In April First Things editor R.R. Reno wrote an article entitled “Gnostic Politics” that began with a vignette about a first year medical student and her run-ins with the hospital’s woke-ified diversity and inclusion office. People often present as male or female, a representative said in a training, but “it’s more complex.”
I sympathize with Reno’s annoyance at this news, though perhaps not with his apocalyptic dread. Biology should be of paramount importance in hospitals, not presentation or even a person’s deeply felt identity. Pathological fear of offending the gender nonconforming is hardly a good use of your doctor’s time or energy. What I have had difficulty sympathizing with, however, is Reno’s connection of the American theory of intersectionality with a little-known movement of ancient sects called Gnosticism.
Before I address my own back-and-forth about Reno’s analogy, I should say something about what Gnosticism was or, indeed, is. (There is a small group of Gnostics still living in northern Iraq today.) Gnosticism arrived on the scene around the same time as Christianity, and, in fact, the most famous Gnostics (like Valentinus) tended to be Christian heretics. (There were also famous exceptions like Mani.) Documents as early as The Gospel of Thomas—the most famous document to be found in a famous archeological discovery near Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945—show signs of Gnostic influence, and later works like The Gospel of Truth, The Apocryphon of John, and The Thunder, Perfect Mind have offered extraordinary insight into the Gnostic way(s) of seeing the world.
Gnosticism was above all a dualistic system of thought. God (or, at any rate, the Most High God) is so transcendent that he has no relationship whatsoever with this world. He is not creator. A lower divinity, what in the ancient world would have been called a demiurge, is the creator god, and this god is identified with the God of the Jews and the God of the Old Testament. If you’ve read it, think of the creator deity in Plato’s Timaeus. The demiurge in Gnosticism, by the way, isn’t good and neither is creation. This world in general is bad, terrifying even. Matter itself and even one’s own soul (psychological processes, let’s say) are bad. One is not at home here. This world is ruled not only by this god, but by lesser deities often called the Archeons. The goal of life for the gnostic is to escape this evil world and return to the Most High God, the One.
Because those who possess gnosis—that is, knowledge—can be redeemed in this way. They possess a spark, almost a piece of the true divinity, and this allows them to escape this world upon death whereas other people who are merely “fleshly” cannot. (This, by the way, does not necessarily mean that Gnostics practiced a Christian morality. But, like the details of gnostic cosmology, that’s another story for another day.)
For our purposes, the main thing to remember is that Gnosticism was a-cosmic. The philosopher Hans Jonas was the first to point this out with any degree of rigor. For the ancient Greeks, kosmos held the idea of order, and order was good. The world was an ordered whole and the parts of the world, people included, had a place. Just what that order was could therefore discerned if one was wise. To some degree, this idea of order held through the Middle Ages until nominalists began the process of its destruction and the beginnings of modern science gave us our universe—vast, uncontrollable, unknowable in its totality.
Gnosticism did not reject the cosmic order for the same reason as moderns did, and Jonas points that out.
Gnostic man is thrown into an antagonistic, anti-divine, and therefore anti-human nature modern man into an indifferent one. Only the latter case represents the absolute vacuum, the really bottomless pit. In the gnostic conception the hostile, the demonic, is still anthropomorphic, familiar even in its foreignness, and the contrast itself gives direction to existence—a negative direction, to be sure, but one that has behind it the sanction of the negative transcendence to which the positivity of the world is the qualitative counterpart. Not even this antagonistic quality is granted to the indifferent nature of modern science, and from that nature no direction at all can be elicited.
Jonas did, however, compare the a-cosmic order to existentialism, using Heidegger’s idea that humans are “thrown” into the world, alienated and without a given direction. Other scholars—Kurt Rudolph and Elaine Pagels come to mind—have also worked on Gnosticism without exploring this connection, and in Jonas’s book on Gnosticism this insight is relegated to an epilogue. (He did continue to write about this insight on occasion.)
It was not Jonas but the Catholic German-American scholar Eric Voegelin that brought “Gnostic” into circulation in American political discourse. Like many right-wing writers today, Voegelin implied or explicitly accused his more liberal opponents (usually Marxists) of “lying,” “mendacity,” or perpetrating a “swindle,” and this accusatory tone sets up the reader to think plausible his identification of Marxism and progressivism with Gnosticism. I use the term identification because Voegelin and his readers have acted as if there is an identity between them even if Voegelin would have claimed he only wished to advocate for a strong analogy.
The claim Voegelin made was this: modern Marxists and progressives hate the created order and reject God in the same way Gnostics did. But whereas Gnostics projected ultimate reality into a higher sphere entirely beyond this world, modern Gnostics (Marxists, liberals) place ultimate reality in the future, denigrating the social order and creation that we have.
National Review founder William F. Buckley found Voegelin’s thesis intriguing and wrote about it. From there, the conservative clerisy picked up on the theme including many who have never read any of the gnostic texts.
Recently, Sohrab Ahmari wrote about Gnosticism in his book The Unbroken Thread makes this connection. Ahmari did the leg work to read Jonas, however, and so limits his claims. The most he is willing to say about “our gnostic liberalism” today is that, like the anti-matter orientation of ancient Gnosticism, we think that “If I don’t like my body, well, I can trade it in for another one.” He doesn’t go so far as Voegelin or, today, Reno.
Reno also seems to have read some of the Gnostic texts, though it’s not clear to me whether he has read Jonas, Rudolph, or Pagels. He has definitely read his Voegelin, however. Reno writes:
Ancient Gnosticism was cosmological in orientation: The world as we experience it is a pale shadow of the higher, eternal order of the cosmos, to which we must return if we are to live in the fullness of truth. Modern Gnosticism adopts a different orientation. Under the influence of Christian conceptions of human destiny, its metaphysical imagination is historicized: The eternal truth is not above; it is in the future.
Forget for a moment Reno’s first line about Gnosticism being “cosmological.” (I believe he means “a-cosmological.”) Let’s look instead at the substance of his and Voegelin’s claim. Is the analogy between Gnosticism and Marxism and liberal progressivism a good one?
The writer Justin Lee has convinced me that Voegelin and Reno have a point. In certain sorts of antiracist thinking, for example, the whole world seems to be racist, being anti-racist comes with a sort of knowledge (gnosis), and our whole system is, in the end, going to have to be undone if we ever intend to atone for our country’s “original sin.” Ibram X. Kendi’s work comes to mind here—though in his recent Atlantic article he seems to disavow some of those positions. Other progressive thinkers have had similar radical outlooks, and there is at least a weak analogy between Gnosticism and their worldviews.
If he knew of these criticisms, Kendi might just respond that, no, he does not believe in a demiurge and move on. We might do the same. But this analogy has had such power for certain conservative intellectuals that I feel the need to say more. Most progressives today have no clear “beyond,” whether that’s an ontologically transcendent beyond or one in the future. Their antiracism or trans advocacy or environmentalism does not see the whole of world today as lost, and that is true even if they level radical criticisms of America’s founding. Their lives are rooted in this world. That world isn’t a cosmos, to be sure. But the world for the vast majority of American conservatives isn’t a cosmos either. It’s not an ordered whole the parts of which all have their places.
For this reason, it seems to me the comparison between Gnosticism and progressivism has held on for more than half a century for only two reasons: (1) It indicates a certain intellectual pedigree among conservative pundits—whether they really have it or not. (2) It connects liberals with a silly premodern belief system. Voegelin and Reno have a point; there is an analogy here. But it’s a weak enough analogy that one gets the feeling that the primary motivation behind it is not to enlighten, but to slander.