Eric Voegelin (14)

A guarded optimism

In his essay "Immortality: Experience and Symbol" Voegelin sketches what he regards as the decline of the West since the High Middle Ages—when religious doctrine separated from experience—through a series of "ever lower levels of spiritual and intellectual order" punctuated by wars and revolutionary chaos, ending in a contemporary "global madhouse". But he also descries a recent "progress of a sort" in the intellectual sphere, a development which ought to "become a living force, sooner or later, in the actual restoration of order" . . . . CONTINUE