Civil theology in the Gnostic age: progress and regress

ONE OF ERIC VOEGELIN's most trenchant apercus is his observation that Gnosticism, which he considered modernity's core, is fundamentally a flight from the universally human "horror of existence," (1) by which he meant, I believe, the horror not of existence itself but of life's seemingly precarious suspension over the void of non-existence. Our terror of the summum malum of annihilation is only partially assuaged in the Western tradition by Christianity's teaching that the world is securely grounded in an eternal, absolutely good, unchanging divine will, for Christianity, which demands faith and bestows no certainty, also teaches that we have a natural inclination to choose nothingness while deluding ourselves that we possess the greatest good. The ironic result of our predicament between uncertain share in reality and certain possession of unreality in a world "dedivinized" by Christianity is, as Voegelin saw, that the theories which modern Western societies have devised to eliminate conscious existential horror have instead intensified it in the depths of the soul.

This is the point of David Hart's observation that modernity believes in nothing, that is, the alternatives are Christianity or nothing, and the modern faith has evolved through a rejection of Christianity into the Epicurean conviction of the reality of nothingness, the absence of truth, a cosmic void, a belief formulated as the greatest good because on this emptiness we are free to project our own personal preferences regarding values and meaning. Because such a "faith" makes no demands and seems to eliminate any risk of being wrong, modernity's religion is, he says, "one of very comfortable nihilism," (2) comfortable because it is designed according to our own wishes so that anything that we want to be true can be "true for us." Nevertheless, it is also very uncomfortable because the nature of meaning, which requires searching and submission, is vitiated by our attempts to create it in conformity with our own personal inclinations, however superficially consoling that may seem. Contrary to modernity's claim that power over reality is a great good, it is, as the soul profoundly knows, the ultimate horror, for in a cosmos we can master and possess we are groundless.

Indeed, in the past few centuries Western civilization has wrestled with the profound paradox that our relentless efforts to convince ourselves that we can secure our human grip on existence and increase the existential density of earthly life through scientific and technological achievements, a constantly rising standard of living, and endeavors to attain the democratic ideal of optimizing both freedom and social order have, ironically, steadily eroded the spiritual substance of truth. Voegelin put this rather pithily in The New Science of Politics when he observed that "the question how a civilization can advance and decline at the same time" is "one of the thorniest ... to plague the student of Western politics," for the West's material advances have been accompanied and perhaps even made possible by a forgetfulness of the essential rootedness of meaning in spiritual truth. Voegelin tersely concluded that "the death of the spirit is the price of progress" and "the very success of a Gnostic civilization is the cause of its decline," (3) stark formulations of the structure of the psyche in-between the transcendence-oriented amor Dei and its antithesis, the egoistic amor sui, that defines goodness primarily in terms of what we can control within the bounds of an inherently meaningless material universe.

It was Voegelin's contention that into the vacuum of earthly meaning created by the Christian dedivinization of the world and its denial that human nature could find fulfillment through material desires irrupted various forms of Gnosticism, a somewhat deformed version of Christianity that seeks immanent salvation through human action in a redivinized world in which humanity is the locus of the divine. Modern Gnostic ideologies are, in general, progressivist but nihilist world views because they promise movement toward an immanent Pleroma which can be attained only by pretending to satisfy the soul's innate hunger for immortality and transcendence with an endless stream of ephemeral gratifications. When he spoke of advance and decline Voegelin was certainly thinking of the unmistakable contrast between the progress of science and technology and the waning of the sense of transcendence, where advancement or improvement in the material realm is clearly distinguishable from the decline of spiritual orientation, but his analysis of the Gnostic characteristics of modernity also implies that what the worldly consciousness perceives as moral or cultural progress can actually be spiritual regress because the ego narcissistically misconstrues the ontological significance of constructing a cosmos according to its own inclinations.