Mr. Casaubon in America | Mark Lilla
MARK LILLA
Crisis is the mother of history. Beginning with Herodotus the urge to write history has been bound up with the need to explain the seemingly inexplicable
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The New York Review of Books
Crisis is the mother of history. Beginning with Herodotus the urge to write history has been bound up with the need to explain the seemingly inexplicable reversals of fortune suffered by nations and empires. The best histories satisfy that need while still capturing the openness and unpredictability of human action, though the best histories are not always the most memorable. Historians who offer “multicausal explanations”—and use phrases like that—do not last, while those who discover the hidden wellspring of absolutely everything are imitated and attacked but never forgotten.

In the twentieth century, European history writing became a kind of Trümmerliteratur, a look back at the rubble of a civilization that collapsed in 1933…or 1917, or 1789, or further back still. Germans have specialized in this kind of literature of ruins, and not only because so much debris litters the German landscape. In the nineteenth century, historians wanted to imitate Hegel, whose grand philosophical vision wove together every aspect of human culture into a seamless dialectical account of historical progress. After the catastrophe of the First World War the challenge was to transform that story into an apocalyptic one of rupture and decay. Spengler was not alone. He was joined by German philosophers, beginning with Heidegger, who came to see their own intellectual tradition as implicated in the collapse of modern Europe, and to believe that the reorientation of philosophy was a necessary—and perhaps even sufficient—condition of social regeneration. Edmund Husserl spoke for many German thinkers when he declared, in a famous lecture just before the Second World War, that “the ‘crisis of European existence’…becomes understandable and transparent against the background of the teleology of European history that can be discovered philosophically.”

For reasons of its own, America has never cultivated crisis history, despite the apocalyptic streak in our native religious imagination. But when German scholars fleeing Hitler began arriving in the United States in the 1930s, they imported some very large and very dark ideas about the crisis of the age, which then found resonance here. Though the diagnoses of Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno were very different, they all assumed that it was transformations in Western thinking that had prepared the unthinkable, and that a new intellectual path had to be found. So did Eric Voegelin. An Austrian émigré who was on friendly terms with both Arendt and Strauss, Voegelin never acquired a wide public readership in his lifetime, nor did he develop a vast network of students to spread his ideas or apply them to political life. There are Voegelinians, in North America and Europe, and thanks to their efforts the vast project of bringing out The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin is nearly complete. But he was too solitary and idiosyncratic a thinker to leave behind a proper school, which is a good thing. Eric Voegelin was an original, a hothouse flower transplanted from the dark garden of German Geschichte to the land of the open road. A curious fate for an Old World thinker, though not unusual for his generation.

Eric Voegelin was born in Cologne in 1901 and left Germany for Vienna when he was nine. He was trained in law and political science but his real education, he later said, came from reading Karl Kraus, the acerbic Viennese journalist whose attacks on the hypocrisy and vulgarity of his time shaped the generation coming of age around the First World War. Voegelin’s detachment from his Austrian homeland prepared him to take an unusual step for a young European academic. In 1924 he traveled to the United States on a fellowship and spent two years studying in American universities, attending the courses of John Dewey at Columbia and discovering the works of George Santayana. This experience inspired his first book, On the Form of the American Mind (1928), which owes more to German thinkers like Max Scheler and Wilhelm Dilthey than to American pragmatists like Dewey. Still, Voegelin’s American experience had large effects. When he returned to Vienna to accept a university appointment, he brought with him an abiding hatred of racism and the shameful intellectual justifications of it. After pseudoscientific works supporting the Nazis’ biological racism began circulating in Austria, he attacked them in two books published not long after Hitler seized power. These and other of his writings made him a choice target of Austrian Nazis, who ordered his arrest immediately after the Anschluss in 1938. He escaped by train while the police searched his apartment.

Though neither a Communist nor a Jew, Voegelin found himself among the mass of émigré scholars seeking work and safety in the United States. Despite his previous American experience, unheard of in this group, he had trouble finding a position teaching American government because he was a German-speaking foreigner. He finally ended up at Louisiana State University, where he taught until 1958, and began writing books in English. On the basis of these works he was invited back to Germany to establish a research institute in Munich, where he stayed for ten years until the poisonous political atmosphere of the late Sixties drove him away. (“Between the staid dummies of tradition and the apocalyptic dummies of revolution,” he declared in Die Zeit, “it has become hard to work intellectually free in Germany.”) He returned to the United States in 1969, taking a position at the Hoover Institution in California, and died there in 1985.

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Voegelin was astonishingly productive during his American years, but in an odd way. Shortly after arriving he was asked by an American publisher to do a short history of political thought to compete with other standard textbooks in the field, and he began writing an enormous, unfinished manuscript called History of Political Ideas, which takes up eight volumes of The Collected Works. After abandoning it as too unwieldy in the 1950s, he then launched a projected six-volume study of “order and history” that also remained unfinished at his death. On top of these undertakings Voegelin produced hundreds of reviews and essays, several more books, extremely long and involved letters, interviews, and a charming short autobiography. Such logorrhea, and in a foreign tongue, inspires amazement. And suspicion, too.

A first glance at Voegelin’s works leaves the unprepared reader baffled, since they seem to be about everything—Byzantine history, medieval theology, gestalt psychology, Paleolithic and Neolithic visual symbols, Greek philosophy, American constitutional development, the Dead Sea scrolls, Chinese imperial history, Old Testament interpretation, Polynesian decorative arts, Zoroastrianism, Egyptian and Mesopotamian cosmology, Renaissance images of Tamerlane, and much else. He brings to mind George Eliot’s Mr. Casaubon, the obsessive polymath whose search for the “key to all mythologies” left him only torsos of unfinishable works. But the advantage of having The Collected Works at hand is that all this writing finally begins coming into focus. Guiding it all was a basic intuition about the relation between religion and politics, and how transformations in that relation could explain the cataclysms of modern history.

The germ of all Voegelin’s major works is to be found in The Political Religions, a dense pamphlet dashed off just before the Anschluss, and which had to be published in Switzerland after he fled. In it he attacked the Nazis as children of darkness, though he blamed the modern secular West for making Nazism possible. This was, to say the least, an unusual perspective, since the modern secular West was just then gearing up for war against Hitler. To make his case, Voegelin sketched out a story that he would elaborate and refine over the next three decades.

The story begins with the early civilizations of the ancient Near East, in Egypt and Mesopotamia, where states were endowed with a divine aura giving them legitimacy. In that lost world the king was thought symbolically to be the representative of the divine order, serving either as an intercessor with the gods or as a god himself. For Voegelin, this was the original condition of all civilizations, which cannot establish an order without believing in its sanctity. The bond between the divine and the human was a tight one in the ancient world and only loosened with the rise of Christianity, which was the first world religion to offer theological principles for distinguishing divine and political orders.

Though those principles were honored mainly in the breach, as Voegelin recognized, the very idea of distinguishing a transcendent City of God from a terrestrial City of Man had deep spiritual and political implications for Western history. On the one hand, it opened up paths to God that did not have to pass through the royal palace; on the other, it raised the prospect of human beings governing themselves without direct divine guidance. Spiritual enrichment came with the risk of political impoverishment, and eventually with the temptation to free man entirely from divine supervision. The radical Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries willingly succumbed to that temptation, completing the work begun by Christianity: in Voegelin’s words, it “decapitated God.”

Yet the modern liberation of politics from God did not mean the liberation of man from man. Quite the contrary. Though the Enlightenment banned God from the city, it could not abolish the practice of divinization that had originally given rise to civilization. What happened in modern Western history after the Enlightenment, in Voegelin’s view, was that human beings began to conceive in sacred terms their own activities, in particular their creation of new political orders free from traditional sources of authority. Modern man became a Prometheus, believing himself a god capable of transforming anything and everything at will. “When God has become invisible behind the world,” Voegelin declared, “the things of the world become new gods.” Once this is understood, the true nature of the mass ideological movements of the twentieth century—Marxism, fascism, nationalism—becomes evident: they were all “political religions,” complete with prophets, priests, and temple sacrifices. When you abandon the Lord, according to this conception, it is only a matter of time before you start worshiping a Führer.

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This hydraulic notion of a religious drive that reappears in secular life if it is denied access to the divine has been a staple of Counter-Enlightenment thought since the nineteenth century, especially among Christian theologians protesting the course of modern history.1 But the theologians had a clear remedy in mind: return to the one true faith. Was this Voegelin’s remedy as well? It was not—though reticence about his own religious views led more than a few of his conservative readers to think it was. Voegelin, who was raised a Protestant, wrote casually about the “transcendent” or “divine” as if its existence were unquestionable, but he never expressed any particular doctrinal faith about it and was openly critical of Christianity, which he blamed for preparing the advent of modern politics. Instead, he wrote about the history of religion and philosophy as the story of man’s continuous attempts to make sense of what lies beyond the temporal sphere and determine its relation to individual consciousness and the social order. Though we cannot know anything about Voegelin’s private beliefs, he clearly valued the power of religion itself as a vitalistic force shaping human society, a force that could be directed to good ends so long as its proper function was respected. He left no doubt that he accepted in his own way the existence of a divine transcendent order. The basic theme of The Political Religions is that the fantasy of creating a world without religion, a political order from which the divine was banned, led necessarily to the creation of grotesque secular deities like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini.

It is also the theme of The New Science of Politics (1952), Voegelin’s first book in English, and of the grand, multivolume work he called Order and History, which began appearing in 1956. Fresh from the experience of the war and the destruction caused by the “political religions,” Voegelin wanted to develop a new political science that would analyze the symbols by which all societies conceive of themselves and order their institutions in history. His concept of “symbol” was somewhat vague, but also flexible, allowing him to compare, for example, the symbolism of ancient Mesopotamian kingship to that of American democratic rhetoric. It is, of course, an anthropological commonplace that aspects of political life—such as the crowning of a king, the architecture of palaces and assemblies, the rituals of voting—have symbolic meaning. What was novel in Voegelin’s thought was that he wedded that commonplace to a theory of history, suggesting that a universal process of symbolization was surreptitiously at work in human civilization, giving world history a discernible direction.

This process could be revealed, he argued, once we see every society as a “cosmion,” a self-contained imaginative world invested with meaning and believed to match the structure of a transcendent order. Take, for example, the preamble to the ancient Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, which Voegelin cites:

When Anu the Sublime, King of the Anunaki, and Bel, the lord of Heaven and earth, who decreed the fate of the land assigned to Marduk, the over-ruling son of Ea, God of righteousness, dominion over earthly man, and made him great among the Igigi, they called [the land of] Babylon by his illustrious name, made it great on earth, and founded an everlasting kingdom in it, whose foundations are laid so solidly as those of heaven and earth; then Anu and Bel called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared God, to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak; so that I should rule over the black-headed people like Shamash and enlighten the land, to further the well-being of mankind.

(translated byLeonard William King)

Here the structure of the “everlasting kingdom” is compared straightforwardly to that of the cosmos (“Heaven and earth”), and the prince’s dominion over his people likened to the gods’ dominion over “earthly man.”

Sometime in the first millennium BC, Voegelin asserted, this symbolic order became more complex, more “articulated.” Man and society began to be viewed independently of each other, and both as needing philosophy or revealed religion to bring them into alignment with divine order. The true man was now one who worked to bring about that harmony in his own soul, and the true ruler was one who tried to achieve it in society. A whole new set of symbols was developed to reflect this outlook, which reached its greatest clarity in ancient Athens. In this “golden hour in history,” as Voegelin called it, the philosophy of Plato and the dramas of Aeschylus expressed the newly revealed truth about human existence.

Voegelin’s sweeping view of the development of civilization owed much to the mystical speculations on the “ages of man” of the German philosopher F.W.J. Schelling in the nineteenth century, and to Spengler, Toynbee, and Karl Jaspers in the twentieth. He did something new, though, when he made his story revolve around the phenomenon of gnosticism. “Gnosticism” is a term that has meant many things to many people over the centuries. Coined in the antiheretical literature of the early Church, it was used to tar different heterodox groups that had sprung up in late antiquity, some claiming to be Christian, others Jewish. These groups were thought to share three basic beliefs: that the created world was the work of an evil lower deity, or demiurge, and thus utterly corrupt; that direct access to a higher, spiritual divinity was possible for those with a secret knowledge (gnosis) developed from a divine spark within; and that redemption would come through a violent apocalypse, led, perhaps, by those possessing gnosis. Today an enormous scholarly literature exists on these sects, and also on whether they shared much at all.

A narrow subject, it might seem. But in fact the concept of gnosticism has had a large role in German thought ever since the early nineteenth century, when theologians and biblical scholars clashed over whether gnosticism was at the root of Christianity. Soon this academic controversy turned into a very public debate over the degree to which even modern thought was indebted to heterodox and heretical religious ideas of the ancient world. Already in the 1830s Hegel was being attacked as a modern gnostic, and the charge was soon leveled against the utopians and revolutionaries who came after him.

This polemic was revived after World War II when Hans Jonas, a German-Jewish scholar who had fled Hitler, published an influential study called The Gnostic Religion. As a young student of Martin Heidegger, Jonas was drawn to ancient gnosticism by what he thought were religious anticipations of the philosophical truths expressed in his teacher’s early existentialism. After the war, and after Heidegger’s public embrace of Nazism, Jonas developed a much darker view of the gnostic impulse and how it affected politics. His final judgment on Heidegger’s thought was that it expressed a “modern nihilism infinitely more radical and more desperate than gnostic nihilism ever could be.”2

Voegelin’s argument in The New Science of Politics was that the entire modern age, which grew out of a rebellion against Christianity, was gnostic in nature. Christianity had advanced beyond the symbols of the Greek world, articulating what it held to be the truth that, though individuals are products of nature and society, they are also direct children of God whose lives are aimed ultimately toward salvation. This was Christianity’s great revelation—and its secret weakness. The life of the Christian pilgrim is hard, his progress slow. It offers no solace on earth, certainly not in political life, which is subordinated to the spiritual mission of the Church. And human beings are impatient: told that salvation awaits them, they rush ahead, building towers up to heaven or hastening the apocalypse.

Gershom Scholem had discovered similar dynamics in Jewish mysticism, but in Voegelin’s eyes they reached the highest intensity in Christianity, whose messiah had already arrived, then inexplicably departed. And so, at a certain point, European Christians got tired of waiting; lacking “the spiritual stamina for the heroic adventure of the soul that is Christianity,” they rebelled and decided to build their paradise on earth, using their own powers. This was how the modern age was born, through a gnostic “immanentization of the Christian eschaton”—that is, the pursuit of the millennium in the political here-and-now.

This is the idea for which Voegelin was best known in his lifetime, and it earned him many admirers among American conservatives such as Willmoore Kendall and Russell Kirk, who saw a “crisis of the West” in the cold war, in mass popular culture, in the student rebellions—in just about everything. By dismissing Hegel and Marx as gnostic prophets, “petty paracletes in whom the spirit is stirring,” Voegelin gave world-historical reasons for dismissing them and their epigones. The histories of modern political revolutions, of liberal progressivism, of technological advance, of communism, of fascism—what were they but testimonies to gnostic rebellion against the very idea of a transcendent order? That Voegelin thought Christianity was partially to blame for this rebellion, and that the American Revolution was one result of it, somehow escaped his conservative readers. In 1968 he published a short, dyspeptic book called Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, in which he called modern gnostics the “murderers of God,” Marx an “intellectual swindler,” and all modern mass political movements forms of “ersatz religion.” The American translation was a hit and has remained in print at conservative publishing houses ever since. It is even available as an audiobook.

Shortly after the appearance of The New Science of Politics Voegelin published in rapid succession the first three volumes of Order and History, which began tracing the entire arc of civilization, starting with the ancient Near East and running down to the present. This was conceived less as a survey than as a rational reconstruction of the process by which the symbolization of human experience had become increasingly articulate up until the birth of Christianity, and then had declined owing to modern gnosticism. These early volumes offer a brilliant if eccentric ride through ancient history, beginning with Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Israel, then taking up the Greek story, from the Cretans and Achaeans down to classical Athens. They are not embarrassments. Voegelin was an earnest amateur historian who seemed to have read everything and could make connections among myths, inscriptions, urban planning, zodiacs, prophecies, epic poetry, biblical stories, Greek tragedies, and Platonic dialogues. His first three volumes quickly established the human ascent up to Christianity, and his cold war American readers looked forward—strange, but true—to reading about their own civilizational decline.

Then something happened: Mr. Casaubon changed his mind.

The next volume of Order and History did not appear for seventeen years, during which time Voegelin spent a decade building his German research institute. When it was finally published in 1974 his readers discovered that he had renounced much that he written up until that point. The book opens with a startling confession by Voegelin that his original historical schema had fallen prey to the very impulse he had criticized, the “monomaniacal desire to force the operations of the spirit in history on the one line that will unequivocally lead into the speculator’s present.” Now he had come to realize that history is “a mystery in the process of revelation,” an open field where the divine and human meet, not a highway without exits. For centuries mystics had tried to express this truth in hermetic language, and in the early twentieth century Karl Barth and Martin Heidegger made new attempts in the languages of Protestant theology and modern philosophy. But the results were just as mysterious as the phenomenon they tried to explain. What was needed, Voegelin now declared, was an objective, scholarly discipline for discovering the truth of this “theophanic” encounter without robbing it of its fundamental mystery. That now became the program of Order and History.

The last two volumes of this work are very tough going, not least because Voegelin felt the need to develop a specialized vocabulary all his own, using terms like “eristics,” “metaleptic consciousness,” “metastatic faith,” “pneumatic theophany,” and “egophanic history,” as if they were transparent. (The final volume of The Collected Works has a thirty-eight-page glossary to help the reader navigate it all.) And there is a regrettable elephantiasis, as the writing veers from lists of Sumerian kings to Max Weber, Saint Paul to Mircea Eliade, Xerxes to Jacob Burckhardt, the Shang dynasty to Rudolf Bultmann. A reader unfamiliar with these epochs and writers will make nothing of it.

Which is a pity, since the intuition inspiring these last works is a deep one. Voegelin first expressed it in an unusual book he published in Germany called Anamnesis (1966), and which was translated into English only a decade later. It begins not with the problem of history, but with the problem of memory—in Greek, anamnesis. What is it about consciousness, Voegelin asks himself, that makes us conceive of our experience in terms of beginning and end, rupture and continuity? And how does that psychological proclivity affect the way we construct our societies? He was now convinced that “the problems of human order in society and history”—including the problem of gnosticism—“originate in the order of consciousness.” In the 1940s he even began his own private “anamnetic experiments,” as he called them, in which he explored his childhood memories and tried to recover the emotions at their core, reflecting on how such feelings might have shaped the construction of his own past. His strange but suggestive notes on these experiments are included in the book. But the guiding thought behind it all is that the human and transcendent realms meet in human consciousness, an old mystic notion that Voegelin extends to history, suggesting that through us “eternal being realizes itself in time.”

When this odd and stimulating book appeared in Germany, Voegelin confessed to a friend that it had certain affinities with the mysticism of Plotinus and The Cloud of Unknowing, and that he was trying to master a “new literary form in philosophy.” He never did. In the last works this poetic impulse lies etherized upon the table of scholarship. Nor did he satisfy his cold war American readers, who, after a seventeen-year wait, hoped to find in the final volumes of Order and History more ammunition for their battle against modern progressivism. One conservative critic declared in a review that “the hope of Christian conservatives” had become “a latter-day Pilate.” Voegelin was amused by the American need to pigeonhole him, remarking in his Autobiographical Reflections that in his long career he had been called a Catholic, a Thomist, a Protestant, a Hegelian, a Platonist, “not to forget that I was supposedly strongly influenced by Huey Long.”