While the project never came to fruition, its themes  were prominent in a course, The History of Heresy, that Taubes taught at Harvard in the autumn of 1954. The opening lecture of the course, “The Gnostic Idea of Man,” was transcribed and published in a student journal, Cambridge Review. There, Taubes laid out the notion of a community of  those alienated from the powers that be. “In the Gnostic perspective the natural order of  things was demonized and satanized, and the powers and principalities of the world, the archontes became the representation of evil. . . . A new basis for community arose in the Gnostic frame, a new intimacy appeared: men are  brothers,  because they are all alien to the world. . . . The Gnostic attitude with its image of man and mankind permeated Christianity. Paul’s image of man is meaningful only through the general tenets of the Gnostic myth of the fall of the original Man.”

[In the same period] Taubes argued that democracy flourished not in the orthodox tradition of Christian religions but among the mystical heretics and sectarians of the  Middle Ages who renounced the Roman Catholic system of hierarchy, attacked the feudal order of medieval society, and tried to penetrate the entire population with the “egalitarian” message of the Gospel. The heretical sects stressed the equality of church members and insisted that elders

and preachers should be elected by the local congregations. The “religious democracies” which came to birth in England in the seventeenth  century felt themselves “blessed communities” in the sense that each individual was ennobled through his fellowship with kindred minds, and this same spirit carried over to some degree into the political democracies which grew out of the religious congregations. The democratic principle of church organization which the Anabaptists were the first to put into practice and which came to the fore again in the sects of the English Commonwealth became in the course of time the basic principle of English and American democracy.

 These egalitarian movements, Taubes argued, had their roots in Judaism and Christianity:

The principle of congregational association among men in the religious and political realms has a venerable tradition of its own: it is foreshadowed in the message of the Hebrew prophets and in the theology of Paul which prepared the way for a universal “catholic” church recognizing no barrier between Jew and Greek, slave and master. . . .  Paul established the religious equality of men “in Christ” but defended the status quo of political in equality in the frame of the Roman Empire. . . .  The entire problem of Christian history turns around the fulfillment of the Christian idea of man in the temporal realm. . . . It is a cardinal point of all medieval and modern  Free Spirits that the Christian image of man can only be realized and materialized by abandoning the theistic frame of reference— the idea of divine sovereignty, the concept of a divine “Kingship”—this led to the philosophers and ideologists of the French and American revolutions who tried to establish the heavenly city on earth.

[…] In 1957, an English historian, Norman Cohn, published The Pursuit of the Millennium, an influential study of the tradition of revolutionary millenarianism and mystical anarchism as it developed in Western Europe, stretching back to the Bible but focused on the eleventh to sixteenth centuries, and including a detailed study of the heresy of the “ Free Spirit.” The book was a sober history, learned and entirely lacking in the radical pathos characteristic of Taubes’s Abendländische Eschatologie or his history of heresy project. Cohn suggested that  these religious movements “can be seen in retrospect to bear a startling resemblance to the  great totalitarian movements of our own day.” But Cohn, unlike Taubes, characterized these movements as embracing “phantasies” of revolutionary eschatology. In short, what for Taubes  were harbingers of modern radicalism  were, for Cohn, precursors of modern totalitarianism.

[…] For Taubes, Gnosticism represented the revolutionary potential of religion, which lived on beyond its confessional expressions.

Jerry Z. Muller, Jacob Taubes: Professor of Apocalypse