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

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relationship to such expressive violence — fanatical violence
for its own sake rather than for a limited military objective —
is that Voegelin’s work is there to be used by everyone, and
especially by those of us who, in our limited ways, seek to
carry on his legacy. Furthermore, there is at least one passage,
cited below, in which Voegelin does make such an explicit
link. There are also references to cruelty-related expressive
violence in the chapter on the „The Gnostic Revolution: The
Puritan Case“ in NSP. Finally, one could cite the two chapters
on Bakunin’s „lust for destruction“ in Voegelin’s From
Enlightenment to Revolution. 23
Definitions of Gnosticism
Before proceeding, I want to consider some definitions of
gnosticism available in the now immense literature on the
subject, with a view to seeing if they can both help flesh out
Voegelin’s own rather hesitant attempts in this direction (in
part because he had an aversion to definitions in scientific
analyis in any case) and also verify the essential soundness of
his interpretation. This is for the obvious reason that if we are
talking about the influence of gnosticism we need to be as
precise as possible about what gnosticism was in the first
place. There are, of course, those of the postmodernist
persuasion who think that gnosticism is nothing but the
construct of modern scholars. Since we are not here to discuss
nonsense, I shall pass over this „constructivist“ view of
„truth“, which may itself have an aroma of gnosticism about it.
Everett Ferguson, for example, provided a crisp and clear
definition of gnosticism as having the following six traits: