Gnosticism

Voegelin, Eric wrote:

POLITICAL SCIENCE, politike episteme, was founded by Plato and Aristotle.
At stake in the spiritual confusion of the time was whether there could be fashioned an image of the right order of the soul and society—a paradigm, a model, an ideal—that could function for the citizens of the polis as had paraenetic myth for the Homeric heroes. To be sure, fourth-century Athens afforded plenty of opinions about the right manner of living and the right order of society. But was it possible to show that one of the multitude of sceptic, hedonist, utilitarian, power oriented, and partisan doxai was the true one? Or, if none of them could stand up to critical examination, could a new image of order be formed that would not also bear the marks of a on binding, subjective opinion (doxa)? The science of political philosophy resulted from the efforts to find an answer to this question.
In its essentials the classical foundation of political science is still valid today. We shall outline briefly its subject matter, analytical method, and anthropological presuppositions.
As for the subject matter, it is nothing esoteric; rather, it lies not far from the questions of the day and is concerned with the truth of things that everyone talks about. What is happiness? How should a man live in order to be happy? What is virtue? What, especially, is the virtue of justice? How large a territory and a population are best for a society? What kind of education is best? What professions, and what form of government? All of these questions arise from the conditions of the existence of man in society.
And the philosopher is a man like any other: as far as the order of society is concerned, he has no other questions to ask than those of his fellow citizens.
However, his questioning leads to a conflict with opinion. This is quite another kind of conflict than that between differing opinions; for although the philosopher’s questions are concerned with the same subjects as those of the philodoxer (these are the terms Plato adopted to describe the adversaries), the nature of his inquiry is radically different. The philosopher’s question represents an attempt to advance beyond opinion to truth through the use of scientific analysis as developed by Aristotle in the Analytica Posteriora. With the instrument of analysis current statements about political matters are broken down into pre-analytic opinions and scientific propositions in the strict sense; and the verbal symbols, into preanalytic or insufficiently analyzed expressions and the analytic concepts of political science. In this way, advocates of opinions who attack one another in daily politics are grouped together over against their common adversary, the philosopher.
When we speak of scientific analysis, we wish to emphasize the contrast with formal analysis. An analysis by means of formal logic can lead to no more than a demonstration that an opinion suffers from an inherent contradiction, or that different opinions contradict one another, or that conclusions have been invalidly drawn. A scientific analysis, on the other hand, makes it possible to judge of the truth of the premises implied by an opinion. It can do this, however, only on the assumption that truth about the order of being—to which, of course, opinions also refer—is objectively ascertainable. And Platonic-Aristotelian analysis does in fact operate on the assumption that there is an order of being accessible to a science beyond opinion. Its aim is knowledge of the order of being, of the levels of the hierarchy of being and their interrelationships, of the essential structure of the realms of being, and especially of human nature and its place in the totality of being. Analysis, therefore, is scientific and leads to a science of order through the fact that, and insofar as, it is ontologically oriented.
The assumption alone, however—that the order of being is accessible to knowledge, that ontology is possible—is still not enough to carry out an analysis; for the assumption might be unfounded. Therefore, an insight concerning being must always be really present—not only so that the first steps of the analysis can be taken, but so that the very idea of the analysis can be conceived and developed at all. And indeed, Platonic-Aristotelian analysis did not in the least begin with speculations about its own possibility, but with the actual insight into being which motivated the analytical process. The decisive event in the establishment of politike episteme was the specifically philosophical realization that the levels of being discernible within the world are surmounted by a transcendent source of being and its order. And this insight was itself rooted in the real movements of the human spiritual soul toward divine being experienced as transcendent. In the experiences of love for the world-transcendent origin of being, in philia toward the sophon (the wise), in eros toward the agathon (the good) and the kalon (the beautiful), man became philosopher. From these experiences arose the image of the order of being. At the opening of
the soul—that is the metaphor Bergson uses to describe the event—the order of being becomes visible even to its ground and origin in the beyond, in the Platonic epekeina, in which the soul participates as it suffers and achieves its opening.
Only when the order of being as a whole, unto its origin in transcendent being, comes into view, can the analysis be undertaken with any hope of success; for only then can current opinions about right order be examined as to their agreement with the order of being. When the strong and successful are highly rated, they can then be contrasted with those who possess the virtue of phronesis, wisdom, who live sub specie mortis and act with the Last Judgment in mind. When statesmen are praised for having made their people great and powerful, as Themistocles and Pericles had made Athens, Plato can confront them with the moral decline that was the result of their policies. (One thinks here not only of classical examples, but perhaps also of what Gladstone said of Bismarck: He made Germany great and the Germans small.) Again: when impetuous young men are repelled by the vulgarity of democracy, Plato can point out to them that energy, pride, and will to rule can indeed establish the despotism of a spiritually corrupt elite, but not a just government; and when democrats rave about freedom and equality and forget that government requires spiritual training and intellectual discipline, he can warn them that they are on the way to tyranny.
These examples will suffice to indicate that political science goes beyond the validity of propositions to the truth of existence. The opinions for the clarification of which the analysis is undertaken are not merely false: they are symptoms of spiritual disorder in the men who hold them. And the purpose of the analysis is to persuade—to have its own insights, if possible, supplant the opinions in social reality. Analysis is concerned with the therapy of order.
Society resists the therapeutic activity of science. Because not only the validity of the opinions is called into question but also the truth of the
human attitudes expressed in the opinions, because the effort in behalf of truth is directed at the untruth of existence in particular men, the intellectual debate is intensified beyond the point of analysis and argument to that of existential struggle for and against truth—struggle that can be waged on every level of human existence, from spiritual persuasion, peitho in the Platonic sense, to psychological propaganda, to even physical attack and destruction. Today, under the pressure of totalitarian terror, we are perhaps inclined to think primarily of the physical forms of opposition. But they are not the most successful. The opposition becomes truly radical and dangerous only when philosophical questioning is itself called into question, when doxa takes on the appearance of philosophy, when it arrogates to itself the name of science and prohibits science as nonscience.
Only if this prohibition can be made socially effective will the point have been reached where ratio can no longer operate as a remedy for spiritual disorder. Hellenic civilization never came to this: philosophizing could be mortally dangerous, but philosophy, especially political science, flourished.
Never did it occur to a Greek to prohibit analytical inquiry as such.
The frame of reference of political science has changed considerably in the more than two thousand years since its founding. The broadening of temporal and spatial horizons has yielded to comparative analysis enormous amounts of material that were unknown in antiquity. And the appearance of Christianity in history, with the resulting tension between reason and revelation, has profoundly affected the difficulties of philosophizing. The Platonic-Aristotelian paradigm of the best polis cannot provide an answer for the great questions of our time—either for the organizational problems of industrial society or for the spiritual problems of the struggle between Christianity and ideology. But the basic situation of political science, which I have briefly outlined here, has, except in one respect, not changed at all.
Today, just as two thousand years ago, politike episteme deals with questions that concern everyone and that everyone asks. Though different opinions are current in society today, its subject matter has not changed. Its method is still scientific analysis. And the prerequisite of analysis is still the perception of the order of being unto its origin in transcendent being, in particular, the loving openness of the soul to its transcendent ground of order.
Only in one respect has the situation of political science changed. As indicated, there has emerged a phenomenon unknown to antiquity that
permeates our modern societies so completely that its ubiquity scarcely leaves us any room to see it at all: the prohibition of questioning. This is not a matter of resistance to analysis—that existed in antiquity as well. It does not involve those who cling to opinions by reason of tradition or emotion, or those who engage in debate in a naive confidence in the rightness of their opinions and who take the offensive only when analysis unnerves them.
Rather, we are confronted here with persons who know that, and why, their opinions cannot stand up under critical analysis and who therefore make the prohibition of the examination of their premises part of their dogma. This position of a conscious, deliberate, and painstakingly elaborated obstruction of ratio constitutes the new phenomenon.

Science, Politics and Gnosticism

Voegelin, Eric wrote:

We shall now try to present the phenomenon of the prohibition of questions through an analysis of representative opinions. Thus, this effort will present not only the phenomenon, but the exercise of analysis as well. It should show that the spiritual disorder of our time, the civilizational crisis of which everyone so readily speaks, does not by any means have to be borne as an inevitable fate; that, on the contrary, everyone possesses the means of overcoming it in his own life. And our effort should not only indicate the means, but also show how to employ them. No one is obliged to take part in the spiritual crisis of a society; on the contrary, everyone is obliged to avoid this folly and live his life in order. Our presentation of the phenomenon, therefore, will at the same time furnish the remedy for it through therapeutic analysis.

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The prohibition of questions as it appears in some of the early writings of Karl Marx—the “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts” of 1844—can
serve as the point of departure.
Marx is a speculative gnostic. He construes the order of being as a process of nature complete in itself. Nature is in a state of becoming, and in
the course of its development it has brought forth man: “Man is directly a being of nature.”9 Now, in the development of nature a special role has devolved upon man. This being, which is itself nature, also stands over against nature and assists it in its development by human labor—which in its highest form is technology and industry based on the natural sciences:
“Nature as it develops in human history . . . as it develops through industry . . . is true anthropological nature.”10 In the process of creating nature, however, man at the same time also creates himself to the fullness of his being; therefore, “all of so-called world history is nothing but the production of man by human labor.”
The purpose of this speculation is to shut off the process of being from transcendent being and have man create himself. This is accomplished by playing with equivocations in which “nature” is now all-inclusive being, now nature as opposed to man, and now the nature of man in the sense of essentia. This equivocal wordplay reaches its climax in a sentence that can easily be overlooked: “A being that does not have its nature outside of itself is not a natural being; it does not participate in the being of nature.”
In connection with this speculation Marx himself now brings up the question of what objection the “particular individual” would probably have to the idea of the spontaneous generation (“generatio aequivoca”) of nature and man: “The being-of-itself (Durchsichselbstsein) of nature and man is inconceivable to him, because it contradicts all the tangible aspects of practical life.” The individual man will, going back from generation to
generation in search of his origin, raise the question of the creation of the first man. He will introduce the argument of infinite regress, which in
Ionian philosophy led to the problem of the arche (origin). To such questions, prompted by the “tangible” experience that man does not exist of
himself, Marx chooses to reply that they are “a product of abstraction.”
“When you inquire about the creation of nature and man, you abstract from nature and man.” Nature and man are real only as Marx construes them in his speculation. Should his questioner pose the possibility of their nonexistence, then Marx could not prove that they exist.
In reality, his construct would collapse with this question. And how does Marx get out of the predicament? He instructs his questioner, “Give up your abstraction and you will give up your question along with it.” If the questioner were consistent, says Marx, he would have to think of himself as not existing—even while, in the very act of questioning, he is. Hence, again the instruction: “Do not think, do not question me.” The “individual man,” however, is not obliged to be taken in by Marx’s syllogism and think of himself as not existing because he is aware of the fact that he does not exist of himself. Indeed, Marx concedes this very point—without, however, choosing to go into it. Instead, he breaks off the debate by declaring that “for socialist man”—that is, for the man who has accepted Marx’s construct of the process of being and history—such a question “becomes a practical impossibility.” The questions of the “individual man” are cut off by the ukase of the speculator who will not permit his construct to be disturbed.
When “socialist man” speaks, man has to be silent.
This, then, is the evidence from which we have to proceed. But before we take up the analysis itself, let us first establish that the Marxian prohibition of questions is neither isolated nor harmless. It was not isolated in its own time, for we find the same prohibition in Comte, in the first Lecture of his Cours de Philosophie Positive. Comte also anticipates objections to his construct, and he bluntly dismisses them as idle questions. For the present he is interested only in the laws of social phenomena. Whoever asks questions about the nature, calling, and destiny of man may be temporarily ignored; later, after the system of positivism has prevailed in society, such persons will have to be silenced by appropriate measures. 16 And the prohibition of questions is not harmless, for it has attained great social effectiveness among men who forbid themselves to ask questions in critical situations. One thinks of the observation of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the extermination camp at Auschwitz. When asked why he did not refuse to obey the order to organize the mass executions, he replied: “At that time I did not indulge in deliberation: I had received the order, and I had to carry it out.... I do not believe that even one of the thousands of SS leaders could have permitted such a thought to occur to him. Something like that was just completely impossible.” This is very close to the wording of Marx’s declaration that for “socialist man” such a question “becomes a practical impossibility.” Thus, we see delineated three major types for whom a human inquiry has become a practical impossibility: socialist man (in the Marxian sense), positivist man (in the Comtean sense), and nationalsocialist man.
And now for the Marxian suppression of questions. It represents, as we shall see, a very complicated psychological phenomenon, and we must
isolate each of its components in turn. First, the most “tangible”: here is a thinker who knows that his construct will collapse as soon as the basic philosophical question is asked. Does this knowledge induce him to abandon his untenable construct? Not in the least: it merely induces him to prohibit such questions. But his prohibition now induces us to ask, Was Marx an intellectual swindler? Such a question will perhaps give rise to objections. Can one seriously entertain the idea that the lifework of a thinker of considerable rank is based on an intellectual swindle? Could it have attracted a mass following and become a political world power if it rested on a swindle? But we today are inured to such scruples: we have seen too many improbable and incredible things that were nonetheless real.
Therefore, we hesitate neither to ask the question that the evidence presses upon us, nor to answer, Yes, Marx was an intellectual swindler. This is certainly not the last word on Marx. We have already referred to the complexity of the psychological phenomenon behind the passages quoted.
But it must unrelentingly be the first word if we do not want to obstruct our understanding of the prohibition of questions.
When we establish that Marx was an intellectual swindler, the further question of why immediately arises. What can prompt a man to commit
such a swindle? Is there not something pathological about this act? For an answer to this question let us turn to Nietzsche, who was also a speculative gnostic, but a more sensitive psychologist than Marx.

Science, Politics and Gnosticism

Voegelin, Eric wrote:

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Nietzsche introduces the will to power, the will to dominion, the libido dominandi, as the passion that accounts for the will to intellectual deception. Let us examine the via dolorosa along which this passion drives the gnostic thinker from one station to the next.
In Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Aphorism 230, Nietzsche speaks of a “fundamental will of the spirit” which wants to feel itself master. The spirit’s will to mastery is served in the first place by “a suddenly erupting resolve for ignorance, for arbitrary occlusion . . . a kind of defensive stand against much that is knowable.” Moreover, the spirit wills to let itself be deceived on occasion, “perhaps with a mischievous suspicion that things are not thus and so, but rather only allowed to pass as such . . . a satisfaction in the arbitrariness of all these manifestations of power.” Finally, there belongs here “that not unscrupulous readiness of the spirit to deceive other spirits and to dissemble before them,” the enjoyment of “cunning and a variety of masks.”
The libido dominandi, however, has a violence and cruelty that go beyond the delight in masquerade and in the deception of others. It turns on the thinker himself and unmasks his thought as a cunning will to power. “A kind of cruelty of the intellectual conscience,” “an extravagant honesty,” clears up the deception; however—and this is the decisive point—not in order to advance to the truth beyond the deception, but only to set up a new one in place of the old. The game of masks continues; and those who allow themselves to be deceived remain deceived. In this “cruelty of the intellectual conscience” can be seen the movement of the spirit that in Nietzsche’s gnosis corresponds functionally to the Platonic periagoge, the turning-around and opening of the soul. But in the gnostic movement man remains shut off from transcendent being. The will to power strikes against the wall of being, which has become a prison. It forces the spirit into the rhythm of deception and self-laceration.
The compulsion to deceive must now be examined further. Does the spirit really strike against the wall of being? Or does it not perhaps will to stop there? The remoter depths of the will to power are revealed through the following aphorism: “To rule, and to be no longer a servant of a god: this means was left behind to ennoble man.” To rule means to be God; in order to be God gnostic man takes upon himself the torments of deception and self-laceration.
But the spirit’s action is not yet at an end. The question of whether the thinker really wants to be God takes us still further; perhaps the affirmation of this desire is just another deception. In the “Night Song” in Zarathustra this question is answered in a revealing confession:

It is night: only now awaken all the songs of the lovers....
A craving for love is in me. . . .
[But] light am I: oh, that I were night! . . .
This is my loneliness, that I am begirt with light... .
I do not know the happiness of those who receive....
This is my poverty, that my hand never rests from giving....
You only, you dark ones, you of the night, extract your warmth from what shines....
Ice is around me; my hand is burnt up with iciness. . . .
It is night: alas, that I must be light.

In this confession the voice of a spiritually sensitive man seems to be speaking, who is suffering in the consciousness of his demonic occlusion.
Mystic night is denied him. He is imprisoned in the icy light of his existence. And from this prison rises the protestation—half lament, half prayer, and still not free of the defiance of the rebel—“And my soul, too, is
the song of a lover.”
No one will hear this lament of a man to whom humility before God was not given without being moved. Beyond the psychology of the will to power, we are confronted with the inscrutable fact that grace is granted or denied.
Yet emotion should not prevent our seeing the dubiousness of this confession. We introduced it by asking whether the gnostic thinker really wants to be God, or whether the affirmation of his will is not just another deception. The “Night Song” appears to admit the deception: it is not that he wants to be God; he has to be God—for inscrutable reasons. But this latter conclusion, which nullifies the former one, immediately prompts us to ask if we have to accept it. Must we now consider the game of deceptions ended? I do not think so. Let us continue with the game and ask if the “Night Song” is not yet another mask. Bearing in mind that Nietzsche confesses that he knows his occlusion and suffers in it, let us turn his confession against him and ask, Does a man really have to make a virtue out of the misery of his condition, which he perceives to be the graceless disorder of the soul, and set it up as a superhuman ideal? Does his deficiency entitle him to perform Dionysian dances with masks? Let us, with the brutality that the times compel if we are not to fall victim to them, ask if he is not rather obliged to be silent. And if his lament were more than a mask, if it were genuine, if he suffered from his condition, would he not
then be speechless? But Nietzsche is not in the least speechless; and his eloquence is convincing proof that the lament is only an act of sympathetic understanding, that it has not been allowed to touch the core of his existence in rebellion against God, and therefore that it is not genuine, but a mask. Just as Marx will not permit his game of equivocations to be disturbed, so Nietzsche refuses to break off his game of masks.
The phenomenon of the prohibition of questions is becoming clearer in its outlines. The gnostic thinker really does commit an intellectual swindle, and he knows it. One can distinguish three stages in the action of his spirit.
On the surface lies the deception itself. It could be self-deception; and very often it is, when the speculation of a creative thinker has culturally degenerated and become the dogma of a mass movement. But when the phenomenon is apprehended at its point of origin, as in Marx or Nietzsche, deeper than the deception itself will be found the awareness of it. The thinker does not lose control of himself: the libido dominandi turns on its own work and wishes to master the deception as well. This gnostic turning back on itself corresponds spiritually, as we have said, to the philosophic conversion, the periagoge in the Platonic sense. However, the gnostic movement of the spirit does not lead to the erotic opening of the soul, but rather to the deepest reach of persistence in the deception, where revolt against God is revealed to be its motive and purpose.
With the three stages in the spirit’s action it is now possible also to differentiate more precisely the corresponding levels of deception:
1) For the surface act it will be convenient to retain the term Nietzsche used, “deception.” But in content this action does not necessarily differ from a wrong judgment arising from another motive than the gnostic. It could also be an “error.” It becomes a deception only because of the psychological context.
2) In the second stage the thinker becomes aware of the untruth of his assertion or speculation, but persists in it in spite of this knowledge. Only because of his awareness of the untruth does the action become a deception.
And because of the persistence in the communication of what are recognized to be false arguments, it also becomes an “intellectual swindle.”
3) In the third stage the revolt against God is revealed and recognized to be the motive of the swindle. With the continuation of the intellectual swindle in full knowledge of the motive of revolt the deception further becomes “demonic mendacity.”

Science, Politics and Gnosticism

Voegelin, Eric wrote:

3

The first and second of the three stages Nietzsche described can be seen in the texts that we have quoted from Marx. How does Marx stand with respect to the third stage in this movement of the spirit, where rebellion against God is revealed to be the motive for the deception? This is exactly what is revealed in the context of the quoted passages:

A being regards itself as independent only when it stands on its own feet; and it stands on its feet only when it owes its existence to itself alone. A man who lives by the grace of another considers himself a dependent being. But I live by the grace of another completely if I owe
him not only the maintenance of my life but also its creation: if he is the source of my life; and my life necessarily has such a cause outside
itself if it is not my own creation.

Marx does not deny that “tangible experience” argues for the dependence of man. But reality must be destroyed—this is the great concern of gnosis.
In its place steps the gnostic who produces the independence of his existence by speculation. It would indeed be difficult to find another passage in gnostic literature that so clearly exposes this speculation as an attempt to replace the reality of being with a “second reality” (as Robert Musil called this undertaking).
A passage from Marx’s doctoral dissertation of 1840–41 takes us still further into the problem of revolt:
Philosophy makes no secret of it. The confession of Prometheus, “In a word, I hate all the gods,” is its own confession, its own verdict against
all gods heavenly and earthly who do not acknowledge human selfconsciousness as the supreme deity. There shall be none beside it.
In this confession, in which the young Marx presents his own attitude under the symbol of Prometheus, the vast history of the revolt against God is illuminated as far back as the Hellenic creation of the symbol.
Let us first clarify the relationship between Marx’s comments and the verse he quotes from Aeschylus.
Prometheus is riveted to a rock by the sea. Below on the strip of beach stands Hermes looking up at him. The fettered Prometheus gives his
bitterness free reign. Hermes tries to calm him and urges moderation. Then, Prometheus crams his impotence and rebellion into the line quoted by Marx: “In a word, I hate all the gods.” But the line is not part of a monologue. At this outbreak of hatred the messenger of the gods replies
admonishingly: “It appears you have been stricken with no small madness.” The word translated here as “madness” is the Greek nosos which Aeschylus employed as a synonym for nosema. It means bodily or mental sickness. In the sense of a disease of the spirit it can mean hatred of the gods or simply being dominated by one’s passions. For example, Plato speaks of the nosema tes adikias, the sickness of injustice. Here we touch on the diseased—the pneumopathological—nature of the revolt that was pointed out earlier. And what does Marx say to this observation of the messenger of the gods? He says nothing. Anyone who does not know Prometheus Bound must conclude that the quoted “confession” sums up the meaning of the tragedy, not that Aeschylus wished to represent hatred of the gods as madness. In the distortion of the intended meaning into its opposite the suppression of questions can be seen again on all its levels: the deception of the reader by isolating the text (the confession appears in the preface to a doctoral dissertation), the awareness of the swindle (for we assume that Marx had read the tragedy), and the demonic persistence in the revolt against better judgment.
The soul’s rebellion against the order of the cosmos, hatred of the gods, and the revolt of the Titans are not, to be sure, unheard of in Hellenic myth.
But the Titanomachia ends with the victory of Jovian justice (dike), and Prometheus is fettered. The revolutionary reversal of the symbol—the dethronement of the gods, the victory of Prometheus—lies beyond classical culture; it is the work of gnosticism. Not until the gnostic revolt of the Roman era do Prometheus, Cain, Eve, and the serpent become symbols of man’s deliverance from the power of the tyrannical god of this world.
Marx’s confession iterates the reinterpretation of the Prometheus symbol that can be found in an alchemist text of the third century, the treatise of Zosimos On the Letter Omega:
Hermes and Zoroaster have said that the tribe of philosophers is above fate (heimarmene): they do not rejoice in the good fortune it brings, for
they master their desires; nor are they affected by the bad fortune it sends—if it is true that they look ahead to the end of all their misfortune; nor do they accept the fine gifts that come from it, for they pass their lives in immateriality. This is the point of Prometheus’ advice to Epimetheus in Hesiod:
[PROMETHEUS.] What in the eyes of men is the greatest good fortune?
[EPIMETHEUS.] A beautiful woman and lots of money.
[PROMETHEUS.] Beware of accepting gifts from Olympian Zeus; put them far from you.
In this way, he teaches his brother to reject the gifts of Zeus, i.e., of heimarmene, through the power of philosophy.
This text has a special significance for us, because it confirms the connection between the revolt against the gods and the proclamation of “philosophy” as the new source of order and authority. Not only does Prometheus become the hero of revolution, the symbol of philosophy undergoes a similar perversion of its meaning. The “philosophy” of Zosimos is not the philosophy that Plato founded. His “philosophers” are
not, as in the Platonic myth, the Sons of Zeus who follow his lead in this world and the next; nor are they the priests and helpers of the gods, as in Marcus Aurelius; their efforts are not concerned with forming men for the order of Zeus and dike. And “philosophizing” is not the Socratic practice of dying so that a man may measure up at the Last Judgment. The “philosophy” of Zosimos is concerned with something else, although the text, to the extent quoted, does not sufficiently make clear with what.
Certainly, it is concerned with a new asceticism, with the attempt to remove oneself from the world and its entanglements—the gnostic motive of doing away with reality. (The transformation of Pandora and her gifts into “a beautiful woman and lots of money” carries overtones of antibourgeois criticism.) Certainly, it has to do with a revolt against the father-gods of classical myth, for the identification of the gifts of Zeus with the dispensations of what by Zosimos’ time was a thoroughly discredited heimarmene is doubtless intended disparagingly. Certainly, it is involved in an opus of delivering man from the evil of the world. And finally, it is certain that “philosophy” is, in some way or other, intended as an instrument of salvation available for man’s use.
Whether Marx knew this text either directly or indirectly, we cannot say. Probably he did not. All the more, then, would the parallel in symbolic expression corroborate the essential sameness of attitudes and motives in ancient and modern gnosticism.

Science, Politics and Gnosticism

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Now just what is this new “philosophy”? What is its connection with the Promethian revolt and with the suppression of questions? Marx modelled his idea of science and philosophy on Hegel. Let us turn, therefore, to the greatest of speculative gnostics for the answer to these questions.
It is to be found in a fundamental statement in the Preface to the Phänomenologie of 1807:

The true form in which truth exists can only be the scientific system of it. To contribute to bringing philosophy closer to the form of science—the goal of being able to cast off the name love of knowledge (Liebe zum Wissen) and become actual knowledge (wirkliches Wissen)—is the task I have set for myself.

The expressions “love of knowledge” and “actual knowledge” are italicized by Hegel himself. If we translate them back into the Greek, into philosophia and gnosis, we then have before us the program of advancing from philosophy to gnosis. Thus, Hegel’s programmatic formula implies the perversion of the symbols science and philosophy.
By philosophy Hegel means an undertaking of thought that approaches and can finally attain actual knowledge. Philosophy is subsumed under the idea of progress in the eighteenth-century sense of the term. As opposed to
this progressivist idea of philosophy let us recall Plato’s efforts to clarify its nature. In the Phaedrus Plato has Socrates describe the characteristics of the true thinker. When Phaedrus asks what one should call such a man,
Socrates, following Heraclitus, replies that the term sophos, one who knows, would be excessive: this attribute may be applied to God alone; but one might well call him philosophos. Thus, “actual knowledge” is reserved to God; finite man can only be the “lover of knowledge,” not himself the one who knows. In the meaning of the passage, the lover of the knowledge that belongs only to the knowing God, the philosophos, becomes the theophilos, the lover of God. If we now place Hegel’s idea of philosophizing alongside Plato’s, we shall have to conclude that while there is indeed a progress in clarity and precision of knowledge of the order of being, the leap over the bounds of the finite into the perfection of actual knowledge is impossible. If a thinker attempts it, he is not advancing philosophy, but abandoning it to become a gnostic. Hegel conceals the leap by translating philosophia and gnosis into German so that he can shift from one to the other by playing on the word “knowledge.” This wordplay is structurally analogous to Plato’s in the Phaedrus. But the philosophic wordplay serves to illuminate the thought, while the gnostic wordplay is designed to conceal the non-thought. This point is worth noting because the German gnostics, especially, like to play with language and hide their nonthought
in wordplay.
The result of such transitions—which are in fact leaps—is that the meanings of words are changed. The gnostic program that Hegel successfully carries out retains for itself the name “philosophy,” and the speculative system in which the gnostic unfolds his will to make himself master of being insists on calling itself “science.”
Philosophy springs from the love of being; it is man’s loving endeavor to perceive the order of being and attune himself to it. Gnosis desires dominion over being; in order to seize control of being the gnostic constructs his system. The building of systems is a gnostic form of reasoning, not a philosophical one.
But the thinker can seize control of being with his system only if being really lies within his grasp. As long as the origin of being lies beyond the
being of this world; as long as eternal being cannot be completely penetrated with the instrument of world-immanent, finite cognition; as long as divine being can be conceived of only in the form of the analogia entis,
the construction of a system will be impossible. If this venture is to be seriously launched at all, the thinker must first eliminate these inconveniences: he must so interpret being that on principle it lies within the grasp of his construct. Here is Hegel addressing himself to this problem:
According to my view, which will have to be justified only through the presentation of the system itself, everything depends on comprehending and expressing the true as subject no less than as substance.
The conditions required for the solution are formulated just as for a mathematical problem: if being is at one and the same time substance and subject, then, of course, truth lies within the grasp of the apprehending
subject. But, we must ask, are substance and subject really identical? Hegel dispenses with this question by declaring that the truth of his “view” is proven if he can justify it “through the presentation of the system.” If,
therefore, I can build a system, the truth of its premise is thereby established; that I can build a system on a false premise is not even considered. The system is justified by the fact of its construction; the possibility of calling into question the construction of systems, as such, is not acknowledged. That the form of science is the system must be assumed as beyond all question. We are confronted here with the same phenomenon of the suppression of questions that we met in Marx. But we now see more clearly that an essential connection exists between the suppression of questions and the construction of a system. Whoever reduces being to a system cannot permit questions that invalidate systems as a form of reasoning.

Science, Politics and Gnosticism

Voegelin, Eric wrote:

5

The essential connection between the libido dominandi, the system, and the prohibition of questions, although by no means completely worked out, has been made clear by the testimony of the gnostics themselves. Let us return
now for the last time to Marx’s prohibition against questions.
We recall that Marx un-Socratically breaks off the dialogue with his philosophical interrogator with a ukase. But though he refuses to go any further into the arguments, he is still very careful to base his refusal on the logic of his system. He does not simply dismiss the questioner; he directs him to the path of reason. When the man brings up the problem of the arche, Marx admonishes: “Ask yourself whether that progression exists as such for rational thought.” Let this person become reasonable; then he will stop his questioning. For Marx, however, reason is not the reason of man but, in the perversion of symbols, the standpoint of his system. His questioner is supposed to cease to be man: he is to become socialist man.
Marx thus posits that his construct of the process of being (which comprises the historical process) represents reality. He takes the historical evolution of man into socialist man—which is part of his conceptual construct—and
inserts it into his encounters with others; he calls upon the man who questions the assumptions of his system to enter into the system and undergo the evolution it prescribes. In the clash between system and reality, reality must give way. The intellectual swindle is justified by referring to the demands of the historical future, which the gnostic thinker has speculatively projected in his system.
The position of the gnostic thinker derives its authority from the power of being. He is the herald of being, which he interprets as approaching us from the future. This interpretation of being is no doubt active in the speculation of Marx and Nietzsche, but it is not yet worked out in all its consequences.
It remained for that ingenious gnostic of our own time, Martin Heidegger, to think the problem through, under the heading of “fundamental ontology.”
The following examples of speculation on being are taken from his Einführung in die Metaphysik.
In Heidegger’s speculation being is interpreted on the basis of the original Greek meaning of parousia as presence (An-wesen). Being is not to be understood statically, as substance, but actively, as presence, in the sense of a coming into presence, as an emerging or appearing—somewhat in the way a ruler makes an appearance or is present. The essence of being as actio is a dominating power wherein being creates for itself a world; and it creates this world through man. Man is to be understood historically as an existence that can either open or shut itself to the domination of being. In the historical process, therefore, there can be times of falling away from
essential being into the nonessential, whence human existence can find its way back only by opening itself again to the parousia of being. Applying these possibilities to contemporary history, Heidegger decides—as did
Marx and Nietzsche in their cruder fashion—that today we in the Western world live in a period of nonessential existence. Hence, the future of the West depends on our opening ourselves again to the essential power of being. Heavy with fate fall the formulas: “This means leading man’s historical existence (Dasein) . . . in the totality of the history alloted us, back to the power of being which originally was to have been opened up”; or: That which is referred to by the word “being” holds “the spiritual fate of the West.”
Heidegger’s speculation occupies a significant place in the history of Western gnosticism. The construct of the closed process of being; the shutting off of immanent from world-transcendent being; the refusal to acknowledge the experiences of philia, eros, pistis (faith), and elpis (hope)—which were described and named by the Hellenic philosophers—as the ontic events wherein the soul participates in transcendent being and allows itself to be ordered by it; the refusal, thus, to acknowledge them as the events in which philosophy, especially Platonic philosophy, has its origin; and finally, the refusal to permit the very idea of a construct of a closed process of being to be called into question in the light of these events—all of this was, in varying degrees of clarity, doubtless to be found in the speculative gnostics of the nineteenth century. But Heidegger has reduced this complex to its essential structure and purged it of period-bound visions of the future. Gone are the ludicrous images of positivist, socialist, and super man. In their place Heidegger puts being itself, emptied of all content, to whose approaching power we must submit. As a result of this refining process, the nature of gnostic speculation can now be understood as the symbolic expression of an anticipation of salvation in which the power of being replaces the power of God and the parousia of being, the Parousia of Christ.

Science, Politics and Gnosticism

Voegelin, Eric wrote:

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This completes the analysis. There remains only the task of defining the results conceptually and terminologically.
For this purpose we shall take over from Heidegger’s interpretation of being the term “parousia,” and speak of parousiasm as the mentality that expects deliverance from the evils of the time through the advent, the coming in all its fullness, of being construed as immanent. We can then speak of the men who express their parousiasm in speculative systems as parousiastic thinkers, of their structures of thought as parousiastic speculations, of the movements connected with some of these thinkers as parousiastic mass movements, and of the age in which these movements are socially and politically dominant as the age of parousiasm. We thus acquire a concept and a terminology for designating a phase of Western gnosticism that have hitherto been lacking. Moreover, by conceiving of it as parousiastic we can distinguish this phase more adequately than heretofore from the preceding chiliastic phase of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when the gnostic movements expressed themselves in terms of the Judaeo-Christian apocalypse. The long history of post-classical Western gnosticism thus appears in its continuity as the history of Western sectarianism.
In the Middle Ages this movement could still be kept below the threshold of revolution. Today it has become, not, to be sure, the power of being, but world power. To break the spell of this world and its power—each of us in
himself—is the great task at which we all must work. Political science can assist in exorcising the demons—in the modest measure of effectiveness that our society grants to episteme and its therapy.

Science, Politics and Gnosticism

Voegelin, Eric wrote:

THE MURDER OF GOD

OUR ANALYSIS OF parousiastic doxa began with the Marxian texts that have to do with the prohibition of questions. The examination was based on
these passages because in them the motives, symbols, and patterns of thought of the gnostic mass movements of our time can be seen in rare concentration. It would be difficult to find another document of modern gnosticism that in power and clarity of expression, in intellectual vigor and ingenious determination, would compare with the manuscript of the young Marx. Nevertheless, the selection has a disadvantage in that one of the most powerful motives of the speculation does not stand out with a distinctness in keeping with its actual importance. This is the motive of the murder of God.
The aim of parousiastic gnosticism is to destroy the order of being, which is experienced as defective and unjust, and through man’s creative power to replace it with a perfect and just order. Now, however the order of being may be understood—as a world dominated by cosmic-divine powers in the civilizations of the Near and Far East, or as the creation of a worldtranscendent God in Judaeo-Christian symbolism, or as an essential order of being in philosophical contemplation—it remains something that is given, that is not under man’s control. In order, therefore, that the attempt to create a new world may seem to make sense, the givenness of the order of being must be obliterated; the order of being must be interpreted, rather, as essentially under man’s control. And taking control of being further requires that the transcendent origin of being be obliterated: it requires the decapitation of being—the murder of God.
The murder of God is committed speculatively by explaining divine being as the work of man. Let us consider what Nietzsche’s Zarathustra has to say on this point: “Alas, my brothers, that God whom I created was
human work and human madness, like all gods.” Man should stop creating gods because this sets absurd limits to his will and action; and he should realize that the gods he has already created have in fact been created by him. “Let will to truth mean this to you: that everything be changed into the humanly conceivable, the humanly visible, the humanly sensible.” This demand also extends to the world, which of old was understood to have been created by God: “What you called ‘the world’ shall be created only by you: it shall be your reason, your image, your will, your love.” “God is a conjecture”—but man’s conjectures should not go beyond his creative will, and they should be limited “to the conceivable.” There may be no being or image of being that might make human will and thought appear finite: “Neither into the incomprehensible could you have been born, nor into the irrational.” In order to appear the unlimited master of being, man must so delimit being that limitations are no longer evident. And why must this magic act be performed? The answer is: “If there were gods, how could I endure not being a god! Therefore, there are no gods.”
It does not suffice, therefore, to replace the old world of God with a new world of man: the world of God itself must have been a world of man, and God a work of man which can therefore be destroyed if it prevents man
from reigning over the order of being. The murder of God must be made retroactive speculatively. This is the reason man’s “being-of-himself ” (Durchsichselbstsein) is the principal point in Marx’s gnosis. And he gets his speculative support from the explanation of nature and history as a process in which man creates himself to his full stature. The murder of God, then, is of the very essence of the gnostic re-creation of the order of being.
Like the Promethean hatred of the gods, the murder of God is a general possibility in human response to God. It is not confined to parousiastic speculation. In order to clarify the phenomenon we shall first describe it in
the relatively simple form in which it appears in the golem legends of the Cabbala of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. The legends have been made available by Gerschom Scholem in his article “Die Vorstellung vom Golem in ihren tellurischen und magischen Beziehungen.”
The late twelfth-century commentary of Pseudo-Saadia on the book Yezirah includes the golem legend in the following form:

Thus is it said in the Midrash, that Jeremiah and Ben Sira made a man
by means of the book Yezirah; and on his brow was the word emeth,
the name that He had uttered over the creature that was the perfection
of all his work. But that man erased the aleph so as to say that God
alone is truth and he had to die.

The Hebrew word emeth means “truth.” If the first of its three consonants is crossed out (in Hebrew the initial sound of the word emeth is represented by a consonant), meth is left. Meth means “dead.” The adepts made the man “by means of the book Yezirah”—that is, by means of a magic operation with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. This is essentially the same kind of operation as Marx’s creation of “socialist man” by means of gnostic speculation. The golem legend now sheds additional light on its nature. In view of the reality of the order of being in which we live, Marx’s prohibition of questions had to be characterized as an attempt to protect the “intellectual swindle” of his speculation from exposure by reason; but from the standpoint of the adept Marx the swindle was the “truth” that he had created through his speculation, and the prohibition of questions was designed to defend the truth of the system against the unreason of men. The curious tension between first and second reality, first and second truth, on the pneumopathological nature of which we have remarked, is now revealed to be the tension between the order of God and magic. But this tension, which results from magic’s will to power, can be eliminated. For what does the golem do, bearing, like Adam, the man whom God created, the seal of truth on its forehead? It erases the letter aleph in order to warn the adepts that the truth is God’s; the second truth is death: the golem dies.
The implications of the tension, as well as the means of its resolution, are set forth in greater detail in another version of the golem legend, which is to be found in an early thirteenth-century Cabbalistic text attributed to Juda
ben Bathyra. The first part of the legend reads as follows:

The prophet Jeremiah was alone, working with the book Yezirah.
There came a voice from heaven saying, “Obtain for yourself a
companion.” He went to his son Sira, and they studied the book for
three years. Then they set to work on the alphabets, according to the
Cabbalistic principles of combination, compilation, and word
formation; and there was created unto them a man on whose brow
were the words: YHWH Elohim Emeth. But there was a knife in the
hand of that newly created man with which he scratched out the aleph
from emeth; this left meth. Thereupon, Jeremiah rent his garments and
said: “Why do you scratch out the aleph from emeth?”

Important aspects of magic creation that were only implied in the first legend are now clarified. The second golem carries on its forehead the seal “God is truth.” With the effacing of the letter aleph it becomes the proclamation “God is dead.” After this deed, however, the second golem does not die as did its predecessor. It remains standing there, the knife it used for the murder in its hand. It goes on living and bears the new seal on
its brow.
Jeremiah rends his clothing—in the ritual gesture of horror before an act of blasphemy. He asks his creature the meaning of its action, and receives this answer:

I will tell you a parable. There was an architect who built many
houses, towns, and squares. But no one could imitate his art and match
his knowledge and skill, until two persons prevailed upon him. He then
taught them the secret of his art, and they now knew all the proper
techniques. When they had acquired his secret and his abilities, they
began to badger him until they broke with him and became architects
like him; only, things for which he took a thaler they made for six
groschen. When people noticed this, they ceased to honor the artist,
but honored them instead and gave them the commission when they
needed a building. Similarly, God has created you in his image,
likeness, and form. But now that you have created a man as He did, it
will be said, There is no God in the world other than these two!

Gerschom Scholem interprets the legend to mean that a successful creation of a golem would be the prelude to the “death of God”; the hubris of the creator would turn against God. The adept Jeremiah is of the same opinion, and he therefore asks the golem for the way out of this dreadful situation. He then receives from it the formula for the destruction of the magic creature, uses it, “and before their eyes that man became dust and ashes.” Jeremiah asks the relevant question; and when he gets an answer that should induce him to destroy his work, he does not suppress the question, but goes ahead and destroys his work. The legend concludes with Jeremiah saying:

Truly, these things should only be studied in order to recognize the
might and omnipotence of the creator of this world and not with the
intention of bringing them to pass.

The murder of God in parousiastic gnosticism is a well known and thoroughly explored phenomenon. But many things generally understood under the headings “dialectics of consciousness,” “point of view of immanence,” “will to pure immanence,” and the like sound different with the golem legend in mind. Again, within the scope of this essay, only an illustrative analysis can be attempted. Nietzsche’s famous aphorism 125 from Die fröhliche Wissenschaft can serve as doxic material. It bears the title “The Madman.” Nietzsche carefully constructed the aphorism to set forth the spiritual action that constitutes the murder of God. We shall go through the various phases of this movement of the spirit.
In the bright morning the madman runs out into the marketplace with a lantern crying, “I seek God! I seek God!” Nietzsche thus begins by changing Diogenes’ symbolism: the philosopher in search of man has become the madman in search of God. The meaning of the change is not immediately clear. The philosophical seeker might well find men in the marketplace; but is that the place to look for God? If we assume that Nietzsche has made an intelligible construct, then we are forced to ask whether the madman is really seeking God; and we thus anticipate the underlying significance of the change in the symbol, which becomes apparent as the aphorism progresses.
The seeker finds in the marketplace just what one would expect to find in a marketplace—men. But these men are of a special breed: “They do not believe in God.” They greet his search with laughter and ridicule: “Did he get lost?” they ask; “or is he in hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he taken a ship? emigrated?”
The madman exclaims to the unbelievers:

Whither has he gone? I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I!
We are all his murderers.
And how was such a deed possible?
How were we able to drink up the sea? . . . What did we do when we
unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither
are we moving? Away from all suns? . . . Are we not wandering as
through an infinite nothingness?

But the deed is done. The murder of God cannot be undone:

God is dead! God will stay dead!

With this outcry the aphorism moves beyond the golem legend. The murder of God is seen for what it is, but the murderer stands by his action.
The new creature who committed the murder does not recognize his own death in what happened. The golem lives. “The holiest and mightiest thing the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives.” The golem stands there, the knife in his hand, ready for other feats.
And what is he seeking with his knife? The God who has already bled to death? No, he seeks “consolation”:

How are we to find consolation, we, the murderers of all murderers? . .
. With what water could we cleanse ourselves? . . . Is not the greatness
of this deed too great for us?

Nietzsche’s questioning recalls the situation in the golem legend, but the golem’s instructions to undo the magic murder of God have already been rejected. The madman does not go backward, but forward: if the deed is too great for man, then man must rise up above himself to the greatness of the deed:

Must we not ourselves become gods just to seem worthy of it? There
has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us will,
because of this act, belong to a higher history than all previous history!

Who murders God will himself become God—the warning of the parable in the second golem legend.
The parable is a warning (and is so understood by the adepts in the legend) because man cannot become God. If he tries, in the process of selfidolization he will become a demon willfully shutting himself off from God.
But Nietzsche wishes to continue on just this path. When the madman finishes his speech, his listeners, the unbelievers, are silent and look at him strangely. Then he throws his lantern on the ground and says:

I have come too soon; my time has not yet come. This stupendous
event is still wandering on its way.... Deeds need time—even after they
have been done—to be seen and heard. This deed is still farther from
them than the remotest stars—and yet they have done it themselves!

The underlying significance of the Diogenes symbolism is now clear. The new Diogenes does seek God, but not the God who is dead: he seeks the new god in the men who have murdered the old one—he seeks the superman. The madman is therefore looking for man, but not the man of the philosopher: he is looking for the being that springs from the magic of the murder of God. It is necessary to elucidate this symbolism, for, in the conscientious efforts in behalf of Nietzsche’s “philosophical” intentions, it is all too often forgotten that the interpreter of a magic opus need not, to put it bluntly, be taken in by the magic. It is not enough to examine the symbol of the superman on the basis of the texts and determine the meaning Nietzsche intended; for the symbol occurs in a context of magic. What really takes place in the order of being when this magic is practiced must also be determined. The nature of a thing cannot be changed; whoever tries to “alter” its nature destroys the thing. Man cannot transform himself into a superman; the attempt to create a superman is an attempt to murder man.
Historically, the murder of God is not followed by the superman, but by the murder of man: the deicide of the gnostic theoreticians is followed by the homicide of the revolutionary practitioners.
The transition to revolutionary practice is evidenced in the propositions with which Marx opens his Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie (1843). The argument is set down so clearly that it scarcely requires
commentary.
As in Nietzsche, the magic opus presupposes the murder of God: “The critique of religion is the pre-supposition of all critique.” God was never anything but a human product. The critique of religion yields this revelation and thereby restores man to the fullness of his nature:

The foundation of irreligious critique is this: Man makes religion ;
religion does not make man. Indeed, religion is man’s selfconsciousness
and self-awareness insofar as he has either not yet found
himself or has lost himself again.

Once this relationship has been grasped, the reality of man will manifest
itself again:

Man, who sought a superman in the imaginary reality of heaven and
found only a reflection of himself, will no longer be inclined to find
just a semblance of himself, just a non-man, where he seeks and must
seek his true reality.

Marx is a great deal closer to Nietzsche in these remarks than the use of the symbol “superman” for God might at first reading lead one to suppose.
For God, of course, does not exist. “God” is, as in Feuerbach’s psychology of religion, the projection of the best in man into a supernatural world. But though the projection in the supernatural is illusionary, this does not mean that the content of the projection is also an illusion. The best in man is real; it must—and here Marx goes beyond the psychology of projection, which exposes religion as an illusion—be drawn back into man. The Marxian
homo novus is not a man without religious illusions, but one who has taken God back into his being. The “non-man,” who has illusions, becomes fully human by absorbing the “superman.” In reality, therefore, the new man is,
like Nietzsche’s superman, the man who has made himself God.
When through the critique of religion man has taken God back into himself and has thereby come into full possession of his powers, the critique of politics begins:

The summons to abandon illusions about his condition is a summons to
abandon a condition that requires illusions. The critique of religion is
therefore in embryo the critique of the vale of tears of which religion is
the halo.

The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly a struggle against that world of which religion is the spiritual aroma.

Real man “is the world of man—the state, society.” Only when this world
is perverted does it produce the perverted world consciousness of religion:
Religion is the groan of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless
world, the spirit of a spiritless condition. It is the opium of the
people.

It is therefore the task of history,

. . . once the world beyond truth has disappeared, to establish the truth
of this world.
Thus, the critique of heaven is transformed into the critique of earth;
the critique of religion, into the critique of law; the critique of
theology, into the critique of politics.

The transformed critique is no longer theory, but practice:

Its subject is its enemy, which it seeks not to refute, but to annihilate . .
. . It no longer acts as an end in itself, but only as a means. Its essential
emotion is indignation; its essential task is denunciation .

Here speaks the will to murder of the gnostic magician. The bonds of reality have been broken. One’s fellowman is no longer a partner in being; critique is no longer rational debate. Sentence has been passed; the
execution follows.
Marx’s critical proclamations refer back to Hegel. Let us turn again to the Phänomenologie, that magnum opus of the murder of God.
We can only offer some reflections on it. A thorough consideration and analysis is impossible in the present context, for it is a rigorously constructed system of more than five hundred pages. The first sentence
states the subject of speculation and its limits:

The knowledge that is first or immediately our object can be nothing
else but that which is itself immediate knowledge—knowledge of the
immediate or existent.

The restriction of the order of being is made even more explicit:

I, this particular person, am certain of this thing, not because I have
developed as consciousness herewith and in various ways prompted
thought; nor because the thing of which I am certain was, because of a
number of distinct qualities, a complex of relations within itself or a
manifold of relations with other things. Neither has anything to do
with the truth of sensible certitude.

The nature of the order of being as it is given, together with man’s place in it, is obliterated: the being of world and ego is restricted to the knowledge of the immediate or existent; questions about the context of the order of being in which this knowledge occurs are declared irrelevant; the prohibition of questions is solemnly made a principle of the speculation.
From this beginning the substance of the order of being—which, for the philosopher, is something given—is systematically construed as a succession of phases of consciousness which proceed in dialectical development from the initial consciousness of sensible certitude. In its language the Phänomenologie is philosophical; in its substance and intention it is radically anti-philosophical. It must be recognized as a work of magic—indeed, it is one of the great magic performances.
Nothing can be plucked out of this masterpiece of rigorous magical speculation without destroying the meaning of the whole. Therefore, we can only advert to a few passages where the theme of the murder of God—the object of the whole enterprise—appears. The most prominent text takes up
the death of Christ:

The death of the Mediator is not just the death of his natural aspect . . .
; what dies is not merely the dead husk that has been stripped from the
essence, but the abstraction of divine being as well.... The death of this
mental image (Vorstellung), therefore, comprises at the same time the
death of the abstraction of divine being, which is not established as
self. This death is the unhappy consciousness’ painful feeling that God
himself has died.

What seems here to be a simple statement—the mere observation of a fact—is actually something more. For God has died because he was no more than a phase of consciousness that is now outmoded. And it is outmoded because consciousness in its dialectical progress has gone beyond it. The death of God is not an event, but the feat of a dialectician. The “harsh utterance” that God has died marks

. . . the return of consciousness to the depth of the night where the ego= ego, where the night no longer distinguishes or knows anything outside of itself.... This knowledge is thus the spiritualization whereby substance, its abstraction and lifelessness having died, has become subject, whereby it has therefore actually become simple and universal self-consciousness.

What at the stage of “religion” was still a mental image of an other has here become the inherent “action of the self.” This last form of the spirit is absolute knowledge. To be sure, religion expresses what spirit is earlier in
time than does science; “but science alone is the spirit’s true knowledge of itself.” When the spirit appears to consciousness in the medium of the concept, or rather is generated by consciousness in this medium, it has
become “science.” The spirit as knowing what it is does not exist until it has completed the task.

. . . of providing for its consciousness the form of its essence and in
this manner of putting its self-consciousness on a level with its
consciousness.

Or, to put it all more simply and directly, the spirit as system requires the murder of God; and, conversely, in order to commit the murder of God the system is fashioned.
The Phänomenologie ends with a meditation on history as the spirit attaining its self-consciousness in time:

This process of becoming presents a slow movement and succession of spirits, a gallery of images, each endowed with the entire wealth of the spirit and moving so slowly just because the self must penetrate and
digest all this wealth of its substance.

A realm of spirits unfolds in the temporal existence of history, in which each spirit takes over the realm of the world from the preceding one, until, in the final phase of self-consciousness, the completely unfolded history has
become “internalizing recollection” (Er-Innerung). The goal—absolute knowledge—is attained through

. . . the recollection of the spirits as they are in themselves and as they
accomplish the organization of their realm.

The preservation of this succession of spirits according to the temporality of their existence is history; their preservation as a comprehended organization is the science of emergent knowledge. Both together, as history
comprehended,

. . . form the recollection and the golgotha of the absolute spirit, the
actuality, truth, and certainty of its throne, without which it would be a
lifeless, solitary thing; only—
from the chalice of this realm of spirits
its infinity foams out to it.

When we were analyzing Nietzsche’s aphorism we had occasion to remark that the interpreter of a magic opus need not himself be taken in by the magic. Let us therefore step out of the magic circle of the opus back
onto the solid ground of reality. Let us consider what is taking place in the order of being as Hegel concludes his work at the golgotha of the spirit. If we attempt to summarize his summary for this purpose, we shall have to
say: On the grave of the murdered God the golem is celebrating a ghastlyritual—a kind of triumphal dance accompanied with chant. The goal has been attained. The “revelation of the depth” has been successfully carried
out. But the depth is nothing but the “absolute concept,” and “this revelation” is therefore the “cancellation” (Aufheben) of the depth. And there is no other revelation. Then sounds the chant:
from the chalice of this realm of spirits its infinity foams out to it.

These last two lines of the work, which are printed as if they were poetry,
alter the conclusion of Schiller’s poem “Friendship”:
Though the Supreme Being found no equal,
From the chalice of the whole realm of souls
There foams to him—infinity.

This is the closing act of the gnostic destruction of reality. For the fate of the order of being when gnostic magicians lay hands on it Hegel has found a fitting symbol: the mutilation of a poem.

Science, Politics and Gnosticism

Voegelin, Eric wrote:

The death of the spirit is the price of progress. Nietzsche revealed this mystery of the Western apocalypse when he announced that God was dead and that He had been murdered. This Gnostic murder is constantly committed by the men who sacrificed God to civilization. The more fervently all human energies are thrown into the great enterprise of salvation through world–immanent action, the farther the human beings who engage in this enterprise move away from the life of the spirit. And since the life the spirit is the source of order in man and society, the very success of a Gnostic civilization is the cause of its decline.
A civilization can, indeed, advance and decline at the same time—but not forever. There is a limit toward which this ambiguous process moves; the limit is reached when an activist sect which represents the Gnostic truth organizes the civilization into an empire under its rule. Totalitarianism, defined as the existential rule of Gnostic activists, is the end form of progressive civilization.

Voegelin, Eric wrote:

Philosophy springs from the love of being; it is man's loving endeavor to perceive the order of being and attune himself to it. Gnosis desires dominion over being; in order to seize control of being the Gnostic constructs his system. The building of systems is a gnostic form of reasoning, not a philosophical one.

Voeglin, Eric wrote:

Gnostic politics is self-defeating in so far as its disregard for the structure of reality leads to continuous warfare.

Voeglin, Eric wrote:

This system of chain wars can end only in two ways: either it will result in horrible physical destructions and concomitant revolutionary changes of social order beyond reasonable guesses; or, with the natural change of generations, it will lead to the abandoning of Gnostic dreaming before the worst has happened.

Voeglin, Eric wrote:

The constancies and equivalences adumbrated work havoc with such settled topical blocks as myth and philosophy, natural reason and revelation, philosophy and religion, or the Orient with its cyclical time and Christianity with its linear history. And what is modem about the modem mind, one may ask, if Hegel, Comte, or Marx, in order to create an image of history that will support their ideological imperialism, still use the same techniques for distorting the reality of history as their Sumerian predecessors?

Voeglin, Eric wrote:

The nature of a thing cannot be changed; whoever tries to “alter” its nature destroys the thing. Man cannot transform himself into a superman; the attempt to create a superman is an attempt to murder man. Historically, the murder of God is not followed by the superman, but by the murder of man: the deicide of the gnostic theoreticians is followed by the homicide of the revolutionary practitioners.

Voeglin, Eric wrote:

The factor Hegel excludes is the mystery of a history that wends its way into the future without our knowing its end. History as a whole is essentially not an object of cognition; the meaning of the whole is not discernible.

Satyr wrote:

_______________

The Left has always been Messianic.
Secular Abrahamism.
Liberation from the tangible, physical, material world corresponds with Abrahamic salvation myths.

The Left insists that the entire world adopt its world-view because it cannot compete in a world where one refuses it....
Like Communism could not survive in a world where one state of capitalism existed; anarchism cannot survive in a world where one form of collectivism persists.
It can only survive in an ideal world, under ideal circumstances.

Once you see it, you can not unsee it. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

— Commander Phil Labonte (@philthatremains) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Woke is a Gnostic cult religion. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

— James Lindsay, anti-Fascist (@ConceptualJames) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]