But the sword of gnosis is double edged. We need to take into account another perspective on the term, that of Eric Voegelin's 1952 work, The New Science of Politics. 9 Voegelin, a political philosopher seeking to discover the root causes of the ills of the twentieth century, pointed his finger at troublemakers he labeled
"gnostics." They were those who strove to rise above nature and find salvation through hidden knowledge of the political and psychological laws by which history secretly works. Modern examples of the gnostic were Comte, Nietzsche, Sorel, and of course the Nazis and the Communists, with their ideological credence that through understanding the "secret" laws of history and nature—those of, say, the metaphysical meaning of race or "dialectical materialism"—human nature could be radically changed and perfected. According to Voegelin, Gnosticism led to World War II and Russian armies in the middle of Europe, all because gnostic thinkers and leaders refused to see moral barbarism when it was there, preferring instead their dreams of how the world should be. Political gnosticism substitutes dreams for reason because it disregards the facts of the world that actually exists. The gnostic elite, no doubt fired by ideological myths, fantasizes that by human effort based on suprarational knowledge of the ultimate goal, their kind can create a society that will come into being but have no end, an earthly paradise equal to God's. 10 On the other side are those who recognize sin and the limitations of human nature, and for that reason are on the side of freedom, limited government, and a society unburdened by an imposed totalistic ideology. They believe, we are assured, in some kinds of "progress" but not in human perfectibility.
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Voegelin went so far as to define all modernity as gnosticism, a term which encompassed such diverse phenomena as progressivism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, fascism, and National Socialism. 11 Later he clarified the position to the extent of revealing that modern persons who hold to "the Gnostic attitude" share six characteristics: dissatisfaction with the world; belief that the ills of the world stem from the way it is organized; surety that amelioration is possible; belief that improvement must evolve historically; belief that humans can change the world; conviction that knowledge—gnosis—is the key to change. 12 In his most memorable statement, Voegelin, who had himself lived under the Third Reich before going into exile and knew Europe's ideological wars at close range, put it well enough when he alluded to "the massacres of the later humanitarians whose hearts are filled with compassion to the point that they are willing to slaughter onehalf of mankind in order to make the other half happy." 13
Were the mythologists gnostic in Voegelin's negative sense of the word? Some of the same attitudes, even some of the same people (Nietzsche), appear in both his catalog of modernist gnostics and in our account of antimodern gnosticism. In both cases one finds the theme of secret knowledge of how the universe really works that is accessible only to an elite, and the idea that by the power of this knowledge one can reverse, or at least stand outside of, the stream of history. The basic problem with Voegelin, of course, is that he applies the term gnostic to speculative nostrums that were essentially political, whereas ancient Gnosticism, together with gnosticism as revived in the modern era by antimodern poets and mythologists, was apolitical if not antipolitical, scorning any thisworldly salvation.
In a real sense, Voegelin is not at odds with the mythologists, for what he calls gnosticism is what they might have called, in Jungian language, "ideological inflation."
Both regarded the ills of modernity as fundamentally spiritual diseases. As Robert Segal has pointed out, Voegelin recognized that what defined modernity is confidence in its ability to master the world. The modern "gnostics" of Voegelin's demonology, from Sorel to Lenin and Hitler, shared that confidence even as they rejected ordinary nonspiritual, nonideological modernity's means of saving itself—science, technology, industry, and democracy. Like the poetic and mythological gnostics, they knew that modernity could not be saved on its own terms. They contended that the social cost of those means was too high; they had seen the ravages of bourgeois capitalism
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and the anomie behind modern urbanization and "democracy." 14 As technological antimodernists and totalitarian futurists, they wanted to combine the best of what modern science and secular thought had to offer with some form of a secret, gnostic, "spiritual" wisdom and power, whether of Marx or Mussolini.
For Voegelin held, that at base, modernity's confidence did not rest in science and technology so much as in a gnostic belief that supreme power lay in knowledge of the true nature of the world. That knowledge, ultramoderns assumed, could now be within the grasp of at least a modern elite. Physical science gave modernity part of that ruling knowledge, of course. But the human engineering aspect of managing history called for another science and other means of knowing. To the true gnostic, ancient or modern, the ultimate knowledge which is power is not about elemental forces but is intrapsychic; it is knowledge of the true nature of humans and so of right politics and social organization. But these studies were also becoming "sciences" in modern times.
Assuming that the idea that humans can irreversibly change the world for the better is essentially modern, the social ideology of the political antimoderns is paradoxically very modern at the same time, for the fascist and the communist takes to the ultimate degree the notion that by secret knowledge— political and historical gnosis—they could transcend history and make a new and irreversible paradisal world. They had a true believer's confidence in their ability to know the world secret, whether enshrined in Marxism or myth. As Stephan A. McKnight has put it, for Voegelin the key gnostic belief is that the gnostic has direct knowledge of ultimate human nature, and so knows how to overcome alienation. Therefore thought such as that of Comte or Marx is no more than political gnosticism, and modernity is not truly secular but a new form of religion, with its appropriate myths and rituals. 15
A comparable situation can be seen in Japan, where the Marxist infatuation of many intellectuals came rather abruptly to an end with the triumph of militaristic nationalism in the 1930s. A congruent romantic literary cult emerged emphasizing classical Japan, the aesthetics of death, and the denial of modernity; it was clearly aligned to the neoShinto that envisioned a primordial Japanese paradise of simple living and heroic virtues, practiced close to the kami or gods, and now accessible primarily through myth and ritual. 16
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It is clear that these romantic dreams were not so much archaic as a way of both protesting modernism and preparing a nation spiritually for success in the thoroughly modern contemporary world of political and military power. The secret of such success, Japanese at the time felt as well as Europeans and others, lay in the gnosis of a past accessible through myth and an antimodern mood capable of generating power for modern triumphs. The mythologists obviously were in the same camp so far as the value of myth was concerned; the question is, how concerned were they with its political, in contrast to its personal, application?
The political world of the Roman Empire in which the ancient gnostics lived was rarely named in their writings; it was clearly and utterly part of the realm of fallen power and matter from which they sought escape. To them gnosticism was the opposite of a thisworldly ideology. It was a way out of the world of society, politics, and power into higher realms of being. Or, in the translation of modern mythological gnostics, it was a way to uncover realms within the psyche that can never be touched by the powers of the outer, political world.