THOMAS HOLLWECK is Associate Professor of German at

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Once again we must speak about time, even when we go
beyond the specific Gnostic experiences and turn to the mood
of alienation. Voegelin’s description of the „mood“ is based
on a philosophy of consciousness that was actually formulated
in opposition to the Gnostic forms of consciousness with their
anti-cosmic „subjectivism“. If we follow Voegelin’s
description, then we don’t live in this world of time but we
exist in the tension of time and the timeless, just as in Eliot’s
Four Quartets, frequently quoted by Voegelin: „History is the
intersection of the timeless and time.“ The Gnostic who wants
to answer the „fall into time“ with the „fall out of time“ is only
more radical in his experience of alienation than the countless
others who experience the „mood“.
On the other hand, Voegelin’s analyses of alienation in general
and Gnosticism in particular are so poignant because the
center of his philosophy of consciousness is the antithesis to
the Gnostic experience. 32 I would go so far as to argue that
without Hegel’s Gnostic speculation and Voegelin’s ever
growing knowledge of the neoplatonic and Gnostic systems
his own philosophy of consciousness might have remained
confined to the phenomenological level that we find in many
of his letters to Alfred Schütz. While there would be nothing
wrong with this, it must be noted that the creation of a
philosophy of consciousness that could be the terra firma from
which to launch his attacks against the Gnostics, ancient and
modern, became Voegelin’s overriding concern. Just as the
ancient Gnostics had in part created their mythologies in direct
32 It is no accident that Voegelin remarked, both in personal conversations as
well as in his late essays, how dependent, as it were, Plato’s philosophical
terminology and his thought in general were on the surrounding Sophistic
discourse. Philosophy, for Voegelin, does not occur in a vacuum but is
directly tied to the surrounding or competing disorder and its languages.