The “New Science of Politics,” Gnosticism, and the Exegesis of Our World Today

• In Event: Voegelin in His Time and Ours

Abstract

In The New Science of Politics, Eric Voegelin provides a “grand sweep” interpretation of history which arrives at his diagnosis that Gnosticism is “the nature of Modernity.” Voegelin attempts, using “the Aristotelian procedure,” to do what Plato and Aristotle did: to provide an exegesis of his own place and time. Like many grand-sweep interpretations, Voegelin’s seeks an answer to the implied question: how did it come to this? But what is the “this” Voegelin seeks to account for? For Voegelin, writing 70 years ago, it appears to be largely the calamities of two world wars and Stalinist Russia. Today these no longer loom as the most urgent circumstances that require interpretation. So, if we now ask the same question “how did it come to this?”—if we apply Voegelinian tools to the exegesis of today’s world—will the diagnosis of Gnosticism still hold? Or will Voegelin’s procedures lead us to a different answer simply because we have, due to a change in our times, applied them to a different question?

Author

• Micah Harris, Catholic University of America