Book Review: Stefan Rossbach, Gnostic Wars: The Cold War in the Context of the History of Western Spirituality (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999, 248 pp., no price given hbk.)
| Published date | 01 December 2000 |
| Author | Christopher Coker |
| DOI | 10.1177/03058298000290030810 |
| Date | 01 December 2000 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Book Reviews
915
Stefan Rossbach, Gnostic Wa rs: The Cold War in the C ontext of the Hi story of
Western Spiritual ity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999 , 248 pp., no
price given hbk .).
In the early days of the Cold War a number of Western intellectuals were rea dy to
see it in spiritual terms. Broadcastin g to a defeated German nati on in 1945, T.S.
Eliot expounded t he view that Weste rn civilisat ion stood in mortal peril b ecause
nationali sm had d isplaced morality in t he European conscio usness. Later, ideolog y
had replaced relig ion as the basis of Western humani sm. He described wha t had
happened as a closing of ‘ mental frontie rs’ that had a ccompanied the closing of
political frontiers in the East.
Eliot did not ask the West to rediscover its faith in God. But he did plead for it to
rediscover i ts commitment to Christian humanism. At the end o f the bloodi est and
most barbaric war in its history it needed to remind itself that only a Christ ian
culture could have produce d what many considered to be its greatest
accomplish ment: its bod y of phil osophical thought. He did not ask whet her perhaps
only a Christi an culture cou ld have produced the Cold War.
Looking back, of co urse, we could also argue tha t it was the absence o f
Christianit y that explaine d what happene d. Both Marxism and Liberalis m were
adhered to as religious faiths. Vattimo, q uoting Ernest Bloch’s maxim th at
Marxism was the last metaphysical ill usion, sought his respo nse to nihilism. But
Liberalism, too, was dee ply influence d by religious ent husiasm. It was the
American Ri ght that coined th e term ‘Better Dead Than Red’ and provided a clear
case of what Julia Kristeva has called a ‘ de facto’ religiou s ideology which
liberalism became in the 1950s, ‘based on t he affective, non-critical adheren ce of
those who subscribed to it’. W hat belie f in liberalism and Marxism gave
intellectu als (their greatest ad mirers) was a ‘reserve of me aning’ that cou ld not be
found in social in stitutions or traditio ns even in the late r years of the twentieth
century. T he United States itself was tu rned into an ‘ism’ and those who were not
only co nsidered unpatrio tic, but harbou red different be liefs or ac ted differently or
even thou ght differently, were characte rised or caricatured as ‘u n-American’. In an
ideologi cal age nati ons were defined by the ir thoughts as much as the ir actions and
heresy was pun ished with the same severity as exco mmunication in the past.
Whatever take we adopt, we c annot escape from a spiritual interpretation of the
Cold War. And this is what Stefan Rossbach offers us in his challenging book
Gnostic Wars. It i s an investigation into the spi ritual preconditions of the Cold War,
and offers a historical analysis of developments in the very sel f-understanding of
human existence, through which the continuous threat of nuclear annihilation could
become accepted in the cont ext of the defence o f ideas and how to live. What he
presents his readers— to quote Max Web er describing the seco nd part of his own
work, The Prot estant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism—is ‘a sort of sp iritualist
constructio n’ of conflic t in the twent ieth century and the Cold War in pa rticular.
Not that the Cold Wa r—in its early years, at l east—was witho ut discussion of
the sp iritual dimensio n. At the Ecumenical In stitute in Geneva in 1946 th e
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