Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America

7. Gnosticism and Modernity

145 7 Gnosticism and Modernity “The temptation to fall from uncertain truth into certain untruth” Since its first appearance in German in 1959, Voegelin’s Science, Politics , and Gnosticism. has become a classic of modern political theory.1 It demonstrates the power of Voegelin’s thought, its lucidity of expression , and provides an analysis of the demonic in modern existence of unique insight and cogency. It also displays the grounds of the new science of politics with its debt to classical and Christian philosophy and to the vocation of diagnosing the maladies of contemporary political existence and supplying their therapies—within the modest limits of reason and science. I want briefly to reflect on the character of Voegelin’s analysis and its commonsense as well as philosophical foundations. In addition, I wish to clarify the meaning and place of the by nowcelebrated thesis that key aspects of radical modernity are “Gnostic,” and how that thesis relates to other facets of Voegelin’s philosophy of human affairs. It should first be said that Science, Politics, and Gnosticism extends, deepens, and to some extent qualifies the argument first made in The New Science of Politics (1952) that the “essence of modernity is Gnosticism .” It also continues to display the “new science” with its anchoring 1. This essay is an adaptation of the author’s introduction to the English-language edition of Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, trans. William J. Fitzpatrick (1968, Henry Regnery Publishers; repr., Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2004). Citations herein will be to this edition and abbreviated as SPG. 146 REPUBLICANISM, RELIGION, AND THE SOUL OF AMERICA in ordinary experience and utilization of the Aristotelian method. The latter is the great strength of Voegelin’s philosophizing, since he begins with commonsense understanding as a given and ascends analytically to a clarification of the key experiences of reality in which everyman shares and through which he becomes—if philosophically inclined and drawn by reason’s persuasiveness—at least potentially a partner in the inquiry of truth. Particularly the first section of the volume, delivered as the inaugural lecture of the new professor of political science at the University of Munich on November 26, 1958, is calculated to deal in a direct way with the subject matter of the modern crisis of human existence in a fashion intelligible and brilliantly informative to a general audience. The talk of “Gnosticism” will be less immediately accessible, of course, until some of the particulars come into view. But this is no more than a momentary obstacle to understanding. The context of Voegelin’s discourse is a philosopher’s search for truth and his own personal resistance to untruth in its manifold forms, especially as it affects the political situation from which his philosophizing took rise.2 This is to say nothing pretentious; for Voegelin believed that the vocation of the philosopher shared much with the vocation of all other human beings, and he directly and powerfully evoked this perspective (grounded in personal experience with National Socialism) in an early passage of his Antrittsvorlesung.3 As his principal philosophical mentor, Plato, contended, the philosopher is no more than an exemplary human being—not a species apart. Thus, in addressing his new colleagues and the assembled studentry of the University of Munich on a solemn occasion of high ceremony, the subject matter and truth status of his discourse were clarified in the following blunt words as applicable to each and every one present—and to any eventual readers as well: We shall now try to present the phenomenon of the prohibition of questions through an analysis of representative opinions. Thus, 2. The publication of three intimately related texts in one volume fosters the sense of Voegelin’s advancing analysis of the place of religious experiences in modern politics from 1938 to 1958. Cf. CW 5, Modernity without Restraint; Political Religions ; Science, Politics, and Gnosticism; and New Science of Politics. 3. Cf. Klaus Vondung, “National Socialism as a Political Religion: Potentials and Limits of an Analytical Concept,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 6 (June 2005): 87–95. Gnosticism and Modernity 147 this effort will present not only the phenomenon, but the exercise of analysis as well. It should show that the spiritual disorder of our time, the civilizational crisis of which everyone so readily speaks, does not by any means have to be borne as an inevitable fate; . . . on the contrary, everyone possesses the means of overcoming it in his own life. And our effort [here] should...