressed especially in the multi-volume study Order and History (1957-1965), Gnosticism sought to triumph but failed to do so in Antiquity, but then emerged anew in the early modern period to become the dominant Weltanschauung of the Twentieth Century. Voegelin did not mean – as some took him to mean – that specific Gnostic doctrines, surviving in latency during the medieval period, then sprang back to life in all their details; rather, Voegelin argued that the difficulty of coming to terms with the “tension” (the perceived imperfection or even hostility) of existence inclined some people to deny existence by constructing an elaborate “second reality.”

The “second reality” eliminates anything inimical to the maladjusted ego in the real world. The real world persists, however, which means that the advocates of the “second reality” find themselves in perpetual conflict with existence. Ideology, for Voegelin, is a magical gesture aimed at altering the structure of reality through unanimous declaration; the requirement for unanimity means that the Gnostic polity must quash all dissenting voices.

Voegelin did not evoke the topic of Gnosticism in a vacuum. The scholarship of Gnosis goes back to various students of G.W.F. Hegel, particularly to Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860), whose pioneering study, Die Christliche Gnosis (Christian Gnosis, 1835), remains a touchstone. Nevertheless, the take-off of Gnostic scholarship happened in the Twentieth Century. A pivotal work appeared in The Gnostic Religion (1958), by Hans Jonas (1903-1993), reissued and revised in 1963, 1991, and 2001. With Kurt Rudolph (born 1929),

whose Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism appeared in 1977, Jonas was a dominant presence in the field right up to his death. More recently, the names of Giovanni Filoramo (born 1945) and Yuri Stoyanov (born 1961) have become obligatory references. So has that of Michel Tardieu (born 1938) for his succinct book, Manichaeism (1981; English version 2008). It should be emphasized that Voegelin was never a primary scholar of Gnosticism. Jonas, Rudolph, and Filoramo, with whom the present essay deals, were and are primary scholars of Gnosticism. Their objectivity distinguishes them from well known others (J. M. Robinson, for example, and Elaine Pagels) whose interest in Gnosticism is rather more advocative than unprincipled.

I. Baur was a student of Hegel. Hans Jonas studied philosophy under Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, and theology under Rudolf Bultmann. Jonas was particularly associated with Heidegger until, in 1933, Heidegger’s suddenly candid Nazi sympathies and Jonas’ Jewishness not only brutally alienated the student from the teacher but also sent the student (doctorate incomplete) into exile to England and thence (1934) to what was still called Palestine. He joined the British Army and returned to Germany in 1945 as a soldier on the victorious side. After the war, Jonas taught in Canada. He joined the faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York, in 1955. In later life, Jonas wrote two books – The Phenomenon of Life (1966) and The Imperative of Responsibility (1979) – that influenced the direction of environmentalism and its offshoot in so-called “green politics.” Conservative readers will feel a shudder of aversion, perhaps, in the divulgence of these latter phases of the Jonas biography, but they should bracket the response. Jonas’ magnum opus remains his Gnostic Religion, a book indispensable for an understanding of Gnosis in its Late Antique context and beyond. The book served that function for Voegelin, who knew it and studied it and incorporated much of its thesis into the fourth (and at the time seemingly the final) volume of Order and History, The Ecumenic Age (1965).

Jonas described himself as an Existentialist, a label that Heidegger always eschewed. Jonas approached Gnosis, through the phenomenological method, from a discernible Existential perspective. [See Note 1] Like Baur, approaching his topic with respect, Jonas took the Gnostic documents seriously, seeing in the documents expressions of anguished consciousness grappling with problems of a disintegrating civilization.

For Jonas the context of Gnosticism is the late, markedly religious phase of Hellenism. The first phase of Hellenism announced itself in Alexander of Macedon’s prodigious conquests and the establishment, in their wake, of the Diadochic Kingdoms. Greek language and Greek high culture became a universal medium of discourse in a great swath of geography from Greece itself right through Persia to Central Asia. Jonas tends to couch his understanding of this new Greek-speaking Orient in dialectical terms: The lingua franca and its related thinking, imposed from above, constituted the unity of a “cosmopolitan secular culture”; the submerged local cultures constituted the multiplicity, in which, in order to articulate itself, each peculiar worldview must employ the standard Hellenic parole of “man as such” and its accompanying techniques of rhetoric and logic. But the pre-Greek societies were not rational or secular societies; they were religious societies or temple polities that articulated their local worldviews as myth. In the course of three centuries, in Jonas’ summary, the varieties of local religiosity gradually transformed the Greek-speaking Orient into “a pagan religious culture” stemming from “profoundly un-Greek sources.”

Gnosticism, like Judaism and Christianity, represents one element in this composite matrix of eclectic notions from diverse ethnic sources, but there were many others: Mithraism, the Astarte and Isis cults, Astrology, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism – even Stoicism had eastern roots. [See Note 2]

By the beginning of the Third Century, this dialectical transformation of secularity into religiosity had reached its terminal form: “Traditional dualism, traditional astrological fatalism, traditional monotheism were all drawn into it, yet with such a peculiarly new twist to them that in the present setting they subserved the presentation of a novel spiritual principle.” This new soul-idea signifies a unity or homogeneity, in which the patchwork of peculiar systems is overcome. The same dispensation finds its most radical, hence also its most representative expression, in a“dualistic transcendent religion of salvation” for which the main label is Gnosis. This Greek word, formerly central to philosophy, takes on a meaning absolutely opposite to its normative, rational usage. [See Note 3]

Jonas writes, “Gnosis meant pre-eminently knowledge of God, and from what we have said about the radical transcendence of the deity it follows that ‘knowledge of God’ is the knowledge of something naturally unknowable and therefore itself not a natural condition.” Gnosis concerns “secrets of salvation,” reception of which “is itself… a modification of the human condition,” an “event in the soul” that “transforms the knower himself by making him a partaker in the divine existence.”

In Jonas’ formula, “the cardinal feature of gnostic thought is the radical dualism that governs the relation of God and the world, and correspondingly that of man and the world.” Jonas allows the consensus that such radical dualism has its source in Iranian cosmology. That, however, is mere genealogy, which interests Jonas much less than the ramping up of the ontological dichotomy in the Late Antique doctrines. In Gnosticism, as Jonas describes it, “the deity is absolutely transmundane,” and really not knowable in mundane terms – not an object of Platonic or Aristotelian“theoria.” By contrast, “the world is the work of lowly powers which though they may mediately be descended from Him do not know the true God and obstruct the knowledge of him in the cosmos over which they rule.” Jonas notes the incorporation in Gnostic cosmology, always under its imperative of antithetical revaluation, of elements from Iranian, Babylonian, Syrian, and Egyptian theology. All gods below the transmundane God become demonic in the conception: “Their tyrannical world-rule is called heimarmene, universal Fate, a concept taken over from astrology but now tinged with the gnostic anti-cosmic spirit.”

The term “anti-cosmic” plays a central role in Jonas’ analysis of the Gnostic worldview. Jonas writes: “For the world as a whole, vast as it appears to its inhabitants, we have thus the visual image of an enclosed cell – what Marcion contemptuously called haec cellula creatoris – into which or out of which life may move.” Governed by the Archons, or lower, demonic gods, “the universe… is like a vast prison whose innermost dungeon is the earth, the scene of man’s life.” Every aspect of existence becomes demonized in the Gnostic re-conception of them. Thus all known extension, whether geographical or celestial, becomes a labyrinth in which the souls of the elect wander in a type of exiled; time, for the elect subject, becomes an agony of postponement, an immensity of aeons (in the purely chronological sense) that must play out before the transmundane deity abolishes the world. Again, in Jonas’ resumption, “darkness has embodied its whole essence and power in this world, which now therefore is the world of darkness.”

Opposite to this world is the “Pleroma,” the divine, immaterial realm existing transcendentally apart from and beyond this world, from which material existence descended or fell as the result of a spiritual catastrophe. Drawing on the Valentinian Gospel of Truth, Jonas tells how: “In the invisible and nameless heights there was a perfect Aeon pre-existent. His name is Fore-Beginning, Forefather, and Abyss… Through immeasurable eternities he remained in profoundest repose.” The term Pleroma (“Fullness”) refers to the total self-sufficiency of the “Forefather” in the realm of light, which is (counter-intuitively and paradoxically) identical with Him. The Forefather emanates other perfect beings to dwell with Him, to be in Him, contemplate Him, and glorify Him. One, Sophia, thinking to imitate the Forefather, attempts emanations of her own.

Sophia’s superbia resulted in what the deluded think of as creation. Gnosis, however, reveals Sophia’s deed to be an aborted mockery of the Pleroma. Sparks from the luminous realm, atoms of the Forefather Himself, have become imprisoned in the abortion. Jonas writes, “This is one of the fundamental symbols of Gnosticism: a pre-cosmic fall of part of the divine principle underlies the genesis of the world and of human existence.”

II. Jonas stresses that although Gnosticism appropriates the language of philosophy and although the authors of the Gnostic tracts demonstrate a system-building talent that results in something that often resembles philosophy, nevertheless Gnosticism remains non- and more especially anti-philosophical. Jonas remarks on the Gnostic use of the rhetorical-analytic device calledallegoresis. One can follow the drawing of allegories between rational discourse and mythic or symbolic discourse back to Plato. The technique gained currency, however, not in the immediate post-Classical period but in the last, transitional sub-phase of secular Hellenism. A key figure in the validation of allegoresis is Philo Judaeus (20 BC – 50 AD), the Alexandrian rabbi and Platonic philosopher who sought to demonstrate the compatibility of Mosaic revelation, as codified in the Old Testament, with Platonic doctrine, as articulated in the dialogues. Philo interpreted symbols in the Old Testament as metaphors of Plato’s rational theology. “In consequence,” as Jonas writes, “the myth, however

freely handled, was never contradicted nor were its own values controverted.” Jonas adds that, “The system of scriptural allegory evolved in [Philo’s] school was bequeathed as a model to the early Fathers of the Church,” and “here again the purpose is that of integration and synthesis.”

Gnostic allegoresis functions otherwise: “Instead of taking over the value system of the traditional myth, it proves the deeper ‘knowledge’ by reversing the roles of good and evil, sublime and base, blessed and accursed, to be found in the original.” [See Note 4] An entire Gnostic sect named itself after the serpent in Genesis – in Greek, they were the Ophites and in Aramaic the Naassenes. Since it is the serpent,” Jonas writes, “that persuades Adam and Eve to taste of the fruit of knowledge and thereby to disobey their Creator, [the serpent] came in a whole group of systems to represent the ‘pneumatic’ principle from beyond counteracting the designs of the Demiurge, and thus could become as much a symbol of the powers of redemption as the biblical God had been degraded to a symbol of cosmic oppression.” A Gnostic sect, the Peratae, “did not even shrink from regarding the historical Jesus as a particular incarnation of ‘the general serpent,’ i.e., the serpent from Paradise understood as a principle.” The Peratae reinterpreted Cain antithetically. Abel, being favored by God, and God being for the Gnostics a false and wicked God, Cain is obviously a heroic opponent of wickedness. “Perhaps we should speak in such cases,” writes Jonas, “not of allegory at all, but of a form of polemics, that is, not of an exegesis of an original text, but of its tendentious rewriting.” [See Note 5]

Jonas judges that, for Gnosticism, “the negative evaluation of the cosmos is fundamental.” One of the most valuable and daring parts of The Gnostic Religion is the suite of chapters devoted to the contrasting images of the cosmos in Greek and Gnostic thinking, culminating in an Epilogue, written for the book’s republication in the mid-1960s, on “Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism.” The Greek and Gnostic images of the cosmos are ideas that imply specific consequences in human behavior and in the structure of society that differ as much as the images, or ideas, themselves. As Jonas reminds his readers, the word cosmos, in its normative usage, carries a wide range of positive connotations, which together sum up a relation of the subject to its existence against the universal backdrop. Jonas writes, “Cosmos means ‘order’ in general, whether of the world or household, of a commonwealth or a life.” A bit later in the discussion: “The universe was considered to be the perfect exemplar of order, and at the same time the cause of all order in particulars,” as for example in the independent polis, or city-state. Jonas quotes Cicero to the effect that, “man was born to contemplate the cosmos and to imitate it,” a precept that “establishes the connection between cosmology and ethics.”

Jonas points out, however, that Alexander’s conquests and the establishment of the Diadochic Kingdoms altered the existential situation of the enlightened individual, who was no longer unambiguously the citizen of an independent city-state, but rather the subject, in the disestablished sense, of a kingdom or empire. In Stoicism, which responds to the new situation, the phrase “to play one’s part” becomes prominent. As Jonas remarks, “a role played is substituted for a real function performed.” The older precept of the Anthropos-cosmos integration became afflicted by a “fictitious element in the construction.” As the suspicion grew that “the part was insignificant to the whole,” the belief in the cosmos as something meaningful entered a phase of “strained fervor.”

The Gnostics, Jonas writes, seized on this rift in the old world-picture in an ingenious – and prototypically antithetic and invidious – way: “In retaining this name [cosmos] for the world, the Gnostics retained the idea of order as the main characteristic of what they were intent on deprecating. Indeed, instead of denying to the world the attribute of order… they turned this very attribute from one of praise into one of opprobrium, and in the process if anything increased the emphasis on it.” The positive elements of hierarchy and regularity in the old idea become “rigid and inimical order, tyrannical and evil law” in the new idea. For the Platonic, Neoplatonic, and Stoic schools the cosmos was itself, if not quite a god, then divine. But for Gnosticism the cosmos becomes “devoid of meaning and goodness, alien to the purposes of man… an order empty of divinity.”

In his Epilogue, Jonas, having completed his “Existential reading of Gnosticism,” undertakes what he calls his “Gnostic reading of Existentialism.” I construe this Epilogue as a response to Voegelin, given its date and supplementary character. Much of modern thinking, Jonas argues, especially the strain of so-called Existentialism exemplified in the work of writers like Heidegger and Sartre, expresses a type of revulsion against existence – tending to nihilism – that strikingly resembles ancient Gnosticism. One difference is that

Gnosticism in its ancient context “was never admitted to the respectable company of… philosophic tradition,” whereas modern nihilism might be said to dominate discourse in every chapter of society. As in antiquity, “the disruption between man and total reality is at the bottom of nihilism,” which constitutes a “dualism without metaphysics.”

III. If anyone were Jonas’ successor it would be Kurt Rudolph although Rudolph is not so lively a writer as Jonas. Like Jonas, Rudolph emphasizes the radical dualism of the general Gnostic worldview, including its vision of an absolutely transmundane deity: “The gnostic idea of God is… not only the product of a dualism hostile to the world, but it is at the same also a consequence of the esoteric conception of knowledge”; and “dualism dominates the whole of gnostic cosmology.” In Gnosticism, according to Rudolph, “the world of the creator is subordinated to a world which lies before it in space and time, and at the same time is thereby devaluated; its origin is to be explained from a disharmony which somehow enters in at the margin of the upper world.” Rudolph, like Jonas, remarks the eclecticism of the Gnostic system-builders. The systems “are built together out of older mythological material,” giving “an impression of artificiality.” Gnostic discourse “attaches itself in the main to older religious imagery,” writes Rudolph, and it “prospers on the soil of ‘host religions.’” Thus Gnosticism “can… be described as parasitic.” It is the case that “Gnosticism strictly speaking has no tradition of its own but only a borrowed one.” The borrowing, however, always conforms to radical reversal of the original evaluation.

On Gnostic anthropology, Rudolph observes the division of humanity into three “races” or genera – the “pneumatics,” who possess a “Soul” or “Self” and hence are saved; the “psychics,” who possess a “Spirit” on the animal-level, with whom the “pneumatics” may collaborate; and the “hylics,” who are entirely of matter and are doomed to perish with the material realm when the pervasion of knowledge abolishes that offense to the Pleroma. Rudolph writes: “All three have originated in succession, but they are united in the one first man; they form the three constituents of every man [and] the one which in each case predominates determines the type of man to which one belongs… Only pneumatics are gnostics and capable of redemption.” According to Rudolph, the intermediate status of the psychics “does not signify any weakening of the dualistic principle, but its consistent application in changed situation,” in which missionary appeals to orthodox communities had come to seem either desirable or necessary to the Gnostic communities in their struggle for public sympathy.

In addressing Jonas on Gnosticism, I made reference to the centrality of allegoresis in Gnostic discourse. Rudolph identifies an example of allegoresis in the Gnostic “Anthropos-Myth.” Gnostic system-builders reinterpreted the story of Adam this way: “The Body of Adam is moulded by the creator and his angels… from the elements… Since, however, he has no real life in him, he is equipped by the highest being in a secret or mediated fashion with the divine spirit, i.e., the pneuma substance, which exalts him above the creator God and bestows on him the capacity for redemption.” Adam stands as the prototype of the pneumatics. Rudolph remarks that, “redemption consists in the awakening of Adam to the knowledge of his true origin and the worthlessness of the Demiurge.” This “Anthropos-Myth” replicates the duality of the two worlds in microcosm in the constitution of the Primal Man.

In its survey of the chief Gnostic documents, drawing heavily on the Nag Hammadi cache, Rudolph’s Gnosis tends to duplicate Jonas. Writing at a later date than Jonas, however, Rudolph had access to additional material either undiscovered or unpublished until the 1970s. Of particular interest are Rudolph’s treatments of Uighur and Tocharian Gnosticism, more specifically, Manichaeism, and Mandaean Gnosticism, the only certifiably Gnostic cult to survive from Late Antiquity continuously into the present day. Whereas in the West Gnosticism had died out by the time of the Gothic kingdoms, in the East, in Byzantium and farther afield in the territories of the Persian Empire, Gnosticism enjoyed a long denouement. Especially in Central Asia, Gnosticism took the particular form of the doctrine originating in the perfervid religious imagination of a single figure. This was Mani (216-276), who, in the Gnostic pattern established by Simon Magus, presented himself as prophet and savior.

Manichaeism enjoyed toleration in Persia under Shapur I and his successor Hormizd I; but Hormizd’s successor Bahram I (reigned 273-276) sided with the Zoroastrian clergy, jailed Mani, and proscribed the

religion. Mani’s talent for missionary organization insured that his movement would survive these setbacks. It did so in North Africa, Italy, and Gaul for two centuries, and in areas east of Persia for much longer. The Uighur Khanate, which dominated Central Asia in the Eighth and Ninth Centuries, made Manichaeism the state religion, while supporting missionaries as far away as China. The successor-states were also pronouncedly Manichaean. Writes Rudolph: “Mani… did not regard himself as a philosopher but [as] a gnostic theosophist and prophet [who] saw his task as fusing the religious tradition of the Orient of his time into a universal religion of the salvation of man.” Mani’s “dualism of spirit and body, light and darkness,” resonated with Zoroastrianism and with many of the ethnic religions of the steppes. Mani’s strict social division of an elite and a laity appealed to the warrior societies of the Turks and Mongols.

Rudolph’s book reproduces graphic material from the illuminated manuscripts of the Central Asian Manichaeans. We see the white-robed elect instructing the laity and copying the scriptures. The books specify the commandments of the faith, including the enjoinment of “any doubt of [the] religion,” and, for the laity, the requirement of “the indefatigable care of the elect.” This Turkic and Tocharian literature from as late as the Thirteenth Century confirms in detail Saint Augustine’s depiction of the Manichaean illuminati in his Confessions. Augustine explains the dietary requirements of the elect, that they consumed vegetarian food supposed to contain a high proportion of the particles of light from the Pleroma that were trapped in matter. So too among the Uighur elect, the preferred table consisted of “plants with a high content of light, such as cucumbers and melons, wheat bread and… water or fruit juice.”

Rudolph’s section on the Mandaeans, lately of southern Iraq but largely driven into exile since Gulf War II (many Mandaeans now live in the USA), bears the title, “A Relic.” Given their geographical situation, a Manichaean origin of the Mandaean religion seems likely although the Mandaeans do not identify themselves as Manichaeans. The word manda means “knowledge.” The Mandaeans are by self-designation “knowers,” whose rich literature reproduces the full range of eschatological motifs articulated in the Nag Hammadi cache as well as in the Manichaean scriptures. Like the Elchasaites, in whose religious dispensation Mani began life, the Mandaeans are Baptists who, rejecting Christ, yet revere John the Baptist. The Mandaean religion, like Manichaeism, is dualistic in the sense of depicting existence as the battleground between a good deity of the light and an evil deity of the darkness, with the latter temporarily holding the world in his grasp.

IV. Before switching to Giovanni Filoramo it is worth quoting one of Rudolph’s concluding statements, from the section of Gnosis devoted to “Consequences of Gnosis.” Rudolph refers to “the more or less conscious, sometimes even amateurish, reception of gnostic ideas and fragments of systems in modern syncretistic-theosophic sects.” Assessing the ambiguities, Rudolph writes: “It is difficult to prove continuity in any detail, as the connecting links are often ‘subterranean’ channels, or else the relationships are based on reconstructions of the history of ideas which have been undertaken especially in the history of philosophy.” Rudolph then mentions – and the reader will detect some sympathy in the remark – Baur’s Christliche Gnosis (1835), which “treats, in accordance with its theme, not only of the anti-gnostic representatives of the early Christian ‘philosophy of religion,’ but also exhaustively of the ‘ancient Gnosis and later philosophy of religion,’ dealing with Jakob Böhme, Schelling, Schleiermacher, and especially Hegel, as its heirs.” As in the case of certain remarks by Jonas, one has the strong suspicion, concerning these words, that they address obliquely Voegelin’s thesis, which is, in part, based on Baur’s study.

Rudolph tends to withhold evaluation, taking a purely descriptive or scientific approach to his topic. Filoramo, like Jonas, is more apt to make an evaluation and to guess at motives, but this is not to assess A History of Gnosticism as anything but objective. In a chapter called “The Gnostic Imagination,” Filoramo explores the meaning of Gnosis and sketches in the psychology that the term implies. “Gnosis,” Filoramo writes, “is the ‘redemption of the interior man,’ that is, the purification of the spiritual being and at the same time knowledge of the Whole.” Referring to The Gospel of Truth, with its explanation of “the call from above,” Filoramo remarks that in the Gnostic texts, the term Gnosis “has become synonymous with epignosis, recognition of one’s own true reality,” which he glosses as “the ontological self that constitutes and is the basis of reality” of “the interior man.”

In responding to the call – in recognizing himself – the Gnostic affirms that his subjective sense of belonging to a minority of the elect is actually the same as objective reality. The Gnostic accesses the secret knowledge by divine revelation. But, as Filoramo notes, “from the Gnostic point of view, revelation is possible only because within the Gnostic there somehow pre-exists a disposition, a capacity, a potential fitted for testing and getting to know that particular reality.” Filoramo hesitates to go so far, but the thesis that Gnostic election is no more than an auto-probative claim of moral superiority belongs to his definition of Gnosis. The opportunity for mischief obviously conditions the Gnostic claim. Filoramo does link Gnosticism with the increasing prominence in Late Antiquity of the hyperanthropos or superman. The pattern goes back to Alexander, whose developing egomania included the idea of his godhead, possibly as an incarnation of Dionysus. It continued in the charisma of magus-types like Simon and Apollonius and in the delusions of one or two emperors; but it was a larger phenomenon.

The basic Gnostic myth implies that the elect person is a god: When the catastrophe occurred in the Pleroma, sparks of godhead became imprisoned in the world of matter. The elect enjoy their ontological difference from others by possessing such a spark as their soul. Posing the question, “Isn’t the Gnostic saved by nature,” Filoramo answers with another question – “Isn’t it precisely the awareness of this eternally preordained salvation that makes possible [Gnosticism’s] ambivalent ethics [of] an ascetism that seeks to cancel out the very root of our desires and a depraved antinomianism that mocks the laws of this world and its rulers?”

“Perhaps Jonas was right,” Filoramo opines, “to emphasize the anarchic and nihilistic character of a naturally rebellious ethic in search of a metaphysical liberty, which exists absolutely, in itself.” Yet, as Filoramo reminds readers in his closing remarks, the personal side of Gnosticism – in distinction to its doctrinal side – remains something of a cipher. “If modern enquiry were possible, it would be… interesting to know how self-aware the average Gnostic was.” Filoramo guesses generously that his “average Gnostic” was simply someone in quest of the divine, a not ignoble disposition. The objection arises automatically, once given the doctrine. The whole of Late Antiquity was in quest of the divine and the Gnostics, even at their zenith, were a minority. It is not simply that the Gnostic goes in search of divinity that differentiates him from everyone else; it is that he already knows where to find divinity – within himself. Indeed, the Gnostic himselfis divine.

Gnosticism remains radically different from both the emerging Christianity of Late Antiquity and the lingering paganism in respect to its adjustment to existence. For Gnostics, the material world is toxic and God is radically alien to it. For pagans, nature is interpenetrated everywhere by God and by gods while for Christians, God, despite being transmundane, contrives to descend into the material world through incarnation to communicate in the flesh with those who seek him. For Christians, inheriting the Jewish view, God is also the benevolent Creator of a world that is good, over which he places humanity in stewardship. Christian heresiologists and pagan critics of Gnosticism converged in condemning the Gnostics for their world-revilement.

Gnosticism was rediscovered by scholarship early in the Nineteenth Century. They heyday of that scholarship was the mid-Twentieth Century. Curiosity about Gnosticism persists and grows. Novelist Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code (2003) is not scholarship, but the success, including screen adaptation, of the book witnesses the popular interest in Gnosticism of recent years. It is precisely as an antinomian symbol that Gnosticism makes its appeal in the context of liberal mass entertainment. In the previous essay to this one, I argued that the Gnostic myth is a variety of scapegoat-myth. The Da Vinci Code is also a scapegoat-myth, making use of the latent anti-Christian sentiment in liberalism to focus reader-resentment on figures that represent normative religion (the Catholic Church and some of its lay orders), and in raising as its heroes the ancient Gnostics and their medieval Paulician and Cathar descendants.

A proliferating modern literature concerns the fictitious bloodline of Christ, who, according to the story, escaped crucifixion, espoused Mary Magdalene, and found asylum from his persecutors in Southern Gaul. The offspring of Jesus became the Merovingian royals. As in the case of the Gnostic texts themselves, the very arbitrariness of the confabulations makes them alluring. Their currency suggests that the impulses generative of the Gnostic view, especially the requirement of many people for a second reality, remain in place.

Notes

[1] Jonas’ Husserlian background expresses itself in The Gnostic Religion in the sense that Jonas interprets his primary documents as articulating a lived and felt reaction to the world; the “Lifeworld” of the Gnostic must, on this analysis, contain elements that really do “alienate” the subject and cause him to react against the structure of reality. One should not forget, however, that there were other contemporaneous responses to “alienation” that did not take the extreme – or, as I would say, pathological – form that we see in the Gnostic doctrines. Among these were the philosophical schools, especially the Neoplatonic School, but also Stoicism and even Epicureanism, and finally Christianity.

[2] Zeno (334 BC - 262 BC), the founder of Stoicism, was a Cypriote and by ethnicity a Phoenician of Tyrian extraction.

[3] Greek has a number of terms ambiguously translatable by the English word, knowledge: Thus episteme means knowledge – of existing things, or what we might call empirical knowledge;whereas sophrosyne is wisdom, as distinct from empirical knowledge; and phronesis is a kind of prudential knowledge related to wisdom. Gnosis, on the other hand, refers to something like intuition although it can also denote immediate understanding or a swift cognitive penetration to essence of the matter. Gnosis is also related to gnomon, a puzzle or riddle. The English verb to know shows obviously morphological kinship with the Greek verb, gnosein, as with the French connaitre, and the German kennen.

[4] I cannot help but be put in mind of Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States (1980), or of most of the work of Gore Vidal, or of ninety-nine out of a hundred written-for-college humanities textbooks.

[5] The Romantics knew of these heretical antitheses and they often followed suit, as in the case of Percy Shelley, whose Prometheus Unbound (1820) is an antinomian fantasy. It is noteworthy that, in Moby Dick (1851), Herman Melville likens Captain Ahab, in his nihilism, to “the ancient Ophites of the east.”

Gnosticism from a Non-Voegelinian Perspective, Part IV (Revisiting Voegelin)By Thomas F. BertonneauCreated 2010-06-22 09:59

Eric Voegelin’s critique of modernity claims that liberalism, the creed of the Enlightenment, is “Gnostic.” Voegelin (1901-1985) drew the term “Gnosticism” from a strain of Late Antique religiosity. The term “Gnostic” refers to that array of sects and cults the adherents of which thought of themselves as forming a saintly elect among the perishing masses on account of their possessing, as their souls, sparks of divinity that had become trapped in the world of matter. The ancient Gnostics (as the previous installments in this series will have shown) abhorred the world of matter and claimed to sojourn in it only as exiles from a realm of pure light, which was the “real” world despite appearances. Voegelin labeled Gnosticism an anticosmic rebellion against reality, emphasizing the tendency of Gnostics to construct what – borrowing from novelists Robert Musil and Heimito von Doderer – he called a second reality built on principles contrary to those governing what morally and intellectually adjusted people understand to be the actual or first reality. Gnosticism for Voegelin constitutes a social pathology for the reason that the upholders of the second reality, once having

invested their emotion in it, make it a fetish and regard criticism of it as lèse majesté. Organized Gnosticism tends to become a censorious war, a jihad or crusade, to protect the second reality from examination and, more aggressively, to coerce assent to the second reality’s existence.

It belongs to Voegelin’s critique of modernity as the re-emergence of Gnosticism that its object – the social pathology of the political religions – corresponds to an attitude (namely, rebuke) rather than to some specific doctrine that has persisted since antiquity. Voegelin never meant to argue that let us say the Valentinian speculation or Manichaeism as such could be identified with Marxism, National Socialism, Leninism, Feminism, Multiculturalism, or any other particular “ism.” Yet, as Voegelin saw it, the ancient and the modern rebellions stubbornly resembled one another in their basic dispositions. When, therefore, in his posthumous In Search of Order (1987), Voegelin alludes to the characteristic modern “divinization of men,” he takes as his exemplum of the genus “the Feuerbach-Marx divinization of man,” whose purpose consists in “explaining divine reality as a human projection that, if returned to man, will produce full humanity.” That normative consciousness is false, that religion is false, that institutions are false and tyrannical, and that only an elite recognizes the situation: These motifs structure both ancient Gnostic speculation and modern ideological discourse – both of which envision their fulfillment in the abolition, one way or another, of existing reality.

Voegelin distinguishes the ancient and modern rebellions in this way: “At the extreme of the revolt in consciousness, ‘reality’ and the ‘Beyond’ become two separate entities, two ‘things’ to be magically manipulated by suffering man for the purpose of either abolishing ‘reality’ altogether and escaping into the ‘Beyond,’ or of forcing the order of the ‘Beyond’ into ‘reality.’ The first of the magic alternatives is preferred by the gnostics of antiquity, the second one by the modern gnostic thinkers.”

I. The magisterial analysis of “pneumopathology” that Voegelin undertakes at the end of his life in the text of In Search of Order solicits further contemplation, which we shall attempt in due course. But as that analysis consummates many decades of meditation on the problem of “the modern gnostic thinkers,” it will be helpful to begin where Voegelin himself began, in his early, sobering study of The Political Religions (1938), which heralds so much in his subsequent authorship. The book’s publication coincided with the Anschluss, with Voegelin’s loss of his teaching position, and with his flight through Switzerland to England in company with his wife. The Political Religions, like The New Science of Politics (1952), either stymied or outraged its earliest readers, or did both at once. Voegelin opens the discussion with a calculated understatement: “Speaking about political religions and construing the movements of our times not only as political but also, and primarily, as religious movements is not accepted as a matter of course yet, even though the factual situation would force the attentive observer to take this stand.” The difficulty actually worsens when one considers that the “movements” of which Voegelin writes identify themselves, not as sacral or religious but quite vehemently as secular and practice open hostility to traditional creeds and churches.

Yet, in looking past the claims, in looking to the organization and behavior of the “movements,” one does begin to see the outward signs of the sectarian religiosity. Among these signs is fanatical enmity towards any competing spiritual authority reminiscent of postures that we associate with Late Antiquity on the one hand and the period of the European religious wars on the other.

The vocabulary of spiritual aperture and closure structures the argument in The Political Religions. Already in 1938 Voegelin describes normative consciousness – the type of consciousness on which the classical political arrangement is based – as having its root in certain fundamental apperceptions that can be attested universally. As Voegelin writes, “man experiences himself as being natural [kreatürlich] and, therefore, questionable,” where the final adjective means amenable to investigation or analysis. All healthy order begins with man’s sense, Voegelin argues, that “his soul is linked to the cosmos,” and that when he acts his actions place him in a relation “to a suprapersonal, all-powerful something,” with which the actions can either be in accord or out of tune. The suspicion that time is out of joint or that something is rotten in the state only makes sense in light of this intuition of a transcendent non-temporal source of temporal order. For the ancients it resided in the visible cosmos, for Christians, in the unseen City of God. As Voegelin writes, “The Beyond surrounding us can be searched for and found in all the directions in which human existence is open to the world: in the body and in

the spirit, in man and in the community, in nature [Natur] and in God.” The “spiritual religions,” which are “trans-worldly,” respond to the intuition of “the Beyond.”

The historical cumulus of symbolizations, including the distorted ones, makes an opportunity, however, for derailment. The living, plastic symbols can “firm up as systems, become filled with the spirit of religious agitation and fanatically defended as the ‘right’ order of being.” This type of reification of a symbol-system, invested with the full measure of anxious emotion, is closed. It takes itself for the end-point of existence or for a final codification of reality beyond which there is no further development or history. “Our time,” writes Voegelin, “is overcrowded with religious orders of this kind, and the result is a Babylonian confusion of tongues, since the signs or symbols of a language have immensely different holy, magic, and value-related qualities, depending on the speaker using them.” The subject’s relation to the symbols of the this-worldly (“immanent”) faith then conforms in a debased way to a lowly thing-relation: The subject encounters the words as though the phenomena designated by them were mere items in the world; he encounters them moreover as fetishes or idols, valorized by charismatic gurus or leaders. “Followers of the movements that want to be anti-religious and atheistic refuse to concede that religious experiences can be found at the root of their fanatical attitude, only venerating as sacred something else than the religion they fight.”

In The Political Religions, Voegelin classifies secularization under the heading of religious developments but in the direction of pure immanence rather than transcendence. He reminds readers that the “process of withering” that afflicts European civilization “has its origins in the secularization of the soul and the ensuing severance of a consequently purely secular soul from its roots in religiousness.” Later in the text, we encounter this: “Precisely the secularization of life that accompanied the doctrine of humanism is the soil in which such an anti-Christian religious movement as National Socialism was able to prosper.” Once the propaganda in denial of a “Beyond” of this world has sufficiently pervaded the social domain the only possible remaining sources of valid propositions are “a powerful person,” “organization accompanied by glamour and noise,” and the combination of “force and terror.” The “powerful person” never invites his followers to test on their own the rightness of his doctrine; he promulgates it in the mode of absolute authority – thus as unquestionable Gnosis, the term that Voegelin would later employ. Voegelin observes that ideological-totalitarian states invariably imitate the trappings of sacred societies. Think of Hitler’s flag-ceremonies or the mummified bodies of the Bolshevik leaders, to which the Communist faithful make pilgrimage.

In The Political Religions, Voegelin undertakes a critique of scientism. As he writes, “the common trend of the new symbolism is its ‘scientific’ character.” Thus Nazi race-theory is “scientific,” complete with catalogues of skull-measurements. All Marxist theory under the Soviet regime is “scientific,” with the word becoming mere reflexive approbation in official discourse. Once “the world as contents has suppressed the world as existence,” and once the “counter-formulas against the spiritual religions and their worldviews are coined and legitimated by the claims of secular science as the [sole] valid form of cognition, contrary to revelation and mystical thought”: Then, as Voegelin writes, “the inner-worldly apocalypse needs only to remove from [medieval religious] thinking the transcendent end realm… to have at its disposal a language of symbols suitable for the secular world.” The “end realm” remains, non-transcendentally, as in the sequence of Feudalism-Capitalism-Communism, after which there is no fourth term; or similarly in the National Socialist coinage of a “Third Reich,” which will also be a “Thousand-Year Reich,” that is to say, permanent and unchangeable.

A skeptic might object to Voegelin’s account of secularization that if intuiting the link to “the Beyond” belonged to human nature then the curtailment of the transcendental orientation could take place only with great difficulty. Why do the addressees of the Robespierre- or Lenin- or Hitler-appeal yield to the leader’s closed vision in the first place? But the capacity for profound intuition never develops equally in all people, nor does the capacity to articulate intuition in transparent symbols; these talents develop powerfully only in a few. To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, for a few there is intuition, but for the rest there is only tuition, often at a steep price. Even the capability of understanding the symbols once the vates or logothete articulates them finds only unequal distribution. Because pride and laziness really exist, moreover, the appeals to them, and to other base motives, always enjoy greater popularity than the admonitions against them. Whereas normative religion, which carefully admonishes, preaches a higher power, humanism preaches the autonomy and supremacy of man. The majority will tend to vote for the second over the first (men like to think of themselves as supreme) whereupon many will eagerly say, “we are the ones we have been waiting for” and “the debate is over.”

II. The New Science of Politics not only constitutes the natural sequel to The Political Religions; it brings to maturity the line of thinking, stimulated by Voegelin’s clash with totalitarianism, that found its tentative discourse, only lacking one or two key symbols, in the earlier book. Yet one should avoid the temptation to underestimate The Political Religions, either on account of its brevity or its schematic construction. With its invocations of Pharaoh Akhenaton’s Aton-cult, as the first political religion, and of Joachim di Fiore (1135-1202) and the history-closing terminology of the “Third Age,” the book forecasts the subject matter not only of The New Science of Politics but also of the volumes of Order and History. The style of The Political Religionsagain forecasts the style of The New Science of Politics. Voegelin writes as one who participates in a “transcendent truth” the gist of which, being universally attested, is other than an entry in the range of competing sectarian opinions. Hence the definite article in the book’s title: Not A New Science of Politics, but rather The New Science of Politics, a grammatical delimitation that outraged academic readers of the book on its appearance.

Voegelin took as his task nothing less than to restore “the science of human existence in society and history” in an age when “the consciousness of principles is lost.” In the last, Voegelin meant not only that contemporary political science so-called had lost sight of basic insights available only through the study of the classical texts (Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Dante) but also that the reigning positivism of the social sciences rejected the idea of principles, confining its method to empirical description.

It is once more a case of the distinction between transparency and occlusion in the cognition of reality, for by the clarity of cognition alone man puts his soul in order. As Voegelin puts it, “if the adequacy of a method is not measured by its usefulness to the purpose of science, if on the contrary the use of a method is made the criterion of science, then the meaning of science as a truthful account of the structure of reality, as the theoretical orientation of man in his world, and as the great instrument for man’s understanding of his own position in the universe is lost.” Voegelin declares that valorizing as knowledge only those results generated by a single approved method amounts to “perversion” in the epistemological realm. That term, perversion, occurs many times in the text. All of these indictments rankled the scholarly mentality, but none so much as the common thesis of the three concluding chapters, the thematic content of which the chapter-titles themselves adequately convey. They are “Gnosticism: The Nature of Modernity,” “The Gnostic Revolution: The Puritan Case,” and “The End of Modernity.” Modernity, of course, once established, ought to be eternally in place.

The critique of scientism in The Political Religions shades logically into the theory of Gnosticism as the “nature of modernity” in The New Science of Politics. Gnosticism, of which scientism is a variety, constitutes the radical case of “perversion” in the realm of knowledge and in the articulation of that knowledge in a shared, effective social symbolism; Gnosticism is meanwhile related – in its modern manifestation, as mandatory liberalism – to Puritanism. A vast occasion for offense obviously offered itself in Voegelin’s prose to everyone from the Trotskyites to the Mayflower Society. But it is in the nature of Gnosticism to take offense, apropos of which Voegelin observes: “One can easily imagine how indignant a humanistic liberal will be when he is told that his particular type of immanentism is one step on the road to Marxism” or when he is told that “totalitarianism, defined as the existential rule of gnostic activists, is the end form of progressive civilization.”

Now to quote these particular remarks is to put the cart somewhat ahead of the horse, but they do have the value of pointing toward one of Voegelin’s essential insights about Gnosticism as the essence of modernity. Voegelin contends that Christianity “de-divinized” politics and permitted the articulation of political forms in a purely temporal realm – a gain for human self-understanding and for freedom. The phrase Gnostic Modernity is synonymous, however, with the “re-divinization” of the political-temporal order.

What drove the atavistic program of “re-divinization,” by the dubious symbolism of which Joachim and his successors, as Voegelin writes, “achieved certainty about the meaning of history”? In the previous “de-divinized” symbolism, history resisted its own dogmatization as a definition or “eidos.” Bluntly, “history has no eidos, because the course of history extends into the unknown future.” The meaning of history, in the “de-divinized” symbolism, belongs to the transcendent realm, with the Ideal Republic or the City of God. One could say that under Christianity the meaning of history is indefinitely deferred and that the deferral helps guarantee freedom. “Certainties,” Voegelin argues, “are in demand for the purpose of overcoming uncertainties

with their accompaniment of anxiety.” What unresolved issue or lacuna in knowledge gives rise to anxiety so acute that even an “illusion,” the mendacious “meaning of history,” becomes preferable to it? “Uncertainty is the very essence of Christianity,” and by corollary, “the feeling of security in ‘a world full of gods’ is lost [when] the world-transcendent God is reduced to the tenuous bond of faith,” as it is by Paul and the Patres.

Voegelin denies that High Medieval Humanism and the Renaissance correspond to new espousal of paganism. On the other hand, “Gnosis… had accompanied Christianity from its very beginnings” and remained available in Scotus Erigena, Dionysius Areopagita, and similar traditions.

The essential trait of modern Gnosticism consists in its “immanentist eschatology.” In Search of Order defines “immanentist eschatology” as the project “of forcing the order of the ‘Beyond’ into ‘reality.’” But the topic here is The New Science of Politics. So pervasively does “immanentist eschatology” propagate itself in Western thinking after Joachim that one fails to notice its presence in the schoolbook and encyclopedia truism that the Modern Age, so-called, succeeded the Middle Ages, pejoratively understood as an era of intellectual obscurantism and superstition. Once one puts the first term, Antiquity, in place, one has the Joachitic “eidos of history” in three phases. The third phase may assume a variety of specific shapes: Joachim’s universal monastery-utopia, Dante’s Apollinian Imperium, Condorcet’s Age of Reason, or Auguste Comte’s Church of Man. That Comte was the confabulator of Positivism reminds us that, “scientism has remained to this day one of the strongest gnostic movements in Western society.”

Voegelin takes as his sample case of a Gnostic movement erupting in a society the English Puritans. He relies on the account of Puritan agitation given by theologian Richard Hooker (1554-1600) in The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1594). Hooker, a Protestant whose thinking remained rooted in Aristotle and Aquinas, insisted on the intellectual continuity of the Logos from its pagan to its Christian manifestation. Rather than being a participant in the Logos, the Puritan (Voegelin’s Gnostic) is man with a “cause.” This “cause,” invariably moralistic and denunciatory, aims its ire at the constituted order of society in Manichaean terms of an absolute division between the good of the “cause” and the evil of the constituted society. Voegelin picks up on Hooker’s observation that the Puritan relies, not on Scripture, but on selective quotation from Scripture with tendentious commentary to propagate his agenda.

In Voegelin’s coinage, every Gnostic insurgency requires its “Koran.” Calvin’s Institutes are such a “Koran” in its mildest variety whereas the proliferating pamphlet-literature of Puritanism waxes swiftly fanatic. “In the Communist movement, finally, the works of Karl Marx have become a kind of Koran of the faithful supplemented by the patristic literature of Leninism-Stalinism.”

III. Oswald Spengler remarks in The Decline of the West that the Glorious Revolution prefigured the French Revolution stage by stage, including the execution of the royal sovereign. In The New Science of Politics, Voegelin, drawing both on Hooker and on the Puritan pamphlets themselves, compares the Puritan insurgency to the Bolshevik insurgency, stage by stage. At the time of the Puritan pamphlet called Queries (1649), a threatening document in which the saints entitle themselves to “authority and rule over the nations and kingdoms of the world,” as Voegelin writes, “the revolution… had reached a stage corresponding to the stage of the Russian Revolution at which Lenin wrote about ‘next tasks.’” The pamphlet forecasts the violent insurgency to come and thus anticipates “the stage at which, in the Russian Revolution, Lenin wrote his reflections under the coquettish title, ‘Will the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?’” As Voegelin remarks, “They will, indeed; and nobody will share it with them.”

In another Puritan pamphlet, A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory (1641), Voegelin discovers the invariable nihilistic strain of the Gnostic imagination in its agitated mood. Drawing on apocalyptic imagery from the Bible, the pamphleteer gloats over the imminent destruction of the constituted order, here characterized as “Babylon.” “While God is the ultimate cause of the imminent happy change,” Voegelin wryly comments, “men should indulge in some meritorious action, too, in order to hasten the coming.” Such action, quoting the language of the pamphlet, will include “dashing the brats of Babylon against the stones.”

In Part II of this series, examining the Gnostic documents of the Second Century, I noted that discursively they represented a resurgence of sacrificial thinking: The abolition of the world means the justified holocaust of all

save the elect. This pattern reappears in A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory, in the infanticide-imagery. The world of the saints will arise on the lifeblood and sweetmeats of the unbelievers. The acknowledgment, as Voegelin writes, that, “the Scriptural camouflage cannot veil the drawing of God into man,” should not, in turn, veil the bloodthirsty character of the Puritan-Gnostic God. Like the Moloch of the Carthaginians, that God demands the newborn in his honor. Hence Voegelin’s judgment: “All this has nothing to do with Christianity,” even while it has everything to do with religion, in a primordial cultic sense. God, responding to “meritorious action,” will reverse all social relations, leveling the mountains of established difference, so to speak. Voegelin adds this: “In this God who comes skipping over the mountains we recognize the dialectics of history that comes skipping over thesis and antithesis, until its lands its believers in the plain of the Communist synthesis.”

In Science Politics and Gnosticism (1958), Voegelin widens the scope of such recognition. Quoting Gnostic documents at second hand from Hans Jonas’ Gnostic Religion, Voegelin avers that in them “the reader will have recognized Hegel’s alienated spirit and Heidegger’s flungness [Geworfenheit] of human experience.” Voegelin reiterates the dichotomy he had employed in The New Science of Politics: Ancient Gnosticism sought grace through the abolition of the material world and the restoration of the Pleroma. In post-Enlightenment Gnosticism, by contrast, the subject overcomes anguish “through the assumption of an absolute spirit that in the dialectical unfolding of consciousness proceeds from alienation to consciousness of itself.” The reassimilation of the alienated element “transforms man into superman.” Structures of consciousness that in the Gnostic’s view inhibit or prevent the advent of the superman become obsessive targets of coercive correction. The ceaseless public diatribe of the modern Gnostics against everything received or traditional intends the dissolution of the abhorrently false (but to everyone else, normal) consciousness.

Because the Gnostic’s premises cannot withstand scrutiny, the Gnostic, when he acquires power, either within an institution or over a society, seeks to establish “the prohibition of questions.” Voegelin instances this implacable sanction in a sequence of close readings of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. In the case of Marx, “a speculative gnostic,” Voegelin begins by calling attention to a semantic sleight-of-hand in the Manuscripts, 1844. Marx asserts that human being is continuous with nature, which produced humanity; but he also asserts that humanity, in laboring to transform nature, has produced itself. In Voegelin’s comment, “The purpose of this speculation is to shut off the process of being from transcendent being and have man create himself.” Marx prestidigitates by “playing with equivocations in which ‘nature’ is now all-inclusive being, now nature as opposed to man, and now the nature of man in the sense of essential.”

Such a theory – or rather such a series of verbal slippages, masquerading as a theory – leaves hanging the question of origin. It invites questions. Marx, as Voegelin now registers, tries to interdict inquiry by labeling any doubt about his assertions “a product of abstraction.” Voegelin writes: “The questions of the ‘individual man’ are cut off by the ukase of the speculator who will not permit his construct to be disturbed. When ‘socialist man’ speaks, man has to be silent.”

In the case of Hegel, Voegelin begins by quoting from the preface to the Phenomenology: “The true form in which truth exists can only be the scientific system of it. To contribute to bringing philosophy closer to the form of science – the goal of being able to cast off the name of love of knowledge [Liebe zum Wissen] and become actual knowledge [wirkliches Wissen] – is the task I have set myself” (Hegel). Voegelin observes that Hegel’s phrase “love of knowledge” translates the Greek term philosophia directly and that his phrase “actual knowledge” corresponds to the Greek term gnosis. It follows that “if we translate them back into Greek… we then have before us the program of advancing from philosophy to Gnosis. Anticipating Marx’s antics, Hegel, according to Voegelin, “conceals the leap by translating philosophia and gnosis into German so that he can shift from one to the other by playing on the word ‘knowledge’” (Voegelin). Hegel’s system, as built up on this flimsy basis and as supposedly justifying it, Voegelin sees as a “swindle.” The system itself serves “libido dominandi” purely and simply, another example of the Gnostic desire for “dominion over being.”

As for Heidegger: Voegelin, like Jonas, discerns the kernel of nihilism in his discourse. Heidegger represents in Voegelin’s judgment “the mentality that expects deliverance from the evils of the time through the advent, the coming in all its fullness, of being construed as immanent.” Like the English Puritans who, trusting their God, nevertheless saw a need for “meritorious action” on their own, Heidegger contented himself not merely to await what in one moment he referred to as a “New God”; he became a Nazi, whose first act as state-approved

Rector of Freiburg was to complete the purgation of Jewish faculty members begun by his precursor. This contemptible cleansing action included Heidegger’s own teacher Edmund Husserl, whose emeritus privileges the new official suspended. Heidegger summarily dropped Hans Jonas from the doctoral program in philosophy, also on account of the pupil’s Jewishness.

IV. In Science Politics and Gnosticism, Voegelin repeatedly acknowledges that declaring secular modernity a sectarian religious triumph flouts the touchy self-understanding of secular modernity. He acknowledges also that his imputation concerning thinkers on the order of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger that they were intellectual swindlers can only, in a modern context, arouse the ire of a large part of his readership. Perhaps even some self-described conservative readers will feel a twinge of irritation on being made acquainted with a harsh critique of Nietzsche in combination with a sustained defense of normative religious ideas about the structure of existence. Such an emotion, were it to occur, would itself be a datum explicable within the framework of Voegelin’s analysis. The sentiment easily attaches to venerated figures – and Nietzsche would be one of them – to the effect that to question their assertions is somehow to transgress the permissible. Science, in its institutional aspect, also enjoys this type of tacit immunity from criticism whereas, on the other hand, casually bashing religion is more or less a sport for many self-consciously modern people, even those who identify themselves politically by their opposition to collectivist projects and political correctness.

Is God not dead, after all, whether one is a liberal or a conservative? Are values not simply assertions, without transcendent source or justification, and therefore implemented by power alone, quite as Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, all English professors, and the spokesmen for the European Union say they are? Is the cosmos not simply what we want it to be?

People hesitate to pose these questions because they hesitate to answer them. They know that the “correct” answer, the officially sanctioned answer, is “yes,” in both cases; they sense at the same time that “no” is at least as likely an answer as “yes,” maybe far more likely. Put more simply, the undeniable prohibition of questions overawes everyone so that everyone maintains silence. The fact that secular modernity defines itself, with increasing stridency and intolerance, as non-religious must be assessed, furthermore, by reference to the specific religiosity against which that antithetic self-definition occurs. In the Communist countries and in Nazi Germany, Christianity and Judaism filled this role, with the initial emphasis landing in Russia on Christianity and in Germany on Judaism. The Holocaust made anti-Semitism embarrassing for Western radicals (who are by definition on the Left) for fifty years, so that, in the United States and Europe, the Left had to concentrate on anti-Christian agitation. Now that the lingering super-ego effect of the Holocaust seems to have vanished, the Left has added open anti-Semitism to its “Glimpse of Sion’s Glory.” But the anti-Christian mood never weakens; it grows stronger. The analysis is not concluded, however.

The contemporary Left’s sympathy with Islam tells us that the Left is not, as it pretends, anti-religious, but merely anti-Christian and anti-Semitic. That is to say, anti-Western and anti-normative. The Left then gleefully welcomes whatever or whoever helps it in its program of annihilating Western (Judeo-Christian) norms. The Left indeed seems to share Islam’s contemporary religious excitation (nothing is as imitable as an adrenal spasm), so that the idea of “Globalism” can refer equally well to the latest Leftwing plan for utopian-redistributive “world governance,” using the jargon of “sustainability,” or the Islamist plan for a revived Caliphate. It is madness – “pneumopathology” – on either side. But it is also ferociously crusading, massively organized, and mutually supportive madness à deux that wants to dominate existence and monopolize the representation of truth. Voegelin’s last word on Gnosticism, the fifth, supplemental volume of Order and History, called In Search of Order, describes the spiritual straits of the early Twenty-First Century with startling lucidity.

Voegelin praises the faculty of imagination as the capacity by which people make sense of the inalterable givenness of existence, the fact that it is what it is whether one likes what it is or not. He writes movingly of the crucial difference between “the reality that reveals itself in imaginative truth” – that is, in symbols – and “a truth that reveals reality.” The first is the realm of investigation of philosophy, the nobility of the Platonic as opposed to the Marxian dialectic; the second is the instrument of Gnostic libido. Voegelin also addresses the subtle relation-in-tension between philosophy and its object, truth, preserving the Platonic insistence that the

philosopher loves truth without claiming to possess it; indeed, no desire for wisdom could exist if the subject already possessed wisdom, for, as Plato notes in the Symposium, no one seeks what he already calls his own.

Voegelin writes: “Imagination, as a structure in the process of a reality that moves towards its truth, belongs both to human consciousness in its bodily location and to the reality that comprehends bodily located man as a partner in the community of being. There is no truth symbolized without man’s imaginative power to find the symbols that will express his response to the appeal of reality; but there is no truth to be symbolized without the comprehending It-reality in which such structures as man with his participatory consciousness, experiences of appeal and response, language, and imagination occur.” These words contain a lifetime’s worth of meditation.

To participate in reality requires of the subject his willing postponement of any definitive knowledge of the whole (what elsewhere Voegelin criticizes as “the eidos of history”). The wise man “is a creative partner in the movement of reality toward its truth,” who must exercise patience and faith. Virtues being in short supply always, “this creatively formative force [imagination] is exposed to deformative perversion.” In such mischievous self-deception “the creative partner imagines himself to be the sole creator of truth.” In the last clause, we find a definition of Gnosticism, which Voegelin concludes is “a constant in history” and therefore part of the structure of reality that imaginative participation in existence needs to visualize and understand. The cumulus of words designating pathological egocentrism suggests that the Gnostic perversion really is an historical constant. Voegelin cites “such symbols as hybris, pleonexia, alazoneia tou biou, superbia vitae, pride of life, libido dominandi, and will to power.”

All such terms designate a subjective conviction of “autonomous ultimacy,” in which the person who feels the tension in existence cannot bear the tension and so “deform[s] the beginning of his quest into a Beginning that brings the End of all beginnings.”

The self-deceiver who initiates this spiritual swindle cannot entirely eliminate the awareness of his mendacity. The swindle pricks the self-deifier constantly, charging him with his pretentious bad faith. The Gnostic’s abyssal hypocrisy explains his need to propagate his delusion. The Gnostic requires the voluble seconding of others – as many others as possible – to assuage the guilt of his initial tying-into-knots of his own soul. Thus Voegelin characterized Gnosticism in all its forms as being “metastatic,” a term used in oncology to describe the tendency of cancerous cells to spread their destabilization to all cells surrounding them in a cascade of cytoplasm-corruption that overwhelms the body. Gnosticism must compel belief because it lacks belief. Gnosticism runs frightened of its own radical inadequacy from the moment it conjures itself into being. Gnosticism is likely therefore to be mortally self-limiting, but a Gnostic movement can do enormous civic and material destruction before it perishes ignominiously from its own spiritual rottenness.