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THE NEW INQUISITIONS: HERETIC-HUNTING AND THE INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF MODERN TOTALITARIANISM |
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8: Eric Voegelin, Anti-Gnosticism, and the Totalitarian Emphasis on Order In conservative circles during the mid- to late twentieth century, one finds a recurrent use of the word "Gnostic" as a peculiar derogatory epithet. This obsession with anti-gnosticism derives from Eric Voegelin, to whom modernity is the venue for a very long-lived ideological threat, a threat to social Order that reappears from age to age, and that is associated with the religious phenomenon of late antiquity (contemporaneous with early Christianity) called Gnosticism. Thus, one finds during the late twentieth century, in various conservative political works, allusions to the "Gnostic" nature of the Soviet Union, of Marxism, of Hitler, of Stalin, of various leftists, and so forth. But, as we shall see, these derogatory references to "Gnosticism" bear no relation to the actual phenomenon of Gnosticism or of gnosticism, and in fact disturbingly resemble such proto-totalitarian, anti-heresiological impositions of Order as one found in the Inquisition or in witch trials. [1] Over the last half of the twentieth century, scholars learned a great deal about the religious phenomenon of late antiquity known as Gnosticism. [2] Before the discovery and dissemination of the extraordinary discovery of the Nag Hammadi library -- a collection of actual Gnostic writings found in Egypt in clay jars in 1945 -- it was possible to hold to a single view, arguably a caricature of Gnosticism along the lines of that proposed by Hans Jonas. But by the late twentieth century, the simplistic characterization (derived from its opponents of late antiquity, like Irenaeus and Epiphanius) of this complex and diverse movement as dualistic, anticosmic, pessimistic, and the like was largely discarded, at least in serious academic analysis. Yet in one arena of political discourse one finds anachronistic and peculiar uses of the word "Gnosticism" that are preserved from another era intact, like a dusty 1952 Studebaker kept intact in an old garage. I refer, of course, to the derogatory use by Eric Voegelin and his followers of the words "gnosis," "Gnostic," and "Gnosticism" as describing, bizarrely enough, the forms and origins of modern totalitarianism. The contributions of Voegelin's other work are eclipsed by his total confusion over what Gnosticism (or gnosticism) is, and in fact unfortunately reveal more than traces of the very totalitarianism that he uses the term "Gnosticism" to condemn. The Rhetoric of Anti-Gnosticism To begin, we will need to consider Voegelin's abuse of "Gnosticism" as a rhetorical weapon. His most widely known set of direct references to "Gnosticism" occur in an essay entitled "Science, Politics and Gnosticism," published in 1958, though he had published other references to what he labeled "Gnostic" politics or political movements many years earlier. When we look carefully at this essay, and at the introduction to it that Voegelin wrote for its American publication, we find something rather surprising. From the title, one would expect to find that Voegelin was going to demonstrate some kind of concrete connection between the three subjects of the essay -- in other words, that he would outline Gnosticism and then show how "it" emerges in the modern period in science and politics. In the introduction, he does briefly (drawing, significantly, as we will later see, on the anti-Gnostic Irenaeus) sketch the outlines of Gnosticism as the realization of "gnosis itself -- knowledge." [3] But knowledge of what? Voegelin does not say. Instead, we find that "the [Gnostic's) aim is always destruction of the old world and passage to the new," and that gnosis is "the means of escaping the world." [4] At the end of this misleading characterization, Voegelin then warns the reader that:
Let us unpack Voegelin's characterization of gnosis here and show why it is so thoroughly misleading. First: what is gnosis, anyway? Voegelin writes that it is "knowledge," implying that it is just another form of ordinary knowledge, or information. But in fact the word "gnosis" in its generally accepted scholarly sense refers to knowledge of God or to put it another way, transcendence of the subject-object division. The word "knowledge" entails a subject knowing an object, but gnosis may perhaps better be termed the realization of inner union between the individual consciousness and divine revelation. The word "revelation" implies a "revealer," and in the various Gnostic writings one finds numerous instances of the divine revealer, in general, Christ. Gnosticism certainly cannot be described as "self-salvation" -- throughout the Gnostic writings, one finds the theme of divine revelation and the need for both human effort toward realizing gnosis, as well as the need for corresponding divine grace or angelic help. But most interesting of all is Voegelin's claim that the "Gnostic" seeks destruction of the old world or even more startling, "world destruction," and that such "Gnostic" attempts are a futile effort to disturb the order of being and the order of society. This is interesting perhaps most of all because there is no evidence for the idea that Gnostics (as represented in the actual writings we possess) were engaged in any such effort at world destruction at all. It is arguable that Gnosticism, as part of the larger emergence of Christianity in late antiquity, represented a shift from Platonism or Hermetism in that Gnostics in the Nag Hammadi library writings often insisted on the decisive revelatory power of Christ, separating them to some extent from the other religious traditions of the era. But in fact Platonism and Hermetism are directly represented in the Nag Hammadi collection, and when one looks closely at the actual collection, one finds nowhere in it an urge toward "world destruction" or even the deliberate disruption of social order. Rather, one finds an insistence on direct inner spiritual experience as opposed to, say, worldly or social power. One finds numerous instances of visionary revelations, and some ethical admonitions as well as what we may call "mystery sayings" like those of Christ in the Gospel of Thomas. The obvious disconnect between Voegelin's characterizations of Gnosticism and contemporary scholarly understanding becomes, frankly, ridiculous when we turn to the actual essay "Science, Politics and Gnosticism." The essay meanders from Plato to Marx to Nietzsche with nary a mention of, let alone a definition of, gnosis or Gnosticism until we find such gems as this in a discussion of Nietzsche: In this "cruelty of the intellectual conscience" can be seen the movement of the spirit that in Nietzsche's gnosis corresponds functionally to the Platonic periagoge, the turning-around and opening of the soul. But in the gnostic movement man remains shut off [!] from transcendent being. The will to power strikes against the wall of being, which has become a prison. It forces the spirit into a rhythm of deception and self-laceration. [6] Thus Voegelin asserts, without reference to anything authentically gnostic, that Nietzsche represents a "gnosis" that is "shut off" from transcendence. Furthermore, he represents a "will to power" that leads to "deception," and all of this in turn leads up to the pronouncement that "To rule means to be God; in order to be God gnostic man takes upon himself the torments of deception and self-laceration." [7] In all of this, "gnosis" and "gnostic" are tossed in and misused as if they meant things to which they certainly bear no relation whatever. Gnosis here is described as being "shut off" when earlier Voegelin himself admitted that this is a word meaning "freedom" and "salvation." The scholar of Gnosticism or of gnosis looks on with bewilderment at such nonsequiturs: what on earth is Voegelin up to? The bewilderment intensifies. In discussing Hegel, Voegelin pronounces him also a "gnostic," and then offers the following: "Gnosis desires dominion over being; in order to seize control of being the gnostic constructs his system. The building of systems is a gnostic form of reasoning, not a philosophical one." [8] "Gnosis" desires something? A strange formulation made stranger by what follows. The subsequent tautology goes: gnostics reputedly had systems; Hegel had a system; therefore Hegel is a gnostic, and further, all system-builders are gnostics. Interesting as an example of fallacious reasoning, but rather frustrating for the scholar familiar with Gnosticism or gnostic religious traditions. What accounts for Voegelin proclaiming that "gnosis desires dominion over being"? Did he not earlier write that the gnostic seeks to escape the world, and shortly after that of the gnostic's will to destroy it? And is not all of this in rather total disregard of anything we have learned of gnosis as inner spiritual revelation and union with the divine? Little wonder that, as Gregor Sebba wrote, "nowhere in the thousands of scholarly papers, books, and reviews [by scholars of gnosis] does there seem to be any evidence that Voegelin's early and later work on gnosticism has even been noticed. There is good reason for that." [9] There is indeed. Voegelin's work is totally irrelevant to the actual study of Gnosticism or gnosis. It has an entirely different agenda. In order to understand this agenda, we might consider the rather obvious clues that are scattered throughout Voegelin's work. In The New Science of Politics, another work that featured Voegelin's peculiar view of "gnosticism," we find an entire chapter entitled "Gnostic Revolution -- The Puritan Case." In it, Voegelin asserts that the entire Reformation movement and the whole of modernity must be "understood as the successful invasion of Western institutions by Gnostic movements." [10] "This event," he continues portentously, this "revolutionary eruption of the Gnostic movements" "is so vast in dimensions that no survey even of its general characteristics can be attempted in the present lectures."" The scope of this claim is rather remarkable, in the way of most sweeping and unsubstantiated claims. Voegelin goes on to offer a brief sketch of Richard Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, an overview of sixteenth-century Puritanism, and from it determines with absolute certainty and no real evidence that Puritanism as a whole was gnostic! Given the hostility of Calvin himself and of Calvinism in general to mysticism in general, let alone gnostic thought, one can only conclude that in Voegelin's view, Calvin and Calvinism (and the entire Reformation movement to boot) were gnostic even in the midst of their hostility to gnosticism, precisely the kind of rhetorical inversion that Voegelin attributes to none other than -- gnosticism. [12] In "Ersatz Religion," Voegelin extends his condemnation as "gnostic" not only to Hegel and Protestantism but also beyond it to virtually the entirety of the modern world. Now everything bad is "gnostic." He begins this odd essay with the pronouncement that "By gnostic movements we mean such movements as progressivism, positivism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, communism, fascism, and national socialism." [13] Given such a list, one realizes where the scholar loan Culianu found reason for his frustrated outburst at those who claimed any old thing at all is gnostic. [14] But the ubiquity of gnosticism is the logical conclusion if one believes, as Voegelin does, that "all gnostic movements are involved in the project of abolishing the constitution of being, with its origin in divine transcendent being, and replacing it with a world-immanent order of being, the perfection of which lies in the realm of human action." [15] Such a definition stretches "gnostic" so far as to make it transparent and thus a label for any effort at social reform. Voegelin is indeed describing something one can see at work in modernity -- that much is true. But its origin will turn out to be somewhere other than in gnosticism (or Gnosticism). Let me offer another clue as to Voegelin's only barely veiled agenda here. Voegelin corresponded at great length over many years with Alfred Schutz, to whom on 1 January 1953 he wrote concerning his views on Christianity. In this revealing letter, Voegelin elaborates on his distinction between "essential Christianity," on the one hand, and what he construes as "the gnosis of historical eschatology," on the other. [16] He goes on to write that "The sectarian movements and certain trends within Protestantism insist that eschatological Christianity is the essential one, while what I call essential Christianity is for them the corruption of Christianity by the Catholic Church." And if this were not clear enough, Voegelin near the end of his letter says it directly: "this essential Christianity can be identified with Catholicism" with only a few reservations. [17] Curiously, he goes on to mention Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa (certainly gnostics within the Catholic tradition itself) but because they do not correspond to his peculiar political definition of gnosticism, he does not directly attack them. In any case, the gist of all this is clear: Protestants and modernity are gnostic; Catholicism, except perhaps in certain cases, is not. Now we begin to see the larger picture here. But what is revealed when we step back enough to see the whole may not be exactly what Voegelin had in mind. First, we should note that in this letter, and in much of his later work, Voegelin confuses gnosticism and "historical eschatology" or millennialism. This, it turns out, is a quite interesting confusion, not least because gnosticism (using the broadest meaning of the term, the perspectives of those who seek or espouse gnosis) is precisely opposed to an historicist view of Christianity. Is there any serious scholar who has studied the history of gnosis and has not recognized the clear division between those who espouse "horizontal" historical faith (pistis), on the one hand, and those who espouse gnosis ("vertical" realization), on the other? This division, after all, is at the very heart of many Gnostic writings themselves. Indeed, Christ in the Gospel of Thomas directly tells his disciples that they seek him somewhere else (historically or "horizontally") when the truth is right there before them in the "vertical" present moment. One finds this also in the Gospel of Philip and other Nag Hammadi texts. Why would Voegelin invest Gnosticism (or gnosticism) with exactly the historicizing characteristics to which gnostics are in fact most opposed? Clearly there is some kind of rhetorical inversion at work here, a sleight of hand. But let us consider the question of "historical eschatology" for a moment. Where do we in fact find the origins of this Christian tradition of historical eschatology? The answer is certainly not in gnosticism -- it is, rather, within Catholicism. Voegelin himself frequently cites Joachim of Fiore, the medieval Calabrian abbot who envisioned history as unfolding in three successive ages: that of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. He anticipated a "third age" immediately in the future, and this millennialism is a theme implicit in Christianity as a whole, which has after all generated many and perhaps countless millennialist perspectives. But one could just as well argue that this millennialist tendency is precisely a result of the loss of gnosis ("vertical" direct spiritual realization for oneself) as a possibility within Catholicism. The rejection of an orthodox gnosis (even that represented by St. Clement of Alexandria) and the emergence of a Catholic hierarchic corporate social structure with an emphasis on historical faith and the mediating power of the Church-it is here that we find the origins of "historical eschatology." Let me make this even more explicit. The Gnostics of late antiquity, and gnostics of all kinds, insist on the necessity that the individual seek direct inner spiritual realization (gnosis) for him or herself. This is not to say that such traditions necessarily represent anarchy or total individualism: rather, they tend toward a simple communal organization not unlike that of Jesus and his disciples. We see this not only in the relatively small gnostic groups of antiquity but also in more recent gnostic traditions such as the Christian theosophy of Jacob Bohme. [18] Such groups exist in order to help one another toward spiritual realization; they do not have worldly or historical aims; their aims are "vertical." It is when this gnostic impulse is absent that we see the "horizontal" and historical-eschatological development of a corporate, hierarchic Church structure that actively opposes and even for a considerable length of time, by way of the Inquisition, persecutes and murders those who espouse one or another form of gnosis. Now, once we realize that Voegelin is falsely accusing gnostics of the very thing (historicism) that belongs in fact to the "essential Christianity" of Catholicism that he embraces, suddenly a very different possibility emerges. What if Voegelin's attacks on gnosticism were in fact a rhetorical deception or mistake that disguises the true origins of totalitarianism? Without any question, the gnostics of late antiquity and the various heretical and gnostic groups and individuals -- that I have made the principal subject of my study for years -- represent the dissident element within Christianity. They are the ones who are willing to stand alone and even die in defense of their inner realizations; historically, they are the victims. If we were to look back in history and think about modern totalitarianism's origins in the West, where exactly might we look? Where, for instance, do we find the totalization of society in a corporate body that expels or murders its dissidents? Is it possible that the Inquisition signals the real predecessor of modern totalitarianism? Certainly it is more reasonable than attributing these origins to the victims of these earlier machines of enforced social order. Such an analysis would not be unprecedented, of course. Alain de Benoist, as is well known, finds the origin of totalitarianism back in the emergence of monotheism itself, in the totalizing God who will have no other gods before him, and who commands the Jews to kill their enemies, to "put the inhabitants of that city [where people serve other gods] to the sword, destroying it utterly, all who are in it and its cattle .... Burn the city and all its spoil." [19] Certainly I am not willing to go quite so far as de Benoist in indicting monotheism, yet one cannot help but be compelled to acknowledge that there is a real tension at work here between one perspective that insists on dogmatic formulations based on historical eschatology resulting in murder of those who believe differently, and another that champions direct spiritual realization for oneself and for others. This opposition, it would seem, is implicit within Jewish, Christian, and Islamic monotheism from antiquity to the present: one sees it again and again. This opposition is what the whole of Voegelin's work disguises by confusing "gnosticism" with historicist millennialism. Once one is in possession of this key, Voegelin's work takes on an entirely different set of implications. Voegelin's insights into the emergence of modem totalitarianism suddenly suggest that the ideological constructs of Fascism and Communism have their origins in prior doctrinal systems enforced on pain of torture and murder; that in historicist-eschatological Christianity are the origins of the Marxist or Fascist historical faith in a future state that justifies almost any means of achieving it in this world, including mass murder. Who more clearly reveals what Voegelin calls the "cruelty of the intellectual conscience" and the will to "domination": the Inquisitor torturing and (by way of the state) murdering a woman gnostic like Marguerite of Porete, or her, the victim? One can easily see why -- since he embraced an "essential Christianity" substantially identical with Catholicism -- rather than look to historicist Christianity for the origins of totalitarianism, Voegelin would seek to blame the victims, the gnostics who in fact represent the dissident opposition to totalism! Of course, when one thinks about it, this rhetorical move seems quite bizarre. I can think of no historical instance in which a gnostic individual or group (using the word in its proper sense) killed or sought to kill anyone; but I can think of numerous examples of the Inquisitions resulting in torture and murder. As it turns out, though, the attribution of virtually everything bad in the modem world to "gnosticism" has an interesting genealogy. Voegelin is only one branch on a fairly large family tree. Generally, apologists for Voegelin's perspective begin with Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860), whose book Die christliche Gnosis, oder die christliche Religions-Philosophie in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung (Tiibingen, 1835) explained the history of religion as an Hegelian gnostic phenomenon developing in a dialectical evolutionary movement toward unity with the Godhead. [20] Baur's Tiibingen school of Protestantism eventually manifested itself as an extreme form of antisupematuralism, particularly in his followers, but in Die christliche Gnosis Baur sees Gnosticism in antiquity through Hegelian goggles, thus forging a link between Gnosticism and Hegel that later Voegelinians could use even if the rest of Baur's work was more or less discarded. [21] Harking back to Baur is convenient for ideological reasons in that he was an Hegelian at the time he wrote that book, but in fact an earlier and more extensive analysis of gnosticism is to be found in Gottfried Arnold's Unparteiische Kirchen-und-Ketzerhistorie (1700), which is somewhat more inconvenient for Voegelinism because it is fairly sympathetic to the gnostics discussed in it. The next major branch on this tree is Hans Jonas, who also saw Gnosticism through very particular lenses, in his case, those of early-twentieth-century existentialism. Jonas's view of Gnosticism in his primary and immensely influential book Gnosis und spatantiker Geist (1934), published in English as The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, defined Gnosticism as a dualistic, world-rejecting phenomenon. Jonas's depiction of Gnosticism -- with its emphasis on the Gnostic mythology of the ignorant demiurge, the malevolent archons, the fallen Sophia, and the effort of the gnostic seeker to reach the kingdom of light -- indeed, depicted a form of Gnosticism that is visible in the Nag Hammadi library in such works as The Gospel of Philip and even more clearly, The Hypostasis of the Archons. But this form of "classical Gnosticism" is only one of many different currents, and in Jonas's rendering bore a strong resemblance to twentieth-century existentialist philosophy. Even in late-twentieth-century efforts of Voegelinians to justify Voegelin's bizarre political renderings of gnosis and gnosticism, when countless other resources are available, it is to Jonas's form of "classical Gnosticism" that they repair. [22] Sebba writes that "in our inquiry, Hans Jonas holds a special position." This is so-even though Jonas's depiction of Gnosticism has long been superceded by the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library and other research -- because Jonas's existentialist Gnosticism can be used to support Voegelin's idiosyncratic views, and many later scholars cannot. Another apologist for Voegelin's political misuse of gnosticism is Stephen McKnight, who seeks to justify this misuse by extending it to the whole of Western esotericism, beginning with the prisca theologia of the Renaissance. He notes that recent scholarship
McKnight rather understates the facts concerning recent scholarship on Gnosticism, which does not support Voegelinism at all, as actual scholarship in this field is much more complex and nuanced than Voegelinism will allow. But what we see in McKnight is an interesting direction: rather than simply attacking "Gnosticism," he seeks to extend the field of what we may call heresiology to magic, alchemy, Ficino -- whatever can be roped in as a purported "source of modern epistemological and political disorder." Interestingly, in a revealing paper given in 2001, McKnight discusses a lecture given by Voegelin in 1971 in which it becomes clear that Voegelin had himself begun to realize his ascriptions to "gnosticism" were untenable in the light of subsequent scholarship and the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library. McKnight quotes directly Voegelin's second thoughts from an audiotape he had made of the lecture at which Voegelin reflected on his earlier works on "gnosticism." Voegelin remarked on
In other words, Voegelin by 1971 had discovered that modern scholarship was by no means according with his idiosyncratic perspective, so he sought to expand his witch-hunt for the sources of the evils of modernity among the Renaissance Neoplatonists, practitioners of magic and alchemy, and the like. But by this time the Voegelinian misuse of "gnostic" had ossified into political dogma, and even he himself could not stop it. What is more, he still held to his basic thesis that esotericism of various kinds was to blame for the ills of modernity -- one merely should look beyond the word "gnostic" itself. Thus we have McKnight's project to identify the "source of modern epistemological and political disorder" with "other esoteric traditions like magic, alchemy, and Renaissance neoplatonism." At this point, we should pause and consider these authors' emphasis on "order" and fear of "disorder." It is interesting because it is precisely the kind of totalistic thinking that one finds in the communist and, although perhaps to a slightly lesser extent, in the fascist state. In the totalitarian state, there is no room for the dissident; the dissident is the source of "disorder," and according to this logic must be imprisoned, tortured, or killed. It is interesting, therefore, that this is precisely the logic of the Inquisition, which also sought to impose social and religious order at all costs, including that of human life. This obsession with order haunts the works not only of Voegelin but of his followers as well, and leads McKnight (just as Voegelin before him) into attributing strange things to gnostics, as when in his conclusion to this article, McKnight claims that "the gnostic regards the search for innerworldly fulfillment as a sign of ignorance (agnoia), not gnosis." [25] Once again, we are in the land of Voegelinism, where gnosis is proposed to have nothing to do with the inner spiritual life so that it can be shaped into a term of political abuse for dissidents. The Voegelinians do not hesitate to take this fetish for order and rejection of dissidence to its extreme, either. Gregor Sebba, another Voegelinian apologist whose work I noted earlier, makes even more explicit what is implicit in McKnight's remark just cited: Sebba writes that "The gnosis of the gnostic is agnoia, ignorance of the truth. But it is not innocent ignorance: he wills the untruth, although he knows the truth. But why then does he will the Evil? Why is there Evil at all? ... The history of ancient gnosticism has become the history of the discord." [26] This is an extremely revealing remark, because it makes absolutely no sense -- except if the author sees himself as a modern Irenaeus, a heresy-hunter. Here the idea of imposed order is counterposed to the gnostic who is now openly identified with "Evil." Not just evil, but capitalized evil, evil incarnate, opposed to the One Truth of the historical Church or of the totalitarian state. Discord, dissidence, these are unbearable to the totalitarian order. The Voegelinians, in their hatred for the least sign of the esoteric, here reveal themselves akin to the very totalitarianism whose origins they purport to be exposing! A similar, typically sweeping application of Voegelinism is to be found in a book whimsically entitled Gnostic Wars: The Cold War in the Context of a History of Westem Spirituality by Stefan Rossbach. This work of about 225 pages of main text does not even discuss the Cold War of the Soviet Union against the United States until page 186. Most of the book is devoted to a survey of "gnosticism" in the West, predictably spending a great deal of time on Hans Jonas, Hegel, and Marx, but with brief stops at the Cathars and Puritanism -- in other words, the usual Voegelinian anti-gnostic train ride through history with the usual stops. But it still comes as a surprise when, with no proof, Rossbach, in the epilogue, announces that
One finds such an announcement totally ridiculous, given that the book is purportedly about the Cold War, yet demonstrates no convincing connection at all between the emergence of the totalitarian, rationalistic Soviet Union and anything gnostic or Gnostic. One is reminded of Voegelin's own frustration, expressed in 1971, with those who "every day" plagued him with "questions of this kind: is, for instance, the Russian government a Gnostic government?" "Of course," the by then slightly more enlightened Voegelin intoned, "things are not that simple." [28] But it would appear from Gnostic Wars that things are that simple after all! By now we are familiar with this sort of wild leaping about in place of logical progression, because Rossbach's is fairly typical Voegelinism. First, gnosis is defined as what it is not -- it is here pronounced to have nothing to do with knowledge of the divine or union with the divine. Then the "classical" "gap" between human and divine realms somehow "mutates" into "those with gnosis and those without." Both groups are then projected to see themselves as in possession of absolute vision, even though before the focus was solely on the bad gnostics. But this shift of focus to a battle between two groups is necessary in order to force "gnosticism" to fit the Cold War of the mid- to late twentieth century. Finally, the groups must fight a war, even if one can find not a single instance in the history Rossbach recites of an actual war between gnostics and anyone. Of course, he does not mention the Western war on gnostics that mars its history; the Inquisition for some reason doesn't merit notice, because it doesn't fit with Voegelinism. But not all the anti-gnostics are quite so immediately obvious in their simplistic demonization of the gnostic currents of the West. There is another development in the general current of anti-gnosticism that also requires mention here, and that is represented in the multivolume, rather opaque works of Cyril O'Regan, a professor at Notre Dame. O'Regan's perspective is more an outgrowth of what I have come to call "hyperintellectualism," the hypertheoretical manifestations of the "linguistic turn" in literary theory and philosophy. O'Regan spends almost no time at all demonstrating with any evidence that Jacob Bohme is a Valentinian Gnostic -- his central claim in Gnostic Apocalypse: Jacob Bohme's Haunted Narrative -- and almost all his time constructing his own abstract linguistic-rhetorical edifice, using terms such as "Valentinian narrative grammar" and "deformations of Valentini an grammar." At first, even the specialist in the work of Bohme is perplexed: what is O'Regan up to here? Then, slowly, it becomes clearer what he is up to. Historical details get almost no play here at all: on the first page (and actually throughout the book) the names of major figures are misspelled. [29] Recent scholarship in the field is ignored. [30] But such details are not so important: more important is what is inadvertently revealed in the language of O'Regan's discourse. He claims that "Bohme's visionary discourse constitutes a metalepsis of the biblical narrative, in that its six-stage narrative of divine becoming disfigures every single episode of the biblical narrative, as interpreted in and by the standard pre-Reformation and Reformation theological traditions." [31] Bohme's work shows "how apocalyptic, Neoplatonism, and the Kabbalah can live together in a master discourse that displays Valentinian transgressive properties." [32] Never mind that there is here no significant evidence that any of these specific historical traditions -- any of them -- actually appear in Bohme's work in any meaningful way, only the attempt at ascription. The key word here is "transgressive." Bohme is made out to be a "Valentinian" and therefore "transgressive." Trangressive of what? Of order, one gathers, represented by the projected unity of the whole of "pre- Reformation and Reformation theological tradition" (which we all know is but a single uniform perspective). This author certainly can generate all kinds of jargon -- in a single line we read of "apocalyptic inscription, apocalyptic distention, narrative deconstitution of negative theology," all part of a self-described "sophisticated conceptual apparatus of general constructs." [33] And this apparatus, O'Regan tells us on the same page, "amounts to taking a machine gun to swat a fly." This is interesting, because presumably Bohme is the fly. On the next page we read that the Bohmean "mode of thinking is irredeemably past." Bohme represents "an impossible hope for a form of knowledge-perhaps any form of knowledge-that would escape the hegemony of an all-controlling rationality." [34] In other words, O'Regan now pronounces the fly dead. There is, in his mind, no possibility that Bohme's thought could be meaningful for anyone today or in the future it represents merely a "deranging of biblical narrative" that is somehow "parasitic" just like he thinks Valentinianism was. Using Voegelin's term, he writes that Gnostics are "pneumapathological." [35] And so we find ourselves, despite all the jargon and the rhetorical convolutions, back in the same general territory as Voegelinism. O'Regan seeks to demonstrate a Gnostic Return in Modernity in order to show what? The total tyranny of rationality, as he suggests above? The impossibility of realizing or understanding what Bohme's work represents? The ponderous prose here has an underlying agenda that is very much akin to that of Voegelin's misguided efforts. What we see in these works is a concerted effort by a number of authors to totally dismiss and beyond that, annihilate all that they construe as gnostic. They represent a kind of hegemonic near-totalitarianism that we can certainly trace back to the anti-gnostic rhetoric of the early Church Fathers such as Tertullian, Epiphanius, and Irenaeus. Consider, for instance, yet another anti-gnostic effort at witch-hunting, this one by a student of Christopher Lasch, Catherine Tumber, and entitled American Feminism and the Birth of New Age Spirituality (2002). Here, too, we see trotted out once again the Voegelinian old saws about "gnosticism" (with a small "g," but often also with a big "g") having a "dominant mood" of "nihilism and despair," a product of a "bitter mood of aristocratic withdrawal and profound cosmic alienation." Tumber at least dimly recognizes that such views "appear to have little in common with the sunny optimism, the nearly ideological cheerfulness that marked late nineteenth-century American gnosticism." [36] Still, such bizarre self-contradictions don't bother her in the least, for Tumber is armed with the rhetorical weapons of fervent anti-gnosticism. By the end of her book, Tumber is making wild claims right and left, asserting unaccountably that modern mass consumerism and "bohemian subculture" derives from "gnosticism," as did the New Thought movement of the nineteenth century and the New Age movement of the twentieth. Indeed, the whole of feminism is based in "self-deluding" "gnosticism" that, clearly wrongly in Tumber's view, "seeks inner peace." [37] One wouldn't want social order inconvenienced by inner peace! But the real tendency toward witch-hunting comes only at the end of the book, when we discover that Marcus Garvey was a "gnostic," and that, in breathless if ungrammatical prose, "not only can self-proclaimed feminist heretic Mary Daly and professed pagan Starhawk be classified as gnostic, but gnostic tendencies can be detected in the work of Nation of Islam leader, Louis Farrakhan, and the founder of Black Theology, James Cone." Oprah Winfrey [!l, Gloria Steinem -- (and] "middle-class women" as a whole -- "revived" "the corrupt spirituality of gnosticism." [38] Never mind that there is not the slightest support for these pronouncements, only the flinging about of the word "gnostic" as if tossing the epithet, like tossing the epithet "witch," were enough to condemn whomever she wishes. But in fact Tumber has only "established" that "gnostics" are like Communists in the America of the 1950s under McCarthyite witch-hunting: everywhere and nowhere at once. "Gnostics" provide convenient enemies, which one needs if one is to establish Order by rooting them out. All of this would be rather amusing and a little sad, if it were not for the fact that this anti-gnosticism had and still has both a following and consequences. When we look at the history of Buddhism, we find something quite different: a range of perspectives is possible, and a general consensus emerges within a tolerance of alternative but related views. This is quite akin to the more pluralistic perspectives one finds within Gnosticism, as evidenced by the range of works in the Nag Hammadi Library, and for that matter, within the pluralism of gnostic traditions in the West more generally. But Western Christianity developed an apparatus to crush dissent, to annihilate a plurality of views, to obliterate those who espoused a gnostic path toward spiritual realization. This apparatus has its roots, I believe, in early Christian efforts to establish an orthodoxy based on historical faith, an orthodoxy that framed itself by exclusion and attack, an orthodoxy framed by those who hated the gnostic traditions that emphasized inner spiritual realization. Out of this anti-gnostic orthodoxy of antiquity, whose adherents so feared direct spiritual realization for oneself -- emerged the panoply of anti-gnostic individuals and social structures of the medieval period. During this period, we see the witch-hunts and the burning of heretics under the oppressive apparatus of the Inquisition. The same dynamic of antidissidence, of enforced adherence to overarching rationalized dogma is replicated in new ways in modern totalitarianism. But whereas even in the medieval period one was comparatively free so long as one's gnostic inclinations did not come to the attention of the Inquisitors, in the modern period totalitarianism has the capacity to reach into every aspect of society, to lay its deadening hand upon not only the outward aspects of freedom like where one goes and what one does but what is more, upon what and how one thinks. That is what is implied by O'Regan's pronouncement that we cannot any longer realize what Bohme realized; gnostic life, he thinks, is closed to us. One begins to wonder if this is a form of totalitarian closure of possibilities differing in form but not in kind from the Chinese Communist destruction of virtually all religious traditions in the lands under their dominion, most notably Tibetan Buddhism, with its gnostic experiential religious traditions. And so we have moved toward conclusions rather different than those of Voegelinism, ones that offer valuable insights into the origin and nature of totalitarianism. The struggle to make real on earth the millennial or utopian reality envisioned in an historical future, the willingness to kill those who dare to be dissidents to an imposed social order -- what is the historical origin of these tendencies? To be sure, no doubt these are also simply human tendencies, the worst human tendencies, one might argue, as they resulted in millions on millions of dead bodies tossed in mass graves or allowed to rot where they fell. But an historical lineage certainly also could be traced from Christian millennialism-apocalypticism to secularized Hegelian evolutionism, and from that to Marx's effort to imagine a utopian society in the historical future. From Marx it was not long to Lenin and Stalin, to Hitler and to the elimination of those who are seen as "parasitic," and finally to a totalized society in which dissent is intolerable if the society is to reach the millennial future imagined to be just around the next bend. The genealogy of anti-gnosticism and its secular reflections is complex, to be sure, but if are seeking the origins of totalitarianism, it is here we must look. Certainly we can begin to see why Voegelinist anti-gnosticism represents what I term a "pseudoconservative" wrong turn because it is not based in conserving anything from the past except the spirit and perhaps by extension the apparatus of the Inquisition transposed to a more or less secular ideological realm. The anti-gnostic is viscerally hostile to inner spiritual life, regards the gnostic (however the word is construed) as the Enemy, and thus represents a particularly interesting modern form of intellectual totalitarianism, one opposed to even the least indications of seeking inner peace or of otherworldliness, one that reduces the whole of life to this-worldly social concerns. This is a fascinating dynamic, and one that we can see not only in Western Christianity but also in Islam. For in Islam, as in Christianity, the origins of modern totalitarianism are found with the witch-hunters and anti-gnostic ideologues. Yet time and again, contemporary authors want to blame the victims -- one of the more complex instances of which is the well-known work of Norman Cohn.
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