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

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has been the foundation of all manifestations of the Gnostic
imagination from its beginning until the present.
Modern Gnosticism has been dedicated to the hubristic
attempt to overcome the anxieties and uncertainties of human
life by building a terrestrial paradise. Despite its limitations
and periodic lapses into fundamentalist repression of
autonomous philosophical inquiry, medieval Catholic
Christianity through its dogma preserved enough of the
„Mediterranean Tradition“, derived from Greek philosophy
and Israelite and Christian revelation and centered on the
cognitio fidei (knowledge by faith), to keep Gnosticism at the
level of an underground movement for centuries —
specifically until the Reformation, described controversially
by Voegelin as the beginning of gnosticism’s triumph over the
Mediterranean Tradition in the Western life of the spirit. 40
Early Gnosticism in the New Science of Politics
Gnosticism „accompanied Christianity from the beginning“,
for there were gnostic influences in Paul and John. 41 In fact ,
writes Voegelin somewhat enigmatically, „only a discerning
eye“ could tell the difference between Gnosticism and
essential Christianity based on the uncertainty of faith as
characterized by Hebrews 11:1-3: Faith is „the substance of
things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen“. In a key
passage on the results of the gnostic „fall“ from the heroic
uncertainty of essential Christianity, Voegelin wrote:
„The economy of this lecture does not permit a description of
the gnosis of antiquity or of the history of its transmission
into the Western Middle Ages; enough to say that at the time
gnosis was a living religious culture on which men could fall
back. The attempt at immanentizing the meaning of existence