Subj : Bible
To   : Frank Masingill
From : Curtis Johnson
Date : Thu Nov 02 2000 03:11 am

 
 CJ> His peculiar usage of "gnostic" is another example--but we've
 CJ> already been through that, haven't we?

 FM> I have only read one rather mild criticism of him for that
 FM> by Russell Nieli ("Eric Voegelin, Gnosticism, Mysticism, and Modern
 FM> Radical Poltics," Southern Review, Vol 25, #2) and he said little
 FM> that Voegelin, himself, did not acknowledge in later years, to wit,
 FM> that his emphasis on gnosticism as a model was overly stressed in
 FM> the earlier years of his work to the neglect of other similar models
 FM> of magic, hermeticism, apocalypticism that were formative elements
 FM> of the positivism, psychoanalysis, progressivism, Marxism, communism
 FM> and national socialism that became so ruinous as mass movements in
 FM> the world of political thought, often posing as philosophy and still

	"magic, hermeticism, apocalypticism" were "formative elements"
in positivism or progressivism???????
	Psychoanalysis (Freud and Jung) were interested in magic and
hermeticism for what they revealed about human psychology, especially
the unconscious, but apocalypticism???
	Magic and hermeticism a "formative element" in Marxism????
	Positivism and psychoanalysis "mass movements in the world
of political thought"?????

 FM> doing so today.   Taking Christianity as one differentiation in
 FM> clarity, Voegelin accepted the mystery that Bergson and James had
 FM> also accepted that the spiritual eruptions that produced greater
 FM> clarity also carried right in with them the Parmenadean "untruth"
 FM> that indicates that the "truth" is simply too much for the vessel 
 FM> to bear.  Why this is so, Voegelin accepted as a mystery.  We simply

	Assuming that there is such a thing as a single, unified
spiritual "truth" (an assumption probably open to question), why
should it be any more of a mystery than comparable "eruptions" in
our understanding of human psychology or of the physical universe?
Most of these also had some admixture of "truth" and "untruth"
in them.  IOW, the state of contemporary knowledge, implicit cultural
assumptions, etc. would probably work quite as well as explanation
instead of a "simply too much for the vessel to bear."
 	
 FM> have to live with this reality.  There are no shortcuts.  I usually
 FM> express this by saying that an institution attempting to reflect the
 FM> new truth about being becomes both the carrier and the killer of the
 FM> spirit.   I don't happen to think that his application of
 FM> "gnosticism" to his "spiritual religions" was all wrong by any means
 FM> and perhaps if you had to escape a book-burning, murderous Gestapo
 FM> about to arrest you for your views your understanding of the "people
 FM> killing other people for the fun of it" might be more similar to
 FM> his.  

	I don't know of any Gnostics that advocated censorship, much 
less the killing of others on belief grounds.  They were horrified
that other Christians would urge others to become martyrs.  Nor, also
in contrast to other Christians, did they have an internal political
structure.  Even the "gnosticism" (note the small "g") of Clement of
Alexandria and his successor Origen was quite tolerant, especially
in contrast to other "mainstream" Christians of the time.




--- Blue Wave/DOS v2.30 [NR]
 * Origin: America's favorite whine - it's your fault! (1:261/1000)

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