The Price of Progress is the Death of the Spirit
“The spiritual strength of the soul that in Christianity was devoted to the sanctification of life could now be diverted into the more appealing, more tangible, and, above all, so much easier creation of the terrestrial paradise. Civilizational action became … a divertissement that demonically absorbed into itself the eternal destiny of man and substituted for the life of the spirit. Nietzsche most tersely expressed the nature of this demonic diversion when he raised the question why anyone should live in the embarrassing condition of a being in need of the love and grace of God. ‘Love yourself through grace’ was his solution — ‘then you are no longer in need of your God, and you can act the whole drama of Fall and Redemption to its end in yourself.’ And how can this miracle be achieved, this miracle of self-salvation, and how this redemption by extending grace to yourself? The great historical answer was given by the successive types of gnostic action that have made modern civilization what it is. The miracle was worked successively through the literary and artistic achievement that secured the immortality of fame for the humanistic intellectual, through the discipline and economic success that certified salvation to the Puritan saint, through the civilizational contributions of the liberals and Progressives, and, finally, through the revolutionary action that will establish the Communist or some other gnostic millennium. …
“The historical result [of the gnostic idea of self-salvation through progress] was stupendous. … On this apocalyptic spectacle, however, falls a shadow …. [W]hat should in this order of things become of men who would rather follow God [than the priests of self-salvation]? …
“The death of the spirit is the price of progress. … The more fervently all human energies are thrown into the great enterprise of salvation through world-immanent action, the farther the human beings who engage in this enterprise move away from the life of the spirit. And since the life of the spirit is the source of order in man and society, the very success of a gnostic civilization is the cause of its decline.
“A civilization can, indeed, advance and decline at the same time — but not forever. There is a limit toward which this ambiguous process moves; the limit is reached when an activist sect that represents the gnostic truth organizes the civilization into an empire under its rule. Totalitarianism, defined as the existential rule of gnostic activists, is the end form of progressive civilization.”
- Eric Voegelin in Science, Politics and Gnosticism
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