“Professor Voegelin finds everything to be Gnostic.”
— Thomas J. J. Altizer
CONTENTS
- INTRODUCTION
- THE TERM “GNOSTICISM” AS AN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY INVENTION
- VOEGELIN’S SLEIGHT OF HAND FROM JONAS TO POLITICAL WEAPON
- CONSERVATIVE WEAPONIZATION OF THE WORD “GNOSTICISM”
- BLAVATSKY ON THE GNOSTICS VERSUS CONSERVATIVE FEARS
- CHRISTIANITY’S UNEXAMINED ASSUMPTIONS OR CHARADE OF IGNORANCE
- DEATH OF VOEGELIN’S FRANKENSTEIN “GNOSTICISM”
INTRODUCTION
Few words in the lexicon of contemporary conservative and traditionalist thought have been abused as thoroughly, as recklessly, and as hypocritically as “Gnosticism.” In the hands of Eric Voegelin and, far more egregiously, in the hands of his intellectual heirs, the term has ceased to function as a rigorous analytical category, if it ever was one, and has devolved into a polemical bludgeon: a single, elastic epithet stretched to cover Marxism, progressivism, the Enlightenment, scientism, esotericism, and virtually any intellectual development that offends orthodox Christian or conservative sensibilities. It is the Swiss Army knife of conservative intellectual invective. It is made versatile, portable, and, upon close inspection, capable of cutting almost nothing cleanly.
The concept of “Gnosticism” as deployed in this tradition is not scholarship. It is a disguise, or rhetoric dressed in scholarly clothing. It is a heresiological reflex inherited from the early Church Fathers, laundered through twentieth-century existentialism, and weaponized for Cold War-era culture wars. Its analytical value is nil. Its persistence is a scandal, and its continued deployment by otherwise intelligent thinkers reveals less about the phenomena it purports to describe than about the intellectual limitations and parochial commitments of those who wield it.
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