THOMAS HOLLWECK is Associate Professor of German at

– 29 –
preserves the order of things.“ 41
The two languages and the correlative two modes of
transcendence experienced as the presence of the Beyond on
the one hand and the abysmal depth of the past of Genesis
provide the matrix from which arise all possible responses to
reality as such. This matrix does not separate the two modes
and their responsive languages cleanly but more often than not
presents a composite that may please the poet but leaves the
philosopher less than satisfied. Yet the matrix is not the result
of a logical incongruity but represents the ambiguity of
existence itself. It represents a problem that is not about to go
away at a time when we have become so unsure of the status
of experiences of transcendence altogether.
Applied to the question of the Gnostic myth, however, the
insight into the dual ways of symbolizing transcendence
becomes crucial. For it provides us with the key to an
understanding of the attraction of Gnosticism to the artist in
general and the poet in particular. Since the artist’s language is
the mythical language of creation – even today –, the alienated
artist, the Gnostic poet, whose immediate experience of divine
reality is in stark contrast to the equally strong absence of the
divine from the world has to fall back on the language of the
Beginning because the reality of immediate divine presence is
in contradiction to the immanent world surrounding us.
The Gnostic, whether ancient or modern, exists in the cold
reality of a world from which God is absent and which in fact
is constructed in such a manner as to prevent man from uniting
with the reality of the Beyond. Redemption becomes a matter
41 Eric Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, Volume IV of Order and History,
Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1974, 17 f.