THOMAS HOLLWECK is Associate Professor of German at

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Taubes’ analysis seems to confirm our earlier claim that
Gnosticism speaks the „language of the Beginning“. In doing
so, it purports to be mythical without really being a mythical
form of knowledge. It shares this characteristic with a great
deal of modern „knowledge“, and certainly most expressly
with the knowledge of modern poetry. It avails itself of the
elements of ancient mythologies, but it does not need to take
them seriously, for they serve only as pieces in its own
doctrinal story of the errant pneuma and its embroilment in the
worlds and eons created by the demiurge and his archons.
Gnosticism is, to repeat the point made earlier, a syncretistic
mythology not because it arose in the culture of late antiquity
but because it is a direct reaction to the dogmatization of myth
that characterizes not only Judaism and Christianity but to a
considerable extent the late pagan culture itself.
It is in this sense that Taubes casts doubt on one of Jonas’
fundamental tenets, that of the ahistorical, existential nature of
the Gnostic myth. To Taubes, the Gnostic myth shares in the
dogmatic tradition to which it owes its genesis. Thus, Taubes
concludes, Gnosticism, despite its ahistorical demeanor, is
more closely related to the apocalyptic tradition than is
commonly believed; only it moves the site of the encounter
between the „true“ God and man from the arena of history to
the interior of man, his soul, his pneuma.
But here Taubes appears to be somewhat too Judaeocentric in
his interpretation. Granted, he correctly identifies the
difference between the apocalyptic and the Gnostic modes of
thought, but he does not offer a satisfactory explanation for
this difference. Thus, Voegelin’s analysis of Gnosticism in the
context of the ecumenic expansion of empires has to my mind
far more explanatory value. „In pragmatic history“, Voegelin