heresy-hunting and the intellectual origins of modern totalitarianism
By Lorenzo Ravagli
In 2006, one of the leading American Esoteric researcher, Arthur Versluis *, a study of the intellectual history of modern totalitarianism, published in the no can go by, the barbarism of the 20th Century to understand wants. He followed their tracks back to its beginnings in ancient and medieval Christianity.
The origin of totalitarianism lies in the idea of orthodoxy, the idea that there is one correct, generally applicable truth, and the deviation from this truth, the heresy is a dangerous evil that of the Church, the guardian of orthodoxy must be pursued and punished. Their sharpest expression of this idea in the Catholic Inquisition. The organization and procedures of the Inquisition laid the foundation for the totalitarianism of the 20th Century. In the 19th
Century, Versluis, established "secular" thinkers a Tradition of defending the Inquisition and in the 20th was the phenomenon of the persecution of heretics in the totalitarian systems of communism and National Socialism again. The methods that were used by the Catholic Inquisition experienced their resurrection. Joseph de Maistre to Lenin, by Carl Schmitt and Theodor Adorno to Satanism-panic in the current U.S. Versluis followed the trail of the heretic hunters. In today's justifications of the U.S. state of emergency in the face of Islamist threat, he also provides the features of a antihäresiologischen discourse.
For Versluis is no doubt that after the two main forms of totalitarianism, communism and fascism, the essence identical are: connected totalized, centralized state power with the extinction of individual human rights. But their modus operandi shows few differences: secret police, secret arrests, torture, show trials, forced confessions to public, public executions, concentration and labor camps. Totalitarianism is the "face of evil," whose archetypal form in the struggle of the Catholic Church against the so-called Gnosticism in Western history in her debut appearance.
The original literal sense, the heretic anyone who chooses (from the Greek "hairein"), someone the freedom of individual choice for can claim increases, and at least some of the dogmas of the church accepted. The heretic is committed to something, but from the perspective of the Church, he denies something. The moment in which a historical community of faith sets a binding commitment, it creates the possibility of heresy. In the first centuries of Christianity were of the Gnostics an individual, internal access to religious truths, which pluralism and diversity single lock. Had the pluralistic model of Gnosis enforced, it would not heretics, but only if dissidents. The consolidation of the Church as an institution created by a dogmatic teaching mandatory first heretics. With Irenaeus, Tertullian and Epiphanius began to denounce the dissenters in the Church. the Gnostics Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Dionysius the Areopagite had prevailed against the dogmatist, had its quest for the transcendence of the subject-object opposition, upon which the heresy-hunting, the establishment of a persecuting Christianity prevented. But Tertullian, who denounced the persecution of Christians by the Roman state, the thought-forms of the pursuing state took over in his struggle against the Gnostics and launched the historic transition from the persecuted Christian church to be pursued. Anti-Gnosis, historicizing and rationalization went into this one.
solidified in the Middle Ages, the belief Heresy is an invention of the devil. She made the torture and murder of heretics possible since they now represent the arch enemy of God. In the Inquisition, the Prosecutor was also judge. In it, the church joined with the state power. She defined deviant thinking as a crime. Persecution of heretics of all stripes since then tried to force the unity of thinking: Think forced shows the specific nature of totalitarian evil . Dissidence is therefore a criminal act, because totalitarian systems "Ideokratien idea gentlemen are. Ideokratien are monistic and totalistic, they insist on the use of ideology in any area of life, Pluralism is anathema to them. The totalitarian State is an attempt to secularism in all spheres of life and extend the only way to achieve this is to impose a totalitarian ideology that brooks no single dissenter. In a Ideokratie is the greatest conceivable crime is dissent. The dissenters proves itself by its existence that the totalitarian construct that is imposed on the Company, is a lie.
Totalitarian discourse in the 20th Century
Two examples of totalitarian discourse from the 20th Century, Versluis examined more closely, were addressed here: the anti-gnostic Eric Voegelin and the polemic polemics antiesoterische Theodor W. Adorno. The anti-gnostic Obsession conservative circles in the second half of the 20th Century is due to Eric Voegelin, is a threat to the modernity of the social order. Following Voegelin appear on interpretations of Gnosticism as a political religion of the Soviet Union, Communism, Hitler or Stalin. But what is referred to in these publications as Gnosticism has nothing to do with the real Gnosis. The truth is that Gnosisbild Voegelin and his imitators identical to the proto-totalitarian, anti-heretical fantasy that Tertullian and others have produced by their polemic. Before the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library in 1945 it was possible to defend that caricature of the Gnosis, which goes back essentially to Hans Jonas. But at the end of the 20th Century is the simplistic characterization of Gnosticism as dualistic and pessimistic acosmic largely discredited in academic research. To make the Gnosticism for the modern totalitarianism responsible for how Voegelin does this appear in the light of current knowledge as bizarre. The anti-gnostic polemic
Voegelin
In his essay "Science, Politics and Gnosticism Voegelin claimed in 1958 that the goal of the Gnostic always the destruction of the old world and the transition to a new one. The Gnostics would use the knowledge escape from this world. Salvation through self-knowledge, then Voegelin possess their own magic and this magic is not harmless. The order of the world does not change just because you think they are bad and try to escape it. The attempt to destroy the world, destroy not the world, but multiply the chaos in society. Voegelin sees in Gnosticism is a form of knowledge which does not differ substantially from others. In reality, gnosis is knowledge of God or the excess over the subject-object opposition. She seeks the unification of the knowing subject and of the divine revelation of content. Revelation presupposes a revealer of what the allegation of self-redemption the soil extracts. Gnostics speak constantly of the necessity of divine revelation and the interaction of the human will and divine grace. Voegelin seems totally absurd the allegation, the Gnostics, strive to destroy the world. There is no single piece of evidence in the historical texts of the Gnostics, that such destruction of the world would be sought. Instead, it goes in the Nag Hammadi corpus always around the inner spiritual experience and its contrast with worldly or political power.
are completely bizarre, the associations that Voegelin between Gnosis and Nietzsche produced. In the "cruelty of the intellectual conscience, speaks of Nietzsche, see Voegelin a Gnostic motif. In Gnosticism the human remains excluded from the transcendent. The Gnostic will to power stumble on the wall of being, which had become a prison. Without reference to any form of authentic gnosis Voegelin writes Nietzsche here a Gnosis, which is excluded from the transcendent. The Gnostic striving for domination, by rule would be God to be God, the Gnostics take the pain of deception and self-mutilation on themselves. Hegel is appointed by Voegelin on Gnostic. The reason: The Gnostic striving for control over the being to obtain this power, he construct his system, the formation of systems is a specifically Gnostic Of thought. The syllogism, which Hegel makes it a Gnostic is: The Gnostics had systems Hegel had a system, which Hegel is a Gnostic, - yes, all Systembildner are Gnostics. It is a mystery, as Voegelin came to the conclusion of the Gnostics strive for world domination, where he claimed at the same time, he was trying to escape her. With the real gnosis, the target for inner enlightenment and union with the Divine, Voegelin syllogisms have to do absolutely nothing.
Voegelin it's not about a knowledge of historical Gnosticism. He is pursuing a different agenda. What is clear when his work "The new science into consideration by the policy." In Chapter about the "Gnostic revolution, the fall of Puritanism," he said, the entire Reformation, the Modern as a whole, must be interpreted by Gnostic movements as the successful infiltration of Western institutions. Puritanism was simply Gnosis. Given the enmity of Calvin and Calvinism against the mysticism or any Gnostic idea must assume Voegelin had thought Calvin and Calvinism are Gnostic in all its Feindchaft against Gnosticism - this is precisely the form of rhetorical twist which Voegelin otherwise the Gnostics accused.
Under the title "substitute religion" Voegelin extends from the charge of Gnosticism to the entire modern world. Now everything bad is "gnostic. "In Gnostic movements we see such movements as the belief in progress, positivism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, communism, fascism and Nazism," so Voegelin. The ubiquity of Gnosticism is a logical consequence if one assumes as Voegelin, Gnosticism was involved in the project of the abolition of the order of being, that order in the transcendent Divine enshrined, and they strive to replace them by a world-immanent order of being, completion, in the realm of human action lies. If the concept of Gnosis is long enough, it can be at the end to any attempt by a social Reform relate.
Voegelin's hidden agenda: the defense of Catholicism, in which he sees the essence of Christianity is clear in his correspondence with Alfred Schutz. 1953 Voegelin writes of protection for him was the true Christianity of Catholicism. Protestantism and modernity are not gnostic in its view of Catholicism.
One of the fundamental errors Voegelin is the confusion of Gnostic with end-time movements, the advent of the millennial kingdom, or the attainment of paradise on earth, expected in the historical time in history. This confusion is all the more remarkable given that Gnosticism is just for a temporality of Christianity to Fought back. Fundamental to the Gnosis, the distinction between the faithful, in the outer church saw the final realization of Christianity in history, and the knowing that their achievement and were present in the heart of everyone is convinced.
Voegelin wrote Why the Gnosis to those objectives which it had distanced itself in truth the most? Where the tradition of historical eschatological expectation has instead originate? In Catholicism. Joachim of Fiore created in the High Middle Ages, the vision of a story that unfolds over the three ages of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. He foresaw the near arrival of the Third Reich, and this Expectation of a millennial kingdom is the whole of Christianity own. It could with more justice say that this hope of a millennial kingdom is a result of the loss of Gnosis (the vertical perspective of a direct spiritual enlightenment for everyone). In the emergence of a hierarchical social entity, with its emphasis on the historic faith and the sole mediation of the church is the historical origin of the end-time expectation. The Gnostics emphasized the need for individual spiritual experience, they had no secular or historical goals. Where this Gnostic uranium lie disappears, the historical and eschatological, hierarchical church is in evidence, The fighting followed the Gnostics, and kills.
If you realize that Voegelin accuses the Gnostics, which will be added to the truth of Catholicism to the load must, they see only the full extent of the rhetorical inversion, which is based on his Antignostizismus. It serves to disguise the real origins of totalitarianism. The Gnostics were in history, the dissidents, the persecuted - and not the holder of the official Church of God, from whom they were persecuted. Modern totalitarianism has its origins in the historical end of expectations totalistic Church Christianity, which followed every different religious view mercilessly. The Marxist and fascist Belief in the state, to a classless society or a thousand-year Reich to justify virtually any means to achieve them, even the mass murder rooted in the Christian end-time expectation. The historical line of development does not proceed from the Gnostics to the totalitarian systems of the 20th Century. It runs from the apocalyptic expectations of the millennial kingdom within Christianity over the Hegelian evolutionism to the belief of Marx, the realization of a utopian society was imminent in the near future. And it was not far from Marx to Lenin and Stalin to Hitler and the extermination of all those who were regarded as parasites.
The anti-gnostic is the individual spiritual life that goes on inside the people, opposed, he considered the Gnostics as the enemy and indeed marks the emergence of a modern intellectual totalitarianism, fought each search for inner peace, or any orientation in a spiritual world. This new totalitarianism the whole life trying to be restricted to this world. The heirs of the perpetrators of yesterday are the militant secularists who fight every form of spirituality. They are the successor to the Inquisition and the 20th Ideokratien Century.
The antiesoterische Adorno's polemic
Adorno is arguably the most influential intellectuals of the 20. Century. As a member of the Frankfurt School, he was instrumental in the development of the left "cultural criticism." A central theme of his confrontation with National Socialism is his criticism of "irrationalism" which he embodied above all in the "occult" and looked. Adorno's attacks on the occult, a closer look reveals an example of the Antiesoterismus the Left, which is an exact mirror image of the inquisitorial tendencies of the Right.
Adorno was convinced that National Socialism was to lead to the collapse of anti-rational or irrational forces in the Company. His fight against the supposedly irrational authoritarianism of astrology and the occult in his eyes was a struggle against those intellectual currents that had allowed anti-Semitism and Nazism. The view is now widespread, many leading figures of the Nazi era - including Hitler, Himmler and Hess - occult inclinations had. In fact, National Socialism grew out of a milieu that was standing in a loose connection with the occult. To this medium were the Thule Society, various "Aryan", pseudomythologische groups, anti-modernist, neo-pagan, vegetarian and other communities, which are broadly defined as irrational, if not could even call occult. Adorno was convinced the enemy of the rational and humane is the irrational and inhuman, so must the irrational in modern society to be destroyed to prevent the return of the Nationalsoziallismus. From this view, his "theories evidence against the occult" (1946-47, reissued in Minima Moralia). Amazingly,
is completely overlooked by Adorno in that the occultists - along with the Jews - in European history far more on the side of the persecuted, as a place to which the pursuer. When Adorno died of the same rhetorical inversion, as Voegelin and others? Fundamental to Adorno's criticism of his occult belief is of its irrationality, its absolute contrast to the rational. This dualism is typical of the logic of the Inquisition. Adorno objectifies the occult and the occult in a way reminiscent of the argument forms of anti-Semites. In his polemic antiesoterischen found just gross generalizations, cartoons, half-truths, logical fallacies and lies, as in the former.
is in his "Theses against occultism" Adorno on far-reaching claims. The tendency to occultism is a symptom of regression of consciousness. The awareness has lost the power to think the Absolute and Relative to endure. Monotheism falls into an after-mythology, "the spirit" of merging in spirits and lose the ability to recognize that the latter did not exist. The covert forces of society fooled their victims with false prophecies and after thousands of years of education returning to humanity in again the panic, the domination of nature by traffic, to a rule of man, all the horrors of, meet the man ever had to suffer by nature.
Adorno remains a more detailed definition of guilty, what he means by occultism. Obviously, he thinks primarily of spiritualism, to the media and soothsayers. He also speaks of a born-again animism, which negates the alienation, which he himself caused I, for which, he offering a non-existent experience. But why an "animistic" or "occult is" experience per se non-existent? Just because it says so? Assertion without proof, no argument. As Adorno comes from the claim that the occult is a symptom of regression to the other, the domination of nature had been wrong in the rule over the people - and that has to do the one with the other?
Adorno makes a return to magical thinking responsible for totalitarianism. But the relationship between them is not established by him. His claim that the hypnotic effect of magical objects to the same totalitarian terror, both would be the time of a hanging in the air. His explanation is bizarre: the chart as directed by the central office to the citizens and the numerology prepare them for the statistics of the management and price control. Finally, the integration turn out as the ideology of disintegration into power groups, which cut off each other. Whoever stumbled was lost. A user of Tarot cards is an SA member equate? It is completely incomprehensible because of what logic we should get from the oppressed and marginalized in the form of the occult, astrology and the Kabbalah numerology to the directives of a central office or the statistics of the administration. And as for the power groups As for the cancel each other: the "occult" is in the history of the West in general on the side of victims of such Aurottungen found. Heretics and witches were the oppressed, the marginalized, the victims of the Inquisition. But miraculously they turn in Adorno in the privacy of the bureaucracy from which they are pursued in the perpetrator that they pursue. to
Without realizing it reproduces, Adorno in his rhetoric antiesoterischen the argumentation of anti-Semitism. Occultists associated with him with unsavory, anti-social edge phenomena, reveal the forces of decline, a "disease of consciousness", for which the Waste from the world of phenomena to intelligible world, the occult is unhealthy in a barbarous manner. The occultist, according to Adorno would bring the world in accordance with its own decadence. to "The" power of the occult in his view, "like fascism" are "not merely" pathic, both are related through their model of thinking together. Instead, there is a relationship between anti-Semitism and Adorno's attack on the occult.
The occult is to Adorno's infamous dictum "the metaphysics of the stupid." Spiritualism, which he equates the occult, had not brought to light, late notices as grandmothers. Towards the end of his theses with Adorno remains a global interpretation of religion, according to which the great religions of the fate of the deceased either with thoughtful silence, or taught the resurrection of the body. They have always maintained the inseparability of the spiritual and the physical. There was nothing spiritual in them that was not anchored in sensory perception or demanded physical performance. The other hand held occultists - Adorno - this view for not facing, made about the idea of resurrection funny and not intended for release.
This reasoning is not only because of strange, because spiritualism is usually accused of He does not distinguish sufficiently between this world and the hereafter, but also because the occult is something untestellt what you can not blame him historically. Even a superficial knowledge of the history of esotericism can teach you that the relationship between the physical world and the spiritual world was a central theme for the New Age and that the idea of a "Geistleiblichkeit" in it still plays a major role.
Adorno concludes with the assertion that the idea of the existence of ghosts is driven to an extreme expression of a bourgeois consciousness. This thesis is not that far away from Marx, for whom the religion was the opiate of the people.
Adorno's theses a collection of confusion and generalizations are mixed with a disturbing bitterness that borders on nihilism. It was hard to understand how someone who was with the rhetoric of anti-Semitism so familiar, this rhetoric in his own polemics antiokkultistischen reproduce so unrestrained. Versluis says Adorno tried theses' is no more necessary to understand the occult or appropriate to show how the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" are striving to understand the Jewish culture or Jews.
The antiokkultistischen resentment Adorno vagi to the present day through 'critical' literature. In particular, radical secularists have his voice and made his own argumentation. In the confessional literature produced by them also the view of Marx returns that religion is opium for the people, except that religion now replaced with occult or New Age.
The deeper reason for the convergence of right and left polemics
Although Voegelin and Adorno from two opposite sides are, but they are in agreement in a fundamental error. Somehow, they try "Gnostic" or "occult" for the rise of totalitarianism to blame, even if, as recent research has shown that occultists were in fact the first victims of the Nazis, they were suppressed, imprisoned and killed. If Voegelin's thesis that the Gnostics were responsible for the left or Marxist totalitarianism, would contain a grain of truth, how is it possible that are influential left or Marxist authors just such Antiokkultisten or anti-Gnostic, as their opponents in the rights? Voegelin and Adorno both make the claim that Gnostic occultists or were responsible for totalitarianism, but both remain the evidence for its assertion guilty. In Adorno can be the same ideological spirit of the Inquisition see how in Voegelin. Adorno hated Nazism, Communism Voegelin, both looking for an ideological and political scapegoat the can they blame for that which they abhor. Occultism and Gnosticism are ideal scapegoats because they carry a lot of historical burden around with them, they adhere to centuries-old suspicions, but they remain vague and indefinite, and are therefore very suitable as objects of contempt, because of its vagueness. Everyone knows that occult or Gnosticism are "bad, even if hardly anyone knows exactly what to mean.
Voegelin and Adorno were desk workers, which was limited to an intellectual witch-hunt. The practical consequences of such demonization settled since 1933 in Germany observed (details in the below-mentioned publication by Corinna Treitel). The moral implications of Voegelin's and Adorno's polemics are more serious, as both were published after 1945.
For Adorno, Voegelin and all those who still attach the rhetorical constructs of "progress" and the "Enlightenment," the "occult" is an easy target and a convenient scapegoat. Occultists represent the "overcome superstition" of the past, the "Dark Ages and are therefore of left and right-wing ideologues who use the rhetoric of progress, which they justify the transition to a future utopia, like as targets of their eradication campaigns chosen, where the "regressive" forces trying to eliminate the Company.
Anti occultism is a separate phenomenon that is observed both in rights as in the left. The lure of ideological inquisition and political scapegoat rituals on both sides of the spectrum of the same size and the natural victims are often the "occult." With their rhetoric antiokkultistischen the right and the left reproduce - usually unconsciously - the language and reasoning patterns of their predecessors in the Inquisition and the witch hunters in the early modern period.
It is easy to understand why conservative writers who were close to the Catholic Church, as Voegelin, or Carl Schmitt, consciously or unconsciously, the Inquisition, as an intellectual and political role model took over. But why leftists such as Adorno and his imitators?
Anti occultism and the anti-New Age are deep into the thinking of the 20th Century interwoven, both in rights and in the left. Communists and Nazis continued the earlier practice of the Church, those representing supposedly "irrational," "occult" or "heretical" beliefs, persecuted and destroyed. In reaction against the "irrational" aspects of Nazism Adorno was exactly the kind of rhetorical Demonization continues to operate the Nazis against unpopular minorities. And in his crusade against the irrationalism Adorno overlooked the terrible role of rational industrialism played in the Nazi regime: what else were the gas chambers, as industrial death chambers? Anti occult and anti-New Age are so deeply rooted in the foundations of Western society, that even by mystics and occultists are hardly noticed that recognize above all the critics, the centuries-old exclusion tactics are no longer as such, even if they are in their tradition. Virtually no one in the left camp seems to have the unpleasant origins and implications of Adorno's remarks anti-occultism, as an alternative you almost tacit or explicit consent affirmations of his prejudices. course you have to reject the occult. But the unconscious such prejudices are, the greater its power. The esoteric research has set out to educate about such prejudice.
* Arthur Versluis is Professor of American Studies at Michigan State University, editor of Esoterica and the founding president of the Association for the Study of Esotericism.
Arthur Versluis, The New Inquisition : Heretic-Hunting and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Totalitarianism
Corinna Treitel, A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the Modern German
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