An Analysis of Eric Voegelin’s 4th and 5th Gnostic Traits

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Did you take a sociology class in high school or college?

Did you know sociology’s founder, August Comte (1798-1857), was kind of a dick? The Encyclopedia Britannica says he was “ungrateful,” “self-centered,” and “egocentric.” If those aren’t bad enough, other biographers say he was a megalomaniac, cruel, and downright nuts.

Comte, on the other hand, considered himself a relevant man, to put it modestly. He was born at the end of the Enlightenment and fully embraced its ideals,[1]which Isaiah Berlin summarized as:

1.            Every genuine question can be answered. If it can’t be answered, it’s not a genuine question.

2.            The answers to the questions can be discovered, learned, and taught.

3.            All the answers are compatible with one another.

Those ideals are captured perfectly by science. Science is the discipline of power: it answers questions and puts them into neat boxes. Physics is especially good at this.

Comte concluded that the principles of physics could be applied to society: “social physics” is what he initially called it before calling it “sociology.”

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“Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.” Rousseau

Rousseau’s passage from the beginning of The Social Contract contends for the most famous in philosophy.

Rousseau’s point was simple: Humans are good, but there’s a lot of suffering, so social institutions must be corrupting everything.

Significantly, Rousseau didn’t see any problems with himself. He was arguably the most self-centered philosopher of all time. He was so self-centered, biographers wonder if he was even capable of love.

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A Diagnostic of the Gnostic

Eric Voegelin was to modern gnosticism what Knute Rockne was to Notre Dame football. Rockne didn’t start the ND football program and Voegelin didn’t discover modern gnosticism, but they took their subjects to much higher levels.

The Swiss theologian, Hans urs Von Balthasar was supposedly the first person to draw parallels between the ancient gnostic heresy and modern theories in Prometheus (1937), which examined modern German thought. Albert Camus did a similar thing with modern French thought in The Rebel (1951).[1]

But Voegelin took the strain of thought much further in The New Science of Politics (1952). The book became a Time cover story and, voila, gnosticism was in the limelight, a least among nerds.

Granted, later in life, Voegelin said he wasn’t sure “gnosticism” was the best term to use and thought perhaps it received too much attention, but he didn’t remotely conclude that the term didn’t work. Far from it. Later in life, at age 67, he published his most popular work, Science, Politics and Gnosticism (1968).

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For the fortunate few, that router is hard-wired with fiber optic. Most of us only get a wireless connection, and a wobbly one at that.

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If you want to understand how gnosticism flourishes in our modern world, you need to understand why it developed in the ancient world.

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Solon opened Athens to true order: the transformative order found through the Tao.

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Within 100 years, the Cartesians used impeccable logic derived from Descartes' I think there I am to reach two conclusions: there is no earthly agent of movement and there is no matter. There is only God and mind. Hume yanked God and mind out of these conclusions and the Cartesian Jenga tower came tumbling down.

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