Hans Jonas' Construct Gnosticism Analysis and Critique

Hans Jonas' Construct "Gnosticism": Analysis and Critique
Michael Waldstein
Journal of Early Christian Studies, Volume 8, Number 3, Fall 2000, pp. 341-372 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/earl.2000.0054
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WALDSTEIN/HANS JONAS CONSTRUCT GNOSTICISM
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Hans Jonas Construct Gnosticism: Analysis and Critique

MICHAEL WALDSTEIN
Hans Jonas inuential account of Gnosticism as the expression of a unitary Spirit of Late Antiquity dened by Entweltlichung (acosmism) has recently come under strong attack by scholars who suggest that the category Gnosticism should be dismantled and discarded. This debate calls for a thorough critical analysis of Jonas construct Gnosticism. Jonas construct has highly problematic roots, on the one hand, in Spenglers account of Arabian culture and, on the other hand, in the normative understanding of de-objectivated existence (Entweltlichung) in the existential philosophy of the early Heidegger. The principal defect of Jonas construct is that it tends to misrepresent the actual history suggested by the Nag Hammadi texts. This criticism can be exemplied by an examination of the Apocryphon of John, generally considered to be a paradigmatic Gnostic text.
1. INTRODUCTION In the 1920s, the Jewish philosopher Hans Jonas, student and friend of Heidegger and Bultmann, proposed an existential interpretation of Gnosticism as the expression of a unitary Spirit of Late Antiquity dened by Entweltlichung (acosmism).1 This interpretation has had a deep and lasting impact on scholarship. Scholars have tended to be skeptical about Jonas neo-Hegelian view of a transindividual Spirit of Late Antiquity,
1. The present essay limits itself to Jonas analysis of Gnosticism in Gnosis und sptantiker Geist: Erster Teil, Die mythologische Gnosis, 3rd ed., FRLANT 33 (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964); Gnosis und sptantiker Geist: Zweiter Teil, Von der Mythologie zur mystischen Philosophie: Erste und zweite Hlfte, 3rd ed., ed. Kurt Rudolph to include for the rst time Jonas discussion of Plotinus, FRLANT 159 (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993). Jonas later analysis of Gnosticism in The Gnostic Religion differs in some respects from his earlier work, above all in its greater historical sense and more cautious use
Journal of Early Christian Studies 8:3, 341372 2000 The Johns Hopkins University Press
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but the existential interpretation of Gnostic texts in terms of Entweltlichung has been widely accepted:
Only those who have labored to understand Gnosticism and its inner unity by examining the sources and who have despaired in the confusion of images and systems can truly appreciate the value of Jonas central idea. It is not in the systems that one nds the unity. The unity lies deeper, namely, in the existential attitude of human beings who created the systems. We cannot go back behind this insight! To this confession of complete assent to Jonas main (hermeneutic) thesis we must add that we cannot adopt the Idealist framework in which the author understands existential posture. For us, the subjects of existential posture are empirical human beings.2
Recently, however, Jonas construct has come under heavy attack. Michael Williams urges scholars of Late Antiquity to jettison this construct entirely:
. . . (I)t is best to avoid imagining something called the Gnostic religion or even gnosticism. . . . (T)he texts in question are better understood as sources from a variety of new religious movements. Modern treatments of gnosticism often do, in fact, include some similar disclaimer acknowledging the multiplicity of phenomena involved, but the discourse normally moves quickly to the enumeration of features that, it is claimed, really make all these movements one thing, gnosticism. The result has been the premature construction of a category that needs to be not simply renamed or redened, but rather dismantled and replaced.3
Whether one agrees entirely with Williams or not, what is clearly needed is a close and critical look at Jonas construct Gnosticism. Williams objections against this construct are not entirely new. Already in 1936, two years after the publication of the rst volume of
of existential interpretation; see Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, 2nd rev. ed. (Boston: Beacon, 1963); similar caution can be observed in Delimitation of the Gnostic Phenomenom Typological and Historical, in Ugo Bianchi, ed., Le Origini dello Gnosticismo (Leiden: Brill, 1967), 90104. For a presentation and critique of this later phase of Jonas work, see Karen L. King, Translating History: Reframing Gnosticism in Postmodernity, in Christoph Elsas, ed., Tradition und Translation: Zum Problem der interkulturellen bersetzbarkeit religiser Phnomene (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1994), 26477, esp. 26573. 2. Hans-Martin Schenke, Review of Hans Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist I, ThLZ 84 (1959): 81320, here 818. 3. Michael A. Williams, Rethinking Gnosticism: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 5.
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Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, Arthur Darby Nock launched a frontal attack:
J[onas]s real interest lies in an attempt to make a synthesis. He does this with concepts of Spengler and Heidegger. Frankly, I cannot understand what he does in this direction. He is a metaphysician trying to shake off the yoke of history and to lead us to a higher level of comprehension; I am left in a terminological fog, and I know that I am not alone in this situation. Is not his book an illustration of a fairly common dissatisfaction with the slow progress and manifest limitations of linguistic and historical scholarship? Is it not in a sense a parallel to the movements which it seeks to present?4
The terminological fog has lifted. Bultmann, in whose seminar on John Jonas work on Gnosticism rst took shape, has been studied closely, as has Jonas teacher Martin Heidegger, who also collaborated closely with Bultmann. Existential interpretation has become a household word in theology.5 Although Nocks observation I am left in a terminological fog can no longer be accepted as a criticism, his other observations are devastating enough.
1.1 Jonas Own Later Critique of His Early Work The remarkable thing about Nocks critique is thatparticularly in its nal rhetorical question (Is Jonas interpretation not in a sense a parallel to Gnostic movements?)it anticipates Jonas own later critique of his early work. Jonas came to see that his own philosophical concern for Entweltlichung, that is, for liberation from objectivated being in favor of authentic existence in the decision of the moment, a concern he shared with Bultmann and Heidegger, lay at the foundations of his reading of ancient Gnostic texts. The Gnostics dimly anticipated the Entweltlichung which the early Jonas saw as the decisive achievement of an authentic existence. Ultimately, according to Jonas, the Gnostics failed to achieve complete and authentic Entweltlichung (see below). Still, they came remarkably close to the discoveries of existentialism. According to Bultmann, it is only in the New Testament, particularly in the Gospel of John and the
4. Arthur Darby Nock, Review of Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist I, Gnomon 12 (1936): 60512; reprinted in Nock, Essays on Religion and the Ancient World, ed. Zeph Stewart, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), 1:44451, here 444. 5. For a detailed account of the principles of existential interpretation developed in the triangle Bultmann-Heidegger-Jonas, see Michael Waldstein, The Foundations of Bultmanns Work, Communio 14 (1987): 11545.
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Pauline letters, that one nds the genuine breakthrough to Entweltlichung which the Gnostics longed for and which Heidegger articulated.6 When Jonas looked back at Gnosis und sptantiker Geist two decades after its publication, he found that existential hermeneutic and Gnosticism had undergone a curious reversal in his mind.7 Existential interpretation had allowed him to see Gnosticism in a thrilling new way:
It was the case of an adept who believed himself in possession of a key that would unlock every door: I came to this particular door, I tried the key, and lo! it tted the lock, and the door opened wide. So the key had proved its worth. Only later, after I had outgrown the belief in a universal key, did I begin to wonder why this one had in fact worked so well in this case. Had I happened with just the right kind of key upon the right kind of lock? If so, what was there between Existentialism and Gnosticism which made the latter open up at the touch of the former?8
When he rst approached it in the early 1920s, Gnosticism had seemed familiar to Jonas: In retrospect I am inclined to believe that it was the thrill of this dimly felt afnity which had lured me into the Gnostic labyrinth in the rst place.9 By the early fties the former lock had turned into a key and the former key into a lock to be opened. When unlocked by the later Jonas with the ancient Gnostic key, modern existentialism showed its true face: acosmic nihilism. To repudiate and overcome the acosmic nihilism of existential philosophythis became the main task to which Jonas dedicated himself in the last forty years of his life by developing a philosophy of organic life and an ethics of responsibility for the technological age.10 For the early Jonas, Gnostic texts were a dim but forceful anticipation of existentialist philosophy, to be positively embraced as examples, even if ultimately unsuccessful examples, of the philosophical breakthrough achieved by existentialism, particularly Heidegger. For the later Jonas, modern existentialism was to be rejected as a symptom of nihilism, as a modern parallel of the ancient nihilism found in the Gnostics.
6. See Waldstein, Foundations of Bultmanns Work, 13336. 7. See Hans Jonas, Gnosticism and Modern Nihilism, Social Research 19 (1952): 43052; reprinted as Epilogue: Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism, in Hans Jonas, Gnostic Religion, 32040. A German translation is included as an appendix to Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 2:35979. 8. Jonas, Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism, 321, emphasis by the author. 9. Jonas, Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism, 320, emphasis by the author. 10. See the retrospect offered by Jonas in a lecture delivered nine months before his death: Hans Jonas, Philosophie: Rckschau und Vorschau am Ende des Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993). Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1966); Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
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The transformation of Jonas relation to Jewish theological traditions, particularly a positive reception of the teaching on creation found in the Hebrew Scriptures and rabbinical tradition, was part of this development. In the context of the dramatic events surrounding the involvement of his revered teacher Heidegger in the Nazi regime, his ight from Germany as a Jew endangered by the regime, the death of his mother in Auschwitz and his return to Germany as an infantry ofcer of the Allied Forces, Jonas began to see the existentialism of the early Heidegger and the parallel acosmism of Gnostic texts as metaphysical anti-Semitism.11 Although Jonas reversed key and lock and shifted from a fundamentally positive evaluation of Gnosticism to a negative one, one may wonder whether this critique of his earlier work was radical enough. Did the thrill of afnity with Gnostic texts felt by the young and enthusiastic student of Heidegger allow him to do justice to ancient Gnostic texts? Did the profound revulsion against Gnostic texts felt by the later Jewish philosopher of nature and human responsibility allow him to improve his reading? Despite the reversal and the greater historical sensitivity of the later Jonas, the basic outlines of his interpretation remained the same.
1.2. Preliminary Overview of Jonas Interpretation Jonas analyzes Gnostic texts to identify the central existential principle that expresses or objectivates itself in them. He nds this principle in Entweltlichung. Gnostic Entweltlichung is a radical and revolutionary attitude of anticosmism; it is an attitude which negates, ultimately, all denite and ordered being and all denite moral norms. In this respect, Jonas claims, Gnosticism is the polar opposite of the Spirit of Antiquity:
While the religion of Antiquity was an apotheosis of what exists (das Gegebene) the Gnostic religion sought to break this sacrum and its entire hierarchy and to gain a point of view outside and against all that exists (das Gegebene). And just as knowability is an essential characteristic of the cosmic God (Weltgott) which belongs to him because of his connection with everything that exists . . . , even so unknowability is an essential attribute of the transcendent God. . . . His negativity was conceived as a launchingpad for absolutely denying all positivity of the world, the entire claim of the worlds existence, all worth and denitive value of existing being (das Seiende) as such.12
11. Hans Jonas, Response to G. Quispels Gnosticism and the New Testament, in Philip Hyatt, ed., The Bible and Modern Scholarship: Papers Read at the 100th Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, December 2830 (Nashville: Abingdon, 1965), 27993, here 288. 12. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 1:248.
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The nihilist existential posture which lies at the heart of Gnosticism is not merely an attitude of the individuals who happen to have composed particular Gnostic texts. It is the attitude, Jonas claims, of a transindividual and transgenerational Spirit, the Spirit of Late Antiquity, which is the true author of Gnostic texts:
. . . the task of the hermeneutic return is to nd the real author, namely historical existence understood as a totality (das geschichtliche Gesamtdasein) which reached beyond individuals and generations to produce this expression (Auslegung) of itselfof what is most essential to itand preserved itself for an entire epoch of history as the only mode of being which was at that epochs disposal, often perhaps in only latent form or congealed in convention, but always open to being actualized. Only this subject of the history of Spirit (geistesgeschichtliches Subjekt) is what philosophical hermeneutics looks for.13
Schenke summarizes Jonas position on this point as follows:

The subject of existential posture for Jonas is by no means an empirical human being or a group of empirical human beings, but something that lies behind them, a sort of intelligible Self that has not yet been split into empirical selves. This Self is not located in empty space, as it were, but is tied to empirical human beings and it is inuenced by the history of the human race in the formation of its posture. However, it is free from the causal fabric of the world and can act into that fabric from the outside, as it were.14
The texts which scholars had classied as Gnostic already before Jonas are for Jonas privileged windows into the very heart of the Spirit of Late Antiquity. Yet the extension of this same Gnostic Spirit is considerably wider: it includes almost all of the epochs religious phenomena, Judaism, specically in its rabbinic form, being one of the few exceptions:
The extent of the Gnostic sphere . . . (comprises) in the West . . . the Hellenistic mystery cults, especially Mithraism, the Hermetic writings and, in the speculative sphere, the philosophy of Late Antiquity, especially Neoplatonism; in the East (it comprises), in much more powerful and original form, the apocalyptic and eschatological movements, the great Gnostic systems, the newly founded religions all the way down to Manicheism; and nally, across East and West, (it comprises) Early Christianity together with its heresies, especially Marcionism.15
13. Hans Jonas, Augustin und das paulinische Freiheitsproblem: Eine philosophische Studie zum pelagianischen Streit (1930; 2nd ed. revised and expanded with introduction by James Robinson, Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1965), 84. 14. Schenke, Review of Hans Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist I, 815. 15. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 1:80.
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2. JONAS HISTORICAL HYPOTHESIS ADOPTED FROM SPENGLER Jonas category Gnosticism is shaped by two main principles: (1) by an overarching historical hypothesis about the Spirit of Late Antiquity adopted from Spengler and (2) by a set of hermeneutic principles governing what he calls existential interpretation.
2.1. Spengler on Arabian Culture, Particularly Early Christianity Jonas himself states that he owes the substance of his historical hypothesis on Gnosticism to the discussion of Arabian Culture in the inuential Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler.16 When one turns to this discussion one nds that Spengler discusses neither Gnosticism in particular nor the culture of the Arabs in general, but a cultural organism dened by Magian religion (Magian from the Magi), which came to its owering in Early Christianity.17 Spengler saw one of the principal achievements of his Decline of the West in
. . . the Copernican discovery in the historical sphere . . . (that there is) no sort of privileged position to the Classical or to the Western Culture as against the Cultures of India, Babylon, China, Egypt, the Arabs, Mexico separate worlds of dynamic being which in point of mass count for just as much in the general picture of history as the Classical, while frequently surpassing it in point of spiritual greatness and soaring power.18
Each of the eight cultures mentioned in this text, Spengler argues, is a distinct organism which preserves its own identity as it passes through a regular and thus predictable pattern of spring, summer, fall, and winter.19
16. See Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 1:7074. Spengler (18801936) was a high school teacher of natural science and mathematics in Hamburg. In 1912 he resigned and dedicated himself to writing The Decline of the West, the rst volume of which was completed before the beginning of World War I (1914). Published in 1917, before Germanys defeat became clear, it contained the detailed table of contents of Volume 2; Volume 2 appeared in 1922; see Anton Koktanek, Oswald Spengler in seiner Zeit (Mnchen: C. H. Beck, 1968), 14449. 17. See Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte, 33rd rev. ed., 2 vols. (Mnchen: C. H. Beck, 1922; 1st ed. 1917), 2:227398; English translation: Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, 2 vols., tr. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: A. Knopf, 192628), 2:189 323. Atkinsons translation has been occasionally revised in the quotes below. 18. Spengler, Decline of the West, 1:18. 19. See the table of four chronologically overlapping cultures (Indian, Ancient, Arabian, and Western) at the end of volume 1 in the English translation.
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Borrowing terms developed by Goethe in his morphology of plants, Spengler attempts to develop a morphology of cultures in which visible history is expression, sign, souldom (Seelentum) that has become form.20 The precise ontological status of the souldoms that dene distinct cultures remains unclear. Some of Spenglers descriptions are reminiscent of Aristotelian biological language and suggest distinct ensouled substances like plants developing toward maturity.21 According to Spenglers friend and Jonas teacher Eduard Spranger, Spenglers conception of cultures as organisms derives ultimately from Schelling.22 Particularly important to Spengler in the list of eight cultures quoted above is Arabian Culture. It is the principal means by which Spengler attempts to break what he sees as the Ptolemaic system of history operative in the conventional division of history into Ancient, Medieval, and ModernEurope being tacitly assumed as the center.23 This Eurocentric triad of historical periods, Spengler argues, should be replaced by a triad of chronologically overlapping cultures with distinct geographic origins and extensions.24 The rst, Classical Culture had its springtime in Greece and Italy from the late second millennium b.c.e down to Hesiod, and its winter among the Roman Stoics of the second century C.E. The second, Arabian Culture, rst appeared in Persian and Jewish religion after Cyrus,25 experienced its springtime in Early Christianity, extended into the West, and found its winter in fatalistic Islam after 1000 C.E. The third, Western Culture, had its springtime in the Germanic Catholicism of the ninth to the twelfth centuries and its winter in the ethical socialism of nineteenth-century Europe, reaching
20. Spengler, Decline of the West, 1:6. Atkinsons translation avoids the neologism, Seelentum: visible history is the expression, sign and embodiment of soul. Soul is, in fact, the term more frequently used by Spengler. 21. See Alfred Baeumler, Kulturmorphologie und Philosophie, in Anton M. Koktanek, ed., Spengler Studien: Festgabe fr Manfred Schrter zum 85. Geburtstag (Mnchen: C. H. Beck, 1965), 99124, here 11014; Baeumler shows that Spenglers ontology of cultures is far from being reectedly and responsibly thought through. 22. See Koktanek, Spengler in seiner Zeit, 315. Manfred Schrter, editor of the works of Schelling, was one of Spenglers closest associates. In 1922/23 Jonas studied with Spranger at the University of Berlin; see Lebenslauf, in Hans Jonas, Der Begriff der Gnosis (Teildruck) (Sonderdruck aus Gnosis und sptantiker Geist; FRLANT 30; Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1930; Gttingen: Hubert, 1930), 53. Spengler does not appear to make use of Hegels notion of Spirit which underlies the development of nations or cultures, eventually to merge into one. 23. See Spengler, Decline of the West, 1:18. 24. See the table at the end of volume 1 of the English translation. 25. Spengler, Decline of the West, 1:18.
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into Spenglers own time. Hence the title of the book in which Spengler advances this thesis: The Decline of the West. Spengler considers the identication of Arabian Culture his own personal achievement and contribution to historical scholarship.26 Jonas agrees with him:
We owe to him (Spengler) the constitution of an as yet unnamed entity (he calls it Arabian culture) as the one bearer of that plethora of disparate expressions. We thus owe to him also the unication of these expressions beyond all possibilities of material classicationinto a unity which, when truly exploited, offers scholarship a new unied eld of interpretation.27
Part of the reason why this distinctive culture was overlooked, Spengler argues, is that it cast itself in forms inherited from Classical Culture, producing deceptive pseudomorphoses:
In a rock-stratum are embedded crystals of a mineral. Clefts and cracks open up, water lters in, and the crystals are gradually washed out so that in due course only their hollow mould remains. Then come volcanic outbursts which explode the mountain; molten masses pour in, stiffen and crystallize in their turn. But these are not free to do so in their own special forms. They must ll up the spaces that they nd available. Thus there arise distorted forms, crystals whose inner structure contradicts their external shape, stones of one kind presenting the appearance of stones of another kind. The mineralogists call this phenomenon pseudomorphosis.28
The new cultural lava of Arabian Culture that lled the hollow shapes of its predecessors, particularly Classical Culture, was a strange excitement which seized the Near East around the time of Cyrus: The Magian soul was awakened.29 The dening characteristic of this soul was, at one and the same time, the birth of the Self and of a cosmic anxiety (Weltangst) . . . a deathly anxiety.30 The nal time was approaching; he was to come to establish a new order; the present period of evil and suffering was to be overcome by a decisive victory of the good. All but the shallower souls trembled before revelations, miracles, glimpses into the foundation of things. Men now lived and thought only in apocalyptic
26. See Spengler, Decline of the West, 2:42. 27. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 1:74. 28. Spengler, Decline of the West, 2:189, emphasis by the author. 29. Spengler, Decline of the West, 2:212. 30. Spengler, Decline of the West, 2:21213. Spengler dedicates an entire chapter, entitled The Magian Soul, to this topic, with particular attention to the manner in which astrology, metaphysical trichotomy (body-soul-spirit), and the redeemer myth arise within the symbolic world of the Magian Soul; ibid., 23361.
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images.31 The deities of Classical Culture were local.32 The God of Magian religion, by contrast, was one, since he was rooted in a cosmic anxiety detached from all local numina. A particularly pure form of Arabian Culture arose, probably in the rst century b.c.e., in Mandean circles.33 It was from this pure Mandean seedbed that the religion sprang in which Arabian Culture found its springtime, namely, Early Christianity. Spengler works with a then cutting edge of historical critical New Testament scholarship developed in the History of Religions School, particularly Reitzenstein and Bousset:34 Jesus became one of the disciples of a Mandean preacher, John the Baptist. Thenceforth the apocalyptic, and in particular the Mandean, thoughtworld lled his whole being.35 He began to preach the imminent arrival of the Mandean redeemer . . . who himself must be redeemed.36 This proclamation of the Last Things was the exclusive content of his teaching.
Religion is metaphysic and nothing elseCredo quia absurdum. . . . He was no moralizer . . . Moralizing is Nineteenth Century Enlightenment, humane Philistinism. To ascribe social purposes to Jesus is a blasphemy . . . . His teaching was the proclamation, nothing but the proclamation, of those Last Things with whose images he was constantly lled, the dawn of the New Age, the advent of heavenly envoys, the last judgment, a new heaven and a new earth. Any other conception of religion was never in Jesus. . . . Religion is, rst and last, metaphysic, other-worldliness (Jenseitigkeit). . . .37
It is noteworthy that, in his early work on John, Bultmann adopts the same set of hypotheses developed by the History of Religions School.38 As
31. Spengler, Decline of the West, 2:213. This mode of viewing the world, Spengler argues, is rooted in a shared perception of space and time as Cave or Cavern space and time. The idea of the Cave or Cavern, which lies at the root of Arabian culture, implies a limited dark space in which persons are conned, a space penetrated from the outside by mysterious light. Spengler unfolds the idea of Cavern space and time in Decline of the West, 2:23342. 32. Spengler, Decline of the West, 2:200201. Spengler admits that Classical Greek philosophy anticipates the nongeographic, universalist character of Magian religion. Though the latter thought of Athens reached somewhat more general ideas of God and his service, it was philosophy and not religion that it achieved; it appealed only to a few thinkers and had not the slightest effect on the feeling of the nationthat is, the polis (ibid.). 33. See Spengler, Decline of the West, 2:214. 34. See Spengler, Decline of the West, 2:214. 35. Spengler, Decline of the West, 2:214. 36. Spengler, Decline of the West, 2:214. 37. Spengler, Decline of the West, 2:217, emphasis by the author. 38. See Waldstein, Foundations of Bultmanns Work, 13335.
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pointed out above, it was in Bultmanns seminar on John that Jonas rst articulated his concept of Gnosticism. A decisive step occurred when Jesus began to see himself as the Mandean redeemer and decided to reveal this identity in Jerusalem.39 It was as the epitome of Magian religion, as the utterly otherworldly one, that he stood before Pilate, heard Pilates question, What is truth? and located himself with precision, My kingdom is not of this world!a scene appallingly distinct and overwhelming in its symbolism, such as the worlds history had never before and has never since looked at.40 Jesus friends and disciples were annihilated in their inner life (innerlich vernichtet) after the death of their master. The story of his resurrection fell thus into an open, receptive space:
The impression of this (story) on such souls and in such a time can never be more than partially echoed in the sensibilities of late human beings. It meant the actual fulllment of all Apocalyptic of that Magian Springtime the end of the present aeon marked by the ascension of the redeemed Redeemer, the second Adam, the Saoshyant, Enosh, Barnasha, or whatever other name one could attach to Him, into the light-realm of the Father. . . . As the risen one he became for his disciples a gure within Apocalyptic itself and, what was more, he became the most important and most denitive such gure.41
Christianity remains the center of Spenglers further account of Arabian Culture as he traces its urbanization and its pseudomorphosis in Greek concepts, artistic expressions, and institutions to its inner completion and termination under Justinian.42 Apart from the brief description of Mandean religion as the epitome of Arabian Culture, Spengler does not discuss Gnosticism in great detail. Fairly typical of the broad brush with which he paints branches of Gnosticism is the following list, contained
39. Spengler, Decline of the West, 2:215. 40. Spengler, Decline of the West, 2:216. 41. Spengler, Decline of the West, 2:218, emphasis added. Spengler expresses a certain disappointment in this transformation of Jesus the preacher into the preached Jesus: His teachings, as they had owed from his mild and noble naturehis inner feeling of the relation between God and man and of the high meaning of the times, which had been exhaustively comprised in and dened by the one word lovefell into the background and their place was taken by the doctrine about him (ibid., emphasis by the author). 42. Spengler, Decline of the West, 2:21961. Islam, which Spengler calls the Puritanism of the whole group of Early Magian Religions (ibid., 260) . . . is signicant only as a piece of outward religious history. The inner history of the Magian religion ends with Justinians time (ibid., 261).
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in his account of Magian scholasticism, the second phase of the springtime of Arabian Culture:
Early Scholasticism . . . comprises Gnosis (Gnosis) in the widest possible sense, namely, the great vision: the author of John, Valentinus, Bardesanes and Marcion, the Apologists and the earliest Fathers up to Irenaeus and Tertullian, the last Tannaim up to Rabbi Jehuda, the completer of the Mishna, and, in Alexandria, the Neopythagoreans and Hermetics. . . . High Scholasticism begins with Neoplatonism, with Clement and Origen, the rst Amoraim, and the creators of the newer Avesta under Areshir (226241) and Sapor I, and, above all, the Mazdaist high priest Tanvasar.43
The central role played by Christianity in Spenglers account of Arabian Culture is not accidental. Spengler himself explains it as follows:
The incomparable element by which Early Christianity lifts itself beyond all religions of this rich early period is the gure of Jesus. In all the great creations of those years there is nothing which can be set beside it. Tame and empty all the legends and holy adventures of Mithras, Attis, and Osiris must have seemed to anyone reading or listening to the still recent story of Jesus sufferingsthe last journey to Jerusalem, the last anxious supper, the hours of despair in Gethsemane, and the death on the cross. Here was no matter of philosophy. Jesus utterances . . . are those of a child in the midst of an alien, aged, and sick world.44
2.2. Jonas Adaptation of Spengler As one moves from Spengler to Jonas, two striking differences immediately become clear. One of them is a matter of terminology, the other of subject matter. What Spengler calls Arabian Culture shaped by Magian Religion, Jonas calls Gnosticism (Gnosis or, at times, Gnostizismus) shaped by the Spirit of Late Antiquity; and while Spengler turns his attention mainly to Early Christianity as the principal representative of Magian religion, Jonas sidesteps Christianity.45 It is well worth considering carefully the reasons that led Jonas not to discuss Christianity, even though Christianity is one of the primary examples of Gnosticism:
43. Spengler, Decline of the West, 2:250. 44. Spengler, Decline of the West, 2:212. 45. The one exception to Jonas restraint vis--vis Christianity is his study of Origens de Principiis in volume 2 of Gnosis und sptantiker Geist. See Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 2:171223.
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Despite the fact that the literature of the New Testament belongs into this sphere (i.e., of Gnosticism), we wish to complete our investigations essentially without it. We do so, rst, because we do not wish to take upon ourselves the entire burden of the issues specic to it; second, because its special position, both in idea and in fact, does not release it as a mere piece of evidence for something more general as long as one has not independently drawn from the pagan half of the evidence that by which the pagan half can be brought to bear on the Christian half. The application of the results achieved by us outside the New Testament to the New Testament and its historical understanding is a task by itself which we do not set for ourselves.46
As for the two halves of the complete sphere called Gnosticism, the pagan half and the Christian half, the Christian half is perhaps the more important hemisphere of our sphere.47 To make the point unmistakably clear, Jonas classies Early Christianity as a whole, not only particular movements within it, as Gnostic. The Gnostic Spirit of Late Antiquity expresses itself in the New Testament and other Early Christian literature as a whole. Although Jonas chooses not to discuss Early Christianity as an example of Gnosticism, he shares much common ground with Spengler. There is only one disagreement with Spengler which Jonas explicitly mentions: We do not share his principle of a complete causal isolation of the distinct unied Cultures from the universal historical process with its manifold determinations.48 Jonas lists four main achievements which he adopts from Spenglers discussion of Arabian Culture. First: With the morphological intuition of a genius Spengler was the rst to recognize a new organizing principle which expressed itself in the profusion of Oriental/Hellenistic syncretism around the turn of the ages. Earlier research had seen much of this material as late and decadent remnants of Classical Antiquity and Oriental traditions, externally mixed into bastardized forms. Spengler, by contrast, saw a new independent principle which organized this material from within.49 Second: Spengler recognized the universal determinative efcacy of this organizing principle as a genuine total principle, a new existential posture and interpretation of existence (in his terminology: a new cultural Soul)
46. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 1:82, emphasis added. Bultmann was to integrate the Christian half of the Gnostic sphere, particularly in his studies on the Gnostic roots of John. 47. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 1:88. 48. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 1:73. 49. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 1:73.
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which truly dominated the age and which was able to appear in external forms hitherto considered unrelated from an external genealogical point of view.50 Third: By introducing the concept of pseudomorphosis into intellectual history, Spengler was able to grasp the tragic relation between the new organizing principle and powerful old forms, particularly the allpowerful culture of the Greeks from which it had to borrow its conceptual language.51 Fourth: With a sure hand he grasped the eschatological myth of the redeemed Redeemer as the center of (the new cultures) content.52 Jonas adopts Spenglers geographical hypothesis that Arabian Culture originated in the East and penetrated into the West partly disguised in pseudomorphosis. In a radical sense we owe to Spengler the insight that the West does not really count in the origin and the original reality of this new Spirit . . . .53 The literature which Jonas chooses for his rst and fundamental account of Gnosticism is, in fact, the literature Spengler considers the purest expression of the Magian Soul, namely, the Mandean literature. According to Spengler,
United at the root (of Mandean religion) one nds all the features of the great prophetic religions and of the entire treasury of the most profound glimpses and visions which had been collected since then in apocalypses. Of Classical thought and feeling not a breath reached this world at the depths of Magian (religion).54
According to Jonas,
It (the Mandean literature) is the most oriental and popularwhich means, at the same time, the most immediateexpression of the life of the Gnostic soul (gnostischen Seelenlebens). In this (literature) the proper essence of Gnosticism (Eigenwesen der Gnosis) manifests itself in the purest form in which it can possibly appear, in the greatest possible removal of all pseudomorphosis. It is the optimal manifestation of that essence.55
Elaborating Spenglers geographical hypothesis, Jonas argues that the East around the turn of the ages, in sharp contrast to the West, was lled with overowing vitality. All in all, we see the East on the attack and one
50. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 1:7374. 51. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 1:74. 52. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 1:74. 53. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 1:70. 54. Spengler, Decline of the West, 2:214. 55. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 1:95.
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can speak of a great offensive of Eastern humanity, launched with a powerful sense of self.56 In describing the content of this attack, Jonas partly follows Spengler, but uses a new set of concepts developed in the triangle of Jonas, Bultmann, and Heidegger. According to Spengler, the dening feature of the Magian Soul was, at one and the same time, the birth of the Self and of a cosmic anxiety (Weltangst) . . . a deathly anxiety.57 According to Jonas the dening feature is a tremendous existential insecurity (DaseinsUnsicherheit), cosmic anxiety (Welt-Angst), anxiety over the world and the self.58 Projected from this anxiety, the world shone back . . . at the Asian of that period in its terrifying hostility and strangeness.59 To the degree in which it was a sphere of awareness at the disposal of the person, even the self was experienced as the expression of hostile powers and it must be left behind through redemption.60 The agent of this redemption is a transcendent power of escape from, or negation of, the world (jenseitige Macht der Entweltlichung) which is not simply at the disposal of the self, but occurs in a redemptive event.61 The life of the Gnostic soul is thus a life which leads inexorably into nothingness. The existential fear of losing oneself to the world gives rise to compulsive self-annihilation which nds its highest expression in the Gnostic notion of God.
The entire paradox of anxiety unfolds here: tremendous is the anxiety of existence (Dasein) that it might lose itself and fall prey to the cosmos; and tremendous, at the same time, is the compulsion of self-abandonment, of self-annihilation, in order to be rid of oneself, in order to break the bane of violent cosmic annihilation by self-imposed free annihilation: death must lead to life. The substantial principle of this redemptive annihilation of the soul is pneumain the end, viewed in relation to the cosmos as a whole, it is God.62 . . . (T)his means that the Gnostic concept of God is in the rst place, even more so than the Gnostic concept of the world, a nihilist concept: God = the nothingness of the world. However, making something positive out of this negative (concept) in some givenness of transcendence that can be experiencedthis is the goal of all mystical exaltation in Gnosticism (Gnostizismus), in short, the goal of all absolute gnosis theou. God is thus posited negativity.63
56. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 1:72. 57. Spengler, Decline of the West, 2:21213. 58. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 1:143. 59. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 1:144. 60. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 1:145, emphasis by the author. 61. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 1:145. 62. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 1:14546, emphasis by the author. 63. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 1:15051.
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As it arose in the East, Jonas argues, the Gnostic existential posture was the product of powerful vitality, in some cases even of a royal attitude.64 It did not emerge in a social matrix of alienation or oppression, though the surviving evidence is too fragmentary to allow certainty.65 In the West the Gnostic existential posture took on a different political and cultural meaning. In contrast to the East, the West around the turn of the ages was a declining world and, as the new acosmic religion grew into its slow death, it functioned as a powerful expression and reinforcement of political and cultural decay.66 The socially oppressed and marginalized, especially slaves and the poor, who were mere objects of power, were receptive to the Gnostic Spirit because in the new order they became kings, absolute subjects.67 Upper classes were similarly receptive because they had been cut adrift by the destruction of the regional political processes of the polis and the concentration of political power in the hands of Rome. In spelling out this social and cultural meaning of Gnosticism in the West, Jonas deploys motifs familiar from Nietzsches analysis of Christianity.
Phrases such as the slave revolt in morals, ressentiment and declining life will always be justied from a psychological and social point of view as ways of characterizing the sorts of causes at work in the Western world in favor of the new principle of existence. But these sorts of causes were operative, at root, only in the Western world, and they explain its receptivity to the new Eastern ideas. The Western world only received the new Word (and transformed it into its own possibilities); it did not utter it. In its paralysis it was incapable of doing so.68
3. JONAS HERMENEUTIC PRINCIPLES Jonas historical hypothesis on Gnosticism and his hermeneutic principles are closely interrelated. It is when seen in the light of his hermeneutic principles that the religious history of Late Antiquity congures itself as he sees it. And it is in this conguration of history that the hermeneutic principles yield the interpretation of Gnostic texts which he adopts. The two aspects are fully intelligible only as a single organic whole. Jonas formulated his hermeneutic principles in two essays rst published in 1930, ber die hermeneutische Struktur des Dogmas (On the
64. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 1:72. 65. See Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 1:68. 66. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 1:69. 67. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 1:69. 68. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 1:70; compare, for example, the rst essay in Nietzsches Genealogy of Morals.
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Hermeneutic Structure of Dogma) and Zum Problem der Objektivation und ihres Formwandels (On the Problem of Objectivation and its Permutations).69 The two essays complement each other: the rst lays out general principles; the second develops them as they apply to Gnosticism.
3.1. The Hermeneutic Structure of Dogma (1930) In Hermeneutische Struktur des Dogmas, Jonas reects on the meaning of dogmas in general, exemplied in the various dogmas debated between Augustine and his Pelagian opponents. He begins his argument with a denition of dogma.
In their external form dogmas are sentences characterized by the rational structure of declarative (theoretical) subject-predicate sentences and, as such, they set the content of their declaration into the realm of objects (Objektivitten) linked among each other in a comprehensive fabric of logical connections. They are non-dialectical object-sentences. The objects (are) entities and events open to intuition (anschaulich) set in order in a uniformly objective horizon of reality. . . . They belong to a certain kind of rationality, namely, world-conceptuality. . . . (L)ike all objects that are open to intuition and can be univocally (eindeutig) named, these formations of intuition (Anschauungsgebilde) are necessarily open to the grasp of a nondialectic, object-related concept which rationally arrests (xiert) them.70
One should note that in this denition of dogma, Jonas operates with a Neo-Kantian understanding of object-rationality. The two salient features of this understanding are clearly spelled out. First, the objects of the human mind about which statements are made are open to intuition (Anschauung, anschaulich). Second, they are set within a comprehensive fabric of rational connections so as to constitute a rationally organized world of objects.71
69. The rst essay was published as an appendix to Jonas, Augustin und das paulinische Freiheitsproblem, 8089. The second essay was written as the introduction to Jonas dissertation under the direction of Heidegger (completed in 1928). The dissertation was partially published in 1930 as Der Begriff der Gnosis, already as an offprint from the as yet unpublished Gnosis und sptantiker Geist. It appeared substantially unaltered in 1954 as the introduction to Gnosis und sptantiker Geist II. For further details on the publication history of these two essays, see James M. Robinson, Introduction to Hans Jonas, Augustin und das paulinische Freiheitsproblem, 15 n. 16. 70. Hermeneutische Struktur des Dogmas, 8081. 71. Both points are denied by those who give an important place to analogy in the language of metaphysics and theology, e.g., the tradition that goes back to Thomas Aquinas; see, for example, Ralph M. McInerny, Studies in Analogy (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1968); David B. Burrell, Analogy and Philosophical Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973).
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Such an objective world, Jonas continues, is not the primary given. The primary given is, rather, human existence (Dasein) urged on by itself and wishing to project, express and interpret (auslegen) itself.72 Jonas plays here with a fruitful multiplicity of meanings in the German sich auslegen: in its will to interpret itself (sich auslegen), human existence places itself outside itself or projects itself (sich auslegen) as an objective world, thereby expressing or symbolizing itself (sich auslegen) for itself.73 Again, an important Neo-Kantian premise should be noted. There is no pre-existing objective world subsequently discovered by human perception and reason. Rather, the human mind gives rise to the object-world according to the minds own patterns. As the product of such self-objectivation the objective world is not ultimately intelligible in itself. In some of its aspects it is produced according to the pattern of object-rationality and is thus open to scientic analysis, which nds the universal and necessary mathematical laws of nature, and to historical research, which nds a fabric of interdependent beings, causes, events, developments, etc. However, as soon as metaphysical problems are raised, any objective worlds lack of internal intelligibility becomes evident. For example, the attempt to reconcile human free will and divine foreknowledge is a hopeless and fruitless venture.74 Jonas is here echoing Kants thesis that the use of reason for classical metaphysical arguments (e.g., proofs of the existence of God and the immortality of the soul) leads reason to contradictions, to the antinomies of pure reason, that cannot be resolved on the level of those arguments. Reason oversteps its bounds and must be called back to its true purpose.75 What is worse, the preoccupation with problems arising within objectrationality leads human existence away from itself. Having symbolized itself by projecting itself in objectivations, human existence must return through these objectivations to itself in order to interpret itself. In describing the negative aspect of this hermeneutic return or retrieval Jonas uses the concept demythologize in what is the rst published use of a word which came to play such an important role in New Testament scholarship.
All of this springs from an inescapable fundamental structure of Spirit as such. That Spirit interprets itself in objective formulas and symbols, that it
72. Jonas, Hermeneutische Struktur des Dogmas, 81. 73. Compare Hegels play on the triple meaning of aufheben. 74. Jonas, Hermeneutische Struktur des Dogmas, 8283. 75. See Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B 432ff.
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is symbol-oriented (symbolistisch), is both most essential to it and most dangerous for it. In order to come to itself, it follows its own nature and takes this detour through symbols, in whose enticing tangle of problems it tends to lose itself, far from the origin preserved in these symbols, inasmuch as it takes as absolute what is merely representational. It is only in a long reversal of such formation, after traversing the entire detour, that a demythologized consciousness is capable of a conceptual approach to the original phenomena hidden under such disguise.76
It is important to note that the problem of myth brought into focus by Jonas in this text is not the problem of myth as ctional story or fable, a problem that could be overcome by a more responsible and critical form of religious discourse. The problem of myth is equally present in critical metaphysical language. In the essential respect, that of objectivation, myth and dogma are equivalent. The phrase demythologized consciousness is in this respect equivalent to dedogmatized consciousness or, more generally, deobjectivated consciousness.77 What does the interpreter nd once the deceptive screen of objectivity has been pierced? In answering this question, Jonas uses both the language of existentialism (Dasein) and that of Hegels philosophy of history (Geist).
What is found in this return, what is left after the destruction (of the objective aspect) as the existential foundation, need not be understood as the individual-biographical fact of Augustine, for example, or some other author. In the symbolical and rational detachment provided by dogma, the purely symbolic-conceptual formula can be discussed on the level of the strictest theoretical stringency without any existential realization of the original phenomena: a particular author, and even an entire generation, need not have experienced these phenomena. It follows that the task of the hermeneutic return is to nd the real author (den eigentlichen Autor), namely historical existence understood as a totality (das geschichtliche Gesamtdasein) which reached beyond individuals and generations to produce this expression (Auslegung) of itselfof what is most essential to itand preserved itself for an entire epoch of history as the only mode of being which was at that epochs disposal, often perhaps in only latent form or congealed in convention, but always open to being actualized. Only this
76. Jonas, Hermeneutische Struktur des Dogmas, 82, emphasis added. On the pivotal importance of this passage in the history of New Testament scholarship, see Robinson, Introduction to Augustin und das paulinische Freiheitsproblem, 1415. 77. Friedrich Gogarten . . . has shown that the problem of the subject-object schema in the history of culture is the nally decisive background of the debate (on demythologizing) (Robinson, Introduction to Augustin und das paulinische Freiheitsproblem, 19 and n. 25).
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subject of the history of Spirit (geistesgeschichtliches Subjekt) is what philosophical hermeneutics looks for.78
One should particularly note two points in this text. First, what the interpreter nds in the existential interpretation of texts is an existential event or tendency as the ultimate root of the object-world congured in the text. Second, the interpreter nds this existential root in a collective subject, Gesamtdasein or Geist. The mode of being possible for a given historical period (Weise . . . des Seinknnens) is offered by, and therefore also strictly circumscribed by, that periods Spirit.79 The rst aspect of existential interpretation was made famous by Bultmanns interpretation of the New Testament and it tends to be the only aspect of Jonas hermeneutics which is highlighted by New Testament scholars.80 The second aspect is no less important. The reader meets the word Geist already as the last and most important word in the title of Jonas Gnosis und sptantiker Geist.
The theme with which Jonas is fundamentally concerned is the objectivation of Geist: the fact that Geist is realized in history only in a mode of being other than and alien to its own mode of being; the fact that Geist is constituted in a dynamic historical movement passing through various levels (Stufen) and changing forms (Formwandels) of objectivation; the fact that Geist comes to its fulllment only through the dialectical movement of thought which destroys the alien original objective mode of being even while it recovers in a new level of conceptuality that which was ontologically fundamental to the original objectivation. Objectivation is thus the ontological concept which designates being in the mode of expression or manifestation of historical actualization; it is distinct from being in itself or as itself.81
78. Hermeneutische Struktur des Dogmas, 84; cf. Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 1:1213; see Roger A. Johnson, The Origins of Demythologizing: Philosophy and Historiography in the Theology of Rudolph Bultmann, SHR 28 (Leiden: Brill, 1974), 22728. 79. The singular Spirit must not be pressed too far. Jonas sees Plotinus, for example, as a philosopher in whom the Spirit of Classical Antiquity and the Gnostic Spirit interpenetrate. We cannot expect to see Plotinus suddenly as fundamentally Gnostic. His Hellenistic impulse is too strong for that. It is enough to see . . . the interpenetration of two foundational impulsesthe clash is in the end unresolved and irresolvableas the historical destiny (das geschichtlich Schicksalshafte) of this spirit (i.e., Plotinus) (Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 2:4). 80. This is the tendency, for example, of Robinsons introduction to Augustin und das paulinische Freiheitsproblem. It is also the tendency of the rich three-volume collection of essays and discussions on hermeneutical issues raised by Bultmann, Heidegger, and Jonas, New Frontiers in Theology: Discussions among German and American Theologians, ed. James M. Robinson and John B. Cobb, Jr. (New York: Harper & Row, 196367); The Late Heidegger and Theology (1964); The New Hermeneutic (1964); Theology as History (1967). 81. Johnson, Origins of Demythologizing, 216.
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3.2. The Problem of Objectivation and its Permutations (1928) Jonas second hermeneutic essay plays a pivotal role in the two volumes of Gnosis und sptantiker Geist. The rst volume makes its way from Gnostic myths to the underlying Geist and its existential posture or tendency. Yet it reaches the Spirit of Late Antiquity only as that Spirit objectivates itself in Gnostic myth. The second volume shows how the Gnostic Spirit objectivates itself also in other forms, above all in mystical philosophy and ascetic spirituality. The two volumes, Jonas remarks, are separated by an inner threshold or transition implied in the two parts of the title, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist.82 Reection on crossing this threshold between Gnostic myth and the Spirit of Late Antiquity is the task Jonas sets for himself in the introductory essay, On the Problem of Objectivation and its Permutations. An important chronological point should be noted: volume two was the rst volume to be written by Jonas; it is substantially his dissertation written under Heidegger. Volume one came later. In the development of his work, Jonas thus crossed the threshold from volume two to volume one.
. . . (M)y doctoral dissertation, Der Begriff der Gnosis, . . . made only passing references to the whole mythological area of the second century, and concentrated mainly on third and fourth century sptantikes thinking. However, for future publication, I had to write a historical introduction to the dissertation on the mythological Gnosis of the second century, which I more and more realized presented the real esh-and-blood form of what appeared in such a spiritualized conceptually rareed form in the later mystical thinkers who tried to stay as much as possible within the Greek tradition. That introduction, once the dissertation itself lay behind me, grew into the rst volume of Gnosis und sptantiker Geist.83
The order of argument in the actual book Gnosis und sptantiker Geist is the opposite. Jonas crosses the threshold from mythological Gnosticism to mystical philosophy and ascetic practice. He begins his argument by pointing to the result reached in volume one.
The investigation up to this point focused on the mythological material and its result was the elaboration of a foundational myth (Grundmythos) which contains the authentically (eigentlich) Gnostic element. The goal of the investigation was not to return from the complex mythological formations to the heterogeneous mythic materials contained in them, but to THE selfgenerated (autogen) and unitary foundational myth.84
82. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 2:1. 83. Jonas, Retrospective View, 7. 84. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 2:1; emphasis by the author.
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A particularly clear articulation of this foundational myth and the manner of its self-generation from its own existential ground is found at the beginning of the third and nal chapter of Gnosis und sptantiker Geist I.85 The chapter as a whole is dedicated to an analysis of the various Gnostic systems. Before he plunges into the bewildering empirical diversity of these systems, Jonas offers a condensed survey of the self-generation of Gnostic myth. The generative existential principle, the true content of Gnosticism, Jonas recapitulates, is escape from, or negation of, the world (Entweltlichung). Entweltlichung is an eschatological posture which unites in itself a volitional gaze into the future, i.e., futurity (Zuknftigkeit), and a cognitive gaze at the now, i.e., presence (Gegenwart).86 The self wills its own freedom from the world (future Entweltlichung) as it recognizes itself as trapped in the world (present Verweltlichung). The distinctive contribution of Gnostic myth lies in a projection of these two dimensions into the past. How did the selfs entrapment in the world (Verweltlichung as a past event) come about? By answering this question Gnostic myth objectivates Entweltlichung in the form of a story.
If the Gnostic content is Entweltlichung, Gnostic myth is the story of the Verweltlichung of being, a story of the past which can throw light on the given Now and reveal the possibility and meaning of the future as Wiederentweltlichung, return to freedom from the world.87
As the story is told, it accomplishes what it signies. It is the call by which those trapped in the sleep of Verweltlichung achieve the waking consciousness that orients them towards Entweltlichung. The telling of Gnostic myth is thus the turning point of its own story. In explaining the construction of Gnostic myth as story from the unitary principle Entweltlichung, Jonas elaborates a set of seven transitional patterns which he calls schemata.88
85. Chapter Four was added in the third edition (1964) to integrate some of the Nag Hammadi evidence. 86. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 1:258. 87. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 1:258. 88. The concept schema appears to be adapted from Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B176187. In Kant, the transcendental schemata are patterns of transition which allow concrete objects of sensory experience to be constituted as instances of particular concepts of pure reason, e.g., particular substances as instances of the concept substance. In Jonas the schemata are patterns of transition which allow concrete elements of story to be constituted as objectivations of Entweltlichung.
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. . . the distance of the world from God (the schema of distance); the enclosure of the world (the schema of the dwelling-place or cavern); the imprisonment of human beings in the world (the schema far down or here); the experience of being lost (the schema of the labyrinth or of multiplicity); the self which does not belong to the world (the schema of negativity or point-like isolation); God as utterly above the world (the schema high up or outside or there)in addition, orientations of movement implied in all these schemata and constitutive of their unity: fall, sinking, loss of the origin and the reversal of all these in an inverse process (the schema of movement down and up or of becoming distant and returning).89
The seven schemata in this list form a system that tends toward what Jonas calls the foundational Gnostic myth. Any attempt to tell the foundational myth moves, of course, beyond the foundation into an actual specimen of Gnostic myth. The foundational myth can only be grasped in its transitional role from the system of schemata to a specimen of Gnostic myth. Having recapitulated the results reached by Gnosis und sptantiker Geist I, the essay Zum Problem der Objektivation und ihres Formwandels takes four steps to cross the threshold from the Gnostic Spirit as it objectivates itself in myth to the same Spirit as it objectivates itself in mystical philosophy and ascetic spirituality. In taking these four steps Jonas guides his reection by a normative question: Do human beings truly come to understand their existential posture through its objectivations, thus reaching an authentic mode of existence? Or do they, on the contrary, lose themselves in the realm of the objective, thus falling into an inauthentic mode of existence?90 In answering this normative question Jonas concludes that the objectivations of the Spirit of Late Antiquity in mystical philosophy and ascetic spirituality are more radically and authentically Gnostic than its objectivations in Gnostic myth. 1. General Reection on Myth as a Form of Objectivation. Human existence, Jonas argues in the rst step, necessarily objectivates itself in a world and it does so, at least in part, according to the patterns of object-rationality. In telling myths, however, human subjectivity comes into play once again by resubjectifying this objective world. According to
89. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 1:259. This system of schemata resembles Spenglers constructive principle of Arabian culture, the sense of space as cave or cavern. Jonas account is considerably more sophisticated. 90. For the rst explicit formulation of this alternative, see Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 2:13.
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the patterns of object-rationality, there are no uncanny or terrifying beings in the world: there are only material objects in causal interaction as grasped by natural science; fear and terror are exclusively matters of the human subject.91 In constructing uncanny or terrifying objects, myth resubjectivizes the objective world.92 The normative question can be posed here. Does human existence truly understand itself when it meets itself in this objective and resubjectivized manner in a mythic world? Existential movements or processes of which human beings are dimly aware are transferred to the objective world before they are known in their own existential character. The original existential wellsprings are thus not fully retrieved, but are covered by a layer of alienation (berfremdung).
Since these (i.e., objects) are in the most comprehensive ontological sense that which is in its very nature foreign to human existence (das wesenhaft Daseinsfremde), we call this transfer (of the subjective into a world) berfremdung.93
2. Gnostic Myth as Objectivation. The problem of berfremdung is particularly acute in the case of Gnostic myth. Gnostics are aware of their disastrous bondage to their world. Yet, by objectifying this awareness in myths, they fall again into bondage to a world, their own mythic world.
Absorption into a world (Verweltlichung) of the tendency of escape from the world (Entweltlichungstendenz) is a paradox; and yet, it is a true fact of human existence.94
3. The Concepts of Gnosis. In the remaining two steps of his argument, Jonas unfolds the implications of the second point by listing various forms of Gnosis to which the existential principle of Entweltlichung gave rise in Late Antiquity. The most immediate form of Gnosis is that claimed by Gnostic myth as a story which explains the process of Ver91. Jonas roots in Neo-Kantian understandings of object-rationality are particularly clear at this point. Here lies the sharpest contrast to his later concern to develop a philosophy of living organisms. 92. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 2:5 and n. 1. While the objectivation of human existence according to patterns of object-rationality is an ontological feature of human existence, rooted in the inalienable structure of the subject, resubjectifying the world is merely an ontic process, contingent on particular circumstances. 93. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 2:9. 94. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 2:13.
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weltlichung and points in the direction of Entweltlichung.95 A second and more specic concept of Gnosis is already implicit in the rst. The Gnosis which denes Gnosticism is saving Gnosis. Having committed its concern for Entweltlichung to an objective world narrated in myth, the Gnostics existence now allows itself to be shaped by the objects represented by this myth. The normative question arises again:
For the structure of any possible action of human existence it is not a matter of indifference whether, in its own view, it moves within a system of such objects and sets them in effective motion in relation to itself or whether its action is guided by a true understanding in which human existence grasps itself.96
4. The Four Practical Concepts of Gnosis. In the fourth and last step of his argument, Jonas divides the more specic sense of Gnosis, namely, saving or praxis-oriented knowledge, into four kinds. And he arranges the four kinds in two pairs which are hierarchically set off against each other by the normative criterion of existential authenticity. (i) The Gnosis which denes Gnosticism can be understood as technicalinstrumental knowledge which enables the knower to nd the path through the heavenly spheres, to utter the appropriate passwords at the appropriate time, etc.97 (ii) Gnosis can be understood as sacramental practice or any other form of knowledge able to set objective causes in motion so as to bring the Gnostic toward the eschaton of Entweltlichung.98 When viewed in the light of the criterion of authenticity, these two forms of Gnosis can be seen as defective. Human existence abandons itself to the objectivations of myth instead of truly understanding itself. Entweltlichung succumbs to Verweltlichung. There are two forms of Gnosis, however, in which the subject to some degree reclaims the existential possibilities which it gave to its objective mythic world. These two forms of Gnosis (iii and iv) are the subject matter of Gnosis und sptantiker Geist II. (iii) The human self can anticipate the eschaton of its Entweltlichung in a form of Gnosis which consists in the experience of mystical ecstasy.
The negative character which allows this (inner state of the subject) to be counted as the eschaton is the momentary real extinction for the subject of
95. See Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 2:1416. 96. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 2:18. 97. See Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 2:1920. 98. See Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 2:2021.
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the world and all that is cosmic (des Welthaften). In positive terms, owing to its character as an experience at the outermost limit of existence, it is interpreted as immediate gnosis theou, i.e., as immediate being with God, which cancels the creaturely distance and lets the self itself be divine (Selber-Gttlichsein). . . . The existential analysis and the conceptual selfunderstanding of this form of Gnosticism is one of the two great themes of our investigations below.99
(iv) A more permanent but gradual reclaiming of the eschaton from its mythic objectivation occurs in ascetic practice, in the increasing purication of the subject from its entanglement in the world. Gnostic myth tells the tale of a fall of spiritual being through various layers into the nal entrapment of matter; and it tells of an ascent in which the layers of entrapment are shed, one by one. In ascetic practice, the existential posture that stands behind this tale is reclaimed as a possibility of the subject, as a true Gnosis of life.
The objective removal of parts of the soul in (the ascent through) the cosmic spheres is replaced by an existentially realized cancellation of various functions of entanglement in the worlda progressively reduced realization of existence in the world. We nd here a type of virtue (arete) which forms a structural whole with the culminations (of mystical ecstasy). This ascetic or cathartic concept of virtue, which has Gnosis as its goal, is the other main theme of our investigations below.100
Both of these forms of Gnosticism developed their own conceptual account of themselves in the metaphysical systems of Middle- and NeoPlatonism and in the teachings of ascetic spirituality. These conceptual accounts do not, as such, depend upon Gnostic myth. Conceptual mystical philosophy and Gnostic myth do not need to know anything of each other.101 Nevertheless, it is appropriate to classify mystical philosophy and ascetic spirituality as forms of Gnosticism. Jonas offers three arguments for this conclusion. First, mystical philosophy and ascetic spirituality arise from the same existential principle which lies at the heart of all Gnostic myth, Entweltlichung. Second, they presuppose the foundational Gnostic myth as a necessary component in the development of their own concepts, even though they
99. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 2:21. 100. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 2:22. 101. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 2:22.
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do not unfold the foundational myth in the form of story.102 In the metaphysical schema of emanation and decline we rediscover Gnostic myth in depersonalized and conceptualized (logisierter) form.103 Third, they are even more essentially and properly Gnostic than mythological Gnosticism because they reclaim the existential principle of Entweltlichung from the objectivation of myth.104 Jonas adds a caveat at the very end of his argument. The sphere of the objective continues to dominate even the two purer forms of Gnosticism. Not only do they depend upon the foundational Gnostic myth in articulating their conceptual self-understanding. In more subtle ways than myth, they too succumb to Verweltlichung. Mystical philosophy does so by anticipating Entweltlichung in the psychological state of ecstasy. As a psychological state, such ecstasy is an objective datum of the world and thus falls short of radical Entweltlichung. Ascetic spirituality does so by positing a gradual ascent of logically ordered detachments with a permanent Self conceived as the substratum of its own progress, again an objectivation which absorbs the Self into a world. Both forms of Gnosticism thus fall into reifying the human existential movement (Verdinglichung der Daseinsbewegung).105 Neither of them nds the way back to the direct understanding of freedom from the world (Entweltlichung) which the existentialism of Bultmann and Heidegger as well as their student and colleague Jonas requires. 4. OVERVIEW This nal caveat shows that Jonas approach to Gnostic texts is very much an engaged approach in which his own early existentialist philosophical position functions as a criterion for Sachkritik. Gnosticism, Jonas observes, brought an unheard-of new orientation which we have inherited through various intermediaries.106 We owe to Gnosticism . . . the new discovery of the Self which showed the Selfs incommensurability with all world-nature. . . . The Self is discovered through a break with the world.107 In this perspective one can see what Gnosticism (der
102. See Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 2:2223. 103. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 2:3. 104. See Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 2:22. 105. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 2:23. 106. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 1:172, emphasis added. 107. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 1:170, emphasis added.
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Gnostizismus) truly is, namely, a cosmic turning-point of the Spirit (eine Weltwende des Geistes).108 The true heir of this cosmic turning point who completes what Gnosticism began is existential philosophy. It is only in existential philosophy that the nal breakthrough to freedom from the world, to an authentic self-understanding of human existence, is achieved. Two decades after the publication of Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, Jonas was to unfold this close connection between his (former) existential philosophy and his interpretation of Gnosticism.109 Jonas hermeneutic principles converge on a single task, namely, retrieving the self-understanding of human existence from its objectivations. The self-understanding characteristic of Gnosticism is the tendency of Entweltlichung, acosmism, negation of the world, liberation from the world, escape from the world. This self-understanding is situated at such a depth in human existence that it affects all perception of the Self and all perception of the world from the very roots of consciousness to the last details. Jonas nds this self-understanding most clearly objectivated in texts which scholarship before him classied as Gnostic. Yet, given the depth at which he sees the Gnostic self-understanding situated in human beings, it is not surprising that he extends the term Gnostic to phenomena not previously classied as Gnostic in the scholarly mainstream, such as the whole of Early Christianity with all its heresies and the philosophy of Plotinus. This extension of Gnostic is aided by Jonas Neo-Hegelian understanding of Spirit and its role in world history. The ultimate true subject of existential self-understanding is a transindividual and transgenerational Spirit. This Spirit extends its inuence over individuals and generations by providing for them the particular mode of selfunderstanding open to them. There is a multiplicity of such Spirits and they partly overlap or interpenetrate, as the Spirit of Greek Antiquity and the Gnostic Spirit interpenetrate in Plotinus. Nevertheless, large blocks of culture can be distinguished by the Spirits that are operative in them. Here lies the point of convergence between Jonas and Spengler, a convergence due to their shared roots in German Idealism: Jonas in Hegel, Spengler in Schelling. In this way Jonas historical hypothesis of Gnosticism as the Spirit of Late Antiquity and his hermeneutic principle of retrieving that Spirits existential self-understanding form an organic whole. It is when seen in
108. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 1:171, emphasis added. 109. Jonas, Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism, 21134; the biographical situation of this essay is discussed in Jonas, Retrospective View, 1315.
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the light of Jonas existential interpretation that the religious history of Late Antiquity congures itself as the history of the Gnostic Spirit. And it is in this conguration of religious history that Gnostic texts yield Jonas understanding of them as privileged windows into the heart of the Spirit of Late Antiquity. Jonas construct Gnosticism came to play an important role in New Testament studies, particularly in the Bultmann school. In his foreword to the rst volume of Gnosis und sptantiker Geist Bultmann writes,
For years I have been dedicating a large part of my work to the study of Gnosticism. There is not one among the investigations in this eldand it is well known that there are excellent onesfrom which I have learned as much for a true understanding of Gnosticism as a phenomenon of intellectual history. In fact, it was here that the signicance of Gnosticism was for the rst time disclosed to me in its full extent. Although the work stands in the continuity of research, it is here, it seems to me, that the place of Gnosticism in the history of Late Antiquity has truly been recognized for the rst time. It becomes clear what signicance Gnosticism had in the history of Late Antiquity, in the shift of the Wests understanding of the world from Antiquity to Christianity.110
Precisely because it has been so formative, Jonas work can neither be taken for granted nor ignored, but must be critically reappropriated as the evidence from Nag Hammadi is analyzed. What Schenke wrote in 1959 is even truer today:
Works like Jonas are typical for the end of a period of research. And we, who stand at the beginning of a new epoch of research on Gnosticism in which everything has become uid again, in which old problems await fresh examination and a multitude of new problems come into view, do well to let the content and ideas of Jonas book pass before our eyes and to raise the question which of his thoughts we must adopt as inalienable insights in the new phase of research and which we are unable to accept.111
5. TOWARDS A CRITIQUE The reception of Jonas construct Gnosticism has been selective in two main respects. First, scholars of Late Antiquity have tended to see his construct only in the literature discussed in the rst volume of Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, not in the whole of Jonas Late Antiquity, which is identical with Spenglers Arabian Culture. In particular, with the
110. Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist, 1:vi, emphasis added 111. Schenke, Review of Hans Jonas, Gnosis und sptantiker Geist I, 814.
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exception of the Bultmann school, they have not applied Jonas concept of Gnosticism to Early Christianity as a whole. Second, again with the exception of the Bultmann school, they have tended to mute the intense mirroring between historiography and existential philosophy characteristic of Jonas work. These two implicit criticisms shake the two main pillars on which Jonas construct rests. Yet a more radical critique is necessary. Jonas theses are fascinating in their insightful soaring above the details of earth. But they tend to misrepresent the actual history suggested by the texts from Nag Hammadi. In this respect there is surely much merit in Williams plea for dismantling the category Gnosticism as inherited from Jonas. Williams summarizes a widely held version of Jonas Gnosticism as follows,
. . . we are told that gnostic demiurgical myths can be distinguished from others because gnostics had an attitude. They had an attitude of protest or of revolt, an anticosmic attitude. This attitude allegedly showed up in the way gnostics treated scripture (they are alleged to have reversed all its values), viewed the material cosmos (they supposedly rejected it), took an interest in society at large (they didnt, we are told), felt about their own bodies (they hated them). These revolutionaries are supposed to have lacked any serious ethical concern, and to have been driven instead by their attitude toward their cosmic environment to one of two characteristically gnostic forms of behavior: fanatical ascetic renunciation of sex and other bodily comforts and pleasures, or the exact opposite, unbridled debauchery and lawbreaking. Gnostics, it is asserted, had no worries about their own ultimate salvation, since they understood themselves to be automatically saved because of their inner divine nature. With salvation predetermined for them because of their nature, ethics were irrelevant.112
All seven points listed in this sketch of Gnosticism turn out to be false or at least problematic when one attempts to apply them to what is surely one of the most important Gnostic texts, the Apocryphon of John (AJ).113 (1) Anti-cosmic attitude: The AJ is decidedly not shaped by an anticosmic attitude in Jonas sense. Quite to the contrary, it is pervaded by a distinctly cosmic piety in which a well-ordered Hellenistic Jewish heavenly
112. Williams, Rethinking Gnosticism, 45. 113. The text of the AJ is cited by synopsis double-page and line number in Michael Waldstein and Frederik Wisse, The Apocryphon of John: Synopsis of Nag Hammadi Codices II,1; III,1; and IV,1 with BG 8502,2, NHMS 33 (Leiden: Brill, 1995).
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court, peopled by an orderly gradation of Middle-Platonic hypostases engaged in Jewish liturgical acts of glorication, represents the apex of life.114 It is important to insist on this point: the most fundamental element of Jonas construct Gnosticism on which all other aspects of this construct depend, namely Entweltlichung, is not veried in the AJ. (2) Reversal of Jewish Scripture: In its rereading Genesis 17, the AJ presupposes that Genesis is inspired by the God of Israel, i.e., by the demiurge Yaldabaoth. It is the book in which the demiurge himself tells through Moses what he himself did in creating the world, just as he also speaks through the prophet Isaiah (AJ 59.19). Since he is the creator, his version of the creation story is illuminating and even authoritative; but since he is an evil and partly ignorant creator, his version is incomplete and at times deceptive. From the perspective of higher knowledge, the AJ completes the account and clears up deceptions, Not as Moses said . . . (see AJ 35.35, 59.13, 61.2, 76.16). In its overall thrust, the AJ is not simply anti-Jewish, but preserves many distinctive features of Jewish religious traditions. (3) Rejection of the material cosmos: The AJs material cosmos is better than its creator. Without realizing it, Yaldabaoth patterned his world after the beautiful astronomical system of the upper world of light (see AJ 27.1, 8, 33.15, 18). Although matter as such is evil, the material cosmos mirrors a higher beauty. (4) Lack of interest in surrounding society: One of the aims of the intellectuals behind the AJ was probably to reduce tension with their Middle-Platonic intellectual milieu. At any rate, the metaphysics of the AJ moves in the mainstream of Middle Platonism. (5) Hatred of the body: The shape of the human body is divine, although its substance is evil (see AJ 37.1338.19). (6) Ethical indifference: Salvation depends both on the spirit of life and on good works (see AJ 68.173.2). (7) Elitist in-group assurance of salvation by nature: All human beings have the spirit of life in them and can be saved (see AJ 70.7). There is no in-group. The phrase race of Seth is equivalent to humanity kat exochen. Salvation can be lost by apostasy from knowledge (see AJ 73.314).
114. See Michael Waldstein, The Primal Triad in the Apocryphon of John, in John D. Turner and Anne McGuire, eds., The Nag Hammadi Library After Fifty Years: Proceedings of the 1995 Society of Biblical Literature Commemoration (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 15487.
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Close analysis shows that the Apocryphon of John is not an expression of a broad Spirit of Late Antiquity characterized by Entweltlichung. It is a very particular and in many respects idiosyncratic eddy in the broad stream of Hellenistic Judaism.115 Michael Waldstein is President and Professor of New Testament at the International Theological Institute, Gaming, Austria
115. See Waldstein, Primal Triad in the Apocryphon of John, esp. 17887.

Hans Jonas&#39; Construct Gnosticism Analysis and Critique

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WALDSTEIN/HANS JONAS CONSTRUCT GNOSTICISM