‘Science, Politics and Gnosticism’: Ideology Leads to Ruin
A review of Science, Politics and Gnosticism, by Eric Voegelin; Regnery, 1968.
Gnosticism emerged in a time of great upheaval. Over the first few centuries A.D., the sprawling Roman empire had grown violent, old religions were fracturing, and traditional forms of identity were breaking down. People felt unmoored: caught between decaying modes of belief and a world in which they no longer felt at home. Gnosticism describes a cosmos ruled by ignorant or malevolent powers called archons, to which the body belonged. Only the soul, trapped in a world which was not its true home, could be saved. That salvation came not through obedience to law or custom or ritual, but through gnōsis—personal knowledge of our divine origin. Through the acquisition of this knowledge, people could awaken the godly spark within them and, if you like, return home. It is a Christian heresy that sees the world in black-and-white terms, and reflects the dislocation of its time.
Eric Voegelin, a German political thinker forced to flee his home in Austria when the Nazis invaded, appropriates the term gnosticism to describe the belief at the heart of contemporary ideologies: that the world is intolerable and must be transformed by human hands. Voegelin sees these political belief systems—progressivism, Communism, Nazism—not as rational programmes or scientific projects, but as spiritual diseases. In Science, Politics and Gnosticism, a slender book composed of two complementary essays, he mounts a scathing attack on those who have the nerve and the arrogance, as he sees it, to think they can change the world for the better. There are no angels in the worldviews of Marx and Nietzsche, Comte and Hitler; but all believed they alone had found the key to history, and had the right to use it.
Voegelin sees these political belief systems — progressivism, Communism, Nazism — not as rational programmes or scientific projects, but as spiritual diseases.
In the first essay, the eponymous ‘Science, Politics and Gnosticism’, Voegelin sets out his stall. He claims that science, that is, inquiry through observation and experimentation, cannot form the basis of political order. That the positivist thinks otherwise only shows his ignorance. For Aristotle and Plato, ‘science’ (epistēmē) was a disciplined inquiry into the nature of being, human, divine and cosmic. It was recognised as resting on unscientific claims—about what exists, what counts as knowledge, and what it means to be human—which are metaphysical, ontological and anthropological. Science was a mode of participation in a larger order. It encompassed a humility before mystery, which the positivist lacks. The belief of the positivist, that only what can be measured and observed as real, is unscientific.
Hence, the positivist is making a category error. He takes a method (science) for a worldview. Science grew out of the notion that we are rational creatures, ordered towards truth and living within a meaningful whole; it is not self-sustaining. The error opens the door to ideological ‘gnosticism’, where the basic complexity of the world is rejected in favour of grand, simplifying theories. Like the positivist, the Communist, Nazi and even liberal progressive turns the messy, human business of governing into a technocratic project. He refuses to live with uncertainty or even claims that science means certainty. In doing so, he ceases to seek truth and starts to create it for himself.
Like the positivist, the Communist, Nazi and even liberal progressive turns the messy, human business of governing into a technocratic project.
So science isn’t wrong, Voegelin is saying. It just isn’t a total explanation. For it rests on humility, wonder, and a belief that reality is ordered. We are not just animals, but persons endowed with reason and inwardly directed towards the truth, the good and the beautiful. This yearning for what transcends us defines our humanity. And science springs from this. It is a disciplined form of wonder. Through science, we do not master the world, as the gnostic seeks to do: we participate more fully in it. We reside in a liminal space between ignorance and knowledge, time and eternity, finitude and transcendence. We are not gods, but we are not beasts either. We live in a kind of half-light.
At least, for Voegelin. Not for the creators, champions and followers of contemporary political belief systems. Ideology, he argues in his second essay, ‘Ersatz Religion’, has become substitute faith. Actual religion may recede—with what Matthew Arnold called ‘its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’—but our hunger for the sacred does not. The modern ideologue offers salvation from this, our unsatisfactory world, but not through humility towards being, no: by political means. Auguste Comte, Karl Marx and those like them—these thinkers clothe themselves in the mantle of the prophet, rejecting the world and demanding it be remade now. And all hell breaks loose. ‘Don’t immanentise the eschaton,’ Voegelin later said, meaning: Don’t try to bring about heaven on earth through politics. All attempts at total justice, complete equality, racial purity, an end to suffering or whatever else end in blood; for the embryo and basis of those attempts is a basic misunderstanding about the structure of the world.
It is natural to ask at this point: What, then, is the alternative? Part of the point is that the restless search for answers springs from a misapprehension. There are no final or total solutions, and if we can improve our lot then it is not by means of pushing through society-wide change politics. The ideologue offers certainty; that is part of his appeal. ‘Follow me’, he says, ‘and I will make it all better’. The truth is that the world, like each of us, is mysterious—not something to be fixed or solved, but understood. His is not a call for a return to dogma or a throne-and-altar conservatism, but a humility in the face of being.
The ideologue offers certainty; that is part of his appeal. ‘Follow me’, he says, ‘and I will make it all better’.
You will have noticed the theological thread running through all this. The central theme of Science, Politics and Gnosticism is both intellectual and spiritual corruption. Modern ideology, like the gnosticism of the first few centuries A.D. emerge from dislocation: a sense of disturbance and a concurrent forgetting of our place in the order of being. By trying to replace God with a system, we are making an old mistake with new language. The gnostic impulse to ‘know’ the true nature of history, and so master reality and abolish suffering, is not just deluded, but dangerous. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Of course, Voegelin was not the first person to make this point, even if he made it in a particularly original way. We can find it in Dostoevsky, Burke and even Plato, all of whom warned against an untethered reason. Both Iain McGilchrist and James Orr have make the point that the one who truly uses her reason grasps that reason alone is insufficient for understanding. True reason encompasses other ways of knowing, such as intuition and imagination. Voegelin’s framing of this insight is particularly striking because it has a theological hue that political theory tends to lack. By calling ideology ‘gnostic’, he moves the discussion away from policy and shows it to be grounded in a fundamental error about the nature of being itself.
Voegelin was not the first person to make this point, even if he made it in a particularly original way. We can find it in Dostoevsky, Burke and even Plato, all of whom warned against an untethered reason.
For Voegelin, a just politics must reflect being as it is, not as we might wish it to be. That is, it must reflect the tension between man and the divine. It must take into account mystery, finitude, the human need for transcendence. He is not saying the world is perfect, but that it is incumbent on us to learn to live within it and resist the temptation to flee the basic ambiguity of existence. Which might frustrate you. He diagnoses but presents no cure—though as I have said, the search for a cure is part of the problem.
Voegelin’s prose is dense but not pretentious. He is certainly not an ‘inclusive’ writer: he expects us to keep up. You may find his blanket labelling of diverse political movements as ‘gnostic’ somewhat imprecise (this is a familiar criticism of Voegelin); but his central insights—that social unrest breeds a need for certainty; that politics becomes a means for imposing these certainties; that these certainties are framed as moral or scientific advances; and that, in opposing the order of being, these certainties sow ruin—would seem on the evidence of the 20th-century to have some truth to them. We might put it like this: politics is not therapy, cleverness is not wisdom, and if we find the world unsatisfying then it is on us, and not the world, for the most part to change. That, in any case, is Voegelin’s view.
