Perennial Gnosticism

cluding those of western Europe, because of international Common Market agreements that undermine the “most highly favored nation” principle and in effect discriminate against American imports.

Thus Voegelin’s central achievement has been twofold : the exposition of the Gnostic tradition as an uninterrupted exercise up to the present, now victoriously shaping our politics; and the correlative thesis that the ordered community presupposes the recepReviewed by BRENTONH. SMITH tion of the transcendental order, and is therefore based on political concepts in communication with the symbols transcribing this order for that community. In the first essay of the present volume Voegelin Perennial Gnosticism masterfully demonstrates the intellectual dishonesty of Gnostic system builders in trying to hide from men the existence of a Science, Politics and Gnosticism, transcendental order. Hermetically enclosed by Eric Voegelin, Chicago: Henry in the system, man is no longer allowed to Regnery Company ,(Gateway Editwn), question its premises. 1968. 1/41 pp. $1.95. The difficulty begins when we expect Voegelin’s philosophy to have a therapeuTHE CENTRAL IDEA of Voegelin’s “new tic effect on contemporary political thought. science of politics” is that old Gnosticism is “Political science,” he writes in the present a demonology, and that political thinking volume, “can assist in exorcising the dein our time is of a neo-Gnostic type, hence mons-in the modest measure of effective non-scientific, inspired by myths; these ness that our society grants to episteme and myths, changed in modern times into its therapy.” Voegelin himself explained ideologies, have, however, retained their the difficulty of such an operation in The basically Christian doctrinal structure. The New Science of Politics: consequence is that their advocates want to transform man into a being saved here The more people are drawn or preson earth, with parousia inside history. sured into the Christian orbit, the greatAnother consequence is that they are paser will be the number among them who sionate men, with inner fuel supplied by do not have the spiritual stamina for the secularized Christian fervor. heroic adventure of the soul that is Scionce, Politics & Gnosticism, now Christianity; and the likeliness of the translated by Prof. William J. Fitzpatrick fall from faith will increase when into sure, limpid, and easy flowing English, civilizational progress of education, contains essays summarizing and carrying literacy and intellectual debate will further Voegelin’s thesis. They lay bare, bring the full seriousness of Christianity once more, the root of modern politics: the to the understanding of ever more indiconcept of freedom no longer sought withviduals. in the framework of civilized community, but in the “freedom” of the autonomous, He returns to the point in the new book: self-created and self-building individual. The reality of being as it is known in UnIess man owes his existence to himself its truth by Christianity is difficult to alone-say Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre, bear, and the flight from clearly seen and their Gnostic forebears-he is not free reality to Gnostic constructs will probaand independent. Assertions of this kind bly always be a phenomenon of wide exof freedom are the rock bottom motivations tent in civilizations that Christianity has of revolutions, whether at the Bastille in permeated. 1789 or at Nanterre in 1968. Summer-FaU 1970

334

LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED

If an illustration is needed for this pessimistic evaluation, the rebels of the church are now supplying it: their “politics” flows even more directly from the Gnostic source than that of long-ago secularized leftists who know they must compromise with reality. Robespierre wanted only to deify Reason; young Dutch Catholics have introduced a motion to canonize Ch6 Guevara. Further illustrations are, of course, provided by the legion of philodoxers and their partisans on our streets and campuses. Who or what will tip the balance in the Voegelinian direction? The question, even though not asked in the book, is nevertheless central to it, as it is to the entire thesis of this profound philosopher. If Gnosticism were a conspiracy, its end would be in sight; but it is a sui generis thought structure, and, if I read Voegelin correctly, he means that it is coeval with mankind, only aggravated and radicalized by Christianity from which it gathers increasing force. Does this not suggest that without Christianity, without the “spiritual stamina” Voegelin says it requires, the importance of Gnosticism would be negligible? And does it not further suggest that the various Hegelians are, after all, right in attempting to elaborate another public philosophy, easier for the citizen to adjust to? Indeed, one might even say that today, as well as in the Middle Ages, the Gnostics have gathered force from their ambition to save Christianity from itself, purge it of dogma, division, symbols, and finally of God, SO as to help the elaboration of a secular Christianity. Disturbing perspectives; whichever way we look for a way out, it appears that Gnosticism will remain incorporated in future political thought. This, of course, would be a very dark prospect since Gnosticism and the thought structure inseparable from it are based on horror of the created concrete world, a horror perpetually stimulating radical dissatisfaction, hence revolution in the soul and in the community. The nucleus of this vision is the opposite of both classical Greek and

Christian visions, and it gives rise to an endless spinning of theories about how to cure the world‘s essential evil through the creation of a new world. Augustine called this spinning of theories a fornicatio fanGastica, an admirable description since the Gnostic ideologue does indeed rape reality, endlessly generating bastard systems, sensational “final” explanations and pseudocurative formulas. Among these bastard systems Voegelin names positivism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, national socialism, and existentialism, and sees in them the destroyers of the politike episteme. Having excluded transcendance from their discourse, the system-mongers substitute history, science, economics, evolution, race, the subconscious, or sex, and advertise instant salvation once the system is adopted. From kindergarten to world government mankind would move, phalanx-like, into the new age, the second-human-creation. But positivism, Voegelin’s chief culprit, did not open the door for all these systems to pass; it was, rather, the guardian of Western spiritual order, Christianity, which failed to keep the door closed. This is no mere play with words. Scholars like Hans Jonas, Urs von Balthasar, Robert Grant, Claude Tresmontant, C. Puech, and Eric Voegelin himself have shown the sudden burgeoning of Gnostic thought in the first centuries of the Christian era, mostly a deformation of Judaic (apocalyptic) and Christian speculation. Practically no church father was able to ignore some variety of it, particularly since Gnostics were, par excellence, cultured men-the intellectuals of the Mediterranean world, holders of esoteric oriental secrets, hence higher in prestige than the apologists of a strange and stubborn sect. Even after 313, Gnosticism continued to flourish, and it took repeated Councils and great theologians to defeat its theses. My point is, however, that the defeat was never final, but that for centuries the church kept the lid on the Gnostic systems, as in the case of the Albigensian heresy, so clearly of Gnostic inspiration. The con-

335

Modern Age


temporary world, from 1789, has blown off the lid: it is quite consistent with what I said above that the great neo-Gnostics: Hegel, Marx, Comte, Freud, Nietzsche and Heidegger should, with gnashing teeth, confront Christianity, and while robbing it of transcendance, retain its schema. “The long history of post-classical Western Gnosti~isrn,~~ notes Voegelin now, “appears in its continuity as the history of Western sectarianism.” Sartre, another Gnostic, holds that the modern ideologue, himself included, is unable to move and speculate outside the magic circle of Marxism; it would be truer to say that Marxism itself, and the subdoctrines it has spawned, move inside the emptied Christian shell. These considerations bring us back to the chances of rehabilitating the politike episteme in our time, at our universities and-let us be frivolous for a momentamong our political personnel. Two remarks must be made in this respect: 1) Such a rehabilitation would have to restore, first, the Aristotelian-Thomist ontology to a place of honor, an operation that our Faustian contemporaries refuse to perform. Why? Because they are trapped by what they see as an insufferable mutilation of their totality, as an unbridgeable gap between self and being. They reject the measure, the moderation of the self, and prefer to suppress the other term, being; thereafter, quite logically, they find the world empty, that is, absurd. With Faust, they must choose action (die Tat) to fill the void with the sound of conflict and domination. I cannot help believing that the Faustian age is far from finished, in fact that its computerized and cosmic phase has just begun. 2) With each new phase, Faustian man hopes to close the gap-in the direction of total knowledge (gnosis) , radical freedom, disalienation ; his impatience grows, his eyes shine with new avidity. On his timetable the time of salvation is always now: he pictures himself as the mature man, standing on the threshold of the terminal phase which is his salutary coin-

cidence with his own godlike essence, once the “external obstacles” are removed. As Sartre now holds, man’s central passion (to become god) is no longer une passion inutile: he is about to fulfill the old dream, in a world-oh, how prosaic of our ideological mentor !-of economic abundance. Again, I can see no end to the fornicatio f antastica. The temptation of critics of Gnostic systems is to assume that Gnosticism may be eradicated. I do not believe this to be possible, but, with Voegelin, I believe in enlightening people misled by antirational systems, demonic myths. We need infinite patience for this task; it would be good to know how Eric Voegelin evaluates our chances, or, to state my wish more precisely, to know how he conceives of mediation between the order of the soul and the order of the community. He may answer, of course, that “help is not a piece of information about truth, but the arduous effort to locate the forces of evil and identify their nature” (Pluto, p. 6 3 ) . This, Voegelin has done, and this seems to be the limit to which he has carried us so far, a tremendous achievement in our intellectual climate. He compels us to recognize that the effectiveness of the help is limited to the “savior” individual and to the eager minds he chances upon. In other words, to small “Socratic” groups. Yet, a malaise remains--obviously experienced by Voegelin himself-which can be formulated in the form of questions: Has Christianity done more than Socrates/Plato ? Has the Incarnation provided a new dynamics for the orientation of souls? If so, can the “Socratic” group expand so as to comprise the community? Voegelin’s answer, in the book under review and in other books, stops short of a clear conclusion. To me, however, it seems that he remains faithful to Plato and refuses (with finality?) to move beyond. The philosopher learns wisdom “in concrete opposition to the elements of disorder in the surrounding society”-but disorder will always remain and the transcendental order

336

Summer-Fall 1970


cannot reflect in the community. “Philosophy is not a doctrine of right order, but the light of wisdom that falls on the struggle. . . If Plato’s evocation of a paradigm of right order is interpreted as a philosopher’s opinion about politics, the result will be hopeless nonsense, not worth a word of debate.”

.

Reviewed by THOMAS MOLNAR

Subversion Unlimited The Losers : The Definitive Report, by an Eyewitness, of the Communist Conquest of Cuba and the Soviet Penetration in Latin America, by Paul D. Bethel, New Rochelle, N . Y.: Arlingto? Home, 1969. 615 pp. $10.00. THIS BOOK, as the subtitle suggests, is indeed an account of the Communist conquest of Cuba, as witnessed by the author, and of the continuing efforts of the Communists from Cuba, from Moscow, and from Peking, to infiltrate and subvert the Latin American nation states during the past decade, as revealed to the author from his research. The book is also more than an account of the tragic development signified by the subtitle, for there is another side to that account, similarly elaborated in detail by the author, which is reflected in the title. Who are “the Losers”? According to the author, they are first of all “that coterie of Castro and Soviet apologists in the United States whose efforts have so greatly aided the Communist advances into free Latin America.” They are also, due to personal qualities common to their breed, “the misfits, the malcontents and ‘losers’ of a free society, who . . frustrated . . retreat to safe havens such as the universities and the bureaucracy to air their sour resentment of democracy.”

.

.

The book is, furthermore, a protesting criticism of the foreign policy of the Kennedy Administration which permitted the lodgment of Soviet power in the Caribbean and, at the same time, a passionate warning that Soviet aggression, whose final target is the United States, will be stopped Only if there is mobilized a stronger resolve in the United States and the Americas to help Cuba become free and thereby keep our own domain free and inviolate.” How successful the onslaught of Communist subversion has been “may be seen,” according to the author, “in the ties that now exist between a Communist Cuba and antidemocratic militants in the United Statesboth black and white.” The evidence of this subversion is marshalled by the author in the opening and closing sections of his book. Within this structural frame the author recounts, year by year and month by month, from 1959 to 1969, the sad and familiar history, of the rise to power of the Communist, Fidel Castro, and the destruction of a free and prosperous Cuba by Castroite Communists, of the establishment of Soviet power in Cuba and of the World Communist base for the training of guerrillas to infiltrate and subvert the free world of North, Central, and South America and of Africa, of the reversal of U. S. policy toward Cuba by the Kennedy Administration, the Bay of Pigs tragic fiasco, and the “so-called” Missile Crisis, and of the Communist Cuban-Soviet offensive to overthrow the governments of Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina, Chile, Honduras, Guatemala, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and even Puerto Rico. Throughout the book, in chapter after chapter, the author, naming names, criticizes the Losers and their writings and the policies and actions of U. S. government officials, corrects the propaganda errors and falsehoods about Castro and Communism with new documentary evidence, and elaborates the tragic history with many eyewitness accounts, including his own in Cuba and Santo Domingo. In the last section of &