Sandoz – Our Western Predicament A Voegelinian Perspective on Modernity
/favicon.ico
Our Western Predicament

A Voegelinian Perspective on Modernity

By

Ellis Sandoz

Moyse Distinguished Professor Political Science & Director, Eric Voegelin

Institute, Louisiana State University

Prepared for Delivery at the Annual Meeting of the Philadelphia Society,

April 24, 1999, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Introduction

The "iron curtain of the future" (as Arnold J. Toynbee called it) that

absolutely bars specific understanding of the human future blocks any

attempt to forecast the twenty-first century. In fact, one of the

principles of Eric Voegelin’s thought, and distinguishing marks of a

philosophy of history and politics-as opposed to an ideological

deformation of historical reality-, is a recognition of the deepening

mystery of human existence as it opens toward the horizon of the unknown

and unknowable future. Not only don’t we know what may happen in the next

hundred years, we don’t even know what may happen next week or this

afternoon. Moreover, to ask a philosopher’s appraisal of a question is to

risk transformation of the debate.

Thus, to declare (or to pretend to know) what the future holds is a

speculative derailment into ideology or modern gnosticism–the very Gnosis

itself. The sole exception is genuine eschatological visions of the

eternal human destiny known in faith, hope, and love, and imparted through

revelatory experiences, a destiny to be achieved in a transcendental

beyond of present existence. The attempt to effectuate fulfillment in the

here and now of history, through the transformation of man and the world

in time, lies at the very heart of radical modern rebellion, deformation

of reality, and our Western predicament-and not the West’s only!

On the other hand, as some of you may remember since he participated in

Philadelphia Society meetings himself on at least three occasions and

wrote widely on the subject, much of Voegelin’s work as a philosopher and

political scientist addressed the plight of contemporary mankind. Thus,

his analysis of the present predicament of Western civilization and of

humanity more generally may shed its flickering light on the future. A

great part of this work of decades revolved around Voegelin’s attempt (a)

to understand the present crisis of the West, (b) to diagnose its most

virulent aspects, and (c) to find remedies for present conditions before

the rampant epidemic of radical modernity and social amnesia proved lethal

for civilization. I shall limit my remarks this morning mainly to these

themes, then conclude with some comments on the human prospect. In

general, I should say that Voegelin’s outlook is often rather like that of

physician facing a gravely ill patient, one whose chances of full recovery

are dim at best. I, of course, want to be more hopeful and so remind you

that it was a famous economist (representative of the dismal science) who

remarked that in the long run we’re all dead! More than once, Voegelin

explicitly called for personal resistance to present evils, and he sounded

the alarm with life and death urgency that action based on understanding

is needed if catastrophe is to be averted. On one occasion, he went so far

as to evoke the words of the Watchman in Ezekiel in giving warning of

impending disaster. Thus, while the situation is dire, our human liberty

is meaningful and the propaganda of historical determinism is just that

and is flatly to be rejected.

I. Advancing and Declining at the Same Time: the Modern Crisis

In his best known book, The New Science of Politics (1952), Voegelin

ponders the question of how it is possible for society to advance and

decline at one and the same time. The experience of progress is all around

us, yet there is the pervasive sense that all is not well: why? His answer

is to notice that human reality is not monolithic but highly complex and,

like the single human personality, a mixed bag-a stratified reality that

ranges from the material, sentient, and biological through a consciousness

that is uniquely intellectual and spiritual. Somewhat like the

stereotypical football player who is a physical specimen of breathtaking

perfection but can’t read, modern society excels in science, technology,

and the abundant life but has allowed its philosophical and spiritual life

to atrophy. The nub of the disorder is a crisis of the mind and spirit.

Its cardinal attribute is a closure against the divine ground of being, a

forgetfulness of the God of our fathers, one assuaged only by the hollow

men who cry up Autonomous Man and beckon us to bow down before this Golden

Calf of radical modernity. This set of circumstances Voegelin analyzes

with an array of terms as a affliction of the soul, or pneumopathology,

that includes spiritual amnesia, intramundane religiousness, diseased

metastatic faith (magic)-thus as a cancer in the souls of contemporary

human beings and our deculturated societies. While far from being some

kind of monistic explanation of the crisis in which we live, the

despiritualization of existence on one side– and the dogmatomachy or

warfare among contending dogmatic religions and ideologies on the other

side-are leading symptoms of the present crisis. It so disorients and

degrades the splendor of civilizational achievement by natural science as

to make, not the conquest of nature through human ingenuity for the good

of all, but the enormity of the Gulag and of Auschwitz the great monument

of our epoch.

II. Stages in Disintegration of the West: Virulent Modernity

How did all of this come about, one may ask? Voegelin always stresses that

the radical epidemic of ideological or Gnostic modernity is a growth

within modern human existence and not by any means the whole of it; that

there are reserves of opposition and resistance to the ideological

perversion of reality that continue in train with the foundations of our

civilization in the homonoia or like-mindedness of the biblical faith

institutionalized in the Mediterranean world of Judaism, Christianity,

Greek philosophy, Roman law, and nurtured in the great medieval synthesis.

These civilizing forces were brought together as a triumph of mind and

spirit that glorified the truth of being enduringly institutionalized as a

community of church and empire before forces of dissolution powerfully

emerged, and it began to unravel. To be sure, the unraveling remains a

work in progress, one incomplete to this day. Voegelin identifies the

principal historical stages of crisis in terms of the Reformation, the

French Revolution, and the radical third wave of especially the German

(Nazi), Russian (Bolshevik), and Italian (fascist) revolutions of this

century. Islands of opposition to nihilism and virulent destructiveness

persist and continue to exert influence into the present-the Philadelphia

Society among them-and especially the British and American institutional

orders, founded in comparatively sound philosophical ground and

traditionally ingrained political habits, are identified as stabilizing

forces in modern existence. One is reminded of Edmund Burke’s observation

in surveying the French Revolution that two things are essential for a

politics of moderation: religion and gentlemen.

What of the forces of virulent modernity? Even the most effective agents

of destruction ape the truth and forms of sound existence. Thus, everyone

will remember the catchy cry "Don’t let them immanentize the Eschaton!"

Some of you may still own campaign buttons and sweatshirts with this

defiant slogan emblemized thereon. The eschaton (meaning the end of the

world) designates the congeries of Christian faith symbols of final things

such as Christ’s Second Coming, Last Judgment, Eternal salvation or

Beatitude and punishment, end of the age, and the Millennium. Behind the

slogan lies Voegelin’s argument that the various ideologies (or Gnostic

variants, in his words) are ersatz religions for persons too weak for

faith. Such dogmatic creeds seize upon one or another aspect of the

Christian eschatological faith symbolism and apply it to the desired goal

of revolutionary transformation of the world so as to achieve, in one form

or another, perfection in the here and now. They run the gamut from the

fairly benign secularism of the liberals to the radical immanentism of

Marx. The life of faith-experienced in loving response to divine grace, as

the pilgrim’s progress toward beatitude, union with God, and the hope for

fulfillment of life in the bliss of eternal salvation-, is replaced by the

ideologue’s desire for worldly fulfillment in some sort of heaven on

earth: the transformation of men and the world through revolutionary

action is embraced and assumed to lie within the scope of human control.

Voegelin identifies progressivism, utopianism, and revolutionary activism

as the three basic types: the first stresses the movement toward

perfection without clarity about the goal itself; the second stresses the

goal without a clear notion of how it might be attained; and the third (as

in Marxism) combines both the teleological and axiological elements into a

comprehensive assault on reality that evokes the superman and so-called

Realm of Freedom. (NSP, 119-21) As Ludwig Feuerbach had exclaimed, the

highest being for man is Man himself; to which Marx himself added, all I

need is new men! Henri de Lubac wrote of this in terms of "the drama of

atheist humanism."

At the end of the Gnostic-ideological century one would suppose human

beings would by now have had quite enough of this sort of thing. After

all, Voegelin gave the detailed diagnosis nearly a half-century ago, and

even Time magazine was sufficiently impressed as to devote its thirtieth

anniversary issue to it in an essay by Max Ways entitled "Journalism and

Joachim’s Children." Since then the powerful voices of Aleksandr

Solzhenitsyn and Václav Havel have reiterated and elaborated in their

inimitable ways much the same diagnosis of the age Voegelin had presented

philosophically. Truth derails into the Lie systematically elaborated:

philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is

to change it (Marx)! The one true reality is deformed into Second

Realities of dreamworld fascination, and the dream becomes reality by

definition through psychological mass management and socially enforced

coercion of the comprehensive kind we call totalitarian. The great

historical theophanies are eclipsed by the egophany of the libidinous

self. Mein Kampf supplants the Bible on the altar, the Word of Marx and of

Lenin forms the new Koran of the party faithful, and the spiritually

hungry file endlessly past the mummified remains of the great vozhd Lenin.

I use the present tense. To the warfare or dogmatomachy among partisans of

contending ideologies must be added the ancient but persistent old-style

fundamentalist dogmatomachy of ethnic-religious fanatics that continues as

a curse to day to day existence in the Middle East, Balkans, Northern

Ireland, China, Africa, and India.

Spiritual and intellectual disintegration proceeds not only through the

destruction of transcendentalism in religion but also through the

destruction of philosophy, in a process Voegelin sees beginning as early

as the generation after Aristotle. To be succinct and mindful of recent

times, Voegelin argues that all good philosophy is based on common sense:

Aristotle is a good philosopher and Hegel is not, and one must be very

highly educated indeed to misunderstand (and deform) reality as thoroughly

as did Marx and Nietzsche. Ideology (modern gnosticism in its several

variants) operates with the truncated "reason" of the Enlightenment,

rather than with the differentiated Nous of Plato and Aristotle. It is

intrinsically irrational because of that: as Alfred North Whitehead

remarked the philosophes were not philosophers! Philosophers start from

common sense and seek to illuminate reality through noetic inquiry into

the truth of being, unto its origins in the eminent Being of the divine

Ground. The philosophes (and their soul-mates: the sophists in antiquity,

the ideologues today) so deploy instrumental reason as to obscure rather

than illuminate reality and ruthlessly decapitate eminent Being, in

intentional closure against truth. Only the outlines can be sketched.

Closure is effected by several means, including: (1) the reduction of

"reason" to analysis or its instrumental, calculative aspect thereby

leaving out as irrational the decisive noetic (intuitive) aspect through

which first principles are grasped; (2) the procedure or trick of

philosophizing in closed "systems" where the errors can be concealed in

premises that routinely go unexamined as postulates or assumptions; and

(3) in expressly or implicitly prohibiting the asking of questions. The

system blinds the mind to any inquiry into the truth of reality not

analytically comprehended in the premises of the system itself; and the

prohibition against asking pertinent questions about these basic premises

(regarding the nature of man and source of being itself, for instance)

slams the door shut: Denke nicht frage mich nicht! Marx’s formulation can

hardly be improved upon: Don’t think, don’t ask me! If you insist on

questioning anyway, bad things may happen to you-especially if you should

live in some politically correct paradise.

I hope my drift at least is clear. Suppression is ongoing and did not die

out with Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. This "cold war" seems to be very

far from over. One particularly poignant trait of ideological deformation

of reality is this: at least the leading protagonists know that and why

their systems are flawed-but they stick to their positions anyway.

Voegelin oddly argues that a person of common sense would say that if a

doctrine is false (say Marx’s account of the human condition, or Auguste

Comte’s of history-this is a multicultural enterprise), if it purposely

and systematically falsifies the facts as experienced and truth of

reality, and if the advocate of such a false doctrine knows this-then

anybody with common sense would suspect that the advocate is a fraud. But

common sense is not the hallmark of the academy nor of our age, it seems.

Marx wrote: "Don’t think, don’t ask me!… A rational man does not ask

such questions!" How does Voegelin respond to these statements by this

famous mover and shaker of the modern world? He writes:

[Marx’s] prohibition now induces us to ask, Was Marx an intellectual

swindler? Such a question will perhaps give rise to objections. Can one

seriously entertain the idea that the lifework of a thinker of

considerable rank is based on an intellectual swindle? Could it have

attracted a mass following and become a political world power if it rested

on a swindle? But we today are inured to such scruples: we have seen too

many improbable and incredible things that were nonetheless real.

Therefore, we hesitate neither to ask the question that the evidence

presses upon us, nor to answer [it:] Yes, Marx was an intellectual

swindler. (SPG, 19)

And why ever might any man, even a Marx, do such a thing? The answer is

found in Nietzsche: because of his lust for power-libido dominandi-, the

will to secure and maintain domination whatever the cost.

III. Therapy? Is there a Jonas Salk in the house?

Marx is a representative case, especially if the academy is considered,

and will serve our purposes of illustrative analysis of the wider problem.

Solzhenitsyn’s earthy, commonsensical, comment at Harvard comes to mind:

Western intellectuals believe Marx to be a living lion (the Soviets just

didn’t do it right!), but we know he is a dead dog! The ideological

perversion of philosophizing is not merely a question of "ideas" but of

actions with lethal consequences. Thus, in the same lecture where he

pronounced Marx to be a swindler, to the accompaniment of gasps from the

audience and headlines in the newspapers the next day, Voegelin provoked

further indignation by drawing a further comparison. He said:

Whoever asks questions about the nature, calling, and destiny of man may

be temporarily ignored; later, after the system of positivism has

prevailed in society, such persons will have to be silenced by appropriate

measures [Comte]. And the prohibition of questions is not harmless, for it

has attained great social effectiveness among men who forbid themselves to

ask questions in critical situations. One thinks of the observation of

Rudolf Höss, the [Nazi] commandant of the extermination camp at Auschwitz.

When asked why he did not refuse to obey the order to organize the mass

executions, he replied: "At the time I did not indulge in deliberation: I

had received an order, and I had to carry it out…I do not believe that

even one of the thousands of SS leaders could have permitted such a

thought to occur to him. Something like that was just completely

impossible." This is very close to the wording of Marx’s declaration [in

the 1844 Paris Manuscripts] that for "socialist man" such a question

[about the Ground of being, the divine source of order in reality]

"becomes a practical impossibility." Thus, we see delineated three major

types for whom a human inquiry has become a practical impossibility:

socialist man (in the Marxian sense), positivist man (in the Comtean

sense), and national-socialist man. (SPG, 18)

In what I have said to this point we have been looking at past and present

evidence. What of the future, you may still want to know? Is there no

encouraging word, prudent counsel, or only disheartening reports on a dead

end? Are we dead men walking after all?

The starting points for any answers one finds in Voegelin throw us back on

the intellectual and spiritual resources of our tattered and beleaguered

traditions. If we are to resist, the means must be found there and

revived. One need not expect from him novelties in principle, only in

detail, as he stressed in the words: "The test of truth, to put it

pointedly, will be the lack of originality in the propositions." (CW12,

122) His scholarly life consisted of a long meditation on our predicament

and the vivifying illumination of it, and of the human condition more

generally to be found (if it is to be found at all), through an open quest

of truth. Voegelin, by his own admission a mystic philosopher, is equally

a philosopher of common sense, as I have tried to stress: from this

perspective it is rudimentary that, if you know death and disaster lie in

one direction, then you must turn around and go in the opposite direction

as fast as you can. This is recognizably not only common sense but, also,

the principle of Plato’s periagoge and of the Christian’s metanoia. It is the conversion of the whole man away from the shadows on the wall, the

conventions of the world and its spiritually lethal climate of opinion,

toward the truth of being within the limits of one’s capacities in

cooperatively following the attractive pull of the Beyond. Dream and

reality must be separated. The uncertain truth we know must be embraced in

preference to the certain untruth of ideology socially enforced and run

amuck. (SPG, 75) "No one is obliged to take part in the spiritual crisis

of a society; on the contrary, everyone is obliged to avoid this folly and

live his life in order." (SPG, 15)

The spiritual crisis of the West and eclipse of transcendent divine

Reality lie at the heart of the problem of recovering truth in the lives

of persons and for the order of society, by Voegelin’s reading. That truth

and the ways to it–whatever their imperfections as imposed by human

perspectives and limitations-remain the fruits of philosophy as ever the

love of wisdom (not its definitive possession) and of faith as ever the

substance of things hoped for, the assurance of things not seen (not the

embrace of an exclusive and unreflecting dogma).

Voegelin’s favorite prophet was Jeremiah, he said, and there is something

of the jeremiad about his work. But when it came time to conclude his

Munich lecture on the "The German University and German Society" he

invoked the persona of the Watchman from Ezekiel (33:7-9):

So you, son of man, I have made a watchman for the house of Israel;

whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from

me.

If I say to the wicked, O wicked man, you shall surely die; and you do not

speak to warn the wicked to turn from his way, that wicked man shall die

in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at your hand.

But if you warn the wicked to turn from his way, and he does not turn from

his way; he shall die in his iniquity, but you will have saved your soul.

(CW12, 35)

Epilogue

If one inquires about Voegelin’s more explicit understanding of the

Western predicament and human prospect, then something like the following

might be added to the foregoing comments.

1. Western civilization is in the late stages of disintegration. It

reached a climax in the thirteenth century and has endured a series of

increasingly damaging blows against its spiritual order and institutional

cohesion in the seven hundred years since the great efflorescence in the

Christian philosophy of man and society of Thomas Aquinas. This began

already with the authoritarian derailment of the church at the hands of

Boniface VIII a bare generation later, compounded in the next century by

the nominalist-fideist split in philosophy and religion; it was further

exacerbated by the "civilizational disaster" of the Reformation, and by

the waves of rebellion and onslaught against the spiritual integrity of

the West effected in complex ways already mentioned since the sixteenth

century. The rise of natural science in the seventeenth century imbalanced

the understanding of reality through a tilt and eventual radical closure

against the divine Ground of being. Science became the seed bed, not only

of great intellectual achievements, but also for destructive scientism,

phenomenalism, positivism, gnosticism, magic, alchemy, Heremeticism, and

other esoteric movements. These and other manifestations of reductionist

egophany have so deformed and afflicted the life of the mind and spirit as

to leave contemporaries with little more than a "hopeless hope" for some

renewal and revival that alone promises to stem the slid of civilizational

decline. A hopeful precedent is the Second Reformation of John and Charles

Wesley and the accompanying Great Awakening that revitalized Britain for a

time and laid the groundwork for the American founding in the eighteenth

century. To this otherwise stark appraisal we may attach the question: Is

any comparable renaissance presently underway?

2. The notion of the West facing other civilizations in a shootout at the

OK Corral for ecumenic hegemony is simplistic and overlooks the factual

situation.

(a) The West has significantly disintegrated already and (unless it again

recaptures its vitality through spiritual renewal) may cease to be a major

player in world affairs in the next millennium. Ever the spiritual

realist, Voegelin observes, invoking the Kohelet and Anaximander, that:

"What comes into being will have an end, and the mystery of this stream of

being is impenetrable." (NSP, 167; EA, 174; Ecclesiastes. 3:1-11)

(b) The disintegration of the West has been accompanied by a process of

"westernization" of the rest of the world to such a degree that all other

extant civilizational societies have absorbed through their dominant

elites many of the nonessential ideological and technological attributes

of the disintegrating West itself: one thinks of a Marxist-Leninist

quasi-Christian Orthodox Russia and a Marxist-Leninist quasi-Confucian and

Buddhist China as prominent illustrations, with the several Islamic,

Hindu, and other Buddhist societies yet to be accounted for at the level

of hegemonic power. Toynbee dealt with the generally subversive

communication of western influence in terms of "radiation" and the "law of

trivia," and Voegelin thought his account meritorious.

(c) Thus, as the West abandons its own distinctive intellectual and

spiritual identity to become more thoroughly relativistic and amorphous at

its core, it finds treacherous common ground with other progressive

societies in scorched earth positivism, scientism, antiphilosophical and

antireligious phenomenalism and nihilism. The Western dissolution radiates

a spiritual and intellectual epidemic infecting contemporary mankind.

3. Voegelin ultimately rejects, however, Toynbee’s dissolution of the

history of mankind into the rise and fall of civilizations as empirically

false; and he also rejects the notion (one that Toynbee also abandoned)

that a civilization is an intelligible unit or field of historical study.

(a) Civilizational societies are no more than secondary or tertiary

phenomena. They are products of religions (not religions of civilizations)

or more adequately of "spiritual outbursts," and of libidinous power

drives resulting in imperial conquests that tend to capture such events so

as to legitimize what otherwise would be naked exercises of power.

Religions, moreover, tend not only to constitute but to spill over

multiple civilizations; and empires, too, are often multi-civilizational.

In addition to the spiritual visions and concupiscential drives that

culminate in conquests in the creative process of societal formation,

Voegelin finds that a third factor of philosophical-theological

historiography typically emerges to evoke the raison d’être of empires as

political constellations organized for action in world affairs. Thus, a

triadic structure appears to be characteristic, if the ecumenic empires

are taken as paradigms.

(b) There still remains the spectacle of a universal mankind–strewn from

distant antiquity and, even, archeological prehistory down to the

present–whose commonality of shared humanity reaches beyond the unique

peculiarities of a pluralistic ethnic, cultural, or power field of any

particular civilization or any discrete religious entity. How explain the

apparent fact that underlying all the differences is a palpable unity of

mankind, past, present, and future? We readily acknowledge that the

ancient Egyptian, and less ancient Athenian, share common ground as human

beings with a contemporary American. This commonality is expressed

philosophically (Aristotle) in terms of a synthetic or composite nature

potentially present in every human being that is, thereby, the epitome of

being, crowned with what the old Greeks called Nous that is paradoxically

both essential nature and tensional participation in the divine Nous

experienced as Ground. The commonality is expressed pneumatically

(Genesis) by characterizing the human being as imago Dei, the Christ in

every man. After diligent search of what is universal about mankind,

Voegelin states that "mankind is not constituted through a survey of

phenomena by even the most erudite historian, but through the experience

of order in the present under God." (WP, 16) Later on he adds:

Universal mankind is not a society existing in the world, but a symbol

which indicates man’s consciousness of participating, in his earthly

existence, in the mystery of a reality that moves toward its

transfiguration. Universal mankind is an eschatological index. (EA, 305)

4. If we recur to Western categories to express ourselves it is because,

Voegelin argues, the differentiation of truth through faith and reason

achieved a reflective depth or differentiation not matched elsewhere in

history: if the language of philosophy were to be abandoned, there would

no other language of reflective discursive rationality that could take its

place. (WP, 22) The universal becomes articulate only in the concrete

divine-human events that occur as experiences in the concrete

consciousness of some particular person at some specific time and place.

All such experiences are inevitably conditioned by a particular language

and ethnic culture. "Man" or "human being" is strictly speaking no where

to be found except in specific individual human persons. Yet one reality

and one mankind are affirmed amidst these particularities; they are

discernible in equivalent symbolizations of man’s participation in

divine-human reality throughout history; and they are convincingly

traceable in an evidentiary trail of equivalent symbols back to the stone

age. Thus, Voegelin observes, what is true for one man also is true for

all men.

Behind every equivalent symbol in the historical field stands the man who

has engendered it in the course of his search as a representative of a

truth that is more than equivalent. The search that renders no more than

equivalent truth rests ultimately on the faith that, by engaging in it,

man participates representatively in the divine drama of truth becoming

luminous. (CW12, 132-33)

A further consequence is that faith and reason are not the opposites

generally assumed but equivalent symbolisms reflecting the truth of being

arising in the participatory experiences of spiritually sensitive men

lodged in the different ethnic horizons of Israel (prophets) and Hellas

(philosophers): Reason (as divine Nous, Plato’s third God in the Laws

713c-714b; EA, 227) is every bit as much a revelation as is the encounter

with Yahweh in faith by the prophets of Israel. There is, strictly

speaking, no such thing as merely "natural" Reason-contrary to the

Scholastics and their continuators.

Such reflections inform Voegelin’s admiration of Jean Bodin’s bold

meditative resolution in Colloquium heptaplomeres (1588-?) of the

murderous religious strife of France in favor of peace through the

mystic’s plea for toleration grounded in awareness of the essential

sameness of God experienced, whatever the creedal differences. The same

truth is expressed in different languages and symbols-each word, syllable,

and gesture of which may be precious to votaries of the respective creed,

nevertheless-the differences among them are not worth the life of a single

human being. The divine reality (the theotes of Col. 2:9) beyond all

dogmatic formulation is experienced as the universally true common

transcendent Ground nurturing by the divine-human encounter of the

In-Between (metaxy) the essential humanity of every person. It is above

all else this that is the source of our sense of universal mankind,

arising as it does out of the paradox of participation in the ineffable

that becomes effable in divine-human experiences in myriad modes, in all

times, and places. (OH5, 103) In Voegelin’s words:

The truth of existence…does not emerge from one single spiritual

event…but assumes the historical form of a plurality of movements

springing up in Persia and India, in Israel and Hellas. The

differentiation of the one truth of existence, thus, is broken in a

spectrum of spiritual eruptions each bearing the mark of the ethnic

culture in which it occurs….The human responses to the divine irruptions

rather tend to accentuate different aspects of the one truth of man’s

existence under God, such as the Greek noetic or the Israelite-Jewish

pneumatic revelations of divine reality.

This is "history" as it was experienced by the more sensitive participants

in the process down to the time of Paul. (EA, 301)

It is, after all, right that we should end on a hopeful note regarding the

Western predicament and the human prospect, even if it may not be exactly

the note we anticipated hearing when we first set out on our discussion.

It is also right to give Voegelin a last summarizing say in order to put

his great work into the Christian perspective he steadfastly claimed for

it, despite his sometimes intemperate and self-righteous critics. He

reminded one of these of the following:

There were always Christian thinkers who recognized the difference between

experiences of divine reality and the transformation of the insights

engendered by the insights into doctrinal propositions. The tension

between theologica mystica and theologica dogmatica goes as far back as

the patres. It dominates the work of Origen; and its dynamics is the

living force in such noteworthy successors as Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius,

Scotus Erigena, Anselm of Canterbury, and the mystics of the fourteen

century….I am equally conscious of not going beyond the orbit of

Christianity when I prefer the experiential symbol divine reality to the

God of the Creed, for divine reality translates the theotes of Colossians

2:9. The theotes, a neologism of the time, is a symbol arising from

experiential exegesis; its degree of generality is so high that it can be

applied, not only to the specific experience of divine reality becoming

incarnate in Christ and the Christian believers (the experiences analyzed in Colossians 2), but to every instance of theotes experienced as present

in man and forming his insight into his nature and its relation to the

divine ground of his existence. Moreover, I am very much aware that my

inquiry into the history of experience and symbolization generalizes the

Anselmian fides quaerens intellectum so as to include every fides, not

only the Christian, in the quest for understanding by reason. Even this

expansion of the fides, however, to all the experiences of divine reality

in which history constitutes itself, cannot be said to go beyond

"Christianity." 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 Aquinas who

considered the Christ to be the head of the corpus mysticum that embraces,

not only Christians, but all mankind from the creation of the world to its

end. In practice this means that one has to recognize, and make

intelligible, the presence of Christ in a Babylonian hymn, or a Taoist

speculation, or a Platonic dialogue, just as much as in a Gospel.

… It is the guilt of Christian thinkers and church leaders of having

allowed the dogma to separate in the public consciousness of Western

civilization from the experience of "the mystery" on which its truth

depends. The dogma develops as a socially and culturally necessary

protection of insights experientially gained against false propositions;

its development is secondary to the truth of experience. If its truth

[pretends] to be autonomous, its validity will come under attack in any

situation of social crisis, when alienation becomes a mass phenomenon; the

dogma will then be misunderstood as an "opinion" which one can believe or

not, and it will be opposed by counter opinions which dogmatize the

experience of alienated existence. The development [in the fourteenth

century] of a nominalist and fideist conception of Christianity is the

cultural disaster, with its origins in the late Middle Ages, that provokes

the reaction of alienated existence in the dogmatic form of the

ideologies, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The result is the

state of deculturation with which we are all too familiar from our daily

talks with students who are caught in the intellectual confusion of a

debate that proceeds, not by recourse to experience, but by position and

counter position of opinion. Once truth has degenerated to the level of

true doctrine, the return from orthodoxy to "the mystery" is a process

that appears to require as many centuries of effort as have gone into the

destruction of intellectual and spiritual culture….

…[Complaint is heard] that I neglect the thought and science of the

twentieth century…. I consider representative, by the side of the work

in theoretical physics, the magnificent work of the historians. They have

brought to light the background of modernity in gnosticism, hermeticism,

alchemy, and magic; they have restored our knowledge of ancient and

medieval philosophy; they have provided a solid basis for our

understanding of the Israelite-Judaic-Christian experiences; they have

extended our knowledge of the Indian, Chinese, pre-Columbian, and African

societies; and they have expanded our historical horizon by the

prehistoric millennia. [The cumulative effect is to demonstrate the

pitiful inadequacy of] the ideological systems of the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries, nothing to say of their epigonal aftermath [as]

obsolete interpretations of reality, for reasons both empirical and

theoretical. [However, this] marvelous advance of science which

characterizes the twentieth century has not yet affected the notorious

"climate of opinion" which [still today] dominates the public debate. But

I do not believe the end of the world has come, if it does not come to the

end the ideologists have projected for it. The world will go on, and the

restoration of the intellectual and spiritual culture in the sciences will

ultimately affect an ideological climate that by now has become a

reactionary force. To assist in this process in one of the motives of my

work. (CW12, 294-95, 302-303)

Abbreviations of Voegelin Sources Referenced

CW12 The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 12, Published Essays

1966-85, ed. Ellis Sandoz (1990; available Columbia: University of

Missouri Press, 1999)

EA Order and History, vol. 4, The Ecumenic Age (1974; available Columbia:

University of Missouri Press, 1999)

NSP The New Science of Politics: An Introduction, foreword by Dante

Germino (1952; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)

OH5 Order and History, vol. 5, The Search for Order, foreword by Lissy

Voegelin, intro. by Ellis Sandoz, epilogue by Jürgen Gebhardt (1987;

available Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999)

SPG Science, Politics and Gnosticism, trans. William J. Fitzpatrick,

intro. Ellis Sandoz (1958; Eng. 1968; rpr. & re-paged, Washington, D. C.:

Regnery Publishing, Inc., Gateway Editions, 1997)