THOMAS HOLLWECK is Associate Professor of German at

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Mann’s ironically refracted version of the „Romance of the
Soul“. The Gnostic must return to a beginning that cannot be a
cosmic beginning but must instead be „personal“ beginning, as
Voegelin rightly stresses when he says:
„Society and the cosmos of which society is a part tend to be
experienced as a sphere of disorder, so that the sphere of
order in reality contracts to personal existence in tension
toward the divine Beyond. The area of reality that can be
experienced as divinely ordered thus suffers a severe
diminution.“ 43
Voegelin’s „contraction of divine order to personal existence“
is of course nothing else than the critical reformulation of what
Sloterdijk had meant when he said: „With gnosis begins the
translation of the life of the soul from nature into history.“
IV.
The Syncretistic Character of the Gnostic Myth
— Then and Now
The analysis of the Gnostic consciousness attempted in the
previous section has yielded some results. Not only should it
have become clear that there is a kind of timeless modernity
about Gnostic thought that puts into question the very meaning
of modernity itself, but there is now also a clearly definable
Gnostic „logic“ that distinguishes Gnosticism from other
forms of alienated consciousness. The Gnostic hermeneutic at
which we had arrived at the end of the section on Bloom must
now be discussed in terms of this logic.
The logic I am speaking of is that of a consciousness that
43 The Ecumenic Age, 22.