Voegelin’s short book is a collection of his six Wallgreen lectures, which attempted to describe what has gone wrong with the political sciences since modernity. He blames the positivist, scientistic, and gnostic turns which reached their apex after the Enlightenment. First, Voegelin decries those who tried to take value judgments out of the field of political science. Nothing was more destructive than “the attempt at making political science (and the social sciences in general) “objective” through a methodologically rigorous exclusion of all “value judgments.”” Voegelin notes that this is a modern phenomena. “The terms “value-judgment” and “value-free” science were not part of the philosophical vocabulary before the second half of the nineteenth century…. This situation was created through the positivistic conceit that only propositions concerning facts of the phenomenal world were “objective,” while judgements concerning the right order of soul and society were “subjective.” Only propositions of the first type could be considered “scientific,” while propositions of the second type expressed personal preferences and decisions…. Only when ontology as a science was lost, and when consequently ethics and politics could no longer be understood as sciences of the order in which human nature reaches its maximal actualization, was it possible for this realm of knowledge to become suspect as a field of subjective, uncritical opinion.” With this modern trend, Voegelin contrasts the study of politics which came to its pinnacle during the classical Greek period. “The validity of the standards developed by Plato and Aristotle depends on the conception of a man who can be the measure of society because God is the measure of his soul…. The Platonic-Aristotelean elaboration of the new truth marked the end of a long history.”
Voegelin blames the Gnostic heresy for the deviation of the study of politics from its solid classical roots. But first he reaches back further. “The clash between various types of truth in the Roman Empire ended with the victory of Christianity. The fateful result of this victory was the de-divinization of the temporal sphere of power…. By de-divinization shall be meant the historical process in which the culture of polytheism died from experiential atrophy, and human existence in society became reordered through the experience of man’s destination, by the grace of the world-transcendent God, toward eternal life in beatific vision. By re-divinization, however, shall not be meant a revival of polytheistic culture in the Greco-Roman sense…. Modern re-divinization has its origins rather in Christianity itself, deriving from components that were suppressed as heretical by the universal church.”
Voegelin suggests that a prime error of modernists is thinking that history has some predetermined destination and purpose. Modern man could cut out the transcendent and solely focus on the immanent world. “The problem of an eidos in history, hence, arises only when Christian transcendental fulfillment becomes immanentized. Such an immanentist hypostasis of the eschaton, however, is a theoretical fallacy. Things are not things, nor do they have essences, by arbitrary declaration. The course of history as a whole is no object of experience; history has no eidos, because the course of history extends into the unknown future.” The Gnostics attempted to restore the certainty that Christian de-divinization had removed from the world. “What specific uncertainty was so disturbing that it had to be overcome by the dubious means of fallacious immanentization?… Uncertainty is the very essence of Christianity. The feeling of security in a “world full of gods” is lost with the gods themselves; when the world is dedivinized, communication with the world-transcendent God is reduced to the tenuous bond of faith…. Ontologically, the substance of things hoped for is nowhere to be found but in faith itself; and epistemologically, there is no proof for things unseen but again this very faith.”
Gnosticism is a mistaken attempt to reach for that which is fundamentally uncertain. “The attempt at immanentizing the meaning of existence is fundamentally an attempt at bringing our knowledge of transcendence into a firmer grip than the cognito fidei, the cognition of faith, will afford; and Gnostic experiences offer this firmer grip in so far as they are an expansion of the soul to the point where God is drawn into the existence of man.” From Hegel and Comte to Marx and Hitler, man surpassed his knowledge and reached into the realm of God. “Gnostic experiences, in the amplitude of their variety, are the core of the redivinization of society, for the men who fall into these experiences divinize themselves by substituting more massive modes of participation in divinity for faith in the Christian sense.” Man was now responsible for his own final purpose. “Gnostic speculation overcame the uncertainty of faith by receding from transcendence and endowing man and his intra-mundane range of action with the meaning of eschatological fulfillment. In the measure in which this immanentization progressed experientially, civilizational activity became a mystical work of self-salvation…. The death of the spirit is the price of progress…. This Gnostic murder is constantly committed by the men who sacrifice God to civilization…. Gnostic thinkers, leaders, and their followers interpret a concrete society and its order as an eschaton; and, in so far as they apply their fallacious construction to concrete social problems, they misrepresent the structure of immanent reality.”
When Gnostic movements successfully takeover the machine of modern politics, the results shall be disastrous. “Victorious Gnostics can neither transfigure the nature of man nor establish a terrestrial paradise; what they actually do establish is an omnipotent state which ruthlessly eliminates all sources of resistance…. The party line may change, but the change of interpretation is determined by the government. Intellectuals who still insist on having opinions of their own concerning the meaning of the koranic writings are purged. The Gnostic truth that was produced freely by the original Gnostic thinkers is now channeled into the truth of public order in immanent existence.”
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