THOMAS HOLLWECK is Associate Professor of German at

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something that is not sufficiently stressed by even the best
interpreters of Gnosticism: the transformation undergone by
the pre-ecumenic symbols used in the Gnostic psychodrama.
The symbols of the cosmological societies of the Ancient Near
East are being changed due to the pneumatic nature of the
Gnostic experience which was not able to express itself in its
own indigenous symbolic language. The „dogmatic myth“, as
Taubes calls it, is in reality Gnosticism’s inability to find an
„adequate pneumatic differentiation“, that is to say,
Gnosticism’s difficulty of expressing „an anti-cosmic
contraction with the pro-cosmic means of the cosmological
gods“ 49 .
And here it is Voegelin’s conclusion that goes to the heart of
what I am trying to argue. If Gnosticism historically failed to
develop its own symbolic language in which to express its
pneumatic experiences, it is because the Gnostic experience of
what Voegelin calls the „contraction of divine order to
personal experience“ permits the use of all the symbols
available in the surrounding societies for the purpose of
articulating the personal experience of the fall and salvation of
the pneuma. The very nature of Gnosticism is syncretistic or,
as one might say facetiously, the Gnostic symbolic dramas
prefigure those of the Hollywood dream-machine. The
indiscriminate use of symbolism from any known culture is
part of the Gnostic story. But as such it also is part of the
Gnostic experience, as Voegelin argues persuasively, when he
sums up the problem of Gnostic syncretism:
„If this syncretism is taken as much for granted as it is in the
phenotypical convention, important experiential implications
may be overlooked. For in the concrete case of the
49 The Ecumenic Age, 22.