The Gnostic Problem Part 2
Last week I gave a brief introduction to the thinking of Eric Voegelin, but more importantly to the problem of Gnosticism. I argued that it may seem strange to refer to a 2000 year-old minor religion as somehow responsible for many of our contemporary problems, but I think the case can be made for the simple reason that it is a clear articulation of and response to what is a perennial human temptation: our tendency toward dissatisfaction with our condition.
The gnostic temptation waxes as the order of society wanes. In imperial ages where politics becomes more of a mass phenomenon with concomitant rises in feelings of alienation, loneliness, and despair – individuals feeling increasingly helpless and powerless – the tendency to see the order of being itself as in disrepair soon overwhelms large portions of the population. Another way to put it is that the order of society reflects the order of being, so when the order of society breaks down, so does belief in the order of being.
As we demonstrated in the last essay, Gnosticism entails a rejection of a belief in a divinely-ordered whole from which the parts gain their meaning and for the sake of which they exist. Our modern condition challenges this belief in at least two ways: first, modern science rejected the idea of nature as a lawfully and morally ordered whole; and, second, modern contract theory insisted that the parts (individual persons) were both prior to the whole (society) and that the whole existed for the sake of the parts. This meant that, to the degree we ever gave thought to “the whole,” we perceived it as having no moral or metaphysical status. Political communities or “the state” were nothing more than artifices created for the convenience of the individuals who formed it. Whatever moral status the community or state might have come from below, not above, and this meant also that moral restraints on state power were only as good as the interests of the people.
The Gnostic impulse resulted in divorcing the higher spiritual realm of freedom from the lower physical realm of necessity. Our “spirit” (pneuma which we might translate as “soul”) gets cast against its will into an alien “body” which is a constraint on the soul’s freedom. One response is to see the body as just material stuff that we can refashion according to the demands of the spirit. It can be a canvas or a tool, but it can also be technologically transformed in an effort to remove its “alien” status and become a comfortable home for the real self, that of the spirit.
As we said in the previous essay, the separating nomos (law) from cosmos (world) meant that things had no laws governing their nature, and from that it was a short step to concluding that things had no nature, for that which has no nature has no norm governing it. The norms for existence result not from reality but from realization – that is, the pneuma recognizing its self-governing status. The imprisoned self seeks emancipation. The elusive nature of that emancipation means that the self is a continuous process whose full meaning and purpose can only exist in the future. The Gnostic not only undervalues the present moment, but treats the present moment as a nullity, filled with indifferent things and inconsequential matters. In contrast, classical philosophy saw the contemplation of the order of the cosmos as a constant Present in the face of the unchangeable.
We live in a vertiginous era of breathtakingly fast social change. While the philosopher seeks permanence in the middle of such change, the Gnostic defers all meaning to a future that can never be known because it doesn’t exist. As a result, the present exists only as constant moments of crisis, and in those moments the temptation to latch on to a charismatic leader who can lead us out of the desert of the moment into the garden of the future proves irresistible.
Voegelin drew our attention to the way modern ideologies aped their Gnostic predecessors, particularly in the way they collapsed the Christian idea of perfection, which existed “when time shall be no more,” into the historical process. That Christian idea of perfection had two elements: one was movement toward the goal of perfection, and the other was the goal of perfection to be achieved. Gnostic thinkers could seize on one or the other, or on the combination of the two. Modern ideologies, such as Marxism, operate by the latter, combining their conception of a perfect world with knowledge of the means by which it could be achieved. The conception could be any number of things: a world of perfect peace, or universal brotherhood; a classless society; a final state of industrial society under the temporal rule of managers and experts, and so on. Again, the present has no reality except as a moment that gestures at the future state of perfection.
Gnostic movements skillfully combine elite leadership with popular will. Most readers will think to themselves, “Well, I’m not a gnostic. I’ve never even heard of it.” But that is not how ideas work. If you’ve seen the movie The Devil Wears Prada, you may recall the scene where Andy tells Miranda that all this fashion is just a lot of stuff that looks the same. Miranda replies:
This... stuff? Okay. I understand. You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and select, say, that lumpy blue sweater because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what's on your body. What you don't know is that your sweater is not blue. It's not even sky blue. It's cerulean. You also don't know that in 2002, De La Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns, Yves St. Laurent showed a cerulean military jacket, Dolce did skirts with cerulean beads, and in our September issue we did the definitive layout on the color. Cerulean quickly appeared in eight other major collections, then the secondary and department store lines and then trickled down to some lovely Casual Corner, where you no doubt stumbled on it.
That may be how fashion works – I don’t know, but it sounds implausible to me – but it’s not a bad description of how ideas work. The intellectuals bat them around, try them out, parade them to others, teach them in colleges and universities, where they soon become part of the climate of opinion, the air people breathe without even realizing what they’re taking into their lungs. But they’ll breathe in deeply if the rest of the air around them doesn’t seem sufficiently fresh. Very few of us have a full awareness of how foreign ideas, like a virus, enter our bloodstreams and infect us unless we have built up some immunity to them. But instead of modern education being a vaccine, it’s a disease carrier.
Voegelin realized that the key to bridging the gap between the intellectuals and the general public was a charismatic leader. “The intellectual,” he wrote, “knows the formula for salvation from the misfortunes of the world and can predict how world history will take its course in the future,” but lacks the means for communicating such knowledge to the general public. Note, however, that “misfortunes” don’t have to be comprehensive; often the gnostic speculator will focus on one particular misfortune – poverty, sickness, death, sexual problems, etcetera – and let that stand in for the evil of the whole. The leader can solve that problem and thus usher in the new era. Hitler’s “Third Reich” is an obvious example of this, but less obvious would be FDR’s frequent references to his policies ushering in a new millennium (the Christian symbol of a perfect society).
The leader must gather into a community the spiritually (pneuma) autonomous persons otherwise separated from one another. Unity becomes the leader’s central mission, and his (and the accompanying intellectuals) gnosis is what makes such unity possible. It can also mean that an ideologically unified party, containing within itself the certainty that accompanies gnosis as well as a deep sense of mission, can serve the function of being the vanguard of all future change.
Of course, reality will often present barriers to such change, and for this reason gnostics will explain failure by the persistent presence of some nasty atavistic tendency: greed, lust for power, violence, fear, and so forth. If only … we could rid human beings of this trait, then perfection would be attainable, and the inability to attain perfection can be attributed to the stubbornness of the trait. But which one, in particular? We don’t have to look far for the answer, because the current state of human beings and society would provide us with it. In particularly disordered ages we will seize upon the most immediate sign of that disorder and believe that if that problem can be solved, then the state of perfection will be right around the corner. The gnostic possesses complete confidence in his or her ability to rid human beings of that pathology, by education or by coercion.
We’ve highlighted the fact that gnostic speculation tends to occur during times of rapid social change and dislocation, particularly during ages of globalization, people losing a sense of both time and place. We’ve described the gnostic temptation as resulting, in part, as a response to feeling insecure in a hostile world. Part of what makes Voegelin’s analysis so unnerving is that he identifies the source of such insecurity as also the source of the very idea of perfection: Christianity. In a rather dense but significant passage, he writes:
The feeling of security in a "world full of gods" is lost with the gods themselves; when the world is de-divinized, communication with the world-transcendent God is reduced to the tenuous bond of faith, in the sense of Heb. 11: 1, as the substance of things hoped for and the proof of things unseen. Ontologically, the substance of things hoped for is nowhere to be found but in faith itself; and, epistemologically, there is no proof for things unseen but again this very faith. The bond is tenuous, indeed, and it may snap easily. The life of the soul in openness toward God, the waiting, the periods of aridity and dullness, guilt and despondency, contrition and repentance, forsakenness and hope against hope, the silent stirrings of love and grace, trembling on the verge of a certainty which if gained is loss -- the very lightness of this fabric may prove too heavy a burden for men who lust for massively possessive experience. The danger of a breakdown of faith to a socially relevant degree, now, will increase in the measure in which Christianity is a worldly success … The more people are drawn into or pressured into the Christian orbit, the greater will be the number among them who do not have the spiritual stamina for the heroic adventure of the soul that is Christianity; and the likeliness of a fall from faith will increase when civilizational progress of education, literacy, and intellectual debate will bring the full seriousness of Christianity to the understanding of ever more individuals.
Human beings don’t deal well with uncertainty. In one of Voegelin’s shrewdest observations, he observes that people will typically choose a certain untruth over an uncertain truth. If his analysis is right, then we are living in a world marked by widespread embrace of untruths held with great conviction. In that sense, the lies being told by politicians pale by comparison to the “certain untruths” that dominate our social and political discourse. Unless the light of truth can shine in those corners, we will remain in an icy darkness. Our situation becomes even more tragic when you consider that the great purveyors of ideological untruth are also the ones responsible for exposing political lies. That makes our way out doubly difficult. Still, there is no reason to despair, for truth has a way of breaking in when we least expect it.
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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