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

– 47 –
„The essential core is the enterprise of returning the pneuma
in man from its state of alienation in the cosmos to the divine
pneuma of the Beyond through action based on knowledge.
[…] This essential core [...] can be imaginatively expanded by
a variety of symbolisms [such as] the divine Pleroma and the
Syzygies, the Ogdoads, Decads, and Dodecads of Aeons, a
higher and a lower Sophia, a Demiurge, a Cosmocrator, and a
pleromatic Saviour. If these richly varied expansions and their
colorful personnel are considered the characteristic
symbolism, as they frequently are, misgivings about the
Gnostic character of the modern systems will understandably
arise“. 65
Voegelin finds that what he calls „the obscurities in the history
of Gnosticism“ are attributable to „a conception of Gnosticism
that too narrowly concentrates on the instances of
psychodramatic expansion“. There follows a discussion of
how Schelling and Hegel drew on the gospel of John for
inspiration, of how it is wrong to consider gnosticism either as
a Christian heresy or as having a Judaic origin, and of how the
scholar must keep his attention focused on the fact that ancient
gnosticism drew its psychodramatic symbolism primarily from
the cultures of Persia, Babylon, Syria, and Egypt, all of whom
had been overrun by imperial conquerors with the resultant
experience of alienation in a vast, unfamiliar, and seemingly
senseless ecumene.
Most important for our purposes are Voegelin’s conclusions
about the relation between gnosticism and violence:
„Gnosticism, whether ancient or modern, is a dead end. That
of course is its attraction. Magic pneumatism gives its addicts
a sense of superiority over the reality which does not
conform. Whether the addiction assumes the forms of
libertarianism and asceticism preferred in antiquity, or the
modern forms of constructing systems which contain ultimate
truth and must be imposed on recalcitrant reality by means of
violence, concentration camps, and mass murder, the addict