Hans Jonas

Heidegger's student (and Hannah Arendt's lifelong friend), who wrote the book that made Gnosticism legible to the twentieth century — Gnosis und spätantiker Geist (1934), in English The Gnostic Religion (1958). His move was to stop cataloguing systems and ask what it FEELS like to hold one: a self that does not belong here, thrown into a world it did not make and cannot love, homesick for a place it cannot remember. He named the two ideas this wing turns on — the alien God and thrownness — the second borrowed straight from his teacher and handed back to antiquity. He later left Heidegger's orbit entirely over the man's politics, and spent his old age writing ethics for a technological age. His late verdict on modern nihilism as a Gnosticism without the God is why this material keeps coming back.