The Pandemic and the Scientific Gnostics

“As Deneen says, Voegelin ‘argued that modern Gnosticism was an effort to ‘redivinize’ the political world—not now by bringing the gods in to the service of the city, but by making the city into a heaven on earth.'”

I have written in the past about Eric Voegelin and his theories on how the ancient heresy of Gnosticism had adapted to the modern world through the totalitarian ideologies of Nazism and Communism. But Voegelin’s thought on the subject was far broader. A fascinating essay by Patrick Deneen on the current Russian invasion of Ukraine through the lens of Voegelin’s 1952 book The New Science of Politics got me thinking about Voegelin’s ideas and how they might be applied in another sphere. Deneen recounts Voegelin’s arguments concerning the role of science and, more importantly, “scientism” for Gnosticism’s development in the liberal West. These insights are hugely relevant for our arguments and debates over the roles of science and expertise during the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, discussions that are still ongoing.

Eric Voegelin himself, born into the intellectual high culture of pre-war Europe, was part of that wave of European émigrés who washed up on America’s shores, escaping the tsunami of genocidal hatred unleashed by the Nazis and Fascists on the Old Continent. Voegelin and his small circle of philosophical peers spent the rest of their lives exploring the roots of the forces that had torn apart the civilized cultures of Mitteleuropa, attempting to chart a philosophical course through the political, cultural, social, and, most importantly, moral chaos that drowned their erstwhile homelands. Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt, two of Voegelin’s most famous contemporaries, each made their own intellectual way through this smashed terrain once they had landed in the United States.

Deneen summarizes well Voegelin’s thesis in The New Science of Politics. Briefly, the history of our civilization can be divided into three theo-political phases: Civil Religion, Christendom, Gnosticism. This categorization echoes that of sociologist Philip Rieff, who divided Western history into that of the First World, Second World, and Third World, here brutally simplified to correspond to the polytheist enchantment of the ancient world, Christianity, and the post-everything world that followed nineteenth-century secularization. As Deneen writes, Civil Religion denoted a world of “gods exist[ing] in the service of human cities, and human allegiance to the gods was equal to allegiance to the city.” Christendom revolutionized man’s place in the world, “teaching that humans were citizens of two cities—the City of God and the City of Man.” Man’s true home was in the hereafter, leading to what Voegelin called the “de-divinization” of the world.