Eric Voegelin (1)

Voegelin vs. Schuon

The German/American philosopher Eric Voegelin (1901–1985) has a small but devoted following who regard him as one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century. Most of these followers are on the political right, but apparently Voegelin did not identify himself as a conservative, as he distrusted the traditional conservative tendency to substitute dogma for the direct experience of truth. He is also in some ways at odds with traditional Christianity. (One suspects, though, that on the current political spectrum, which has shifted dramatically leftwards in the past 25 years or so—I refer here to attitudes to cultural, rather than comparatively superficial economic, questions—he would fall decidedly at the conservative end.) . . . CONTINUE The basic emphasis in Voegelin's work is probably the analysis of millenarian "political religions" such as Marxism and Nazism, and the argument that to counter the tendency indicated by such movements, a spiritual or philosophical renaissance is necessary, rather than merely political reforms (say, reverting to aristocracy from democracy). A key to this renaissance would be the philosophical or religious treasures of Greece and early Christianity, which may be all that we have to build on once the modern political fanaticisms have finished devastating the cultural landscape, and so have finally discredited themselves. In this sense Voegelin is a strong traditionalist.

It is of interest, then, to try to compare Voegelin with the other traditionalist school represented by Frithjof Schuon. There are a number of points of contact between these two streams of thought, but there are at the same time some fundamental differences. Both are, I think, suspicious of the way in which Christianity has "deviated" from other major religions by emphasizing the possibility of salvation on a worldly plane. Both would probably regard the world in Platonic fashion, as an inevitably poor copy of an ideal that could exist only in the spiritual realm. Both believe in an essentially unchanging human nature. Both probably regard the outward or material achievements of the West as having being purchased at the price of an inward or spiritual impoverishment so dire that it is not far from producing a total collapse even on the material level, appearances to the contrary. Neither thinker shares the classical liberal's faith in freedom of thought as inevitably leading to the victory of Truth: the lie may be more attractive. (Nevertheless, one suspects that Voegelin places so much value on free philosophical inquiry that he would accept even catastrophic social consequences in order to preserve this freedom.) Voegelin writes with respect of the pre-philosophical "cosmological" or mythological religious view: the primitive "cosmological empires", such as that of the Mongols, consisted of those who experienced themselves to be in harmony with the cosmos, and understood themselves as representatives of a transcendent cosmic order. One can imagine Schuon sharing such a standpoint.

Nevertheless, these two thinkers are radically opposed to each other. Schuon admits only the decay of the Kali Yuga. Voegelin, by contrast, acknowledges the possibility, though not the inevitability, of genuine progress. This consists not in the evolution of human nature or experience, but in the deepening of self-awareness of that nature or experience. Greek philosophy and Christianity both represented genuine advances in their illumination of human nature. Hence, Voegelin is free of the Western self-hatred that is apparent at an essential level in Schuon. (Christopher Dawson has a similar view of the relationship of Christianity to older pagan religions, which were oriented towards the outer world rather than the inner self.) Voegelin would probably agree with Reinhold Niebuhr's view of progress: new fundamental developments, such as Christianity, bring with them the potential both for unprecedented good and, when they are perverted into heresy, for unprecedented evil. Thus, there are new things under the sun, yet no such thing as the guaranteed progress in which the nineteenth century naively believed. (Voegelin, incidentally, apparently sees the year 1900 as representing a kind of spiritual nadir, with some recovery of genuine thought in the first half of the twentieth century, impelled by the political turmoil of that era. Would he have seen any continuation of this recovery in the late twentieth century? This seems doubtful to me.)