Voegelin: Modernity and Gnosticism

Lee Trepanier

This is a blog that I have written for the Imaginative Conservative website
(http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org) on October 14, 2013.

Eric Voegelin (1901-85) is often portrayed as one of the severest critic of modernity, with its
belief in human reasons ability to understand and convey the fundamental structures of reality
and its dismissal of transcendent teleologies as private and suspect beliefs. For Voegelin,
modernity was a Gnostic revolt against reality: the belief that human beings can transform the
nature of reality through secret knowledge and social action. According to Voegelin, Gnosticism
had three primary features: a strong feeling of alienation stemming from a sense that some
essential aspect of ones own humanity remains unfulfilled, a revolt against the conditions in the
world that purportedly caused this alienation, and a belief in that esoteric knowledge and
political will is sufficient to overcome these conditions. In short Gnosticism is the belief that
human beings have the power to transform both themselves and reality into some sort of magical
utopia.
However, this portrayal of Voegelin is incomplete. In our book, Eric Voegelin and the
Continental Tradition, Steven F. McGuire and I have gathered a group of scholars who contend
that Voegelins relationship with modernity and its thinkers is more ambiguous than initially
described. Although it cannot be denied that Voegelin was highly critical of modern philosophy,
he also praised many philosophers in the modern continental tradition. He refers to Kants
philosophy as a brilliant development; Schellings philosophy as one of the most profound ever;

and Hegels philosophy as a rediscovery of the experiential sources of symbolization. Such

statements of praise may be rare, but they cannot be discounted.
Not every relevant thinker is included in this volume, but there are comparisons with
Voegelins philosophy to Kant and neo-Kantianism, Hegel, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche,
Heidegger, Gadamer, Strauss, Kojve, and Derrida. Although Voegelin himself worked at a
distance from the continental tradition, his philosophy is nevertheless a part of it insofar as he
both studied the thinkers normally associated with this tradition and grappled with many of the
same philosophical problems that they did. Hopefully this volume demonstrates that Voegelin
made an important contribution to the philosophical conversation of modernity, all of which is
not negative, and can provide a helpful approach to some of the most important questions that we
face today.
To overcome the problems of modernity we must work through it. That is, we cannot
romantically go back to some pre-modern view of the world; instead, we must somehow
reconcile what has been lost in modernity with what has been gained. We must be willing to take
the achievements of modern philosophers while casting aside their errors. This volume hopes to
show both Voegelin did not reject modern philosophy entirely and there still remains a need to
explore Voegelins own project in a different light than often portrayed.