voegelin's gnosticism reconsidered_eugene webb

7/28/2019 Voegelin's Gnosticism Reconsidered_Eugene Webb

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Voegelin's ''GnosticismReconsidered

For good or ill, Er ic Voegelin is prob ably b est known, espec iallyamong many who have not actually read him , for his denuncia -tions of some thing called "gnosticism."^ Even some who have readhim but rem ain skeptical abou t the value ofhis thought associate himwith a virtually monomaniacal anti-gnostic polemic. Thomas J. J.Altizer, for example, said (with an exaggeration that illustrates mypoint) that "Professor Voegelin finds everything to be Cnostic."^

On various occasions I have suggested tha t it is time to rethinkwhat it was Voegelin meant by tliis term and perhaps to find otherlanguage for it that would be less polemical, more prec ise, and morein line with current historical scholarship. I would like to take thisoccasion to explain in mo re detail why I think th e term "gnosticism"has beco me inappropriate for the analysis of the p hen om ena Voegelinwas trying to elucidate. T o do so, I will take up the prob lem s of th eterm or analytic category itself, considered in the light of develop-ments in historical scholarship that have taken p lace since the dayswhen Voegelin began to use it, and I will also discuss what in his ownthought Voegelin was trying to use this analytic category to illumi-nate. This will lead in tu rn to a consideration of the word 's ambiguityand occasional tenden tiousness in Voegelin's use, its tenuou sness asa historical explanation of later movem ents, and th e ways in whichthe use of a single term tended to obscure the variety of problems


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Voegelin's "Gnosticism" Reconsidered 49

gether with other phenomena under the single heading of gnosti-cism, is actually very different from what that word has usually be enused to mean.^ Michael Franz, in his Eric Voegehn and the Politicsof Spiritual Revolt: The Roots of Mo dem Ideology has writtenextensively on the some of the problems Voegelin used the idea of"gnos t ic i sm" to ana lyze and has sugges ted the te rm"pneumop athological consciousness" to replace it.'* This is probablya pretty good term for the m eaning Fran z focuses on, bu t I will beless concemed with finding new terms than with clarifying thevariety of issues that make it clear that new language is called for.

I think t he re is good reason to be lieve that if Voegelin w ere stillalive and carrying on his researc h today, he would himself be activelylooking for new ways to talk about the issues at the intersection ofspirituality, politics, and the culture of modernity he once used theterm "gnosticism" to refer to . Fo r one thing, he said at a conferenceon "Gnosticism and Modemity" at Vanderbilt University in 1978that he would probably not use that term if he were starting overagain because, besides what then went by that name, the ideas hewas interested in using it to address included many other strands,such as apocalypticism, alchemy, magic, theurgy, and scientism.^And for another, in his conversations with me when I was workingon my book on him in the late 1970s, he often spoke of the greatadvances being m ade in historical scholarship and the importance ofintegrating them into his work. H e spoke disdainfully of much of thecu rren t intellectual scene of that tim e, bu t for the work of historicalscholarship he had great respect. In particular, I remember howwhen I urged him to publish m ore of the voluminous manu script onthe history of political thought which he had abandoned when heshifted his focus, in Order and History, to the history of experienceand its symbolizations, he pro teste d that to publish any par t of it hewould have to study the historical research tha t had since been done


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50 T H E POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER

earlier man uscript. H e was aware in 1978 that m uch was hap peningin that a rea of scholarship, bu t I think even th en he had no idea howradically the picture was going to change in the next few decades.According to Geoffrey L. Price , in April of 1962 w hen V oegelin wasinvited by the Senate and Academic Gouncil of the University ofLondon to give the lecture, "Ancient Gnosis and Modern Politics,"he w rote the m , "The finding of th e G nostic Library in 1945 has mad eit possible to formulate theoretically the problem of Gnosis withresult of [sic] interesting parallels in modern political theory sinceHobbes."** Evidently he thought the discovery of actual "Gnostic"texts would confirm and aug m ent what he had b een using the termto say. But in fact in 1962 hardly any of that material had yet beenedite d a nd tran slated, and th e bulk of it was not generally availableuntil 1977 with the publication of The Nag Hammadi Library inEnglish J so Voegelin him self had proba bly seen little of the actualtexts except the Gospel According to Thomas, which had beenpublishe d, with a grea t deal of publicity, in 1959^ bu t which ha d littlebearing on any of the topics Voegelin had be en con cern ed with in hisown use of the term.^

Voegelin's understanding of ancient Gnosticism was basedmainly on his reading of volume I of Hans Jonas's Gnosis undSpdtantiker Geist, published in 1934,^" wh ich was largely rep ro -duced in Jonas's later The Gnostic Religion (1958), though in hisNew Science of Politics Voegelin also refers to works by Eu ge ne deFaye (1925), Simone Petremen t (1947), and H ans Sode rberg (1949),with the co m m ent, "The exploration of gnosis is so rapidly advancingthat only a study of the principal works of the last generation willmediate an understanding of its dimensions."^^

Well, the picture has changed enormously since the genera-tion Voegelin was referring to in those lectures of 1951, and it haschanged even more since the Gnosticism and Modernity confer-


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called Gnosticism tha n the dev elop m ent of a unified new o ne.Describing in 1957 his motivation in writing Gnosis und

Spdtantiker Geist, Jonas said that the generation investigatingGnosticism before him had bequeathed a "wealth of historicaldetail" but at the cost of an "atomization of the subject into motifsfrom separate traditions."^^ He felt himself, however, that beneathall the fragm ents he cou ld discern an essence: "That the re was sucha gnostic spirit, and the refore an essen ce of Gnosticism as a w hole,was the im pression which struck m e at my initial enco un ter with th eevidence, and it deep en ed with increasing intimacy. To explore andinterpret that essence became a matter, not only of historicalinterest, as it substantially adds to our understanding of a crucialperiod of Western mankind, but also of intrinsic philosophicalinterest, as it brings us face to face with one of the more radicalanswers of man to his pre dic am ent and with the insights which onlythat radical position could bring forth, and thereby adds to ourhum an und erstand ing in general." In that earlier work (though notin The G nostic Religion) Jonas also tried to extract from that essen ce"a metamorphized 'gnostic principle"' which he applied to ananalysis of later thinkers such as Origen and Plotinusoffering amodel for Voegelin's later effort to do the same with respect tom ode m movem ents such as Fascism and G omm unism and what heconsidered their medieval and early modem antecedents, such asthe Utopian movem ents stemm ing from Giaccomo da Fiore and theradical wing of the Reformation.^^

What was the essence of Gnosticism that Jonas thought hediscerned? Gnosticism, he said, was bom in the aftermath ofAlexander the G reat's opening up of the eastern and weste m worldsto exchange of symbols and worldviews. O ut of this cam e a syncre-tism into which were drawn traditional dualism, astrological fatal-ism, and traditional monotheism "yet with such a peculiarly new


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of man and world. The deity is absolutely transmundane, itsnature alien to that of the universe, which it neither created norgovems and to which it is the complete antithesis: to the divinerealm of light, self-contained and rem ote, the cosmos is opposedas the realm of darkness. The world is the work of lowly powerswhich though they may mediately be descended from Him do notknow the true God and obstruct the knowledge of Him in thecosmos over which they rule."'

Th ese "lowly powe rs" are the A rchons (or, if th er e is only on e,the Demiurge); they "collectively rule over the world, and eachindividually in his sph ere is a warde r of the cosmic prison," trying tokeep humans from winning freedom to return to their tme lifebeyond the cosmos: "Their tyrannical world-rule is calledheimarmenei, universal Fate, a concept taken over from astrologybut now tinged with the gnostic anti-cosmic spirit."'^These ideas are coupled in Gnosticism, for Jonas, with the ideatha t salvation is to be attained throu gh some form of special revela-tory knowledge, gnosis. This is not kno wledge in th e rational sense ,but has to do with matters that are inherently existential and inprinciple unknowable to rational inquiry. "The ultimate 'object' ofgnosis is Go d," says Jonas, and "its eve nt in the soul transform s theknower himself by making him a partaker in the divine exist-ence...."^^ Gnosis has the power to liberate the pneuma within thehuman individual, a divine element distinct from the human bodyand soul, which have been created by the A rchons in order to k eepthe pneuma imprisoned in the cosmos. The moral law, in Jonas'sconstruction of Gnosticism, is just one m ore produc t of the A rchonsdesigned to keep humans in ignorance and thereby hold themcaptive. There have been both ascetic and libertine versions ofGnosticism, says Jonas, but the libertine is the form in which the


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life in this world could be good under any circumstances.^ It is,therefore, a movement of spiritual revolt against the conditions ofreality under which human beings necessarily live. That is the"essence of Gnosticism" that Jonas intu ited a nd looked for ev idenceof in the fragmentary materials assembled by the historians andphilologists of the early twentieth century. He recognized himselfhow large was the role of intuition in his methodology, bu t defen dedit: "...this system has to be elicited as such from th e mass of disparatematerials, which yield it only und er p rop er questioning, that is, to aninterpretation already guided by an anticipatory knowledge of theunderlying unity. A certain circularity in the proof thus obtainedcannot be denied, nor can the subjective element involved in theintuitive anticipation of the goal toward which the interpretation isto move. "^ Jonas tm ste d the guess with which he started, and he wasrewarded by the widespread acceptance won by his very vividportrait of a pu rpo rted ancient religion. (I reme m ber being told inthe mid-1980s by one prominent figure in the field of religiousstudies that Jonas's was still his favorite Gnosticism despite whatm ore re cent scholars had uncovered in the confusing mix of materialunearthed at Nag Hammadi.)

But as I said, Voegelin believed in scholarship, and if he werehe re now I am confident h e would want to be ope n to even a radicalrevision both of Jonas's Gnosticism and his own. Of course thechange in our current knowledge of the ancient movements thathave gone by the nam e of Gnosticism would not in itself necessarilyinvalidate th e analytic category Voegelin con struc ted on the basis ofan earlier genera tion's ideas of the m , since the purp ose of Voegelin'scategory was not primarily to describe ancient phenomena but tohelp us understand some modem ones for which the evidence is agreat deal clearer. Even so, I think the category is of limitedusefulness for the purpo se to which he pu t it, as I wiU explain, and the


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begin with, we have to recognize something that Voegelin himselfwo uld have recognized as a major issue: that the w hole idea of the rebeing a Gnosticism, conceived as a movement with some kind ofcoherent core of beliefs is a modem construction. I rememberhea ring Voegelin say once at a lecture in 1976, wh en someone in theaud ience asked if he w ere an existentialist, "I am n ot an -ismist."^' H ewent on to explain that the various models of thought known bynames ending in "-ism" are mostly products of the eighteenthcentury, when there was a fashion for interpreting all sorts ofpattems of thought or spirituality as though they were "philoso-phies," in the En lightenm ent conception of what that m eant. Well,Gnosticism was itself exactly such am odem constmction. AsMichaelWilliams points out in his important Rethinking "Gnosticism": AnArgument for Dismantling a Dubious Category, "The term 'gnosti-cism' seems to have originated in the eighteenth century. On theothe r hand, th e words 'gnosis' and 'gnostic' are G reek term s that areactually found in some of the ancient sources.... However, whenused for the m ode rn category 'G nosticism,' 'Gno sis,' or 'the Gn osticreligion,' none of these terms has an ancient equivalent. Antiquityquite literally had no word for the perso ns wh o are the subject of thepresent studythat is, no single word. The category is a modernconstmction."^^ Similarly, ano ther pro m ine nt co ntem pora ry scholarin this field, Kurt Rudolph, has called the word "gnosticism" "amodem, deprecatory expression, a theologizing neologism."^^

A further problem is that it is difficult to find evidence of anyonefitting the designation as comm only used actually using the w ord todescribe himself. SaysW illiams,"... w e apparently do not have directevidence of a single so-called gnostic writer using the self-designa-tion gnostikosl"'^'* Until the N ag Ham m adi discovery in 1945what weknew ab out peop le called "gnostics"was from Ghristian heresiologists.It was generally assumed that there w ere people who used that na m e


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called gnosticism on the basis of the denunciations of theheresiolog ists, these texts too offer not even a single instan ce of theword "gnostic" used as a self-designation. According to Williams,"Numerous other self-designations do appear in these writings,including Christians, pneumatics, seed, elect, race of Seth, race ofthe Perfect Human, immovable race...but not gnostikos."^ Oddlyenough, the only really well attested use of the term as a self-designation is found in the w ritings of C lem en t of Alexandria, whow rote about th e ideal Christian gnostikos, by which he seem s to havemeant som ething Hke wh at today we m ight call a "Christian intellec-tual," not what we would now call a "gnostic."

This introduces another problem: it is only by being selectiveabo ut examp les (such as leaving out C lem ent) that on e was able, inthe m ann er of Jonas, to put tog ether a picture of a clear cut p atternof thinking rep rese nted by all the exam ples in the selection. In oth erwords, the term seems to have been broad and vague even in the useof Christian heresiologists. The most influential of these has beenIrenaeus of Lyons, who composed his five-volume "Exposure andRefutation of Knowledge [gnosis] Falsely So Called" around 180AD . Irena eus 's work may have been partially based on an earlier oneby Justin Martyr in the mid-second century, but no copies of thishave survived, and subseq uen t Ch ristian heresiologists took Iren aeus'scatalogue as their starting point and even copied some of hisdescriptions. The principal heresiologists after Irenaeus wereHippolytus of Rome in the early third century and Epiphanius ofSalamis in the late fourth century , but n eith er of these use d th e te rm"gnostic" as broadly as did Irenaeus and did not categorize asgnostics many of the figures or groups that Ire na eus had design atedby that word. Another heresiologist, Pseudo-TertulHan (perhapsmid-third century) does not use the term "gnostic" at all. Themodern use, on the other hand, generally encompasses under


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modern lists, are the Ebionites, Marcion, and the Encratites,including Tatian, although Jonas does count M arcion as a gnostic onthe basis of the distinction he m ade betw een the Co d revealed in theNew Testament and that represented in the Old.^^ Jonas, veryinfluentially, interpreted Irenaeus, on the basis of his title, asintending to categorize as "gnostic" every heretic he even m ention edin hiswork. W illiams, on th e othe r han d, po ints out th e fallacy in this:

Although Irenaeus's catalog has served as the ultimate inspirationfor the modem construction of "gnosticism" as a category, it wasnot itself really constructed for the purpose of grouping togethe rexamples of religious thought and practice on the basis of phe-nomenological similarity. Rather what all the items on Irenaeus 'slist share in common is deficiency (in his judgment) with respec tto Truth. 27

Wilhams goes on to offer a methodological critique that, al-though he is not aiming directly at Jonas, describes perfectly howJonas came up with the essence he intuited:

This is not to deny that there are phenomenological similaritiesamong some of the data cataloged by Irenaeus. It is only toemphasize how little we should de pend on his catalog itself to dothe grouping for us. That is, our methodological approach shouldnot be to attem pt to determ ine w hat "gnosticism is" by begin-ning with Irenaeus's catalog, or a large portion of it, and fromthis abstracting "gnosticism"'s characteristic features. ForIrena eus is not really trying to show us what "gnosticism" is, butwhat heresy is.

W illiams's bottom line is that as Irenae ns u sed th e term "gnostic," itseems to have been mainly a catch-all term for heresy in general.

Ru twh at about the word's utility as a term fo rpatterns of though t


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that accords very closely with th e se t of characteristics Jonas intuite dand so many later users of the te rm have accep ted from him: a spiritof anti-cosmic revolt stemming from radical dnalism and fatahsmwith respect to the tyrannical world-rule of Archons or D em iurges.Looking mo re closely at the texts from Nag H am m adi th at show howsome of the groups Irenaeus talked about, and others commonlyclassified as gnostic, really tho ug ht, W illiams poin ts out th at th er e isactually a lot of diversity among Demiurges and dualismsmorethan there is any point in trying to detail here.

Let me simply summarize Wilhams's findings briefly. Sometexts trac e a dualism back to the roots ofall being, before Dem iurges.Some describe D em iurges who are evil from the start and prod uceall later evil, although no information is given abo ut w he the r or notthey themselves derive from evil principles. Some talk aboutDemiurges who fell away from an original monistic perfection orwho began as good but later revolted. Some dem iurgic m yths are notanti-cosmic but treat the cosmos as having a proper place in thegreater sc hem e. In som e, the devolution of the D em iurges is part ofa providential divine plan aimed at an ultimate good. Some talkabout Demiurges who are not evil but good, or who grow intogoodn ess. Som e express hostility to the body, while others talk ab outthe perfection of the h um an and speak favorably of the body. Som eurge asceticism, and some are not ascetic, though Williams saysthere is no solid evidence for the libertinism Irenaeus attributed tosome Cnostic groups. Although some texts do speak of someindividuals as m em be rs of a spiritual race ("pn eum atics"), the re is nosolid evidence that their authors really thought in terms of adeterm inistic eHtism in which the pne um atics we re predes tined forsalvation w ithout the nee d for any striving and ach ievem ent; in fact,som e even talk as thoug h th e potential to belong to the spiritual raceis universal and open to development in everyone.


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played some role in shaping th e cosm os hence his suggestion thatthe term "gnostic" would be better dropped in favor of "Biblicaldemiurgical."^^ But this would not, for Williams, be a more precisedefinition of what was previously called gnosticism; it would be awhole new category:

Biblical demiurgical myth would not be just another name for"gnosticism" because the intent of the new category would beprecisely to cut free from baggage surrounding the old one. W hileit would be grouping most of the same myths together for studyand comparison, it would not make the series of mistakes I havetried to argue in this study have been made with the category"gnosticism." The defmition of the category "biblical dem iurgical"says nothing in itself about "anticosmism," and assumes nothing,and therefore it allows for the range of attitudes about th e cosmosand its creator(s) that are actually attested in the works. ^

So at the very least, the w ord "gnosticism" as used in the largerscholarly world has beco m e highly prob lem atic with regard to bo thits meaning and its usefulness as a description of the phenomenoncalled by that name in the history of religionsall of which lendssupport to M ichael Franz's suggestion that "one can do m uch m orein the way of corroborating Voegelin's basic thesis if the analysis iscon du cted at the level of pat tern s in consciousness tha n at the levelof specific traditions and movements in history."^"

Another problem with the word "gnosticism" should also beclear by now: all the evidence we have suggests the term has beendepre catory and inhe rently polem ical from its earliest use. As no tedabove, for Ire nae us, th e source of most later use of th e term , it seemsto have been virtually equivalent to "heretical" or simply "false."Voegelin's own use of the w ords "gno stic" and "gnosticism" was alsopolem ical, and I have suggested on ea rlier occasions that those w ho


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Centre of the University of Manchester, "If Voegehn is going tospeak to the post-1989 world, which is torn less by universalistideologies than by ethnic, religious, and nationahst particularisms,it will not be throu gh his opposition to ideologies that have alreadylost most of their force but through his contributions to a positiveconception of human universality."^^

To explore what bearing Voegelin's critique of what he called"gnosticism" may have on the funda m ental issues of hu m an univer-sahty, I would hke to turn now to the variety of ways he talked abou tgnosticism in his writings over the years, som etime s w ith a politicalem phasis, some times w ith a philosophical one. It wasw hen his focuswas on the political that Voegelin tended to be most polemicalunderstandably, since some of the political ph eno m ena that arousedhim (Nazism and Soviet communism, in both their domestic andtheir imperial modes) really did deserve strong opposition, and thefact that they we re abe tted in E urop ean and Am erican societies bypeople who refused to recognize their combination of folly andbarbarism was all the m ore exacerbating to him . But underlying th erheto ric of political polem ic the re was always a serious philosop hicalfoundation, which was an expression of profound existential andspiritual reflections. It is the se reflections and tha t foundation thatare the h ea rt of Voegelin's tho ugh t, and it is because I hope they willnot be lost in a general dismissal of his thought as outdated or"conservative"^ that I raise the question of w heth er the language ofa critique of "gnosticism" is really the m ost appro priate and effectivefor communicating what is really important in what Voegelin wastrying to say.

Just to co nsider briefly V oegehn's use of th e ide a of "gnosticism"in his more pohtical writings, we might consider first the way hedevelops it in wh at are probab ly the two m ost polemical of his books.The New Science of Politics and Science, Politics, and Gn osticism.


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3 . salvation from the evil of the world is possible4. if the order of being is changed,5. and this is possible in history6. if one knows how. {Gnosis is the knowledge aboutReading along through the six, they seem to flow logically

eno ugh that som e reade rs may not have noticed how they eUde fromw hat in VoegeUn's own day was a standard, recognizable descriptionof something quite different. The first three characteristics are inline with Jonas's idea of the essence of ancient Cnosticism. Thefourth begins to introduce an idea from Voegehn's own system ofthou ght, and th e fifth and sixth depa rt from th e standa rd use en tirelyin their em phasis on salvation within history throug h chang es on e isable to bring abo ut in the world, w herea s Jonas's gnostics de spaire dof th e world a nd its history and looked for salvation elsew here. Thiswould be less of a prob lem if Voegelin w ere simply trying to extendthe meaning he found in Jonas, but by placing his emphasis onintramundane salvation through human action and reinterpretinggnosis as know ledge of how to perform that action he does no t justextend it, but transforms it.

Th en a few pages later, Voegelin pu ts the seal on this transfor-m ation by saying, "All gnostic m ovem ents are involved in the projectof abolishing the constitution of being, with its origin in divine,transcen dent being, and replacing it with a wo rld-imm anent orderof bein g, the perfe ction of which lies in the realm of hu m an action."''^He does not say "all modern" or "all immanentist" gnostic move-ments, but simply "all gnostic movements." Nor does he intend itonly to refer to m ode rn m ovem ents, since w he re he says this he hasjust be en talking abou t the twelfth cen tury Christian figure, Joachimof Fiore, whom he also describes in The New Science of Politics asa "Cnostic prophet."^"There has already been a certain amount of controversy over


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eviden ce: "The econ om y of this lectu re does n ot allow a descriptionto th e gnosis of antiquity or of the history of its transmission into theW es tem M iddle Ages; enough to say that at the time gnosis was aliving religious c ul tu re on which m en cou ld fall back."^' In reaUty, hehad no concrete evidence to offer, although I am sure he thoughtthere must be some (just as he expected the Nag Hammadi docu-m en ts wouldjustify his use of the w ord). I think that Voegelin is righttha t the Th ird Kingdom symbolism deriving from Joachim has bee nenormously influential on the medieval and modem imagination,^^but my point here is only that Voegelin begins with a definition ofgnosticism that seems to be grounded historically in the ancientfigures cond em ned as heretics by Irenaeu s and taken as expressionsof an essence by Jonas, and then he elides from that to laterphenomena with a meaning that reverses what for Jonas and manyothers had been the key element in the mix: the rejection of thisworld in favor of something radically transcendent.Voegehn departed still further from the standard model ofthinking abou t gnosticism when h e exp anded his concep tion of it toinclude intellectual, emotional, and volitional varieties. These con-sist of "speculative penetrations of the mystery of creation andexistence" (the intellectual variety), enthusiasm (the emotionalvariety), and "activist redemption of man and society, as in theinstance of revolutionary activists like Co m te, Marx, or H itler" (thevolitional variety) . ^ It was th e enorm ou s brea dth of this expansiontha t m ade it possible for him to make such a statement as, "By gnosticmovements we mean such movements as progressivism, positivism,Marxism, psychoanalysis, communism, fascism, and national social-ism.'"*" One can see where Altizer got his caricature of Voegelin assom eone "who finds everything to be gnostic." A term this b road,this dubious (with regard to actual historical continuity), and thispolemical is hardly well suited to the more serious philosophical


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ancient gnosticism was "the interaction between expansion of em-pir e and differentiation of consciousness."'*^ Th e expansion of e m -pire gave rise to dissatisfaction with the present situation (the firstcha racte ristic in his list of six that we saw above), bu t that dissatisfac-tion took a special form du e to the fact tha t some peo ple we re alreadyexperiencing and trying to und ersta nd what Voegelin calls a "differ-entiation of consciousness," one of the major th em es of his thoug ht.There are two distinct thmsts in Voegelin's thought vwthin the ideaof differentiation of consciousnessw hat he called noetic (intellec-tual or rational) differentiation and pneumatic (spiritual).

The no etic differentiation was essentially the self-discovery an dappropriation of the reasoning mind that took place among theclassic philosophers, the realization that at least part of what weknow, we know by engaging in the methodical procedures ofinquiry, with attention to processes of interpretation and criticalreflection. B ut the re was also someth ing else that could be know n ina different way, and this was w here spiritual exp erience, th e p ne u-matic differentiation, and cognitio fidei (the knowledge that takesplace by faith)'*^ came in. Voegelin also sometimes called this"existential consciousness" or "eschatological consciousness." Thekey element in both the noetic and pneumatic differentiations wasthe realization of a difference, within our concrete, personal expe-rience of existence, betwe en an imm anen t pole (which we call "m an"or "ourselves") and a radically transcendent pole, which can go byvarious names such as "the Beyond" or "Cod" or "Being." Thehum an experience of existence then becom es that of what Voegehncalled a "Between" (translating the Greekmetaxy), that is, betweenthe two poles. This is experienced as a condition of tension, espe-cially of longing for what is Beyond or being pulled by it. So thephilosopher experiences questioning as a seeking and being drawnby potentially knowable truth , and th e m ystic experiences the soul's


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ce nte r to a noetic periphery.'"'^ In both differentiations it is the sameBeyond, th e same pole with its tension of seeking and being d rawn.The difference is only in the way the philosopher or the mysticrelates to the Beyond. One relates to it through questioning, theother through prayer.

Before th ese two differentiations, th ere was wh at Voegelin calls"the p rima ry exp erience of the cosmo s." This was an earlier way ofapprehending the field of human experience. Imaginatively, it wasexperienced as a cosmos full of gods; that is, the transcen den t p olewas experienced as present in the field but dispersed within it insuch a way that it was identified with the variety of particularintracosmic forces. Hence there were gods of fertility, the weather,and so on. Both the im m anent and transc end ent poles of experiencewere present in this primary experience, but they were inter-mingled, and the s truc ture of th e field was unclea r. Cognitively, th eprimary experience of the cosmos was known by a human mindembedded in its myths; the structure of reality was grasped imagi-natively as the cosmos full of gods, and bo th cosmos and gods wereknown in the stories told about them. Classic philosophy was bornin the process (the noetic differentiation) in which the hu m an mindand imagination ceased to be simply em bed de d in their myths butdeveloped a refiective distance that made it possible to think morecarefully and critically abo ut th e con ten ts of th e field and its bipo larstructure. The prophetic movement in Israel was motivated by thecorresponding pneumatic differentiation of radical transcendencefrom the my thic imagery of a tribal god who cam e to be und ersto odas the radically transcen dent, m onotheist God.

When differentiation of consciousness takes place, Voegelinsaid, it is bo th exciting and distu rbing ; it is also sub tle, delicate, a ndvery susceptible to distortion. It can give rise to the ex ubera nt playof dialectics and also to feelings of a gulf betw een us and the Beyond


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the Beyond becomes an individual entity named "Cod," and webecome entities called human beings, which exist separately fromthe being of that other entity called Cod. (Just as the noeticdifferentiation could slip into hypostatization of th e dynam ic ope ra-tions of interpretation and critical refiection into faculties called"intellect" and "reason.") As Voegelin pu t it in "R eason: The ClassicExperience," "If man exists in the metaxy, in the tension 'betweengod and m an,' any construction of man as a wo rld-imm anent entitywill destroy the meaning of existence, beca use it deprives man of hisspecific hum anity. The poles of the ten sion m ust not be hypostatizedinto objects independent of the tension in which they are experi-en ce d as its poles."''''

Both differentiations were susc eptible to what Voegelin liked tocall a "derailm ent" in to gnostic forms. So, for exam ple, he says withregard to the pneumatic differentiation's implications for ancientCnostics that "[t]he Cnostic imbalance of consciousness...causes asplit to run through divine reality, separating the daimonic powersof the world from the pneumatic divinity of the Beyond" and that"[wjhile these early movements attempt to escape from the Metaxyby splitting its poles into the hypostases of this world and theBeyond, the modem apocalyptic-Cnostic movements attempt toabolish th e Metaxy by transfo rming th e Beyond into this world."'*^ Inthis instance, Voegelin remains close to the usual meaning of theterm "gnostic," bu t in his general usage h e ex tende d it in such a waythat it became a collective name for every possible way ofimmanentizing the transcendent polevery far from its usualmeaning.

He sees the various forms of distortion as virtually inevitablecompanions to the pneumatic differentiation in the prophets ofIsrael and th e early Christian s, since it is so easy to slip from on e tothe o ther. In "T he C ospel and C ulture," for example, he says, "The


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cosmos full of gods has to yield to the e xperien ce of em ine nt divineprese nce in the mo vem ent of the soul in the metaxy," and "the areaof existential consciousness, thou gh em ine nt of rank, is only one areaof reality. If it is overemphasized, the cosmos and its gods willbecome the 'alien earth' of the Cnostics and Hfe in the despisedworld will hardly be worth living. The tendency toward this imbal-ance is certainly present in the gospel movement."^^

In fact, the pne um atic differentiation is so elusive and therefo reso inhere ntly fragile, th at in the early Christian e xperienc es, whichVoegelin thought reached the historical high point of pneumaticdifferentiation, it was particularly susc eptible to de railm ent. As hepu t it in The Ecumenic Age, "Co nsidering the history of Cnosticism,with the great bulk of its manifestations belonging to, or derivingfrom, the C hristian orbit, I am inclined to recognize in the epiph anyof Christ t he great catalyst that m ade eschatological consciousness anhistorical force, both in forming and deforming humanity.'"'^ Spiri-tual hopes can easily becom e im m anentized by the imagination ashop es for a sup er-terres trial p aradise w ith virtually terrestrial palmtrees and fountains, and just as easily they can slide into becominghop es for a terrestr ial parad ise in which each will give according tohis ability and take only according to his ne ed. O r the auth enticcognitio fidei that knows Cod as the B eyond of the B etween can b eimm anentized into the belief that Co d is a god, dragging, as it we re,the Beyond into a world that is no longer a Between: "Unless theUnknow n Co d is the undifferentiated divine prese nce in the back-gro und of the specific intraco sm ic gods, he is inde ed a god unkn ow nto the prim ary experience of the cosmos. In that case, however, ther eis no process of revelation in history, nor a millennial Movementculminating in the ep iphany of the Son of Cod, bu t only th e irruptionof an extra-cosmic god into a cosmos to wh ose m ankind h e h ithe rtohad been hidden."'"*


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described, the attem pt to "imm anentize" the B eyond, that is, to treatit as though it w ere an intram und ane entity. In the latter case. Co ddoes not become a god, but is reduced to an ultimate knowable, akind of supreme idea that has finally become thoroughly under-stood. Voegelin's classic case of this is C.W .F. Hegel's " attem pt toreduce the Logos of revelation to the logos of philosophy, and thelogos of philosophy to the dialectics of consciousness. Philosophy{Liehe zum Wissen) was supposed to advance toward Cnosis{wirkliches Wissen)and that could be done only through anaes-thetizing the philosopher's sensitiveness to the bord erhn e betw eenthe knowable and the unknowable, for the point at which theknowable truth of order is rooted in the Eros of the transcendentSophon" (that is, the Beyond as the transcendent pole of noeticseeking that makes possible the refiective distance that keeps onefrom identifying any one interpretation of experience with truth assuch).''" Referring to both Hegel and Friedrich Engels in FromEnlightenment to Revolution, Voegelin states this issue in the w ords,"The fallacy of gnosis consists in the immanentization of transcen-dental truth."^^ Extending this idea further to refer to all efforts tored uc e th e totality of the knowable to what can only be known by wayof the method s of the na tural sciences, Voegelin says, "Scientism hasremained to this day one of tlie strongest Cnostic movements inWestern society..." and goes on to speak of "the immanentist pridem science."^'

Th e imm anentizing negations of both the noetic and the p neu -matic differentiations of consciousness easily issue into the types ofpolitical utopianism or "realized eschatology" that Voegehn calledpohtical gnosticism. So, for example, he says of Karl Marx, "TheMarxian gnosis expresses itself in the conviction th at th e m ovem entof the intellect in the consciousness of the empirical self is theultimate source ofknowledge for the understand ing of the un iverse.


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utopianism has a religious dim ension, even wh en, as in M arx's case,it denie s the value of traditio nal religion; its goal is radical transce n-den ce realized as radical im m anen ce. So, Voegelin speaks of M arx's"gnosticism" as "parousiastic," referring to the religious hop e for t hetransformation of the world through divine action into a trueparad ise: "The aim of parousiastic gnosticism is to destroy the ord erof being, which is expe rienced as defective and unjust, an d throu ghman's creative pow er to rep lace it with a perfect and just order."^^This effort tries to reverse or suppress th e insight of the pn eum aticdifferentiation regard ing the radical distinctness of the tran sce nd en tpole of the experiential field. The pneumatic differentiation"dedivinized" the world by bringing forward that distinctness;parou siastic gnosticism "redivinizes" it.^'' Bu t this does no t have theeffect of restoring th e prima ry experien ce of the cosm os, which h aditself involved a healthy appre ciation of wh at lies beyo nd us, even ifits symbolism blurred the distinction between the Beyond and itsfinite pa rticipa tions . As Voegelin explains it, "Modern re-divinizationhas its origins rath er in Christianity itself, deriving from componentsthat were suppressed as heretical by the universal church" that is,from ancient Cnosticism.'^

Here again we see Voegehn eliding from the conventionalpictu re of ancient C nostic wo rld-rejection to m od em efforts to builda perfect world that would exclude any real transcendence. But inthis Voegelin is nevertheless making an important point: that therecan be forms of m od em world-affirmation that imply de ep hostilitytoward transcend ence and thereby deform the o rder of our existen-tial stm cture , or, as Voegelin also pu ts it, they close us off against thetran sce nd ent pole of consciousness.^^ To do this requ ires force andentails hostility; hence the angry atheism that animates attempts tobuild a new heaven on earth: "And taking control of being furtherrequires that the transcendent origin of being be obhterated: it


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his tradition effectively. In his 1974 essay, "Reason: the ClassicExperience," Voegelin talks about the positive insights into thestmcture of human existence among the philosophers of classicalCr eec e, and he also talks about what can go wrong w hen peop le oflesser insight or perv erse peo ple will defy tha t stm ctu re, b ut he doesso without the use of the words "gnostic" or "gnosticism." He talksabou t th e Hellen ic differentiation of"nous," abou t Plato's awa renessof "tension toward the grou nd of existence," and abou t how his wayof speaking about it "left consciousness open to the future oftheophany, to the pneumatic revelations of the Judaeo-Christiantype as well as to the later d ifferentiations of mysticism and oftoleran ce in doctrinal matters."^^ H e also talks about how "th ephenomena of existential disorder through closure toward thegrou nd of reality" had b een observed and analyzed from the time ofHerachtus.'^ He talks about how "the shattering experiences ofecu m enic imperialism and, in its wake, existential disorientation asa mass phenom enon"' '" both stimu lated the philosophers to developa language with which to bring th eir insights to "conceptu al fixation"and gave rise to the "agnoia ptoiodes" (fearful ignorance) andanxietas that stimulated aspematio rationis (rejection of reason)'and would eventually produce the parallel modern closure of thesoul that Heimito von Doderer in the twentieth century calledApperzeptionsverweigerung (refusal to apperceive).''^ Voegehnoffers an analysis that effectively takes account of the hostility inthis to transcendence and the order of being, "the decapitation ofbeing" or "m urder of Co d" referred to above. Drawing on Plato'slang uag e, Voegelin discusses this as "eristics," the negative, de ath -seeking, counterpart to the open, hfe-seeking, exercise of reasoncalled "dialectics." "The differentiation of Life and Death as themoving forces behind Reason and the passions," says Voegehn, isworked out in Plato's syinbohsm of reason as open exploration of th e


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Voegelin's "Gnosticism." Reconsidered 69

Plato uses the term dialectics ([Philebus] 17a). Since, however,man's consciousness is also conscious of participating in the polesof the m etaleptic tension (i.e., in the Apeiron [the Boundless] andNous), and the desire to know is apt to reach beyond the limits ofparticipatory knowledge, there will be thinkers"those who areconsidered wise among men these days"who are inclined to letthe In-Between reality (ta mesa) escape (ekpheugein) them intheir libidinous rush toward cognitive mastery over the hen [theOne] or the apeiron. To de note this type of speculative thoughtPlato uses the term eristics (17a).^^

Here we see, I think, a clear analysis of th e issues Voegelin often use dthe w ord "gnosticism" to designate, b ut in this essay he manages tooffer it without once falling back on that word (and dragging in withit all its manifold relevant or irrelevant connotations).

I hope that by this time the reader can see both that Voegelin'suse of the language of "gnosticism" involves some serious pro blem sand that he was nevertheless trying to use it to address importantissues regarding the fundamental order of hum an existence and th eways it can fall into disorder. To sum up briefiy, the p roble m s withVoegehn's use of that language are:

1. It begins by claiming to draw out th e imphcations of histori-cal research on th e an cient gnostics bu t doe s so in ways that confiictconfusingly with the meanings given the word by the leadingscholars in that field of research in his own time.

2. Ev en if his use of the te rm had be en in line with tha t of thescholars of his tim e, the state of scholarship has advanced consider-ably in the last half century , in directions th at call into que stion eventhe most widely accepted scholarship Voegelin drew on.

3 . Ev en if the an cient C nosticism h e appea led to as the sourceof what he called modem "gnosticism" had not been so clearly


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4. When the word "gnosticism" appears in the writings ofVoegehn and V oegelinians, it brings with it a host of associations thatare hkely to confuse th e issues its use is in ten de d to clarify, or at leastputs out a bone of contention that is hkely to distract many readersfrom the serious problems Voegelinian research tries to bring totheir attention.

5. Voegehn's own use of the term, though richly meaningfulwhen one goes into it in depth and sets aside all the side issues ittends to arouse, covers so many distinct problems that its veryrichness makes it seem overly general and imprecisea problemVoegehn seem s to have recognized himself whe n h e said in 1978, asI m entio ned earhe r, that besides what was the n usually called by thatname, the ideas he was interested in using it to address includedmany othe r strands, such as apocalypticism, alchemy, magic, theurgy,and scientism.

Voegehn's analyses of the universal stmcture of human exist-en ce and th e symbolisms that have developed to express the insightsinto that stm ctu re that have em erged in the course of history werestated in terms specific to the many facets of those matters headdre ssed. H e did not try to use some single term to cover them all.But the manifold forms that can be taken by all the various ways ofm isund erstand ing and distorting those insights, philosophical, the o-logical, spiritual, poh tical, psychological, literary, and so on, Voegelinoften tried to cover with what we can now see was a single, veryprob lem atic term , "gnosticism," tha t is likely to confuse m ore thanto clarify. Also, I hope I may be permitted to add, that term'spolemical associations pose the danger that what tries to operate asobjective analysis may easily come to sound merely partisan in theears of many in the potential audience for further Voegehnianresearch and those same associations m ay tem pt some who wouldcarry forward that research to lapse into a kind of lazy polemicism


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over the difficulties involved in establishin g the pre senc e of spiritualdisease in th e objects of the ir ridicule."*^ These a re issues that thosewho would honor Voegelin's achievement and seek to extend it inthe future in their ovra rese arch w ould do well to consider carefully.

Fugene WebbUniversity of Washington

N O T F S1. The term is usually capitahzed when referring to the (sup-

pose d) ancient religion of Cnosticism , an d I will capitalize it wh enreferring primarily to that. I will leave it uncapitalized wh en refer-ring, as here, to a more general phenomenonalthough I shouldstate from th e start that the real existence of a gene ral ph en om eno nsufficiently unified to be designated by such a name seems morequestio nable now, as I shall explain, than it did a few de cade s ago.That there was a sufficiently consistent pattern of thinking amongmany ancient figures traditionally called "Cnostics" to allow us tospeak of an ancient religion of Cnosticism has also become highlyquestionable. (Voegehn's own pubhcations follow no consistentpattern regarding capitahzation of the word.)

2. In a conversation reported by John Wilham Corrington in"Order and History: The Breaking of the Program," Denver Quar-terly, no. 3 (Autumn, 1975): 122.

3. See especially his Sacralizing the Secular : the RenaissanceOrigins of Modemity (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UniversityPress, 1989) and The Modem Age and the Recovery of AncientWisdom: A Reconsideration of Historical Consciousness, 1450-1650 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991).


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ruary 1997), archived at http://vax2.concordia.ca/~vorenews/7. Leiden: E.J, Brill; San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1977.

French translations appeared in 1978, Before this, scholars werepre tty m uch re stricted to working with facsimile cop ies of the Co ptictexts as they were made available. For an indignant account of theslowness with which the Nag Hammadi documents were madeavailable, see Han s Jonas's supp lem ent to the second ed ition of TheGnostic Religion; The Message of the Alien God and the Beginningsof Christianity (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), pp. 290-291,8. Leiden: E,J. Brill; New York: Harper and Row, 1959.

9. Voegehn was also acquainted with the descriptions andsumm aries of some of the Nag H am m adi m aterial in Jean D oresse's,The Secret books of the Egyptian Gnostics: An Introduction to theGnostic Coptic Manuscripts Discovered at Chenoboskion, trans.Philip M airet (London : Hollis & Carter , 1960), proba bly in its 1958French original.10. Jonas published a second volume in 1954 and was workingon a third but never finished it.

11 . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952, p. 124 n. 25,Voegehn had also read the Erano s address, "Cnosis and T ime ," byHe nri-Charles P uech published in the 1951 Eranos Jahrbuch and inEnghsh translation in Man and Time, Papers from the EranosYearbooks 3, ed, Joseph Cam pbell (New York: Panth eon, 1957), bu tthis essay was based almost entirely on the traditional heresiologicalsources rather than on the Nag Hammadi manuscripts,

12. The Gnostic Religion, second edition, revised, p, xvii.13. Hans Jonas told me in 1987 that Voegelin had not under-

stood his conception of Cnosticism. My own impression was thatVoegelin understood quite well what Jonas said about Cnosticismbut modified the idea for his own purposes, as I will explain below.

14. The Gnostic Religion, pp , 23 , 26,


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what he meant by Cnosticism (see note 13, above). Jonas's ownapplication of the category to modern phenomena was to what hecalled nihihsm (which included, for him, Sartrean existentialism)rath er th an, as in Voegelin, to unrealistic Utopian m ovem ents, whichwere trying to bring about changes that were hoped to offer theprom ise of a be tte r life in this world. See The Gnostic Religion, ch.13, "Epilogue: Cnosticism, Existentiahsm, and Nihihsm," pp . 320-340.

20, Ibid,, p. 24.21. The title of the le cture was "Modem Dogmatism," dehvered

at the University of Washington in March, 1976,22. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996, p, 7, Em-

phasis in original.23. "'Cnosis' and 'Cnosticism': The Problems of Their Defini-

tion and T heir R elation to the W ritings of the New T estam ent," inThe New Testament and G nosis: Essays in Honour of RobertMcLachlan Wilson, ed, A,H,B, Logan and A.J.M. Wedderbum(Edin burgh : T.&T. Clark, 1983), p. 28, quoted inWilliams, Rethink-ing "Gnosticism," p. 263.

24. Rethinking "Gnosticism," p, 32,25, Ibid, Ellipsis in original.26, Jonas also includes the P oim ander of H erm es Trismegistus,

which is not in Irenaeus, Stephen A, McKnight, in the works citedabove, has shown the inapp ropriate ness of this, given the essenc e ofCno sticism that Jonas was trying to assimilate this to.

27. W ilhams, p. 45.28, Ibid., pp . 51-52, 265,29, Ibid,, p, 265,30, Franz, op, cit., p. 102.31. See my essay, "Eric Voegelin at the E nd of an Era: Differ-entiations of Consciousness and the Search for the Universal," in


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NEWS Volume III, No. 1 (February 1997); and my essay inresponse to critics, "Persuasion and the Problem of PolarizingRhetoric ," VOECELINRESEARCH NEWS, 4, no, 4 (August1998). The latter two are archived at http://vax2.concordia.ca/-vorenews / .

32. "Eric Voegehn at the E nd of an Era," p. 168,33. A note on Voegelin's supposed "conservatism": Voegehn

often expressed his wariness of political parties both of the left andof the right. One of the few figures involved in politics (though nothimself a politician) whom Voegelin exp ressed unqualified adm ira-tion for was John R, Commons, an economist at the University ofW isconsin who was a major voice for political reform m ovem ents inthe early twentieth century. Commons favored redistribution ofwealth for the sake of greater equahty, a minimum wage, unioniza-tion of labor, and hmitations on the hours of labor that employerscould demand. Legislation drafted in Wisconsin by John R, Com-mon s and his stude nts served as mo dels for me asures e nac ted in th eNew D eal, including social security. See Ro bert W ilham Fog el, TheFourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism (Chi-cago: U. of Chicago Pre ss, 2000), pp . 117 ,129, See also Lafayette C,Harter, Jr. ,/ohnR , Commons: His Assault on Laissez-Faire(Corvai]is,Oregon: Oregon State University Press, 1962), Cf. also MichaelFra nz, op . cit., p, 14 on how Voegelin's mo re conservative adm irersdo not give sufficient atten tion to Voegelin's apprec iative cr itiqu e ofsome features of Marx in From Enlightenment to Revolution.Th om as J.J, Altizer wrote th at "Voegelin, hke Ricoeur, is radical andreactionary at once and altog ether, thu s baffling all who at tem pt toemp loy him eithe r for political or theological ends." Journal of theAmerican Academy of Religion, 43 (1975): 758.

34. Science, Politics, and Gnosticism: Two Essays (Chicago:Henry Regnery, 1968), pp. 86-88, This title will subsequently be


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37. NS?, p. 124.38.1 wrote about this, before I had ever read Voegelin, in The

Dark Dove: The Sacred and Secular in Modem Literature (Seattleand London: University of Washington Press, 1975), pp. 22-24,34-35, and 132-133.

39. Ibid.40. SPG, p. 83,41. Order and History, vol. 4 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State

University Press, 1974), p. 21. This title will subsequently beabbreviated as OH, 4.42. This is not to be m isund erstoo d as simply an end run arou nd

ordinary processes of rational knowing. The cognitio fidei is not acognitive grasp of a transcendent object; it is more like a sense ofw hat one is drawn towa rd ultimately, a sense of the ultim ate goal oflove. And if one thinks abou t th at in any land of objective te rm s thes eare only analogical, beca use w hat the Beyond u ltimately is in reahtyis better to be understood as Subject, not object.

43 . OH, 4: 244.44. The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 12: Published

Essays 1966-1985 (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana StateUniversity Press ), p, 280. Originally pub hsh ed in Southern Review,n,s., 10 (1974): 237-64.

45. OH, 4: 234, 237-38.46. Collected Works, 12: 207, 209, Originally pubhshed inDonald B. Miller and Dikran Y. Hadidian, eds., Jesus and Man'sHope (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh Theological Seminary Press, 1971),pp. 59-101.

47. OH, 4:20.48. "The Cospel and Culture," Collected Works,12: 210.49. Order and History, vol. 2: The World of the Polis (Baton

Rou ge: Louisiana S tate University Press, 1957), p, 17. See also SPG,


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50. Ed. John H, Hallowell (Durham, N,C,: Duke UniversityPress, 1975), p. 265. This title will subsequently be abbreviated asFER.

51. NSP, p. 127.52. FER, p. 273,53. SPG, p, 53.54. NSP, p. 107.55. Ibid.56. Cf. NSP, p. 165.57. SPG, p. 54.58. Collected Works, 12: 266.59. Ibid,, p, 274.60. Ibid.61. Ibid,, pp, 275-276,62. Ibid,, p, 278,63. Ibid,, p . 28 3.64. Franz, op, cit., p, 14.


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