McGilchrist Finds Gnosticism . . . and the Thought of Eric Voegelin
I've maintained for years that these two thinkers needed to get together. It finally happened.
Woke up Saturday morning, wishing I’d stopped one drink sooner on Friday, and hazed through the digital wasteland.
I stumbled on Iain McGilchrist posting excerpts from dusty letters by Sir Richard Clough, a 16th-century Elizabethan fixer in Antwerp. Clough was tattling to his boss, Sir Thomas Gresham, about the Puritan wrecking crew that tore through Antwerp in August 1566, smashing altars, torching beauty, and desecrating anything that didn’t bow to their grim, literalist dogma.
Puritans. Freakin’ Puritans. The OG cultural bulldozers.
I’ve been hollering about these joyless bastards for years. They’re the patron saints of the modern mind—rigid, self-righteous, and allergic to nuance.
Eric Voegelin, that Viennese sage, nailed them in The New Science of Politics (1952), painting them as the poster children of gnosticism, a mental rot that’s been afflicting Western civilization for millennia. Puritanism is a clearer portrait of this mind-sickness than a wino passed out in a gutter is of alcoholism.
Voegelin’s the real deal, a heavyweight from that fin de siècle Viennese intellectual crucible that spat out Menger, Wittgenstein, Freud, and Mises, a scene that produced more world-class thinkers than Swinging London produced groovy mods in the 1960s.
Voegelin’s New Science hit pretty big, at least as far as nerd literature goes. It even landed on Time magazine’s radar in ’53, a rare crossover, like Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited in reverse.
The book was all about gnosticism.
Voegelin had been tracing gnosticism throughout history with the doggedness of a cocaine-fueled Harvey Weinstein searching under tables for the actress to whom he’d just promised a co-starring role with DiCaprio in a Scorsese film.
But then he hit the brakes.
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Eric Scheske
