Eric Voegelin (3)

The Christian "vacuum"

As mentioned in the preceding post, Voegelin's reservations regarding Christianity stem largely from its lack of a firm and compelling position on political matters, a "civil theology", which leaves the way open for essentially un-Christian utopian political movements (whether these take a Christian or non-Christian guise). At a more basic level, he believes that Christianity sets up a kind of existential tension. The world as a whole is "de-divinized", as Christian adherents are required to worship a transcendent, invisible God rather than either the more tangible pagan deities formerly attached to natural objects or god-emperors. Christian worship is more difficult than nature-worship and, for a great many Christians, is a matter of accepting the authority of others rather than of personal experience. (This is especially the case, Voegelin suggests, since mystical and scholastic theology were divorced from each other in Western Christianity in the Middle Ages. Perhaps this accounts for some of the interest in Voegelin in Eastern Orthodox circles.) . . . CONTINUE Such Christians are liable to assuage their chronic spiritual hunger with various forms of worldly idolatry, especially if this can be presented as something other than "religion" so that it does not come into open conflict with Christianity. They may also embrace religious gnosticism, which may or may not be regarded as a heresy by the Church. It seems indisputable, for example, that the primitive Church was for a long time convinced that the Second Coming was always just round the corner.

This criticism that Christianity, in its puritanical monotheism, de-divinizes the world, is not limited to ancient pagan writers such as Celsus; V.S. Naipaul, for example, has criticized monotheism's recent effects on traditional pagan cultures in similar terms (with emphasis on the even more rigorously monotheistic Islam). Some contemporary Christian apologists claim that their religion, with its God-made-flesh, is pre-eminently the religion of worldly divinization, and this may be true in principle. In practice, however, Christianity has rarely been interested in the details of subjecting nature to divine law. One might mention here its attitude to sexuality, which it has generally regarded as an unavoidable evil, to be kept rigorously separate from religion, rather than as a field to be transformed in the Divine image. Probably this attitude to worldly idols was necessary when the surrounding culture was actively worshipping them. By now, however, the natural world has become thoroughly deadened for Westerners as a result of centuries of Christian monotheistic rigour followed by more centuries of mechanistic physical science (and now industrialization). The need now would seem to be to revive some sense of the natural world as richly alive, rather than to stop people from worshipping it. The early Christians may have had no choice but to change the pagan gods into demons; it might now be desirable to restore them as subordinate deities, if they had not died out in the meantime. (Voegelin, incidentally, observes that Philo Judaeus attempted to turn Judaism into a pan-Roman religion that would have been a rival to Christianity, by relegating the Roman gods to the status of subrulers under a Jewish "king of kings".)

I wonder if some form of religious, rather than political, "gnosticism" might not be a solution to the problem Voegelin identifies. If nothing else, it might divert people's attention away from political fanaticism. Personal cultivation through such techniques as yoga may be a way of satisfying the need for relatively accessible spiritual or emotional experience which does away with the need for political substitutes such as the Nuremberg rallies. Yoga, specifically, is probably fundamentally inconsistent with Christianity, and ultimately spiritually dangerous, at least for Westerners (or so most orthodox Christian critics claim). On the other hand, a number of Christians who are familiar with the matter seem to be quite comfortable with the possibility of a combination of Taoism and Christianity. (The book Christ the Eternal Tao is said to examine this possibility, though I have not read it as yet.) Taoism is strongly oriented towards the natural world, and so would seem to make up for that gap in Christianity; it also seems, like Christianity, to be suitable for large numbers of practitioners, rather than a small spiritual élite as seems to be the case for yoga in its authentic form (see my Chi Gung post).

None of this would do anything to make good on Christianity's lack of a "civil theology". But this lack is not necessarily a bad thing. Ideally our political beliefs should rest on a foundation of broad classical philosophical and Christian (or "Judeo-Christian") principles, but not be cast into any more rigid, specific form that would leave society unable to adjust to changing conditions. Our current cultural problems result largely from our failure to establish such a foundation for our dominant liberal political practices. (David Walsh's The Growth of the Liberal Soul (1997), influenced by Voegelin, is an attempt to address this problem.)