Eric Voegelin.pdf - Geschwister-Scholl-Institut für Politikwissenschaft

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One problem that presents itself both in Voegelin and in the
title of this study may be formulated by the following
question: „How does one prove that a complex of experiences
and ideas such as gnosticism is an indispensable source of
totalitarianism and the Cult of Violence?“ Here Aristotle is
relevant: one cannot demand greater precision than the
subject-matter affords. Ideas have to be mobilized and
translated into action, and it must be admitted that Voegelin
did not devote much detailed attention to this problem so far as
gnosticism is concerned. Certain key figures such as Joachim
of Fiore and the radical Puritans are named as key
transmission belts. This is a field of research for someone who
takes his teaching seriously to fill in the gaps. Voegelin never
claimed to have done everything.
On the other hand, one must avoid the danger of being led into
the trap of modern inductivism. Writing history, Ranke-like,
„wie sie eigentlich gewesen ist“ is not exactly appropriate to
anyone who has learned anything at all from Voegelin.
Voegelin of course saw history as a trail of symbols — one
could say symbolic forms if this term is divested of its
Cassirer-like Kantian connotations — and gnosticism was one
of the great symbolic forms blocking the road leading from
compactness to differentiation. Gregor Sebba caught the spirit
of the Voegelinian enterprise when he referred to ancient
Gnosticism as dissolving „into a weblike network of processes
spanning [the] millennia“. Gnosticism, Sebba suggests, is
„flexible, adaptable, and capable of producing variant after
variant to bewilder the eye“. 10
Sebba suggests on the same page that to understand gnosticism
and its mutations from ancient to modern one must first ask
the Voegelinian question „Why are there gnostics at all?“ This