Eric Scheske

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Gnosticism

Gnosticism

Gnosticism starts with a fundamentally flawed view of reality. Ancient gnosticism rejected the immanent (earthly) realm of reality. Modern gnosticism rejects the transcendent realm and, with it, the Tao. Eric Voegelin did the most among all philosophers to raise the alarm about gnosticism and its perennial quality. There has almost always been a gnostic element of society, and it has always been a problem, and it's a huge problem today because modern culture is culturally gnostic.

Voegelin’s New Science of Politics Put Gnosticism Back into Our Awareness

Voegelin’s New Science of Politics Put Gnosticism Back into Our Awareness

💡If you want to understand how gnosticism flourishes in our modern world, you need to understand why it developed in the ancient world Time magazine ran a peculiar feature in 1953. It used a five-page analysis of The New Science of Politics to celebrate the magazine’s 30th anniversary, stating

The Modern Gnostic Wants His Structure to Control

The Modern Gnostic Wants His Structure to Control

Part VI of an Analysis of Eric Voegelin’s Six Gnostic Traits (Part II of Two Parts)

The Gnostic Believes His Paradise is a Historic Inevitability and His Movement Will Bring It About

The Gnostic Believes His Paradise is a Historic Inevitability and His Movement Will Bring It About

Parts IV and V of an Analysis of Eric Voegelin's Six Gnostic Traits

Why Gnosticism is Left Hemispheric

Why Gnosticism is Left Hemispheric

Gnosticism is logical. In fact, it can be argued that logic and rational conclusions are the gnostic's gods. The gnostic uses rationality to construct abstract ideas of how the world works . . . of what full reality is. The gnostic then embodies these abstract ideas into structures (the belief in

These Six Traits Make a Person a Gnostic

These Six Traits Make a Person a Gnostic

A Diagnostic of the Gnostic Eric Voegelin was to modern gnosticism what Knute Rockne was to Notre Dame football. Rockne didn’t start the ND football program and Voegelin didn’t discover modern gnosticism, but they took their subjects to much higher levels. The Swiss theologian, Hans urs Von Balthasar

Those Hippy Puritans

Those Hippy Puritans

Exploring America's Millenarian Movements 💡The Puritans were Gnostics. If you understand Puritans, you start to understand modern Gnosticism. If you understand modern Gnosticism, you begin to see the glaring problem that is modernity. We are a nation held together, paradoxically, by the agonism of conflicting millenarian projections: communists,

A Key Modern School of Philosophy Looked a Lot Like an Ancient School of Heresy

A Key Modern School of Philosophy Looked a Lot Like an Ancient School of Heresy

The pagan cosmic system of late antiquity put the earth at the center of creation, surrounded by eight heavenly spheres: (sun, moon, first five planets, and their stars). The ancient Christian heresy of gnosticism accepted this view of the cosmos but added a few things. The eight heavenly spheres, the

The Three Ideals of the Enlightenment

The Three Ideals of the Enlightenment

Isaiah Berlin summarized the Enlightenment ideals in these three premises, which Enlightenment thinkers held with religious-like fervor (to David Hume's amusement and, later, to Dostoyevsky's disgust): 1. Every genuine question can be answered. If it can’t be answered, it’s not a genuine question. 2.