2025

In book VII of Plato’s Republic, he provides one of his most famous allegories. Socrates, Plato’s teacher and central participant in the dialogue, tells the story that has come to be known as “The Allegory of the Cave.” He first describes a group of prisoners chained up in a cave. They are positioned in such a way that they cannot move their heads, and they can see only what is right in front of them. Their discussions with one another concern only what they are able to apprehend from this limited vantage point. They see shadows cast on the wall in front of them and come to believe that all of reality is contained in what they can observe.

Socrates then asks those with whom he is conversing to imagine that one of the prisoners is released from his chains and allowed to ascend to a higher position in the cave. This would be disconcerting to the released prisoner at first. Socrates says, “he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him.” Nevertheless, once he becomes accustomed to the brighter part of the cave, he will be unable to see things in the way he once did. He will no longer see shadows; he will now see the source of those shadows—the puppets that were casting the shadows on the walls.

There is still more to reality than the puppets casting the shadows. Socrates portrays the liberated man as at least somewhat unwilling to move to the next stage. He says, “he is reluctantly dragged to a steep and rugged ascent and held fast until he is forced into the presence of the sun himself. Is he not likely to be pained and irritated? When he approaches the light his eyes will be dazzled and he will not be able to see anything at all of what he now calls realities.” From this new perspective, the man sees not shadows, or puppets, but the truth of reality itself.

At this point, Socrates emphasizes the intrinsic value of knowledge. Though the prisoner was reluctant at first, once he sees things in the light of the sun, he would never want to return to the state he was in before. He would never trade true beliefs for falsehoods, even pleasant falsehoods. He would rather live a solitary life knowing all that he knows than have honors conferred on him by his former fellows for assenting to the truth of all they took themselves to know before.

In his Meditations on First Philosophy, René Descartes describes a similar solitary journey.

The crisis of modernity, Voegelin argued in his 1951 Walgreen lectures at the University of Chicago (anthologized in the book The New Science of Politics and further elaborated on through a series of essays now collected in Science, Politics & Gnosticism), was the crisis of Gnostic revolution and totalitarianism. This was a long time in the making, not something that suddenly emerged in the nineteenth century with the likes of Hegel, Comte, or Marx—though they all feature prominently as avatars of Gnostic revolution in Voegelin’s eyes. It goes back to the origins of political society itself; it goes back to human nature and the need for symbolism and representation in life. Here, Gnosticism is not merely the esoteric mystery religions of late antiquity but a condition of the soul in which representational symbolism provides meaning for existence—we are creatures of symbolism and representative meaning, and Gnosticism provides a symbol of meaning for political life to which we endeavor to manifest to assuage our restless anxiety. The early stages of this crisis played itself out in the civilizational and intellectual battles of antiquity and late antiquity, suppressed through the victory of “Augustinian Christianity,” before reemerging about a millennia later near the end of the Middle Ages and proceeding forward with terrible fury into the Enlightenment and modernity. For Voegelin, the root of Gnostic totalitarianism and revolutionism lies in (metaphysical/spiritual) alienation, hatred of the existing order of the world, and the desire to forcibly create a new (symbolic) reality to dedicate one’s life which will, in that feverish dedication, seemingly assuage the alienation at the heart of the Gnostic. The Gnostic fervor is the attempt to direct the disordered soul to symbols that promise meaning and order—two things that the soul seeks. […]

This process of re-divinization, in the simplest sense, came to critique the existing world as evil, dark, and terrible—a world of “darkness that must give way to the new light”—and that the Gnostic prophet possessed the revelation of what the world of “new light” would be; this new world of a paradise on earth was also universal in nature, a return to the cosmic universalism common to the pre-Augustinian understandings of the self as part of a cosmic and collective whole. “The world is no longer the well-ordered, the cosmos, in which Hellenic [philosophers] felt at home; nor is it the Judaeo-Christian world that God created and found good. Gnostic man no longer wishes to perceive in admiration the intrinsic order of the cosmos.” Essential to the Gnostic vision is a bleak and terrible world in need of cleansing, purgation, and purification—the prerequisites for the reunification of heaven and earth, the final cosmic battle of the eschaton. “For [the Gnostic] the world has become a prison from which he wants to escape,” Voegelin famously writes. But to escape this prison meant the destruction of the present prison and its replacement by the new symbols of cosmic and heavenly perfection—the utopia dreamt by the Near Eastern empires of the Iron Age and their modern utopian descendants.

Thus was born the Gnostic phantasmagoria of eschatological revolution, one that cleaved the world in two in pursuit of realizing its world of “new light” that served as the basis for understanding human and political existence: “From the Gnostic mysticism of two worlds emerges the pattern of the universal wars that has come to dominate the twentieth century,” Voegelin writes. We are familiar with this dichotomy by second nature in all the manifold ways it manifests itself: progressive vs. reactionary; light vs. darkness; tolerant vs. intolerant; democracy vs. autocracy; enlightened vs. deplorable, and so forth. The bifurcation of the world into two, a quintessential aspect of Gnostic and Manichean mysticism, was the cleavage point for Gnostic revolution, it gave them the target of their ire but also provided the rhetoric for restoration—a reunification of the symbolic with the political through revolutionary, purgatorial, fire. Gnostic revolutionism, therefore, portends the re-divinization of the world under the old cosmic imperialism and collectivism of the mystic past that was lost through the vicissitudes of history but can be restored in the present day. Readers of Rousseau and Marx will realize how much they really do fit this Gnostic mold that Voegelin describes.

Seminal to this re-divinization was the ritualistic symbolism and metaphysical spirit which provided representation and classification for unity brought forth by cosmic conflict: The Gnostic revolution had its sacred text, its prophet(s), its salvific heroes, its saints; it also had its heresies, its false prophets, its demons and enemies drawn out from the binary world of antagonism it had crafted for itself. To underscore the point, though Voegelin concentrated on the Puritan in The New Science of Politics as the first violent manifestation of the Gnostic revolutionary, one could equally draw the line into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and Voegelin did—pointing out how the “Scripture” of Marx served the Gnostic Marxist as their sacred salvific text and the writings of various Marxist disciples became the “patristic literature” of supplementation which drew the boundaries of legitimate interpretation (one can think of Lenin, Trotsky, Adorno, and now, perhaps, Žižek as the continuation of this supplementary literature to the holy book; of noteworthy mention, here, is that this is something that Michael Oakeshott also detected in Rationalism and Politics). Moreover, deviation cannot be tolerated, thought and consideration outside the Gnostic system must be suppressed, “such persons [who ask questions] will have to be silenced by appropriate measures.” Sound and look familiar, doesn’t it?