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

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ideas most of these people had little or nothing in common,
but at the level of experience they sought in various ways to
„immanentize the eschaton“, which is the experiential
equivalent of trying to square the circle. 46
Is Voegelin vulnerable to Hannah Arendt’s observation that
„[t]here is an abyss between the men of brilliant and facile
conceptions and men of brutal deeds and active bestiality
which no intellectual explanation is able to bridge“. 47 The
answer must be in the affirmative, except that Voegelin might
well have insisted that the question is wrongly posed and that
no such „abyss“ exists. Still, it is puzzling that he did not
devote more attention to the problem of how to account for the
fact that only some gnostics were of the brutally activist
variety, suggesting perhaps that he placed excessive emphasis
on the spiritual formation of individuals and not enough on
their (genetic) bodily foundation. He of course did not deny
the importance of the latter; indeed, it would have been gnostic
of him to do so, for early gnosticism taught that the body was
a prison from which deliverance is to be had by gnosis.
There is no point in detailing the argument in the New Science
as to why and how „Totalitarianism“, defined as the existential
rule of Gnostic activists, is „the end form of progressive
civilization“. 48 The general argument, we will recall, is that,
beginning with the Reformation, which destroyed the unity of
the universal church, gnosticism went from strength to
strength, culminating in a victory over „The Mediterranean
Tradition“ in our own horrible twentieth century. With each
victory, however, gnosticism confronted a problem: the
structure of reality remained unchanged and no radical
transformation of man and society occurred. Gnosticism
therefore split up into right wing or accommodationist and left