Black Mass: How Religion Led the World into Crisis by John Gray Page B

the emigre Russian writer Dmitri Merezh-kovsky, himself the author of a book of apocalyptic speculation. 61 Both writers were sympathetic to Dostoyevsky’s fantasy of Russia as a ‘third Rome’ that could produce spiritual renewal in Europe, andvan den Bruck visited Russia in 1912. With these beliefs one would expect him to be sympathetic to the emerging Nazi movement. Yet –perhaps because he seems not to have shared their anti-Semitism – he and the Nazis never joined forces. On meeting Hitler in 1922 van den Bruck was repelled by the Nazi leader’s ‘proletarian primitivity’. Later the Nazis repudiated van den Bruck’s ideas, but a signed copy of his book was found in Hitler’s bunker and for a time van den Bruck supplied a scheme of thought that matched the Nazis’ sense of apocalyptic crisis and historical destiny. If the Holy Roman Empire was the first Reich and the united German Empire ruled by the Hohenzollerns (1871–1918) the second, the third would be the Nazi state that would last for a thousand years.
    It is wrong to see the Nazis as coming from outside the western tradition. Some Nazis saw themselves as anti-western, and it was a view adopted by some of their opponents, such as the once widely read but now almost forgotten writer Aurel Kolnai, who saw Nazism as part of a ‘war against the West’. A Catholic convert, Kolnai defined ‘the West’ in terms of Christianity, 62 and it is true that some of the most courageous opponents of the Nazis were devout Christians; for example, Claus von Stauffenberg, a pivotal figure in the July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, was a pious Catholic. However, while many leading Nazis were hostile to Christianity and some Christians resolute anti-Nazis, it is also true that Nazism continued some Christian traditions. Eric Voegelin, a German scholar who fled Nazi Germany in 1938 and whose work has done much to illuminate the nature of modern political religion, recognized that ‘Hitler’s millennial prophecy authentically derives from Joachitic speculation, mediated in Germany through the Anabaptist wing of the Reformation and through the Johannine Christianity of Fichte, Hegel and Schelling.’ As he summarized this development, ‘The superman marks the end of a road on which we find such figures as the “godded man” of English Reformation mystics … A line of gradual transformation connects medieval with contemporary gnosticism.’ 63
    Voegelin understood Nazism as being – like communism – a contemporary revival of Gnosticism. There can be no doubt that Gnostic beliefs have had a far-reaching influence in shaping westernthought, and there may well have been Gnostic influences on medieval millenarian movements, but there are few points of affinity between Gnosticism and modern millenarianism. Like the Manicheans, with whom they had much in common, the Gnostics were subtle thinkers. They did not look to an End-Time in which the Elect would be collectively saved, but understood salvation as an individual achievement that involved release from time rather than its end. Again, few if any Gnostic thinkers envisioned a world in which human life is no longer subject to evil. While it undoubtedly had an influence, the impact of Gnosticism on modern political religion was not formative. The decisive influence was the faith in the End that shaped Christianity from its origins. In expecting a final struggle between good and evil forces, medieval millenarians harked back to this eschatological faith, as did modern totalitarian movements.

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Utopia Enters the Mainstream
     
    The ultimate similarity between Marxist and bourgeois optimism, despite the initial catastrophism of the former, is, in fact, the most telling proof of the unity of modern culture.
    Reinhold Niebuhr 1
     
    A belief that a single economic and political system was coming into being throughout the world began to shape the policies of western governments from the late 1980s onwards. An expression of