Eric Voegelin on the Incarnate Christ
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MICHAEL HENRY is Professor of Philosophy at St. John’s University in New York City. In his 1965 Ingersoll Lecture “Immortality: Experience and Symbol” Eric Voegelin declared that “the symbolism of incarnation would express the experience, with a date in history, of God reaching into man and revealing him as the Presence that is the flow […]
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Intercollegiate Studies Institute
MICHAEL HENRY is Professor of Philosophy at St.

John’s University in New York City.

In his 1965 Ingersoll Lecture “Immortality:

Experience and Symbol” Eric

Voegelin declared that “the symbolism of

incarnation would express the experience,

with a date in history, of God reaching into

man and revealing him as the Presence that

is the flow of presence from the beginning of

the world to its end. History is Christ written

large.”1 Despite the fact that the Incarnation

was a subject to which Voegelin devoted

relatively little space in his extensive writings,

as this statement indicates it does play a

critical role in his philosophy. Nevertheless,

as Mark Mitchell observed at the beginning

of an essay critical of Voegelin, “Eric

Voegelin’s treatment of Christianity is notoriously

problematic”2 in the sense that it

demands at the very least a revaluation of the

meaning of core Christian beliefs, particularly,

as some critics have pointed out, the

Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Resurrection.

Gerhart Niemeyer, for example, who

deeply admired and was greatly influenced

by Voegelin’s work, nonetheless expressed

disappointment at Voegelin’s inadequate

treatment of the historical person of Christ in

The Ecumenic Age.3 Mitchell argues that

because Voegelin’s philosophy cannot account

for fallen human nature and salvation it

is “simply inadequate.”4 David Walsh characterized

Voegelin’s treatment of Christianity

as incomplete and unsatisfactory, Bruce

Douglass argued that Voegelin lacks “a sense

of the Gospel as salvation in the specifically

Christian sense,” and others such as John

Gueguen and Frederick Wilhelmsen have

also pointed out what they see as significant

problems in Voegelin’s understanding of

Christianity.5 Ultimately all of these criticisms

raise a question about Voegelin’s understanding

of Christ and the Incarnation.

Despite their serious reservations about

the implications of Voegelin’s philosophy for

Christian belief, these same critics do not

reject Voegelin’s philosophy out of hand

because they find too much common ground

with Ellis Sandoz who “never doubted that

Voegelin was profoundly Christian” (although

not a “Christian philosopher” because of his

desire to maintain an impartial stance) since

“the whole of his discourse was luminous

with devotion to the truth of divine reality.”6

That is, Voegelin’s philosophy resonates so

powerfully with the soul’s hunger for God

that it cannot be simply dismissed. This

creates a dilemma for Christians who believe

in traditional Christianity but also find profound

truth in Voegelin. I shall argue that

despite the insights by which Voegelin en-

hances our understanding of Scripture and

Christianity there remains a fundamental

incongruity between his philosophical analysis

of the Incarnation and traditional Christian

belief.

To be sure, Voegelin did not claim to be

an apologist for Christian doctrines. What he

did, implicitly, claim was that he had grasped

better than anyone in modern times the true

pre-dogmatic meaning of Christianity, not

as a theologian but as a philosopher who

began to reflect on Christianity in order to

understand its effects on political phenomena

(although his meditations eventually took

him far beyond this). In his New Year’s Day,

1953 letter to Alfred Schutz he explained that

his interest in Christianity was not based on

religion but on the impossibility, for a serious

“theoretician of politics,” of simply ignoring

“1500 years of Christian thought and Christian

politics.” The rational and responsible

philosopher’s requirement to attend to Christian

thought means that he must concede the

clearer insight into, and articulations of,

experiences of reality wherever they occur,

for example in Christianity’s reinterpreting

the philosopher’s forced removal from the

cave in Plato’s parable as the new understanding

of “the experienced intrusion of

transcendence into human life which can

break in from outside so overwhelmingly

that it may call human freedom into question.”

7 The nature and history of Christianity

compel the objective “theoretician of

politics” not to “throw Christianity overboard”

but to analyze its symbolization of

transcendence experiences along with all of

the historical consequences of this articulation,

just as he would have to analyze every

other phenomenon that has had political

ramifications. Sandoz was certainly right in

his observation that Voegelin was not a

“Christian philosopher” because of his desire

to maintain a “dispassionate even fiercely

independent stance of impartiality.”8

That Voegelin’s objective philosophical

approach to understanding Christ and Christianity

resulted in the rejection of traditional

theology as a distinct form of inquiry is

apparent in his 1970 comment in response to

a question at a panel discussion at the Thomas

More Institute that “If you were to speak of

theology in the Christian sense, we would get

into problems, because there is no theology

in the Christian sense which is not at the same

time philosophy, also.”9 What he meant is

somewhat ambiguous, for his comment could

mean either that Christian doctrine is formulated

using the concepts developed in Greek

philosophy, formulations that succeeded only

in deforming and burying the symbolism of

the Gospel under “two thousand years’ accretion,”

or that philosophy in the true sense

is the only way to approach Christian theology.

For Voegelin it could and probably did

mean both. To understand Jesus Voegelin

said that he had to “go back of theology and

work directly on the sources of the time [of

the Gospels].”10 In a response to a question at

a panel discussion Voegelin deplored the use,

at the Council of Chalcedon in the fifth

century, of inadequate substantive terms

(terms which Voegelin said he himself would

never use) to “solve a problem, which is an

entirely ridiculous problem in theology, on

the basis of the depositum fidei,“11 by defining

Christ as one person who is a hypostatic

union of human nature and divine nature,

meaning that Christ is, mysteriously, truly

and fully God and truly and fully man.

Voegelin did not, however, consider the

use of Greek philosophy by Christian theologians

entirely unfortunate. In “The Gospel

and Culture” he points out that Christianity

had no choice but to enter “the life of reason

in the form of Hellenistic philosophy”12 in

order to avoid failure as an obscure sect, that

is, Christianity needed to adopt the philosophical

language understood by the educated

people of the time to articulate its

insights into transcendence. But Voegelin

saw this as more than just the expedient of

adopting an already comprehensible and

familiar vocabulary, for he mentions, as “an

early statement of the issue,” Justin Martyr’s

“conception” that “the Logos of the gospel

is rather the same Word of the same God as

the logos spermatikos of philosophy, but at a

later stage of its manifestation in history” and

therefore “Christianity is philosophy itself in

its state of perfection.”13 The problem he

found in the alliance of Christianity with

Hellenistic philosophy is that even though

philosophical concepts were initially necessary

to preserve the insights gained through

experiences of transcendence from those

who failed to understand, philosophically

formulated doctrines and dogmas inevitably

ossified into verbal propositions that themselves

became disconnected from the originating

experiences and, as a result, distorted

the meaning and lost the reality.

One of the few labels Voegelin would

accept was “mystic philosopher,” by which

he meant that he searched for the meaning of

the dynamism of human consciousness as it

searches for and is illuminated by experiences

of the ground of its existence, experiences

it endeavors to express in symbols

rather than in the propositional, factual statements

of doctrine and dogma.14 This, of

course, created a frame of reference so broad

that Christianity became one articulation of

transcendent experiences among many others.

Voegelin rejected the distinction between

revealed truth and truth attained by

“natural reason,” as he rejected the distinction

between philosophy and faith, for he

understood all truth to emerge from a divine-

human encounter that is universal in

man, who is the imago Dei, and he regarded

faith as the philosophical attitude of trusting

openness to transcendence. His conviction

that the truth of divine reality is universal

and varies only in the adequacy, or “differentiation”

of its symbolization along a continuum

of theoretical insights15 is the reason

why he often lists Christianity in the midst of

other, more or less equivalent, symbolizations

of such experiences—Platonic philosophy,

Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism,

Confucianism, Taoism, etc.—and he frequently

compares Christianity with Platonic

philosophy, finding it in some ways superior

to Plato but in other ways inferior. For

Voegelin Christianity is really better understood

in terms of the more differentiated

philosophy that he was able to develop because

of his deeper insight into the originating

experiences, rather than by the dogmatic

theology based on traditional concepts and

categories with an inferior articulation of

reality. It is on the basis of this philosophical

analysis of universal encounters with the

divine that he said 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.”16 What, then, did

Christ and Christianity mean to Voegelin

and how did he philosophically arrive at the

conclusion that history is specifically Christ

written large?

An explanation of the meaning of Christ

and the Incarnation for Voegelin must begin

from one of his fundamental assumptions,

that the “nature” of our experience of ultimate

reality is the flowing or flux of divine

presence.17 It is on the basis of this assumption

about flux that Voegelin can make the

initially startling assertion that “existence is

not a fact.” Since the word “fact” comes

from the Latin verb facio and means something

done, finished, accomplished, and since

for Voegelin human existence is best understood

as movement, process, flux, because it

is illuminated by the flowing divine presence

in consciousness, “existence is the nonfact of

a disturbing movement in the In-Between of

ignorance and knowledge, of time and timelessness,

of imperfection and perfection, of

hope and fulfillment, and ultimately of life

and death. From the experience of this movement,

from the anxiety of losing the right

direction in this In-Between of darkness and

light, arises the inquiry concerning the meaning

of life. But it does arise only because life

is experienced as man’s participation in a

movement with a direction to be found or

missed. If man’s existence were not a movement

but a fact, it not only would have no

meaning but the question of meaning could

not even arise”18 because in a world of

facticity life has no direction but is only a

“wasteland” of sterile “things.” This “inquiry

concerning the meaning of life” is

philosophy.

Voegelin’s understanding of philosophy,

which embraces his understanding of Christianity,

flows from this sense of conscious

human existence located in an unfathomable

region that can only be described, somewhat

apophatically, as neither this nor that, because

as soon as one attempts to gain certainty

by declaring precisely what it is in terms of

our worldly concepts, we lose it. To refer to

it as flux really means that it defies any

attempt to confine it within humanly generated

categories. For this enigmatic region of

experience he adopted the Platonic symbol

of the metaxy, the “In-Between,” the region

of reality where human consciousness searches

for, is drawn by, and encounters the awesomely

mysterious transcendent flux of divine

presence. In his essay “Eternal Being in

Time” he says that “in the philosophical

experience, neither does eternal being become

an object in time nor is temporal being

transposed into eternity. We remain in the

‘in between’, in a temporal flow of experience

in which eternity is present. This flow

cannot be dissected into past, present, and

future of the world’s time, for at every point

of the flow there is the tension toward the

transcending eternal being. This characteristic

of the presence of eternal being in temporal

flow may be best represented by the term

flowing presence.“19 “Transcendence” and

“immanence” denote not places but directions

in the structure of reality encountered

in the experience. Plato first used this symbol

of the In-Between in The Symposium when

Socrates asks Diotima whether Eros, the

psychic force that drives the soul to seek the

divine, is a mortal or an immortal, and she

replies, using the preposition metaxy, that

Eros is neither but instead is in tension

“between” them, partaking of both but not

fully identifiable with either. This is the

ground of the experiences of transcendence

that cannot be described or defined but only

symbolized. Major problems arise, Voegelin

believed, if the loss or obscuring of the

original experience causes the symbol to

harden into a literal truth or dogma that has

the effect of eliminating the tension by

creating the illusion of a certain grasp of

Truth. I use the word “hardens” deliberately,

because Voegelin thinks of metaxic

experiences as steeped in the tension of the

fluidity and unpredictability of divine presence.

20

All human beings, by virtue of having

human consciousness, exist in the metaxy,

although to varying degrees and with different

levels of tolerance for the tension and

uncertainty in the experience of flow, change,

appeal and response, movements and countermovements,

and questioning that cannot be

translated into propositions, all of which can

be only inadequately articulated as symbols

that are really meant to point others to their

own metaxic experiences. The greater the

awareness of the “structure” of this process

the greater the degree of what Voegelin calls

the “differentiation of consciousness.” When

the emphasis of the symbolization falls on the

human quest for the divine and the anxiety

of losing the right direction he uses the term

“noetic.” When the emphasis is on the other

pole of this tension, the divine presence and

the “pull” that draws the soul beyond itself,

the term is “pneumatic.”21 For Voegelin

either term points to the same uncontrollable

and unpredictable flux that cannot be captured

or communicated in the concepts developed

to describe the “things” in the world

of our sense experience. He follows Plato and

Aristotle in using the term “psyche” for the

sensorium of divine reality, the site of “divine-

human mutual participation, as the

metaleptic [participatory] reality,” and the

“site in which the comprehensive reality

becomes luminous to itself.”22

As Voegelin put it, “the specific area of

reality in which the process occurs…is neither

divine nor human, neither transcendent

nor immanent, but rather has the character

of an In-Between reality.” This means that

the partners, or poles, in the metaxy cannot

be “reified” into independent entities.

Therefore, “neither must the divine partner

be hypostatized into an object, nor the

human partner into a subject, of cognition.”

Consciousness in the metaxy is not one of

subject-object, of human cognizance of an

objective thing. Rather it is a “process” in

which divine mystery becomes “cognitively

luminous” as the divine movement of “revelatory

appeal” and the human counter-movement

of “apperceptive and imaginative response.”

It is simply not the case that human

beings acquire conceptual knowledge of God

as the object of knowledge in the metaxy.

Furthermore, because the metaxy cannot be

dichotomized into God and man, and because

the appeal and the response “belong to

the one reality that becomes luminous in the

experience” the language that erupts in the

experience “is as much divine as it is human,”

23 that is, the divine and the human

expressions of the experiences of this inbetween

encounter are indistinguishable.

Now, the question that Voegelin says

“Christian visionaries” must ask is “‘Who is

this Son of God?’—who is this Messiah, this

Christ, this vessel of divinely immortal presence,

this living Word of the truth.”24 The

basic assumption in Voegelin’s Christology

is that Christ can be spoken of as “the

representative human being,…the Son of

God incarnate in his full perfection” because

he dwelled in the metaxy more fully and

intensely than other human beings.25 Rejecting

all of the hypostatic terms of person,

substance, and nature as distortions or loss of

the flowing divine presence, Voegelin found

it much truer to reality to understand the

impenetrable mystery of the identity of Christ

as one who was able to endure the highest

possible tension of living fully in the metaxy,

in the flux of divine presence, while other

human beings have a lesser experience of

metaxic tension and reality.

Although Voegelin refers to Christ by the

traditional term “Son of God” he did not

mean that Christ was the Son, the Second

Person of the Trinity, or that Christ naturally

had a divine nature. The term “Son of God”

he traced to Ancient Egypt where “every

pharaoh [was] the son of God.”26 In the

Exodus story this symbol was transferred to

the Chosen people and was later transferred

to Christ when he was baptized by John.

There is, therefore, according to Voegelin,

nothing unique or unprecedented in bestowing

on Christ the title “Son of God” or

even the “only-begotten Son,” for the history

of the terms amounts to “the realization

that the existential presence of God is experienced

in existence in consciousness.”27

While in Israel and Revelation he does refer to

“the Christian revelation that only God can

be the Son of God—the mystery expressed in

Trinitarian theology and the Christology,”28

it is not at all clear that he meant to say that

Christ was truly God, because in his comments

on the dogma of the Trinity in his

letter to Schutz he says that the achievement

of this symbol is to combine the experiences

of the radical transcendence of God (the

Father) with the experiences of divine power

over nature (the Son) and the Christian

community’s participation in the spirit (the

Holy Spirit). If the Trinity symbolizes human

experiences of the divine but not what

God is in himself, then Trinitarian theology

cannot say that Christ is the incarnation of

the Second Person of the Trinity.

To explain the meaning of “the Son of

God incarnate in his full perfection” Voegelin

frequently turned to the Epistle to the

Colossians29 where he found the critical passage

explaining what is meant by “incarnation”

in the second chapter in which Paul

says that in Christ “katoikei pan to pleroma tes

theotetos,” that is, “dwells all the fullness of

divine reality,” as Voegelin preferred to

translate the neologism theotes. “And if you

read only Colossians and not [any other text],

you would assume that Christ is to be defined

[…] as the optimal presence—the pleroma of

parousia—of the divine in a human being,

while all other human beings have lesser

presences of the divine, and are only aware

that there is one person, the Christ, in whom

there is the pleroma of presence. And the

theotes is not identified as a personal god, but

as…the presence of divine reality experienced

in reality by the people who stand

around and hear the Christ talk.”30 This is the

core of Voegelin’s Christology, that while

everyone has some degree of participation in

divine reality, in the metaxy, simply because

we all have human consciousness, Christ is

the optimal Presence that is the fullness of the

flowing divine presence “from the beginning

of the world to its end.”

When Voegelin analyzes the passage in

Matthew (16:13-20) in which Jesus puts to

his disciples the question of who they believe

he is, he finds in the Gospel a careful distinction

between the past experiences of divine

presence in individuals called “prophets,”

experiences open to ordinary people who

have accordingly concluded that Christ is

one of the prophets, the disciples’ greater

awareness that Christ is in some obscure way

different from the prophets, and Peter’s even

greater internal experience of divine presence

that enables him to discern “the even

fuller presence of ‘the living God’ in Jesus.”

Peter “recognizes” him as “the Son of the

living God,” which is another symbol for the

fullness of divine reality, theotes. Voegelin

then comments that “the God of whom the

pneumatic visions are true has to be the

anonymous theotes, the immortal Beyond

that can save from the struggle by its suffering

participation in human existence. The apostolic

visionaries were better philosophers

than some of the doctrinaire theologians of

our own time.”31

Voegelin, of course, understands theotes to

refer to the presence within the metaxy of a

nameless but immortal divine reality Beyond

our world and consciousness, one that constitutes

consciousness by reaching into it, rather

than to a Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy

Spirit. In fact, Voegelin understands theotes

in a more Platonic than Christian sense. He

explains that he prefers the translation “divine

reality” to others such as “godhead,”

“divinity,” or “deity,” because they imply a

personal God, but “divine reality” “renders

best the author’s intention to denote a

nonpersonal reality which allows for a degree

of participation in its fullness while remaining

the God beyond the In-Between of

existence.”32 But, assuming that the divine

presence in the metaxy is, in fact, an anonymous

theotes, rather than a particular and

personal theos, why does this mean that God

cannot also reveal Himself in his personal

existence? Why is God necessarily anonymous?

The abstract noun theotes does seem to

refer to God in impersonal terms,33 but why

should that one word used only once in the

entire New Testament be the pivot on which

all of Christian belief must turn?34 Christians

have never believed that Christ was filled

only with an impersonal and anonymous

divine reality, although Voegelin seems to

consider this an error, for when he says that

“the Unknown God whose theotes was present

in the existence of Jesus has been eclipsed by

the revealed God of Christian doctrine,”35

he means that the true God of mystical

philosophy has been obscured by Christian

dogma.

Still, why didn’t Paul say that in Christ

dwells all the fullness of God (to pleroma tou

theou)? In that particular passage he is referring

to the dangers of a purely philosophical

(non-metaxic) worldview, arguing that what

makes the divine what it is can be found fully

only in Christ and not in the elements (ta

stoicheia) of the cosmos. He continues, “And

you, having been made full [pepleromenoi],

are in Him who is the head of all rule and

authority.” That is, because Paul is emphasizing

the union between Christ and those

who believe in him, through being circumcised,

buried, and raised from the dead with

him, he speaks of the dynamic source of life

that all share with Christ, which he names

not bios or zoe or theos but theotes, “divineness”

or divine presence. Christ is the locus of

indwelling divine “fullness” while we are the

“having-been-made-fullness” of divine reality,

to the limits of our own capacity,

through an intense transforming union with

Christ. In terms of Christian doctrine, we

participate in the divine presence in Christ

who is fully God, but we are not fully God

ourselves.

Voegelin does not interpret either the

Caesarea Philippi or Colossians passage to

mean that either Peter or the Evangelist

believed that Christ was anything as static or

thing-like as a hypostatic union of divine

and human natures, or God and man. What

he believes these writings were attempting to

communicate was the experience of the

intensity of divine presence, since, Voegelin

said, what we experience is a dynamic presence,

not a static “nature.” This is almost

certainly correct as far as it goes, but it

ignores the meaning of tradition, of the belief

that the long-term reflection on the meaning

of this intense encounter with divine presence,

which concluded that it was an encounter

with God himself, was just as divinely

inspired as Scripture. After discussing

the Caesarea Philippi question in the essay

“Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme”

Voegelin goes on to raise for himself the vital

question who this person of the Christ really

is. “He is neither a man, moving in the

struggle of the metaxy toward immortality,

nor the divine reality beyond the metaxy.

The [pneumatic] visions see in the Christ the

historical event of God’s pleromatic presence

in a man, revealing the suffering presence of

the God in every man as the transfiguring

force that will let mortal reality rise with the

God to his immortality. The pleromatic

metaxy seen in the Christ reveals mortal

suffering as participation in the divine suffering.”

36 This is in accordance with Christian

belief in the sense that Christ was not anxiously

searching for the ground of existence,

nor was he merely an apparition of the

unincarnated God. But it contradicts Christian

belief if it means that Christ was neither

fully God nor fully man.

Voegelin considers the phrase “pleromatic

metaxy” to be the most exact possible expression

of Chalcedon’s textual summary, arrived

at after several centuries of complex

struggle to define Christ. According to the

Council’s definition Christ is “the same perfect

in godhead [theotes], the same perfect in

manhood [anthropotes], truly God and truly

man [theos alethos kai anthropos alethos], the

same of a reasonable soul and body;

homoousios with the Father in godhead

[theotes], and the same homoousios with us in

manhood [anthropotes], like us in all things

except sin; begotten before ages of the Father

in godhead [theotes]…acknowledged in two

natures…the difference of the natures being

by no means taken away because of the

union.”37 Despite the complexities and ambiguities

of this definition, it is quite clear

that Christ is understood to be both theos and

anthropos, as well as both theotes and anthropotes

(human reality). This text, with its alternation

between Christ as theos and theotes,

conveys the sense of a groping to find adequate

expression for something that defies

verbal formulation, since the mystery of the

Incarnation is indeed, as Voegelin said, “impenetrable”

by human understanding. Nonetheless,

despite its inadequacy, it does go

beyond theotes to say that Christ is “truly theos

and truly anthropos,” which Voegelin interprets

as an attempt to convey “the visionary

truth of the Christ’s existence in a metaxy that

is distinguished from the noetic metaxy by

the pleromatic presence of divine reality.”38

What he meant is that unlike the philosophical

noetic experience of searching for what

loves to hide (to borrow from Heraclitus), the

experience of Christ is one of overwhelming

divine presence, or “unconcealedness” (to

borrow from Heidegger).

Here, consistent with his understanding of

the metaxy, Voegelin interprets Christ as

neither fully God nor fully man, in the sense

that we normally mean by the term “man,”

rather than fully both. Because He is the

fullness of divine presence as it can dwell in

and be perceived by consciousness within the

limits of human reality, he is more than a

man, but because He is filled, according to

Voegelin’s reading of Colossians, with theotes

rather than theos, it is not accurate to say

simply that He is God. When Voegelin says

that Christ was not “a man, moving in the

struggle of the metaxy toward immortality”

he means that, “as far as consciousness is the

site of participation, its reality partakes of

both the divine and the human without being

wholly the one or the other,”39 which would

entail that Christ could not be “true God and

true man” but rather something ineffable inbetween

“mundane humanity and something

transmundane.”40 A man in this “not

quite human,…not quite divine” tension is

neither the “mortal man” in the Homeric

sense, nor an immortal god, but “a new kind

of man,” that Plato calls the daimonios aner,

which Voegelin translates as a “spiritual

man,” the man who dwells fully in the

metaxy as he is filled with divine presence.

But how much difference there is between

Plato’s daimonios aner, of whom a prime

example is Socrates, and Voegelin’s Christ is

not entirely clear.

Voegelin says that in John’s Gospel “there

is no doctrine to be taught but only the story

to be told of God’s pull becoming effective in

the world through Christ, the Saving Tale.”41

Christ is the exemplar, the man transparent

for the presence of the Unknown God, a

revelation that is “in conscious continuity

with the millennial process of revelation”

that Voegelin found constituting human history.

42 This God encountered in the metaxy

is an unknown God whom, Voegelin believed,

Plato knew “just as much as Jesus,”

although Plato did not differentiate God in a

man but instead regarded the “son of God”

(or the monogenes theos) as the cosmos rather

than a human being.43 Nevertheless, Voegelin

determined that, despite Plato’s equal knowledge

of the unknown God and the noetic

superiority of Platonic philosophy to Christianity

on some points, “the full differentiation

comes only through Jesus, not through

Plato.”44 For Voegelin the whole point of the

New Testament is the experiential revelation

of the fullness of divine presence in

Christ, who is, on the whole, more pneumatically

but less noetically differentiated

than Platonic philosophy. The real mingling

of divine and human is not so much in Christ

as in the metaxy. Christ, as the Mediator, is

the metaxy made visible.

Therefore, the drama of revelation in

Christ is also the drama of history, a subject

that Voegelin often discussed. He believed,

and said that Plato and Paul believed, that

history and its meaning as the movement of

consciousness toward greater differentiation

and luminosity45 are constituted by theophanic

events in the metaxy of which one of the

most important is Paul’s Vision of the Resurrected.

In other words the meaning of

history is “transfiguring incarnation [which]

does not begin with Christ, as Paul assumed,

but becomes conscious through Christ and

Paul’s vision as the eschatological telos of the

transfiguring process that goes on in history

before and after Christ and constitutes its

meaning.”46 Therefore, history for Voegelin

is the process by which man participates

more and more fully in divine presence and

becomes, in effect, more Christ. Just as

revelation is a process in which divine reality

becomes luminous to itself in humanity, so

history is a process in which humanity becomes

the incarnation of God, a process that

becomes conscious not in a philosopher but

in Christ, although we must also draw the

inference that after a period of obscurity this

process has returned to awareness in the

consciousness of the philosopher Voegelin.

Therefore, for Voegelin, what constitutes

history and is therefore important is not the

abstract question whether Christ was truly

God and truly man but the theophanic event,

the metaxic vision of divine reality in Christ

that motivated the disciples to preach the

revelation of God in Him. Hence, Voegelin

often refers to “the Christ event” rather than

simply to Christ. Similarly, since the Resurrection

is an essential Christian belief it

should be noted that Voegelin apparently did

not accept the actual physical resurrection of

Christ, but thought of resurrection in terms

of the metaxic “vision of the Resurrected.”47

The historically significant event is the vision

in the metaxy, not the empty tomb in

the physical world. But what happens to

Christianity if Christ is not really physically

risen from the dead, but is only “resurrected”

in visions?

All of this leaves Christians with a significant

problem. We might attempt to read

Voegelin as saying that the understanding of

Christ as theotes but not theos, a human

consciousness living fully in the metaxy but

not actually God, is a purely philosophical

exegesis of Christ, and further illumination

of who he is must be left to the theologians.

However, Voegelin has precluded this reading

by his stance on dogma and theology. If

theology is merely a deformation of philosophy,

which is the true science, then his

philosophical interpretation of Christ must

become all of the truth of Christ that we can

ever know. This significantly changes the

Christian sense of who Christ is, for, hypothetically,

if Voegelin’s understanding is the

accurate one, then much of Christian belief

is false. Christ is not, as the Nicene Creed has

it, “deum verum de deo vero” or “consubstantialem

patri,” since these are dogmatic

propositions that according to Voegelin have

deteriorated into verbal formalities that have

lost the original living experiences of mysterious,

ineffable reality. Who is he then? In

Voegelin’s mind, how much difference is

there between Christ and Plato as avatars of

divine presence? If Christ was not really God

but was only a Jewish version of the daimonios

aner, and if the knowledge of the unknown

God is in Plato just as much as in Jesus, only

less differentiated, then why should anyone

be a Christian? If William Thompson is right

in saying that “Jesus’ death as that of Socrates

is representative because it expresses this

pull” by which God “draws” the soul,48 then

how is Christ significantly more central to

history than was Socrates? If Christ is most

adequately understood as the man who lived

more intensely in the metaxy than anyone

else, then what does it mean to worship or

pray to Christ? If the advantage of Christianity

over Platonic philosophy is only that of

greater “differentiation,” then to what degree

is it better to be a Christian than a

philosopher?

Voegelin’s philosophical analysis seems to

undermine completely the Christian belief in

the radical uniqueness of Christ, for if He is

merely the fullness of the metaxic theotes and

not God himself, then how do we know that

he has been the only such person in history,

particularly if Plato “knew just as much?”

How do we know that other itinerant preachers

did not have the same fullness of divine

reality but lacked a literate Paul and evangelists

with the necessary symbols to articulate

the experience, insight, and vision? How do

we know that there will not be future

“Christs” who will have just as much theotes?

Why should Jesus be the only or the last

instance of the fullness of divine presence

manifested in a human being? Glenn Hughes

in his commentary on Voegelin’s Christianity

asserts that Jesus’ uniqueness is not in his

consciousness shaped by divine-human encounter

and his share in divine presence, for

these are true to some degree of all human

beings, but it is rather in the fact that, for

those with the ability to experience it, “there

is in him such a fullness of revelation, such a

fullness of imaging-forth of the unseen, transcendent

divine reality, that it must be affirmed

to be unsurpassable.”49 We must ask if

he was experienced as unsurpassable as God

or as metaxic theotes.50 Christ as God is

indeed unique and unsurpassable, but Christ

experienced as fullness of presence of an

Unknown God is another matter. In short,

Christ defined as fullness of divine presence

does not seem as necessarily and radically

unique as Christians have always believed.

The implications of this for Christianity

are profound. As Eugene Webb put it, “To

digest the implications of Voegelin’s thought

for Christian theology will require the efforts

of a generation of theologians, and it will

have to involve radical reconsideration of the

traditional claims of Christianity to exclusive

validity as a religion,” something that Webb

admits would be both difficult and dangerous

because “the question of the relative truth of

various religions cannot be solved by giving

up all doctrinal claims.”51 Some seem to think

the radical reconsideration is indeed warranted

by the doctrinalization that distorted

the original meaning, such as Michael

Morrissey who commented that “Voegelin

challenges Christian theology to break from

its doxic conception of truth,”52 and to

recognize that the traditional identification

of Jesus with God was “a development authorized

by some later, enthusiastic but flawed

Church theologizing that overlooked the

explicit and implicit nuances of Nicea and

Chalcedon, not to mention the Gospel sources

themselves.”53 However, a theologian of the

stature of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, while

acknowledging the mysterious nature of revelation

and the symbolic character of doctrine,

nonetheless bluntly insists “it has always

been a basic tenet of the Christian faith that

Jesus is completely God and completely man.”54

If the traditional belief in the Incarnation

as the mysterious union of true divinity and

true humanity in Christ is correct, then there

must be an error in Voegelin’s philosophy. In

my view the questionable assumption that

Voegelin makes is that regarding knowledge

of God we are limited to symbols that articulate

the experience of consciousness in the

“In-Between” and that God cannot or does

not communicate anything to us about what

he is in himself, beyond the metaxy. The

Nicaean and Chalcedonian formulations of

doctrine grew out of centuries of struggling

to refine and clarify what the Scriptural

accounts of Christ were telling us and to

reject false or inadequate interpretations.

The similarity or even continuity between

philosophy and Christianity does not necessarily

mean that Christ is Socrates raised to a

higher power but rather that philosophy

grasped the nature of human participation in

metaxic divine reality without being able to

foresee that the ultimate gift of God would be

to cross over the metaxy and actually become

man. The substance of Christianity, after all,

is not the metaxy but the Incarnation, and

while Voegelin’s thought can certainly enrich

Christianity, its interpretation of the

Incarnation as the metaxy excludes much

that is vitally important in traditional Christian

theology. Consider, for example, the

following theological statement of Christian

belief that opens a book by a contemporary

theologian: “The Christian doctrine of God

is to be understood from within the unique,

definitive, and final self-revelation of God in

Jesus Christ his only-begotten Son, that is,

from within the self-revelation of God as

God become man for us and our

salvation….[and] it is in the Lord Jesus, the

very Word and Mind of God incarnate in

our humanity, that the eternal God ‘defines’

and identifies himself for us as he really is.

Only in Christ is God’s self-revelation identical

with himself, and only in Christ, God for

us, does he communicate his self-revelation

to us in such a way that authentic knowledge

of God is embodied in our humanity….”55

For all of the welcome richness and profundity

of Voegelin’s philosophy, and for all that

the metaxy has added to our understanding

of the depths of consciousness, I believe there

are far greater depths of wisdom and mystery

here that are simply invisible within the

range of the spectrum of truth to which

Voegelin’s philosophical assumptions restrict

him.

NOTES

Eric Voegelin, “Immortality: Experience and Symbol,”

The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, [CW] Vol. 12:

Published Essays 1966-1985, ed. Ellis Sandoz (Baton

Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 78.

Mark Mitchell, “Regaining the Balance: An Augustinian

Response to Eric Voegelin,” Humanitas, Vol. XV, No.

1 (2002), 4.

Gerhart Niemeyer, “Eric Voegelin’s

Philosophy and the Drama of Mankind,” originally

published in Modern Age, Winter, 1976 and reprinted in

Gerhart Niemeyer, Aftersight and Foresight: Selected Essays

(Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988), 169-

189. Near the end of his life he devoted an essay to arguing

that textual and anecdotal evidence supports the conclusion

that Voegelin was at least favorably disposed to

Christianity, and that Voegelin’s personal beliefs were a

matter of his solitude with God. Niemeyer mentions in

this essay that if he were writing his critique of The

Ecumenic Age then, his criticism would have been “milder.”

“Christian Faith, and Religion, in Eric Voegelin’s

Work,” Within and Above Ourselves: Essays in Political

Analysis, (Wilmington: Intercollegiate Studies Institute,

1996), 126-142. Originally published in The Review of

Politics, Vol. 57. No. 1 (Winter, 1995), 91-104.

Ibid.,

31.

David Walsh, “Eric Voegelin and Our Disordered

Spirit,” Review of Politics, Vol. 57, no. 1 (Winter 1995),

134; Bruce Douglass, “A Diminished Gospel: A Critique

of Voegelin’s Interpretation of Christianity,” in Eric

Voegelin’s Search for Order in History, ed. Stephen A.

McKnight (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University

Press, 1978), 146; Frederick Wilhelmsen, “Professor

Voegelin and the Christian Tradition,” in Christianity and

Political Philosophy (Athens: The University of Georgia

Press, 1978), 193-200; John Gueguen, “Voegelin’s From

Enlightenment to Revolution: A Review Article,” The

Thomist 42:1 (January, 1978), 134.

Ellis Sandoz, “Carrying

Coals to Newcastle,” Eric Voegelin Society panel

on Voegelin and Christianity, 2002, 1. Available on the

Eric Voegelin Society website.

“Letter from Eric

Voegelin to Alfred Schutz,” The Philosophy of Order:

Essays on History, Consciousness and Politics, ed. Peter J.

Opitz and Gregor Sebba (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981),

449-450.

Sandoz, 2.

Eric Voegelin, “Responses at

the Panel Discussion of “The Beginning and the Beyond,”

CW, Vol. 33, 420.

Eric Voegelin, Conversations

with Eric Voegelin at the Thomas More Institute

for Adult Education in Montreal” CW, Vol. 33, The

Drama of Humanity and Other Miscellaneous Papers, 1939-

1085, ed. William Petropulos and Gilbert Weiss (Columbia:

University of Missouri Press), 2004, 282.

Eric

Voegelin, “Responses at the Panel Discussion of ‘The

Beginning of the Beginning’,” CW, Vol. 33, 420. He also

wrote that the creedal definition that the Father and the

Son are homoousios, consubstantial, was “sublimely meaningless.”

The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago:

The University of Chicago Press, 1952), 100.

Eric Voegelin, “The Gospel and Culture,” CW, Vol. 12,

173.

Ibid., 173. This seems to reflect Justin’s own

approach to Christianity by a kind of ascent of the soul

through the successive study of Stoicism, Aristotelianism,

Pythagoreanism, and Platonism. Jaroslav Pelikan, The

Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine,

Vol. I, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600)

(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971), 63.

As Sandoz put it, “If the exploration of the human

relationship to the transcendent divine ground of being

is the cardinal problem of philosophy, as Voegelin

thought, and if he devoted his life to the task in its manifest

diversity over time from prehistory into the present, the

designation [mystic philosopher] seems appropriate

enough.” Sandoz, 2.

See Eugene Webb, “Eric

Voegelin’s Theory of Revelation,” Eric Voegelin’s Thought:

A Critical Appraisal, ed. by Ellis Sandoz (Durham, NC:

Duke University Press, 1982), 160.

Eric Voegelin,

“Response to Professor Altizer’s ‘A New History and a

New but Ancient God?'” CW, Vol. 12, 294. Voegelin

makes this statement with reference to the belief of

Aquinas that the Christ is “the head of the corpus mysticum

that embraces, not only Christians, but all mankind from

the creation of the world to its end.”

Although this

emphasis on flux would seem to put him in the Heraclitean

camp, I believe a more apt modern comparison is with

Bergson, who argued that the inner, metaphysical,

absolute reality is not Being but becoming, flowing,

time, and change that can be known only intuitively. .It

was Bergson’s belief that the static, “scientific” concepts

of ordinary language are the artifacts of an intellect that

must analyze and use the world in order to survive, but

all such concepts artificially stop the vital motion so that

we might surround ourselves with a world of “things”

that have constant and reliable properties that we find of

use. To grasp reality, the constant flow, Bergson thought

metaphysics “must transcend concepts to reach intuition”

that could be expressed only in “supple, mobile,

and almost fluid representations” that are “always ready

to mold themselves on the fleeting forms of intuition”

to convey the reality of constant change and are very close

to what Voegelin meant by symbols. Henri Bergson, The

Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, (New York:

Philosophical Library, 1946), 168. Voegelin frequently

commented that the concepts that we use in propositions

are inadequate to express the flux of reality because they

were developed to deal with the material realm in which

we must engage in practical action to preserve our

physical existence.

“The Gospel and Culture,” 176.

Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis, tr. and ed. by Gerhart

Niemeyer (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame

Press, 1978), 133.

For an eloquent account of this

metaxic experience, see Voegelin’s description of the

uncertainty of Christianity in The New Science of Politics,

122.

Philosophy is characteristically noetic, while

Scripture and visionary sources are predominantly pneumatic.

Ibid., 184. The metaxy has been well described

as the psyche’s searching, uncertainty, and hope in The

Cloud of Unknowing, a classic mystical work that Voegelin

frequently mentioned as an example of his own approach

to philosophy. The anonymous author speaks of God’s

grace arousing the soul to enthusiasm and ultimately joy

while bringing it to a deep experience of himself, but the

soul must be willing to enter the darkness of “unknowing”

with only “a naked intent toward God.” This

meditative consciousness that is acutely experienced

between the “cloud of forgetfulness” of everything in the

world and the “cloud of unknowing” that obscures the

vision of God is the metaxy. The Cloud of Unknowing and

The Book of Privy Counseling, ed. by William Johnston

(New York: Doubleday, 1973), 48-49.

Eric Voegelin,

“The Beginning and the Beyond,” CW, Vol. 28, What

Is History? And Other Late Unpublished Writings, ed. by

Thomas A. Hollweck and Paul Caringella (Baton Rouge:

Louisiana State University Press, 1990),178-180.

Eric

Voegelin, “Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme,”

CW, Vol. 12, 366.

Eric Voegelin, “Natural Law in

Political Theory: Excerpts from the Discussion,” CW,

Vol. 33, 119. The statement quoted is actually part of a

question raised by one of the participants who described

Christ “as far as faith is concerned” as quoted and asked

Voegelin where the representative human being is to be

found otherwise. Voegelin responded “Nowhere!” As

Glenn Hughes put it, “Jesus existed in the metaxy like

every other human being. But…his response to the

divine appeal was of unparalleled completeness, in such

a way that the divine partner in his existence was

experienced, by himself and his followers, as what

Voegelin calls ‘an extraordinary divine irruption.'”

“Eric Voegelin and Christianity,” The Intercollegiate

Review (Fall/Winter 2004), 28.

“Conversations,” 293.

Ibid., 293.

Eric Voegelin, Order and History, Vol.

I, Israel and Revelation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State

University Press, 1956), 467.

He says that this epistle

is “of dubious origin but is certainly Pauline.” Eric

Voegelin, “Structures of Consciousness,” CW, Vol 33,

372.

Ibid., 372-73.

“Wisdom and the Magic of

the Extreme,” 368.

“The Gospel and Culture,” 190.

The Greek suffix –tet (-tes in the nominative)

expresses the abstract notion of the adjective or substantive

from which the word is derived, such as philotes,

friendship, from philos, friend.

Romans 1:20 does use

the word theiotes, which is similar. Voegelin comments,

“If the author [of Colossians] belonged to the Pauline

‘school’, one can understand his symbol theotes as an

attempt to overcome certain imperfections in Paul’s

symbol theiotes.” “The Gospel and Culture,” 193.

“The Gospel and Culture,” 199.

“Wisdom and the

Magic of the Extreme,” 369. Voegelin includes in these

pneumatic visions not only those of disciples such as St.

Paul but also visions attributed to Christ himself, such as

in Matt. 3: 16-17.

The English is from Pelikan, 263-

264.

Ibid., 370.

“Immortality: Experience and

Symbol,” 90.

“Conversations,” 250.

“The Gospel

and Culture,” 190.

Ibid., 198.

The Gospel of John

uses the word monogenes, usually translated as “onlybegotten”

to refer to Christ, such as in 3:16.

“Conversations,”

281.

Eric Voegelin, Order and History,

Vol. IV, The Ecumenic Age, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State

University Press, 1974), 242.

Ibid., 270.

One of

Niemeyer’s criticisms of Voegelin is “the elimination of

the Resurrection by reducing the resurrection experiences

of the disciples to the type of Paul’s vision.” Gerhart

Niemeyer, “Faith and Reason in Eric Voegelin,” Within

and Above Ourselves, 123.

William M. Thompson,

“Voegelin on Jesus Christ,” Voegelin and the Theologian:

Ten Studies in Interpretation, ed. by John Kirby and

William M. Thompson. (Toronto Studies in Theology,

Vol. 10. New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1983), 183.

Hughes, 28.

As James Rhodes comments on the

position of Gerhart Niemeyer, “he is challenging

Voegelin on his own terms, contending that Jesus was

experienced as the ‘only begotten Son’, not as the most

perfect of many Sons.” James Rhodes, “Voegelin and

Christian Faith,” Center Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Summer

1983), 91.

Eugene Webb, “Faith, Truth, and Persuasion

in the Thought of Eric Voegelin,” Voegelin and the

Theologian, 366.

Michael Morrissey, Consciousness and

Transcendence: The Theology of Eric Voegelin (Notre Dame:

The University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 249.

Morrissey’s book contains an excellent analysis of

Voegelin’s Christology with which I essentially agree,

although I have serious reservations about his advocacy

of creating a Voegelinian Christian theology (p. 249)

because while I agree that “faith is not rooted in assent to

dogmatic propositions” and that a Voegelinian Christian

theology might well be in some sense a “more liberating,

personal, and universal conception” of faith, such a

theology would not quite be Christianity.

Ibid., 242.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity,

tr. J. R. Foster (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990),

208. Ratzinger does hold some views about Christ that

are not far from those of Voegelin, such as “Christian faith

believes in Jesus as the exemplary man” (which he

believes is the best way to translate the Pauline concept

of the “last Adam”). “But precisely because he is the

exemplary, the authoritative man, he oversteps the

bounds of humanity; only thus and only thereby is he

the truly exemplary man,” and “Jesus Christ is…the man

who has truly come to himself.” “That man is most man,

indeed the true man, who is most unlimited, who not

only has contact with the infinite—the infinite being!—

but is one with him: Jesus Christ. In him ‘hominization’

has truly reached its goal.” 175-76. Still, Ratzinger insists

on the traditional doctrine that Jesus Christ is God and

man, not simply a man filled with divine presence.

Thomas F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God, One

Being, Three Persons (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 1.