The New Inquisitions: Heretic Hunting and
the Intellectual Origins of Modern
Totalitarianism, by Arthur Versluis
(New York: Oxford University Press,
2006). xii + 190 pp.

CHRISTOPHER O. BLUM is Professor of Humanities
at Thomas More College in New Hampshire. He is
the translator, most recently, of The True and Only
Wealth of Nations: Essays on Family, Economy, and
Society by Louis de Bonald (2006).

“Had Gnosticism become the dominant
model in early Christianity,
Christianity would have been a much more
pluralistic tradition.” But it did not, and,
therefore, for Arthur Versluis, the story of the
West is a tragedy ending in bureaucratized
persecution and murder. For him, the “bloody
question” begins not with Henry VIII and
Luther, or Descartes, or even with Ockham,
but with Irenaeus, Tertullian, and the “early
Christian efforts to establish an orthodoxy
based on historical faith…an orthodoxy
framed by those who hated the Gnostic
traditions that emphasized inner spiritual
realization.” Thence sprang the Inquisition
of the thirteenth century and, later, of Spain,
and heretic- and witch-hunts from Geneva
to Salem. And from those roots, watered and
tended by latter-day apologists of the Inquisition
such as Joseph de Maistre and Juan
Donoso Cortés, grew the thorns of twentieth
century “ideocracy” and its “inquistional
dynamic.” The Gulag and the Concentration
Camp both had their origin in a “perspective
that insists on dogmatic formulations
based on historical eschatology,” a
perspective “resulting in [the] murder of
those who believe differently.”

Versluis announces at the outset that he has
arrived at this conclusion after “an inductive
inquiry.” The reader will readily perceive
that his “journey began with a foray into the
anti-gnostic work of Eric Voegelin.” The
central and longest chapter of the New Inquisitions
is devoted to Voegelin and his followers.
It will be a difficult chapter to those who
are not conversant both with Voegelin’s
thought and with the history of Gnosticism.
In brief, the author’s tack is to show that
Voegelin’s treatment of Gnosticism was the
product of a “total confusion over what
Gnosticism is.” If he had carefully studied the
Nag Hammadi scrolls, Voegelin could not
have produced the caricature of ancient
Gnosticism that Versluis sees in his writings.
Voegelin’s work is so inaccurate as to be
“totally irrelevant to the actual study of
Gnosticism.” There must, therefore, lie behind
it “an entirely different agenda” than
one of dispassionate scholarly inquiry. This
agenda, “only barely veiled,” Versluis holds
to be Voegelin’s sympathy for Catholic Christianity.
This sympathy, in turn, generated a
“fetish for order” that cast Voegelin and his
followers into the arms of the Inquisition. For
the very act of accusing the Gnostics of being
the progenitors of the Totalitarians—in an
ironic twist—made the Voegelinians into
heretic-hunting Totalitarians themselves.
Thence results, after a half-century of
Voegelinian influence within the conservative
movement, the Patriot Act and the
“scandals of prisoner torture and sexual abuse
at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and elsewhere.”
For to Versluis, George W. Bush’s American
Exceptionalism is, like communism and Nazi
fascism, just another secularized version of
Christian Orthodoxy. Voegelinians and Bush-doctrinaires, Stalinists and Nazis: all
make the same fatal mistake of considering
those who think freely to be enemies of the
regime.

An analysis that reduces Wilsonian neoliberals,
Nazis, throne-and-altar Catholics,
Stalinists, and academic critics of modernity
to one common root is aggressive, to say the
least. Unfortunately, in addition to being the
kind of sweeping thesis that a short book
cannot really make convincingly, it is marred
by the author’s frequent recourse to ad hominem
arguments. In the case of Joseph de
Maistre, the reduction of his convictions to
his experience is mild. Versluis is arguably
justified in characterizing his writings as
“impelled by his horror of the French Revolution.”
With Juan Donoso Cortés, however,
the analysis is more dubious. The “key”
with which “to unlock a door whose opening
will reveal some hidden dimensions of
Donoso’s thought” is the Spaniard’s bout
with syphilis. “Is it not possible, indeed,
likely,” Versluis writes, “that Donoso’s own
struggle to master and to extirpate the raging
illness in his own body might well have been
projected outward into society as a whole?”
Carl Schmitt, a Nazi propagandist, is an easy
target. But Voegelin and his followers are
not. However oddly the Voegelians may use
the term “Gnosticism,” it is little more than
a slur to describe their thought by phrases
such as “the kind of totalistic thinking that
one finds in the communist,” “a term of
political abuse for dissidents,” and “fetish for
order.” The boldness of his conclusion may
well offend those many followers of Voegelin
who nourish sincere religious convictions:
“the anti-gnostic is viscerally hostile to inner
spiritual life.”

And what of the heretics? They have been
misunderstood. From the “Satanic panic” of
the 1980s—spread by hucksters seeking fame
and fortune through their extraordinary conversion
stories—and the errors of Theodor
Adorno in blaming occultism for the horrors
of the Third Reich, to the “demonization of
heresy…in the works of Tertullian and
Irenaeus,” the heretics have been the victims
of a bad press campaign that has sprung,
ultimately, from the “perspectives shaped by
the Inquisition.” Versluis would turn our
prejudices about heretical movements on
their head. The “Gnostics of late antiquity
and the various heretical and gnostic groups
and individuals,” he tells us, have been the
“principal subject of my study for years.” He
speaks as one who is familiar with the “vast
and complex history of esotericism,” and
who has written widely about its “almost
wholly unexplored inner continent.” These
are his bona fides, the assurances that his
judgment is to be trusted when he tells us: “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.” The rehabilitation is to be complete.
The heretics are not merely innocent,
they are martyrs: “Witches, heretics, do
these not represent the suppressed, the
marginalized, the objects of Inquisitional
terror?” “What if,” he ends his plea, “the
‘heretic’ was right all along?”

A scholar who employs sweeping condemnations
of the methods of those he criticizes—
as, for instance, “historical details get
almost no play here at all”—would presumably
do well to avoid making sweeping
claims. Even a passing acquaintance with the
history of heretical and spiritualist movements
over the past two millennia gives the
lie to Versluis’s contention that they have
universally been guiltless seekers after the
truth. Are we to believe that the murder of
the papal legate Pierre de Castelnau by
Provencal Albigensians and the Anabaptist
takeover of Münster, to cite only the most
notorious examples, were purely political
events lacking any necessary connection to
the beliefs of their instigators? And what are
we to think about the ritual suicides led by
Jim Jones in Guyana or, more recently, by
the Heaven’s Gate community? Did all of the
believers die uncoerced? These examples
only scratch the surface of the bizarre life of
cults and sects. Many have been those seeking
spiritual illumination from unorthodox
sources over the past century and more of
channeling, séances, and New Age ritual
who have found for themselves that there is
“more in heaven and on earth” than Professor
Versluis dreams of in his philosophy. Will
all of them agree that the “spiritual” is always
benign?

In addition to rehabilitating witches and
heretics, the New Inquisitions contains a political
vision. Versluis perceives that there are
now “two Americas.” The older or “first
America” was founded upon an eighteenthcentury
liberalism that carried “the connotations
of liberality and the kind of generosity
of spirit—and skepticism of religious zealotry—
that characterized Thomas Jefferson.”
The “second America,” a product of twentieth-
century fundamentalism, and perhaps
of earlier religious revivals, “is marked by a
literalist, fundamentalist doctrinalism,” that
is, “by a persistent strain of what one must
term a dispersed inquisitionalism.” To renew
“Jeffersonian rationalism” by displaying the
“positive political ramifications of mysticism
or gnosis,” might, therefore, be taken to be
the book’s aim. And indeed, to those who
agree with Versluis that “the fundamental
politicosocial question facing us is how to
avoid totalitarianism,” an alliance with the
Gnostics may seem attractive. For Gnosticism,
as Versluis understands it, shows us “a
pluralistic model akin to those found in Asian
religious traditions.” Those others, however,
who are convinced that our tolerant world is
slouching towards Gomorrah, will not be
likely to agree that we need more pluralism
than we already have. Nor does it seem likely
that the forty million souls of the children
who have been killed in their mother’s wombs
during this Age of Aquarius will tell us that
what we need is a more permissive society.

The New Inquisitions is, then, a difficult
book to recommend. There is no hidden
agenda here that must be carefully unlocked
or warned against. Indeed, Professor Versluis
is admirably direct. Yet it was a curious
choice on his part to have attempted to
vindicate the need to tolerate those who seek
“inner spiritual life” by connecting the Catholic
Church, its Inquisition, some of its notable
defenders, and even some of its fellow travelers,
with the horrors of twentieth-century
totalitarianism. It would have been more
profitable, perhaps, to have written in the
mode of William James about some of the
appealing figures on the margins of Western
spirituality, such as Ramon Llull and Meister
Eckhart. Such a work might well have
achieved the same goal more directly and
with less collateral damage.