La gnosi cristiana e la sua eredità moderna. L'opera di Ferdinand Christian Baur nella discussione di Hans Kelsen con Eric Voegelin

"Gnosis" is an ambiguous term by which a certain anti-modernist school of thought used to define Rationalism, Enlightenment, and Idealism during the twentieth century with the aim to make them a sort of ancient evil defeasible, as such, through the reestablishment of the truth contained in the Bible or in the classic Greek metaphysics. In its critique to Eric Voegelin, Hans Kelsen's posthumous work "Secular Religion" highlights the theoretical and historical flimsiness of this fascinating juxtaposition, and shows how philosophical analysis and historical-philological learning can work together to deconstruct a polemical idol. Nevertheless, even Kelsen's aspiration to expunge all traces of theology from modern thought emerges in its partiality through his own revisiting of those studies on Gnosticism Voegelin had superficially referred to (in primis those of nineteenth-century theologian Ferdinand Christian Baur from Tübingen).