For Eric Voegelin, all modern ideologies—left or right—were simply Gnostic attempts to order a disordered world according to ritual and knowledge.
This essay concludes my three-essay series on Eric Voegelin (1901-1985). In the first essay, I discussed Voegelin’s own influence on my intellectual development over the past 37 years. I also, rightly or wrongly, questioned his character. It’s quite possibly that I’m revealing poor things about my character as I question his. Remove that beam in my own eye and all that. In the second essay, I considered Voegelin’s argument from his 1952 Walgreen Lectures at the University of Chicago that all progressivism, by its very nature, is totalitarian. In this third and final essay, I want to consider several other ideas original to Voegelin, each stressing his intellectual prowess and genius.
First, Gnosticism. In the early 1930s, the Austrian Voegelin became increasingly fascinated and horrified by the racialism and racism and racial politics that were not only emerging, but also manifesting into insane totalitarian systems. He wrote two important books critiquing especially the National Socialists in the 1930s, but it was in the late 1930s that he came across the early work of Swiss theologian, Hans Urs Von Balthasar. In one of von Balthasar’s essays on Prometheus, he employed the ancient term “Gnosticism.” Voegelin immediately latched onto this term, believing the heresy to have found new life in the twentieth century. He wrestled with this concept all of his life. Gnosticism, as understood by the early Christian church, was the belief that one could attain heavenly salvation through specific knowledge, complicated rituals, the wearing of underwear with sacred symbols, or through one’s works. Obviously, this was antithetical to the freely given grace of Christ and mutilated what it touched of Christianity. For Voegelin, all modern ideologies—left or right—were simply attempts to order a disordered world according to ritual and knowledge.
Modern gnosticism began with the writings of a twelfth-century monk, Joachim of Flora. Joachim opposed St. Augustine’s idea that the world was about to encounter the end times. Augustine, of course, was writing as Rome fell. Joachim was writing at one of the high points of the Western world (the High Middle Ages). In his scheme, he divided the world into three parts:
- Age of the Father, begun by Abraham
- Age of Christ, begun by Jesus
- Age of the Holy Spirit (to begin in 1260; many believed it was St. Francis of Assisi (much to his chagrin))
For Joachim, each era needed a prophet and a leader (fascists and communists loved this idea). Joachim not only saw himself as the prophet for the leader of the Age of the Holy Spirit, but he believed that the Third Age would be one of peace, with all of the world living as monks, and with no need of the church and the sacraments.
Such an idea could be easily transferred to the progressivism of National Socialism and Communism, as the ideologues take the things of heaven and pull them to the earth.
Second, Voegelin was fascinated with the ideas of mythology (defined as a story that involves the supernatural) and symbol. Having been influenced by several philosophers and philosophies of language, Voegelin believed that words and stories had layers and layers built upon them, some through tradition and some simply as expressions of timeless and eternal truths.
However, because myth and symbol were so powerful, they could also powerfully be manipulated to create ideology and propaganda:
When the evocative power of an idea has been seriously shattered under the pressure of disenchanting analysis it may shade off into the twilight of an ideology. A further class of ideas are the utopian dreams. They occur frequently in history since there are always men who wish to overcome the misery of the finite imperfection of the political cosmion by the invention of an order of intrinsic value that would settle definitely the struggle of the evocative forces. Dreams of this kind, openly or silently, that one or the other of the essentials of human nature [with need for] change can eliminated from a social order. The elimination of an essential feature of human nature may be said to define technically a utopia. And, finally, men have cherished the idea of abolishing political order altogether and [living] in an anarchic community…. The problem of politics has to be considered in the larger setting of an interpretation of human nature. [Voegelin, History of Political Ideas, vol. 1, 231.]
Properly understood, though, philosophy combatted ideology and brought us back to right order. “Philosophy is not a doctrine of right order, but the light of wisdom that falls on the struggle; and help is not a piece of information about truth, but the arduous effort to locate the forces of evil and identify their nature.” [Quoted in Federici, Eric Voegelin, 23.]
Indeed, man must critically be a philosopher as he holds a unique place in the universe. God and the angels are the transcendent, and the flora and fauna represent the concrete. In between God and the animals, man holds the noble place of being the “metaxy”—the middle, both transcendent and concrete at once.
Third, though, Voegelin was not so grim as to believe the end of the world had come with the arrival of ideology and the new Gnostics. Voegelin also fully believed that men and societies could remember—what Plato called an anamnesis—what was true, good, and beautiful.
Again, Voegelin wrestled with the concept of Gnosticism his whole professional career after 1938. In his 1958 Munich lectures (attended, fascinatingly, by Carl Ratzinger), he explained how to overcome it:
The attempt at world destruction will not destroy the world, but will only increase the disorder of society. The gnostic’s flight from a truly dreadful, confusing, and oppressive state of the world is understandable. But the order of the ancient world was renewed by that movement which strove through loving action to revive the practice of the ‘serious play’ (to use Plato’s expression)—that is, by Christianity.
Just as Christ answered the questions and the longings of the ancient world, so it could do the same in the modern world.
In addition to Christianity being the ultimate anamnesis, Voegelin also believed there were more minor, but still critically important, manifestations of the anamnesis, such as the Founding of America.
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Author’s note: I would like to note that for these three essays on Voegelin, I drew on several original works—books and articles—by Voegelin, but I also heavily relied upon Michael Federici’s excellent intellectual biography from ISI Books, Eric Voegelin, as well as upon Don Lutz’s American Ideas Lecture on Voegelin, back in the year 2000, for ideas as well as for guidance as to how to structure this essay. I owe Federici and Lutz a great deal.
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The featured image is “Dark Harbor Fishermen” (1943), by N.C. Wyeth, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
