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# Thursday
- URL: https://thedailyeudemon.com/41572/
- Published: 2016-12-01T06:40:59.000Z
- Updated: 2016-12-01T06:40:59.000Z
- Author: Eric Scheske
- Tags: Essay, #wpChunk

![-Eric_Voegelin](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ea/fd/eafdb338-c9b6-4f87-8363-78ab94cc3a18/content/images/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Eric_Voegelin-300x282.jpg)

Could gnosticism become a hot discussion point, at least in Catholic circles? Al Kresta last week did a segment on the new EWTN documentary, "[Wolf in Sheep's Clothing](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/ave-maria-radio-kresta-in/id316247661?mt=2&i=378123836&ref=thedailyeudemon.com)," about Saul Alinsky. The producers said that Alinsky was a gnostic.

A gnostic! Wow, I hadn't heard or read much about gnosticism since the 1990s, when I spent a large amount of time studying it through the works of Eric Voegelin and Norman Cohn's outstanding, *The Pursuit of the Millennium*. The reference prompted me to dust off my Voegelin, as well as an aborted book I started to write that focused on gnosticism. I'm greatly enjoying getting acquainted with these old intellectual haunts.

Especially since I think these haunts will explain to me (or re-explain, as it were) what all these disparate leftist trends have in common. I mean, what is the thread that connects, say, open borders, men in women's restrooms, LGBT marriage, Obamacare, extreme environmental activism, and this hell-bent certitude by the leftists that they know that X, Y, and Z are true, whereas people on the right are ignorant rubes that must be forced along the path to a better world?

The answer, I think, is gnosticism, and because George Soros is the high priest of modern gnosticism, you find his activist money behind the most disruptive causes.

"\[T\]he aim \[of gnosticism\] always is destruction of the old world and passage to the new. The instrument of salvation is gnosis itself--knowledge." Eric Voegelin, *Science, Politics, and Gnosticism*.

Expect gnosticism to become a recurring touchstone on TDE from this point forward.