The Revolutionary and The Hermit: Eric Voegelin's and Hans Jonas's Conceptions of the Modern Gnostic

Abstract

In his writings and lectures, Eric Voegelin made the claim that the dangerous political ideologies of the twentieth century (primarily communism, fascism, and national socialism) were "Gnostic movements." Even modern intellectual movements like positivism and psychoanalysis Voegelin believed to be fundamentally Gnostic. Voegelin was adored by many conservatives, such as The National Review's William Buckley whose paraphrase would become famous, especially among conservative youth groups: "Don't immanentize the eschaton!" For Voegelin, Gnosticism is a dangerous and destructive worldview that represents an insidious line of thought throughout history. Voegelin received much of his knowledge of Gnosticism from scholars such as Hans Jonas. I will look at the contested definition of "Gnosticism" between Jonas and Voegelin, and how they both saw Gnosticism as a modern problem. Voegelin saw the modern Gnostic as a revolutionary who, armed with true knowledge of the world, would force the world to become a paradise. For Jonas, the modern Gnostic was a hermit who withdrew from the world, because the world is a fallen thing that bears no relationship with the true divinity that lies beyond all things. Although Voegelin and Jonas disagreed on many fronts, such as the cause of the Gnostic turn and the effects of such a turn, both thinkers saw Gnosticism as a response to a declining Christianity. They both believed that the Gnostic turn explained much of the tragedies of the twentieth century and warned against a Gnostic future.

Eric Voegelin (1901 – 1985) was a political philosopher who was born in Cologne, Germany but spent most of his academic career in America at Louisiana State University and Stanford. In 1938 Voegelin and his wife fled Vienna to escape the Nazi forces. This experience deeply shaped Voegelin’s preoccupation with the question “what is it that gives rise to such profound deformations of consciousness?” Voegelin determined that these sorts of deformations have been present throughout history but in the modern world they had reached unparalleled proportions. Ultimately Voegelin thought the root of this deformation to be something that he first called “political religion” and later “Gnosticism.” Ted McAllister summarizes Voegelin’s position on Gnosticism thusly:

Gnosticism, in the Voegelinian sense, is a belief in the power of knowledge to transform reality, to create earthly perfection. It refers, moreover, to an existential core that has three primary components: one, a strong sense of alienation, a feeling that some essential part of one’s humanity is unfulfilled; two, a revolt against the conditions that create alienation; and three, a belief that human knowledge is sufficient to overcome these conditions, that humans have the power to transform themselves, or both. McAllister 1996, 21-22.

Eric Voegelin’s criticism of Gnosticism was greatly influenced by the philosopher Hans Jonas. In Voegelin’s opening lines to the preface of his book Science, Politics, and Gnosticism he wrote:

The more we come to know about the gnosis of antiquity, the more it becomes certain that modern movements of thought, such as progressivism, positivism, Hegelianism, and Marxism, are variants of gnosticism. The continuous interest in this problem goes back to the 1930’s, when Hans Jonas published his first volume of Gnosis und Spätantiker Geist on ancient gnosis. Voegelin 1959, 246.

Hans Jonas (1903 – 1993) was, like Voegelin, a philosopher who put forth a new understanding of Gnosticism. Hans Jonas was a student of Heidegger and fought for the British in World War II. Like Voegelin, this left a lasting impression on Jonas, especially Heidegger’s fervent support of the Nazis which deeply impacted the Jewish Jonas. His first writing on Gnosticism was his doctoral thesis under Heidegger called Der Begriff der Gnosis (The Concept of Gnosis). His next book on the subject was called Gnosis und spätantiker Geist (Gnosis and the Spirit of Late Antiquity). Finally, Jonas’ most famous and well-received book on Gnosticism was The Gnostic Religion which was first published in 1958. For a period in the early 60’s, The Gnostic Religion was the classic text for an overview of Gnosticism.

Jonas argued that Gnosticism emerged from a milieu that was deeply existential. He understood existentialism as fundamentally related to alienation and estrangement, writing:

Gnosticism has been the most radical embodiment of dualism ever to have appeared on the stage of history, and its exploration provides a case study of all that is implicated in it. It is a split between self and world, man's alienation from nature, the metaphysical devaluation of nature, the cosmic solitude of the spirit and the nihilism of mundane norms; and in its general extremist style it shows what radicalism really is. All this has been acted out in that deeply moving play as a lasting paradigm of the human condition. The analogical modernity of ancient Gnosticism, or the hidden Gnosticism in the modern mind, has struck me. Jonas 1963, XXVI

Jonas spends a considerable portion of The Gnostic Religion discussing the historical milieu into which Gnosticism was born. This is a very important part of his larger philosophical strategy, for it is in this section where Jonas intends the reader to draw parallels between ancient and modern milieus. He writes that the Gnostic “revolutionary character comes fully to light only in a confrontation with the classical-pagan world of ideas and values, which it met in a head-on clash… the gnostic movement in addition to being a stranger was an upstart, with no legitimate parentage.” Jonas 1963, 239. Jonas, along with Voegelin, saw Gnosticism as a counter-cultural phenomenon that sought to replace the mainstream culture. For instance, he believed that one of the primary areas of attack for the Gnostics was the idea of the cosmos which placed man within a larger “order.” For the classical mind, the cosmos was the epitome of order and just law. Citing Cicero, Jonas writes “this world is the All, and there nothing beside it; it is perfect, and there is nothing equaling it.” Jonas 1963, 245-246. Jonas says that the Gnostics “singled out this most valued concept of the cosmos for its most radical revaluation… Order and law is the cosmos here too, but rigid and inimical order, tyrannical and evil law, devoid of meaning and goodness, alien to the purposes of man and to his inner essence, no object for his communication and affirmation... "Cosmos" thus becomes in the newly appearing view of things an emphatically negative concept.” Jonas 1963, 250.

For Jonas, two of the most important characteristics of the Gnostic worldview were hatred for the cosmos, and the absence of virtue. Jonas writes that “virtue in the Greek sense (areté) is the actualization in the mode of excellence of the several faculties of the soul for dealing with the world.” Jonas 1963, 267. He then argues that “it is obvious that Gnosticism had no room for this conception of human virtue… the exclusive concern in the destiny of the transcendent self, ‘denatures’ as it were these realities and takes the heart out of the concern with them”, in other words, for the Gnostics “the world and one's belonging to it are not to be taken seriously.” Jonas 1963, 268. Jonas was worried that the Gnostic worldview made man a stranger in his home and was an unhealthy response to the existential predicament.

In his essay Gnosticism, Nihilism and Existentialism Jonas states his philosophical thesis explicitly: the current historical moment and the historical milieu of ancient Gnostic traditions are similar in that they are both fundamentally reactions to an existential predicament. That is, there is a fundamental disconnect (or alienation) between the human and the world, with the Gnostics having added a third estranged entity, “God”. Not only are the Gnostics alienated from the illusory world of the demiurge because it is false, they are also alienated from the transcendent godhead who is disconnected from all worldly referents. In his essay, Jonas compares the ancient Gnostic milieu with modernity and comes to the conclusion that the modern situation is far more hopeless than the ancient Gnostic one:

There is no overlooking one cardinal difference between the gnostic and the existentialist dualism: Gnostic man is thrown into an antagonistic, anti-divine, and therefore anti-human nature, modern man into an indifferent one. Only the latter case represents the absolute vacuum, the really bottomless pit. In the gnostic conception the hostile, the demonic, is still anthropomorphic, familiar even in its foreignness, and the contrast itself gives direction to existence—a negative direction, to be sure, but one that has behind it the sanction of the negative transcendence to which the positivity of the world is the qualitative counterpart. Not even this antagonistic quality is granted to the indifferent nature of modern science, and from that nature no direction at all can be elicited. This makes modern nihilism infinitely more radical and more desperate than gnostic nihilism ever could be for all its panic terror of the world and its defiant contempt of its laws. That nature does not care, one way or the other, is the true abyss. That only man cares, in his finitude facing nothing but death, alone with his contingency and the objective meaninglessness of his projecting meanings, is a truly unprecedented situation. Jonas 1963, 338-339.

Jonas clearly had better knowledge of historical Gnosticism than Vogelin (as evidenced in Jonas’ Gnostic Religion) but like Voegelin, he also applied a philosophical-thematic definition of Gnosticism in order to critique modernity. However, as we shall see, Jonas’ philosophical-thematic definition differed substantially from Voegelin’s. The primary problem for Jonas was the idea that Gnostics hated this world and yearned for an other, transcendental world. Jonas did not connect politics and Gnosticism the way Voegelin did, even though he did criticize modernity for its Gnostic proclivities. His primary concern was the Gnostic relationship to "das Fremde" which can be roughly translated as “alienation” or “otherness.” According to Jonas, “This sense of alienation is wildly overdetermined in gnostic theology: man is alienated from himself, from a fully transcendent God, and most powerfully from the material sensuous universe in which he lives, created as it was by an evil, malicious demiurge.” Lazier 2003, 620. Jonas thought that Gnostics could still bring misery into the world through their beliefs in a transcendent other-realm, but this misery was not necessarily related to politics. This anti-cosmist attitude of Jonas' Gnostics could be used to justify “both ascetic retreat from the world as well as an antinomian descent into the worldly abyss, with the intent to defeat it from within.” Lazier 2003, 620.

Lazier describes Jonas' fear as related to that of Ioan Culianu’s "Gnostic body-snatchers" —an idea which could capture a human body and use it to reject the material world and spread the idea itself. Lazier 2008, 22. This negative take on Gnosticism created ripples in the milieu that Voegelin swam in—after reading The Gnostic Religion, the famous conservative philosopher Leo Strauss wrote a letter to Jonas. In the letter, Strauss comments on the relationship between The Gnostic Religion and Jonas’ earlier work Gnosis und Spätantiker Geist. Strauss wrote “I saw for the first time the connection between this fundamentally earlier study of yours and your present preoccupations. I would state it as follows: gnosticism is the most radical rebellion against physis. Our problem now is to recover physis.” Lazier 2003, 632.

Fundamentally, Jonas saw the problem as a wrong sort of theology that was present within modern society and modern religion. In a draft of his dissertation Jonas had written “what the Church fought down with the entire array of its forces… is today on the other hand conscripted, if less defiant and more tacit (and naturally also without the notion of two gods) into Christian and especially Protestant theology, this time as a quasi-official opinion communis, even if not formulated as such. It no longer proffers, if it does not e silentio negate, a realist, worldly notion of God’s providence, or even the world as the domain of his power… one could well speak of all recent theology as Marcionite through and through.” Lazier 2008, 32-33. As we shall see, Voegelin is more concerned about those who hate the world and would like to transform it because they have no understanding of the transcendent grounding of the world. On the other hand, Jonas was concerned about those who only believed in the transcendent and for whom this world was a fallen thing which deserved not a second’s thought.

Although a very verbose writer, Voegelin gave a concise six-point definition of Gnosticism in his essay Science, Politics, and Gnosticism (abridged by Kwiatkowski here):

1. Gnostics are dissatisfied with their situation.

2. They believe that the imperfections of the world result from its poor organization.

3. Gnostics assume that salvation from the evil of the world is possible.

4. They claim that from the corrupt world a better one must evolve in a historical process.

5. Gnostics believe that this change can be achieved without assistance by transcendent powers.

6. Seeing themselves as prophets who have superior knowledge, Gnostics try to create a program to save the world from evil. Kwiatkowski 2020, 226.

Before this definition of the “gnostic attitude,” Voegelin writes that “the historical continuity of Gnosticism from antiquity to modern times… [has] been sufficiently clarified to permit us to speak of a continuity.” Voegelin 1959, 297. Voegelin does not cite any scholarly sources on Gnosticism for this claim. Despite his familiarity with Jonas’ work, Voegelin chose to associate Gnosticism with a medieval theologian Joachim of Fiore and other millenarians—a debatable historical position. Kwiatkowski writes that “therefore, [Voegelin’s] treatment of Gnosticism or, we should rather say, his creative use of the term, is based on the analysis of the High Middle Ages.” Kwiatkowski 2020, 224. Voegelin also attaches great importance to the role of Christianity in the production of the Gnostic attitude: “[Gnosticism’s] particular fervor and secular momentum are hardly intelligible without the prophetic and apocalyptic pre-history, culminating in the epiphany of Christ, as an important genetic factor.” Ranieri 2009, 135.

However, scholars such as James Wiser argue that Voegelin should not be understood as a historian of Gnosticism. Rather, “Voegelin’s analysis of Gnosticism is primarily an analysis of gnostic consciousness. He is not an intellectual historian who is concerned with discovering the remnants of a premodern creed within modernity. Nor is he attempting preserve a preferred tradition from the challenge of certain recurring heretical ideas. To interpret him in this fashion is to misunderstand both his argument and approach to theory.” Wiser 1980, 97. Ted McAllister agrees with Wiser, writing that “Voegelin chose the word ‘gnostic’ because it refers to claims about esoteric knowledge, knowledge that saves, but the problem is that most people associate the word with the infamous group of early Christians who were known as Gnostics. Voegelin, however, intended no such specific reference.” McAllister 1996, 21. These apologetics ring somewhat hollow, considering that Voegelin was inspired by writings on historical Gnosticism and wrote his own intellectual history of Gnosticism. However, there is also an argument to be made along the line of Wiser’s: that Voegelin was trying to look at the modern deformations of consciousness, concluded that they were somewhat akin to what Jonas said, and then used a newly defined “Gnosticism” in tracing the history of these particular psychological deformations. Kwiatkowski correctly notes some of the major differences between Jonas and Voegelin’s philosophical conceptions of Gnosticism when he writes “Voegelin’s understanding of the Gnostic attitude excluded most typical characteristics of ancient Gnosticism—as it was understood by Jonas and other scholars of his time—such as indifference to worldly or social power and radical negation of matter.” Kwiatkowski 2020, 227.

Voegelin was a Christian and saw Gnosticism as a response to a waning Christian spirituality. The Gnosticism of Voegelin is not the ancient spirituality of Jonas’ The Gnostic Religion but a worldview held by political revolutionaries. James Wiser describes the fundamental vision of Voegelin: “understanding religion as man’s quest for the realissimum, Voegelin distinguished between those forms of religion which located the object of their quest within the transcendent and those which placed it within immanence.” Wiser 1980, 94. In other words, Gnostics were radical believers in immanence. Voegelin was deeply troubled by the de-spiritualization of the world. Like Jonas, he was concerned with man’s alienation from the cosmos, the ordered holism of reality. Voegelin (contrary to Jonas) saw the Gnostics confront this existential horror with a turn to the immanent material world and away from the transcendent. In his book The Political Religions he states: “Men can allow the contents of the world to so expand that the world and the god behind it disappear. But they cannot resolve thereby the problematic of their existence for it endures in every soul. Thus when the god behind the world is unseen, the contents of the world emerge as new gods.” Wiser 1980, 95. This disbelief in a transcendent realm in favor of only an immanent world was accomplished by science united to “political religions” which have taken the place of traditional religions. Modernity, according to Voegelin, is fundamentally characterized by this persistent flattening of the cosmos into the immanent and profane. The modern project is a project of denying the existence of any transcendent realm and trying to realize utopia out of the materials of this world. This desire to use materiality to create paradise Voegelin called metastasis. John Ranieri writes that in the modern struggle over “the truth of order” Voegelin contends that “none is more dangerous to modern society than the metastasis (the notion that the world will change its nature while remaining the concrete world we know)… ‘Metastatic faith is one of the great sources of disorder, if not the principal one, in the contemporary world; and it is a matter of life and death for all of us to understand the phenomenon and to find remedies against it before it destroys us’.” Ranieri 2009, 132 For Voegelin, the stakes of the confused Gnostic perception of the cosmos is great and, in the age of the atomic bomb, potentially civilization-ending. One of Voegelin’s most used examples of a political religion gone awry is the Nazis and the vast amount of human suffering they wrought.

Voegelin depicts Gnosticism as an attempt to find divinity in this world rather than have this world stand in relationship to an ordered cosmos. Wiser writes that Voegelin believed that “historically, Christianity had achieved the de-structuring of the cosmos and its gods. The Christian god was radically transcendent and, as such, was available to man only through faith. Gnosticism according to Voegelin was an attempt to redivinize the world, that is, to overcome the very accomplishment of the Christian traditions.” Wiser 1980, 99. The problem with a post-pagan de-divinized world is that it was uncertain. In other words, Christianity was fundamentally about uncertainty, the thing Gnostics hated the most. The Gnostic response (directed against the Christian worldview) was to restore certainty and dispel uncertainty. Voegelin is not shy in his conclusion that the Gnostic attitude is geared towards certain and absolute knowledge, or at least, the belief that such a thing has been achieved. Voegelin elaborates:

[Gnostics] achieved a certainty about the meaning of history, and about their own place in it, which otherwise they would not have had. Certainties, now, are in demand for the purpose of overcoming uncertainties with their accompaniment of anxiety; and the next question then would be: What specific uncertainty was so disturbing that it had to be overcome by the dubious means of fallacious immanentization? One does not have to look far afield for an answer. Uncertainty is the very essence of Christianity. 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. Voegelin 1952, 187.

In terms of the Gnostic historical influence, “Voegelin argued that the human attempt to transform the world and human nature reached its most obsessive and libidinous depths in the nineteenth century.” McAllister 1996, 126. Voegelin looks at the great intellectuals of the nineteenth century as those who claimed to have understood history and where it is going, just like the millenarianism of Joachim of Fiore. These prophets “constructed an iron curtain around this world and mustered immanent reason as the defense of and instrument for the transformation of humans and human society.” McAllister 1996, 125. In particular, Voegelin called out Comte, Marx, Hegel, and many French philosophers of the nineteenth century as participating and helping to lay the groundwork for the catastrophes of the twentieth century. As Voegelin writes in his New Science of Politics,

The more fervently all human energies are thrown into the great enterprise of salvation through world-immanent action, the farther the human beings who engage in this enterprise move away from the life of the spirit. And since the life of the spirit is the source of order in man and society, the very success of a Gnostic civilization is the cause of its decline… the limit is reached when an activist sect which represents the Gnostic truth organizes the civilization into an empire under its rule. Totalitarianism, defined as the existential rule of Gnostic activists, is the end form of progressive civilization. Voegelin 1952, 195.

Voegelin saw the Gnostic project as a world conquering enterprise rather than a world renouncing one. Politics is the means by which the religion of the elite Gnostics (what he calls “activists” in the above passage) becomes impressed upon every element of the world in a totalitarian state. McAllister writes that for Voegelin, “of all the gnostic paths the most enduring is ‘science’. Modern science is a visible tool of ‘progressive’ change, and ever since the nineteenth century, ‘science’ has been the primary repository of human knowledge and faith. The church, with its uncertainties, could not challenge ‘science’, which offered people increased control over their lives. The dream of supreme knowledge and control works in the modern era to seduce people into believing in an ideology in the same way the serpent seduced Eve.” McAllister 1996, 23. Voegelin was not against the progress of knowledge but only knowledge that was severed from the transcendental root of being. It was this incomplete picture of the cosmos and man’s place within it that was dangerous. Science is only evil when it is actually ignorance in disguise, or as McAllister puts it, “reality remains constant, and the structure of a humanly fabricated reality can only bend so far before it breaks.” McAllister 1996, 24.

Voegelin, does not simply criticize the mistakes and errors of the Gnostic worldview, he also suggests a remedy via a positive vision. Voegelin believes that a closer relationship between the divine and political orders creates healthy civilizations. The world cannot be successfully understood without a relationship to the divine:

For Voegelin, rationality is not the result of some methodological technique; rather, it is the expression of a particular form of human existence. Life in openness before the divine is the existential foundation which allows for a knowledge of reality. Accordingly, only the person whose soul is attuned to the divine order of the cosmos is capable of that self-conscious participation within reality which illuminates the order of being. Wiser 1980, 98.

Voegelin advocated for a return to religiosity even if it was in an unchurched form. Voegelin expressed the problem, in 1938, as having to do with secularization, writing that “the world is experiencing a serious crisis… which has its origins in the secularization of the soul and in the ensuing severance of a consequently purely secular soul from its roots in religiousness, and, secondly, does not know that recovery can only be achieved through religious renewal, be it within the framework of the historical churches, be it outside this framework.” Voegelin 1938, 24. Although Voegelin clearly has a deep respect for the Christian tradition, his views on how one approaches the transcendent are flexible.

Voegelin, claimed that the de-divinized world gives rise to Gnosticism (or political religions). Hans Jonas, on the other hand, stated that alienation and the existential predicament (predicated on a flawed conception of the relationship between man and the cosmos) gave rise to a dangerous belief in the absolute and total primacy of transcendental reality. Unlike Voegelin, he was concerned with the proliferation of world-renouncing belief in the transcendent. Voegelin, on the contrary, was concerned with the denial of the transcendent realm. Both however, believed that the fundamental relationship between this reality and the divine had been misperceived.

Fryderyk Kwiatkowski claims that Hans Jonas believed Gnosticism to be an anti-revolutionary movement, and quotes Jonas’ Gnosis und Spätantiker Geist:

Gnosis is anything but revolutionary. Since it does not have the world as its goal and is neither directed against a social order of governance (soziale Herrschaftsordnung) nor concerned with it, it could even becalled “reactionary”, insofar as it tries—through its pronounced desistance from the world—to persuade humans to abstain from changing and improving their situation. Kwiatkowski 2020, 227.

Benjamin Lazier emphasize Jonas’ negative evaluation of Gnosticism, with Jonas representing “gnosticism’s ’third overcoming’.” Lazier 2003, 620. Both claims are accurate: Jonas saw modernity as beset by the threat of existentialism, a situation that was very similar to the ancient Gnostic milieu. He did not believe that Gnosticism was revolutionary but that it was a philosophically problematic way of handling existentialism. In fact, as Kwiatkowski claims, Jonas’ Gnostics were more likely to be world-renouncing ascetics than starry-eyed revolutionaries.

Hans Jonas and Eric Voegelin used “Gnosticism” as a pejorative philosophical category which they used to criticize modernity. Although both were primarily philosophers, Hans Jonas was a much better historian of ancient Gnosticism than Eric Voegelin. The most important difference between the two philosophers lies in Voegelin’s radical reinterpretation of Jonas’ criticism of Gnostic modernity. Voegelin depicted Gnostics as those who claimed special or profound insight into what constituted a perfect world and that this perfect world could be constructed here on earth. The archetypal Gnostic for Voegelin is the revolutionary while the archetype for Jonas is the world-renouncing hermit. Jonas believed the Gnostic impulse arises in response to the existential predicament. In Voegelin’s case, the Gnostic impulse arises out of a set of human impulses concerning human knowledge, certainty, and relationship to the transcendent.

Eric Voegelin and Hans Jonas were traumatized by the events of World War II. Both saw Nazism as a product of a modernity that had lost touch with true religion. In its wake, an old religious current that they both called Gnostic (albeit for different reasons), had taken root and done damage to the minds of men. Jonas called the modern world Gnostic because it was confronting the existential predicament through retreating from a meaningless material world. Inspired by Jonas, Voegelin set out on his own journey to find the Gnostic heart of darkness. Voegelin found a strain of thought that was deeply troubled by the radical uncertainty brought about by the transcendent god of Christianity. In an attempt to regain certainty about this world Gnostics tried to shut out the transcendent world by claiming that this material realm is all that exists and that it is perfectible with the right sort of knowledge. Both Voegelin and Jonas believed that human beings are connected through this world into the infinite realms of God to form a united and ordered whole. When the true extent of reality is shut out it becomes impossible to form a coherent order. Jonas believed that Gnostics had abandoned worldly engagement while Voegelin claimed that was the only engagement they knew. Voegelin’s message to the world was that only a return to religion could resituate man in the cosmic order and that living in uncertainty is the price man must pay to live in freedom.

Bibliography

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