The gnosticism of the mythologists, of Jung, Eliade, and Campbell, then, turns Voegelin on his head; what Voegelin means by gnosticism is what mythological gnosticism, closer to the ancient meaning of the term, seeks to save people from. It saves them from entrapment in the false hopes of worldly political fantasies. It instead unfolds compensatory fantasies, or intrapsychic realities, which show the self that its true recovery of wholeness lies within. If the mythologists' neognosticism had lasting political ramifications, they lay in the way that any ostensibly nonpolitical psychotherapy by default supports the existing order. Or, at best, it sustained spiritually the efforts of those prepared to make changes on the grubby level of everyday, nonideological politics by helping them get their lives clarified, and so do their useful work better.
The three mythologists under study, C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell, were no doubt modern gnostics all the way through, and they were not unacquainted with both political and intrapsychic gnosticism. But my sense is that in the end, and only after some unfortunate dallying, they came down to an intrapsychic, not a political, gnosticism. They were certainly tempted at times by some version of the political gnostic myth in Voegelin's sense, usually in its fascist form. But they came through bitter experience to agree implicitly with the
Page 16
ancient gnostics that gnostic wisdom was intended for the soul rather than the state, and they did not present any fullblown mythical models that could be enacted on the political stage. Their political philosophy was finally that the state and society can do no more than safeguard the practice of intrapsychic gnosticism, and they wished of them only that they and their sort of people remain free to read and teach mythology, practice mythologybased therapies, and act out their personal myths in their private lives.
But to understand why they dallied and may have come close to presenting political models based on myth and gnosis, it is necessary to look at their social context and intellectual heritage.
Antimodernism
Why mythological gnosticism? And why did political gnosticism become inner gnosticism? We must look again at the social and intellectual world of the mythologists.
Despite war and worldwide depression, in the first half of the twentieth century the prevailing wisdom was that the future would be better, perhaps almost unimaginably better, than anything humanity had so far known. Somehow, after the wars and depressions, after the problems had been solved, a shining new world like that adumbrated by the 1939 World's Fair in New York would appear: a world of democracy, of everexpanding scientific knowledge, of humming factories and universal prosperity, perhaps even space flights to other worlds. This was the vision, in caricature, of what has been called ''modernism."
There was, of course, another side. This was the modernism of mindnumbing assemblyline jobs cursing the lives of people uprooted from familiar fields and villages.
Now faceless in their bleak smokestack environments, these "masses" were less paragons of democracy than "atomized" individuals without extended family or significant place, prey to any demagogue who came along. Conservative observers bemoaned the loss of local cohesion found in common myths and sacralities, the loss of social hierarchy, the loss of moral and traditional values amid the modern wastelands.
What then did modern mean? Here it will suffice to present some qualities of modernism particularly useful for understanding the mythologists; these can be summed up in the two "metanarratives" JeanFrançois Lyotard has offered as the essence of modernism: the
Page 17
metanarrative of the emancipation of humanity by progress and the metanarrative of the unity of knowledge. 17 The first means, briefly, that cadres of educated elites since the effective beginning of modernism in the Enlightenment have believed that history controlled by persons like themselves was capable of freeing humanity from all its shackles through more and better knowledge and its application. The second metanarrative tells us that this knowledge which emancipates is found through the generalized, abstract, rational ways of thinking characteristic of science and social science. Under this rubric the particular is subordinated to the abstract category; the old is generally inferior to the new; the local submits to the universal.
The mythologists were far from alone is sounding alarms at excesses of modernism, though they may be regarded, in a particular but authentic sense, as the most radical of antimoderns. Others also sought to call those wandering on the spiritually stony ground of modernism back to some true faith, or to take vengeance upon its hateful philistines through a cause like fascism. But difficulties lay along the path of those, from T. S. Eliot to Billy Graham, who sought to correct modernity by appeal to one of the "great religions" like Christianity. For those faiths had fraternized with the enemy—indeed were the enemy as much as not. Actually the "great" religions, above all Judaism and Christianity, with their ancient founders and long histories, are world prototypes of what modernism really means. Before state or university went modern on anything like the same scale, they had their reasoned universal truths, their elites and bureaucratic institutions, their beliefs that history was, despite often dismal appearances, an arena of emancipation through progress: in this case through revelations of God or universal truth at specific historical moments, leading up to a supreme consummation.
The Hebrew scriptures present God as revealing law and truth successively to Noah, Abraham, Moses, and the prophets; to this Christianity adds the manifestation of God in Jesus Christ; both traditions look to an ultimate historical and metahistorical fulfillment in God's creation of a new heaven and earth. Beyond doubt Western modernism is to no small degree the secularization of Judaism and Christianity. At the same time, fascism was patently no less half modern and half antimodern, using radios, railroads, and bombers, together with dreamily utopian visions of paradisal racial futures, on behalf of Atilla the Hun agendas.
Page 18
Moreover, on the local level, modernism was often experienced as only the newest mask worn by exploitation. Peasants who had common lands taken from them to make factory sites, and whose children then had to work for pennies in front of pitiless machines in that factory, did not see the modern dream at its best. Although themselves of different background, the mythologists were temperamentally attuned to the rhythms and values of the rural, peasant life in which living folklore seemed to have best survived. They were therefore at odds with all that was destroying that heritage.
The other side was not seldom comprised of the sort of modernist capable of imposing progress regardless of cost and whether desired or not. Although democracy was among the most deeply held ideals of modernism, the modern regimen also called for effective power by knowledgeholding elites. These were people particularly adept at the second of Lyotard's criteria of modernity, the unity of knowledge, pointing toward ability to organize all particular knowledge under universal and abstract categories like those of law, science, or social science, and to utilize that knowledge through industrial or social engineering. The kind of education that did this well prepared modernity's professionals, industrialists, enlightened civil servants, teachers, and often religious leaders.