Gnostic Modernity

We live in a gnostic age, and thus an age inhospitable to human being. Such is the claim of the German philosopher Hans Jonas. Jonas’s study of gnosticism eventually led him to become a philosopher of modern science, its implicit ontology, and the effects it has on the way we view ourselves, the world, and the relationship between the two. According to Jonas, gnosticism is not limited to what we usually think of as the Christian heresy prominent in late antiquity, but is an entire worldview built on the belief that the world in which we live is not actually good, true, or beautiful—that is to say, is not ultimately real—and thus the really real must be accessed through a secret knowledge (gnosis) available to only a select few. Jonas believes that the modern era shares the same ontology, and that this ontology is a threat to what is truly human.

A child of the twentieth century (1903-1993), Jonas was a German Jew, so it might be easy to understand why he thought the reigning modern ontology fundamentally inhospitable to human being. It would be a mistake, however, to ascribe any sentimentalism or even reactionism to Jonas’s thought, as his interrogation of any worldview or philosophy boils down to one main question: is this human? Jonas’s answer for both gnosticism and the ontology hidden within science as it is practiced today is a resounding “no.” Both are premised upon a profound suspicion of the world itself, leading to the impulse either to try and leave the world behind altogether, or, as is the case in modernity, to reshape it according to what gnostic ideology thinks it should be.

The gnosticism of early Christianity comes in many forms, but all share one dual doctrine: (1) one must have secret knowledge in order to gain salvation (or whatever one calls access to transcendence), and (2) a horror of material being. The latter is necessary to the former, for if transcendent knowledge were somehow revealed in and through material being, that knowledge would in principle be accessible to everyone. The vilification of matter is crucial to gnostic schemata because matter is, in a certain sense, the great equalizer of our world: everyone comes from dust and will eventually return to it. Gnosticism abhors such equalization, for it founds itself on secret access to transcendence. Thus, gnosticism imagines a world in which only the enlightened few really matter and the uninitiated are expendable, and tries to denigrate the world through complex mythologies and rituals. Gnosticism not only abhors the world and most people in it, it even abhors the humanity of the chosen, as its entire purpose is to help those select few shed their corporeal tomb—that is to say, their very humanity.

Han Jonas at his desk.

It should be noted here that Hans Jonas brings a unique perspective to the discussion of gnosticism, as he himself is not Christian. His criticism of gnosticism is not that it is anti-Christian (though it is absolutely that), but that it is anti-human.

So too with the ontology hidden within modern science. It may seem strange to accuse modern science, with its stated goals of being for, in the words of Francis Bacon, “the use and benefit of men,” of sharing gnosticism’s distaste for the world and the people in it. To accuse modern science of abhorring matter might seem particularly ridiculous. Isn’t modern science concerned only with matter, such that it is often charged with either ideological or functional materialism? But Jonas demonstrates that materialism is in a certain sense a horror of matter itself because it tries to treat material being as that which it is in fact not: dead stuff. In all ages before modernity, our primary hermeneutical category for the world was life. “Life,” writes Jonas in The Phenomenon of Life (1966), was to man “everywhere, and being the same as being alive.” In other words, life was our fundamental category for understanding the world, and thus understanding material being. Material being was never understood as just matter, but rather as yearning to be taken up into what was fully alive—that is to say, material being’s telos was human being, and matter was beheld in and through this lens: being’s desire to be alive.

This changes with early modern science: material being becomes “mere matter,” because that which has no intrinsic telos is easier to control than a living organism, as anyone who has interacted with a toddler, a puppy, or even a houseplant knows. Modern science’s stated goal is not to know the world as it is, but to reshape the world according to what its practitioners think it should be, and more importantly, do. As Bacon writes in the preface to The New Organon, the goal of the new science is “to conquer nature by action.” Achieving this goal requires treating everything in the world as if it were dumb stuff to be manipulated to the practitioner’s ends. “What the general nature of world is,” Jonas writes in The Phenomenon of Life, “has been decided in advance: mere matter in space.” But there is one phenomenon in the world which resists what Jonas calls this pervasive, if hidden, “ontological dominance of death”: the phenomenon of life.

Perhaps the reader will notice that as I have described it, modern science looks very much like how one would describe technology or the technological impulse. This is no accident, for Jonas understands technology to be the implicit ontology of modern science. In his essay “Seventeenth Century and After: The Meaning of the Scientific and Technological Revolution,” he says that the “technological call of the new . . . [science] is a twofold one of physical feasibility and metaphysical admissibility.” Technology has been the implicit ontology of modern science from its inception because modern science has always sought to make the world into something useful. But to accomplish this, one must ignore that the things of this world have their own telos, their own natures—that is to say, that this world and everything in it is alive. Indeed, it is in biology—ostensibly the science of life, βιος—where technology’s inherent violence becomes most apparent. It is difficult to ignore the attempted manipulation of life, especially human life, into that which it is not by nature: the result is often grotesque and often ends in the telos of a gnostic ontology—that is, it often ends in death.

What we face in the technological ontology of modern science, writes Jonas, is “the metaphysical neutralizing of man.” Human being is no longer the telos of being itself—which includes the material—rather, human being is now an outlier that must be brought in line with the reigning ontology: death. Both ancient and modern gnosticism abhor the world. The former wishes to escape from it, the latter wishes to change the world—and everything in it, including man—into something it can control. Neither wishes to know the world as it is in itself.

It is of course true that technology has brought us certain miracles—in medicine, agriculture, etc.—but so long as the ontology of death stands at the center of our cultural advancements, we will remain in a gnostic age, an anti-human age.

Jonas’s claim is rather shocking at first, but thinking about our current situation, is it really so difficult to believe modernity is gnostic? Technology lies at the foundation of the industrialization and globalization that has made this world almost unlivable in some areas. We have made our soil infertile, polluted our air and water—this is to say nothing of the violence man commits against himself in acts such as abortion, war, and genocide. All in the name of control, all in the name of making the world “a better place.”

Here’s the thing: despite the current ontological dominance of death, we still live in a world teeming with life. The ontology of the real—that is, the actual metaphysical structure of the world—is still actually hospitable to humanity. And what’s more, humanity—every single one of us—has access to this real ontology. Material being is not the enemy but rather that which opens the true, good, and beautiful for us. Man belongs to the world, and the world belongs to man. Jonas pushes us to have an ontology that lives up to that truth.

Rachel M. Coleman is the Edith Stein Fellow in Metaphysics at the Cultura Initiative in Washington, DC. She also occasionally blogs about pop culture here.