Gnosis and Modernity – a Postwar German Intellectual Debate on Secularisation, Religion and ‘Overcoming’ the Past

Abstract

This paper aims to formulate a topic that combines the interests of four German thinkers (Blumenberg, Jonas, Scholem and Voegelin) after World War II, despite their different disciplines (philosophy, political theory, mysticism, and the history of ideas). The severe moral crisis that followed the war was the subject they discussed in the context of the German intellectual tradition by employing the concept of Gnosis. This paper adopts a method by which it presents the intellectual context of the issue (the German intellectual context that has, since the end of the nineteenth century, been engaged in the crisis of German culture which is associated with questioning the Enlightenment and modernity, and the concept of Gnosis), and the post-war political context. The paper presents the arguments of the four scholars in a way that takes into account their differences and the purpose of the paper as well. The paper concludes that discussing the moral crisis that followed the war, through the concept of Gnosis and the German cultural background, is what united them for the trial of modernity. Voegelin denounced modernity, Blumenberg defended it, even exonerated it, and both Jonas and Scholem sought to save it. This, unusually, confirms that a religious element, the Gnosis, still exists within secular modernity.