In the early 1950s, Eric Voegelin influentially argued that modern secular political ideologies, especially Communism and Nazism, bore important similarities to ancient Gnosticism.1
The term Gnosticism is used to refer to a set of ideas of somewhat uncertain origin. These ideas “coalesced” in the late first century A.D. among various Christian and Jewish sects and peaked in influence during the second and third centuries.
Gnosticism was never an institutionalized or well-defined school of thought, and scholars continue to debate whether it is a useful or coherent concept.
My purpose here is to identify the central tenets of Gnosticism, according to standard scholarly accounts, and to understand the link that Voegelin draws between ancient Gnosticism, on the one hand, and modern religious and secular ideologies, on the other.
Gnostics sharply distinguished the spiritual world from the material, or physical, world. They argued that the material world was inherently defective or even evil, that it constituted a prison for the human soul. The material world was created, they believed, by a malevolent, lower deity, a demiurge, which they associated with Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible. According to Voegelin, Gnostics rejected the material world because they felt alienated, or disconnected, from it.
The Gnostics were mystics. They sought to transcend the material world not through the mediating institutions of religion, but through direct personal contact with a hidden, higher power.2 But to make contact in this way, one needed special insight, or esoteric knowledge (Gnosis), which belonged to a spiritual elite. Gnosis was visionary knowledge; it did not come from critical reflection and, importantly, was not subject to critical evaluation.
The Gnostics, then, were, anti-materialist, mystical, and spiritually elitist. They were also utopian in a broad sense. That is, they believed it was possible, in earthly life, to vanquish imperfection, to enter an ideal or perfect realm.
Because the Gnostics sharply distinguished the material and spiritual worlds, regarded the latter as better or higher, and posited a means to enter it; and because they emphasized “illusion and enlightenment” over “sin and repentance,” they were, in the Levantine context, the supreme embodiment of Karl Jasper’s Axial revolution, sharing much with Plato and the Buddha.
Early Christian writers, Irenaeus foremost among them,3 denounced Gnosticism as a heresy. A large number of Gnostic writings were excluded from the canon and destroyed, with few surviving to the present day.4
The most profound objection to Gnosticism, on the part of the early Church, was that Gnosticism rejected the material world. The Church fathers maintained, in line with Genesis, that God’s material creation was good. Man’s free embrace of sin, not materiality itself, was responsible for corruption and evil on Earth. The Gnostic phenomenon played a role in the Church fathers’ decision to include the Hebrew Bible in the Christian canon.
Another objection was that Gnostics regarded Jesus as God, but not as God incarnate. On the Gnostic account, Jesus only appeared to exist in the flesh. The early Church argued, of course, that Christ was both divine and human, both spiritual and material. In the sixth century, the Church formally adopted the doctrine of the hypostatic union (i.e., of Jesus’s simultaneous divinity and humanity).
For Voegelin’s purposes, and our own, the most important features of Gnosticism are its vanguardism and utopianism – its contention that an elite few know how to attain perfection, or near perfection, on Earth.
Many contemporary Christians, especially conservative ones, bristle at this suggestion. They do not deny man’s capacity to improve his situation, individually or collectively. But they do deny that sin can be erased, and perfection attained, this side of the eschaton.
Voegelin notes that the Gnostics, to their credit, only sought to transcendentalize the eschaton. That is, they sought to exit the material plane and commune with the divine through mystical experience. Political Gnostics, by contrast, seek to immanentize the eschaton – that is, to transform the material world so radically that it resembles, or even becomes, heaven.
Political Gnosticism is mistaken and highly dangerous, according to Voegelin. Attempts to usher in the utopia – in the form of radical equality, racial purity, or anything else – necessarily fail. And when they fail, the vanguard, instead of scaling back their revolutionary ambition, blame the population. They argue that extreme coercive and propagandistic measures are required to alter behavior and eliminate opposition. They crack many eggs as they try in vain to make omelettes. They let many chips fly as they try in vain to chop wood.
In essence, Voegelin offers a Christian-inflected critique of social and political utopianism. For this reason, he is very attractive to small “c” conservative thinkers, who favor cautious reformism and incrementalism and deplore utopianism as misguided and dangerous (e.g., Burke, Oakeshott, Hayek, Sowell).
There is some debate about whether Voegelin applied the term Gnosticism appropriately. Paul Gottfried, for example, stated in a conversation with the author that “Voegelin had a tendency to call everything ‘Gnostic’ that was a Christian heresy.”
As Daniel Garner puts it, mysticism is the unmediated experience of the divine. Religion is the mediator. In John David Ebert’s formulation, religion is spirituality with form, structure, and organization.
Irenaeus wrote five books critical of Gnosticism.
Notably, Voegelin only had access to the critical writings of the early Church fathers, as well as to secondary sources (e.g., Balthasar, de Lubac). Scholarly interest in Gnosticism blossomed after 1945, following the discovery of various early Christian and Gnostic texts in the Nag Hammadi library in Upper Egypt. But these texts were not widely available at the time of Voegelin’s writing (early 1950s).