Eric Voegelin (2)

Voegelin and Christianity

(As in the preceding post, these impressions are gleaned mostly from Voegelin's The New Science of Politics along with Michael Federici's overview, Eric Voegelin: The Restoration of Order.)

Any fundamental examination of Christianity from a more or less conservative point of view may be of key importance, because on a conservative's attitude toward Christianity can hinge the difference between, for example, a pathological ideology such as Nazism, with its attempt to replace Christianity by aggressive neo-paganism; Burkean conservatism, with its tolerance of different religious forms; and Catholic traditionalism, which would be relatively intolerant but at the same time presumably restrained by its own Natural Law in the methods by which it suppressed rival belief-systems, . . . CONTINUE provided at least that these did not constitute an existential threat to Catholic traditionalism. (Incidentally, many conservatives regard Nazism as essentially a left-wing phenomenon, but it seems more accurate to call it a mixture of leftist and conservative elements—a matter which I will not go into here.)

Voegelin, who seems to have been more of a Platonist philosopher than a Christian in the traditional sense, had a highly nuanced and personal view of the historic role of Christianity, seeing it both as an advance in man's consciousness of fundamental importance and as the carrier of tendencies towards fanatical political millenarianism. These two aspects stem from two apparently separate ideas introduced by Christianity into the Roman world (though both originated in Judaism). On the one hand, Christianity was the religion of "condescending grace"—of God's extension of Himself in friendship toward man. The Platonic-Aristotelian God, by contrast, had been remote, impersonal, indifferent to how His Creation was playing out, and could never have been in a relationship of friendship (which for Aristotle presupposed equality) with anyone.

The experience of mutuality in the relation with God, . . . of the grace which imposes a supernatural form on the nature of man, is the specific difference of Christian truth. (New Science of Politics, p. 78.)

This, for Voegelin, is Christianity in the true sense. But from the outset, Christianity also signified a second novel belief, that the Kingdom would come on Earth as well as in Heaven. The truth according to Voegelin is that fulfillment lies beyond nature, not in history, as some Christians, such as St. Augustine (who had to come to terms with an obviously collapsing Empire) recognized. But both St. Paul and the author of the book of Revelations confused the heavenly and earthly Kingdoms, thereby "immanentizing the eschaton", in what has become the best-known sample of Voegelin's personal terminology.

Such an immanentist hypostasis of the eschaton, however, is a theoretical fallacy. Things are not things, nor do they have essences, by arbitary declaration. The course of history as a whole is no object of experience; history has no eidos [visible form?], because the course of history extends into the unknown future . . . . The meaning of history, thus, is an illusion; and this illusionary eidos is created by treating a symbol of faith as if it were a proposition concerning an object of immanent experience. (New Science of Politics, p. 120.)

As far as I am aware, Voegelin is the first writer to combine a respect for Christianity, as an advance in human consciousness, with some agreement with those pagan Romans who blamed it for diverting Roman energies away from the preservation of the Empire. At least in its primitive form, Christianity is purely other-worldly in orientation, while at the same time it has insisted on the destruction of the more worldly paganism which it replaced. It leaves a dangerous vacuum, then, in the area of "civil theology": a vacuum which tends to be repeatedly filled by millenarian (or "gnostic") political movements. Voegelin argues convincingly that this tendency has persisted in post-Christian culture, in the form of various secular millenarian "isms" which are even more vicious than their Christian heretical forerunners. It will not be enough to defeat any of these movements on a political level, because in the vacuum left behind by Christianity new gnostic movements will always be springing into existence. Nothing short of a transformation of consciousness, to be achieved through the recovery of genuine philosophical experience, will do.

Some Christians will take offense at Voegelin's denial of any (knowable) meaning in history as a flat rejection of Christian revelation, though there are actually a number of modern Christian writers on the philosophy of history who hold a similar view. And it does seem difficult to reconcile Voegelin's assertion with the orthodox Christian belief in an omniscient God beyond time and space (see my post on Boethius): if God knows the future, who is Voegelin to decree that God will never reveal parts of it, or even its overall pattern, to prophets? Voegelin is also willing to attack the Prophet Isaiah for advocating a reliance on the help of God in place of prudent political decisionmaking. Here too he seems to be on dangerous ground: Jesus himself said that faith could move mountains; the Lord's prayer also asks for God's will to be done "on Earth, as it is in Heaven". Judging by his actions during his lifetime, Jesus, unlike Isaiah, was not referring to meddling in political events. But is the dividing line between actions in the political and spiritual spheres always clear? Is the Christian God really completely indifferent over worldly, political matters—considering, for example, how a certain level of civil peace is indispensable if people are to pursue the life of the spirit? Isn't such a God starting to sound more like the Aristotelian Prime Mover which Voegelin supposedly rejects?

The two Christian innovations, the personalization of the One God and the belief that worldly events are part of a Divine historical scheme, actually seem to be two sides of the same coin. Once one accepts that God extends grace to human beings living in the world, it is difficult to deny that this affects all worldly affairs. Evidently it is true that Christianity and post-Christian culture are subject to recurrent bouts of millenarianism. But such millenarianism is a more subtle distortion of "true" Christianity (and hence even more difficult to avoid) than Voegelin realizes. It is the kind of distortion that results because people are too impatient to wait for the working-out of the genuine Divine historical plan, so that they habitually assume that the plan is going to be fulfilled more quickly than it actually is. People invariably put too much value on their own small segment of history. Whenever some crisis arises, little though it is likely to matter in the grand historical scheme, Christian or post-Christian millenarianists appear on the scene, preaching that the end of the world is (figuratively or literally) at hand. As Voegelin observes, such preaching is typically aimed at the masses, who cannot be expected to have much historical perspective. Moreover, historical perspective may not be of much comfort when one's entire civilization, the vessel of everything one holds dear in the world, may be collapsing. Here, for practical purposes, it might indeed be preferable to regard one's God as working outside history, in some extramundane realm.