THOMAS HOLLWECK is Associate Professor of German at

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question that corresponds to Voegelin’s idea of the Gnostic
„psychodrama“ and Bloom’s notion of Gnostic „revisionism“
or „misreading“. What Taubes means by „dogmatic myth“ is
the problem that Gnosticism is nothing less than an original
spiritual symbolism but a latecomer in a situation in which the
spiritual field is already occupied by allegoresis, the medium
of the demythologizing efforts of the Hellenistic Stoa on the
one hand, and by the monotheistic religion of Judaism on the
other.
Nature, according to Taubes, has ceased to be the stage where
the mythical gods, men, and things play out the drama of the
cosmos. The stage has become empty while the revealed
monotheistic religion of Judaism transfers the encounter
between the „true“ God and man to the stage of history.
Gnosticism rejects both, nature as well as history, whereas the
stage of Gnosticism is of course the inner man, the soul, the
spirit, the pneuma. The drama is about the rebellion against the
Jewish Creator-God and his creation, the language used to
enact the drama is that of the Greek and Near-Eastern myth
and the multitude of philosophical discourses of late antiquity.
Syncretistically, Gnosticism, a belated spiritual form, as
already Bloom noted, blends mythical and philosophical
symbolisms into its uniquely Gnostic form, so that Taubes can
even assert that Gnosticism is not just outwardly syncretistic
but that syncreticism is Gnosticism’s inner character.
In Taubes’ view, Gnosticism marks the crisis of the
monotheistic revealed religion by reinterpreting, Bloom would
say „revising“, the symbolism of the supramundane Creator-
God. Gnosticism operates with the symbols of a monotheism
that has become dogmatic and overlays these symbols with the
spectrum of symbols that form the Pantheon of late antiquity.