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For good or ill, Eric Voegelin is probably best known, especially among many who have not actually read him, for his denunciations of something called "gnosticism."1 Even some who have read him but remain skeptical about the value of his thought associate him with a virtually monomaniacal anti-gnostic polemic. Thomas J. J. Altizer, for example, said (with an exaggeration that illustrates my point) that "Professor Voegelin finds everything to be Gnostic."2
On various occasions I have suggested that it is time to rethink what it was Voegelin meant by this term and perhaps to find other language for it that would be less polemical, more precise, and more in line with current historical scholarship. I would like to take this occasion to explain in more detail why I think the term "gnosticism" has become inappropriate for the analysis of the phenomena Voegelin was trying to elucidate. To do so, I will take up the problems of the term or analytic category itself, considered in the light of developments in historical scholarship that have taken place since the days when Voegelin began to use it, and I will also discuss what in his own thought Voegelin was trying to use this analytic category to illuminate. This will lead in turn to a consideration of the word's ambiguity and occasional tendentiousness in Voegelin's use, its tenuousness as a historical explanation of later movements, and the ways in which the use of a single term tended to obscure the variety of problems Voegelin was trying to address.
Of course I am not alone in raising some of these questions. Stephen A. McKnight has probably done more than any other scholar to show that the pattern of thought and symbolism known as hermeticism, which Voegelin and many others once lumped together with other phenomena under the single heading of gnosticism, is actually very different from what that word has usually been used to mean.3 Michael Franz, in his Eric Voegelin and the Politics of Spiritual Revolt: The Roots of Modern Ideology has written extensively on the some of the problems Voegelin vised the idea of "gnosticism" to analyze and has suggested the term "pneumopathological consciousness" to replace it.4 This is probably a pretty good term for the meaning...