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The Challenge ofEric Voegelin

The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, edited by Ellis Sandoz,Jurgen Gebhardt, Thomas A. Hollweck, and Paul Caringella.Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990. (Vols. 12,28) and 1991 (Vol. 27).

Volume 12, Published Essays, 1966-1985, edited by Ellis Sandoz.Volume 27, The Nature of the Law, and Related Legal Writings,

edited by Robert Anthony Pascal, James Lee Babin, and JohnWilliam Corrington.

Volume 28, What Is History? And Other Late Unpublished Writ-ings, edited by Thomas A. Hollweck and Paul Caringella.

Fnc Voegelin was a prolific writer. He needed to be, given hisambitions, which in the end amounted to a critical analysis of

the entire religious, philosophical and political heritage of the Westwith regard to essential discoveries and decisive transformations.Though usually identified as a political scientist or political philoso -

pher, that label does not well prepare us for what we find inVoegelin's writings. Especially in his later work, the examination ofwhat we would normally consider political matter is subordinate toVoegelin's vaster project of working out a full-scale philosophy ofhistory and a detailed philosophical anthropology upon which tofound it. Still, to consider his work as political science in a broad

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sense is hardly off the mark, since its focus never strays far from thefundamental political question, On what basis should we order ourlives in society? In time Voegelin came to hold that, in order toapproach a satisfactory contemporary answer to that question,nothing less was required than an analysis and appraisal ofall of themost influential images and ideas-or, as he would put it, "sym-bols"-with which Western cultures have understood, and tried toshape, personal and political order. Consequently we find theenormous scope of material addressed in the fourteen books andmore than one hundred articles published during his liftetime.

One of the frustrations for readers of Voegelin has been the stateof publication of much of his writing. Though major works-including his magnum opus, the five-volume Order and History-have remained available, much of his important later work neverappeared in book form. Thus for the reader unwilling or unable totrack down far-flung journal articles, there have been frustratingdevelopmental gaps between milestone books, especially betweenOrder and History III: Plato and Aristotle (1957), the original(German) edition ofAnamnesis (1966), and Order and History IV:The Ecumenic Age (1974). For Voegelin enthusiasts, the publica-tion by Louisiana State University Press of the Collected Worksholds as not the least of its attractions the gathering into book form,at last, of dozens of articles that must be read alongside his books ifVoegelin's work is to be properly evaluated. And it is especiallyfelicitous that the editors have chosen first to publish two volumesof essays written during the last decades of Voegelin's life. Writtenat the height of his powers, they include some of his finest work.Published Essays, 1966-1985 (Volume 12 of the projected thirty-four volume series) contains fourteen es- ays, most of them ofsubstantial length and containing the cry allization of Voegelin'sthought on topics that he had long addr ssed, such as the Greekdiscovery and interpretation of reason (' ous), Hegel's philosophy,the teachings of the Gospel, and th notion of immortality. Acompanion collection, What Is Histo ? And Other Late Unpub-lished Writings (Volume 28), contai• 1~ ,what its editors describe asthe most significant pieces of Voegg 1tn s unpublished writing from

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the early 1960s to the later 1970s. These include studies closelyassociated with the essays of Anamnesis and most especially withthe working out of issues treated in The Ecumenic Age. It alsoincludes an important essay circulated among Voegelin scholars intypescript form since the late 1970s, "The Beginning and theBeyond: A Meditation on Truth." Originating as the AquinasLecture at Marquette University in 1975 and significantly expandedafterwards, this is one of the key writings of Voegelin's late career,and its availability in published form is a major boon to Voegelinstudies. The third volume to appear in the series, "The Nature of theLaw" and Related Legal Writings (Volume 27), centers on an essaywritten for students in Voegelin's course on jurisprudence atLouisiana State University, and makes available his most completestatement on philosophy of law.

The most important questions raised by the appearance of thetwo volumes of late essays-leaving aside for the moment consider-ation of "The Nature of the Law"-involve, first, the place of theseessays in the development of Voegelin's thought, and second, whatthey contribute to a philosophy of politics. To address the latter wemust treat the former in some detail.

IAs he would be the first to assert, the facts of Voegelin's biographyare directly relevant to the genesis of his political and philosophicalconcerns. Born in Germany in 1901 and educated in Vienna from1910, he earned his doctorate in a political science program underthe Faculty of Law at the University of Vienna in 1922, and taughtpolitical science and sociology as a member of the law faculty therebetwen 1929 and 1938, serving the same faculty also as an assistantfor constitutional and administrative law. Between 1924 and 1926 hespent two years in the United States on Rockefeller Foundationfellowships, where he attended lectures at Harvard, Columbia, andthe University of Wisconsin. Out of his studies of Anglo-Americanlegal and philosophical traditions came his first book (1928), Uberdie Form des amerikanischen Geistes (On the Form of the AmericanMind). The increasing tensions on the European political stage and


the rise of National Socialism led Voegelin to the focus of his next twobooks, both appearing in 1933,Rasse and Staat (Race and State) andDer Rassenidee in der Geistesgeschichte (History of the Race Idea).They present in part an exacting scholarly critique of the biologicaltheories underlying Nazi race doctrines, and represent Voegelin'sincreasing awareness of the need for critiques of modern politicalideas from a perspective grounded in a thorough knowledge ofclassic texts and historical wisdom. His last two books written beforeemigrating to the United States in 1938, The Authoritarian State(1936) and Political Religions (1938), reflect Voegelin's efforts tounderstandthe rising influence of ideological fanaticisms in hispolitical milieu, and his recognition that they involve the criticallyuntenable transference of religious or transcendent values andenthusiasms to world-immanent objects such as the race or thenation. Not surprisingly, these last four books brought himunflatteringly to the attention of the Nazis, and when Hitler annexedAustria in 1938 Voegelin had to flee for his life. His close escape fromthe Gestapo, into Switzerland and finally to the United States,allowed him to continue to devote himself, in his new surroundings,to the study of political disorder in general and especially of theorigins of the twentieth century European calamity.

Eventually Voegelin settled into an associate professorship inthe Department of Government at Louisiana State University,where he embraced his adopted homeland with gusto, becoming anAmerican citizen. He began publishing primarily in English, devel-oping in time a remarkably flexible and convincing style. WhenVoegelin first gained widespread attention, it was as a politicalphilosopher with a book written in English, The New Science ofPolitics (1952), an expansion of the Charles Walgreen Lectures hegave at the University of Chicago in 1951. This work, in whichVoegelin introduces in concise, data-rich chapters the lineaments ofa philosophy of politics and history answerable to the full scope ofWestern civilization, may be read as a kind of precis for the multi-volume Order and History, which began appearing in 1956 andwhich begins the large-scale working through of Voegelin's attemptto analyze the sources and fundamental problems of political order


in the West. The concerns and methods articulated in The NewScience of Politics, which more or less established the aims ofVoegelin's work until the end of his life in 1984, were the productof his attempts during the 1940s to find an approach to theunderstanding of political phenomena more comprehensive andexplanatory than those found in current philosophies and method-ologies, an approach that could equally diagnose the "disease" ofcontemporary totalitarian movements and explain their rise in termsof an understandable, genetic development in the history of politicallife in the West. Voegelin has described his "breakthroughs" indiscovering the principles of such an approach in various writings(including the essay "Remembrance of Things Past" included inPublished Essays, originally written as an introductory chapter. tothe 1974 American edition of Anamnesis).

One of his most important breakthroughs should be describedin light of the story of the massive "History of Political Ideas" uponwhich he worked for years in the early 1940s. After emigration to theUnited States, Voegelin was commissioned by McGraw-Hill towrite a short "History of Western Political Ideas" to be used as anintroductory textbook. Voegelin's researching ardor soon expandedthe project beyond the bounds of its original conception. Setting hissights on a significantly more ambitious work, Voegelin eventuallyproduced a manuscript of enormous breadth and multi-volumeproportions analyzing political ideas from antiquity through thenineteenth century. Another publisher agreed to publish this muchlonger study; but in the end, with over four thousand typescriptpages completed, Voegelin abandoned work on the "History" alongwith the intent to publish it. He had become suspicious about thelegitimacy of the entire enterprise. In fact he had come to theconclusion that the very notion of a "history of ideas" is theoreticallyflawed, that the conception itself involves a "deformation" of reality.The deformation occurs when ideas are considered as objectsexisting apart from the experiences of reality to which they giveexpression. Because verbal or written expressions of meaning maybe torn loose from their experiential moorings, they maybe treatedas if they were autonomous entities. But to trace the historical


adventures of such linguistic objects is a pointless exercise, since thepolitical scientist's concern is the meaning of lived reality. A furtherproblem with the notion of a "history of ideas" is that certain kindsof symbolic expression that have been used to articulate a society'sexperience and understanding of political order-for example, thesymbolic forms used in important societal rituals of ancient Egyptand Sumeria-are not readily classifiable as "ideas" at all, butnevertheless are essential to a history of Western political self-interpretation. Suchs considerations led Voegelin to conclude thatthe political scientist's concern is with any and all "symbols" bywhich human beings have interpreted and ordered their lives in theworld and in society, and more especially that it is incumbent uponhim or her to penetrate to a critical understanding of the actualexperiences articulated by such symbols. Political "ideas," in otherwords, are nothing more than counters to be manipulated inintellectual games unless the political analyst locates and re-discov-ers the experiences and insights that engendered those "ideas." Thisbecame a defining principle for all of Voegelin's subsequent work;as he put it in his 1967 article "Immortality: Experience andSymbol":

When the experience engendering the symbols ceases to be apresence located in the man who has it, the reality from whichthe symbols derive their meaning has disappeared. The sym-bols in the sense of a spoken or written word, it is true, are leftas traces in the world of sense perception, but their meaningcan be understood only if they evoke, and through evocationreconstitute, the engendering reality in the listener or reader,(Published Essays, 52-3).

Since for all its labor and wealth of analysis the "History of PoliticalIdeas" had been written prior to Voegelin's grasp of " the principleof experience and symbolization" and its full implications, it wasdeemed in the end to be methodologically unsound, and Voegelinshelved it in favor of a new start. This new start, of course, could nowbegin on the basis of Voegelin's much vaster acquaintance withmaterials pertaining to the origins and development of Western

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political self-understanding. The New Science of Politics was thefirst fruits of this "re-theoretizatiōn of the political materials.

The hermeneutical insight into experience and symbolizationwas bound up with other important insights. By the early 1940sVoegelin had arrived at the frustrating conclusion that none of thephilosophies of history, society and human consciousness that wereavailable to him from the world of European and American philoso-phy, academic institutions, and current methodological trends,provided a fully adequate theoretical foundation for making senseof contemporary political events. A theory of politics, he reasoned,must be based on a theory of human existence, an explicit philo-sophical anthropology; and since what is distinctive about humancreatures is to be found in the nature and structure of humanconsciousness, a fully convincing theory of politics must have at itscenter a theory of human consciousness that both accounts for, andis confirmed by, the entire historical spectrum of data arising fromthe human experience of political order and disorder. It turned outto be Voegelin's ongoing study of Husserl that finally triggered, in1943,a series of insights that allowed him to begin formulation of analternative theory of consciousness to those of Husserl and othercontemporary schools of thought, a theory whose explicitationwould guarantee the philosophical cogency of the political analysesbased upon it: For the next forty years, then, Voegelin's work movedsimultaneously in the two directions of expanding the scope of hisunderstanding of Western political reality, through the critical studyof source materials as far back as the records go, and of establishingand continually refining a theory of consciousness intelligible inlight of, and responsive to, the phenomena, the political events andsymbols, that required explanation.

The key features of Voegelin's theory ofconsciousness, remain-ing unchanged as details underwent refinement and reformulation,are (1) that human consciousness is not originally self-constitutingbut finds itself and its capacities given to itself, so that its freedomto discover and to create is a derived freedom, dependent upon the"ground" of its existing; (2) that consciousness involves awareness ofthe "ground" from which it derives, and that it naturally seeks the


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meaning of this ground in seeking to understand the essentialmeaning of its own existence; (3) that consciousness "belongs,"ontologically speaking, both to the individual and to the realitywithin which consciousness has irrupted-that consciousness, inother. words, is primordially a participation and, because the partcannot completely know the whole, is incapable of achieving finalunderstanding of the realities of world and history within which itparticipates; and (4) that consciousness is not an entity in themanner of physical objects, but rather a "tension" of awareness,questioning and understanding-a tension ultimately oriented byits desire for deepening participation in the very "ground" that is thecause of its existence.

The New Science of Politics and the first three volumes of Orderand History (1956-7), proceeding in light of these hermeneuticaland anthropological principles to analyze the primary insights andsymbols that have shaped the Western understanding of society,cosmos and human nature, break well beyond the bounds of whatwould normally be called "political science." They do so becauseVoegelin's search for a thorough explanation of modern Europeanpolitical developments forced him to become a philosopher, and tothe philosophical task of mastering the complete range of importanttraditions and texts influencing Western political life. These includethe classics of Greek philosophy, the prophetic traditions of ancientIsrael and of Christianity, and the varied heritages of medieval,Renaissance, early modern, Enlightenment, and post-Enlighten-ment theories of politics and society, not to mention more reconditebut ultimately significant elements such as the mythopoeic tradi-tions of ancient Near Eastern cultures, the teachings of ancientGnosticism, and the millenialist movements and sects associatedwith the Reformation. By the time he formulated the original planfor the multi-volume sequence of Order and History, Voegelin'saims as a political scientist had become. inseparable from those of aphilosopher of history.

The first three volumes of Order and History-Israel, andRevelation (1956), The World of the Polis (1957) and Plato. andAristotle (1957)-analyze the major categories and symbols of

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Western thought down to Aristotle in Greek culture and to thebeginning of the Christian era in Hebrew culture. The original plancalled for three more volumes, covering the emergence of Empireand of Christianity, the Reformation, the rise of the nation states,and the modern period leading up to the contemporary "crisis" ofcivilization. But Voegelin's continued grappling with the under-standing and organization of symbols of order, as he workedthrough the materials, led to revisions, and then to more revisions.Soon after the first three volumes were published he abandoned theoriginal six-volume plan, and during the 1960s and into the early1970s constantly changed his conception of the conclusion of theenterprise. Appended to the essays in Volume 28 are outlines fromthe early 1960s and early 1970s that Voegelin sent to directors atLSU Press setting out the contours of the remainder of the project,and these indicate how fluid the organizing plan had become dueto Voegelin's new discoveries and the consequent repeated refor-mulation of the project's overall purpose. The fourth volume, , TheEcumenic Age, appeared at last .seventeen years after Plato andAristotle.

One reason for the long delay involved the traditional chrono-logical sequence envisioned for the original project. Voegelin'sanalysis of constants and variants in the symbolization of order hadforced him to conclude, finally, that the patterns of meaningrevealed in the history of Western self-understanding are notproperly explained when presented as a linear, one-way develop-ment. Rather, the patterns of meaning by which humans haveoriented themselves in society and world must be approached fromthe recognition that there are synchronic "lines of meaning" inhistory as well as diachronic ones, and that furthermore a "timeless"dimension of meaning must be taken seriously as the background ofreality against which, and only against which, the historical pluralityof societies can be intelligibly understood as constituting a single"human history." A proper analysis of meaning in history musttherefore, as Voegelin put it in the Introduction to The EcumenicAge, be able to move "backward and forward and sideways, in orderto follow empirically the patterns of meaning as they [have] revealed


themselves in the self-interpretation of persons and societies inhistory" (57). In the same Introduction he explains the "break" inthe original program of Order and History as arising from therefractoriness of the discovered structures of meaning in history tobeing arranged intelligibly in the form of a merely linear "course" ofhistory. And The Ecumenic Age indeed arranges its materialsdifferently. While it addresses developments that fall chronologi-cally during the centuries that saw the rise of "ecumenic empires,"roughly600 B.C. to 600 A.D., it examines them synoptically andguided by a focus on the recurrent constants in the symbolization oforder, even as these undergo during this period radical re-articula-tion as a result of both spiritual discoveries and new forms ofpolitical organization and upheaval.

Another cause for the long wait before the appearance of TheEcumenic Age involved Voegelin's concentration on working out indetail the theory of consciousness whose basic principles he hadconceived in 1943. Entailing in part a careful examination andexposition of Plato's and Aristotle's exegesis of rational conscious-ness, this work of Voegelin's amounted to a thorough explicitationof the theoretical premises that underlay the analyses in The NewScience ofPolitics and the first three volumes ofOrder and History.The results were set out

,in Anamnesis, written in German and

published in Germany in 1966, where Voegelin had moved in 1958to become director of the newly formed Institute of Political Scienceat the University of Munich. Anamnesis included, along with anumber of pertinent historical studies and important letters from1943 to his colleague Alfred Schuetz, a series of technically exactingessays developing a nuanced ontology of consciousness, employinga set of carefully chosen explanatory terms. upon which Voegelinrelied in all of his later writings. This work, too, showed him theneed for revisions in his interpretations of the historical material tobe included in a continuation of Order and History. When thatcontinuation appeared at last in 1974 as The Ecumenic Age, itturned out to be the centerpiece of Voegelin's philosophy of history;in many respects it is his masterwork.

A fifth volume of Order and History, long worked toward,


appeared posthumously in 1987 under the title In Search ofOrder.A slim volume of two chapters, it does not continue the analysis ofWestern symbols of order into the medieval and modern periods;rather, in its first half, it refines both the theoretical formulation ofVoegelin s theory of consciousness and the interpretive principlesof his philosophy of history, while its second half carries theserefinements into a series of complex and provocative reflections onhistorical themes-German Idealism and Hegel, Hesiod'sTheogōny,Plato's Timaeus-that advance Voegelin's efforts to determine whattypes of symbols adequately represent consciousness and reality.What the volume most certainly does not do is provide anything likea grand summing-up of Voegelin's interpretation of history, or afinal statement of his philosophical "position." It is self-declaredlyonly another stage in a search that cannot, on principle, be finished:the search to understand and articulate the meaning of the unfin-ished story of history and reality. In Search of Order does offer,however, what Voegelin considered his highest achievement indelineating a theory of consciousness. The foreword to the volumewritten by his widow Lissy attests to his considering its formulationsas, in• this regard, "the key to all his other works."

The choice of material for In Search of Order was made late inVoegelin's life, reflecting his typical revisioning and reorganizingbased ōn new discoveries. Footnotes in The Ecumenic Age hadidentified as forthcoming in the projected fifth volume (alreadyreferred to as In Search of Order) a number of the important essaysfrom the late 1960s and early 1970s that in fact were never to beincluded there, and which instead we find gathered in the volumeshere under review. These late essays, read chronologically, form akind of bridge from Anamnesis, through The Ecumenic Age, to InSearch of Order; all of it is of a piece, and constitutes Voegelin'smost important philosophical achievement.

In what does the achievement consist? What are the majorelements of the political philosophy that began to be articulated indecisive form in The New Science of Politics and continued, throughall revisions, to define Voegelin's mature outlook?

First of all, Voegelin's work is a resistance to and a rejection of

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positivist social science. As a political scientist in 1930s Europe,Voegelin's intellectual environment was dominated by the convic-tion that the social sciences must take their methodological bearingsfrom the natural sciences, whose exploration and exploitation of thephysical world during preceding centuries had enjoyed such mag-nificent success. Positivism in the social sciences, or philosophyadopts the viewpoint that the world of physical phenomena ex-plainedby the modern mathematical sciences is the only world thatexists; that reality is what is susceptible of clear and precise quan

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tification; and that truth must be defined strictly in terms of theconclusions and judgments yielded by such "value-free" analysis.The upshot is a social science that disregards or is contemptuous ofany truly critical analysis of social values, and restricts itself to whatfacts may be derived from the observation and analysis of behavior,Such a science of human behavior cannot, of course, offer reasonswhy one should prefer the "values" of democratic to totalitarian rule,nor can it set out arguments for an explicit interpretation of thepolitical good. Voegelin's critique of positivist assumptions, spurredby the political events that surrounded him, began early andwidened into a lifelong attack on all forms of reductionism, allinterpretations , of reality that attempt to explain away, usuallythrough one or another version of philosophical materialism, hu-man experiences beyond those of sensory perception. A definingprinciple of Voegelin's political work became his tenacious. open-ness to what he would call the full range of human experience; areadiness to recognize and accord proper analysis to the humanexperience and symbolization of those areas of reality dismissed bypositivism.

In doing so, Voegelin faced a problem of language; insofar as themeanings of such terms as "objectivity," "reality," "truth," "experi-ence," and "science" had increasingly since the eighteenth centurybeen appropriated by proponents of reductionist viewpoints; andconsequently had become imbued with connotations reflecting anunacknowledged reductionist bias. To establish a political sciencewith a non-reductionist theory of consciousness at its core, Voegelinneeded to establish epistemological and ontological principles that


would counteract that bias, and as fully as possible regain for theterms their proper range of meaning. He directed his efforts in thistask mainly toward a reclamation of the terms "experience" and"reality," attacking in work after work any unwarranted ontologicalconstriction of their scope of meanings.

The second guiding principle of Voegelin's thought is the needto recover the wisdom of the past. Openness to reality in the fullnessof its dimensions includes openness to the best insights of the past,and Voegelin had found to his frustration that the modern mindtends to be characterized by a readiness, sometimes a compulsion,to jettison the accumulated wisdom of earlier centuries as out-moded, irrelevant, or harmful. His work became in part a restora-tion of the classical Greek and Judeo-Christian heritages, the heartof pre-modern traditions that had, he declared, become encrustedwith pedantic doctrinalism and misinterpretation, consistently mis -

understood by thinkers not capable of attaining experientially orintellectually their level of insights, or attacked and ignored out ofa desire to validate or apotheosize the present. As presented in hiswork this restoration is obviously not intended to be a neo-conser -

vative retrenchment; it is carried out with full appreciation of theadvances of modem science and historiography, and draws on theachievements of numerous modern thinkers in philosophy, litera-ture, physics, history, comparative religion and political science.Voegelin, as Ellis Sandoz points out in his Editor's Introduction toPublished Essays, was not "a traditionalist" or "a sentimentalist." Hewas convinced that part of authentic recovery is reformulation andresponse to the contemporary situation, and his philosophical workaims not simply at repeating but at advancing the classical wisdomby bringing its insights and symbols into an explanatory frameworkthat pays full due to the claims of historicity, the intrinsic ambigu -

ities (as well as possible corruptions) of language, the pathologies ofpsyche and spirit, and modernity's improved understanding of thestructures of consciousness. Voegelin often emphasized that hisown theory of consciousness was grounded in, and fundamentally inconformity with, the Platonic-Aristotelian conception of reason andhuman nature, but not as a mere recapitulation of the classical


analysis in modern or idiosyncratic terminology. It is a theoryintended to be sophisticated enough to critically address the Chris-tian philosophy of spirit, the rationalist and empiricist models ofmind and reality, German Idealism, existentialist and phenomeno-logical analyses of the self, the challenge of radical historicism, andthe contemporary dissolution of the subject in various philosophiesof language, society, and the unconscious. It attempts-howeversuccessfully-to effectively renovate the West's legacy of insightinto order and disorder in human affairs: to make it new, pressinglyrelevant, and diagnostically useful.

The centerpiece ofthat attempt, Voegelin's theory of conscious-ness, brings us to a third guiding principle of his thought: his analysisof what he calls "the differentiation of consciousness." For Voegelin,the most significant transformation in, the history of human self-understanding has been the discovery and affirmation, in variouscultures, of transcendent being, of a reality not intrinsically condi-tioned by space and time, and the consequent re-imagining andreorienting of personal and political existence in the wake, of thatdiscovery. Transcendent reality-understood as a personal Godrevealed through prophets in Hebrew and Christian cultures, as thetranscendent Agathon or self-sufficient Nous in Greek philosophy,as impersonal Brahman or Tao inHindu and Chinese traditionsrespectively-is identified as a dimension of reality beyond therhythmic play of forces in the cosmos, beyond the spatiotemporalfield, and hailed as both the invisible `"ground" of finite reality andthe invisibly "inward" essence of human beings. Through thisdiscovery the cosmos "differentiates" into a finite world and a divineBeyond, while human consciousness stratifies into worldly andtranscendent dimensions or capacities. This stratification of humanconsciousness does not, Voegelin tells us, entail the assertion thatthe self is essentially two parts or entities; rather, in the differenti-ating process consciousness recognizes itself to be a . union (or a"tension" in Voegelin's later terminology) where. world and tran-scendent ground interpenetrate and co-constitute the human sub-ject. The "differentiation of consciousness" is therefore a differen-tiationon the part of consciousness regarding both 1) its own nature,


and 2) the cosmos, the whole of reality, which conceptually sepa-rates into immanent and transcendent dimensions of meaning. Ineach civilization where differentiating insights were articulated andtook hold, the consequences were enormous as the traditionallyauthoritative perspectives on personal, political and religious truthwere challenged or shattered. And the impact, Voegelin insists, hasnot subsided. He argues that we are still struggling to cope with theconceptual and existential' difficulties engendered by the onlypartial success of the transmission of the differentiated insights. Forthey are not accessible to all, demanding as they do a certainreadiness of intellectual and emotional development, as well aspropitious social conditions; and when understood or believed theyare still liable to all kinds of subtle or gross misinterpretations; andwhen promulgated through institutionalized activity they are oftenenough obscured by a rigid dogmatism that fails to distinguish thetruth of experienced insight from its verbal formulation or doctrinalsedimentation.

Voegelin's emphasis upon the importance of the differentiationof consciousness for understanding Western culture and politics,already clearly apparent in The New Science ofPolitics and the firstthree volumes ofOrder and History, only became stronger in laterwork. The range of issues related to it is the dominant principle ofinterpretive cohesion in The Ecumenic Age. In the West, Voegelinargues, there were two principal civilizational loci of differentiation:the Greek, or "noetic differentiation" (from nous, or "reason"); andthe Judeo-Christian, or "pneumatic differentiation" (frompneuma,"spirit"). As we shall see, a significant portion of Voegelin's maturework from The Ecumenic Age on concerns critical exposition of thefundamental agreement of the two sets of differentiating insights atthe core of these two cultural traditions, and the precise delineationof their differences.

Voegelin's theory of the differentiation of consciousness under-lies a fourth important feature of his thought, one for which he isperhaps most widely known: his characterization of modernity ingeneral, and of modern political thought in particular, as distortedby unrealistic and misleading portrayals of the human condition.

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The "project" of modernity, for all its successes, has in his view beenguided by an energetic, civilization-wide effort to relocate perfectgoodness and truth from the transcendent to the worldly realm.From this desire derives the cult of progress, the promise ofscientific eradication of all problems and all mysteries, and thepopularity of guidebooks to political utopias, All of these reflect,from Voegelin's perspective, a fundamental misconstrual of themeanings of symbols deriving from the differentiation of transcen-dence. They are based on a denial of the transcendence of the"ground" of reality and on the conviction that immanent realityalone is real and perfectable. But, Voegelin repeatedly insists, thereis no conceptual or ontological validity to "immanence" alone; theonly meaning of "immanence" is as the exegetical counterpart of"transcendence"; the two notions entered thought only as pairedsymbols in the context of experiences wherein the one cosmos wasdifferentiated into finite things (immanence) and the non-finiteorigin or ground of those things (transcendence). Modem dreamsof worldly perfectability, and all the social, educational and politicalideas nurtured by them, are based on a category error. And thaterror is not a mere intellectual mistake: to Voegelin it reflects, andsustains, "existential closure" to the transcendent ground, a closurethat pervades, in his view, much of modem thought.

Notoriously, Voegelin has on the above basis characterizedmodern political philosophy as being heavily "gnostic" in nature andorientation. Ancient Gnosticism considered the world an alienplace created by an evil divinity, from which we may be saved andreturn to our true spiritual home through attainment of the requisiteknowledge (gnosis). Voegelin's thesis, first articulated in The NewScience of Politics, is that modern political movements such asprogressive liberalism, Marxism, Communism and National Social-ism exemplify a "secular" gnostic attitude, in that they promise,through knowledge and application of the proper principles, thetransfiguration of this world from a realm of disorder and evil to oneof social perfection Voegelin seeing as the core of the gnosticattitude the rejection of reality as it is and a desire to bring it underhuman control and to re-create it after human liking. Although in


late writings Voegelin acknowledged that his application of thecategory of gnosticism to modern political thought had sometimesinvolved oversimplification, he held to its relevance with respect toprecisely this point: the claim to have a method for liberating us froman evil and imperfect world. The modern version does not promiseour removal from the world: it promises transfiguration of the worlditself. But this is only the late variety, Voegelin holds, of a gnosticdream of escaping reality-a modern fanatasy that, it is crucial tonote, can appear plausible only if the "ground" of reality is assumedto be immanent, so that reality as a whole falls within the scope ofhuman comprehension and control.

Modernity, then, for all its blessings brought by technologicalinvention and political and legal reform, and its huge advantage inresearch into history and human development, remains in Voegelin'sview overshadowed by a fundamental and `stunting misinterpreta-tion of the human situation involving the occlusion of transcendentmeaning and the efforts of many of the best philosophical minds ofrecent centuries to, in one way or another, apotheosize immanenceanddivinize humanity. The upshot, as Voegelin sees it, has beenpersonal and political disorientation on an unprecedented scale;and for evidence he points again and again to the grandiose politicaldreams, born of the modern re-theoretization of human nature andreality, that have inflicted death and misery on millions in ourcentury. This charge, however, is not accompanied by a champion-ing of pre-modern culture, or of non-democratic political struc-tures, or of religious orthodoxy. While he asserts that we mustreclaim the pre-modern heritage, especially in its original insightsregarding human nature, he also insists that it must be augmentedby modern discovery and scholarship in all their dimensions, andmade capable of speaking to the contemporary situation. What thisrequires above all is a new translation, as it were, of the "symbols"that accurately illumine the true order of reality and the structureof human participation. At the end of the Introduction to TheEcumenic Age Voegelin announces a key concern quickening hismature philosophical enterprise to be the loss of efficacious symbolsthat reveal the human situation for what it is, a middle-ground or


meeting-place between world-immanent and transcendent being,and the oppressive pervasiveness of modern symbols (the variousUtopias of social planners and political activists, Freud's model ofthe mind, Nietzsche 's Superman, Marx's Communist Man, Skinner'sbehavioral subject, etc.) that obstruct proper self-understanding.

IIPublished Essays and Late Unpublished Writings are clearly com-panion pieces; together they include almost all of the previouslyungathered studies that underpin, accompany and at times clarifythe major books of Voegelin's later career. They may thus beexamined as a unit, before turning to the volume "The Nature of theLaw."

Each volume has been edited with care and includes a brief,well-written introduction providing a biographical and theoreticalcontext for its essays. These introductions, though, are certainlymore apt for the Voegelin student than for the uninitiated, andwouldn't do much to prepare the latter for Voegelin's sometimesstrange terminology or for the inevitable difficulty of following, attimes, his more complex meditative reflections.

They could hardly have done so had the editors wished. By thisstage in Voegelin's career, his writing, which often built' on formu-lations discovered in the process of earlier reflections, had grownremarkably condensed, though not at all turbid; the pages are thickwith discoveries, and exposition and examples for the slow to followare at a minimum. Voegelin's writing style, though at times Germansyntax makes a palimpsest appearance, is, for one whose Englishwas not native, extraordinarily lucid and free of rhetorical self-indulgence; its tone is muscular, at times magisterial; and there arepassages with a power deriving from importance of thought, preci-sion of language, syntactical structure, and rhythm and grace ofdelivery, that rival the best English prose.

The contents of the nineteen essays in the two volumes, very fewof them brief or "minor" pieces, reveal the breadth of Voegelin'sinterests. They include, for example, a detailed analysis of thesymbolism in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (originally a


letter to his friend and mentor in English style Robert B. Heilman);a bitter critique of the German intellectual establishment that wasunprepared to diagnose the evils of Hitler and National Socialism("The German University and the Order of German Society: AReconsideration of the Nazi Era"); a "thought-experiment" yieldinga proof that the principles of modern theoretical physics cannot ontheir own provide an image of reality as a complete and coherentwhole ("The Moving Soul"); and a condensed, sharp-tonguedretelling of his frustrations in being unable to find in the Vienneseintellectual life of his early career the analytical tools that couldmake theoretical sense of current political events ("Remembranceof Things Past"). "Remembrance of Things Past" and the essay"Configurations of History," both in Published Essays, are perhapsthe best place to start for a reader not too familiar with Voegelin'swritings. They are brief, and together indicate well Voegelin's maininterests and the spectrum of his writing voice-"Configurations ofHistory" (1968) being an unemotional, crystal-clear introduction tothe principles that shape the conception of history presented in TheEcumenic Age, and "Remembrance of Things Past" (1978) showingVoegelin's polemical side, which can be simultaneously scathing,humorous and profound:

Today, the academic world is plagued with figures who couldnot have gained public attention in the environment of theWeimar Republic, dubious as it was, with neo-Hegelians whocombine Marx and Freud in a theory of repression that assuresa monopoly of repression to themselves; with megalomaniacbehaviorists who want to manipulate mankind out of freedomand human dignity; and with egalitarian Holy Rollers whowant to redistribute distributive justice. It is only fair to add,however, that in the country of its origin, in Germany, thequality of the methodological debate has declined even worse,if that is possible. But it has become increasingly difficult todescribe this sector of the academic world, with its peculiarmixture of libido dominandi, philosophical illiteracy, andadamant refusal to enter into rational discourse, because theadequate form would have to be satire and, as Karl Kraus noted


already in the 1920s, it is next to impossible to write satirewhen a situation has become so grotesque that reality sur-passes the flight of a satirist's imagination (308).

Voegelin's biting tone can sometimes seem gratuitous; but when hisjudgments ring true, they manifest a critically evaluative intent andexistential seriousness that contrast sharply with the wan, disin-genuous "neutrality" of historians, political scientists and philoso-phers who don't appear to be aware that in their fields of studymatters of some urgency are , . being discussed.

The essays in both volumes have in common certain recurringthemes, such as the Platonic-Aristotelian view of the "life of reason,"modern misconstruals of the nature of consciousness, and theultimate complementarity of Greek and Judeo-Christian insightsinto human and divine reality. Together they portray, between theirearliest (1963) and last (1985) compositions, Voegelin's develop-ment of these and other key themes into their richest stages, withtheoretical refinements repeatedly coming into view in the overlap-ping analyses. We can survey some of those developments byexamining common topics of two or three essays at a time.

First there is Voegelin's attempt to clarify the nature of "his-tory," as he struggled with re-envisioning the project of Order andHistory. It is a commonplace among philosophers and theologiansthat history in the sense of a one-way linear progression of eventswas a discovery of the ancient Hebrews, whose conception of atranscendent God gave human events the character of a uniquesequence unfolding in time, a one-time creation of the Creator. Oneof Voegelin's major theoretical insights during this period was hisrealization that linear conceptions of history actually permeatedancient, mythopoeic cultures, in the form of a phenomenon helabelled "historiogenesis." Historiogenesis is a mythic speculationon origins, like cosmogony (the origins of the universe), anthropogony(human beings) and theogony (the gods); in this case the concern iswiththe origins of the present social order. Historiogenesis tells thestory of how its author's society came to be. It begins the story at anabsolute point of cosmic origins, progresses through legendary

1


events, which in turn merge into the known history of recent times,and it concludes with the establishment of the current social order.Historiogenesis uses reason, within mythic patterns of thinking, toexplain the existence of society-and, more specifically, the inevi-tability of the existence of this very society. In doing so it confers anaura of predestination and necessity on the current social order,both glorifying that order and, perhaps most importantly, assuagingthe anxiety that always attends human awareness of the contingencyof existence. Voegelin's identification of widespread (though notuniversal) historiogenetic speculation in ancient mythic societiesthat predate or were contemporaneous with Hebrew culture spurredhis re-examination of what is truly revolutionary about Hebrew andlater "historical consciousness," and his rethinking the linear chro-nology of Order and History.

Voegelin's analysis of historiogenesis appeared first in journalform in 1960, then as an expanded essay in Anamnesis in 1966, andfinally as the first chapter of The Ecumenic Age. A fourth versionpreceeding this last exists as an essay from about 1968 titled "Anxietyand Reason," now published in Late Unpublished Writings. Itexpands from an explanation of historiogenesis into an extendedreflection on human anxiety about the precariousness of existenceand the use of reason to understand the human situation and calmthat anxiety. A good deal of the latter material did not find its wayinto the final treatment of historiogenesis inThe Ecumenic Age,andits availability makes a difference: it distinctly enriches Voegelin'sinterpretation of ancient mythic consciousness, and his account ofthe relation of reason to myth. The material on historiogenesisrepeats what is elsewhere.

On the larger issue, the crystallization of Voegelin's matureconception of history and his insights into the emergence of fullhistorical consciousness, of greater interest than "Anxiety andReason" is the essay dating from 1963 that begins Late UnpublishedWritings, "What Is History?" This work came to light as a sixty-eightpage typescript found among Voegelin's papers after his death.Once intended to introduce the fourth volume of Order andHistory, it is an extended analysis and theoretical clarification of the


concept of history. The salient point is that historical events, unlikephenomena of the natural world, are not simply "given"; rather, theycome into being only through a human encounter with reality andconsequent selection of , memorable "events of encounter" forpreservation and retelling. The encounter and response of existingpersons as they undergo and co-constitute memorable events arethe substance of history; thus it is a type of phenomenon that isproperly analyzed only by beginning with the "sphere of involve-ment or encounter" out of which the "story" of history has emerged.Now, if we turn our attention-Voegelin writes-to the first casesof full-blown historiography, which appeared in the ancient cul-tures of Israel, Greece and China, we find in each case the creationof historiography taking place in conjunction with a similar specificset of circumstances, including 1) the rise of an ecumenic empirethreatening the order, and thus the validity of the self-understand-ing, of a smaller society in its path, and 2) a "spiritual outburst" inwhich the discovery of transcendent reality placed time-events inexplicit relation to eternal being. The last point-that experiencesof transcendence were central to the emergence of historicalconsciousness-is the crux of Voegelin's thesis on historical mean-ing.

According to Voegelin, the foundational and decisive "events ofencounter" constituting historical meaning were, and remain, en-counters with transcendence. "History," we know, in the largersense envisions all human events as connected within a single webof meaning; but this conception can only arise if human events areunderstood to have a common "ground" beyond biological, psycho-logical and societal circumstances-beyond, that is, spatiotemporallimitations. Thus, only experiences of transcendence can give rise toa conception of "universal humanity" or "humankind." In light ofthis conception, the foundational patterns in "history" will relatehuman events to transcendent reality. Thus while historiographyindeed selects a tale comprised of. temporal events, it does so byrelating them to eternal being as the ultimate ground of theirmeaning. Historical meaning, Voegelin insists, has a "transcenden-tal texture.


"What Is History?" develops these and related ideas in detail forsome fifty pages, and following its arguments can be difficult, dueto a wandering organization in its second half and what one sensesto be the working-out of provisional categories of definition as thestudy proceeds. A distilled presentation of some of its themes-without the focus on epistemological problems or a careful treat-ment of the issue of transcendence-can be found in the brieferessay "Configurations of History" inPublished Essays. Here Voegelinbegins by presenting his basic conception of history and using it toidentify the pattern in history he calls the "Ecumenic Age," and thendevelops a number of "categories" useful to the philosopher ofhistory relating to the discovery of transcendence. Along the way heexplains why, no matter how many patterns in history one mayanalyze, one cannot reach anything like a complete explanation ofhistory. History is unfinished; therefore it isimpossible for anyonewithin history to reach a perspective on its completion or ultimatemeaning. The Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philoso-phersof history, such as Comte, Hegel and Marx, who claimed tohave provided a definitive explanation of the purpose and directionof human events were ignoring the elementary fact that a philoso-pher exists within an incomplete process of history; likewise theywere ignoring history's "transcendental texture." Voegelin's diagno -

sis of what causes the writing of terminal history? Accounts ofhistory that reduce its meaning to world-immanent and fully com-prehended events are produced by the desire to escape the "ten-sion" of an historical existence stretched in uncertainty betweentemporal, and eternal being.

The challenge to a positivist historiography could not be moredramatic. These essays set forth principles of a philosophy of historythat cut sharply against trends of the last two centuries in theirrejection of the Enlightenment rejection of transcendent mystery.These centuries have produced an explosion of historiographicanalysis, of course, but Voegelin argues that the results need to bedisentangled from ideological misconstruals of reality. A corrective,explanatory philosophy of history-that is, Order and History-must critique and dispel modern oversights about the transcenden-


tal texture of history. This can only be accomplished through criticalrehabilitation of the fact that human consciousness inhabits a"sphere of encounter" between the temporal and the timeless,between immanence and transcendence. And this brings us toanother topic in these essays, which is Voegelin's conception ofhuman existence as a kind of "In-Between."

The essays of Anamnesis consolidated for Voegelin the prin-ciples of the philosophical anthropology that informed all his laterwork, and a number of the articles in Published Essays are devotedin part to unpacking their implications. For Voegelin the mostelementary fact of human existence is that it is a participation inreality, a participation that has the specific form of a conscioussearch for meaning. Consciousness, with its capacity for growingunderstanding and self-guidance, is not an entity like objectsperceived by the external senses, but a "tension" of awarenessstructured by its desire to know. That desire is, overridingly, asearch for the meaning of one's existence; and since no one'sexistence is the cause of itself, ultimately it is a desire for a fullunderstanding of one's true origin or "ground." Human conscious-ness, Voegelin concludes, can thus be described ontologically as a"tension toward the ground" of existence, the "ground" being atonce the reality from which consciousness emerges and towardwhich its searching tends.

Now, consciousness only gained recognition of itself as just sucha "tension" on occasion of discerning the ground of reality to betranscendent. In the West it was the Greek philosophers who firstcarefully articulated the structural peculiarities of consciousness, ofthe soul (psyche) informed by nous (intellect), a faculty that graspsintelligibilities, deliberates, and guides action. The philosophersportrayed human consciousness as neither purely mortal nor im -

mortal, but somehow sharing in both modes of being. In Voegelin'sreading of the Platonic-Aristotelian analysis of consciousness, whichhe essentially approves, what is human about consciousness isprecisely its transcendence of mere mortality, mere perishability,through conscious participation in the invisible, eternal Thinking orIntelligence that grounds all of reality. This makes consciousness an


"in-between" reality, a meeting-place of time and timelessness,world and divine "beyond." Adopting one of Plato's terms, Voegelinrefers to consciousness as a metaxy ("in-between"), and to humanexistence as having a "metaxic," or intermediary, character. Theessence of being human is therefore divine-human participation.

Published Essays includes Voegelin's finest single essay. on hisinterpretation of the Greek discovery of the mind, "Reason: TheClassic Experience." First published in Southern Review in 1974and reappearing in the American edition of Anamnesis (1978), theessay is wonderfully succinct both in summarizing Voegelin's het-erodox reading of Plato and Aristotle on the nature of consciousnessand in outlining its implications for a,"psychopathology" of mentaldisease deriving from the "rejection of reason," a pathology Voegelinfrequently applies, as he does in this essay, to the analysis of modernpolitical thinkers such as Marx and Hegel. At the core of the analysisis the assertion that the original and still valid meanings of "reason"and "rational" derive from the Greek discovery of consciousness asa questioning knowing, able to create personal and social order onlythrough loving participation in the divinely transcendent source ofall things.

Why does this sound so odd-perhaps so outmoded-to con-temporary ears? Voegelin's answer is that we have grown accus-tomed to reducing the co-constituting elements of the "tension" intothing-like objects-taking "human" and "divine," "man" and "God,"for entities rather than as explanatory, exegetical "indices" of themetaxic reality, of consciousness; and mistaking "consciousness"likewise for something in the manner of a physical entity rather thanas a relational tension with these indices ("divine" and . "human") asits structural "poles." Clarification of the nature of consciousnessrequires Voegelin to return time and again to one of his mostpersistent themes, the human tendency to "reify" or "hypostatize"symbols deriving from the differentiation of reality-such as "hu-man" and "divine," "immanence" and "transcendence"-so thatthey are mistakenly thought to refer to spatiotemporal objects orplaces. The constellation of problems surrounding this issue isaddressed in two seminal works in Published Essays, "Immortality:


Experience and Symbol" (1967) and "Equivalences of Experienceand Symbolization in History" (1970).

The "Immortality" article explores some of the difficultiesinvolved in creating symbols adequate to this conception of humannature. Focusing on the transition from mythic, "cosmological"portrayals of the human search for meaning to the Platonic andAristotelian efforts to resymbolize that search in light of the differ-entiating discoveries, Voegelin shows how hard it is to avoid those"objectifications" of transcendence and immanence that yield dis-torted interpretations of human nature and history. The symbol of"immortality" itself, he explains, is a theoretically unsound hybridthat mixes a cosmological (pre-differentiated) conception of thelastingness of an entity with a philosophical (noetically differenti-ated) understanding of consciousness's participation in timelessmeaning. To be theoretically consistent, one must describe humanconsciousness in philosophical terms as neither "mortal" nor "Uri-mortal," these being terms referring to imaginable objects in space-time; rather, it is a non-image-able "tension of existence," theoutcome of whose participation in timeless meaning remains, fromthe human perspective, an insoluble mystery. What is not a mysteryis the constant structure of consciousness as a metaxy, and theprinciple that when a misconstrual of the symbols of timeless realityleaves us with only "immanentist," reductionist interpretations ofconsciousness, a mood of anxious alienation and a loss of "existentialdirection quite naturally ensue.

In "Equivalences," Voegelin gives careful attention to definingthe human-divine metaxy, the In-Between of existence. This piececontains perhaps the classic articulation of his view of the humansituation:

Existence has the structure of the In-Between, of the Platonicmetaxy, and if anything is constant in the history of mankindit is the language of tension between life and death, immortal-ity and mortality, perfection and imperfection, time and time-lessness; between order and disorder, truth and untruth,sense and senselessness of existence; between amor Dei and

The Challenge ofEric Voegelin 425

amor sui, l'āme ouverte and l'āme close; between the virtues ofopenness toward the ground of being such as faith, love, andhope, and the vices of infolding closure such as hybris andrevolt; between the moods of joy and despair; and betweenalienation in its double meaning of alienation from the worldand alienation from God. If we split these pairs of symbols, andhypostatize the poles of the tension as independent entities,we destroy the reality of existence as it has been experiencedby the creators of the tensional symbolisms; we lose conscious-ness and intellect; we deform our humanity and reduceourselves to a state of quiet despair or activist conformity to the"age," of drug addiction or television watching, of hedonisticstupor or murderous possession of truth, of suffering from theabsurdity of existence or indulgence in any divertissement (inPascal's sense) that promises to substitute as a "value" forreality lost (119-20).

The essay continues by listing several basic propositions concerningthe structure of existence: summarily, it is an irruption of conscious-ness within the process of reality, in which understanding engen-ders symbols that express what is intelligible about that process-including what is intelligible about itself as the "area" of the processwhere reality "becomes luminous to itself"-though no humanconsciousness can experience or understand the process of realityin its entirety.

Again, the In-Between of existence is not an object of sense-perception. Still, Voegelin insists, propositions about it such as theabove can be "tested objectively" for their truth. How? By testingthem against the entire historical field of symbolizations of the orderof reality, the "trail of symbols" left by the historical search for truth.

The validating question will have to be: Do we have to ignoreand eclipse a major part of the historical field in order tomaintain the truth of the propositions, as the fundamentalistadherents of this Or that ideological doctrine must do; or arethe propositions recognizably equivalent with the symbols


created by our predecessors in the search of truth abouthuman existence? The test of truth, to put it pointedly, will bethe lack of originality in the propositions (122).

Critics of Voegelin have pointed to such passages to argue for hisunoriginality as a thinker and for his status as a neo-conservativefighting the tide of modern and postmodern philosophical discov-ery. For his part Voegelin would consider such criticism to sufferfrom a "progressivist" bias infected with the desire to move beyondthe perduring human condition, and from a failure to understandthe experiential roots of the very concepts it uses to interpret reality.For the notions of a dedivinized "world" and of an ontologicallyautonomous, radically historicized "human nature" which dominatemodern thought merely separate in a theoretically indefensiblemanner the world-immanent aspect of reality from the transcendentaspect, and denounce the latter as illusory. Human imagination,forgetting the experiences whereby it learned to imagine worldlyreality as distinct from an invisible but omnipresent "ground," haslearned to imagine itself to be a merely world-immanent self.Though consciousness is not radically autonomous-though it is aderived luminosity granted existence by the mysterious ground ofthe reality within which it finds itself it has enough imaginationand cognitive autonomy to construct such distorted interpretationsof reality, which have serious and harmful consequences in personaland political life. A number of essays in Published Essays and LateUnpublished Writings concern themselves with the diagnosis ofsuch distortions. But before addressing this topic, it would be wellto complete our summary of Voegelin's analysis of the humansituation by considering his meditations on divinity and Christianityin three major essays, "The Gospel and Culture" (1971), "TheBeginning and the Beyond" (unpublished but completed around1977) and "Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme " (1983), and intwo shorter pieces, "Response to Professor Altizer's `A New Historyand a New but Ancient God? (1975) and the posthumouslypublished "Quod Deus Dicitur" (1985).

Voegelin's metaxy of consciousness is a "tension of existence" in


which the desire for meaning, whether one knows it or not, headstoward fuller participation in, and deepening understanding of, thesource of all meaning, which is transcendent divinity. But "divinity"here is not some inert object of cognition, which consciousness onits own pure volition reaches out toward. The "tension" is therelation between the searching of human intention and the divinecompleteness of meaning that lures it on. That relation exists beforeits character is understood; it exists as soon as consciousness begins,with its first inarticulate gropings, to understand its situation andmake sense of reality. Voegelin often refers to the "divine partner"in the search for meaning, a partner always present in the dynamicsof consciousness from the beginning.

This means that the human seeking is simultaneously a divine"drawing," and that the "tension" is both at once: one unit ofmovement. Voegelin finds the language of "seeking" and "drawing,"he tells us, in the Platonic-Aristotelian analysis, where "the termsseeking (zetein) and drawing (helkein) do not denote two differentmovements but symbolize the dynamics in the tension of existencebetween its human and divine poles. In the one movement there isexperienced a seeking from the human, a being drawn from thedivine pole" ("The Gospel and Culture," 183). In this view, the'searching of reason is always being guided by an anticipatory trustin the meaningfulness of reality and its basis or ground; further, thissearching is from its inception and throughout a response to thepresence of meaning-and indeed, of ultimate meaning. Humanreason, then, is always the unfolding of a trusting, response to adivine appeal. And "a trusting response to a divine appeal" is thebasic meaning of "faith." The implications here for traditionalconceptions of the relation between "faith" and "reason" are mo-mentous, and Voegelin develops them thoroughly.

The standard view that the Greek philosophers stand for"Reason" as distinct from "Faith" is a time-honored distortion of thefacts, Voegelin asserts, and not only will an accurate theory ofconsciousness indicate this but so will a careful, unbiased reading ofthe Pre-Socratics, Plato and Aristotle. Voegelin goes to somelengths to show how Plato, in particular, eloquently acknowledges


the "divine partner" in. the process of philosophical discovery, aswell as the "revelatory" character of the philosophical vision ofworldly, human and divine reality presented in dialogues such asPhaedrus, Republic,. Timaeus and Laws. Philosophy, for Plato,articulates the logos, the structure and meaning, of a participationin a reality that is saturated with divine presence. Thus Voegelinstates: "The language of noetic philosophy is the language thatemerges from the response to the divine movement; it has revela-tory character....Hence, the noetic quest of the ground is more thana merely human effort at cognition with merely human means; it isa process in the divine-human Metaxy of the psyche..." ("TheBeginning and the Beyond," 187). If this is how Plato understoodhimself, and how we ought to understand him and the achievementof the philosophical vision of human existence generally, how hasthe'traditional assessment gone so far astray?

Voegelin places the blame principally on two factors: first, theease with which, following the tendencies of mythic imagination, wehypostatically separate the human and divine "poles" of existentialtension into a searching human object and a divine object beingsought; and second, Christian "monopolizing" of the revelatorycomponent in differentiated experiences of the divine. In bothGreek and Judeo-Christian cultures, Voegelin asserts, languagesymbols were developed to express the human seeking and thedivine drawing, the appeal of the divine and the "response" ofconsciousness, and the in-between character of the conscious areaof mutual participation between human and divine. In both cul-tures, he continues, it was further understood, by the philosophersand prophets whose experiences once articulate formed the tradi-

tions, that these language symbols themselves shared the in-be-tween status of divine-human encounter-that is, that the "word" ofdiscovery, whether philosophical or prophetic, is both a humanword and a divine word: "the ontological status of the symbols isboth human and divine" ("The Gospel and Culture," 187). After thetwo cultures came into contact, this "double status" of the philo-sophical symbols faded from mainstream interpretation; the culprit,by and large,. Christian theologians


who have split the two components of symbolic truth, mo-nopolizing, under the title of "revelation," for Christian sym-bols the divine component, while assigning, under the title of"natural reason," to philosophical symbols the human compo-nent. This theological doctrine is empirically untenable-Plato was just as conscious of the revelatory component in thetruth of his logos as the prophets of Israel or the authors of theNew Testament writings ("The Gospel and Culture," 187-8).

The concept of "natural reason," in other words, insofar as itpurports to isolate the human component in the search for truth andset it ontologically apart from "supernatural revelation," falsifies theempirical experience of philosophical endeavor and occludes thetrue nature of consciousness as a divine-human met axy. The entiretradition deriving from this falsification must be re-thought; andVoegelin sees his own work as the beginning of the necessary re-thinking, a re-thinking made inevitable, really, by achievements ofthe human sciences and the contemporary state of historical andglobal awareness.

The dichotomies of Faith and Reason, Religion and Philoso-phy, Theology , and Metaphysics can no longer be used asultimate terms of reference when we have to deal withexperiences of divine reality with their rich diversification inthe ethnic cultures of antiquity...and with the contemporaryexpansion of the horizon to the global ecumene. We can nolonger ignore that the symbols of "Faith" express the respon-sive quest of man just , as much as the revelatory appeal, andthat the symbols of "Philosophy" express the revelatory appealjust as much as the responsive quest ("The Beginning and theBeyond,' 210-11).

Such an approach calls for the reinterpretation not only of theexperiential foundation of Greek philosophy, of course, but also ofHebrew and Christian revelation and of the Gospel claims regard-ing Jesus. Voegelin does not shirk his obligation to explain the"Christian difference"; but by now it is not surprising that his


explanations are invariably situated within analyses asserting the"common core" of Hellenic and Hebrew-Christian discoveries.This "common core" includes experiences giving rise to the convic-tions 1) that the divine ground ofreality transcends spatiotemporallimits; 2) that therefore the truly divine is known "within," bymediation of the human faculty (nous or pneuma respectively) thatcan reach toward and participate in divine transcendence; 3) thatthe glory and responsibility of human existence is that it is a tensionof divine-human encounter, in which one can find or miss thedirection of meaningful life; and 4) that authentic or "awakened"existence is a; movement of intensifying conscious participation inthe divine ground of existence-that is, a movement from mortalitytoward immortality. Both traditions, then, offer a way to be "saved"from directionless and non-illumined existence, and the "savingtale" each offers-Voegelin juxtaposes and compares the Gospelswith Plato's myths-are presented in each tradition as having"revelatory" authority, as grounded in guiding visions suffered byexemplary individuals in the metaxy of divine-human encounter.Radiating from these individuals through society and history, the"saving tales" have existential authorityas appeals and challenges toall who come into contact with them.

The foregoing is a highly abbreviated description of the "com-mon core" Voegelin presents; his lengthy analysis is thick withtextual reference and treatment of detail. It is enough, though, togive sharpness to the inevitable question: are the "saving tale" of theGospels and the person of Jesus not unique?

Well, in Voegelin's view, yes and no. First, Jesus existed in themetaxy, like every other human being. But, as manifest in his actionsand attested by those who bore witness to him, his response to thedivine appeal was of unparalleled completeness, in such a way thatthe divine partner in his existence was experienced, by himself andhis followers, as "an extraordinary divine irruption" (The Gospeland Culture," 192). In,other words, Jesus is not uniquely privilegedinsofar as his consciousness is shaped as divine-human encounter orinsofar as his words and deeds reveal the mystery of divine presence;that he shares with other prophets, philosophers, saints, and in fact


to some degree with every human being. But Jesus is uniquelyprivileged in that in him that encounter and presence reach suchdimensions of clarity and completeness that, for those "who cansee," there is in him such a fullness of revelation, such a completeimaging-forth of the unseen, transcendent divine reality, that itmust be affirmed to be unsurpassable. Jesus's authority, Voegelinurges, does not come from the quality of some "information" heshares about a God to whom he has sole access; it comes from therecognition, on the part of those whose own existences in the metaxyhave been a struggle to shape their lives in response to the divineappeal in their own consciousnesses, of the overpowering presencein Jesus of the same divine source and goal that has moved their ownsearching. This is what warrants a new and definitive application ofthe inherited symbol "Son of God." Anchoring his analysis inspecific Gospel texts, Voegelin concludes:

The Matthean Jesus, thus, agrees with the Johannine (John6:44) that nobody can recognize the movement of divinepresence in the Son unless he is prepared for such recognitionby the presence of the divine Father in himself The divineSonship is not revealed through an information tendered byJesus, but through a man's response to the full presence inJesus of the same Unknown God by whose presence he isinchoatively moved in his own existence ("The Gospel andCulture," 202).

There is no Son of God unless there is a God whose son a mancan be without becoming untrue to the truth of existence; andthe Son of God cannot be recognized by other men unless they"see" in him the full presence of the God to whose presencethey respond themselves in the ordering movements of theirexistence ("Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme," 368).

Thus, for Voegelin Jesus's union with God is unique in its quality,but not in its nature. This view will be unacceptable to those whoinsist that in Jesus a one-time incarnation of divine presence inhistory took place. Voegelin's answer would be that, first of all,


human consciousness is co-constituted by divine presence at alltimes; secondly, "revelation" in the sense of exemplary disclosure ofdivine nature and meaning is world-wide and age-old. Most Chris-tians anyway; would admit that the prophetic tradition in Israelleading up to the epiphany of Jesus consists of a continuity ofincreasingly profound revelations of the one true divine reality. Andthis being acknowledged, it would be ludicrous to assert that therevelatory experiences attested to by Greek poets and philosophers,or by the Upanishads or the Tao Te Ching, do not also consist ofinsight into the one divine reality. "The breaking forth", of thedivine-human word of truth about ultimate reality, writes Voegelin,"does in fact not occur as a single manifestation of truth in historybut assumes the form of an open historical field of major and minordivine-human encounters, widely dispersed in time and space overthe societies who together are mankind in history. Nevertheless, inspite of the pluralistic historical form, what breaks forth in this fieldis the one truth of the one reality" ("The Beginning and theBeyond," 182). It is fully orthodox, Voegelin insists, to understand"the Christ" as a fulfillment of a millennial and world-wide process,and not as an unprecedented one-time intrusion into history:

For it is the Christ of the Gospel of John who says of himself:"Before Abraham was, I am" (8:58); and it is Thomas Aquinaswho considers the Christ to be the head of thecorpus mysticumthat embraces, not only Christians, but all mankind from thecreation of the world to its end. In practice this means that onehas to recognize, and make intelligible, the presence of Christin a Babylonian hymn, or a Taoist speculation, or a Platonicdialogue, just as much as in a Gospel ("Response to ProfessorAltizer," 294).

Voegelin would claim that, unlike most theologians and Christianphilosophers, he has taken up precisely the challenge of makingintelligible the "presence of Christ" in such non-Hebrew-Christiantestimonies to revelatory experience and insight, especially in thoseof the Greek thinkers whose parallel differentiation of conscious-ness merged with the Hebrew-Christian to form our civilization.


Such an argument for the common core of the Hellenic andHebrew-Christian differentiations must be accompanied, of course,by a proper, careful account of their genuine differences. The twotraditions of differentiating insights do not, after all, symbolizemetaxic consciousness, or divine reality, or the relation of theworldly immanent to the divinely transcendent, in identical ways.The essential differences are accounted for, Voegelin writes, by thediffering aspects or "areas" of divine-human encounter each tradi -

tion respectively focuses upon. The attention of the Greek philoso-phers falls primarily on the human seeking-that is, on the rational(noetic) component in the movement of divine appeal and humanresponse, and on the dynamics of human participation in the divine.By contrast, Hebrew-Christian prophetism focuses on the divinedrawing-on the spiritual (pneumatic) center of loving response tothe divine appeal, and on the dynamics of divine participation inhuman suffering. Each tradition's set of symbols complements theother by its stress on distinct components in the appeal-response ofdivine-human encounter, and each needs the other to balance andcomplete its discoveries. This is why classical philosophy wasperfectly suited to become the analytical instrument for the exposi-tion of meaning in Judaic and Christian teachings. But Christianrevelatory insight into divine reality, Voegelin asserts, is also in asense a completion or fulfillment of the philosophers' quest, in thatits more thorough differentiation of divine nature illuminates moreprofoundly the loving, absolutely transcendent source and object ofthe human search for meaning. Thus Voegelin, while extolling theunique accomplishment of Greek philosophy in establishing atechnical language and critical basis for analyzing structures inreality-including the structure of existence as a metaxy-stillasserts that the Greek philosophical enterprise finds its fulfillmentonly through the full manifestation of the Logos in Christ, in whomdivine reality is "maximally differentiated" for the truths of transcen-dence.

That "maximal" differentiation reveals, through the Mosaic andprophetic epiphanies culminating in Jesus, a divine ground radicallydistinct from the finite world: a transcendent divinity who creates


the universeex nihilo. Nothing in the Greek discoveries of transcen-dence, in the conceptions of Plato's Agathon or the Platonic-Aristotelian Nous, so radically separate the divine ground from thecosmic stream of things. There is no notion of a creation ex nihilo inclassical philosophy, because there is no conceptual removal ofdivine presence from the world to the degree it is found in theJudeo-Christian teaching. That further degree of differentiation,Voegelin reminds us, is what made possible the recognition that thecriteria of a life properly lived, of "true existence," pertain not tophysical or cultural determinants but to elements in each individual'sresponse to the invisible divine appeal in his or her soul. In otherwords, the Judeo-Christian differentiation reveals that every indi-vidual shares in the gift of divine presence, and that the onetranscendent divine reality is the source of insight, virtue andgoodness in every human soul. This universalizing of "true exist-ence" down to the level of the individual soul lay beyond theexperiential and conceptual orbit of classical philosophy.

But such an achievement has its costs. Such a radical differen-tiation of transcendence allows one not only to conceptually distin-guish, but to conceptually divorce, divine ground and finite world.In fact, the intensity of the Judeo-Christian differentiation, Voegelintells us, introduced new and dangerous ways of "deforming" ourview of the relation of ground to world. To discuss these, he relieson his categories "the Beginning" and "the Beyond."

Divine reality, Voegelin writes, is "experienced in the twomodes of the Beyond and the Beginning." The presence of thecosmos demands causal explanation in the form of an origin oftemporal processes: thus the symbols in all cultures of a divineBeginning. But the discovery of the transcendence of the divineplaces it "beyond" space and time: thus the symbols, as in Greek andJudeo-Christian traditions, of a divine Beyond. These two symbol-isms, referring in their distinct ways to divine reality, can come intoconflict, Voegelin explains, if the experience of the divine Beyondbecomes so intense-as it does in the Judeo-Christian prophetictradition-that the physical cosmos with its Beginning in timebecomes sundered, in one's imagination, from the "true" divine


reality beyond the cosmos. Inevitably the discovery of divine tran-scendence casts a shadow of imperfection over all that is finite; the"index of perfection" is removed from the world. If the removal isthorough enough, it becomes possible to conceive of the world as aplace alienated from the true divine ground; as a place of evil fromwhich we must escape to our true spiritual home; even as havingbeen created, in the Beginning, by an evil God or Demiurge, fromwhose creation we can escape if we find the proper formula,practice or knowledge. This last is the conceit, already described, ofthe ancient Gnostic sects; one of the misinterpretations of realitymade possible by a radical enough differentiation of transcendence.

In brief, a divine ground not at all "of this world" is one whoserelation to this world can come into question. There ensue two mainpossibilities of "deformed" interpretation. One is divine realityconceived as "another world," a spiritual realm of goodness andtruth simply apart from the one full of evil and falsehood in whichwe live. This type of cosmic dualism pervades every religiousoutlook that devalues this world and its conditions of existence whileimagining another world to which the saved will one day come. Theother possibility of "deformed" interpretation comes about when adivine reality declared to be absolutely transcendent, radically otherthan anything finite, ceases to be felt as present, and becomesunbelievable. When the divine ground is only to be experienced foroneself in the silent, invisible discernments of consciousness as itreaches, through yearning and questioning, toward a "beyond" of allpalpable reality, there are many who will conclude that there is nosuch "divine ground" at all. Using the seemingly obvious criteriathat what is real is what can be seen, felt or imagined, they will rejecttranscendent reality as an illusion. Voegelin analyzes the logic of thissequence in a number of essays, considering it a basic element in theformation of modernity.. As he sees it, modern intellectual life hasbeen characterized by widespread rejection of the classical-Chris-tian conceptions of transcendent God and in-between humanity,and equally widespread efforts to resymbolize the ground of realityin a manner more appealing or convincing. The results are thefamiliar "reductionisms" of philosophical materialism, as well as a


striking inflation of human status-since, if there is no transcendentdivine ground of consciousness, humans must be considered thecreators of meaning. Furthermore, if the ground is finite, it caneventually, perhaps soon, be brought under human control. Enterthe modern prophets of total self-determination and of earthlyparadises to be forged by human will and technological mastery: theFouriers, Comtes, Marxes, Hitlers. Such is the thrust of Voegelin'scritique of a principal strand in modern political philosophy.

So what might appear in Voegelin' s work to be arcane specula-tion on the experiences of ancient philosophers and prophets isactually, from his perspective, reflection bearing directly on politi-cal science and on the explanation of contemporary political events.The pertinent issue is, always, the symbolization of order in realityas this establishes the assumptions about human nature and thehuman good that guide political vision and legal, social and educa-tional policies. The Greek and Judeo-Christian heritage of insightsinto the order of reality is, Voegelin argues, the most profound theworld has achieved; but it has also created conditions allowing forthe most powerful and persuasive "deformations" of personal andpolitical life, due to the ways in which the human situation can bemisconstrued through the misinterpretation of symbols derivingfrom experiences of transcendence, and the manner in which thelatter process opens opportunities for indulgence of the lust formastery and control, to the extreme of what Voegelin calls attemptsat "self-divinization." The diagnosis of that indulgence is the focusof a last pair of major essays in these volumes, "The Eclipse ofReality" and "On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery," as also of portions of"Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme" and a number of otheressays.

The human situation being what it is, there is always thetemptation to deny certain facts about existence and substituteothers more palatable. One can, as Voegelin puts it, refuse to live inthe cosmos under the conditions of its actual structure, whichinclude all the familiar evils and fundamental uncertainties aboutthe future, about personal destiny and meaning, and even abouthow and why the universe exists at all. The refusal usually takes the


form of using imagination to eclipse or distort unwanted truths. Ifpracticed on a small enough scale, say on the level of an individual'sneurosis, the consequences may be benign enough; but if such adistortion shapes massively influential philosophical, political orscientific "constructs" of reality, the outcome can be the presence insociety of ideological persuasions that seriously hinder the emer-gence of good order in individuals and societies. Voegelin's critiqueof modernity centers on his conviction that many of the mostinfluential intellectual projects of the last two centuries-includingthose of Hegel, Comte, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger andSartre-are flawed through neglect or willful denial of certainelemental truths about the human condition. In each thinker thereis a notable "eclipse of reality," though the area or areas of realityeclipsed of course differ. The three most common distortionsinvolver 1) the denial of God, of a dimension of transcendentmystery; 2) the claim that humans (or some humans) can achievecomplete knowledge of the purpose of existence, of the solution toproblems of evil, of the direction of history, and so on; and 3) theassertion that the ground or essence of reality is something finiteand, at least intrinsically, fully explicable by philosophical or scien-

tific explanation. These three symptoms-for Voegelin indeedcharacterizes them as symptoms of "pneumopathological" disorder,or spiritual disease-are logically related; the self-apotheosis of thehuman thinker follows from the denial of God, as does inevitably theraising of some finite stratum of reality to the status of ground: "Ifa man lives in openness toward God, Bergson's l'āme ouverte, hisconsciousness of his existential tension will be the cognitive core inhis experience of reality. If a man deforms his existence by closingit toward the divine ground, the cognitive core in his experience ofreality will change, because he must replace the divine pole of thetension by one or the other world-immanent phenomenon" ("OnHegel," 237). The consequence is that, to the degree that one ofthese intellectual projects is socially persuasive, the view of the realhuman situation is obscured by a "Second Reality" (Voegelinborrows the term from' the novelist Robert Musil, withacknowledgements). And such a Second Reality, as recent centuries


have witnessed, can bring enough people, and people of power,under its sway to inspire revolutions and wars, the creation ofpolitical empires, and social and educational programmes thatsystematically mirror distorted-even inhumane-interpretationsof human nature.

To desire to have reality other than it is, and to set about tryingto discover, and then to claim to have provided, a recipe forchanging it, Voegelin insists on calling "magic" or "sorcery." Need-less to say, to label Hegel and Marx sorcerers runs Voegelin the riskof being considered a mere polemicist, if not a crank, rather than aresponsible analyst of political philosophy. His response would bethat, solid historical knowledge of more or less constant traditions ofNeoplatonist, alchemical, gnostic and hermeticist thought in West-ern culture, along with careful scrutiny of the actual texts of Hegel,Marx, Nietzsche and others, would validate his use of such terms,shocking as they are. More immediately, one can validate for oneselfthe basic truths of the human situation in "the tension of imperfec-tion and perfection," and contrast it with the thinkers' pronounce-ments, since First Reality is accessible to each of us, unchanged bythe magic decrees.

This summary of the two books of essays is enough to indicatethe unusual and highly provocative character of Voegelin's accom-plishment in them. It also suffices to indicate why many politicalscientists are wary of Voegelin: he purposefully, some. might sayostentatiously, sets himself apart from the currents of modernpolitical theory and social science, which he criticizes as largelyaberrant; he insists that profound philosophical accomplishment isa necessary precondition for respectable contemporary politicalscience; and he appears to be farmore concerned with philosophi-cal foundations and even with mysteries of divinity than withgovernmental, legislative or other recognizable political topics.Also, moreso than any twentieth century political philosopher ofcomparable stature, he champions the work of classical thinkers-especially Plato-as directly relevant to the analysis of contempo -

rary political life. None of these facts, of course, is reason to judgehis thought ill-guided, On the contrary, Voegelin's penetration of


philosophical and anthropological issues foundational to politicalscience is so much more thorough and sophisticated than all but avery few contemporaries that, whatever his faults, he does in factachieve his ambition of offering an explanation of twentieth centurypolitical developments that is cogent precisely because of its philo-sophical and historical comprehensiveness. These essays convey thepower of that explanation-but they also reveal some of Voegelin'sweaknesses.

One problem consists of the incompleteness of Voegelin'sanalysis of human consciousness, specifically of the details of thethinking process. His constant references to the "truth of existence"and to the truth of "engendering experiences" cry out for an accountof those cognitional operations whereby interpretations of experi-ence are attained and the truth of those interpretations are verified.An account of the mental operation of judgment, in particular,would seem to be a requirement in a philosophy in which claimsabout "truth" are so prominently relied upon. It is certainly notinappropriate for Voegelin's theory of consciousness, like the earlyHeidegger's, to explicitly contradict the self-contained,"immanentized" subject of modern philosophy from Descartesthrough Kant and Hegel to Husserl primarily at the level of basicontological presuppositions; but an attempt to correct the epistemo-logical confusions of modern and postmodern theory, which in thelast decades have led to widespread intellectual disdain for the verynotion of "objective truth" not only in the social but even in thephysical sciences, must be part of any thorough diagnosis of contem-porary sources of disorder.

Another problem, and one pertaining to Voegelin's credibility,lies in his tendency to present important thinkers either as spiritu-ally and philosophically healthy or as invidious, if not downrightdethonic-as intellectual white hats and black hats. On the side oflight we find (of course) Plato and Aristotle, accompanied atdifferent times in these essays by Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas andBergson, along with a host of literary figures including Shakespeare,Flaubert, Thomas Mann, and T. S. Eliot. On the side of darkness areregularly Comte, Hegel, Marx, and Sartre. The impression of a


propensity for exaggerated, one-sided assessment is not whollyjustified, since from these pages can also be drawn measuredcritique as well as careful, explanatory praise of Descartes, Husserl,and Hegel; but rarely if ever does Voegelin discuss a thinkerdialectically, distinguishing in a single context of analysis what isacceptable and what is not. And his criticism of what he findsphilosophically reprehensible is often so permeated with scorn andcondemnation that, unalleviated by reminders that the thinkerunder discussion has some important insights to offer as well, suchpassages can seem superficial and unfair, contributing to a generalsense of impatience, or endemic contentiousness.

The scathing personal tone that appears in some of thesepassages (and in flashes throughout Voegelin's writings), whetherone sympathizes with it or is put off, must be acknowledgedhowever as testimony to Voegelin's commitment to evaluativeanalysis. In political philosophy, in a history of the human symbol-ization of order, a non-critical approach is in Voegelin's estimationpointless; worse, it is a complicity in perpetuating cultural declinethrough indirect sanctioning of corrupt principles and conclusions,through failing to expose the falsifying superficiality of positivistmethodology in the social sciences, and through abandoning thephilosopher's responsibility to diagnose political and spiritual dis-ease. To his credit, Voegelin never hesitates to identify the preciseexistential and intellectual foundations which in his view providethe only valid basis for evaluative analysis, as in this passage from"The German: University and the Order of German Society":

We have spoken of the spirit which is needed to write criticalhistory. By spirit we understand the openness of man to thedivine ground of his existence: by estrangement from thespirit, the closure and the revolt against the ground. Throughspirit man actualizes his potential to partake of the divine. Herises thereby to the imago Dei which it is his destiny to be.Spirit in this classical sense of nous, is that which all men havein common, thexynon as Heraclitus has called it. Through thelife of the spirit, which is common to all, the existence of man


becomes existence . in community. In the openness of thecommon spirit there develops the public life of society. He,however, who closes himself against what is common, or whorevolts against it, removes himself from the public life ofhuman community. He becomes thereby a private man, or inthe language of Heraclitus, an idiotes (Published Essays, 7).

This passage makes quite clear why Voegelin holds that questionsof political order cannot be divorced from those of theory ofconsciousness, philosophical anthropology, ontology and theology:political ordering actually occurs through the influence of personswho order the community, and that ordering reflects their sub-stance and maturity, revealing their priorities, their concrete aims,the focus of their hopes and the quality of their affections. Politicalwisdom springs only from a well-ordered soul. So: what is a well-ordered soul?

Two strengths of these essays should finally be mentioned.Voegelin understands that human beings, temporary participants inthe fabric of the cosmos, aware of their "existence out of nothing"and searching for direction within the mystery, in fact alwaysdepend upon myths: stories that narrate or evoke an encompassingmeaning regarding human participation in reality. Political life inthe twentieth century has been dominated by harmful, inappropri-ate myths-most obviously the. Marxian-and Voegelin is able toexplain why they are harmful because he can explain what myths areand why human beings require them. The only political analysis thatcan critically deal with myths of progress and Utopia is one that haspenetrated below the current cultural fascination with myth to athorough grasp of the function it has served in societies both old andnew. Among contemporary philosophers concerned with myth,Voegelin is unsurpassed in his combination of historical scope andphilosophical acuity. Indeed, his treatment of myths in "cosmologi-cal" cultures-cultures not yet reshaped by symbols arising from thedifferentiation of transcendent reality-as part of his analysis of theself-understanding of early societies, is one of the.most impressiveareas of his work, as are his explanations, as in "Anxiety and Reason,"


of what was gained and lost, forgotten and retained, in the transitionfrom a cosmological to a differentiated symbolization of order.

Only in the context of a convincing discussion of this transitioncan there be investigated' the original meanings of the symbols-God, Nature, Man, Being, Science, Reason-by which our West-ern world has attempted to make sense of the human situation. Byexamining those original meanings, Voegelin is able not only to limnthe essential assumptions about reality that. underlie the develop-ment'of Western thought, but to assess how key symbols-such asGod, Being, and Reason-have been misinterpreted and misappro-priated by thinkers unacquainted with, or uninterested in, theprecise experiences out of which the symbols originated. Andimportantly, this allows Voegelin to give careful attention to theproblem of what he calls "doctrinization": the "hardening" ofsymbols expressing a truth into doctrinal propositions, declared tobe by themselves permanent and self-sufficient embodiments oftruth. Unfortunately, doctrinal propositions do not necessarilyacquaint one with the insights that engendered their formulation;and when a society or person depends for self-understanding onpropositions and symbols no' longer transparent for the insights theywere meant to represent and evoke, the result is a loss of existentialorientation and eventually a skeptical resistance to the "truths" ofprevailing doctrine, religious or secular. Voegelin's description ofthis process with respect to symbols concerning "immortality" isworth quoting at length:

There is no guarantee whatsoever that the reader [of anaccount treating of an "immortal" dimension of human exist -

ence] will be moved to a meditative reconstitution of theengendering reality; one may even say the chances are slim, asmeditation requires more energy and discipline than mostpeople are able to invest. The truth conveyed by the symbols,however, is the source of right order in human existence; wecannot dispense with it; and as a consequence, the pressure isgreat to restate the exegetic account discursively for thepurpose of communication. It may be translated, for instance,

The Challenge. of Eric Voegelin 443

into simple propositions, rendering what the translator con-siders its essential meaning, for use on the secondary level ofinstruction and initiation. If submitted to such proceedings,for quite respectable purposes, the truth of the account willassume the form of doctrine or dogma, of a truth at secondremove, as for instance the propositions "Man is immortal" or"The soul is immortal." Moreover, dogmatic propositions ofthis kind are liable to condition corresponding types ,of expe -

rience, such as fideistic acceptance or even more deficientmodes of understanding. There is the 'seminarian, as a Catho-lic friend once bitterly remarked, who rather believes inDenzinger's Enchiridion than in God; or, to avoid any suspi-cion of confessional partisanship, there is the Protestant fun-damentalist; or, to avoid any suspicion of professional partisan-ship, there is the professor of philosophy who informs youabout Plato's "doctrine" of the soul, or of the idea, or of truth,though to conceive of Plato as a promoter of doctrine ispreposterous. Even the transformation into doctrine, how-ever, is not the last loss that truth can suffer. When doctrinaltruth becomes socially dominant, even the knowledge of theprocesses by which doctrine derives from the original account,and the original account from the engendering experience,may get lost. The symbols may altogether cease to be translu-cent for reality. They will, then, be misunderstood as propo-sitions referring to things in the manner of propositionsconcerning objects of sense perception; and since the casedoes not fit the model, they will provoke the reaction ofskepticism on the gamut from a Pyrrhonian suspense ofjudgment, to vulgarian agnosticism, and further on to thesmart idiot questions of "How do you know?" and "How canyou prove it?" that every college teacher knows from hisclassroom (Published Essays, 53-4).

There is then no remedy in simply insisting that propositions aretrue; the only remedy lies in recovering validating insights foroneself and in helping others to do the same, or at least in inculcating


respect for the primacy of insight over symbolic formulation. Thisremedy is available, Voegelin makes clear, only to the degree that thequestioning search that gave rise to the initial insight is aroused.Propositions are answers; answers are answers to questions; if thequestion is lacking, one is indifferent to the answer. As Voegelinwrites near the beginning of "The Gospel and Culture" with respectto the Christian dogmas, "The answer will not help the man who haslost the question; and the predicament of the present age is charac-terized by the loss of the question rather than of the answer" (175).These essays successfully begin recovery of the questions about thehuman good that provoked the classical political and spiritualanswers-some of them questions that modern ideologists have hadto ignore or suppress in constructing political fantasies responsiblein part for turning the twentieth century into a sequence of politicalnightmares.

IIIWhen we recall that Voegelin's -first academic appointment in the1930s was in the Law Faculty of the University of Vienna, we realizehow fitting it was that from 1954 to 1957 the School of Law atLouisiana State University should have invited the Professor ofGovernment to teach a course on Jurisprudence. Fortunately for us,in 1957 Voegelin prepared for the use of students enrolled in thecourse a 64-page treatise titled "The Nature of the Law." Togetherwith 13 pages of Outline and Supplementary Notes, this opusculummakes up the heart of Volume 27 of the Collected Works, which alsocontains reviews of. four books on legal science and philosophywritten in 1941 and 1942.

In the United :States and in England, the field of law isdominated by •legal theorists who assume that law is simply acommand sanctioned by force, with those who resist that view in thename of natural law forming a dissenting minority. On the conti-nent, Max Weber's comprehensive hypothesis about the historicaldevelopment of Western law from substantive to formal legalstructures has held sway to such an extent that Georg Lukacs and themembers of the Frankfurt School have even managed to integrate


it with Marxian attempts to explain law as the outcome of thestruggle between sheerly economic and class interests. This Marxianframework still plays a heuristic role for political theologians in theThird World, but even that role seems to be on the wane since thecollapse of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. The point is thatVoegelin's treatise does not quite fit into any of the conventionalproblematics. So, just as the rest of Voegelin's writings break themold of standard political science in either the behaviorist vein oreven the fashion of those who, like his fellow German-speakingemigres Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt, have been intent onretrieving insights from the classics in political philosophy, so toothis effort in legal theory is rather strikingly singular.

As regards the background of his theory, Voegelin tells us in hisAutobiographical Reflections that the Pure Theory of Law of HansKelsen (who along with social ontologist Othmar Spann had beendirector of his doctoral dissertation)

was the splendid achievement of a brilliant analyst, and it wasso good that it hardly could be improved upon. What Kelsendid... still stands as the core of any analytic theory of law. I laterused this core, with some improvements of my own, in thecourses in jurisprudence that I gave in the School of Law atLSU. I should like to stress that there never has been adifference of opinion between Kelsen and myself regardingthe fundamental validity of the Pure Theory of Law (21).

But we should not rush into likening Voegelin's analysis toomuch to Kelsen's approach, because Voegelin goes on to object thatKelsen had superimposed the ideology of Marburg neo-Kantianmethodology upon his treatment of the logic of the legal system.This caused Kelsen's legal theory to be artificially isolated from thetheory of government or political theory in general. As early as 1924,therefore, Voegelin set about trying to redress this misconstructionchiefly through a recovery of all the historical materials relevant toa full-bodied science of politics. Thirty years later, in the 10-pointOutline of his LSU jurisprudence course (1954-1957), Kelsen'stheory of pure law appears under "VII. The Theory of Positive Law"


after "1. Austinian jurisprudence and its succession" (72). And inthe Supplementary Notes for that same course, under the sectiontitled "Concerning Principles of Jurisprudence," Voegelin writesthat a "positivist, or progressivist, philosophy of law, which seeksperfection in the world-immanent course of history, has a lowdegree of rationality" in contrast to a philosophy of law "which hasa differentiated understanding of transcendent reality" (78-79).

The Nature of the Law appears in the wake ofThe New Scienceof Politics (1952) with its emphasis upon political representation asexistential, in which Voegelin radicalizes the approach of Frenchinstitutionalist Maurice Hauriou. He had already criticized Kelsen'sone-sided claims about the theory of law as the basis for understand-ing politics across the board in the second part of his The Authori-tarian State (1936), not only on theoretical grounds, but after havingwatched positivistic liberalism play into the hands of Hitler's Naziparty in Austria. In the work presently under review, it becomesclear that the state cannot be understood as a collectivity of individu-als held together by a legal framework because "rules as a self-contained realm of meaning" are not self-explanatory. Voegelinobserves that "the preanalytical knowledge and language of lawyersabout their law extend beyond the crosscut of the positive law intoareas of which we may speak provisionally... as the history of law andthe law-in-the-making (15-16). This means ' that the legal order ofa society cannot be adequately understood either in terms of a "staticpoint on a time dimension created by the constitutional procedure"as an aggregate of valid civil, criminal, and constitutional rules ornorms; or as "the continuum imagined as a series of static points onthe line" (17) . The key to Voegelin's analysis of the nature of the lawis to lay bare "the intricate pattern in which legal rules interweavewith social reality" (21) by paying careful attention to social conductand the richness of everyday language. His analysis discloses "arelation between law and society so intimate that the whole exist-ence of man in society is pervaded with `law"' (24). In this mannerVoegelin moves from dialectical analysis and a phenomenology oflaw to an explanatory ontology-something far from usual in con-temporary academic discourse about the law.


Voegelin calls "the law" "the substance of order in all realms ofbeing" (24). Voegelin's recurring language of "substance" and "thetruth of order" distinguishes his analysis from virtually all othertreatments of the law. Indeed, his entire inquiry flies in the face ofnot just the legal formalism of Max Weber, John Austin, and Kelsen,but of the more recent tendency of legal realists such as KarlLlewellyn, O.W. Holmes, Jr., and Jerome Frank to reduce law toextra-legal social, economic, or technological forces.

For Voegelin "the law is something that is essentially inherentin society, though the manner of this inherence is complicated bythe fact that it must be secured...by organized human action, thetype of action ofwhich we speak as the lawmaking process" (25). Thecrucial insight is that the lawmaking process has "to secure asubstance of order that is not of [its] making" (27). Neither the legalformalists nor the realists confront the question of the criteria of thetrue order of society. Voegelin faces the question of criteria head on,but with great subtlety, by placing lawmaking within the frameworkof truth and existential representation. For Voegelin the root ofpolitical order is an experience of participation in a wholeness thatgoes beyond the existence of individuals, and so the articulation ofthat order in law is rendered substantial rather than just formal inthe measure that it conforms experientially to an order attuned tothe ground of being as a whole.

The issue of the criteria for a society's lawmaking is thus locatedsquarely and concretely in the midst of "two essential tensions":

1) there is a tension between the substantive order of societyand the lawmaking process insofar as the organized process ofmaking the law is apparently the inevitable means for keepingthe substantive order in existence; and 2) there is a tensionbetween the substantive order of society as it exists empiricallyand a true substantive order of which the empirical order fallsshort (30).

However much Voegelin realizes that the ultimate source of thevalidity of law is the divine ground of being as a whole, he makes nobones about the fact that "the `powers-that-be' confer validity on the


law when they enact it, [and]...the power structure of a society is thereality that becomes legally articulate in the rules of the constitutionin the material sense" (31-32). For instance, in one of thosestunningly illuminating passages of which he is capable, Voegelininvokes the example of the U.S. Constitution:

The procedure by which the Constitution of 1789 was createdhad not been provided by the Articles of Confederation. Interms of procedural validity, the Philadelphia Convention wasa revolutionary assembly and the continuity of the legal orderhad been broken. Nevertheless, while the term revolutionordinarily is used in connection with the events of 1776 andafter, it is very little used in connection with the events of1789-in spite of the fact that the constitutional continuity wasbroken and that not all the means for achieving ratification ofthe new Constitution in the several states fell under the headsof sweetness and reason. The peculiarity will become intelli-gible if the whole period, from the beginning of the movementfor independence to the making of the Constitution of 1789,is considered one social process in which the growing nation,winding its way through the difficulties of intercolonial andinterstate 'relations and the labors of the war, gained its powerphysiognomy and, after the unsatisfactory experiments withthe Continental Congress and the Articles of Confederation,at last found the Constitution that was valid and at the sametime expressive of the authoritative power structure of the newnation (36-37).

Hence, "constitution" in the sense of devising legal forms islocated in the more basic and complex context of "constitution" inthe sense of a social process of "creating and ordering the nation"and bringing about "authoritative power." Constitution in the senseof "the actual power structure with its authority" pervades or"enters" constitution in the sense of "the validity of the rulesthemselves" (37). This is why, for Voegelin, "the legal order, whileit has no ontological status of its own, is part of the process by whicha society brings itself into existence and preserves itself in ordered


existence" (38).Voegelin's ontological analysis of the nature of law is centered

on the set of experiences through which the existence of a peopleparticipates in an order of being which embraces God, the world,and society, and becomes articulate in symbolizations of the perva-sive order of being exemplified in the maat of Egypt, the tao ofChina, and the nomos of Greece. The constitutive existence of asociety gives rise to what Voegelin calls "the Ought in the ontologicalsense" :

Man...experiences the anxiety of the possible fall from thisorder of being...; and, correspondingly, he experiences anobligation to attune the order of his existence with the orderof being. Finally, he experiences the possible fall from, and theattunement with, the order of being as dependent on hisaction, that is, he experiences the order of his own existence asa problem for his freedom and responsibility (44).

In this context Voegelin distinguishes but does not separate "rule,"as a statistical phenomenon of behavioral regularity in cooperativeaction, from "norm,", as what links rules to the overall purpose of asociety as it lives out the tension of existence (44-48).

Voegelin elucidates the issue of the validity and normativity ofthe law in a way that goes beyond the scope of the logic of rules inthe manner of Kelsen, or of the power tactics of social engineeringin the manner of the legal realists or the critical legal theorists, oreven of formalistic discourse ethics in the manner of J. Habermasand K.O. Apel. He does so by examining validity or normativity inthe framework of a society's substantive communication. Whenpeople in society individually or collectively deliberate whethersome action intended by rules , is truly normative, for Voegelin thisis part and parcel of the overall process by which a society deter-mines its identity (29-38) and orientation [see V. The Rule as Projeet(48-55)]. This communication-process constitutes the historicalunfolding of true order. Any empirical society may approximate thetruth of existence more or less fully and, as historically conditioned,the people in a society may be more or less permeable to the


realization of true order.Typically, Voegelin also stresses the degree of differentiation

achieved by any given society. At the time of this writing-roughlycontemporaneous with Volumes I-III of Order and History-Voegelin highlights the differences proper to (1) law in societiesordered by global and compact cosmological myths such as Egyptand the Ancient Near East; (2) those under the order differentiatedfrom myth by either revelation (Israel) or philosophy (Greece); (3)societies in the West where both reason and revelation operate asauthoritative sources of order; and (4) societies where an intentionaloblivion of one or other authoritative source goes hand-in-hand inthe 19th and 20th centuries with "the rise of Gnostic creed move-ments that attempt the ordering of society by fusing the normativeauthority into the authority of power," as in Communism andNational Socialism (68).

The ontological density-cum-differentiatedness of Voegelin'sanalysis of law derives from the way he traces therules of legal orderthrough the context of the lawmaking process and the larger contextof society whose members are addressed by law, down to thesociety's normative projects for concrete order. These in turn arerooted in the ontological Ought, which is a tension in society, a moreor less clearly and universally experienced exigence to create andmaintain order for the sake of existence in society. The society as aself-organizing entity (55-58) articulates its identity and orientationin creating and accepting representatives (58-59) to function au-thoritatively in the self-ordering of society by issuing rules more orless in line with true order.

Because any representation of substantive order is liable tofailure and abuse, societies also tend to set up institutional safe-guards like the separation of powers, bills of rights, independentjudiciaries, universal suffrage, short terms for representives, and soforth-in short, what Voegelin calls "the calculus of error" (59-61).

Moreover, "the realization of order [as] the substantive organi-zation of human life in attunement with the order of being as it isexperienced in the Ought" (59-60) is directly a function of thedegree to which a society has a critical mass of persons who


habitually order their conduct by reason and conscience. Reachingthat critical mass is made problematic by external conditions, andmore so by internal passions that gravitate against personal orderand give rise to impersonal disorder in society. In response to theimpersonality (61-64) of a society beset by the citizenry's "pride andinertia,...aggressiveness and lack of courage,... righteous indigna-tion and lack of wisdom,...dullness and lack of imagination,...complacency and indifference,...ignorance and folly" (63), there isalso an impersonal character proper to the legal order. This imper-sonality of the law is embodied in its sanctions by force. ForVoegelin the disposition of force, while not the essential moment ofthe law, is still a necessary and inevitable component of compulsionand threat demanded by the impersonal existence of human beingsthat resist or refuse attunement to true order in society. As a socialresponse to the tension between what a society is and what it shouldbe, genuine power is a separate and subordinate, as distinct fromnormative, source of the validity of law. Force is needed to disci-pline disordered individual and collective emotions and drives.

Voegelin rejects the conceit of law as the command of thesovereign. He relates the publicity of the law (45-48) to processes ofcommunication in order to do justice to the "elaborate socialmediation" of the Ought of society. What is socially mediated are"projects" (today the term of choice is "life plan"). According toVoegelin such projects take basically two forms (49-52). There arethe projects worked out in political culture and public opinionthrough all the institutions, discussions, political activities anddebates about social reform that set the conditions for the immedi-ate preparation of the lawmaking process. These communication-processes are aimed at the effectual realization of the empiricalsocial order. There are also the more detached and disinterestedconversations of philosophers. Voegelin typically sees philosophersas motivated by resistance to the disintegration of their society'sorder to inquire into the conditions of order that favor the fullestflourishing of human nature. Because they are paradigmaticallywell-ordered, mature persons, philosophers possess a heightenedawareness of the tension between the de facto order of society and


true social order. They are able to envisage through treatises ordialogues the models of rightly ordered society and practice, butthey do so only in literary forms, in speech alone. Although themotivation of philosophers is practical, the chief aim of the philoso-phers' project is contemplative. So Voegelin does not expect themto become socially dominant. Indeed, it is of the essence of thephilosophic existence that the orientation of philosophy betranspolitical, and that its influence be only indirect, throughpersuasion and. education.

It is remarkable how much of Voegelin's analysis of the natureof law would seem to be unaffected by the later developments in histhought already sketched in this review. Perhaps only his way ofspeaking about reason and revelation as authoritative sources ofnormativity would need to be modified from the viewpoint of hislater insights, but this would not lead to any substantial change in hisaccount of the nature of law.

Finally, notice the great affinity between Voegelin's approach tolaw and society and what , today is called the "communitarian"approach to social theory on the part of thinkers like MichaelSande', Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and others. Perhapsthis is where today's discussion would most benefit by this littlebook.

Glenn HughesSaint Mary's University

Frederick LawrenceBoston College

oferic voegelin - isistatic.org · the challenge oferic voegelin the collected works of eric...

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