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

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remembers that he was a master of the art of condensation.
Quoting from Voegelin’s Autobiographical Reflections of
1973, we find in Sandoz’ Introduction the following comments
by Voegelin:
„Since my first application of Gnosticism to modern
phenomana […], I have had to revise my position. The
application of the category of Gnosticism to modern
ideologies, of course, stands. In a more complete analysis,
however, there are other factors to be considered in addition.
One of these factors is the metastatic apocalypse deriving
directly from the Israelite prophets, via Paul, and forming a
permanent strand in Christian sectarian movements right up to
the Renaissance […] I found, furthermore, that neither the
apocalyptic nor the gnostic strand completely accounts for the
process of immanentization. This factor has independent
origins in the revival of neo-Platonism in Florence in the late
fifteenth century.“ 19
Another comment occurred in a 1976 conversation with R.
Eric O’Connor in which Voegelin replied to a question as
follows:
„I paid perhaps undue attention to gnosticism in the first book
I published in English. [...] I happened to run into the problem
of gnosticism in my reading of Balthasar. But in the
meanwhile we have found that the apocalyptic tradition is of
equal importance, and the Neo-Platonic tradition, and
hermeticism, and magic, and so on. [Still] you will find that
the gnostic mysticism of Ficino is a constant ever since the
end of the fifteenth century, going on to the ideologies of the
nineteenth century. So there are five or six such items — not
only gnosticism — with which we have to deal.“ 20
I shall hazard the thesis that without Voegelin’s confessed
overemphasis on gnosticism in the New Science of Politics
(hereinafter NSP) 21 we should not today be in a position to
recognize gnosticism as the catalyst for what I shall call the
cult of violence in a host of modern writers and movements,