Our Gnostic Moment
One question I like asking people is, if they went to college, which books had a special impact on either their thinking or their general approach to life. You can tell quite a bit about a person by how he or she answers that question. I also like finding out what thinkers exerted a significant influence on them.
My own list is rather lengthy, but my sophomore year in college I read two books that were not assigned for class but were coincidentally recommended to me by professors in two different courses, and the overlap between them helped frame my own academic journey. One book was Hans Jonas’s The Gnostic Religion and the other was Eric Voegelin’s Science, Politics, and Gnosticism.
Voegelin became one of the most influential thinkers in shaping my thinking about political life. An émigré who was forced to flee his native Austria in 1938 because he was hunted by the Nazis, Voegelin repatriated to America where he exerted no small influence in the American academy. In 1953 Time magazine ran a long feature story on Voegelin wherein the editors questioned with their readers whether “In the U.S. today, is there enough unity about fundamentals to make for a sensible and fruitful debate on public policies? Are the limits of debate and the final standards of policy clearly and generally understood? To clarify such fundamentals is the duty of the intellectuals, especially the philosophers.” Living in a world where “the idea of an objective, unchanging moral law is hotly denied,” the editors wondered whether anyone could cut through “the resulting confusion, the lack of a common ground” that left “the man in the street” feeling hopelessly lost and at odds.
Voegelin’s published work amounts to 33 volumes of dense prose designed to cut through the moral confusion by identifying its sources and developments, and attempting to get at the animating experiences of the persons who were the source of confusion. The stakes were high: Voegelin experienced firsthand the Nazi terror that made him make a midnight escape out of his home. (He had published in 1933, the year Hitler came to power, two books criticizing the Nazis for their ideas concerning race.) By 1953 the rising tide of communism deepened concerns about totalitarian regimes and led to a series of books trying to analyze and understand its appeal. But no author did so with the clarity that Voegelin did, for he understood that the political crisis resulted from a much deeper spiritual one.
The spiritual crisis leading to gnostic responses typically results when people feel powerless in their practical situation. This is generally true of times of political expansion: the rise of empire and its defense in cosmopolitan ideas. One would expect an age of globalization to create deep anxiety in the population, for politics always involves the relationship of parts to the whole, and when the whole becomes unintelligible the parts lost their sense of place within it. The first and primary rupture that leads to gnostic speculation is this between part and whole, and people conclude that the whole is therefore not just meaningless but in some sense hostile. The rationality and intelligibility of the cosmos itself is put into doubt. This rupture of cosmos and logos means that the logos, to the degree there is one, now gets collapsed into each discrete part.
For Jonas and Voegelin both, the essential condition leading to gnostic speculation is one of alienation. The more alienated people are, the most susceptible they are to the temptations of Gnosticism. So what are these, exactly? What are the features of Gnosticism. While Jonas spells those out in great detail, Voegelin gives a succinct formulation:
The Gnostic is dissatisfied with his situation. This is not surprising as most people can find reasons to be dissatisfied with the situation in which they find themselves. But the more widespread such dissatisfaction, the greater the danger.
The Gnostic concludes from his dissatisfaction that the bad situation results from the fact that the universe, or order of things, is itself poorly designed. Rather than concluding that the order of things is good and it is we who are inadequate (as the Framers of the Constitution believed), the Gnostic is filled with self-confidence, often self-righteousness, and believes the universe is a hostile and indifferent place.
Salvation from this condition is possible.
This salvation typically entails the attendant belief that it can be achieved within the historical process. It often takes the Christian idea of a perfect world where the crooked shall be made straight and the broken shall be made whole and transfers it from the end of time to within time.
This change in the order of things can come through human action; salvation and perfection can be achieved by human effort.
The key is having knowledge (gnosis) of the secret method for altering reality. The effort to alter the cosmos is first and foremost an effort to reform society by “the people who know.” The gnostic caste is the vanguard of historical change, confident in their gnosis and the belief that the world is imperfect but they are not so.
Typically, the revolutionary class will be led by a charismatic leader in whom the gnosis has achieved its highest understanding and expression. Followers will fall under the spell of that leader’s charisma, they will attribute to the leader nearly supernatural powers to fix things or clean things up, and will devote themselves to carrying out the leader’s wishes.
There is much more to be said about Gnosticism and how it plays out in political life, but the reader can see the outlines of how political movements gain traction. The key, again, is that the gnostic temptation most fully manifests itself in times of social dislocation, instability, and the breakdown of traditional forms of communal life. The further explication of the problem will have to wait until next week.
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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