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Faith in search of the order of realiiy

Eric Voegelin: Philosopher of Divine Presence

Pa u 1 Ca ringella

ERIC VOEGELIN’S WORK addresses the modern mind. As a philosopher’s work it con- fronts a modern mind shaped by philosophers such as Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger, whose explora- tions concentrate especially on the concrete questioning consciousness and its relation to reality and that consciousness’s relation, in reflection, to the reality of its own “constitutional history,” and then, if possible, to the history of reality as a whole.

Since his is a philosopher’s work, Voegelin seeks to present what is common to the structure of “everyman’s” consciousness, the “everyman” implied in Aristotle’s formula in the beginning of the Metaphysics. Voegelin finds consciousness, the concrete consciousness, his own the most concrete since it is the only one to which he has direct, i.e., reflective, ac- cess, to be first of all constituted by reality. Even though the consciousness will be shown to have an important role in what we may call the “coconstitution” of reality, the primacy lies with the always prior- forming reality. This prior reality, in which Voegelin found his consciousness already moving and by which it was already structured opened up, in the questioning search provoked by that reality’s movement in himself, to the mystery which Voegelin called the Beginning and the Beyond, following the language of the constitutive history he recovered in his own work, opened up to the mystery, in a word, of “what men call ‘God.’ ”

To put the matter simply, Voegelin does

not see “modernity” starting abruptly with the methodical doubt of Descartes’s questioning consciousness. While Descartes’s reflections may seem to be the very es- sence and beginning of “modernity” for the so-called “modern mind,” Voegelin makes present, current, or “modern” (if you will) the divine mystery constituting the questioning consciousness, the mystery still alive in the third meditation of Descartes but soon to be forgotten by much of the modernity which, in its con- cern to explore the light of human consciousness, risked putting into shadow the constitutive light, the light in which we see light. We can see here the significance for the spiritual substance of all of Voegelin’s later work of his 1943 letters to Schutz, in which he goes behind and beyond the Meditations of Descartes and Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations to regain the Ansel- mian and Augustinian meditation which consciously and reflectively participates in the movement of the founding and forming divine mystery in the soul.’ Here we see already the importance of the theme of “meditation” for Voegelin, the “anamnetic meditation” beginning in 1943, which is the rubric under which he places the beginning of his Anamnesis volume of 1966, and the “meditation” which enters the titles of his last two major essays, the unpublished “The Beginning and the Beyond: A Meditation on Truth” from the middle 1970s,* and the last major essay before volume 5 of Order and History, “Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme: A Meditation” (1981)? The “history” which

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Voegelin remembers in anamnetic meditation, the always greater and deepening “history” which forms the substance of what now must be seen as the prolonged single meditation over decades of work, Order and History, is the history of divine presence and its manifestation in human consciousness. Voegelin makes “modern,” Le., makes present today, at least in his own thought and for those moved by him in their own meditations on reality, the great foundational experiences and sym- bolizations of divine presence, the great movements of consciousness toward “transcendence” in the direction of the Beginning and Beyond, the historical symbols he draws from Genesis and Plato to represent the one divine mystery in which human consciousness lives and moves and has its being.

Voegelin’s anamnetic meditation moves over millennia of divine presence. The movement of reality in human experience, in personal autobiography as well as in the larger history of societies of per- sons, goes from compactness to differentiation of experience and is always accompanied by the struggle of imaginative symbolization to express adequately the emerging differentiation. For Voegelin this movement from compactness to differentiation is primarily the movement in which the mystery of the divine formative presence in the whole of reality deepens into the mystery of the divine Beyond of its moments of presence. This differentiation of the Beyond is inseparable from the corresponding differentiation of the concrete consciousness which emerges in the process as the eminent location for the presence of this further mystery of the divine, i.e., the mystery of the divine presence as an experienced tension of presence and beyond of presence. The

itself in emphatic partnership with a divine Beyond that reveals itself precisely by drawing the participant consciousness beyond itself in its experienced presence of the movement of “revelation” toward a beyond of revelation. As Voegelin put it in regard to the great foundational revela-

I concrete, reflecting consciousness finds

tion in the Thornbush episode of the Book of Exodus in volume 1 of Order and History, the divine “I will be with you” of the Exodus text is “an effort to articulate a compact experience of divine presence so as to express the essential omnipresence with man of a substantially hidden God. The ‘I will be with you,’ we may say, does not reveal the substance of God but the frontier of his presence with man; and precisely when the frontier of divine presence has become luminous through revelation, man will become sensitive to the abyss extending beyond into the incommunicable substance of the Tetragrammat~n.”~

I wish to place this reference to the Tetragrammatic mystery before our eyes from the start to remind us of its important place in all of Voegelin’s work. As at this point in volume 1, so also at other crucial moments of his analyses over the years, Voegelin turns to St. Thomas Aquinas’s philosophical exegesis of the Exodus text. In Anamnesis this Tetragrammatic depth of the mystery is “the area of the incom- prehensible, of which we know only that it is the area which we touch by the symbolic terms of noetic and pneumatic experience~.’’~ And in volume 4: “Beyond the theophanic experiences there lies, in the language of Aquinas, the tetragrammatic depth of the unfathomable divine reality that has not even the proper name M GO^."^ Whatever I write of the mystery of divine presence in Voegelin’s work in the following pages must be read in the light of these words of his on the ultimate limits of language in regard to the experience of the divine, the experience he expresses in the paradoxical phrase re- peated almost like a refrain at key junc- tures in volume 5: “the experience of the non-experientiable reality.”’

What I hope to do within the limits of this essay is to bring out what I consider to be the most important new or more fully developed elements of Voegelin’s later work, especially volume 5 and the “Wis- dom” essay, for our discussion of the topic “religion” in Voegelin. These elements, of course, are in meditative continuity with

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the core of the Voegelinian movement toward the divine Beyond indicated in the preceding pages.

What I will try to present in brief and, I am afraid, disconnected and fragmentary form, trusting to our discussions in person to fill in what is lacking, are the following elements: (1) The Imagination and its Im- aginative Story (Mythbas the necessary and irreplaceable way of speaking of the mystery, and this Story as always the expression of Faith. (2) Reflective Distance- Voegelin’s “third dimension” of consciousness in the paradox of consciousness in its relation to reality, the paradox that per- vades the central Voegelinian complex of consciousness-reality-language-as the human correlate of the divine Beyond.

The imaginative stories Voegelin re- covers in volume 5 , chiefly that of Genesis I, the creation story, then Hesiod’s story of the gods at the beginning of the Theogony, and, finally, Plato’s philosopher’s story of beginnings in the Timaeus, are, as are all the other stories Voegelin studied in the other volumes of Order and History, stories of faith told from varying degrees of reflective distance. Voegelin’s own story, then, the unfinished story of Order and History itself, is such a story of faith told in the reflective distance of Voegelin’s anamnetic meditation.

I wish to proceed by presenting first the latest articulation by Voegelin in the first chapter of volume 5 of the structure of consciousness, supplementing this presentation with the version of the same structure which Voegelin worked out in the “Wisdom” essay. These articulations are the latest developments of that primary theme prominent in Voegelin’s work from 1943 and especially attended to in the Anamnesis volume, that is, the constitution of consciousness by reality. The articulations also further unfold the implica- tions of the participatory nature of consciousness Voegelin stressed so strongly in his introduction to the first volume of Order and History. And, as I have said already, the further differentiation of the consciousness of the human partner in the divine-human movement and counter-

movement Voegelin is describing is the correlate of the deepening mystery of the divine Beyond in the same differentiating process. With the later writings it becomes most clear that the human partner’s response to the divine movement must be an imaginative one in trying to find appro- priate symbols for what is happening in reality to the partners as each moves deeper into mystery in the growing inti- macy of growing distance in the differentiating movement. The divine becomes more “unknown” just as the human becomes more a mystery to itself.

As this movement proceeds the greatest skill is required of the human imagination to keep the balance, not to sever the tie that binds divine and human in the movement. Here, then, in reflective distance of consciousness, the human storyteller is most godlike, most the “image of God.” And here, too, he can enter into his greatest rivalry with God, the rivalry Voegelin recognizes on the first page of the first chapter of Order and History.8 The image of reality and its movement that the human partner creates in response to the divine movement in his soul can maintain the balance or it can fall away into the imaginary world of magical self-creation and self-salvation, split off in these acts of imaginative oblivion from the divine reality which makes the very distance of such a fall possible. For Voegelin it is the anamnetic meditation, carried out in the respectful reflective distance gained in the differentiating movement of the corre- lates: the divine beyond and the respond- ing human consciousness, which, alone, can keep the balance. The consequences for Voegelin’s philosophy of history, I think, are obvious: the philosopher must become a mystic and the philosopher’s “history” must be told as a history of the differentiating movement of the divine Beyond and the soul.

In volume 5, Voegelin demonstrates both the imaginative oblivion of the reflective distance in Hegel’s “reflective iden- tity” of consciousness, with its deformation of the truth of the Beyond and the grotesque consequences of this deforma-

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tion, and, more importantly, the way of carrying out the anamnetic recovery of the Beyond by a meditation on Hesiod‘s poetic distance to the emerging and changing language of the gods in the Theogony, and, especially, by a meditation on the great imaginative work of reflective distance that is Plato’s Timaeus.

I hope to use the insights gained by this concentration on imagination and reflective distance in the later work of Voegelin to go back, even if briefly, to his treatment of the Pauline imaginative story of the “Vision” in volume 4, in order to come to some conclusions in regard to Voegelin’s own story of faith and what that philosopher’s story might have to say to the “modern mind’ and its questions of “religion.”

The Structure of Consciousness

Voegelin develops in the last major essay and in volume 5 is the structure common to everyman. The significance of that fact came out for me most vividly in what Voegelin wrote in volume 5 about the consciousness of the authors of Genesis 1: “The authors of Genesis 1, we prefer to assume, were human beings of the same kind as we are; they had to face the same kind of reality, with the same kind of consciousness, as we do; and when, in their pursuit of truth, they put down their words on whatever material, they had to raise, and to cope with, the same questions we confront when we put down our word^."^ The common structure Voegelin exempli- fies in Genesis I will be found in, and ap- plied by Voegelin in volume 5 to, Plato and his Timaeus, Hesiod and his Theogony, and even Hegel and his Phaenornenologie. With it we can explore with Voegelin the consciousness involved in the great visions of a Hesiod, a Parmen- ides, or a Plato on the Hellenic side, or of an Isaiah, a Jesus, or a Paul on the Israel- ite-Judaic-Christian side. With him we can inquire about what is going on in their souls or in the soul of an Abram, a Moses, or a Jeremiah, and about what goes on in

THE STRUCTURE OF consciousness that

the soul of a poet, a prophet, or a philosopher. With the common structure gained we can penetrate what is common in the dominant images of reality which emerged from the great visions and their stories: the images of order coming out of disorder in cosmological myth and ritual; the Hesiodian mytho-speculation on beginnings and the language of the gods emerging from the beginnings of his great mytho-poem; the pneumatically differentiated mytho-speculation of the authors of Genesis I and its creative word of God spiritually alive in the tellers of the tale of creation as the story of the beginning of their own attempts to wrest order from disorder; the philosopher’s myth of Plato in the Timaeus, the myth of the cosmos as the monogenes eikon of the divine paradigm whose demiurge persuasively presses order onto the resistant-receptive chora; the Pauline myth of the Son of God, the victorious presence of the God in the human struggle for order, the Pauline eikon of God (which was the monogenes of John) revealing the fullness of divine participation in the drama of salvation prom- ising the victorious end to the drama; and finally, perhaps, we can find that common structure in Voegelin’s own “modern” philosopher’s story, his image of reality in faith, which was able to weave together such moments of divine ordering into the reflective distance of his anamnetic meditation.

What 1 think Voegelin is saying is that what goes on in the great souls, in the heart of their formative stories, the stories of their visions and the images of reality they create in reflection upon those visions, is what goes on in the soul of everyman. That is why I speak of Voegelin as the philosopher of divine presence: He illuminates the structure of everyman’s existential consciousness as oriented to the same divine constitutive movement, everyman’s consciousness as the place where the divine movement finds formative response or deformative resistance. Volume 5 most fully articulates and ex- plores that common structure of consciousness. (The extensive quotations that

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follow are the most direct way for me to bring out the aspects of Voegelin’s “new” analysis, the dimension of reflective distance and the force of imagination.) Espe- cially the emphasis on imagination links back to my desire to present Voegelin as the philosopher of divine presence in everyman, for surely everyman experiences himself as imagining.

At the heart of Voegelin’s presentation of the structure of consciousness is what he calls “the paradox of consciousness”- “the paradoxical structure of consciousness and its relation to reality.”

On the one hand we speak of consciousness as a something located in human beings in their bodily existence. In relation to this concretely embodied consciousness, reality assumes the position of an object intended. Moreover, by its position as an object intended by a consciousness that is bodily located, reality itself acquires a metaphori- cal touch of external thingness. . . . I shall, therefore, call this structure of consciousness its intentionality, and the corresponding structure of reality its thingness. On the other hand, we know the bodily located consciousness to be also real; and this concretely located consciousness does not belong to another genus of reality, but is part of the same reality that has moved, in its relation to man’s consciousness, into the position of a thing-reality. In this second sense, then, reality is not an object of consciousness but the something in which consciousness occurs as an event of participation between partners in the community of being.

In the complex experience, presently in process of articulation, reality moves from the position of an intended object to that of a subject, while the consciousness of the human subject intending objects moves to the position of a predicative event in the subject “reality” as it becomes luminous for its truth. Consciousness, thus, has the struc- tural aspect not only of intentionality but also of luminosity.

. . . To denote the reality that comprehends the partners in being, i.e., God and the world, man and society, no technical term has been developed, as far as I know, by anybody. However, I notice that philoso phers, when they run into this structure in- cidentally in their exploration of other s u b

ject matters, have a habit of referring to it by a neutral “it.” . , . I shall call it therefore the It-reality as distinguished from the thing- reality.’O

This seemingly abstract and neutral philosophers’ language developed in volume 5 by Voegelin, of two structures of consciousness named “intentionality” and “luminosity,” and two corresponding structures of reality dubbed “thing-reality’’ and “It-reality,’’ will be used to great effect in the rest of volume 5 to explicate and explore the tensional nature of reality in its movement toward order, its struggle for order, which engages the participating human consciousness at every step in its role in the paradoxic complex process which, Voegelin goes on immediately to show, includes in the paradoxic complex the very language man must use in his attempts to describe the process in development.

To remove some of the seeming ab- stractness and neutrality of Voegelin’s presentation here I will turn to his parallel discussion of structure in the 1981 “Wisdom” essay. In that essay the first two structures of consciousness are named “mystery” and “intentionality.” Again, I will let Voegelin speak for himself

For the truth of reality is not an ultimate piece of information given to an outside observer but reality itself becoming luminous in the events of experience and imaginative symbolization. Truth is a perspective of reality, arising from man’s participation, with his conscious existence, in the reality of which he is a part. Hence, the consciousness of a reality intended as its object by the desire to know is accompanied by the consciousness of the quest as an event within the reality intended: the human intentionality of the quest is surrounded by the divine mystery of the reality in which it occurs. . . .

Of intentionality and mystery, we shall speak as “structures” of consciousness. With the caution, however, that they are not fix- tures of a human consciousness in the im- manentist sense, perhaps an (I priori structure, but moving forces in the process of reality becoming luminous.

Voegelin moves next from these first two

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structures to the third, which he names here “the balance of consciousness” or “wisdom” and, in the fifth volume, “reflective distance.”

The forces of intentionality and mystery are neither speculative assumptions, nor do they operate as a blind a priori. They are experienced as the moving forces of consciousness. . . . Hence, the process of reality becoming luminous is further structured by the consciousness of the two moving forces, or the tensions between them, and of the responsibility to keep their movements in such balance that the image resulting from their interactions will not distort the truth of reality. l2

Imagination VOECELIN introduces at this point “the neutral force” of imagination, which can either aid in the balance or produce imbalanced images of reality.

. . . a thinker must remain aware of his consciousness as permanently engaged in balancing the structuring forces, in the personal, social, and historical dimensions of the process. And finally, to be aware of the truth of reality as an image emerging from a balancing process, means to remain aware of the tension between the balanced image and a power of imagination which is necessary to achieve symbols of truth at all but is a neutral force inasmuch as it can also produce imbalanced and distorted images of reality.I3

As we move to Voegelin’s fuller discussion of imagination in volume 5 , pages 37-41, we must recall the paradoxical structure of consciousness and its relation to reality: intentionality and luminosity, thing-reality and It-reality, introduced in the first pages of the volume; for imagination fits right into the middle of the complex process of participation traced out in that structure and emerges now into reflective consciousness.

Truth has its reality in the symbols engendered by the quest. . . . The symbols . . . arise from the human response to the a p peal of reality, and the response is burdened with its character as an event in the reality to which it responds.

At this point it will be helpful to introduce the term “imagination” into the analysis. The event, we may say, is imaginative in the sense that man can find his way from his participatory experience of reality to its expression through symbols. . . . There is no truth symbolized without man’s imaginative power to find the symbols that will express his response to the appeal of reality; but there is no truth to be symbolized without the comprehending It-reality in which such structures as man with his participatory consciousness, experiences of appeal and response, language, and imagination, occur. Through the imaginative power of man the It-reality moves imaginatively toward its truth.14

Imagination also offers man “escapes of a sort from the reality by which it is gov- erned.” Voegelin finds the “source of the escapes in the tension between imaginative force and the reality in which it occurs, between the image of reality and the reality it is supposed to image.” He continues:

By virtue of his imaginative responsive- ness man is a creative partner in the movement of reality toward its truth; and this creatively formative force is exposed to deformative perversion, if the creative partner imagines himself to be the sole creator of truth. The imaginative expansion of participatory into sole power makes possible the dream of gaining ultimate power over reality through the power of creating its image. The distance inherent in the metaleptic tension can be obscured by letting the reality that reveals itself in imaginative truth imaginatively dissolve into a truth that reveals reality. We are touching the potential of deformation that has been discerned, ever since antiquity, as a human vice. . . . In the Romantic period, the vice has found its most impressive characterization in the “statement” of the Baccalaureus in Fuust: “The world, it was not before I created it.” The image of the world becomes the world itself. By his imagination, we may say, man can out-imagine himself and out-comprehend the comprehending reality.15

“The imaginative perversion of participatory imagination into an autonomously creative power,” Voegelin goes on,

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has remained a constant in history. . . . And, as far as we can discern analytically it will not disappear in the future. For imaginative perversion is . . . a potential in the paradoxic play of forces in reality as it moves toward its truth.

Voegelin finds this potential in the very quest for truth itself: “Every thinker who is engaged in the quest for truth resists a received symbolism he considers insuffi- cient to express truly the reality of his responsive experience. In order to aim at a truer truth he has to out-imagine the symbols hitherto imagined; and in the assertion of his imaginative power he can forget that he is out-imagining symbols of truth, but not the process of reality in which he moves as a partner.”16

Reflections WHAT I want to emphasize for the sake of the topic of “religion” in Voegelin is that the comprehending reality, Voegelin’s It- reality, which encompasses its tensional pole of thing-reality and is never to be split off from it, includes among the “things” comprehended the bodily-located consciousness that, reflecting on its own intentional and imaginative search within reality, becomes aware of itself as part of that greater, comprehending reality which is not a “thing” like the consciousness or the other “things” consciousness intends but is the “All” of reality becoming luminous for its truth in the imaginative sym- bolizations of the consciousness in its reflective search. The area of reality explored here as the It-reality, the comprehending reality, the “all” of reality, which later Voegelin finds in the Platonic periechon (comprehending) to pan (all), is the area for which the imagination must find symbols such as “Mystery” or “Vision,” the area of Faith, the area from which, in faith, emerges the respective searches of what later will be called the myth or, if you prefer, the story of the noetic vision or the pneumatic vision, the stories emerging from imagination as the

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symbolic expression the participating consciousness must utilize to give an account of its vision and its emergence out of and over against earlier myths.

This emphasis on the interaction and in- separability of It-reality and thing-reality, of the luminosity of consciousness and its intentionality in the participatory paradox of reality and consciousness, and especially on the role of the imagination in symbolizing the movements in the complex of tensions, is, I think, the key point for our discussion of Voegelin’s significance for the modern mind. For the imaginative interaction he describes includes a much wider horizon than what is usually included under the Christian symbolism of fides quaerens intellectum. (One can look at page 90 of volume 5 for the application of this formula to the Platonic work.) With the development of the paradox in the first chapter to the culmination of the chapter in filling out and balancing intentionality and luminosity and their inter- mediary force of imagination in making the third dimension of consciousness, its reflective distance, thematic as Voegelin’s own fuller differentiation of the reflective remembrance compactly symbolized by Plato as anamnesis; then with its application to his own work of Order and History and its testing in the German case (especially in the case of Hegel) in the first half of the second chapter; and finally, with Voegelin’s exemplification of its importance in the question of “the language of the gods” and the emergence of the symbolism “one god” in his anamnetic meditation on the mystery of beginning in Genesis in the first chapter and on Hesiods Theogony and Plato’s Timaeus in the last pages of the book, Voegelin has achieved in volume 5 , In Search o f Order, a remarkable feat of illumination from reflective distance, an exemplary “contri- bution” to that “philosophy of symbolic forms” that he called a desideratum in volume 1” and that, as “the comparative study of symbols and experiences” he found still only in its beginnings eighteen years later in volume 4.’*

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Voegelin ‘s Return to the Platonic Myth: The Timaeus

THE READER of Voegelin’s last major works, the “Wisdom” essay of 1981 and volume 5, might be surprised at the re- newed emphasis on and extended analysis of the Platonic myth there by Voegelin, after Voegelin had so clearly stated in volume 4 his judgment of “the superior degree of differentiation” of the Pauline myth:

Since the truth of existence . . . is the criter- ion of truth for the myth, the Platonic type was no longer suitable as the ultimate truth about God and man, once the pneumatic depth in divine reality beyond the Nous had been articulated. . . . The movement in reality, that has become luminous to itself in noetic consciousness, has indeed unfolded its full meaning in the Pauline vision and its exegesis through the myth. The symbolism of the man who can achieve freedom from cosmic Ananke, who can enter into the freedom of God, redeemed by the loving grace of the God who is himself free of the cosmos, consistently differentiates the truth of existence that has become visible in the philosopher’s experience of athanatizein. l9

Well, then, why did Voegelin go back to Platonic myth, and in such great detail, and especially to the Timaeus, in volume 5?

Voegelin must not have been fully satis- fied with his treatment of the Platonic myth in volume 4 in respect to the Pauline myth. There was more to the Platonic myth than he was able to state on that occasion. The Timaeus is so present in the history of philosophical and religious thought since antiquity and so significant also throughout much of Voegelin’s own earlier work that he found that it simply demanded further study in its own right as illuminating the nature of myth as such and especially the “myth” of the comprehending whole of reality, Voegelin’s It- reality, in volume 5.

The Timaeus exploration most fully il- lustrates Voegelin’s paradoxic tension of consciousness, of It-reality and thing- reality, and the central role of the imaginative psyche within the process of reality

and the telling of its story. The core of the Timaeus myth, the Platonic philosopher’s myth par excellence, illuminates the consciousness and story of the twentiethcen- tury philosopher Voegelin, and his up- dated story of the quest for order, of the soul’s struggle for order in the Metaxy of reality that the soul represents and em- bodies, the In-the-Middle of the philosopher’s soul, Plato’s and Voegelin’s, illuminates the struggle in the soul of everyman in his quest for order in his own life and in the greater reality in which he participates.

While I must cite a few passages from Voegelin’s earlier work that underline this importance for the illumination of the philosopher’s quest for Voegelin of the Timaeus, I can only refer the reader to numerous pages of the “Wisdom” essay on “Vision” and “Myth” where Voegelin develops his analysis of the myth in Plato by reference to dialogues other than the Timaeus. There Voegelin describes the growth of Plato’s “vision” through a se- quence of myths in the Laws, the se- quence corresponding to the growth of the vision in Plato’s own personal history (and, I might add, in my reading of his work, to the growth of the vision in Voegelin’s own personal history of study, which culminated in the return of the always young “old philosopher” in his last days to the myth of the Timaeus). As early as 1943, Voegelin recognized the phenom- enon of development from myth to myth in Plato, on that occasion remarking on the movement from the mythical story elaborating the insight into the three different human types in the Republic to the “better” myth in the Laws, the “true” myth of the cords in tension and the golden cord, a myth of the nature of man as such. There Voegelin wrote, in regard to the “puppet symbol” of the Laws, that “Plato’s representation evokes the awe of transcendence, the ‘numinous’ in the sense of Rudolf Otto.”zo We should note that this mystery of the pulls of the cords returns at the very end of Voegelin’s unfinished meditation in volume 5 with his “conclusion” on the limits of the philoso-

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pher’s quest for truth: The quest for truth, as an event of participation in the process, can do no more than explore the structures in the divine mystery of the complex reality and, through the analysis of the experienced responses to the tensional pulls, arrive at some clarity about its own function in the drama in which it participates.*’

The Timaeus was important for Voegelin’s work at least from the time of The New Science of Politics. Then, in the Pluto volume of Order and History, Voegelin devotes pages 170-204 to the Timaeus. Here, again, I find myself forced simply to cite Voegelin’s own words, hoping that they will help the reader better approach Voegelin’s final study of the dialogue at the end of volume 5.

The central importance of the Timaeus for any study of the philosophy of myth is stated right at the beginning of the Timaeus chapter in volume 3:

The philosopher discovers that the myth is the ineluctable instrument for communicat- ing the experience of the soul; for he must himself develop mythical symbols in order to express his discovery both as a process and as a result. And through the opposition of his conscious myth to the less conscious forms he becomes aware that the old myth also expresses the truth of the soul, merely on a less differentiated level of consciousness. The soul as the creator of the myth, and the myth as the symbolism of the soul, is the center of the philosophy of order. That center, the philosophy of the myth, is reached by Plato in TimaeusZ2

Pages 183-203 of this chapter are made up of three sections, entitled, respectively, “The Philosophy of the Myth,” “The Myth of the Myth in the Timaeus,” and “The Myth of the Incarnation in the Timaeus.” At the very beginning of this extensive study through the three sections on the myth, Voegelin again underlines the crucial place of the Timaeus:

The philosophy of the myth is presented in the Timaeus in the form of an intricate myth of the myth. . . . The Timaeus marks an epoch in the history of mankind in so far as in this work the psyche has reached the critical consciousness of the methods by which it symbolizes its own experiences. As a consequence, no philosophy of order and

symbols can be adequate unless the Platonic philosophy of the myth has been substantially absorbed into its own principles . . . the importance of the Timaeus as a basis for every philosophy of the myth.23

At the midpoint in time between the analysis of the Timaeus myth in the Pluto volume of 1957 and that of the last twenty pages of the fifth volume, substantially completed in 1983, Voegelin again gave careful attention to this primary text, in 1970, in the major essay, “Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in His- tory.” (He had, in the 1966 “Vorwort” to Anamnesis, once more emphasized the importance of the Timaeus for his own philosophy of remembrance and for any philosophy of symbols.) Now, in the “Equivalences” essay, Voegelin continues to spell out that importance. I will again cite key passages at length, not only to spare myself the struggle of paraphrase and the reader the pain of decipherment of my inevitably distorting effort, but also in the hope that the reading of these passages will be the best accompaniment to the reader’s tackling the intricate Timaeus analysis of the concluding pages of Volume 5. I imagine it will be quite some time before an adequate com- mentary is available on these last pages of Voegelin. Gregor Sebba, Voegelin’s life- long friend, who read the pages for the first time on the evening following the memorial service for Voegelin at Stanford and a few months before his own death, marveled at their richness and at their perfection of analytical presentation.

In the “Equivalences” essay, Voegelin relates the “primordial field of reality,” what he will later, in volume 5, call the It- reality, to the search for truth in the philosopher’s psyche represented in the Timaeus:

The primordial field of reality is the community of God and man, world and society; the exploration of this field is concerned with the true nature of the partners in the community and of the relations between them; . . . The philosopher in search of truth about reality will want to know what kind of reality in terms of the primordial field is

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touched when man descends into the depth of his psyche; and since the truth hauled up from the depth affects his perspectival view of the field as a whole, he will not identify the reality of the depth with any of the partners in the community but with the underlying reality that makes them partners in a common order, Le,, with the substance of the Cosmos. This was Plato’s answer to the question, in the Tirnaeus. The depth of the Cosmos below the primordial field.Z4

“Hence,” Voegelin concludes, “the reality of the Cosmos in depth is the anima rnundi. ” After describing the “prodigious career” of this “world-soul” with its “extra- ordinary vicissitudes,” Voegelin centers on what the symbol tells us about the “philosopher’s myth” itself and its “truth”:

When Plato tried to characterize the type of truth peculiar to the symbolism of the Tirnaeus he wavered between the more assertive alethinos logos and the more doubtful eikos rnythos. But whether his myth of the Cosmos was a “true story” or a “likely myth,” he was sure that the symbolism had not been engendered through articulation of an experience. The anima rnundi is a philosopher’s myth: It articulates neither the experience of the primordial field, nor the experience of the psyche, but achieves the imaginative fusion of insights gained by the two types of experiences separately. That is not to say that the imaginative play does not express any reality at all. It is true, we have no experience of the depth of the Cosmos as psyche; and Plato himself is careful enough to claim for the psyche and logos of man no more than to be kindred (syngenes) to the divine psyche and logos of the Cosmos. Still, the imaginative play has its hard core of reality as it is motivated by man’s trust (pistis) in reality as intelligibly ordered, as a Cosmos. Our perspectival experiences of reality in process may render no more than fragments of insight, the fragmentary elements may be heterogeneous, and they may look even incommensurable, but the trust in the underlying oneness of reality, its coherence, lastingness, constancy of structure, order and intelligibility will in- spire the creation of images which express the ordered wholeness sensed in the depth. The most important of these images is the symbol cosmos itself, whose development runs historically parallel with that of the

symbol psyche. The result is the eikos mythos whose degree of likeness will de- pend on the amount of disparate experiences it has achieved to unify persuasively in its imagery. But that is not yet the last word in the matter; for Plato lets Timaeus conclude his story with the assurance that, according to the likely myth, the Cosmos is a zoon ernpsychon ennoun in very truth (te alefheia). The earlier wavering characteri- zations of the myth as somewhat less than really true are now superseded by the assertion of its truth in the full sense. The statement is delivered with impenetrable serious- ness but in its depth we can sense an ironic smile: The most intimate truth of reality, the truth about the meaning of the cosmic play in which man must act his role with his life as the stake, is a mythopoetic play linking the psyche of man in trust with the depth of the Cosmos.2s

This passage brings us to the issue of “the philosopher’s faith” and the role of “the Cosmos” in that faith. Voegelin concludes the essay with a reflection of the “faith” expressed in Aristotle’s famous sweeping statement: “All men by nature desire to know.” We share with Aristotle, Voegelin says, “the belief in the premise that a truth concerning the reality of one man concretely does, indeed, apply to every man.” And he continues:

The faith in this premise . . . is . . . engendered . . . by the primordial experience of reality as endowed with the constancy and lastingness of structure that we symbolize as the Cosmos. The trust in the Cosmos and its depth is the source of the premises-be it the generality of human nature or, in our case, the reality of the process as a moving presence-that we accept as the context of meaning for our concrete engagement in the search of truth. The search for truth makes sense only under the assumption that the truth brought up from the depth of his psyche by man, though it is not the ultimate truth of reality, is representative of the truth in the divine depth of the Cosmos. Behind every equivalent symbol in the historical field stands the man who has engendered it in the course of his search as representative of a truth that is more than equivalent. The search that renders no more than equivalent truth rests ultimately on the faith that,

16 Spring 1990


by engaging in it, man participates repre Through Voegelin’s Timaeus analysis SentativeIY in the divine drama of truth we can get some sense of the central role

of everyman’s consciousness and uncon- become luminous. 26

I hope these long citations will serve to sciousness, of everyman’s imaginative power to form and deform images of reality, to remember and forget, to fall back into the oblivion of the dominant cosmos of the Public Unconscious-a place “from which,” Voegelin tells us, quoting from Timaeus 53B, “ ‘as it were, God is ab- sent,’ 9928-or to remember again the

and keeping it open, waking up to the ~6common9~ world of Heraclitus.

The COSmOS of our cOnSciouSneSS is the 66world” in which each of us lives and

and has our being. It can be the COSmOS graced with the vision of the Beyond which it moves, the greater Whole revealed to us through the lives and deaths of those humans who

uring the moments of their lives and who were able imaginatively to symbolize this experience.

frame the reader’s own reading and re- reading of Voegelin’s Timaeus exposition in the fifth volume.27

Conclusions on Voegelin ’s Timaeus WHAT EMERGES from Voegelin’s “final”

of the Image. The imagining teller of the tale, Plato, through the speaker of the tale, Timaeus, finds the structure of the Cosmos as the It-reality moving through all things to the ultimate paradigmatic oneness. But the “place” of its movement, the place of its manifestation, its “epiphany,” of structure, and the place Of both the theophany and the resistance to it, is the imaginative

beginning and the beyond. It is in the soul of the “thing” man that

the struggle between It-reality and thing- reality goes on, symbolized as the pull of the Beyond and the resistant counter-pull of the chora, the divine, immortal beyond and the “mortal beyond.”

Plato creates in the Timaeus an image of reality. Timaeus’ account itself, his eikos mythos, a likely story, is in fact an account of the visible cosmos, the encompassing All, the to pan of reality (Voegelin’s It- reality) experienced by us as an Eikon, an Image, as the monogenes, image of the in- visible oneness (monosis) of the eternal liv- ing Paradigm-Reality. The noetic quest of the embodied soul, embodied within the cosmos, which itself is imaginatively presented by Plato’s mythologizing imagination speaking through Timaeus as Nous-in- Psyche-in-Soma, is the place where the cosmos becomes luminous for its paradigmatic order, but this only through the ordering force of persuasion, of peitho, working on the receptive-resistant force of the non-thing chora, “Space.” This Myth of the Cosmos, which, Voegelin says, is not a cosmological myth, is Plato’s exposition of his Fides, the report of his fides guaerens intellectum.

Timaeus reading in is the Image divine presence moving the c o n ~ c i o u ~ n e ~ ~

noetic psyche Of the questioner for the were more aware of the mystery transfig-

The Philosopher’s Fides: Beyond Plato’s Fides o f the Cosmos

to the Pleromatic Metaxy THE COSMOS itself, Voegelin’s comprehending It-reality, the periechon in his Timaeus reading, appears to assume the role of receptive-resistant chora when seen in its tensional relation to the Beyond of tension, the Eternal Oneness which, having its Parousia in the formative process of cosmic reality, constitutes It as an intelligible process, transfigures It in the process of forming things within It and promises It and all the things within It an ultimate transfiguration beyond the process.

The philosopher’s Fides can advance from Plato’s Fides of the Cosmos. But that Fides is included now in the “new” philosopher’s Fides that is Voegelin’s. The Beyond of the cosmos, with its Parousia in the cosmos, which founded Plato’s Fides, is now enriched by the Parousia seen in Man, in the Christ, and in the symbolism

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that emerges from the Gospel-movement with its vision of the victorious end, now possible in man’s suffering and death because that suffering is seen by the vision to be God-in-man’s, bringing with Gods rising an end to the mache athanaros, the undying struggle with death. The End is clearly announced by the eschatological pneumatic vision and it enters into and helps advance the articulation of the philosopher’s vision as the basis of his Fides and the content of his story. But in all cases-even with the differentiation of the “pleromatic metaxy,” in the “Wisdom” essay-the “position” of the consciousness that bears the vision is still metaxic, the concrete consciousness remains in the middle of the struggle, in the metaxy, still lives and tells its story only by faith, and the philosopher, handmaiden still to the mystery, serves by reminding “true believers,” if they still have ears to hear, of their precarious status, the status he shares with them in the middle, in his philosopher’s fides.

Voegelin’s “History,” his story of faith, is a philosopher’s history. It becomes clearer and clearer that it is a history of visions and of theophanies, of the language of the gods and of the one God who grows by the imaginative elaboration of these visions. Voegelin’s is a spiritual history of mankind, not just a history of Christianity. The philosopher’s history, then, can help restore, enrich, and articulate Christian- ity’s original “catholic” vision, its universal horizon.

The pleromatic metaxy is the fullest Parousia in the metaxy. Note: parousia and metaxy. It is the presence of divine reality, the presence of the beyond in a fullness of formative force, but it is not a “fullness of the Beyond,” or else it, the Beyond, would be comprehended and we would be out of the middle in some nowhere of being. The Beyond is truly beyond and its experience is precisely the experience of the tension between its forming and ordering presence and its ac- tuality beyond its ordering force of presence: the experience of what Voegelin calls, in volume 5 , “the experience of the

non-experientiable.” The experience is presence, which is Parousia, and points to the beyond of presence.

So the One-God-Beyond of the Christ, who is the Parousia of that God-Beyond, the Christ who is the Eikon of that God and in whom the “fullness of divine reality” dwells corporeally, is and remains and becomes ever more mysterious as the Un- known God of the millennial process of the incarnation of God in time. And with the growth of this mystery of the divine beyond as it comes ever closer to humanity, this mystery that moves through the bodily life and death of a man to bring man to its immortality, so, too, grows the mystery of the unknowability of the human partner, already recognized from the first pages of volume 1, the mystery of the unknowability in every man.

Voegelin traces the millennial process: From the Parousia of the formative and renewing Beyond in the New Year’s ritu- als through the Hellenic development from Poet to Tragedian to Suffering Ser- vant Socrates and the Saving Story of Judgment and Choice in Plato to the fullness of the Suffering Servant in the Christ, and now to the anamnetic meditation of a Voegelin, passes the history of man and the form of humanity emerges in the Im- age of God as the Suffering Servant.

The most concrete presentation of the fullness of the divine mystery of the formative Parousia of the beyond, concrete and full because in human experience and imagination there can be no fuller presence than in the whole story of one man’s life and death, is, of course, the Christian story of the life and death and resurrec- tion of Jesus the Christ. Voegelin’s sighting in the Christian visions of a “pleromatic metaxy” describes the fullness of the mystery of the Unknown God and Unknown Man meeting at the center of the movement of the unfinished story of reality.

The visionary faith, thus, is faith in the monogenes cosmos, the periechon Image, which as One tensional story, told in the flawed language of things by the human partner, images the ultimate Oneness. As the moving image of eternity, time reveals

18 Spring 1990


its movement as the psyche’s ascent through the flux of divine presence in the time of the In-Between to the monosis of the Whole in which it moves: the movement of the alone to the alone at the end of Plotinus’ Enneads and the end of Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed. This moving Image becomes even more dra- matic when, in the culmination of the millennial Israelite-Jewish-Christian develop ment, the Image finds in Man’s response the pneumatic fullness of the saving movement.

We participate in the tension of this millennia1 process as images of God our- selves and image-makers too in our images of reality, our story-telling and story- remembering (and dis-membering). We trust the images we shape while remaining, in our reflective distance, aware that they are only images; yet still, as expres- sions of reality, the images would not strive to image if they were not participating in some manner in reality’s moving presence. In reflective distance we are aware that the images do not comprehend the comprehending reality of the All nor the beyond of the comprehending reality toward which “It” moves, but that the images are part of that mysterious All moving toward its Beyond.

We live, then, in the tension of the Word, that is, the Image of God, the Eikon, in whose divine reality we share in our lives and deaths, and which commands us to share the participative word by our telling the saving story, but which also commands us to refrain from making images of God. So all our languages of the gods, and even our language of the one God, must draw back in the reflective distance of meditative-mystical remembrance before the ultimate luminosity of the horizon, the luminosity of the “light in which we see light,” the light of the beyond of all epiphany, of all Parousia. That sobering yet intoxicating awareness of the distance of the beyond then mea- sures us and our strides as we “walk while we have the light;” our upright walking is the Way of the Beyond, that is, our very conduct of life is, beyond the words we

say, and by way of judging the words we say in the conduct of that life, the witness to the adequacy of our Fides, of our fidel- ity to the Beyond of all images that mea- sures our concrete imaging of the Mystery of the Unknown God and our participation in its life.

The vision of the Christ in the apostolic witness, the vision of the Christ in the Apostle to the Gentiles and his story, which is the exegesis of his vision, is inseparable from the struggle of life and death in daily life made transparent as the struggle, in every man, of the suffering God. This is the mystery at the heart of the oldest cosmological symbolism of paleo- lithic times, the mystery expressed, perhaps, by the anonymous mound build- ers and stone carvers of Newgrange, the mystery of the New Year’s ritual renewals of cosmic order in the ancient near east, the experience of the new covenant in the heart of Jeremiah, the loving vision of love and of the beyond in the heart of Plato, the vision of the resurrected in Paul, and the vision of history as a history of visions in Voegelin’s unfinished story of Order and History.

Voegelin S Balance of Consciousness VOEGELIN’S balance of consciousness comes from the reflective distance of his consciousness to the process of reality of which it is a part and from which it emerges while remaining a part. The balancing reflective distance is first of all aware that its consciousness, of itself and of the process, is only a part imaging the mystery of the comprehending whole of the process, and not the sole creator, even in imagination, of that whole, but that even, and especially, in its imaginative, creative response to the whole, it remains a part, a responsive part and a responsible partner.

Voegelin’s balance of consciousness is anamnetic. It comes from the reflective distance embodied in his great acts of remembrance in all their scope and depth, from his great horizon with all the richly articulated detail within it, and which

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manifests itself continually in his respect for every element in the process of which his consciousness is a part-his respect for the lastingness of the cosmos and our experience of its mystery; his respect for the mystery of the beyond of the cosmos that not only does not abolish the cosmos but also appears to have created it as the place for the transfiguration of the “things” within it along with, ultimately, the cosmos itself; respect for the mystery of revelation of that transfiguring process in the variety of myths (stories) that are seen not as infinitely varied but as revealing constants in the process of transfiguration, one of which being the paradoxical constant of movement itself, that is, the constant of differentiating pressure; respect for the diversity of the differentia- tions of the beyond, especially in the emergence over millennia in the two different ethnic cultures of Hellas and Israel of two different modes, the noetic and pneumatic; respect, indeed, for the deformative process that accompanies and parallels the struggle for the understand- ing of the truth of the noetic and pneumatic revelations (for example, and evi- dent in so much of Voegelin’s work, his respect for Hegel’s great attempts to regain the “experience of consciousness”), the struggle to explore the structures of these revelations and the entire “history of revelation” in “religion” and “philosophy.”

Voegelin’s respect for the cosmos is evi- denced in his respect for all the things of the cosmos, from the plant and animal life in which the divine reality can show itself to the point of there being as many forms of gods as there are forms of “natural” phenomena, to the celestial gods at the limits of the visible cosmos. Respect, then, too, for the foundational reality of the cosmos, especially for the bodily founda- tion of consciousness, the consciousness of a concrete man in a concrete place and time, on a concrete earth in a concrete universe. This concrete, bodily, thingly reality is what is in the process of transfiguration. “Plato carefully stresses,” Voegelin reminds us near the end of

volume 5, “that ‘the divine’ cannot be discerned by itself alone; there is no participation in ‘the divine’ but through the exploration of the ‘things’ in which it is discerned as formatively present (69A).”29

And Voegelin’s respect includes respect for the intentionality of consciousness and the marvels of its discoveries in “thing”- reality, in the “things” of the “external world,” the world of space-time with its “infinities” of structure to be explored from the subatomic to the super-astro- nomic, and this respect includes respect for the immense amount of “information” unearthed by the exploration of “history” as a “thing.”

The balance of Voegelin, his wisdom, of course, always remains philosophy, that is, the loving search for wisdom that lets the background of mystery emerge always more clearly, the background expressed a number of times by Voegelin as the tetragrammatic depth of the divine beyond, expressed so often that the Aquinas text that he uses for this purpose seems to become the most important text for Voegelin’s philosophical mysticism, the tetragrammatic depth that, for Voegelin, does not have “even the proper name ‘God’ ” or “Being.” Voegelin’s mysticism, then, is that respect for reality inseparable from, and the basis for, true “tolerance.”

This balance of Voegelin, his wisdom, can illuminate our “modernity” and its “religious” formation and deformation. Pneumaticism divorced from noetic structure, noetic structure separated from the divine mystery of its epiphany as structure in man’s soul and in reality, both can set free the imagination to wander in confu- sion among broken images of reality, either to proclaim defiantly its own image to be the image of reality or to succumb in a public unconscious to the latest image of reality dominating the public scene, or sceptically or cynically to resist the truth of any or all of images of reality and, finally, to sink into the despair and futility of the little or no reality such a contracted self carries by itself, with no image of reality and certainly a poor “self-image.” It is

20 Spring 1990


, this scene that Voegelin’s work can, for some, penetrate. The work must lead the questioner back to the roots of the pneumatic and noetic revelations, recognizing in them the constitution of consciousness by divine reality and seeing in the balance between the two movements of the soul, for it is the same movement of divine reality informing both, Voegelin’s balanced response to the “revolutions” of “modernity.” Of course, the social effectiveness of his work can come about only if Voege- lin’s vision is taken seriously by new generations of scholars and students within the institutions of church and university, if it is studied, explored, ques- tioned, challenged, tested, and expanded by a free community of scholars and teachers. To the extent that that does hap- pen in this country, one might rightly speak, as Ellis Sandoz does, of a “Voegel- inian Revolution” or of an “American Renais~ance.”~~

1,

I

The Philosopher’s Story THE philosopher’s story, Voegelin’s, is an anamnetic story of the whole, but since there is no knowledge of the beginning and the end and no knowledge of the comprehending reality in which the story is an event and whose story the teller tries to tell, his unfinished story must remain content to be an image created by faith, trusting that it is a true image because it tries to remain faithful to the reality whose story it tells.

Even though it must attempt to be a representative story of the whole, a comprehending story, it knows, if it remembers the reflective distance in its story-its distance to its beginning and its end and its whole-that the story is told in the flawed language of things, the language that expresses the intentions of intentional consciousness seeking to grasp the comprehending reality as its “object.”

Even the Parousia of the Beyond to which the story testifies by its own ordering, formative response is a Parousia formative of “things,” a formation in and of things. The Parousia, and every parousia,

is ultimately in tensional relation to its beyond.

Hence, even the great images, noetic and pneumatic, which both carry the note, monogenes-i.e., the Cosmos in Plato and the Son in John-along with all the things comprehended by their respective comprehending Eikon-Image, are seen to be in movement from the mystery of their absolutely creative beginning, the silent mystery of the “nothing” from which all “things” come, including the non-thing “thing” Cosmos and the non-thing “thing,” the Son, which comprehend all the more thing-like “things,” including all the other “sons of god”-e.g., Plato’s and Plotinus’s gods of the Phaedrus vision, and all the adopted sons of god in the Pauline story, made children of adoption by their being filled with the only Son’s one pneuma-in movement toward the absolutely transfiguring End beyond the cosmos of space and time and “things,” beyond the paradigmatic Cosmos, which comprehends the eikon-world, and beyond the Son whose mystical body contains all the other “images of God,” his brethren, toward the God who is All-in-all. Thus, the philosopher’s story is eschatological. The mache athanatos will come to an end.

What are the philosophical alternatives to this philosopher’s story? A completely sceptical reflective distance? But does it, in turn, have a story of its own to tell? And, if not, then where does it get its distance and to what is it a distance? How does it, or can it, account for itself? If it asks questions it is on its way. If it stops asking it has closed up. At a certain point, however, it might fall into an honest, hum- ble silence before the mystery. Its reflective distance might express itself in its wish to keep a respectful distance before a reality too mysterious in its beginning and its end and its process to be spoiled by making up stories about it. The philosopher who asks questions about all reality experienced, seeking to comprehend all of reality, might take a lesson from this respectful silence. The mystic-philosopher knows that his own quest emerges from and must return to the silence of the in-

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comprehensible beyond, but the situation of the struggle impels him to speak now from the middle, to tell his story from within the Metaxy, from within the Cosmos, for the philosopher is called to respond to the Image by his own images.

Voegelin ’s Story

VOECELIN presents to the “modern mind’ a vision of history as a divine comedy. He tells the story of a mystery in the process of being revealed. At the heart of his story is the concrete embodied consciousness of the storyteller, in this case, that part of reality called Eric Voegelin. But the part of reality telling the story of reality is the representative of everyman, the everyman who has his own story of reality to tell. Eric Voegelin reminds everyman of the reality of which each story is a part, formative or deformative, a story of the struggle for order in reality; he reminds each man of the great unfinished story of which each individual story is an episode, the unfinished story of divine reality moving toward the fullness of reality.

Eric Voegelin’s story is the story of his remembering vision, his faith searching for the order of reality. The evidence of that quest is contained in the decades of his published works, which document the growth of his vision in his unfinished search for order in history.

‘Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis (Munich, 1966), pp. 2 1-60; esp. pp. 34-36. ‘To be published by Louisiana State University Press in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. Voegelin, “Wisdom and the Magic of the

Extreme: A Meditation,” Southern Review (Spring 1981), pp. 235-87. ‘Voegelin, Israel and Revelation (Baton Rouge, 1956), p. 411, vol. 1 of Voegelin, Order and History. SAnamnesis, p. 338. Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age (Baton Rouge, 1974), p. 264, vol. 4 of Voegelin, Order and History. ‘Voegelin, In Search of Order (Baton Rouge, 1987), vol. 5 of Voegelin, Order and History. Vsrael and Revelation, p. 16. 91n Search of Order, p. 19. ‘OIbid., pp. 15-16. lL“Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme,” p. 245. 121bid. ‘Vbid., pp. 245-46. “In Search of Order, pp. 37-38. Vbid., pp. 38-39. ‘Vbid., p. 39. 171srael and Revelation, pp. 154 f f . I8The Ecumenic Age, pp. 254 f. and 260. 191bid., p. 251. ’OAnamnesis, p. 47. ”In Search of Order, p. 106. 22Voegelin, Plat0 and Ari- sfotle (Baton Rouge, 1957), 170, vol. 3 of Voegelin, Order and History. 231bid., p. 183. ”Voegelin, “Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History,” Philosophical Studies (The National Univer- sity of Ireland), vol. 28 (1981), p. 98. 2sIbid., pp. 98-99. ’Vbid., p. 103. 27Having tried here to help the reader approach Voegelin’s discussion of Plato and the Timaeus in volume 5 , I might take this opportunity also to point out Voegelin’s earlier treatment of the other major figure of the last part of that volume, Hesiod. I refer the reader to volume 2, The World of rhe Polk (Baton Rouge, 1957), not only to the chapter on Hesiod, pages 12664, but especially to two other passages: pages 72-73, where Voegelin describes the importance of the singer-poet’s newly gained reflective distance as the servant of the Muses who announces the truly memorable in a new symbolism of divine and human order; and page 167, where, in the introduction to the chapter “The Break with the Myth,” Voegelin places the “dynamic center” of this break, the center of the new “speculative quest for the origins of being and order,” in “the personality of a great poet. . . . The Creator of the work presented himself in person, fully conscious of what he was doing . . . there emerged the self-consciousness of the thinker as the carrier of a new truth in history. The personality of the man who can distinguish verities of order and create the symbols to express them became with Hesiod a new element in the structure of reality.” 281n Search of Order, p. 106. 291bid., p. 103. 3oEllis Sandoz, The Voegelinian Revolution (Baton Rouge, 1981).

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