Just finished reading a book by Eric Voegelin and it brought up some comments in me which I wanted to express.
- The rebel (in Voegelin) is a curious being. Saying that he is a gnostic is misleading in the sense that even Plato and Christ could be said to be so as well. Just as Marx had envisioned a Utopia in the collective, so does Plato in his Republic. It is hard to make a distinction between a gnostic an a prophet. The only difference sometimes is that the gnostic’s writings failed to be integrated within the holy canon. Jesus apocalyptic beliefs also approach the same end. The “Kingdom of God” is upon you by his actions. Many distinctions can also be added but they depend on faith more than on fact.
- Hegel, Hobbes and Marx may have had to skip over an inconvenient possibility that perhaps “humanity” was not as they saw it; denied the the possibility so that their system could be expressed. Voegelin accuses Marx of prohibiting questions against his critique, his denunciation. But these are matters taken on faith and faith is more or less what Voegelin himself asks of us, as he sees love of wisdom as love of God. Held by his own critique I am unable to accomodate him, and he becomes a gnostic just the same. If this fails to reach his consciousness, it is because he sees some distinction between, I suppose, between St Augustine and Pelagius; between the church father and the heretic of the church. These distinctions are made on one’s accepted faith and not so much on the strenght of one argument over another.
- The gnostic theoretician, to use Voegelin’s terminology and his relation to mass movements is unclear. It is not self-evident. It is no smoking gun. First of all, the practical revolution is carried by the proletariat, the workforce and is probably doing it not because of the sincere belief in the system but in the hope that it’s promise is possible. In this sense, the gnostic theoretician is served by man’s ability to have faith.
Second of all, revolt is done in the name of God as well, so that I fail to see a connection between the murder of God by the speculator and the revolution. Resistance to unfair conditions does not require that I believe that there is no god. Before Hippo was sacked, Augustine told his christian to resist the Vandals. Apparently, belief in Heaven does not mean that one capitulates.
But perhaps what is meant is that the revolution expects Utopia. Again, I believe that the speculator might have such beliefs, but the men at arms need not have such convictions. Enough for him is a change of conditions and this is why, while communism was like a spark upon dry grass in some countries, it failed to materialize in many others. Discontent, then, with the current conditions is the primary factor and not the convinction of a people that God is dead, that there is no heaven, that man is superman etc. In such case even communism would have or should have failed to materialize by way of it’s own internal contradictions. But the matter is not considered from a chair in a library, where one might weight the validity of it’s argument and denunciation, but from a cold house, a long workday, from an empty stomach etc. It is this that drives the faith and it is the faith that drives the revolt.
That is all.