Overcoming Gnosticism: Hans Jonas, Hans Blumenberg, and the Legitimacy of the Natural World

Abstract

In 1984, about a decade before his own murder, Romanian scholar of religion loan Culianu complained of a more widespread, if decidedly less grisly form of assault.1 The gnostics, he declared in a moment of high jocularity, had taken hold of whole world, and we were not aware of it. It is a mixed feeling of anxiety and admiration, since I cannot refrain myself from thinking that these have done a remarkable job indeed.2Though offered in jest, Culianu's designation alien body-snatchers quite accurately sums up what has remained since 1934 leading view of gnosticism as a delimited, identifiable phenomenon. In that year appeared first monumental volume of Gnosis und spatantiker Geist (Gnosis and Spirit of Late Antiquity) composed by young Jewish philosopher Hans Jonas as a dissertation under Martin Heidegger and theologian Rudolf Bultmann. Over next sixty years Jonas returned again and again to movement as he defined it. Above all, gnosticism had as its guiding principle notion of das Fremde. The term includes in its linguistic domain not only the alien, by which it is most usually translated, but its cognates as well: strange, foreign, other, unknown, uncanny, and like. This sense of alienation is wildly overdetermined in gnostic theology: man is alienated from himself, from a fully transcendent God, and most powerfully from material, sensuous universe in which he lives, created as it was by an evil, malicious demiurge. Such anti-cosmism could license both ascetic retreat from world as well as an antinomian descent into worldly abyss, with intent to defeat it from within. The locution body-snatcher now acquires relevance, for gnostic theology made impossible any positive appraisal of physical body, or of physical world at all for that matter. As political philosopher Leo Strauss put it in a letter to Jonas, gnosticism may well have been most radical rebellion in Western history against Greek notion of physis.In stylized terms Jonas's philosophical career represents what I would like to call gnosticism's overcoming. Such terms signal an allegiance to work of German philosopher Hans Blumenberg. But they signal a departure as well. In Legitimitat der Neuzeit (Legitimacy of Modern Age, 1966), Blumenberg undertook what must count among most ambitious revisions of Western intellectual history ever ventured. Against a rash of attacks on modern age as an ill-concealed, secularized derivative of an earlier Christian era, he stepped up in its defense. he linked emergence of modern age-defined preeminently by man's need for self-assertion, to act in world-to a second of gnosticism at end of Middle Ages. The gnostic spirit he found revived by nominalism and theological voluntarism of latemedieval scholastic theology, a loose confluence of thought centripetally bound by black hole of deus absconditus or hidden god. Whereas gnosticism's first overcoming was Augustine's work and but a partial success, its second, and for Blumenberg final overcoming was work of an ethos of human self-assertion best instantiated by scientific program of Francis Bacon.To argue for its third overcoming in late 1920s and '30s is therefore to take leave of Blumenberg's account, if also to extend it. The condition for possibility of this argument, of course, is that gnosticism had in fact returned. Gnosticism, or at very least a host of phenomena going by name and generally understood as such, did indeed return, and with a vengeance-on occult scene, in philosophy, in theology of all persuasions, even in natural-scientific discourse. This period also witnessed return of theological problem attending birth (in Blumenberg's view) of both Middle and Modern Ages: that ofcoram deo, or man's sufficiency before God. …