I like the interpretation where Mephistopheles is not the adversary but Wittgenstein trying to coax the fly out of the bottle better. Also it amuses me that the author equated gnosticism, the most extreme retreat from the world at a time when everything was retreating from the world, with the science of early modernity, which reversed the trend of hiding from the world that had characterized late antiquity to the middle ages. My inclination is to point to the gnostics being the Christians who didn't accept the role of social control the Empire gave them and the Enlightenment taking that role away from the Roman shill's descendants, because this is after all First Things, but I have been drinking and there might be a more charitable interpretation that escapes me.