Gnosticism and Modernity: Voegelin’s Reconsiderations Twenty Years after [i]The New Science of Politics[/i]

In 1971, Notre Dame University held a conference to celebrate
the 20th anniversary of Voegelin’s Walgren Lectures given at the
University of Chicago and published the following year as The New
Science of Politics. The purpose of the conference was both to pay
tribute to Voegelin’s contribution to the restoration of political
science and to discuss the key theoretical and methodological issues
confronting political science twenty years after the publication of
The New Science of Politics. Voegelin attended all the presentations
by other scholars and then gave the final lecture. His address
responded to a request by the planners of the conference for
Voegelin to reflect on the state of political science and his own work
as it had evolved over the intervening twenty years.

Voegelin began by a stating that there was nothing about The
New Science of Politics, as he wrote it twenty years before, that had
to be retracted in light of subsequent theoretical, methodological or
empirical developments. On the other hand, Voegelin acknowledged
that there was much that needed to be added to the work he
had begun in 1951 on the basis of subsequent empirical and
theoretical findings. He then briefly identified some representative
areas to demonstrate how the topics delineated in The New Science
of Politics needed to be augmented or expanded. Before turning to
these new developments, however, Voegelin briefly summarized
the issues that concerned him when he gave the lectures and when
the lectures were published as The New Science of Politics in 1952.
First of all, the title The New Science of Politics suggested a more
ambitious project than Voegelin had intended to address when he
was invited to give the set of lectures. The lectures were given under
the title of a specific problem ” Truth and Representation.” He used
as a subtitle “The New Science of Politics” to signal how his approach
differed from the prevailing approaches in political science. I want
to briefly quote Voegelin at this point:

What was new about this was the conception that political science
is not a straight statement of propositions concerning a reality
which is somewhere lying around as a datum and can be simply
stated as true….furthermore, on that occasion, a factor of newness
was the consciousness that we do not deal with actions or rather
behavior in the external world and in politics, but with states of
consciousness, with states of experiences, so that the central
problem in every analysis of social order would be the analysis of
the experiences which produce the symbols in which a society
expresses its order. That analysis of symbols is certainly a central
problem for Plato and Aristotle, but is almost eliminated from
contemporary political science. So, the complete presentation of
the experiences as the origin of symbols, and then the changes of
these experiences that are called “representation” with other
changes in history, and therewith the changes in the symbols, are
an important part of political science, and that was the new
element I tried to introduce. However, in a very incomplete
fashion.¹

Voegelin added that even within this one field of political science,
that is, the problem of truth and representation, he had to be
selective. The first three lectures, which became the first half of the
book, dealt with truth and representation in the classical and
Christian sense; the second three lectures, which became part two
of the book, dealt with one modern aberration, with the Gnostic
formulation.

Voegelin again acknowledged that his efforts to articulate some
of the key issues dealing with classical philosophical truth and
Christian truth were incomplete; and, even twenty years later, there
was much work to do. In fact, the correspondences and the characteristic
differences between the truth of philosophy and the truth of
gospel Christianity remained the core issue in the Western experience
of order. Again, let me briefly quote some of Voegelin’s
remarks:

The problem of the restoration of a philosophy of politics, or of
order and history, cannot be conducted without being clear about
what the problem of philosophy is because, besides philosophy,
we have other conceptions, experiences, and symbolizations of
order, for instance: the Judaic, the Christian, sectarian movements,
radical Christian movements—and a lot of other things….
So, let me be clear about the meaning of philosophy and its
relation to Christian experience. Now in the first place, the
development of philosophy occurred before we had Christianity,
and it is characterized by the coming to differentiated consciousness
of the consciousness of existence as the center of all truth and
symbolization concerning the existence of man. From the consciousness
of the tension of existence are developed the categories
in which we talk about the order of existence. And this body
of symbols and experiences which engendered them, for example,
the seeking for God, to be moved by God, the “In Between
of existence” that are articulated in Platonic philosophy have
become part of the Western culture…. However, a further differentiation
occurred which was not to done by a philosopher. It
occurred with gospel Christianity. (Transcript, 6–7)

Voegelin then gave a brief characterization of one of the key
differences in the two levels of experience of the truth of existence.
Again I quote:

[I]f you look at classical philosophy—in the Platonic dialogues—
you will find all the superb analyses of existential order of the
human being…are still built into the conception of the embracing
the order of the cosmos…. In the Timaeu
s, for instance, Plato
develops the concept of a demiurge that operates within the
cosmos…as an internal mystical figure in the cosmos. But Plato
also knows that behind the cosmos and all the talk about the
cosmos and the demiurge, there is the divine Father who is not the
demiurge, and about that divine Father we know very little, and
therefore one can barely mentioned him, and otherwise he is
never been praised worthily by man…. Now if you compare this
formulation of Plato: the cosmos is the son of God, say with the
Gospel of John, where you find that Christ is the Son of God, you
see the difference. In the one case—in classical philosophy, in
Plato—still the cosmos remains the son of God. In the Christian
context the symbolism of the Son of God is shifted to the
consciousness in the existence of man, of a specific man, a
concrete man. Here is a differentiation of the problem of
truth…which has not been created by any philosopher…it comes
out of the prophetic, Judaic tradition and Christianity. Now what
is the relation of a philosopher, in the classical sense, to the
problem presented by this further differentiation? And here we
get all sorts of interlocking relations. Nothing is simple in this
matter. In the first place,…the original community around Jesus
after his death probably would not have gotten very far unless it
adapted itself to the cultural environment. The cultural environment
was that of pagan philosophy. At that time already Stoicism,
Epicureanism and so on was the environment of philosophy into
which Christianity had to enter in order to become communicable,
socially articulate, and socially effective…. Without such a
language, the philosophical language, one could not have communicated
in the Roman Empire what the truth of Christianity
really is. Because the Jewish symbolism was almost inaccessible to
non-Jews at the time. So philosophy entered the Christian community
as its means of entering culture and becoming socially
effective. So from the outset we have no problem. The Christian
revelation is expressed in philosophical language. It becomes a
problem only when for certain reasons this mixture of symbolisms
stemming from the writings of the New Testament
and philosophical
language developed difficulties. I will come to this problem a
little later on. Because now, one cannot simply revive classical
philosophy. One cannot become a Platonist again and return to the
cosmos, but one has to remain in the truth of existence differentiated
by Christ and the early Christian community. (Transcript, 7)

Then Voegelin noted that one key aspect of classical philosophy, is
not altered by the coming of Christianity or by further differentiation.
This is the discovery of reason. “Reason is in philosophy the
consciousness that man does not exist out of himself but out of the
divine ground of his existence….and I cannot substitute for that
analysis of reason any arbitrary conception of reason. So the existential
tension of existence to the ground of existence…that is reason.”
Voegelin then adds that one of the primary tasks of philosophy in the
present age is to re-establish the meaning of reason and to reestablish
the philosophical consciousness of existence in the “In
Between” of reality. There is need for this to be done in the
contemporary era because reason has been redefined in ways that
eliminate the experience of the ground of existence and thereby
deforms the nature of human experience. So, much of the work of
philosophy in the present age is to strip away and to recover the
foundations of classical philosophy.

Having briefly described the central issues in part one of The
New Science of Politics and related them to the ongoing debates,
Voegelin turned to the developments in recent scholarship that
open the field and carry it beyond his conception in 1951 and 1952.
The first that he mentions is the enormous deepening of the
historical horizon. When Voegelin The New Science of Politics and
Order and History, he started with the cosmological symbolizations
that existed about 3000 B.C. In the relatively short span of twenty
years, archeological and anthropological evidence had shown that
these same symbolisms exist 10,000 to 15,000 years earlier and they
exist all around the world. The evidence of these symbols, which
cannot be attributed to some kind of cultural diffusion because they
are so expansive, provides compelling evidence of humanity’s primary
experience of the cosmos, and they place into broad historical
perspective ideological attempts to deny the primary experience of
the cosmos in the 19th and 20th centuries in the West.

Voegelin’s fullest discussion of developments that expanded his
project as originally conceived centered around the analysis of
modernity, which was the subject of the second half of his lectures
and of the book, The New Science of Politics. Voegelin’s analysis in
The New Science of Politics dealt with the Gnostic dimensions of
modernity. As I turn to Voegelin’s reflections on this topic, I want to
quote Voegelin’s remarks rather than paraphrasing or summarizing
them. His first comments occur near the beginning of his lecture
where he had some remarks to make about the original structure of
the lectures, and then he moved to a more general discussion of the
reception the book had received over the past twenty years. In
reflecting on the reception of the work, Voegelin turned to the
second half, the part on Gnosticism first. Here is what he had to say:

Let me first reflect back on the second part because later I can
deal with it more extensively [deal more extensively with the
analysis of modernity. He does not deal further with Gnosticism.].
Here the dogmatization which sets in whenever a book is published
was perhaps more dangerous than in the other situation
[the first part dealing with classical philosophy and Christian
political philosophy], which did not attract so much attention.
Because immediately the problem of gnosis as characteristic of
modern political ideas…was absolutized and everyday I get questions
of this kind: is, for instance, the Russian government a
Gnostic government? Of course things are not that simple. Gnosis
is one element in the modern compound, but there are other
elements of which we can talk later, for instance, the apocalyptic
traditions and Neoplatonic experiences and symbolizations. So
gnosis is not some panacea for dealing with modernity. There are
other problems besides gnosis in modern political thought. (Transcript,
3)

These preliminary remarks are fairly brief, but they are revealing.
First, they show that Voegelin was concerned that the focus on
Gnosticism was interfering with the study of other dimensions of
modernity. Second, Voegelin was a bit frustrated that so much
attention given The New Science of Politics centered on Gnosticism.
In this connection it is important to note that Voegelin seemed as
frustrated with his sympathetic followers as with his detractors,
because his followers were the ones who were plaguing him with
questions like—is the Soviet government Gnostic.

Voegelin does not take up the subject of Gnosticism again.
Instead, he devotes about half of his lecture time to a description of
two important elements of the analysis of modernity that had not
received adequate attention. In fact, he indicates that he was not
aware of these two particular ones when he was writing The New
Science of Politics; they had emerged only recently in the specialized
scholarly literature dealing with the Renaissance. The first Voegelin
identifies as the re-introduction of the divine cosmos by Ficino and
the Neoplatonists. The second was the emergence of a new historical
consciousness or a new epochal consciousness emerging during the
Renaissance and found in the writings of Petrarch and Vasari.
Unfortunately, the lack of time did not permit Voegelin to develop
either of these in much detail. And with regard to the re-divinization
of the cosmos through Neoplatonism, Voegelin was very brief and
relied on his preceding discussion of the transformation of the
understanding of existence in the cosmos under the impact first of
philosophy and then gospel Christianity. As you recall, Voegelin
indicated that one result of the Christian revelation is that truth
becomes incarnated in Christ and human beings experience the
resonance between the human soul and the transcendent ground of
being. The result of this differentiation of consciousness is that the
truth of cosmological existence recedes and the cosmos is no longer
experienced as divine. Now let me begin to quote Voegelin:

The truth of the cosmos recedes as the Christian language
becomes dominant as the instrument for the expression of truth.
The language in which the cosmos is the son of God and the
ultimate embodiment of the divine and the incarnation of the
divine recedes and is lost…but then in the Renaissance, all of a
sudden in the 15th century, we get a renaissance of
Neoplatonism…by Ficino and Pico della Mirandola in which…the
cosmos is re-introduced as a sacred reality permeated by the
divine. So, just that part of the world, which had become nondivine
during the Middle Ages under the concentration of the
truth of existence, now all of a sudden emerges and becomes
gradually a playground of divine forces, through the Neoplatonists.
This is a problem of great importance that is still not sufficiently
realized. This divine cosmos had disappeared in the transition
from the Stoic philosophical language to the Christian theological
language in the later Roman Empire. One cannot revive the
understanding of the cosmos as a divinely permeated reality
infused with the pagan gods who permeated the cosmos of the
cosmological civilizations.² So, in the Renaissance the Christian
language symbols remain, but the cosmos becomes divine or
immanent. So, the great movements of immanentism of all sorts
of dubious types are the result of an undigested, re-introduction
of the cosmos through the Neoplatonism of the 15th century. All
modern immanentist speculation originates here. That is why I
said that gnosis is not complete, is not everything. (Transcript, 18)

Voegelin adds that the Neoplatonic foundations of modern
immanentism were readily acknowledged by the 18th-century French
philosophes and by 19th-century philosophers. Voegelin further
notes that “in Hegel’s philosophy of history you will find an extensive
presentation of Neoplatonism; and in the concluding summary of his
presentation of Neoplatonism you find the following statement: ‘and
my philosophy continues Proclus with the element of the selfreflective
ego as the organizing center.'” (Transcript, 19)

Voegelin did not have time to develop fully the significance of
this re-divinized cosmos that reappears with the Florentine
Neoplatonists, and it is not a subject familiar to most philosophers
and political theorists even today. Therefore, in order to understand
the significance of the reference Voegelin made, it is necessary to
develop this issue more thoroughly. In doing so, I will draw upon the
specialized scholarly monographs that Voegelin alluded to in his
lecture—to the work in Renaissance studies and the history of
science that was most directly relevant to Voegelin’s analysis of
modernity. This scholarly work focused on what is known as the
prisca theologia or ancient wisdom tradition. This prisca theologia
tradition is a compendium of a wide array of esoteric religious and
pseudoscientific traditions, including Orphism, Zoroastrianism,
Hermeticism, Cabala, alchemy, and magic. The term prisca theologia,
which was used by Ficino and other theologians and philosophers of
the Renaissance, reflects their opinion that these materials contained
the pristine theological and philosophical revelations to the
great wise men, the magi, of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean.
One of these traditions, the Hermetic, was so highly regarded
that Ficino, the head of the Platonic academy in Florence, set aside
his work on recently acquired Platonic dialogues to analyze newly
found Hermetic materials. The reason for giving primacy to these
was that Hermes was believed to be the first in a series of ancient
wisemen, who received revelations regarding the true nature of the
world and of humanity’s place in it.³ Scholarship on the Hermetic
Corpus has long recognized that it was a compendium of a wide
range of materials—some radically dualistic, others intensely
immanentist. It was only fairly recently recognized, however, that
Ficino and the other influential early modern thinkers concentrated
on the highly optimistic, immanentist elements of the Hermetic
tradition. This portion of the materials portrayed man as a terrestrial
god (deus en terra) able to master nature and perfect society. It is this
scholarship and these materials that Voegelin recognized as playing
an important role in the shaping of modernity. I, therefore, want to
briefly give a representative sketch of the content of these materials
and show how this immanentist worldview differs from Gnosticism.

The Hermetic text that Ficino was responsible for translating
and introducing into the mainstreams of modern thought was
Pimander. This text contains a creation myth often referred to as the
“Egyptian Genesis.” According to this text, a compact but comprehensive
description of the creation of the world and of primal man
is revealed after a spiritually restless Hermes has struggled to
advance beyond the present state of ignorance and error. His efforts
to find knowledge are rewarded by his being called into the presence
of Pimander, “the mind of absolute sovereignty,” who asks Hermes:
“what you want to hear and see; what you want to learn and know?”
Hermes replies: “I wish to learn about the things that are, to
understand their nature, and know God.” Pimander then reveals
that God created the Demiurge, who created the seven celestial
Governors who encompass the world and whose rule is known as
fate. He is then told of man’s creation, which is by the supreme God
and not by the Demiurge. When man sees the creation of the
Demiurge, he wants to participate in creation, and God orders the
celestial powers to teach man how the cosmos is governed. After
receiving knowledge and creative power from the cosmic Governors,
primal man enters into the world of nature and matter. This
part of the myth needs to be briefly quoted:

having all authority over the cosmos of mortals and unreasoning
animals, man broke through the vault and stooped to look through
the cosmic framework, thus displaying to the lower nature the fair
form of God. Nature smiled for love when she saw him whose
fairness brings no surfeit [and] who holds in himself all the energy
of the Governors and the form of God…when man saw the form
like himself as it was in nature, he loved it and wished to inhabit
it; wish and action came in the same moment, and he inhabited
the unreasoning form. Nature took hold of her beloved, hugged
him all about, and embraced him for they were lovers.⁴

Already, I think, the differences between the Hermetic myth of
creation and the Gnostic myth are evident and I intend to look at
these differences more closely further on. For now, however, other
elements of the hermetic view need development. Following this
account of creation, the divine messenger explains the implication
of this union for human nature: “because of this, unlike any other
living thing on earth, mankind is twofold—in the body mortal but
immortal in the essential man. Even though he is immortal and has
authority over all things, mankind is affected by mortality because he
is subject to fate.” (Hermetica, 245) Further on, Pimander explains
how loss of immortality can be avoided. This is a key passage because
it reveals that the gaining of immortality or salvation is attained
through man’s own efforts. When Pimander puts the question about
immortality to Hermes, Hermes replies that man, in order to avoid
sinking into the material, finite world, must turn toward the light
(knowledge/nous ) because it is the essence of God and the essence
of man. But Hermes is still troubled and asks if all human beings
possess God-given minds and, therefore, are all capable of salvation.
Pimander answers that “only a few men are capable of using their
intellect to ascend to their full human potential as terrestrial gods.
“This is the final good for those who have received knowledge: to be
made God.” (ibid.) I have deliberately chosen these passages because
they not only reveal essential components of the Hermetic
material, but also help to understand the differences with Gnosticism.
First of all, the creation of the cosmos is a work of beauty and
harmony that is divinely inspired and maintained by celestial influences.
The material world is not intrinsically evil or an inherent
threat to man. On the contrary, primal man and nature love each
other. Admittedly, there are aspects of the world that have turned
away from the divine influence and that retain the properties of the
primal material. Nevertheless, the myth affirms that the world is a
work of beauty and a suitable home for man, especially when he
becomes actively involved in perfecting it. The explanation of man’s
loss of immortality makes it clear that the world is not inherently evil.
For the man whose life is oriented toward the light (knowledge and
God), the world is neither a temptation nor an obstruction. Only if
man has turned from the light is he susceptible to the attraction of
the flesh and inclined toward darkness (material existence). This
pursuit of material pleasure is a willful choice; it is not the result of
Original Sin or the inherent evil in the world. The myth, therefore,
stands in dramatic contrast to dualistic views of the tension between
the flesh and spirit, the secular and the sacred. Another feature to
note is the emphasis which the myth places on man’s capacity for
godlike knowledge and on knowledge as the means of salvation.
After his creation, God provides man with the knowledge needed to
exercise his role as a divine co-creator, and the myth contains
repeated references to parallels between the divine nous and man’s
nous and to the role of the logos as the link among man, the creation,
and the supreme God. Man becomes damned to a material existence
only if he willingly ignores or denies the noetic dimension of his soul.

The Hermetic material does parallel the Gnostic in its emphasis
on saving knowledge but there are key differences. In the Gnostic
myth, salvation—regaining one’s divine station—depends on escaping
from the world. In the Hermetic myth the world is necessary for
mankind to exercise its divine creativity, and it is in the world that
man creates the social microcosm that completes creation. The
threat posed by the material world results not from its inherent evil
but from human ignorance of the proper relation of the material and
the divine. The Hermetic and Gnostic traditions also have very
different understandings of the benefits of knowledge. In the
Gnostic myth, knowledge frees humanity from a misguided effort to
find meaning and purpose in the world. In the Hermetic writings
knowledge enables humanity to master nature and perfect society—
that is, to achieve innerworldly perfection.

The elements of modernity that enter through the Renaissance
and the revival of Neoplatonism/Hermeticism are reflected in these
mythic passages. Humanity exercises its godlike role when it is
actively involved in shaping and completing the creation. It is also
important to note that knowledge is power. Knowledge is not the
wisdom to understand the complexities of existence and accept
existence in the Platonic “In-Between.” The disorder that is prevalent
can be transformed by the select few who receive the full extent
of human knowledge. This can only be accomplished through
human action. It is for this reason that Voegelin recognized this
material and its re-discovery by the Neoplatonists as the beginning
of all forms of modern immanentization.

Before leaving the subject, it is important to recall that Voegelin
did not propose to substitute Neoplatonism as the panacea for
understanding modernity. Just as Gnosticism is not the sole explanation,
neither is Neoplatonism. But Voegelin rightly said in 1971
that this was a subject that had been little studied by philosophers and
political theorists. Unfortunately, little work has been done in this area
since Voegelin identified it at the end of 1971.

The second topic that Voegelin identifies as central to his
analysis of contemporary disorder is the formation and character of
modern epochal consciousness. This epochal consciousness and its
construction of history also arises in the Renaissance period, As
Voegelin notes, the term modernity or modern (moderna) has a long
history of usage, but its connotation changes markedly in the
Renaissance. Prior to the Renaissance, the term moderna simply
noted the present in distinction to a previous state or condition. No
value judgment is implied in this designation of a historical transition.
The present period might be better, worse, or simply different.
Beginning in the Renaissance, however, the modern becomes
associated with a dramatic advance that separates the new age
qualitatively from the age that had preceded it. Another characteristic
of this modern epoch that begins in the Renaissance is the
conviction that this qualitative advance is permanent; unlike other
periods in human history, it will not deteriorate and it will not be
surpassed. The two figures that Voegelin briefly discusses in connection
with the creation of this epochal consciousness are Petrarch and
Vasari. Petrarch makes two major contributions to the formation of
modern epochal consciousness. He creates the epochal distinction
between his own time as an age of light and the preceding medieval
period as an age of darkness. Petrarch also creates the first pattern
of a three-stage history of progress in which there is first a classical
age of excellence, followed by a period of darkness, which is
superseded by a recovery and an enhancement of human excellence
attained and given expression in the classical age. Vasari adds to the
emerging epochal consciousness by creating another vivid symbol to
mark the new age of excellence. Vasari describes the period of
human accomplishment of his own time as a “renascita” or rebirth.
He then places this age of rebirth in a pattern of history that makes
the present age of excellence a permanent state. Because modern
epochal consciousness is so central to Voegelin’s analysis of modernity,
this brief sketch needs to be more fully developed. In doing so,
I will draw on the monographic literature that Voegelin alluded to
in his lecture but did not have time to develop fully.⁵ I will begin with
the significance of Petrarch for the forming of modern epochal
consciousness.

As already noted, Petrarch juxtaposed the dawn of the new age
to the dark age that was at last coming to an end. Petrarch also
provided the first formulation of a three-phase history moving from
a classical period through a Christian dark age to the modern age of
humanity’s rebirth and renewal. His revolutionary interpretation of
the stages of Western history was evidently precipitated by his trip
to Rome for his coronation as poet laureate in 1341. His correspondence
shows that he was awed by the sight of the civilizational
remains from the imperial period, which preceded the establishment
of Christianity as the religion of the Empire. For Petrarch, the
stone and marble monuments stood as imperishable testimony to
both the nobility of man and the majesty of his cultural and political
achievements. In an effort to reawaken the consciousness of the
dignity and creativity of man reflected in the grandeur of the Roman
monuments, Petrarch proposed to prepare a history that would
highlight this period and distinguish it from the period of darkness
(eta tenebrae) that followed “the celebration of the name of Christ
in Rome.” This formulation is extraordinary because it is the first
time that the term dark age is used to refer to the period of the
Christian Empire. In fact, this characterization inverts the standard
periodization of history that contrasts the age of Christianity to the
preceding age of pagan darkness. In his famous poem, the Africa,
Petrarch develops this imagery further and adds: “my fate is to live
amid varied and confusing storms. But for you perhaps,” he says
“who I hope and wish will live long after me, there will follow a better
age. This sleep of forgetfulness will not last forever. When the
darkness has been dispersed, our descendants can shine again in the
form of pure radiance.”⁶ In expressing this hope, Petrarch is now
distinguishing three periods in western history—the classical age,
the dark age, and the emerging modern epoch.

In developing this pattern, Petrarch introduces two major
innovations in western historiography. First, he has changed the
conventional model that divided western history into two epochs,
the ancient and the modern. Second, he has transformed the site and
source of the basic epochal distinction. In conventional history, the
coming of Christ and the establishment of Christianity as an ecumenic
religion divided the ancient and modern epochs. In this formulation,
the period before the birth of Christ is referred to as a dark age. In
Petrarch’s conception, the age of darkness begins with the establishment
of the Christian religion in Rome, and the modern period
begins with the reawakening consciousness of the grandeur of
Western civilization and the majesty of the human spirit. Petrarch’s
formulation, then, is the first instance of the three-stage pattern of
history that separates two periods of light by a period of darkness.
Petrarch’s reconceptualization would not be of great significance if
it remained restricted to his own work or even to his own time. But
this characterization supplies the root symbols of the Enlightenment
and introduces the historical pattern that has dominated western
historiography down to recent times.

While Petrarch viewed his own time as the tenuous beginning
of the transition from darkness to light, later Renaissance humanists
confidently boast that their age as one of “rebirth” and even
proclaimed the accomplishments of its greatest figures to be superior
to the achievements of the classical age. The historian who first
uses the term renascita to distinguish his own the age from the
preceding age of sterility and death was the 16th-century historian
Vasari. His book, Lives Of The Most Excellent Italian Painters,
Sculptures and Architects, is more than the “first modern art
history,” as it is often described. For Vasari and many of his
contemporaries, art represented the highest form of human creativity.
Therefore, his record of the achievements of Leonardo and
Michelangelo, whom he regards as the greatest artists to have ever
lived, is a demonstration of a burgeoning human creativity that leads
to a thorough-going cultural renewal and revitalization.

Vasari’s designation of this new era as a period of renaissance
marks another significant appropriation of religious imagery and
another blurring of categorical distinctions between the sacred and
the secular. Petrarch had borrowed and reversed the distinction
between the age of darkness and the age of light. Vasari draws upon
the conversion imagery of resurrection and rebirth and applies them
to a cultural rather than a spiritual revitalization. Prior to Vasari’s
formulation, there had been references to other cultural renewals,
for example, the Carolingian era; but contemporary interpreters
regarded them as a revitalization (renovatio) and not as a revolutionary
epochal break. The basic framework in which society was
understood was not questioned, and the conventional historical
pattern was not broken by these events. Vasari’s formulation, by
contrast, presents the new age as a radical departure from the
Christian (Gothic) period. Moreover, his application of the language
of salvation to secular developments marks an extraordinary inversion
of the sacred and secular history paralleling Petrarch’s inversion
of the periods of darkness in light.

Another important feature of Vasari’s historiographical innovations
is his alteration of the conventional analogy of the history of
culture to biological cycles of birth and death. Greek and Roman
historians had equated the rise and fall of civilizations to the
movement from infancy through childhood to adulthood, old age
and death. Vasari traces the infancy of the Renaissance from the
work of Giotto through the transition in Masaccio (adolescence) to
its maturity in the work of Leonardo and Michelangelo. There is no
discussion of the fourth and final stages, however, because Vasari
finds no inherent reason that this extraordinary artistic achievement
would go into decline. The only precedent for Vasari’s truncated
historical pattern is found in Christian salvation history, which
purposely uses the truncated pattern to mark the essential contrast
between sacred and profane history. Tertullian, for example, describes
three phases of religious and spiritual evolution culminating
in “the Paracletan period,” a period of spiritual maturity that will
endure forever. St. Augustine contrasts the city of God to the city of
man by stopping the cyclical pattern with the third stage of maturity
because the city of God can never reach a period of senility and
death. With Vasari, then, we find another instance in which the
modern epochal consciousness is expressed in a historical pattern
that had been reserved for salvation history. For Vasari, Petrarch,
and other Renaissance revisionists seeking to mark the uniqueness
of the events unfolding in their own time, conventional secular
historical patterns were inadequate. Their experience could only be
expressed in the language of conversion and spiritual awakening.

It is worth taking time to develop, briefly, subsequent uses of this
pattern of epochal consciousness. In the 17th century, the consciousness
of an epochal break with the past intensified and with
ironic results. The central event at this stage is the Scientific
Revolution, which divides the intellectual camp into “the ancients
and the moderns.” In the early stages, the scientific modernists
would concede to the ancients that classical civilization had impressive
achievements in politics, culture, and philosophy, and would
grant that the principles established in the models provided continued
to set the standards in those fields. Soon, however, modernists
became convinced that the basic principles of the natural sciences
were applicable to every area of human endeavor and produced new
insights into human nature and society. As a result, ignorant and
distorted conceptions transmitted from the past could be overcome
and true knowledge attained. Of course, when the split becomes this
pronounced, early “modernists” like Petrarch and Vasari, who are so
instrumental in the founding of the age and in articulating its epochal
consciousness, are exiled to the camp of the ancients. Sometimes
they are given an elevated status in the “dark ages” because they were
able to advance somewhat beyond the superstition and negativism
of the Christian religion. Ultimately, however, they are relegated to
the ancient period because their efforts do not rest upon a scientific
base. By the 18th-century, the accumulated pressures to integrate
the recent political, cultural, and intellectual advances into a coherent,
intelligible pattern of historical development becomes a major
preoccupation. Voltaire’s proposal to develop a “philosophy of
history” to replace the outmoded theology of history is emblematic
of the direction taken. Voltaire and his contemporaries shifted the
focus of history from the saving acts of the Judaeo-Christian God to
the unfolding progress of human reason and morality. In the 19thcentury,
Auguste Comte refined the 18th-century model and presented
the famous three-stage pattern of historical evolution that
supplied the basic historiographical model for most of the 19th and
20th centuries. This Comtean paradigm, like Vasari’s prototype,
traces three stages in the maturation of human consciousness from
its infancy in religion through its metaphysical adolescence to its
scientific maturity.

Conclusion

So what are we to make of Voegelin’s 1971 lecture in relation to the
topic of this symposium? In 1971 Voegelin chose to stress the
importance of investigating elements of modernity that are not to be
traced to Gnosticism. The first he mentions is the origins of
immanentization in the re-divinization of the cosmos by the Florentine
Neoplatonists. The second is the origins of modern epochal consciousness
and its sacralization of the secular through historical
constructions of progress from darkness to light and from death to
rebirth. What I find most interesting about Voegelin’s remarks are
his cautions against making Gnosticism a panacea for diagnosing all
the ills of modernity and his effort to direct investigations into
materials that came to light after the publication of The New Science
of Politics in 1952. This position is especially noteworthy in light of
what was going on in the 1970’s with regard to the study of
Gnosticism and modernity. The most significant event was the
publication of the Nag Hammadi Library. The manuscripts had
been discovered in the 1930s; but a series of blunders, coupled with
extraordinary professional jealousy, and turf protection kept the
materials from being widely accessible to scholars for about 40 years.
At any rate, a scholarly edition of the texts was undertaken and
published in the 1970’s. Concurrent with their publication, Yale
University hosted an international conference on Gnosticism. Most
of the scholars present were biblical scholars or scholars of late
antiquity. Nevertheless, many of the sessions dealt with the impact
of the scholarship on the understanding of modernity. I will quickly
cite as evidence of this fact that three of the four plenary lectures
focused on modern themes. Gilles Quispel offered the first lecture
under the title “Gnosis and Psychology: Self-Experience and Projection
in Gnosticism According to Jung and His School.” Carsten
Colpe gave the second lecture under the title ” The Challenge of
Gnostic Thought for Alchemy, Philosophy and Literature.” The
third lecture by the irrepressible Harold Bloom was entitled “Lying
Against Time: Gnosis, Poetry, Criticism.” The only lecture dealing
directly with ancient Gnosticism was Henry Chadwick’s, “The
Domestication of Gnosticism.” So, the 1970’s brought a new scholarly
basis for the study of Gnosticism and modernity, and the Yale
conference was only one of several and its volume of proceedings
was only one of several that came out in this time period.

Voegelin was, of course, aware of the work being done on
Gnosticism and he was aware of the momentum that had been
building under the influence of Hans Jonas and of Carl Jung to apply
the ancient Gnostic categories to dimensions of modern experience.
In fact, by the 1970’s, the study of the Gnostic dimensions of
modernity had become quite fashionable—to the point that Harold
Bloom and other literary critics had incorporated it into the most
recent wave of literary criticism. Therefore, if Voegelin had chosen
to do so, he could have underscored the importance of Gnosticism
and of his own work and demonstrated how the opening of the field
confirmed and enriched his studies from the 1940’s, 1950’s, and
1960’s. But Voegelin did not to choose to do this. On the contrary,
he used the occasion of the Notre Dame conference in 1971 to stress
that Gnosticism was not a panacea for the analysis of modernity.
Voegelin took a similar position a few years later in another keynote
lecture. In 1978, Vanderbilt University hosted a conference on the
topic “Gnosticism and Modernity.” The purpose of this conference
was to examine Voegelin’s concept of Gnosticism in light of the
renewed interest precipitated by the publication of the Nag Hammadi
Library and other scholarly developments of the decade. Voegelin
spoke in the evening of the first day of the conference, and he again
explained the need to avoid focusing exclusively on Gnosticism and
pointed to areas that new research in various fields was making
available. He again mentioned specifically the Renaissance and
Renaissance Neoplatonism. He also mentioned apocalyptic constructions
of history that he pointed to as Renaissance developments.
Moreover, if you consider carefully Voegelin’s writings from
the mid-1970’s to his final publication, you find little mention of
Gnosticism. Certainly, you do not find it as a defining trait or
characteristic of Voegelin’s work to the degree that it was in the
1940’s, 1950’s, and 1960’s.

In my opinion, it was not only that new fields were opening that
needed to be taken into account. I believe that Voegelin realized that
the explosion of interest in Gnosticism in the 1970’s had the peculiar
result that it made the term less viable as a theoretical or an analytical
category. When Voegelin first applied the term, there was a relatively
narrow context in which the term was understood and applied,
and which Voegelin explains in Science, Politics and Gnosticism.
But what was known about ancient Gnosticism in the 1930’s and
1940’s was changed dramatically in the 1960’s and 1970’s. At the
same time, the application of Gnostic categories to modern experience
had become fashionable. But when a concept becomes fashionable,
its theoretical value is compromised because all sorts of
people use it in all sorts of different ways that erode the specific
framework out of which the term was first developed and applied.
So, I think, Voegelin was cautious about the use of the term
Gnosticism because he saw what was coming. He saw that two such
different literary critics as Harold Bloom and Cleanth Brooks could
use the term in entirely different ways and apply it to entirely
different features of modernity. He also saw that with the growth of
the Jung cult that the term would come to be associated with a vague
psychological notion of self-realization. Finally, he knew that the
serious philosophical application of the term centered around Hans
Jonas and his application of the term to modern existentialism. This
use stands in sharp contrast to the use Voegelin made of the term.
So, in my view, Voegelin, as always, was far ahead of the rest of us.
His determined pursuit of the foundations of modern disorder
carried him beyond the construction of the 1930’s through the
1950’s. His experience with trends in scholarship warned him that
the attention being focused on Gnosticism in the ’70s would cause
more confusion than clarity when the term was applied to modern
forms of disorder.

Stephen A. McKnight
University of Florida

NOTES

1. I am quoting from a taped recording I made of the lecture. A
   slightly modified transcript is included in the Voegelin Archives at
   the Hoover Institute. Subsequent citations will be made within the
   text.
2. By this, Voegelin means that the differentiation of experience
   and consequent language symbols have so transformed the experience
   of the cosmos that what is revived is not the experience of the
   cosmos that was experienced in the cosmological civilizations.
   Rather, there is a confusion in which the language symbols of
   Christianity are present at the same time there is an effort to redivinize
   the natural world.
3. This is the source of the immanentism that Voegelin associates
   with the re-divinization of the cosmos.
4. Hermetica (transl. Brian Copenhaver), Cambridge: Cambridge
   University Press, 243–244. Subsequent page citations will
   occur in the text.
5. Voegelin refers to the work of Theodore Momsen, see
   “Petrarch’s Concept of the ‘Dark Age'” in Medieval and Renaissance
   Studies, (ed.) Eugene Rice, Jr. (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1959),
   106–29, and Erwin Panofsky, see “Renaissance Self-Definition or
   Self-Deception” in Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art,
   (Stockholm, 1960), 25–63.
6. Quoted in Momsen, op. cit., 114.