According to
Eric Voegelin, as explained in
this article,
In
The New Science of Politics (1951), Voegelin writes that an important effect of Christianity in the period between the disintegration of the Roman Empire in the West and the High Middle Ages was the “de-divinization of existence.” What does this mean? For Jews and Christians, nature is Creation, but it is itself neither a divinity nor in any way a proper object for veneration. People should direct their worship lovingly to the transcendent God, whose non-interference in daily life guarantees freedom of conscience and self-responsibility, not to images or objects. Another effect of Christianity was to replace the mundane experience of the divine, symbolized by the elemental gods of polytheism, with experience of the divine as a transcendent ground or goal. Now in this goal, the imperfections of the natural world and the social order might be redeemed, but, importantly, not in this life, where only degrees of amelioration are possible. The Gospel, much more articulately than Pagan wisdom, tells men that they must reconcile themselves to the limitations inherent in existence. The Gospel, as Voegelin argues, devolved a new demand for the delay of gratification on human consciousness, from which stems the whole range of specifically Christian ethics and from the impatient reaction to which stems the whole range of Gnostic tantrums.
Voegelin argues for faith, which postpones certainty, and which incorporates doubt, as essential to normative Christianity. Uncertainty and doubt afflict some people, however, with terrific anxiety; and when, historically, these anxious parties could not fall back into pre-Christian forms, which had gradually disappeared, they availed themselves of “the Gnosis” that formed “an accompaniment of Christianity from its very beginnings.” Voegelin writes: “Gnostic speculation overcame the uncertainty of faith by receding from transcendence and endowing man and his intramundane range of action with the meaning of eschatological fulfillment.” The new Gnostic rebels against reality thought that they could, in other words, realize in this natural world, using the crooked timber of humanity, the perfection and redemption that Christianity postpones to the City of God; and that they could become gods themselves, deposing the Gospel deity, and annulling the patience that faith demands.
. . . [T]he rebel against reality, determined to erect his second reality, can tolerate no vestige of that which he despises, lest it remind him of his petulant inadequacy. “The revolution of the Gnostics,” writes Voegelin, “has for its aim,” one at least among others, “the monopoly of existential representation.” It cannot abide challenges or alternatives to itself. In addition to this, the Gnostic assault on reality seeks “a change in the nature of man and the establishment of a transfigured society.”
And
Christian theology shares with Pagan Monotheism (Plato’s and Aristotle’s) the insistence, founded in experience, that nothing is perfectible in this world, and that disappointment, resentment, unjust shares, bad luck, arguments with one’s wife, pain, debt, and all the rest belong ineradicably to the mortal realm. The most that a just political order can do is to ameliorate the worst cases of these woes.
. . . Christian theology says that perfection will exist only at the End of Days, when, after the Last Judgment, the righteous will enjoy their translation into Paradise; but by the time of Augustine, Christianity had more or less reconciled itself to the non-occurrence in the foreseeable future of the End of Days, the Greek term for which in Revelations is the eschaton. Christianity declares that good people must make the best of mortal existence because the eschaton is indefinitely postponed; people must adhere to morality, love one another, and act as stewards over the earth, while reconciling themselves to fallibility and imperfection.
When Voegelin writes that impatience to immanentize the eschaton constitutes the essence of Gnosticism, he refers to the petulant dogma that one need not wait, without schedule, to be translated into Paradise, but that one can, by his own self-salvaging activity, realize Paradise in this world. The skeptical claim that such a work is impossible is more of a focus for the Gnostic than the Gnostic’s own claim that such a work is actualizable because the first, the standing, the intuitive and plausible claim is what blocks and scandalizes the Gnostic’s own project. From this mis-priority of arguments stems the desperate nastiness of the Gnostic towards those who criticize or disagree with him.
Voegelin attributes these attempts to “immanentize the eschaton” unto Gnostic patterns of thought, however, which is obviously not quite the same as atheism, at least conceptually. In practice, on the other hand, any ideology which aims to abolish God or religion inevitably must substitute something else in its place. Whether this is incidental, perhaps simply due to an innate instinct in our species, or rather by intentional design of some sort, the fact historically is that political ideology functions to a strong degree as a substitute for religion; and this is often in a form that’s blatantly hostile to God/religion (arguably as its “new competition” which thus cannot ignore what it must dethrone). Even if it’s not logically necessary, a system of belief that abolishes superior deities will frequently convert Man into the deity-by-default, the new apex of the hierarchy of being. And now he’s got to build up to a heaven for himself, the tower of Babel if you like. (And this is done, naturally, by killing people. A lot of 'em. Like, several million.)
