Hans Jonas’s Gnostic Myth: An Existentialist Worldview Between Romanticism and Christianity

The essay examines the historical role of an important yet largely forgotten work, namely, Hans Jonas’s 1934 Gnosticism and the Spirit of Late Antiquity, Part 1: Mythological Gnosticism, the major project of his early philosophical career. The essay suggests that this early work should be understood not only as a preliminary stage of a debate that will reach fruition later, but as it addresses some of the fundamental problems in nineteenth-century German thought, namely the problem of dualism. More specifically, the essay suggests seeing Jonas’s early work as part of the history of German thought as it depicts a transition from German Romanticism to Existentialism, making innovative use of two of the most salient terms of nineteenth-century German philosophy, the “symbol” and the “myth.”