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

– 7 –
cruelty, the conviction that one is most free when one is
expressing the need for violence, the kind of violence we see
praised in Fascist ideology, may have a genetic bodily
foundation, but its roots may well also lie in a certain
spiritually distorted way of viewing the world as badly made
and in need of destruction. Such a way of looking at the world
was first coherently expressed by gnosticism — or gnosis as
some prefer to call it.
I must confess that for a long time I was inclined to agree with
Jürgen Gebhardt, who told me in our scholarly conversations
that Voegelin’s view of gnosticism was too compact and
insufficiently differentiated, which was the reason that his
thesis in the New Science to the effect that gnosticism is the
essence of modernity was unconvincing. Only gradually did I
come to appreciate the fact that gnosticism is not so much a
doctrine or even a creed-movement as it is a series of
hallucinations, or nightmares, if you prefer. In this series,
dramatic transformations take place with regard to what is to
be done about man’s alienation from and imprisonment in the
cosmos. The shift of emphasis from escape from to control
over the cosmos — the dominant themes of ancient and
modern gnosticism, respectively — could take place in the
twinkling of an eye. Indeed, it is now clear to me that
Voegelin not only understood that ancient „otherworldly“
gnosticism could transmute into modern „innerworldly“
gnosticism, but that he grasped additionally that it had to do
so. Gnosticism’s impatience with reality in the cosmos
guaranteed that after the earlier generations had (inevitably)
failed to escape from the cosmos, later generations of gnostics
would turn toward attempts at transforming it. When the
cosmos refused to be magically transformed, then the fault
could be said to lie in the failure to use the correct