A seminal influence on Taubes’s doctoral dissertation was a book published in 1934 by Hans Jonas, Gnosticism and the Spirit of Late Antiquity (Gnosis und Spätantiker Geist). Jonas too had been a student of Martin Heidegger, and brought certain Heideggerian modes of analysis to bear in his work on Gnosticism. The term had a curious history and a variety of meanings (which, again, made it grist for endless debate). “Gnosis” is Greek for “knowledge,” and denoted some secret or esoteric knowledge about the world. Gnosticism turned the traditional Jewish notion of a providential creation on its head. The world as most of us know it, the Gnostics insisted, is indeed a creation: but it is a world of evil created by an evil deity. The possibility of a better world was open to those who recognized the current one as saturated with evil. In the Christian tradition, Gnosticism was regarded as a heresy, dating back to the second century. Indeed, it was regarded as so heretical that its literary works  were destroyed, so that much that was known about Gnosticism could be gleaned only from the attacks on it by Christian theologians, such as Irenaeus’s Against Heresies (c. 180). In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was an explosion of scholarship on Gnosticism. Scholars disagreed as to whether it arose in the Greek world or in Persia, nor did they agree on the extent to which parts of the Christian Gospels reflected Gnostic influences.

Jonas argued that Gnosticism arose in a number of societies around the ancient Mediterranean at about the same time, and that it did so  because  those societies faced a common experience that made Gnostic myths and doctrines so appealing. His main innovation was to present what he called a phenomenological account of Gnosticism, that is, an account that sought to recover the feelings, perceptions, and fundamental attitude  toward the world (Daseinshaltung) of the adherents of Gnostic doctrines. Not only did Jonas try to recapture Gnosticism using Heideggerian categories, his description of the Gnostic attitude bore a striking resemblance to elements of Heidegger’s own view of the world, as expressed in his book Being and Time. Since, for the Gnostics, the world was evil and the creation of an evil deity, their fundamental experience (Urerlebnis or Grunderlebnis) was of being aliens in the world, of loneliness, anxiety, of not understanding the world and not being understood by it. The Gnostic also felt that without proper awareness, he could fall prey to forgetting his essential alienness, becoming assimilated into the world of evil, and alienated from his real origins, which lay in a better, transcendent realm. The first step  toward real wisdom, the Gnostics believed, was to recognize one’s own alienness, which was a sign of superiority. That went together with a longing (Heimweh) for a higher, transcendent world.

Gnosticism, Jonas wrote, was a revolutionary doctrine: not in the sense that it intended to overthrow the existing order of society and replace it with another, but in the sense of a wholesale devaluation of the world as it is, and its replacement by a counterworld, through an alternative interpretation of reality. God—the real God, not the gods embraced by society—is defined negatively, as entirely beyond this world, as an unknown God from whom redemption will come. The result, Jonas wrote, is a sort of “cosmic nihilism” (kosmische Nihilismus), and allegiance to a deity who is a “Nothing” (Nichts), and a way of life that paradoxically derives its meaning through negation. According to that interpretation,  those possessed with a consciousness of the true spirit (pneuma) were able to break  free of existing society and its norms. That resulted, at least in the first instance, in moral anarchism and libertinism, before possibly leading to new forms of self-d enial (asceticism), or of religious community. Based on a purportedly higher knowledge, Gnosticism led to a disdain for the world and its “wisdom.” The pneumatics, in their own eyes at least, formed a privileged aristocracy, a new h uman type free of  the obligations and standards of existing society. Indeed, the unrestrained use of this freedom was a positive injunction, leading to a sanctification of sacrilege. The pneumatic, as Jonas characterized him, glories in demonstrating his distinction from the rest of society through his actions. Libertinism, in its deliberate flouting of social conventions, is regarded as a sort of declaration of war against the world as it exists.

Jerry Z. Muller, Jacob Taubes: Professor of Apocalypse