Eric Voegelin (8)

The state of modern thought

At one point in The Ecumenic Age (pp 265–267), Voegelin denounces Hegel in particular and post-Enlightenment thought in general as "egophanic" distortions of the theophany that once upon a a time gave birth to Western philosophy and religion.

As the fundamental motivation [of modern thinkers], there can be discerned the legitimate discontent with a doctrinaire metaphysics and theology that has cut loose from the originating experiences and an earnest desire to return to the reality experienced. The desire, however, did not reach its goal. The outburst [of egophany] was personally possible, and socially effective, because by the eighteenth century the gulf between symbols and experiences had become so wide that the standards of control by reason and reality were lost. The atrophied dogma, metaphysical and theological, was so badly discredited that it could no longer function as a controlling authority, while the originating experiences, noetic and pneumatic, were so deeply buried under the millennial accretions of doctrine that their recovery proved considerably more difficult than anybody anticipated at the time. As a matter of fact, by now it has taken two centuries of work by historians and philosophers to gain a moderately adequate understanding of Greek philosophical culture as well as of the New Testament period . . . . But a proper regard for [these] extenuating circumstances . . . must not obscure the clear perception of egophanic self-aggrandizement as the motive power behind the grotesque mixture of brilliant speculation and mischievous semantic games, of vast historical knowledge and arbitrary distortions of facts, of profound insight into problems of the spirit and an almost blasphemous misuse of Biblical texts, of serious concern about the disease of the age and the tactics of deceptive manipulation, of perceptive common sense and the dream of accomplishing a salvation of mankind . . .

These "millennial accretions of doctrine" began, in Voegelin's view, with St. Paul's own mistake about an imminent Second Coming, continued with the Church's necessary but unfortunate Christological dogma, and were completed by Hegel's own "egophanic constructions".

The sequence of symbolizations just adumbrated did little, if anything, to dissolve the initial defect, but rather inflated it to monstrous proportions. The result is the grotesque intellectual mess which today has become the principal obstacle to a rational study of history . . . . This many-storied edifice of interpretations, with one derivative symbolism piled on top of the other through almost two thousand years, must be considered beyond repair . . . . It rather has become the philosopher's task to clarify, as far as that is posible, the problem in reality that has been experienced as existentially important enough to inspire the erection of the building in continuity through the millennia, and still inspires our ideological dogmatomachy, however zealotic, doctinaire, aberrant, and dilettantic its efforts may be.

Eric Voegelin (7)