Eric Voegelin (15)

Glenn Hughes on "Eric Voegelin and Christianity"

Voegelin has important things to say about Christianity but they may tend to remain buried among his copious writings. A valuable 2004 Intercollegiate Review article by Glenn Hughes, available here as a pdf file, summarizes Voegelin's assessment of the place of Christianity in the development of human consciousness . . . . CONTINUE

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

Eric Voegelin (13)

Tolstoy and Christian pacifism

(From Enlightenment to Revolution, pp 219–222.) Tolstoy, unlike other revolutionaries of his time, recognized that "the devising of new institutions is no substitute for the metanoia, for the change of heart." Reform requires enlightenment and the arousing of the conscience. Superficially this seems like a Christian attitude; and Tolstoy understood himself as advocating a return to the primitive Christian ethics of the Gospel. Nevertheless, Voegelin rejects this claim to Christianity. For him, Tolstoy is "substantially ... quite as anti-Christian as ... Bakunin"—which is harsh criticism, considering that Voegelin elsewhere characterizes Bakunin's anarchism as "Satanism ... visible".

Voegelin holds that Tolstoy rejects the spiritual substance of Christianity while accepting its ethics. This moralization of Christianity is a trend that has been underway since the Enlightenment; Tolstoy, however, radicalizes and isolates it.

The conception of Christ as a "progressive" moral thinker, the secularization of Christianity and its reduction to a code of ethics, is a general Western movement that has deeply corroded Christian sectarian life. The typical consequences of such despiritualization are to be found in Tolstoi. Christian ethics without Christian love is prone to produce righteousness and critique of the sinner. We have to recall that the Sermon on the Mount is not a code for the life in the "world"; it is addressed to men who live between the worlds in eschatological expectation. In historical existence, entangled in the network of social obligation, man has to pay his debt to nature and is obliged to commit acts in violation of the Sermon. If he is struck on the right cheek, he will not turn his left, but hit back in defense of his life, his family and his community. But in hitting back, he will do good [well?], as a Christian, to remember the Sermon, and to be aware that in defense he is involved in guilt and that the man who struck him may have had quite as excellent "worldly" reasons for the attack as he has for the defense. Both are involved in a common guilt, both are engulfed in the inscrutable mystery of evil in the world, and in their enmity both have to respect in each other the secret of the heart that is known only to God.

This Christian attitude is not the attitude of Tolstoi. He falls into the series of fallacies which a revolutionary of the nineteenth century does not seem able to avoid: (1) the concrete evil in social relations and institutions is not accepted as emanating from the nature of man, to be remedied as far as possible in concrete instances but not to be abolished on principle, (2) the concrete evil is generalized, in a next step, into an abstract evil that attaches to institutions, not to man, and, in a last step, (3) the abstract evil attaching to institutions is attributed as a personal guilt to those men who by biographical circumstance happen to be the bearers of the institutions. In his political tracts Tolstoi points his accusing finger at the evil of governmental institutions and at the men who are responsible for it and he presents the evils so vividly that his accusations could be taken over by the radical, violent anarchist groups for their propaganda-pamphlets inciting to revolt. Tolstoi's admonitions to practice "pardoning love" are in vain in face of the unpardoning, critical content of his writings, and in vain are his assertions that the use of his writings for revolutionary purposes would be like setting a village on fire by means of a gospel-book .... [T]he difference between the gospel-book and Tolstoi's writings is that the gospel-book contains nothing that would justify incendiary action.

His Christianity is in substance an extreme form of enlightened Puritanism. Tolstoi occupies a most conveniently situated island of righteousness: it is close enough to the "world" to hurl his accusations of guilt at it, but far enough from the "world" to deny responsibility for his acts as acts in the "world."

Such strictures also apply to subsequent "passive resisters" such as Gandhi, who, Voegelin believes, brought about a considerable amount of violence through his nonviolent agitation. Gandhi's non-Christian origins make little difference: "Tolstoi could rest his anarchism on the prestige of the Gospel, while Gandhi successfully developed a halo of Eastern saintliness." Both are political actors, not saints.

Eric Voegelin (12)

Liberalism: station on the road of disintegration

From From Enlightenment to Revolution, ed. John H. Hallowell, Duke University Press, 1975 (pp 140, 143–144):

It is impossible to understand the graveness of the Western crisis unless we realize that the cultivation of values beyond [the classical liberal] Littré's formula of civilization as the dominion of man over nature and himself by means of science is considered by broad sectors of Western society to be a kind of mental deficiency.

... [W]e can lay our finger on the principal structural problem of the Western crisis. Its structure is that of a gradual decomposition of civilizational values, consummated historically by repeated upheavals which destroy, or intend to destroy, the social bearers of the condemned values. Between the upheavals we find periods of stabilization at the respective levels of destruction. The attitudes toward this ... crisis may differ. In the case of Comte we see the great intramundane eschatologist ... who anticipates its end, and who 'plans' the new age. On the other side ... the liberal ... is satisfied by the amount of destruction worked up to this point and ... is ready to settle down in the ruins .... He is willing to participate in revolution until civilization is destroyed to the point which corresponds to his own fragmentary personality.

... Since the process of decomposition does not stop, [the liberal] is pressed more and more into a conservative position, until, in our time, the few surviving specimens of the genus are labelled as reactionary .... The liberal Positivist reduces the meaning of humanity to the dominion, by science, over nature and man, and thereby deprives man of his spiritual life and freedom; the dictatorial eschatologist collects the castrates and grafts his own spirit on them. The one plays into the hands of the other ...

Eric Voegelin (11) and (10)

Eric Voegelin (11)

Limits of the moral community
(continued from preceding post)

Another problematic aspect of Voegelin's description is that he writes as though he were ignoring Aquinas's implicit distinction between those who are "actually" members of the corpus mysticum and those—namely, all human beings—who are merely members in "potentiality". Obviously, this distinction creates two unequal moral categories of person: the Christians and the potential Christians, or Christians belonging to unrecognized churches, who are likewise potential converts to one's own church. If one were to regard both categories as equivalent, the Christian sacraments would seem to be pointless. (Also, the missionary orientation of Christian churches to non-Christians would not be regarded as essentially different from the attitude of an inward-looking religion like Zoroastrianism. Voegelin is not acknowledging that the Christian missionary attitude does in fact constitute a recognition that non-Christians are potentially members of the Christian community.) The kind of simplification which Voegelin strikes me as engaging in here is a characterically liberal, universalist one.

Voegelin recognizes that the expansion of the corpus mysticum to include all mankind has been a gradual process in Christian history. What he does not, as far as I know, point out is that this expansion has also been a radical dilution. For example, the earliest Christian church took its rites so seriously that mere candidate Christians, the catechumens, let alone members of the general public, were not permitted to witness the full service. (The Orthodox service still contains an injunction to catechumens to leave at a certain point, although apparently this is now considered to be purely a matter of liturgical form.) The earliest church seems to have been charged with a mysterious Spirit which might do acute physical harm to someone who committed sacrilege by participating in the Eucharist in the wrong frame of mind—as Aquinas still recognized—and which presumably could confer commensurately greater benefits on those who were fitted to participate. The strength of the ties in such a community is perhaps inconceivable to us now. That being the case, it is difficult to see the historical expansion of the Church as an unmixed blessing, or to agree with Voegelin that any drawing-in of the boundaries of the moral community must ipso facto represent a regression.

Surely it would be a mistake, in view of the dilution which has occurred, for each of the various present-day churches to continue to claim that it represented the one true Christian community, the corpus mysticum. Indeed the formally organized churches have probably become largely irrelevant to this community (though some of them may still represent important guiding centres within it). It would seem that what remains of the Christian community has by now expanded to encompass the Western world, as well as parts of the non-Western world: a society of global scale which is still held together by vaguely Christian moral ideas. This moral community now includes Christians, those of other faiths, and those of no faith. Nevertheless, it is not universal. The distinction remains between those who are "actually" members of the community and those who, in refusing to acknowledge its moral precepts, are merely part of the community "in potentiality". The Germans, for example, defected from the Western moral community during the Nazi period. It is a grave mistake to treat all human beings as though they are "actually" community members, imposing no qualifications whatsoever for community membership.

How should one treat those outside the moral community? This seems to me to be a very difficult question. Tentatively I would say that at the most basic level, justice requires that one accord outsiders the same consideration as those outsiders would accord oneself. Beyond this, it seems to be a matter of charity, which cannot be subjected to legalistic prescriptions. Where a political decision is in question, one should also always keep in mind that support for a "charitable" collective action is at the same time support for coercion of any dissenting fellow-voters to participate in the "charity". Such coerced action is not, in fact, charitable.

Ideally, the Golden Rule tells us that we should treat non-members of the community as we would wish to be treated if we found ourselves in their shoes. But it is extraordinarily difficult to put ourselves in the shoes of people of whom we know little, who do not share our basic values, whose reactions to our initiatives are unpredictable.

Eric Voegelin (10)

The limits of the moral community

Voegelin puts considerable stress on the idea of universal membership in the fully-developed Christian community. He points to Thomas Aquinas as setting out this idea, in the form of a Mystical Body of Christ (corpus mysticum) which includes all human beings, of all places and times—even those preceding the Incarnation. Or at least, everyone is potentially a member of the mystical body:

. . . people can be classed as members of the mystical body because of their potentiality, and not merely when they are actually in it.

(Aquinas, "The Grace of Christ", Summa, vol. 49, cited by Voegelin in Hitler and the Germans, p. 202.) The closely related idea of universal human equality is also specifically Christian, Voegelin believes:

Only in terms of this problematic of incarnation, which then had as a consequence the whole problematic of the Trinity and the dogma of the Trinity, is it unequivocally said what man is. That is to say, man is man insofar as he is imago Dei, and insofar as he is imago Dei all men are equal . . . . This is precisely what is characteristic of Christianity, its unique achievement. Every attempt to withdraw from this achievement is a regression . . .

(Hitler and the Germans, pp 204&ndash205). This Christian universalism, Voegelin suggests, has been largely forgotten by Christians since Thomas Aquinas, and in particular by the churches in Germany in the Hitler era. Catholic and other churches have each set themselves up as "the one and only corpus mysticum". Karl Rahner, in 1943, contracted the membership of the church to those Catholics who have received the sacrament. Voegelin claims that this is "the most severe contraction of the membership of the church that it had ever received" (p. 211). With such a contraction, the way is open, Voegelin implies, to the treatment of those outside one's own denomination as subhuman. In one of his first books, Race and State, he also points out that with the decline of Christian allegiance, each major European nation—England, France, Germany—acquired a conception of itself as "the world", surrounded by lesser beings to be feared and hated; this was presumably also a "contraction".

To me Voegelin's discussion of this question in Hitler and the Germans seems somewhat unsatisfactory. In the first place, I think he ignores the case of the Polish Catholics. There was never any question that these were members of the same corpus mysticum as the large number of German Catholics; yet this did not stop the Germans, including the Catholics, from attempting to enslave the Poles on the same basis as other Slavs, and wiping out a large proportion of them in the process. In other words, the theory of the corpus mysticum, given considerable prominence in Hitler and the Germans, was actually more or less irrelevant in Nazi Germany: Christian allegiance had in reality long given way to national allegiance (now intensified into pseudo-racial allegiance by the Nazis)—as Voegelin himself had pointed out in Race and State. In this connection, Voegelin provides the interesting statistic that just seven German Catholics refused military service in Nazi Germany. (Six were executed; one was declared insane and survived.)

(To be continued.)

Eric Voegelin (9)

Eric Voegelin (9)

Hitler and the Germans

For most readers this is probably one of Voegelin's more accessible and interesting books, though he does not seem to have put as great a value on it as on some of his more theoretical work. It is basically a critique of modern German culture, which he sees as to a large extent "radically stupid"—as incapable of correctly perceiving reality—despite the existence of individual sages such as Thomas Mann and a few others Voegelin names, and of the substantial fraction of ordinary German voters who refused to vote for Hitler. Those who refuse to acknowledge the prevalence of this stupidity are forced to conclude that Hitler was either not really all that bad, or else some kind of demon with hypnotic powers.

Such radical stupidity was by no means cured by the German defeat in World War Two, Voegelin finds. It extended and extends (as of the 1960s) through all levels of German society, into the churches and universities as well as the political leadership. Germany has church leaders who are ignorant of basic theology, writers who are oblivious of the existence of the basic literature in their fields, politicians who are morally and intellectually unqualified to lead, let alone to assume the role of "Teacher of the People" as Hitler presumed to. Such stupidity is not confined to Germany; but he regards other countries such as Britain and the United States as suffering less from it, apparently because of their greater experience in self-government and relative freedom from the influence of ideological thinking (which has corrupted German philosophical language into a kind of Newspeak). God knows what he would think of the current state of political, academic and ecclesiastical life in Britain and America.

Voegelin follows Robert Musil (in Precision and Soul) in distinguishing "simple" from "higher" stupidity. Simple stupidity is consistent with "decent middle class" virtues such as loyalty and purity of feeling. These have nothing to do, however, with the higher virtues—the primary Christian virtues of faith, humility, charity and asceticism. (Josef Pieper might put the classical virtue of prudence or wisdom at the top of this latter list.) The middle-class decencies, the virtues of the "good Germans", merely serve to add effectiveness to evil if the higher virtues, which should guide them, are missing or deformed. The German problem is that of

the simple man, who is a decent man as long as the society as a whole is in order but who then goes wild, without knowing what he is doing, when disorder arises somewhere . . .

Since one cannot expect everyone to possess higher virtues, such guidance is properly the role of social élites (I may be interpolating a bit here). But in Germany the élites are riddled with people who lay claim to higher virtues, or at any rate higher knowledge, while actually lacking them. These are the stupid in the higher sense. Professors and bishops, too, can form an ignorant "rabble".

Voegelin recommends Alan Bullock as an intelligent biographer of Hitler (while noting that Bullock was largely unknown in Germany).

An interesting aside: Voegelin, who does not usually talk about natural science, remarks that Darwin derived the idea of the Survival of the Fittest from Herbert Spencer, not the other way around. Darwinianism is a derivative of early English liberalism (p. 144). To refer to "Social Darwinism" is in effect to make the false claim that the political ideology of the Survival of the Fittest is founded on objective scientific knowledge.

Eric Voegelin (8)

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)

Eric Voegelin (7)

Transcendence vs. Christianity

Here is a passage of Voegelin's (from chapter 9 of Plato and Aristotle), comparing Aristotelian "empiricism" unfavourably with Plato's refusal to fall prey to the illusion that the Absolute can be found in the material world:

Curious as it may sound . . . , Plato is the better empiricist; Aristotle, who wants to find form in reality at all cost, can find it only at the price of losing such parts of reality as do not fit the pattern of his evolving form. The [theory of the] polis is a premature generalization from insufficient materials.

Plato is satisfied with transcendent Ideas that are imperfectly manifested on the inferior material plane; this paradoxically makes him a better student of the material world.

It strikes me that while this observation may well be accurate as far as the history of empirical science is concerned, it reflects rather badly on Plato from the point of view of later Christian philosophy. At the core of Christian thought is the idea that the world is created by an omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent God, and therefore in some sense perfect, or as perfect as is possible without logical contradictions. Admittedly, this idea is obscured by the notion of the Fall of man through the abuse of free will. Nevertheless, God created man in the knowledge that this abuse would take place as a consequence, and so even the Fall must ultimately be part of the perfect Divine plan. The world ultimately is an unmarred reflection of the Divine; appearances to the contrary only indicate our own limited consciousness. Plato, on the contrary, saw no reason to believe ours to be "the best of all possible worlds"—or so I gather from Voegelin. Perfection had to be reserved for the transcendent.

This pantheistic idea of a hidden perfection in the world is itself rather dangerous. Voegelin does not talk about this idea (as far as I know); his focus, rather, is the problematic nature of the "gnostic" belief in the coming manifest perfection of the world. Naive pantheism, the refusal to acknowledge the existence of evil, is a distinct heresy which has also become prominent in the last couple of centuries. (The danger of a premature pantheism, notwithstanding the truth of pantheism in an ultimate sense, was a theme of the early-20th-century "Sufi universalist", Hazrat Inayat Khan.)

Eric Voegelin (6)

Eric Voegelin (6)

Was Plato a fascist?

As noted before, Voegelin puts a very high value on individual freedom, and for him it is completely illegitimate to impose an idea of the good on anyone by force. He also loves Plato. This might possibly be why Voegelin refuses to believe that Plato could ever have been an advocate of theocratic tyranny, appearances notwithstanding. One of Plato's imaginary states featured, for example, the Khmer-Rouge-like deportation of the adult population to the countryside in order to create the New Man out of the uncorrupted younger generation; indeed, it is not inconceivable that the Khmer Rouge got this idea from Plato, since several of their leaders are said to have studied at the Sorbonne. At any rate, Voegelin's explanations of how Plato did not mean what he seems to mean strike me as uncharacteristically circular and unconvincing.

I refer, for example, to the opening of chapter 4 in Plato and Aristotle. The program of deportation, Voegelin says, is "ingenious and eminently practical"; unfortunately it obviously "cannot be executed by true philosophers", because "any attempt to realize the order of the idea by violent means would defeat itself. The authority of the spirit is an authority only if, and when, it is accepted in freedom." (Though this seems to disregard the likelihood that the children of the deportees would "freely" accept the Order of the Idea once their corrupting parental influences had been removed.) Therefore, Plato, being the true philosopher par excellence, could not have intended the passage discussing deportation as a "program for political action in the historical environment." But the only internal evidence for this, as opposed to deductions from axioms about true philosophers, is that the passage in question is put in the form of a third-hand report (that is, it is effectively buried within layers of quotation marks). Why, then, did Plato report it at all? The only function of the passage, Voegelin says, is "to show that technically it is not impossible to translate the idea into reality, and to forestall the facile assumption that the Socratic politeia is an impractical daydream. The idea can be realized if the people want to realize it; the philosopher-king is present in their midst, waiting for their consent. Beyond this appeal, however, no attempt either will or can be made to force the consent". I confess to finding this confusing. The Socratic politeia is a practical proposition—but only if a lot of people can be deported to make way for the New Socratic Man. But such an imposition by philosophers would be self-defeating. How, then, is it practical? If, on the other hand, it is a matter of near-universal acceptance of rule by philosophers by the common people (impractical though this may seem), why bring mass deportations into the picture?

Strangely enough, Voegelin himself then goes on very interestingly to provide a reason why Plato might well have been prepared to commit what are now considered to be political atrocities. In short, he might have viewed the ordinary corrupted Athenians of his own decadent time as sub-human. This does not mean that Plato was a monstrous anomaly: it was a natural consequence of the dissolution of society in the pre-Christian era. The dissolution of society into the corrupted mass and a handful of truth-seekers, Voegelin suggests (p. 141),

engenders a tension of such sharpness that the common bond of humanity between the lost souls and the manic souls is almost broken. The difference between the souls tends to become a generic difference between a lower type of human [being], close to animals, and a higher type of semi-divine rank. This divinization, which seems absurd in the realm of Christian experience, is inherent in the logic of the myth of nature. If the particle of substance which animates a particular human individual happens to be of high quality, there is no objection to recognizing its semi-divine character. The obstacle to such recognition which in the Christian orbit stems from the experience of creaturely equality before a transcendent God, does not exist in the Platonic experience.

If nothing else, this ought to be a useful reminder of what we owe to Christianity.

Eric Voegelin (5)

The course of social and political corruption

Two excerpts. The first is from World of the Polis, p. 363:

. . . When the corrosion of reason has reached a certain degree in depth and has befallen a sufficiently large proportion of the people, effective leadership in terms of reason becomes difficult and perhaps impossible, even if the man at the head under more favorable conditions could exert such leadership; in a further degree of corrosion a man of such qualities will, precisely because he possesses them, find it impossible to reach the position of leadership; and in a final degree the society by its corruption may prevent the formation of a man of such qualities even if by nature he should not be lacking in such gifts.

The second, from Plato and Aristotle, p. 57, refers to the older generation in a rapidly decaying society, who are sympathetic figures because of their genuine virtues, yet also slightly contemptible because they practiced those virtues out of the force of habit or tradition rather than any love of wisdom. When tradition breaks down, they are unable to muster any arguments (or other forces) in its defence.

. . . And in a crisis they have nothing to offer to the younger generation which is already exposed to more corruptive influences . . . . For the men of [their] type are the cause of the sudden vacuum that appears in a critical period with the break of generations. All of a sudden it appears that the older generation has neglected to build the substance of order in the younger men, and an amiable lukewarmness and confusion shifts within a few years into the horrors of social catastrophe.

With regard to the first quotation, it is important to note, however, that Voegelin sees corruption not only as a social phenomenon that infects politics, but also (or even primarily) as something with political sources. In the case of Athens, Voegelin says, a fatal but inevitable decision was made to hold on to her empire by force after winning the Persian war had catapulted the city to wealth and Greek leadership. The alternative, a return to Athens' previous modest peasant existence, would have been politically unthinkable. "The process, spreading from the public to the private sphere, begins with habituation to unjust action in the affairs of state and ends with the dissolution of honesty, loyalty and shame in personal relations" (World of the Polis, p. 362).

Eric Voegelin (4)

Eric Voegelin (4)

The World of the Polis

Voegelin's multivolume Order and History seems to be an effort to write a universal history at the deepest possible level, the level of the history of the development of human self-consciousness. This attempt can be likened to the Catholic historian Christopher Dawson's works, in which history is built up around the influence of ideas more than of material factors. Like Dawson, Voegelin puts the "Great Books" in their historical contexts, which have evidently not been adequately appreciated in the past, and so apparently manages to deepen our understanding of these works in a rather dramatic way. The two authors are probably somewhat complementary, since Dawson (without neglecting philosophy) emphasizes Christianity and the key importance of the "Dark Age" of Western culture, during which Christian influences were acting as a ferment, while Voegelin (without neglecting Christianity, or denying that it constituted an advance in consciousness) concentrates more on the role of ancient Greek philosophy. . . . CONTINUE

Voegelin calls upon the evidence of both artistic and philosophical works, as well as of more conventional historical sources, to which the historian may restrict himself only if he assumes that human consciousness is unchanging. One important result of this kind of investigation is that it becomes apparent that there can be abrupt losses of the ability of cultures to grasp profound truths. One generation's greatest writer can become essentially incomprehensible to even the leading minds of the next generation. This occurred, Voegelin claims, in the generation after the great Greek tragedian Aeschylus, whose leading representative Herodotus was already unable to fully grasp Homer. Voegelin saw his own generation, that of the first half of the twentieth century, as recovering some of the wisdom lost by the shallow materialists of the nineteenth century, but I think that he would now perceive a similar process of cultural impoverishment at work in the West. The good news about this is that history demonstrates that such declines can be unexpectedly reversed. Plato and Aristotle, for example, succeeded in recovering wisdom that seemed to have disappeared from the Greek world.

The World of the Polis is the second volume in this work, and deals with Greek culture up to the appearance of these great philosophers (who are the subject of the subsequent volume). Unlike in much of Voegelin's work, the style is quite readable. Nevertheless I did not become really engaged with it until the chapter on the sophists. These itinerant teachers have had a justifiably bad reputation ever since Plato's condemnations of them, but at the same time, Voegelin points out, they were essential to the education of Athens, which had been a backwater within Greece until her victory in the Persian War; and some of the ideas credited to Plato actually derive from sophist sources.

Here is Voegelin finding a parallel between the age of the sophists and the modern Enlightenment (p. 275):

[Gorgias's] essay On Being is a priceless document because it has preserved one of the earliest, if not the very first, instance of the perennial type of enlightened philosophizing. The thinker operates on symbols that have been developed by mystic-philosophers for the expression of experiences of transcendence. He proceeds by ignoring the experiential basis, separates the symbols from this basis as if they had a meaning independent of the experience which they express, and with brilliant logic shows, what every philosopher knows, that they will lead to contradictions if they are misunderstood as propositions about objects in world-immanent experience . . . .

If we assume [this] tract to be representative of the sophistic attitude . . . and if, furthermore, we define enlightenment by the type of philosophizing just characterized, we can arrive at some clearness with regard to the question whether the sophistic age can justly be labelled an age of enlightenment. We may say that the age indeed has a streak of enlightenment in so far as its representative thinkers show the same kind of insensitiveness toward experiences of transcendence that was characteristic of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century A.D., and in so far as this insensitiveness has the same result of destroying philosophy—for philosophy by definition has its center in the experiences of transcendence.

(Frithjof Schuon would probably agree with Voegelin here.)

See also: Eric Voegelin (3).

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.)

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.

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.)