Politics, Order and History: Essays on the Work of Eric Voegelin [1 ed.] 9780567347381, 9781841271590

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POLITICS, ORDER AND HISTORY

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POLITICS, ORDER AND

HISTORY ESSAYS ON THE WORK

OF ERIC VOEGEUN

Edited by

Glenn Hughes, Stephen A. McKnight and Geoffrey L. Price

^Sheffield Academic Press www.SheffieldAcademicPress.com

Copyright © 2001 Sheffield Academic Press Published by Sheffield Academic Press Ltd Mansion House 19KingfieldRoad Sheffield SI 1 9AS England www.SheffieldAcademicPress.com

Typeset by Sheffield Academic Press and Printed on acid-free paper in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 1-84127-159-4

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Notes on Editors and Contributors

9 11

Introduction Stephen A. McKnight

17

Parti

DIE POLITISCHEN RELIGIONEN Voegelin's Political Religions in the Contemporary Political Order Peter J. Opitz

48

The Experience of Limitation: Political Form and Science of Law in the Early Writings of Eric Voegelin Sandro Chignola

61

National Socialism as Political Religion and Apocalyptic Worldview Klaus Vondung

85

The Religious Dimension in the Works of Dietrich Eckart, Joseph Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg and Adolf Hitler Claus-Ekkehard Barsch

104

Political Reality and the Life-World: The Correspondence Between Eric Voegelin and Alfred Schiitz, 1938-59 Gilbert Weiss

125

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Part II

POLITICAL RELIGIONS IN A SECULAR AGE

The Cold War, the Decline of the West and the Purpose of 'Containment': The Political Philosophy of George F. Kennan Stefan Rossbach Recovery From Metastatic Consciousness: Voegelin and Jeremiah Geoffrey L. Price Quebec Nationalism and Canadian Politics in Light of Voegelin's Political Religions Barry Cooper Axial Age Sectarianism and the Antinomies of Modernity S.N. Eisenstadt Order and History as a Response to the Theoretical and Methodological Problems Confronting Historians in the Twentieth Century Stephen A. McKnight

144

185

208

233

259

Part III

ORDER AND HISTORY. THEMES AND VARIATIONS Revisiting Voegelin's Israel and Revelation after Twenty-five Years Bernhard W. Anderson

284

Voegelin's Israel and Revelation: Some Observations Moshe Idel

299

The Significance of Plato's Timaew and Critias in Eric Voegelin's Philosophy Zdravko Planinc 'Voegelin Not Mysterious': A Response to Zdravko Planinc's 'The Significance of Plato's Timaetis and Critias in Eric Voegelin's Philosophy' Terry Barker and Lawrence Schmidt

327

376

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CONTENTS

Eric Voegelin and the Essence of the Problem: The Question of Divine-Human Attunement in Plato's Symposium M.W. Sinnett

410

'The Gospel Movement': Pulls and Counterpulls in Voegelin's Interpretation of Christ and Christianity William M. Thompson

440

Eric Voegelin and the New Testament: Developments, Problems and Challenges Michael P. Morrissey

462

Part IV

VOEGELIN'S IMPLICIT' THEORY OF LITERARY AND MODERN CULTURAL CRITICISM Eric Voegelin and Literary Theory Eugene Webb

502

Tragedy and the Polis in Eric Voegelin's Order and History Jack E. Trotter

516

Milton's Chaos and the Experience of the Apeiron Robert A. Watson

545

Voegelin and the Study of Literature: Restoring Sense to Senseless Sounds James Babin

576

Bibliography Index

608 628

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Publication of this book was supported by a grant from the Centre for Voegelin Studies, University of Manchester. The following bodies generously supported the Second International Conference on the Work of Eric Voegelin, 'Order and History', at the University of Manchester, 3-6 July 1997, from which these essays for the most part derive: the British Academy (Humanities Research Board); the Earhart Foundation; UNESCO (Conseil International de la Philosophic et des Sciences Humaines); and the Research Support Fund, University of Manchester. In addition, the Goethe Institute, Manchester, both supported the conference and assisted in planning the first day's session on 'Political Religions'. A number of chapters in this book have previously appeared elsewhere. Bernhard W. Anderson's essay, 'Revisiting Voegelin's Israel and Revelation after Twenty-Five Years', also appeared in William M. Thompson and David L. Morse (eds.), Voegelin's Israel and Revelation: An Interdisciplinary Debate and Anthology (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2000), and is reprinted here by arrangement with the author and Marquette University Press. James Babin's 'Voegelin and the Study of Literature: Restoring Sense to Senseless Sounds' appeared in an earlier version as 'Eric Voegelin's Recovery of the Remembering Story' in The Southern Review 34 (1998), and is reprinted with the kind permission of the author and The Southern Review. Peter J. Opitz's 'Voegelin's Political Religions in the Contemporary Political Order', which first appeared as the 'Nachwort' in Eric Voegelin, Diepolitischen Religionen (ed. Peter J. Opitz; Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 3rd edn, 1993), is reprinted here in English translation by arrangement with the author and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. A revised version of Stefan Rossbach's 'The Cold War, the Decline of the West and the Purpose of "Containment": The Political Philosophy of George F. Kennan' appeared as a chapter in his book Gnostic Wars: The Cold War in the Context of a History of Western Spirituality (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), and it appears here courtesy of the author and Edinburgh University Press. Klaus Vondung's essay, 'National Socialism as

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Political Religion and Apocalyptic Wo rid-View', appeared originally as an article entitled 'Die Apokalypse des Nationalsozialismus' in Michael Ley and Julius H. Schoeps (eds.), Der Nationalsozialismus alspolitische Religion (Bodenheim: Philo, 1997); this extended version of the essay in English translation is printed here by permission of Philo Verlagsgesellschaft and the author. Stephen A. McKnight's essay,''Order and Historyas a Response to the Theoretical and Methodological Problems Confronting Historians in the Twentieth Century', has been adapted from his article 'The Ecumenic Age and the Issues Facing Historians in the Twentieth Century', which appeared in The Political Science Reviewer 27 (1998); it appears here with the permission of The Political Science Reviewer and the author. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Earhart Foundation for a grant that enabled Stephen A. McKnight to prepare his essay and the Introduction here included. Work for S.N. Eisenstadt's essay, 'Axial Age Sectarianism and the Antinomies of Modernity', was supported by grants from the Israel Science Foundation and from the Chiang-Ching-Kuo Foundation. The co-editors are grateful to Dr Francesca Murphy for translating Sandro Chignola's essay, 'The Experience of Limitation: Political Form and Science of Law in the Early Writings of Eric Voegelin'. We wish to express our gratitude to Paul Caringella and the Voegelin Literary Trust for permission to quote from unpublished correspondence and manuscripts in the Voegelin Archive at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Generous permission to use lengthy quotations from the following works of Eric Voegelin has been granted by the University of Missouri Press: Anamnesis (ed. and trans. Gerhart Niemeyer); Order and History, I. Israel and Revelation^ II. The World of the Polis, III. Plato and Aristotle, IV. The Ecumenic Age, V. In Search of Order, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. XII. Published Essays, 1966-1985, and XXVIII. What Is History? And Other Late Unpublished Writings. Finally, the co-editors wish to express their gratitude to William Petropulos for his gracious and careful assistance with matters of translation; to Dr Thomas Bolin of the Theology Department at St Mary's University, San Antonio, for his generous and expert assistance with Hebrew linguistic and textual questions; to Fr Conrad Kaczkowski, Chair of the Philosophy Department at St Mary's University, San Antonio, for administrative support; and to the contributors to this volume, who have so generously laboured in its development and so patiently awaited its completion.

NOTES ON EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

Bernhard W. Anderson is Professor of Old Testament Theology Emeritus at Princeton Theological Seminary. He is the author of many books, including The Living World of the Old Testament (1958), The Beginning of History: Genesis (1963), The Eighth Century Prophets: Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah (1979), Creation in the Old Testament (1984), Understanding the Old Testament (1986), The Unfolding Drama of the Bible (1989) and, most recently, The Contours of Old Testament Theology (1999). James Babin is Associate Professor of English at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. He is the co-editor (with Robert Anthony Pascal and John William Corrington) of Voegelin's The Nature of the Law and Related Legal Writings, volume 27 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, and is the author of articles on Melville and other topics in American literature. He is currently writing a book of essays on the American experience as expressed in American literature from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Terry Barker is currently teaching at H umber College of Applied Arts and Technology in Toronto. His book After Acorn: Meditations on the Message of Canada's People's Poet (1999) analyzes the work of the Canadian poet Milton Acorn through application of the thought of George Grant, Eric Voegelin and C.S. Lewis. He is presently at work on a manuscript entitled 'Richard Hooker's Classic and Christian Response to Puritan Gnosticism: Eric Voegelin Revisited'. Claus-Ekkehard Barsch is Professor of Political Science at the University of Duisburg, where he is Chairman of the Institutfur Religionspolitologie and Vice Chairman of the Institutfur deutsch-jiidische Geschichte. His publications include Der Staatsbegriff in der neueren deutschen Staatslehre (1974), Die Gleichheit der Ungleichen (1977), and Die politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus (1998). His research interests focus on the connection between religion and politics.

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Sandro Chignola is a member of the editorial staff of the journal Filosofia politico, and of the Centro di ricerca sul lessico politico europeo, and an associate correspondent of the Eric-Voegelin-Archiv in Munich. He is the author of Pratica del limite: Saggio sulla filosofia politica di Eric Voegelin (1998), and the editor of La politica: dai simboli alle esperienze. 1. Le religioni politiche. 2. Riflessioni autobiografiche (1993), translations of Voegelin's Political Religions and Autobiographical Reflections. Barry Cooper, FRSC, is Professor of Political Science at the University of Calgary in Canada. He has written several books on contemporary French and German political thinkers as well as on contemporary Canadian politics, the significance of technology as a political regime, and on television news. He co-edited the Voegelin-Strauss correspondence and two volumes of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. His most recent book is Eric Voegelin and the Foundations of Modern Political Science (1999). S.N. Eisenstadt is Rose Isaacs Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the recipient of many awards, including the International Balzan Prize in Sociology and the Max Planck Research Award, and the author, editor or co-editor of many works. His books include The Political Systems of Empires (1963), Tradition, Change and Modernity (1976), European Civilization in a Comparative Perspective (1987), and Paradoxes of Democracy: Fragility, Continuity and Change (1999). Glenn Hughes is Associate Professor of Philosophy at St Mary's University in San Antonio, Texas. He is the author of Mystery and Myth in the Philosophy of Eric Voegelin (1993), and the editor of The Politics of the Soul: Eric Voegelin on Religious Experience (1999). He has published numerous articles on Voegelin's thought as well as on that of the philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan, with a frequent focus on the theme of transcendence. Moshe Idel is Max Cooper Professor of Jewish Thought in the Department of Jewish Thought at Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He has served as visiting professor at Yale, Harvard, Princeton, UCLA and the University of Pennsylvania. The author of many works, his major books include Kabbalah: New Perspectives (1988), Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid (1990), Hasidism: Between Ecstasy and Magic (1995) and Messianic Mystics (1998).

NOTES ON EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

13

Stephen A. McKnight is Professor of European Intellectual and Cultural History at the University of Florida. He is the editor of Eric Voegelin 's Search for Order in History (1978) and the co-editor (with Geoffrey L. Price) of International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Eric Voegelin (1997). His other publications include Science, Pseudo-Science and Utopianism in Early Modern Thought (1992), and Sacralizing the Secular: The Renaissance Origins of Modernity (1989). Michael P. Morrissey, formerly Assistant Professor of Theology at the University of St Thomas in St Paul, Minnesota, is presently Research Consultant for the Institute of Reading Development in Novato, California. He is the author of Consciousness and Transcendence: The Theology of Eric Voegelin (1994) and various articles focusing especially on the theological ramifications of Voegelin's work. Peter J. Opitz is Professor of Political Science at the Geschwister-SchollInstitut for Political Science at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitdt of Munich, and has been a member of the Governing Board of the Geschwister-Scholl-Institut since 1976. The author and editor of many books, he is the Director of the Eric-Voegelin-Archiv at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitdt and the co-editor (with Dietmar Herz) of the series of Occasional Papers published by the Eric-Voegelin-Archiv. Zdravko Planinc is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at McMaster University in Canada. He has published Plato's Political Philosophy: Prudence in the Republic and the Laws (1991), and articles in journals such as The Political Science Reviewer, History of Political Thought, Dionysius, Voegelin Research News, and Hamlet Studies. His current research interests include the relation of Homer and Plato, Shakespeare's political philosophy, and Nietzsche's critique of modernity. Geoffrey L. Price was formerly Senior Lecturer in the Department of Religions and Theology at the University of Manchester, where he founded and for many years served as the Director of the Centre for Voegelin Studies. He is the co-editor (with Stephen A. McKnight) of International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Eric Voegelin (1997), and the author of Eric Voegelin: A Classified Bibliography (Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library, 1994) and Eric Voegelin: International Bibliography 19222000(2000, in press).

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Stefan Rossbach received his doctorate from the European University Institute, Florence, and is now Lecturer in Political Theory and Methodology in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent at Canterbury. His research focuses on the spiritual dimension of politics and political philosophy. Recent publications include Gnostic Wars: The Cold War in the Context of a History of Western Spirituality (1999). Lawrence Schmidt is Associate Chair in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. His articles include 'Simone Weil on Religion: A Voegelinian Critique', in Cahiers Simone Weil (1992), and 'George Grant on Simone Weil: The Saint and the Thinker' in A. Davis (ed.), George Grant and the Subversion of Modernity: Art, Philosophy, Politics, Religion and Education (1996). His recent research has focused on technology and ethics in the works of George Grant, Simone Weil and Eric Voegelin. M.W. Sinnett is ordained as Minister of Word and Sacrament of the Presbyterian Church (USA), currently serving the Clemmons Presbyterian Church of Clemmons, North Carolina. His essays have appeared in such journals as Review of Austrian Economics, Religious Studies and the Scottish Journal of Philosophy. His first book, Restoring the Conversation: Socratic Dialectic in the Authorship ofSoren Kierkegaard, is forthcoming from the Scottish Academic Press. William M. Thompson is Professor of Systematic Theology at Duquesne University. He is the co-editor (with John Kirby) of Voegelin and the Theologian: Ten Studies in Interpretation (1983), the co-editor (with David L. Morse) of History of Political Ideas. IV. Renaissance and Reformation in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, and most recently the co-editor (with David L. Morse) of Voegelin's Israel and Revelation: An Interdisciplinary Debate and Anthology (2000). Jack E. Trotter is Assistant Professor in the English Department of Trident College in Charleston, South Carolina. His publications include essays on Shakespeare's Richard IIIand Anthony Trollope's The American Senator. Presently he is preparing for publication a revised version of his doctoral dissertation for Vanderbilt University, 'Another Voyage: The Drama of Gnostic Modernity in Shakespeare, Marlowe and Webster', as well as developing a series of essays on sacrificial ritual in tragic drama.

NOTES ON EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

15

Klaus Vondung is Professor of German Literature and Director of the Graduate School for Literature and Communication at the University of Siegen. He is the editor of Race and State and The History of the Race Idea from Ray to Cams, volumes 2 and 3 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, and the author of, among other works, Magie und Manipulation: Ideologischer Kult undpolitische Religion des Nationalsozialismus (1971) and Die Apokalypse in Deutschland (1988). Robert A. Watson received his doctorate in Comparative Literature from Stanford University, specializing in mediaeval English, Italian and Latin literature. He subsequently served as a faculty member of the Yale University English Department, and in 1998 published Philosophical Chaucer, a study of Chaucer's poems in light of the influence of Cicero (and Cicero's Platonism) on Chaucer's narrative art. He is presently working on studies concerning heraldic symbolism, and changing conceptions of the epic genre. Eugene Webb is currently Professor of Comparative Religion and Comparative Literature and Associate Director of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is author of six books including The Dark Dove: The Sacred and Secular in Modern Literature (1975), Eric Voegelin: Philosopher of History (1981), and Philosophers of Consciousness: Polanyi, Lonergany Voegelin, Ricoeur, Girard, Kierkegaard (1988). Gilbert Weiss is Research Associate at the Research Center: Discourse, Politics, Identity at the University of Vienna. He is the author of Theoriey Relevanz und Wahrheit: Zum Briefiuechsel zwischen Eric Voegelin und Alfred Schutz, one in the series of Occasional Papers published by the EricVoegelin-Archiv at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitdt of Munich, and is also editor of the American edition of Voegelin's The Authoritarian State, volume 4 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin.

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INTRODUCTION Stephen A. McKnight

This collection of essays explores the development of Eric Voegelin's distinctive approach to politics and history from its early formulation in the 1930s to its culmination in the 1980s. The essays are grouped into four parts, which are organized along both chronological and thematic lines. The first part offers a detailed analysis of Diepolitischen Religionen (1938). Until recently, this early work was not readily accessible and, consequently, has not received the careful scrutiny it deserves. Now, however, it is available both in a standard German edition and in English translation. Essays in this section situate the development of Voegelin's concept of political religions within the immediate political circumstance of National Socialism as well as within the prevailing theoretical and methodological trends of the 1920s and 1930s. The second set of essays builds upon the analysis provided in the first section by demonstrating the value of concepts and methods introduced in Die politischen Religionen for understanding recent political and historical developments. Essays in this section examine the merits of Voegelin's critique of apocalyptic and gnostic elements of modern spiritual and political disorder. The third group of essays moves the focus of attention from pivotal developments in Voegelin's early work to an examination of Voegelin's magnum opus, Order and History. Essays in this section assess Voegelin's contribution to biblical and classical studies and analyze the theoretical and methodological developments which Voegelin's work undergoes from the History of Ideas project to the first three volumes of Order and History and, finally, to the crucial period from 1958-74 when Voegelin was making major theoretical and methodological revisions, which substantially altered the subjects treated in volumes 4 and 5. The fourth set of essays provides an extended discussion and analysis of a relatively recent development in Voegelinian scholarship: the application of Voegelin's theory of symbolization and his philosophy of history to literary and cultural criticism. Essays in this part discuss Voegelin's 'implicit' theory of literature, demonstrate Voegelin's use of literary sources in his analysis of both

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classical and modern culture and compare Voegelin's approach to recent trends in cultural criticism. Having identified the four main areas of investigation, let me explain how the individual essays contribute to the analysis offered in each part. Part I: Die politischen Religionen The focus of this section is on Voegelin's concept of political religions. The first essay, taken from Peter J. Opitz's introduction to the new (1993) German edition of Voegelin's Die politischen Religionen, begins with a question that all the essays in this section seek to address. As Opitz asks: 'Is it possible to commence a reconstruction of Voegelinian thought from this short essay, which appeared more than half a century ago—especially since the author himself did not assign the essay a prominent position among his works, and did not retain the concept of political religions in his subsequent work?' Opitz's response is that this work merits careful consideration because it was written during the time when the great ideological mass movements of the twentieth century were in full force; and Die politischen Religionen, like Voegelin's work as a whole, is first and foremost an effort to understand the origins and vitality of these movements. Die politischen Religionen is also valuable because it sets out Voegelin's criticism of the functionalist, positivistic approach to political science, and introduces seminal elements of Voegelin's highly original and distinctive contribution to twentieth-century political theory. The second essay in this section is by Sandro Chignola, who provides a detailed analysis of the pragmatic political circumstances and the theoretical and methodological assumptions of political science in the 1920s and 1930s. Chignola's essay situates Die politischen Religionen around the specific topics and issues which set Voegelin at odds with his mentor Hans Kelsen, as well as with two of the most prominent political theorists of the day, Carl Schmitt and Max Weber. Chignola then develops the circumstances that forced Voegelin to abandon the 'science of law' and to move toward a more philosophical/historical interpretation of political symbols. This theoretical and methodological transition, which begins with Die politischen Religionen, Chignola maintains, sets Voegelin in the direction of an original philosophy of consciousness centred on the experience of order and the process of symbolization of history, which finds its fullest expression in Order and History. The third essay, by Klaus Vondung, demonstrates that Voegelin's Die

McKnight INTRODUCTION

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politischen Religionen treated National Socialism as a prototypical manifestation of a form of political religion which envisioned an apocalyptic purge of the filth and evil of the world by the agents of purity and light. In Die politischen Religionen, Voegelin maintained that there is a core human religious experience that can be expressed in two forms: in transcendent religions like Judaism and Christianity, and in 'earthly' religions in which a mundane entity is elevated to the status of the realissimum. After establishing the core elements of National Socialist political religion, Vondung contrasts the Judaeo-Christian and the Nazi apocalypses. In the JudaeoChristian apocalypses, the agent of the liberation from evil oppression is God, and the state of perfection longed for is to be found in a heavenly Jerusalem. In the Nazi apocalypse it is not God who intervenes to implement world judgment; rather, the task of accomplishing salvation is accorded to the Volk, the earthly embodiment of the true, everlasting community. Consequently, the longed-for state of perfection is not presented as a heavenly Jerusalem but as an earthly salvation through the state, led by its political messiah. Vondung then offers textual evidence to confirm that apocalyptic transmutation was at the core of National Socialism, citing the writings of Hitler and Goebbels. Particularly significant is Vondung's argument that this immanentized apocalyptic vision is a key to understanding the vilification of the Jews that leads to blood purification and ultimately to the Holocaust. The fourth essay, by Claus-Ekkehard Barsch, continues the analysis of National Socialism as political religion. Barsch provides a detailed reading of key texts that helped to shape National Socialism, beginning with the poet Dietrich Eckart (1865-1923) and moving to the writings of Goebbels, Himmler and Goering. Barsch's analysis expands the discussion initiated by Vondung of the apocalyptic symbols of the Third Reich: the Volk as the chosen race, Hitler as messiah, and the Jews as the source of satanic evil. The fifth and final essay in this section, by Gilbert Weiss, examines the theoretical and methodological issues occupying Voegelin's attention during the period between 1938 and 1959, the period between the publication of Die politischen Religionen and the early volumes of Order and History. Rather than relying on a cursory overview of Voegelin's numerous publications during this time, Weiss focuses his analysis on Voegelin's correspondence with his friend, the eminent philosopher/phenomenologist Alfred Schiitz. Weiss gives particular attention to their discussions of Husserl's phenomenology and how Voegelin attempted to move beyond the

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impasse he felt marred Husserl's work. Weiss demonstrates that the correspondence provides valuable insight into the period in which Voegelin was setting aside his planned six-volume history of political ideas and was beginning work on the brief book, The New Science of Politics (1952), and was about to launch the much larger project, Order and History. Through the correspondence, Weiss is able to show how key issues kept recurring and how Voegelin attempted to develop a theoretical framework adequate to handle the growing body of empirical data. Part II: Political Religions in a Secular Age This section builds upon the analysis in the preceding section by examining the validity of key concepts introduced in Die politischen Religionen for analyzing current issues in philosophy, political science and history. The first essay, by Stefan Rossbach, examines the questions and issues that Voegelin was attempting to address which led him to employ the term 'gnosticism' to describe certain varieties of modern political disorder. According to Rossbach, Voegelin applied the term 'gnosticism' to political ideologies that stubbornly refused to recognize human frailty and limitation and proposed to transform the human condition through human agency guided by human knowledge. Rossbach then presents his argument that the phenomena that Voegelin identified as characteristic of political movements in the first half of the century apply equally well to the Cold War and its continuing consequences. Rossbach's analysis shows that the USSR is another example of the kind of totalitarian regimes analyzed by Voegelin. Like other political religions, communism transforms the state into the ultimate source of meaning and purpose and sees itself as the agent of historical progress. Also, like the apocalyptic political religions analyzed by Vondung, the USSR reduced the complexities of international relations and world history into a battle between the powers of darkness and light. The most original element of Rossbach's analysis of the Cold War is his discussion of the gnostic tendencies of the United States. To develop his argument Rossbach examines the Cold War situation through the writings of one of the key participants: George F. Kennan, a senior diplomat and policy analyst. Through a careful examination of Kennan's situation, Rossbach describes the ossification of Cold War strategies into gnostic ideology whereby each side created a Manichaean dualism in which the forces of light were compelled to fight the forces of darkness. The second essay, by Geoffrey L. Price, also explores the merits and

McKnight INTRODUCTION

21

applicability of Voegelin's concept of gnosticism to contemporary civilizational analysis. Price takes issue with scholars who contend that the concept was appropriate in the political climate of the first half of the century but of limited value in the post-Cold War era. According to these scholars, Voegelin himself acknowledged the limits of the usefulness of the concept and, therefore, employed it far less frequently in his later writings. Price readily concedes that Voegelin's later writings identify several forms of political and spiritual disorder which derive from Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, apocalypticism and magic. Price argues, however, that these elements serve only to widen the scope of Voegelin's analysis and do not diminish the central role Voegelin gives gnosticism as a defining component of Western civilizational history. To substantiate his contention, Price traces the centrality of the concept from Voegelin's History of Political Ideas through The New Science of Politics to the final two volumes of Order and History, The Ecumenic Age (1974) and In Search of Order (1987). Price gives particular attention to the fourth volume, The Ecumenic Age. In this penultimate volume, Voegelin examines the breakdown of cosmological myth, the disorder accompanying the ecumenic empires, the reification of philosophy, the dogmatization of religion, and the proliferation of esoteric religions, including ancient Gnosticism. Price's analysis of the philosophical and religious events of the ecumenic age leads him to conclude that the distinctive character of modern political and spiritual disorder is rooted in the philosophical and religious derailments of the ecumenic age. Price stresses, however, that the origins of metastatic faith and apocalyptic dreams of innerworldly fulfilment do not appear first during the ecumenic age. They arise in Israel between the ninth and seventh centuries BCE. Price then argues that the analysis of the origins and proliferation of this longing to escape historical existence remained a central element in Voegelin's work from the 1940s through the 1980s. Price's textual examination leads him to conclude that Voegelin employed 'gnosticism' as the generic term to identify various expressions of the metastatic longing to escape reality. The concept of gnosticism, therefore, remains central to Voegelin's work and cannot be moved to the margins as some scholars have attempted. The third essay in this section, by Barry Cooper, employs Voegelin's concept of political religion to illuminate core issues in contemporary Canadian politics. In Cooper's assessment, the issues behind the Canadian political debate have to do with the nature of sovereignty and autonomy for both the federalist Canadian politicians and the separatist Quebec

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movement. In his view, both sides have abandoned objective, empirical grounds for their stances and have moved into the realm of political myth. The federalist nationalists find hope for the future in a 'renewed federalism' and justify their aspirations with a myth of 'the two founding peoples'. According to Cooper, the notion of two founding peoples was invented in the heat of the Quebec provincial election campaign during the late nineteenth century. This myth, underscoring the dual personality of the Canadian people, continues to be prevalent and marches on through history untroubled and untouched by later events such as Eastern European and non-European immigration, the addition of other colonies and territories and the settlement of the west. Indeed, the myth overcomes even prior historical realities such as the existence of human beings already living in societies of various kinds prior to the arrival of Europeans in the territory later called 'Canada'.

Cooper devotes fuller discussion to the myth of Quebec nationalism. The central myth is that of an 'ethnic garrison', which Cooper traces to the middle of the nineteenth century in historical writings and in popular novels. In this myth the Canadian French are presented as being oppressed by the demonic English but eventually gaining liberty through the superior quality of their character. Cooper follows this analysis with a comparison of the principal characteristics of a political religion as identified by Voegelin in Die politischen Religionen and the features of Quebec nationalism. The fourth essay in this section, by S.N. Eisenstadt, offers another perspective on the Gnostic and apocalyptic religious foundations of Western civilization. Eisenstadt, a comparative sociologist, traces these developments to a stage of civilizatiorial history that Karl Jaspers referred to as the 'axial period'. The 'axial age' denotes the period of theological and philosophical eruptions occurring throughout the world between the twelfth century BCE to the third century CE. During this period, widespread spiritual eruptions led to a fundamental differentiation between the transcendent order of reality and the mundane order. In all civilizations the effort was made to model the mundane order insofar as possible in relation to the transcendent. But there was the recognition of the imperfectability of man and therefore of the limitation on the possibility of a complete implementation of the full dimensions of the transcendent within the mundane. While this was the predominant view, alternative visions also developed which rebelled against the notion of reconciling the mundane, social sphere with the transcendent. These rebellions took three basic

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forms during the axial period. One was the re-formulation of the tension between the transcendent and mundane orders, as in the case of the Buddhist re-formulation of the premises of Hinduism and the Christian re-formulation of the premises of Judaism. Another alternative vision promulgated the return to a compact chthonic or cosmological existence. A third vision concerned the quest to merge the transcendental into the mundane; the Gnostic effort was one such attempt. Efforts of this type often combined attempts to implement its vision with the wider social movements of social protest, and attempted to overcome or supersede the predicaments and limitations of human existence. The result was the emergence in the axial civilizations of Utopian visions of an alternative, better order beyond the given one, a new social and cultural order that would be constructed according to the precepts of the higher transcendental order and which would negate and transcend the given one. According to Eisenstadt, this third, Gnostic, type came to constitute the central component in the crystallization of modern civilization as it developed in the Enlightenment and in the great European revolutions. The crystallization and institutionalization of this programme continued from the eighteenth century and expanded from Western Europe to the Americas, Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. Eisenstadt's studies, therefore, confirm and expand Voegelin's analysis of modern Western civilization as deriving from religious impulses that contain immanentized forms of apocalyptism and Gnosticism. The fifth and final essay in this section is my own contribution. My intent is to examine Voegelin's contributions to twentieth-century study of civilizational history. My analysis is framed in relation to three fundamental issues. The first is what Arnold Toynbee referred to as the problem of'the intelligible field of historical study'. This issue, while always a basic one, became acute during the extraordinary expansion of data on some 26 known civilizations. While these empirical data provided an unprecedented wealth of facts, they did not automatically translate into wealth of insight. Before the wide-ranging data could be integrated into a coherent whole, the essential or primary field had to be established. The second major issue centred on the question of the appropriate method of historical analysis. This issue was framed more specifically as the question of how to conduct a 'scientific' study of history. The third major issue centred on the search for the meaning of history. The problem that the twentieth-century historians faced was that the linear, progressivist patterns employed in the nineteenth century were shattered by totalitarianism

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and two World Wars. While the breakdown of the progressivist constructions posed fundamental problems, it also opened the possibility of developing a theoretically sound and empirically based science of history. My intent is to demonstrate that Voegelin greatly advanced the understanding of the primary field of historical study through his analysis of symbolizations of order as they unfolded in historical societies. Voegelin argued that the historical field of study must include such diverse phenomenon as concrete political orders, events in philosophical consciousness, messianism and apocalypticism. Adequate analysis, Voegelin argued, requires the examination of the total configuration of order, that is, both the pragmatic and the spiritual events, which shape an epoch. Voegelin also made another key contribution by re-establishing the meaning of a 'science' of politics and history by demonstrating that the method must be appropriate to the subject, and that the subject of historical science is the symbolizations of order as they unfold in history. Part III: Order and History. Themes and Variations This section, as the title indicates, focuses on Voegelin's major work, Order and History. One aim is to assess Voegelin's contribution to classical philosophy and biblical religion. Another aim is to present some current reflections upon the philosophical, theoretical and methodological issues at the foundations of Voegelin's analysis of civilizational order and disorder. The first essay, by Bernhard W. Anderson, takes as its task a consideration of Voegelin's Israel and Revelation in light of the vast changes in the field of biblical studies over the last generation. He begins by noting that when Voegelin immersed himself in biblical studies, the field was most influenced by Gerhard von Rad and W.F. Albright. Von Rad maintained that the subject of Old Testament theology is not pragmatic history but the history of traditions, that is, a study of how the Israelite story, found in core confessions of faith, were appropriated and made present in the changing circumstances of Israel's historical journey. Albright, too, maintained that Israel's faith is not based upon creedal formulations but upon the recital of the mighty acts of God—crucial events including guidance of the ancestors, exodus from Egypt and taking of the 'promised land'. Voegelin's work, drawing upon both traditions but especially von Rad's, interpreted the history of Israel as a history of symbolization from Moses, through the Israelite experience with monarchy, on to the emergence of

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Christianity out of Judaism. With his philosophical accent, Voegelin drew a distinction between the transcendental order of the Kingdom of God and the mundane affairs with which the historian or political scientist deals. Anderson then notes that the current generation of scholars have revolted against the dominance of history and the historical method and have adopted methodologies that deal with the biblical text rather than a history behind the text. Anderson cites as an example Walter Brueggemann's Theology of the Old Testament, which dismisses the historical critical method as a legacy of the Enlightenment and its Cartesian epistemology. Anderson notes, however, that Voegelin's work is not fundamentally invalidated by the fate of historical criticism, because Voegelin is not really interested in a sequence of crucial historical events charged with revelatory import. Voegelin is concerned with revelation in historical consciousness or in the psyche of sensitive persons like Moses, Jeremiah and Jesus—persons so attuned to the order of being that their souls are sensoriums of the transcendent. Anderson then moves to a comparison of Voegelin's approach with the sociological approach to biblical studies, which poses new challenges to the treatment of transcendence. Some sociologists, especially those influenced by Marxist studies, focus on the social dynamics of power and reduce theology to ideology, that is, to the attempt of the established powers to legitimate their authority and hold others in subjection. Liberation theology, a radical form of the sociological trend, focuses on the relation between order and freedom and views efforts at linking social order to the divine order of reality as part of the effort of the dominant majority to keep the disenfranchised minority under control. This pattern is obviously in opposition to Voegelin's, who gives divine warrant to order and is fearful of revolutionary expressions of human freedom that are aimed at taking power from the rich and established and distributing some of it to the poor and marginal. Anderson then moves to the next major trend in scholarship, the growing effort of Jews and Christians to work together on biblical texts and biblical history. Anderson notes that the title of Voegelin's foundational work, Israel and Revelation, gives prominence to Israel as a crucial contributor to the unfolding drama in human history. Nevertheless, Israel and Revelation's treatment of the thorny problem of the relation of Judaism to Christianity poses serious problems. This is because in a particularly problematic passage Voegelin attributes Talmudic Judaism with a failure to be the carrier of the truth of being for all humankind, owing to the inability

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to get rid of its cultural mortgage, that is, of the territorial claim on the land of Canaan and its ethnic exclusivism that separates the Jewish community from the rest of humanity. Hence, in Voegelin's interpretation, the promise to Abraham, originally intended to include all humankind, was forfeited to Christianity, which was able to free the truth of being from land and Volk Anderson notes, however, that if Israel, as the carrier of revelation, was involved in defection from the truth of being because of participation in pragmatic history, the same must be said of Christianity. The Church, as the carrier of revelation, has boldly accommodated itself to the pragmatic history of nations, and has itself preserved some of the trappings of empire. A second problem Anderson finds with Voegelin's treatment of Israelite history is his dismissal of the royal covenant theology as a derailment. For Anderson, Voegelin's treatment fails to give proper weight to a symbolic pluralism in the tradition. The Old Testament contains three major patterns of symbolization: (1) the priestly symbolization of the tabernacle presence of God; (2) the Mosaic symbolism of the Mountain of God and the covenant formulary that governs Deuteronomy; and (3) the Davidic symbolism of monarchy and temple that is dominant in the Book of Psalms and the Chronicler's history. According to Anderson, each expresses distinctly the presence of the holy God in the people's midst and all are necessary to express in human speech the revelation of the holy God whose being is beyond the reach of human conceptuality but who is nevertheless 'God with us'. The final issue that Anderson takes up is the problem of Christology, which marks a fundamental point of difference between Judaism and Christianity. Here again, Anderson indicates that Voegelin's ontology focuses on a fundamental differentiation between Judaism and Christianity rather than providing a basis for a synthetic understanding. Nevertheless, Anderson concludes by noting that reading Israel and Revelation after all these years has helped him to see more clearly that there are two different ways of thinking christologically. Anderson, therefore, finds Voegelin's work not only useful in the present state of theoretical and methodological confusion, but also with regard to the deeper theological issues that are at the centre of the discussion between Jews and Christians regarding biblical history. The second essay in this section, by Moshe Idel, has two foci. The first is a comparative analysis of Voegelin's and Gershom Scholem's theories of

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religion. The second is Voegelin's and Scholem's treatment of metastasis in post-biblical Judaism. In Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, published in 1941, Scholem enunciated his theory concerning a threefold evolution in matters of religion. Idel states that Scholem's work was known by Voegelin and indeed employed by him in his own major work, Order and History. To establish thematic parallels between Scholem and Voegelin, Idel quotes Scholem extensively, and then compares these passages with excerpts from Voegelin's Order and History. The first phase of religious development for both Scholem and Voegelin is the compact cosmological myth characteristic of the ancient Near Eastern mythologies, which are superseded by the process of differentiation that installed the historical form of existence characteristic of the Israelites. Idel points out that for Scholem, just as for Voegelin, the religious drama takes place in the deepening of the discovery of the distance between man and God at the second phase of religious development. Idel notes some important differences between Scholem's terminology and Voegelin's. Scholem describes humanity conceived in opposition to the transcendental being, while Voegelin deals always with the possibility of a noetic relationship between the two. Moreover, Voegelin's third phase, which is conceived as transcending the second one, assumes the dissolution of the communal compactness of Israel, and the discovery of the individual soul. For Scholem, mythology returns and plays a major role in the third stage of Judaism after it has been obliterated in the second one. The process of remythification of theology is a major characteristic of Scholem's view of Jewish mysticism in general. Idel notes that Voegelin, on the other hand, is not welcoming of such re-versions. Though Voegelin could accept the lingering of one form of religiosity into the other immediately following it, as is the case with the cosmological symbols that were accepted and transformed into the historical religion, the return of the first stage within the third one was conceived of as much more problematic. Before developing his critical analysis of this element of Voegelin's work, Idel introduces additional relevant material by discussing the views of Scholem and Voegelin on Gnosticism. According to Idel, both Scholem and Voegelin conceived Gnosticism as a critical factor in Western religion, influential much beyond its first historical manifestations in late antiquity. Both were concerned with the reverberations of Gnosticism in later phenomena in mediaeval and premodern Europe, though their attitudes to what they described as Gnosticism differed dramatically. Scholem

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conceived the Gnostic elements to be a positive element that fertilized stagnant Rabbinism; for Voegelin on the other hand, Gnosticism, with its metastatic proclivities, is a negative approach, which involves attempts at changing Being rather than understanding it. Drawing upon his observations on Voegelin's approach to Gnosticism and to his emphasis on the noetic dimension of religious experience, Idel moves to a critique of Voegelin's understanding of Judaism. It is Idel's opinion that Voegelin's approach, while attempting to be objective, is shaped by a Christian and Greek perspective which emphasizes the noetic dimension. To give a case citation, Idel looks at Voegelin's interpretation of God's divine name in Exodus 3. Idel says that the number of theological explanations of this divine name is huge, and that the decision to adopt one is therefore a dramatic decision by Voegelin, a choice that reveals the acceptance of an ultimately Greek metaphysical interpretation. Idel then cites an example of an alternative Jewish approach to this divine name. What is crucial in the Jewish interpretation is a 'moment of reciprocity'. Not only is God present with the people, but also the people are with God. In other words, the divine presence with the people is not an unchangeable order but depends upon the people's being with God. According to Idel, this view makes Judaism a living religion, and also calls into question the unilinear process of development found in Voegelin's volumes of Order and History. Idel says it is characteristic of Voegelin's approach that a certain religion has one main message and that religion remains unchanged. By emphasizing the noetic function of humanity as the highest one, and the sole one to best express the religious experience of the static ground of being, other aspects of humanity, and of religious life, are marginalized, and Israel is left as a biblical fossil rather than as a living religion. Having offered this criticism of Voegelin, Idel quickly points out that Voegelin's understanding of Judaism is shared by the two most influential scholars of Judaism in the twentieth century: Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem. This pervasive approach, he concludes, is part of the appropriation of visions of perfection inspired by Greek philosophy, on the one hand, and of the overemphasis on the importance of history, on the other. The third essay, by Zdravko Planinc, argues what is certain to be a highly controversial claim: It would seem that, from his first publication to his last, over a period of almost half a century, Voegelin frequently defends a cliched understanding of Plato's philosophy, and what is more, a cliched understanding that stands in opposition to both Voegelin's own account of the permanence of

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the community of being and Voegelin's frequent praise of the lucidity of Plato's exploration and description of its quaternarian structure.

Planinc finds three fundamental problems underlying this predicament, first, there is a fundamental contradiction, and not a 'tension', between Voegelin's recognition of 'equivalences of experience and symbolization' within the order of the community of being, on the one hand, and Voegelin's use of unilinear or developmental schemes to order the data of human history, on the other. Secondly, the fundamental contradiction between these two aspects of Voegelin's work is only confused, and not clarified or resolved, by his frequent recourse to the distinction between 'compactness and differentiation'. Thirdly, Voegelin's frequently repeated claim that Plato was unable to transcend the boundaries of cosmos and polis is almost always supported with evidence from the Timaeus and Critias. This is problematic because Voegelin never fundamentally reconsidered his initial understanding of these two dialogues as expressed in the History of Political Ideas. According to Planinc, Voegelin's conventional scholarly account of the limits of Plato's philosophy—ultimately derived from Christian accounts of the inherent inability of pagans to transcend natural philosophy—even appears in the exegesis of the Timaeus in the concluding fifth volume of Order and History. Planinc begins his argument with a detailed textual analysis of Voegelin's essay, 'Plato's Egyptian Myth', published in 1953. This essay is taken from Voegelin's History of Political Ideas, which was abandoned in part due to Voegelin's study of Schelling, which led him to understand that the premises of this project were unsound in that they uncritically reflected modern assumptions concerning the progress of history. Planinc next turns to Order and History, arguing that the early volumes were ostensibly undertaken to rework the premises and analyses of the History of Political Ideas, but gives no evidence that its understanding of Plato had received substantive reconsideration. Planinc notes, for example, that while Voegelin admits, on the one hand, that Plato's 'dualism of the Erotes [is] closely related to the Christian dualism of amor Dei and amor sui', he also claims, on the other, that 'Plato's philosophizing remains bound by the compactness of the Dionysiac soul', a compactness which allowed neither 'mystical union with God, nor any other neo-Platonic or Christian developments'.

According to Planinc, the preference for the Christian view is not expressly contained in the texts themselves, but reflects an ongoing prejudice on

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Voegelin's part in favour of Christian revelation and unilinear patterns of history. Planinc then turns his attention to the problem of the long delay separating the publications of volumes 3 and 4 of Order and History. In Planinc's view, the project of Order and History came to a standstill with the publication of volumes 2 and 3 in part because of the manner in which Voegelin continued to use Platonic materials from his History of Political Ideas. In Planinc's view, volume 4, which originally was projected to be a study of early Christianity and the New Testament, posed fundamental problems with regard to the relation of Platonic philosophy to gospel Christianity. According to Planinc, the results of Voegelin's efforts to deal with these issues, 'for all their brilliance and innovation, seem never to escape the interpretative dilemmas in which he found himself after publishing the first three volumes of Order and History. Planinc argues that Voegelin never returned to a thorough, systematic analysis of the Platonic dialogues in light of his emphasis on equivalences of experience and symbolization. Instead he offered many 'short, set-piece interpretations' of various sections of the dialogues; and while 'there is a flourishing of technical terms, ostensibly representing Plato's terminology, in Voegelin's own writings', unfortunately 'the proliferation of Platonic technical terms does not necessarily indicate better insight into the texts from which they are taken'. In order to explore the developments that separate volumes 3 and 4, Planinc turns to a series of articles and addresses prepared in the intervening period which treat the problem of equivalences and the relation of Platonic philosophy to gospel Christianity. These include 'Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History' (1970), remarks addressed to the Thomas More Institute in 1970 and subsequently published in Conversations with Eric Voegelin (1980), and 'The Gospel and Culture' (1971). In Planinc's judgment, the essays written after volume 3 are evidence of Voegelin's struggle with the conflict between conventional beliefs and the radical implications of studying the quaternarian structure philosophically, a struggle that results in a unique theoretical apparatus and vocabulary that allows him both to acknowledge equivalences and to discount them into conventionally accepted terms. Consequently, the Introduction to The Ecumenic Age is 'confusing and somewhat disingenuous: Voegelin criticizes himself for an error he had not made, and then presents as his recent theoretical advance the same error in a new form'. Commenting further on volume 4, Planinc notes that there are occasional traces of

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understanding of Plato as a man open to the revelation of divine reality in both of its 'fundamental modes—in the cosmos and as an ordering presence in the soul', and he finds that the final section of volume 5 of Order and History offers a discussion of Plato's Timaeus that reveals that Voegelin's own philosophy was closer to the philosophy of Plato than it was to Christian theology. Voegelin discovers in Plato his own struggles, and he presents Plato as struggling for language that will optimally express the analytic movements of existential consciousness within the limits of that of a fides of the cosmos. But even here, according to Planinc, Voegelin qualifies his interpretation of Plato and reduces his differentiation. This leads Planinc to conclude that 'the Plato of Voegelin's last published remarks is the Plato of his earliest published remarks, a philosopher with "a less developed level of spirituality compared to that of the Christian era", because it was "as yet impossible" for him to "breach the bounds" of cosmos and polls'. The fourth essay in this section, by Terry Barker and Larry Schmidt, is a direct response to the essay by Planinc. Through a detailed reading of Voegelin's writings from the 1930s through the 1980s, this paper argues that Voegelin's work does show a move away from the progressivist and developmentalist understandings of history towards an integrated classical and Christian political theory and philosophy of history. The specific issues that Barker and Schmidt address centre around Planinc's treatment of Voegelin's notions of'the primordial community of being...with its quaternarian structure', 'equivalences of experience and symbolization', and 'compactness and differentiation'. These three sets of terms, they argue, are severed from their context and from one another by Planinc and 'reassembled by him to articulate what Voegelin supposedly should have said about Plato's philosophy, or to explain why he didn't say it'. Barker and Schmidt begin their response by noting that The New Science of Politics of 1952 is where the first set of terms, 'compactness and differentiation', is introduced; that the second, the 'quaternarian structure of the primordial community of being', is presented in 'The Symbolization of Order', the Introduction to Israel and Revelation, the first volume of Order and History (1956); and that 'equivalences of experience and symbolization' is developed in concert with the other two in the essay 'Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History' (1970). According to Barker and Schmidt, these texts—considered together in the order in which they were produced—demonstrate the stages that Voegelin's theory undergoes in breaking from progessivist patterns of analysis. This articulation and the

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stages in which it unfolds played a crucial role in developing his 'histories', which serves as the basis for his new theory of consciousness and reality that is set out in the last stages of his work. Barker and Schmidt next turn to the break in programme announced by Voegelin in the introduction to volume 4 of Order and History, which appeared in 1974. Barker and Schmidt argue that the evidence shows that the long delay was not caused by problems with Voegelin's treatment of Plato; instead, it reflected the difficulty Voegelin had in dealing with historical materials related to the study of Christianity and its deformations. According to Barker and Schmidt, it was Voegelin's realization that it was no longer possible to characterize Christianity as a linearly conceived sequel to classic and Israelite experiences and symbolizations that caused him to rework the original programme of Order and History. To support their argument, Barker and Schmidt point to Voegelin's German book Anamnesis (1966), which deals with the theory of consciousness; and to his Candler Lectures at Emory University (1967), which discuss the nature of the revisions he needed to make in his analysis of classic and Christian civilizations in their relation to the crisis of modernity. Barker and Schmidt's most extended discussion involves the essay, 'Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History'. In this essay, Voegelin returns to his original focus on the problems of a constant in history and of equivalence. Here he states that there is no constant to be found in history, for the reason that the historical field of equivalences is not given as a collective of phenomena which could be submitted to the procedures of its abstraction and generalization. Indeed, history itself originates in the presence of the process when a truth of reality emerging from the depth recognizes itself as equivalent but superior to a truth previously experienced, so that the only thing that is constant is the process, which leaves a trail of equivalent symbols in time and space to which we can attach the conventional name of'history'. Barker and Schmidt conclude by stating that Planinc's understanding of Voegelin's use of the terms 'quaternarian structure of the primordial community of being', 'compactness and differentiation' and 'equivalences of experience and symbolization' is quite different from Voegelin's actual use of them. 'Our detailed examination of Voegelin's relevant theoretical texts revealed no lack of coherence in his terminology, no lack of candour in his acknowledgment of debt on a selective basis to classic, Christian and modern thinkers, and no evidence of deliberate obfuscation of his meaning.' The principal merit of these two essays is that they offer detailed link-

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ings of texts and themes in Voegelin's work from the 1930s to the 1980s. The reader is not required to agree or disagree with either. The more productive use of them would be as resources for exploring the core of Voegelin's theoretical and methodological development as it moves from his History of Political Ideas through the various stages of Order and History. The fifth essay in this section, by M.W. Sinnett, begins by lamenting the paucity of informed criticism of Voegelin's scholarship: 'Specialist scholars, approaching Voegelin's treatment of a particular text with little or no knowledge of the breadth of vision that guides his explorations, often fall short of any genuine engagement with Voegelin, thus depriving us of all benefit from the mutual insights that might otherwise have been possible.' Voegelinian enthusiasts, on the other hand, 'being unwilling or unable to question their master's reading of basic texts, quickly find themselves helpless in the relentless sweep of Voegelin's exegesis, thus abandoning any hope of a critical approach to his work'. As a consequence, the former run the risk of an uninformed dismissal of Voegelin's work, while the latter, at best, contribute another item to the growing catalogue of 'Voegelinian hagiography'. What is needed at this stage, Sinnett declares, is the endeavour on the part of many scholars over a period of many years to explore in detail and in a relevant manner the empirical bases of Voegelin's writings. Sinnett then proposes to offer 'a small contribution to this vast undertaking'. Sinnett's analysis focuses on Plato's Symposium, which, Sinnett states, does not receive extended treatment in any of Voegelin's writings nor in the secondary literature on Voegelin. In approaching the Symposium, Sinnett underscores the importance of recognizing the dramatic element in the Platonic dialogues. The dialogues present the drama located in the human soul as it moves through the depths of consciousness, in an effort to explore the full range of human experience. As drama, they are also intended to draw the reader into a participatory exploration of the essential nature of existence. The subject of the Symposium is, of course, the nature of Eros. Sinnett notes that the dialogue opens with conventional encomia full of empty platitudes regarding love as the binding force in the polis. These speeches are followed by the burlesque of Aristophanes and the sophistry of Agathon, which serve to underscore the problematic nature of human knowledge, and to set the context for the exploration of the question of divine-human attunement as the foundation for the order of the soul and

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the order of society. This exploration is presented in Socrates' account of his dialogue with the priestess Diotima, which introduces a new myth of Eros's genealogy. In this myth, the personified Eros is presented as being the product of Resource (Poros) and Poverty (Penia), so that Eros himself is at no time either resourceless or wealthy, but is always 'in the middle' between wisdom and ignorance. From this genealogy Diotima goes on to explain that neither the gods nor the ignorant are lovers of wisdom. The former already possess wisdom, and the latter, though they utterly lack it, are satisfied with themselves and have no desire for that with regard to which they feel no defect. Socrates then asks Diotima who the lovers of wisdom are, if they are neither the wise nor the ignorant. Diotima responds that they are the ones in-between the two, and one of them is Eros. There then follows a fuller articulation of the characteristics of these lovers of wisdom and their quest for beauty and truth. It is in the context of this dialogue, of course, that a symbol so integral to Voegelin's work, that of the metaxy or Cln-Between', is presented. It is also in this dialogue that the nature of the search in the 'In-Between' is articulated. It is underscored that wisdom is not the result of an accumulation of facts, but is an ongoing search in the form of participation in the drama of humanity. In exploring this dialogue, Sinnett is able to establish the fundamental connections in Voegelin's work between the symbols of 'participation', 'differentiation of experience and symbolization,' and 'the paradox of consciousness', all pertaining to the fundamental In-Between of human existence. The sixth and seventh essays in this section move the focus of the discussion from Platonic philosophy to gospel Christianity. The sixth essay, by William M. Thompson, examines Voegelin's essay 'The Gospel and Culture', which Thompson regards as especially useful for understanding Voegelin's views on Christ, Christianity and politics. In order to develop his lines of analysis, Thompson employs a Voegelinian approach to this Voegelin text. That is, he turns to the key symbols employed in the text and relates them to primary symbols in Voegelin's other writings. The primary symbol in 'The Gospel and Culture' essay is movement. For Thompson, it seems clear that Voegelin considers this term a key symbolism, even capitalizing it numerous times toward the essay's conclusion to indicate the one, common dynamism shared by the classical and Jewish-Christian traditions. In order to establish this common dynamism, Thompson offers a brief discussion of parallel symbols found in both traditions. Thompson refers

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to Voegelin's statement in The World of the Polls, the second volume of Order and History, that Heraclitus and Plato agree that no composition can lay claim to 'truth' unless it is authenticated by the movement of the psyche toward the sophon. This movement, in Thompson's words, 'includes struggle—think of the pulls and counterpulls of the noetic core, echoing especially Plato in Laws 645a—and at one point Voegelin even suggests the fruitfulness of a comparison with Zen mysticism in order to elucidate further "the connection between love of the All-wise and [the] askesis of the warrior" in Heraclitus'. The point of this discussion is that it establishes the emergence of a more differentiated soul which constitutes a new authority within society and history. For Thompson, the deliberate and repeated use of the phrase 'the gospel movement' indicates Voegelin's desire to evoke how Christ and Christianity are rooted in the metaxy of society and history, thus uncovering their point of connection with all of human existence. Thompson notes that it should not be surprising that Voegelin's philosophy of order and politics focuses on the sociopolitical implications of these 'spectacular breakthroughs in history', because this approach enables Voegelin, the political philosopher, to grasp the relevance of a consideration of Christ to political theory. While Voegelin wants to establish an essential point of convergence between the philosophical and Christian spiritual traditions, he also gives attention to the distinctiveness of the Christian. According to Thompson, there is no question that Voegelin regards the epiphany of Christ as the culmination of the millennial movement because it articulates ' the eminent truth of existential consciousness'. Or, said differently, Voegelin regards Christ and the gospel movement as the dramatic point at which consciousness becomes luminous to itself as the site of the revelatory process. This emphasis on the soul as the site of revelation differentiates the Christian revelatory experience from the noetic structure of Greek consciousness. Having noted this important distinctive characteristic of Christianity, however, Thompson stresses that the overriding emphasis of 'The Gospel and Culture' seems to be upon the fullness of Christ as the representative man, not upon Christ as the unique fullness. Thompson next relates the key symbolism of 'movement' to other key symbols in Voegelin's writing. He begins by reminding us of the importance of the symbol 'drama' throughout Voegelin's writings. Drama, especially tragedy, depicts the soul in the process of making decisions, and recalls the Heraclitean 'deep knowing' of the soul whose border cannot be measured because its logos is too deep. According to Thompson, the sym-

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bols of'movement' and 'drama' function like content and form in Voegelin's perspective. The point of the two symbols is to stress the fact that human beings are not spectators but participants in the community of being. As Voegelin stated in the Introduction to volume 1 of Order and History, humans are actors playing a part in the drama of being. This drama presupposes a tension between freedom and necessity and a human response to the mystery of existence. The fourth section of 'The Gospel and Culture' is permeated with the language of drama. Voegelin repeatedly emphasizes that the gospel movement is to be thought of as a drama. He speaks of the historical drama of revelation and states that it is far from alive in the Christianity of the churches today because of the separation of school theology from mystical or experiential theology and the drama's eclipse by Christian doctrine. He writes of the gospel drama with its dramatis personae of God and man. He seems to make a distinction between the gospel drama and the poet's work of dramatic art as well as the historian's biography of Jesus; but, as he draws the distinction, he goes on to write about the personal drama of Jesus in the gospel, the social drama of his followers, and its historical dimension inasmuch as this forms part of an ongoing tradition of experience and symbolization. Thompson then moves to the next key symbol, that of 'story'. This symbol is found especially in the final volume of Order and History. Here, according to Thompson, we find Voegelin writing of the 'necessarily storied and narrative character of human existence'. Voegelin writes: 'The story is the symbolic form the questioner has to adopt necessarily when he gives an account of his quest as the event of wresting, by the response of his human search to a divine moment, the truth of reality from a reality pregnant with truth yet unrevealed.' Thus, the story that Voegelin writes is both narrative and event. 'Narrative' points to how the story conveys insights into reality in the mode of intentionality or 'thingness'. 'Event' is Voegelin's special way of pointing to how the story, in a more comprehensive sense, is an event of luminosity within the in-between of existence. Narrative is narratively referential, while event is luminously symbolic. According to Thompson, Voegelin's Order and History displays a dramatic, narrative and perhaps even epic form. Commentators who concentrate on the 'order' dimension often miss this narrative quality. The attention to history, to how order only emerges from the struggle for it in history, is the more narrative and dramatic feature of Voegelin's project. Thompson then examines Voegelin's treatment of the Gospel of Matthew as evidence of the dramatic elements of the gospel movement. For

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Thompson, Voegelin's interpretation of Matthew is particularly helpful in displaying how the gospel drama surfaces the theme of participation and emphasizes that knowing comes by way of participating. Revelation thus is knowing through participation—that is, it is an existential event which admits of varying levels of comprehension and enactment, depending upon the depths of one's own entry into the passion and resurrection of the pulls and counterpulls. The discussion of the various degrees of participation opens to view the possibility of a flawed or derailed manner of participation, or even a deliberate rebellion against the full depths of human consciousness. In this context Voegelin discusses both ancient and modern gnosticism as modes of derailed participation. In his concluding paragraphs Thompson, a theologian, credits Voegelin with establishing a philosophical or scientific approach to the study of human consciousness. In Thompson's view, a true science of consciousness involves a form of spirituality or mysticism, reflecting the formation through virtues of the knower. Voegelin's work is an invitation and even a challenge to philosophers and theologians to likewise undertake this challenge. Thompson adds that an appropriate next step for Voegelin students interested in the gospel movement would be to explore the trinitarian dimensions of the same, along with their implications for political order. There are some promising sources for this in Voegelin's works themselves, and this would be a way of challenging and expanding Voegelin's project from within. The seventh essay, by Michael P. Morrissey, reviews recent developments in New Testament studies. Morrissey notes that the current generation of scholarship has produced a proliferation of fields and sub-fields as well as a number of new methodologies. In order to make the scope of his assignment more manageable and in order to make it directly relevant to this volume, Morrissey narrows the focus to that area of New Testament studies dealing directly with the central figure, Jesus of Nazareth. More specifically, Morrissey takes as his point of departure the problematic in Christian theology that deals with the relation between the so-called 'historical Jesus' and the 'Christ of faith', a distinction that came to light in the nineteenth century with the rise of critical historical consciousness. Morrissey notes that no previous generation has seen so many scholars—stimulated by new archaeological discoveries, new analytic methodologies and new theories—preoccupied with the debate about who Jesus was and the proper categories by which to understand him. He then turns to an analysis of the work of six of the most influential contemporary scholars: E.P. Sanders, John Dominic Crossan, Marcus J. Borg, Burton L.

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Mack, Robert W. Funk and John P. Meier. After his analysis of these six scholars, Morrissey indicates that he believes Voegelin would defend 'historical Jesus' research as a legitimate and necessary affair, insofar as the historical reconstruction of Jesus marks a post-Hegelian attempt to return from dogma to the reality of experience. However controversial the conclusions of these scholars, their work cannot be dismissed, for what they seek to do is salutary: to clear away the rubbish of false interpretations that have been laid over Jesus and the gospels, thus providing a fresh understanding of who Jesus was and what he was about. On the other hand, Voegelin would also likely note that the concentration on the positivistic approach, and on the empirically verifiable content of gospel Christianity, cannot get at the crucial issues concerning Christianity and its place in human history. Voegelin frequently stated that history is not the agglomeration of empirical data. History is made up of those epochal events that contain a new understanding of the fundamental nature of human existence. The study of the New Testament and of Jesus, therefore, if it is to have historical validity, must focus on Christianity's epochal character. Morrissey then turns to an assessment of some of the principal points developed by Voegelin from his early work in the 1940s through his last work in the 1980s. Morrissey notes that Voegelin focused on the emergence of Christianity as an epoch-making event due to its creation of a new community substance that grounds the civilization of the West. This was Voegelin's primary interest in his History of Political Ideas from the 1940s, because as a political scientist he was primarily interested in the host of problems caused by Christianity when its ritual substance and universalistic claims were absorbed into a world empire founded on a collection of diverse ethnic societies loosely held together by a hegemonic power organization but lacking any spiritual unity. This absorption yielded the classic conflict between the spiritual and temporal powers in political society. As Voegelin developed his analysis in the 1940s, he turned to the specialized studies available from biblical scholars. In his treatment, Voegelin aligned himself with the bulk of scholars who read the gospel as myth more than as history. Nevertheless, he argued that the personality of the historical Jesus does emerge in the miracle stories, in the parables and in the dialogue scenes. In his later work, according to Morrissey, Voegelin continued to explore the gospel's mythic accounts and argued that the Gospels are the unique symbolic form that the revelation of the Christ took in response to the theophany of the divine in him. In other words, according to Morrissey,

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the Gospels serve as a narrative theology based on the pneumatic experiences of those first-century Jews who met and remembered the man they came to call the son of God. According to Morrissey, reading the Gospels with critical-historical eyes alone misses the point, because it misses the reason why they were composed and circulated in the first place and, perhaps more importantly, why Christianity became a defining event in the history of Western civilization. Therefore, while Voegelin would be interested in the new fields and methodologies in New Testament studies, he would be critical of any attempt to reduce the symbolic contents of Christianity to their historical details. As Morrissey says, to reduce the substance of the Gospels to their 'historicity' destroys the symbolic form of the myth, which for their anonymous authors was the proper expression of the vision of the divine in the metaxy mediated by Jesus. To ferret out the 'objective', factual core of the 'subjective' myth is inane, since it breaks apart the poles of the tension in religious experience.

Part IV: Voegelin's 'Implicit' Theory of Literary and Modern Cultural Criticism This section examines how Voegelin's philosophy of consciousness and theory of symbolization relate to literary and cultural analysis. The first essay, by Eugene Webb, sets out what he describes as Voegelin's 'implicit theory of literature'. Voegelin's approach to literature is not concerned primarily with aesthetic issues; it is concerned with literature as a mode of expression of one of two fundamental forms of existence or orientations towards reality. Voegelin referred to these modes of existence as copen' and 'closed'. Open existence is the mode that consciously directs itself towards reality in all its dimensions, spiritual as well as material. Open existence, in other words, is openness to existence under the conditions of finitude. Closed existence is a tendency to close oneself to existence, to pull back from living with full consciousness of the ambiguities and uncertainties of existence. Literature expressing openness towards existence is best reflected in classical literature in Greek tragedy and then later in the Platonic dialogues. In The World of the Polls, Voegelin provides a detailed discussion of tragedy as a fundamental component in the ongoing search for truth that runs from Hesiod's cosmogonic myth to the Platonic dialogues. According to Voegelin, the truth of Greek tragedy is action itself, that is, action on the new, differentiated level of a movement in the

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soul that culminates in the decision of a mature responsible person. The other form of literary expression articulates the conditions of closed existence, that is, the stubborn refusal to accept the full range of human experience and the subsequent attempt to construct a second reality. Webb briefly discusses two examples from Voegelin's work. The first is his analysis of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. When his friend and colleague Robert B. Heilman first introduced Voegelin to this work in 1947, Voegelin thought James was expressing a deeply rooted will to self-salvation, growing out of a secularized version of America's Puritan heritage. In 1970, after further reflection, Voegelin became persuaded that the symbols were not so readily transparent; that, in fact, they represent a modern form of literature that expresses an existential dimension of closed existence. As the process of closure gains momentum, the symbols of open existence— God, humanity, the divine origins of the cosmos, and the divine logos permeating its order—lose the vitality of their truth and are eclipsed by the imagery of a self-creative and self-saving ego confronted with an immanently closed world. In contrast to classical tragedy, which had the function of eliciting in its audience a clear awareness of the existential issues underlying people's lives, the latter form of literature merely gave articulate form to the confusions of its age and helped to keep its reader bound by them. Webb stresses that Voegelin did not dismiss all of modern literature as an expression of confusion or closure to existence. He cites as an example Voegelin's comments on Baudelaire's prefatory poem to his Fleurs du maly which develops a deliberate parody of Plato's philosophical myth in which man is depicted as a puppet pulled by diverse cords and drawn by the divine cord of noetic reason. Baudelaire transforms this image so that it is not God pulling humanity through divine reason but Satan enchanting us and vaporizing, through a sort of reverse alchemy, our capacity for reasonableness and responsible decision. Voegelin contrasted Baudelaire to Hegel, who Voegelin thought consciously rejected the Platonic view of human dependency and created a countermyth of human self-divinization. Baudelaire, Voegelin stated, by contrast did not symbolize the balance of consciousness but, on the contrary, expressed the consequences of its loss. Baudelaire had experienced the man of his time as being engaged in the sorcery of self-divinization. Baudelaire himself lived through the Satanic situation without letting it impair his intellectual order. While Webb underscores the emphasis Voegelin gives to the didactic purpose of literature, he warns against regarding Voegelin as a rigid moral-

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izer. Webb stresses the point that Voegelin's position was one of openness. The openness he advocated is receptive to participation in a reality that is always ready to receive the full range of human experience. Voegelin's openness is one of discovering a genuine fulfilment that can satisfy the deep appetite for existence underlying all of our other desires. To come to realize where our true satisfaction lies is what makes it possible to become truly ourselves and to realize genuine freedom in the decision for open existence. This openness to existence is the point of origin of another characteristic feature of Voegelin's implicit theory of literature: its emphasis on dialogue as an element of open existence, as opposed to monologue, which turns within itself. The main issues identified as elements of Voegelin's implicit theory of literature by Webb are treated in detail in the three other essays in this section. The next essay, by Jack E. Trotter, offers a Voegelinian examination of Greek tragedy as a primary reflection of the developing consciousness of political order and disorder in the Greek polis. Trotter, like Webb, begins by explaining that Voegelin's interest in tragedy is not as a form of literature but rather as a mode of expressing the state of openness or closure to the full range of human experience. Trotter therefore provides an overview of the move from the epic poetry of Homer through the three main stages of Greek tragedy to the Platonic dialogues. Trotter's analysis includes a discussion of Aeschylus's The Suppliants and follows Voegelin's discussion of the Platonic dialogues as a form of tragedy. The link between the two very different literary genres is that each represents a mode of exploration of the structure of the soul. Trotter next compares Voegelin's work to postmodern literary theory, especially to the highly influential work of Rene Girard. After providing a brief, balanced overview of the strengths and weaknesses in both Voegelin's and Girard's work, Trotter turns to the essential differences in their approaches. Again, these differences are not at the level of aesthetics but rather reflect fundamentally different views of human nature and society. Girard's analysis is ultimately based on the ideology of postmodernism. Through brief but pointed examples, Trotter demonstrates that the ideological underpinnings of Girard's position are in conflict with empirical studies by ethnographers and anthropologists, while Voegelin's theory is commensurable with the emerging empirical data. The third essay in this section, by Robert A. Watson, employs Voegelin's theoretical approach to literature to examine Milton's Paradise Lost. Watson begins with the brief remarks Voegelin makes regarding Milton in

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The New Science of Politics and in his essay on Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. In these works, Voegelin focuses on the potential of Christian Puritanism to degenerate into a gnostic form of rebellion or closure, which leads to an effort at Utopian perfectionism and self-salvation. From this perspective, the key episode is Milton's presentation of the bland departure of Adam and Eve from Eden. Milton, Voegelin observes, released Adam and Eve to a paradise within them 'happier far' than the paradise lost. From this Miltonian perspective, the world has become Eden; God is kept back in his Paradise; and the couple go their own way to create a paradise on earth. Employing other elements of Voegelin's philosophical writings, Watson explores another dimension within Milton's work that depicts not the defiant modern rebellion against openness, but the experience of the individual living in an age in which the ordering symbols of the society have become rigid and fail to provide an adequate means of participating in the Beyond. To develop this dimension, Watson focuses on the symbol of 'chaos' in Milton's Christian universe. More specifically, Watson asks why Milton chose to incorporate the symbol of chaos into the Christian universe rather than use the more conventional Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo. Through Watson's analysis, two answers are provided. First, the presence of chaos as an ontological force offsets the fundamentalist tendency to make God responsible for everything in the world, including the evil and disorder that often permeates human existence. Secondly, Milton's use of the symbol of chaos, which he draws from Hesiod, Plato and Augustine, allows him to express what Voegelin describes as the essential experience of humanity: existence in the In-Between—that is, existence in a tension between the timeless, immutable perfection of eternity and the experience of the unstable, fragmentary and irrational flux of existence. Through a careful, detailed reading of Milton's poem, Watson makes it clear that Milton's use of the symbol of chaos reflects the tenor of his age. Watson likens Milton's age to that of ecumenic empires discussed by Voegelin in the fourth volume of Order and History. In the ecumenic age, the older symbolisms survived but lost the authority and ordering force they had once exerted in the societies from which they emerged. The result, according to Voegelin, is that an abyss seemed to yawn between the order of the cosmos and the order of personal existence and society. As Voegelin notes in his discussion of ecumenic empires, this existence amid disorder and disease results in manifold responses. The ancient Gnostic

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outburst was one of the more radical, but the experience generated less extreme adjustments as well. By focusing on the key symbol of chaos, Watson argues that it is Milton's subtle achievement to have portrayed the individual soul as itself the epic landscape of an interiorized heaven, hell and chaos. Chaos was a force to be feared in Milton himself, as well as in his reader and in the culture they shared, but it was also a reservoir of material from which to build a common ground with his reader. Milton's symbolization of chaos may broadly represent a Puritanical dissatisfaction within imperfection. But it also symbolizes the philosopher's experience of the apeiron as experienced by a blind poet whose mind was probing for equivalences of symbolization in the milieu of armed sectarian controversy. The fourth and final essay, by James L. Babin, draws the closest connection between Voegelin's philosophy and literature. Babin does this by directing attention to the Introduction to Israel and Revelation, where Voegelin likens history to an existential drama in which humanity is required to play a part. The ironic part that he must play is to search for his identity in relation to the other actors in the existential drama, God, the natural world and society. What is particularly important for Babin is Voegelin's emphasis on the drama as a mode of participation. As Babin notes, Voegelin 'begins volume 1 and ends volume 5 by situating his quest "in search of order" in a drama, in a paradoxic story meant to hold in consciousness the awareness that human beings cannot know the mysterious "primordial community of being" as an "object of the external world but...only from the perspective of participation in it" '. Voegelin thus begins Israel and Revelation with a meditation on this paradoxical circumstance of human existence. As a form of story, drama provides its audience the reflective distance necessary to meditate on the participatory character of human life and action. Inherent in drama's mode of representation, however, is the paradoxical character of the situation, for man is not a selfcontained spectator. He is an actor, playing a part in the drama of being and through the brute fact of his existence, committed to playing it without knowing what it is. From this disconcerting but inescapable perspective, both the play and the role are unknown. But even worse, the actor does not even know with certainty who he is himself. In the final sentences of volume 5, In Search of Order, which Voegelin was working on in his last months, he reports the same result of analysis as at the beginning of volume 1:

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POLITICS, ORDER AND HISTORY No 'principles', or 'absolutes', or 'doctrines' can be extracted from this tensional complex; the quest for truth, as an event of participation in the process, can do no more than explore the structures in the divine mystery of the complex reality and, through the analysis of the experienced responses to the tensional pulls, arrive at some clarity about its own function in the drama in which it participates.

In contrast to Voegelin's emphasis on the drama in the In-Between of finitude and infinitude, knowledge and ignorance, Babin finds that much of modernity is characterized by rebellion against the uncertainties that characterize such existence. He focuses on Freud, especially his Civilization and its Discontents, as a case study of a deliberate rejection of the open field of human existence and the reduction of the consciousness of dramatic participation to subject-object consciousness that reduces phenomena to facts and events under human control. While Freud joined thinkers like Frazer and Jung in the attempt to regain a whole stratum of lost reality by adding the dimensions of dream and myth to an understanding of the psyche, his motivation was to 'finish the story' and reduce the mystery of the paradoxical structure of reality to a 'thing' to be mastered. Freud's attempt to contain the reality recovered as an object of intentional consciousness is most evident in his reduction of the religious ground of existence to an 'illusion', or a 'neurotic relict', or a form of'infantilism'. Freud begins Civilization and its Discontents with a discussion of the 'oceanic feeling' described to him by his friend Romain Holland. In a letter to Freud, Rolland had indicated that this 'oceanic feeling' had never failed him and had been a source of vital renewal. As a consequence he considered himself profoundly religious. Babin notes that Freud does not deal with religion as an experiential event as described by Rolland. Rather, from his positivistic, scientific perspective, Freud reduces or dismisses the participatory depth of religious experience as beyond the scope of scientific observation. Since Freud himself had had no such 'oceanic' experience, and since his judgment of its character remained external and objective— or, as he would say, 'without illusion'—Freud dismissed the phenomenon. Rather than considering the oceanic sensation an instance of a normal, non-pathological experience, Freud concluded that it cannot be of 'a primary nature' and so is not 'real', regardless of the testimony of thousands or millions of persons. One consequence Babin finds in the effort of scientists like Freud to replace 'illusions' with truth is to attempt to master nature. According to Babin,

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anyone who has accepted the reality principle, Freud says, rather than turning away from the world to a quiet, private life, should consider 'a better path': 'becoming a member of the human community, and, with the help of a technique guided by science, going over to the attack against nature and subjecting her to the human will'.

Babin then turns to a further exploration of the structure of modern consciousness and its rebellion against participation in the unfolding story of humanity through a study of Melville's Moby-Dick. He begins his discussion by recalling a contrast Voegelin makes in Anamnesis between the classic experience of the restless quest in search of the divine ground and that of modern thinkers, including Freud: c[T]he tonality has shifted... to the hostile alienation from a reality that rather hides than reveals itself. Babin comments: 'The anxiety produced by the threat of the unknown results in the effort to contain within intentional consciousness the reality of knowledge apprehended in luminous consciousness: the deformative inversion that defines modernity.' With Melville, the storyteller, and his narrator Ishmael, we move from Freud's analysis of civilization's discontent to the story Ishmael tells of Ahab's murderous rage. '[W]e can mark the transition in emphasis from the outside knowledge of reality to the inside reality of knowledge and the different awareness that thus presents itself Ishmael knows he is telling a story that he is in, and he comes to recognize that his primary struggle is with himself. Ahab's furious effort of inversion, to remain outside his story and so to determine its end, becomes part of Ishmael's story. Through references to key episodes, Babin demonstrates that Ahab explicitly acknowledges this wilful inversion of health and disease and shows his awareness of its inverted character. Whatever the cost, Ahab is resolved to conquer the alien, external world embodied for him in Moby-Dick. The reflective distance Ishmael gains as he watches Ahab's story unfold allows him to see the inversion for what it is and to see its distorting, fatal consequences. This 'outside-inside' perspective enables him not so much to resist the destructive forces embodied in Ahab as to allow them to be dissolved by counter-forces welling from his depths: surprise, wonder, awe, delight, joy, gratitude and love. In his concluding section, Babin draws an implicit connection between Ishmael and Voegelin. Ishmael recognizes the nature of health and disease, recognizes his own capacity for good and is able to move toward a balanced existence. In similar fashion, Babin describes Voegelin as the storyteller telling the story of modernity. Voegelin's story, taken in its entirety,

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POLITICS, ORDER AND HISTORY unfolds the drama of a modern soul struggling to restore its wholeness by recovering for itself and others what its community has attempted to erase or has allowed to fade from memory. Since the 'truth' it must remember for itself is true also for everyone in its community, the illumination of order emanating from its struggle with the forces of disorder may exercise a therapeutic function in the souls of other actors in the drama who are sensitive to the 'anxiety of existence' and willing to respond to the same questing movement in themselves... By carefully articulating the immutable conditions of our existence and the movements in our depths in the full range of their presence and force, Voegelin helps to restore continuity with our past and opens to us the whole historical, communal experience of that movement—and resistance to it—in which the story of our quest takes its part.

Having offered a description of the contents of this collection, let me conclude by briefly restating its primary aims. The purpose of this collection is to identify integrating themes in Voegelin's work from 1938 through the 1980s. The intent is to show that Voegelin's analysis developed in response to fundamental problems of the twentieth century. It demonstrates why Voegelin's work departed from the main lines of political science and sociology, and further demonstrates how Voegelin's theoretical vocabulary is grounded in a broad-based historical analysis. This collection also demonstrates that the issues that Voegelin had identified as early as the 1930s remain fundamental issues for scholarly analysis in the present. By drawing connections between Voegelin's early work on political religions and his major work in Order and History, the collection demonstrates how Voegelin's theoretical vocabulary changed as the historical data increased. At the same time, the fundamental problems remain constant. Lastly, the intent is to show the relevance of Voegelin's work to current analysis of the modern age.

Parti DIE POLITISCHEN RELIGIONEN

VOEGELIN'S POLITICAL RELIGIONSIN THE CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL ORDER Peter J. Opitz

Political Religions was first published by Bermann-Fischer in Vienna in April 1938.1 A few months later, the author was forced to flee to the United States to escape arrest by the National Socialist authorities. Is it possible to commence a reconstruction of Voegelinian thought from this short essay, which appeared more than half a century ago? The attempt to do so is not self-explanatory, and requires some justification—especially since the author himself did not assign the essay a prominent position among his works in his Autobiographical Reflections. Several such justifications offer themselves. The first arises from the crucial events and developments of the recent past: the collapse of the Communist regimes in central, eastern and southern Europe. With their failure—after the demise of fascism and National Socialism in Europe and Asia after the Second World War—there has occurred the failure of the last of the great ideological mass movements which came to power in the first half of this century and which defined the profile of the entire century. The historical significance of the collapse of these movements and the empires to which they gave rise can hardly be overestimated. With it a whole era in European history has come to a close. The starting point of that era can be readily traced back: it lies in the first decades of our century, to the founding of the communist and fascist empires. To find the crucial influences which precipitated those events of our own period, we may of course go back further, to the late mediaeval period, to the sectarian mass movements which were moved by secular utopianism. Here we will quickly be deeply immersed in interpretations of the modern mass 1. Eric Voegelin, Diepolitischen Religionen (ed. Peter J. Opitz; Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 3rd edn, 1993 [1938, 1939]); in English, Political Religions (trans. TJ. DiNapoli and E.S. Easterly III; Toronto Studies in Theology, 23; Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1986). The present article is translated from the 'Nachwort' to the third German edition.

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movements with which Voegelin himself grappled intensively over many decades of his life, an investigation which profoundly shaped his own thought.2 Clearly, when Voegelin wrote his essay in 1938, the construction and rise of the Bolshevik empire, along with Mussolini's fascist state and National Socialist Germany, was still in full swing. The full extent of the murderous politics of the governing elites was not yet clear to their own people, neither was their imperial expansionism and thus the world war which it was about to unleash. Since that time all of these phenomena and processes have become known: the expansion of these empires as well as their internal structure, the movements and parties which they created, as well as the worldviews on which these movements were based and which determined their actions, have been subjected to exhaustive description. Despite these investigations, the last word on the nature of what Voegelin termed 'political religions' has still not been spoken. Convincing philosophical interpretations of the nature of the internal and external history of the modern mass movements have not yet appeared, and the task of placing them in a deeper historical perspective with relation to the history of human thought is, even today, a controversial task which is rarely undertaken. A renewed reading of Voegelin's own brief essay therefore recommends itself—especially since his interpretation, eschewing superficial moral judgments, seeks to penetrate to the very core, namely the religious roots, of the modern mass movements. It is important not to be put off by the terminology of the title of the essay: 'Political Religions'. Voegelin himself later acknowledged the problems of the term and remarked that he would no longer use the term 'religions'.3 More important than these early problems with terminology, is the level of understanding reached concerning the causes and motivations of the political mass movements of the 1930s. Voegelin's early essay remains important, because it grasped that the rise of the fascist and

2. See Eric Voegelin, Das Volk Gottes: Sektenbewegungen und der Geist der Moderne(zd. Peter J. Opitz; trans. Heike Kaltschmidt; Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1994); this contains a German translation of 'The People of God', Part Four, Chapter 3 in Eric Voegelin, History of Political Ideas. IV. Renaissance and Reformation (ed. David L. Morse and William M. Thompson; Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 22; Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), pp. 131-214. 3. Eric Voegelin, Autohiographische Reflexionen (ed. Peter J. Opitz; trans. Caroline Konig; Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1993), p. 69; in English, Autobiographical Reflections (ed. Ellis Sandoz; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), p. 51.

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communist movements was not merely a consequence of unconscionable politics and clever mass manipulation; rather, these movements' programmes also spoke to sentiments and exploited experiences which reside in the deepest layers of the human psyche. That attraction could be demonstrated by the fascination that the movements of fascism and communism held for many people at that time, a fascination whose structure Robert J. Lifton was later to identify in his psychological studies of the similar mass movement of Maoism.4 Voegelin's thesis—that the rise of the ideological mass movements were to a large extent founded on the religious needs of wide sections of the population, which these ideologies satisfied—was highly original at the time, and remains valid. For, despite his later terminological qualifications, he never revised his interpretation of the religious roots of the political mass movements. In saying this, however, it is important to note that Voegelin did not intend his interpretation to be monocausal, any more than Max Weber did when he drew attention to the nexus between the spirit of capitalism and the Protestant ethic. A second justification for beginning a reconstruction of Voegelinian thought with his Political Religions should be cited, which concerns the key position of this short essay in the development of Voegelin's complete works. To claim this is not to say that in and with this essay a breakthrough was made to new fundamental insights: Voegelin himself never allocated it such a significance. Nevertheless, the essay proved to be highly significant, as we may see from a retrospective consideration of the further development of his works. For the first time in this essay, the political mass movements are thematized and interpreted as an expression and symptom of a deep spiritual crisis of Western civilization. These two themes—mass movements and spiritual crisis—are taken up later in much more detail, not only in his History of Political Ideas? on which he commenced work soon after emigrating to the United States, and on which he worked until the 1950s; they also appear in The New Science of Politics and appear finally in the original plan of Order and History, whose last volume was to be devoted to the 'crisis of western civilisation'.6 4. Robert J. Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology ofTotalism: A Study of 'Brainwashing in China (London: Gollancz, 1961); Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Cultural Revolution (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1969). 5. Peter J. Opitz, 'Erste Spurensicherung: Zur Genesis und Gestalt von Eric Voegelins "History of Political Ideas'", in Eric Voegelin, Das Volk Gottes, pp. 132-56. 6. Eric Voegelin, Order and History. I. Israel and Revelation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956), p. x.

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In his Political Religions Voegelin also presented for the first time a certain type of universal-historical overview which is so characteristic of his later work. Whereas there it has taken on the form of a fully developed philosophy of history—whose theoretical foundations became explicit in 1956 in 'Mankind and History', the introduction to The World of the Polis—here it is merely a first sketch, in which the author hurries through the century in giant leaps, and with broad, sometimes crude brushstrokes draws philosophical-historical and political linkages timelapse style, in order to elucidate the philosophical-historical context and background of these earthly communities, the interpretation of which is the actual subject of the treatise. The significance of Political Religions, however, is not to be found so much in its thematic precepts and anticipation of later works. Rather it is to be found above all in the theoretical approach which informs the individual analyses of the essay and which provides their systematic interrelationship. At base, however, this approach is based on a new understanding both of 'polities' and 'religion' as well as of the relationship between the two arenas, which had already been present in earlier works of Voegelin's,7 but which is more precisely developed for the first time here and whose resilience to scrutiny is tested against historical material. In the years that followed it would be further clarified in the individual essays in the History of Political Ideas and above all in Voegelin's conversations and correspondence with Alfred Schiitz,8 and was eventually to be fully unravelled in the introductions to the first two volumes of Order and History? As the significance of Political Religions for the development of this theoretical approach is often overlooked, a knowledge of this approach is itself important for an adequate understanding of the treatise; thus, it would appear useful at this stage to elaborate its central elements and at

7. See in particular the Introduction to Eric Voegelin, Rasse und Staat (Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1933); translated into English as Eric Voegelin, Race and State (ed. Klaus Vondung; trans. Ruth Hein; Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 2; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998). 8. See the first part of Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis: Zur Theorie der Geschichte und Politik (Munich: R. Piper, 1966). 9. Eric Voegelin, Order and History, I, pp. 1-11; Order and History. II. The World of the Polis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957), pp. 1-24. German translations of the two introductions are to be found in Eric Voegelin, Ordnung, Bewusstsein, Geschichte: Spate Schriften—Eine Auswahl (ed. Peter J. Opitz; various translators; Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1988), pp. 19-27, 28-44.

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the same time to refer to a number of consequences for Voegelin's philosophy and its reception which result from it. Political Religions is divided into six chapters, of which the first formulates the 'problem', while the last summarizes the essay's conclusions in an 'Epilogue'. Together they form the systematic framework, and each supplements the other, in so far as the Epilogue is a form of response to the problem formulated at the outset. It is a highly personal response, in which Voegelin finally turns away from the positivistic political science and political understanding which for him are represented by Georg Jellinek, Max Weber, and above all his Viennese teacher, Hans Kelsen.10 These three—along with Hegel—are also the philosophers against whom the 'problem' is expounded: that of a concept of the state that understands it as an institution furnished with original power, where the absolute character of this power is not called into question and where the state is elevated to the level of a super-personal 'realissimum', to which the individual human being is assigned as a mere appendage of a superstructural whole, by which and for which, however, he is completely instrumentalized. Here also a crucial part of the problem is addressed: the elimination of the human 'person' in its indivisibility and proximity to God, which provides its worth and—in the Christian sense—its being, through its subsumption in an earthly collective, the 'state', which in relation to the 'realissimum of the spirit of the world' itself becomes in Hegel's philosophy of history—and this only serves to accentuate the problem—a mere instrument of a higher goal, the revelation of spirit. 'Man sinks before the realissimum of the state, people and state sink into the impersonal void of their instrumentality before the realissimum of world spirit.'11 This nullification, this obliteration of the 'person' for which the way is paved in the Hegelian system and in German political science, is one part of the 'problem' that Voegelin addresses and against which he rebels. The other part is the speculation itself, in which it comes about: the experiences upon which the obliteration is founded along with the attitude that 10. This aspect is discussed by Sandro Chignola in 'Fetischismus der Normen. Tra normativismo e sociologia: Eric Voegelin e la dottrina dello Stato', Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia del Diritto 70 (1993), pp. 515-65. See also Sandro Chignola, 'Presentazione', in Eric Voegelin, La political dai simboli alle esperienze L Le religioni politiche. 2. Riflessioni autobiografiche (ed. and trans. Sandro Chignola; Valori Politici, NS, 10; Milan: Giuffre, 1993), pp. 3-15. This book contains Italian translations of Political Religions and Autobiographical Reflections. 11. Voegelin, Diepolitischen Religionen, p. 15; Political Religions, p. 10.

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not only accepts this obliteration and sublimation of the individual in the 'super-personal realissimum', but that indeed seeks it, even yearns for it. For Voegelin this is a tendency which is at its heart religious, and which can only be interpreted as 'religious experience'—an interpretation that, however, requires an extension of the term 'religion' beyond that of high religion. The direction in which this extension tends is revealed in the discussion of the term 'religion' that ensues. In it, Voegelin accords 'human speciesnature' a central role right from the start. From the 'impulses of speciesnature' he then derives a broad spectrum of the most varied moods ranging from deepest despair to supreme bliss. The influence of Max Scheler on this anthropological fundament cannot be overlooked and is explicitly confirmed by Voegelin in a reference to his work Man's Place in the Cosmos (Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos). These 'impulses of speciesnature' do not merely call forth vague emotions, but rather they also create states of psychic tension which demand resolution. This initiates a search for the 'beyond'. Persons, conscious of their species-nature and disturbed and anxious because of it, can now struggle to identify themselves with this beyond. By this process they lose their loneliness, and find relaxation and calm. At the same time—depending on sensitivity, spirituality and impulse—essentially any arena of the world can serve the part of such a realissimum: 'Wherever something real can be viewed as something holy through religious experience it becomes that which is most real, that is, the realissimum.'12 However, whatever is experienced and accepted as the realissimum— worldly objects such as human beings, society, or nature, or supernatural entities, indeed the 'ultimate reason' itself—in each case becomes the kernel, the 'holy centre', upon which the person structures their entire existence, the whole reality which they experience and express in symbols and systems, in conceptions and views of the world. 'Worlds of symbols, linguistic signs and terms orientate themselves around the holy centre, attach themselves to systems, fill themselves with the spirit of religious excitement and are fanatically defended as the "correct" order of being.'13 The approach is clearly seen here which later—in a strongly differentiated form— would form the theoretical foundation of Order and History. This is the thesis that essential existential experiences belong to human behaviour. They are interpreted and arranged, moulded into symbols, forged into 12. Voegelin, Diepolitischen Religionen, p. 17; Political Religions, p. 13. 13. Voegelin, Die politischen Religionen, p. 17; Political Religions, p. 12.

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terms and finally fashioned into all-inclusive worldviews. These in their turn form both the structure of political systems and institutions, as well as the forms and strategies of personal and political action. The theoretician of social systems is, as a result, necessarily presented with the reverse path, or the contrary process: in order to lay bare the principles of the order of a society, he must make transparent the behaviour of the society in question, its institutions, but above all the symbolic orders in which it articulates its order, the worldviews which encompass them, and the essential experiences which lie at its base and reveal themselves through it. At the same time these 'principles' do not disappear into mere functionality, which ensure the survival of the society and the prosperity and peace of its members. Rather they are based in the end on those 'reality experiences' in which human beings gain the truth of their existence. However, as these experiences have vastly divergent reference points and also different levels of spiritual differentiation and transparency, every 'present', even the field of history in total, is characterized by a large number of such orders and representations of the truth of existence, which for the most part stand in sharp antagonism to one other and which compete with each other for social representation. The problem of 'spiritual representation' would later become the theme of the 1951 Walgreen Lectures on 'Truth and Representation' at the University of Chicago, from which grew The New Science of Politics. If Voegelin's analysis of the term 'state' had made it clear that essential religious experiences lie behind even its positivistic levelling and constraining, there thus results, vice versa, in his analysis of the term 'religion' its political implications. The meanings of both terms, the religious and the political, are thus seen to be produced by the antagonistic relationship in which they have stood in Europe since the start of the modern age, and are once again set in relation to one another through the elucidation of the 'closely related fundamental human forces' upon which they are based.14 Those who see in the sharp separation of religion and politics a specific achievement of the modern age will view this connection with mistrust and will try to interpret it as a risky and reactionary undertaking. Such an interpretation would be justified if a theocratically ordered society was the only, indeed the inevitable, consequence of such a unity. The development of the Anglo-Saxon democracies, in which both areas are admittedly clearly separated from one another but in which they are at the same time

14. Voegelin, Diepolitischen Religionen, p. 11; Political Religions, p. 5.

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co-referenced, and in a way in which they mutually supplement and support one another, shows that this is in no way the case. However such a mutual attribution may appear in individual historical cases, and however these may be best handled, one must always in each case bear in mind the empirical finding: that politics and religion—the latter in the broadest sense of the word, which Voegelin sketches in the Political Religions—are not two radically demarcated areas, but have a common root in human nature. This itself, again, forms a unity, which must be accepted as such. However, this is in the end also the 'result of the conclusion' that Voegelin draws in the 'Epilogue' and concluding section of the Political Religions, where he states that the life of man in the political community cannot be circumscribed as a secular area, in which we must only consider questions of legal structures and structures of power. The community is also an area of the religious order, and the recognition of a political condition is to a decisive degree incomplete if it does not incorporate within it the religious forces and the symbols in which they find expression, or which recognizes them but not as religious, but rather translates them into a-religious categories.

A neglect, or even a suppression, of this fact impairs not only the quality of theoretical analyses of social orders, but it also has important political implications, as it provokes dysfunction in societies whose order—partly due to so-called 'modernization processes'—threatens to be reduced to mere functionality. Religious and ethnic fundamentalism, which became prevalent in many regions of the 'south' at the end of the 1970s and which have appeared in the former communist societies of the 'east' since the start of the 1990s, is also to be understood as a reaction to compensate for encroaching losses of meaning. The same applies to the attraction that a large number of religious sects—often of the far eastern or the Christian fundamentalist genus—have for sections of the young in industrialized western societies. Their need for meaning in secularized and materialistic societies is, as this process shows, no longer adequately fulfilled. The term 'polities' as reinterpreted by Voegelin in Political Religions and enriched with religious elements corrects those abbreviations, incorporates deep psychological structures within it, and thus allows—as further demonstrated by his subsequent analysis of the 'political religions'—analyses of society that correspond more closely to reality than those positivistic political analyses which present themselves as empirical-analytical, 15. Voegelin, Diepolitischen Religionen, p. 63; Political Religions, p. 77.

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in which religious aspects are at best regarded as religious categories, but which are usually excluded altogether. However, the incorporation of experiences of transcendence within the term 'polities' brings with it a whole set of problems that again and again expose Voegelin to criticism and at the same time impair the reception of his analysis. For one thing, they provoke the thesis that Voegelin's thought is at its core not philosophical, but theological.16 This assertion—particularly when one considers that philosophy and theology in fact have a common root—is not incorrect. It applies in particular to the last decades of Voegelin's life, during which these religious dimensions of his thought come increasingly to the fore. It is, however, not the whole truth, to the extent that the material significance and methodological justification for the consideration of essential existential experiences, which are a central element of human nature and which therefore must also be reflected by a theory of politics, are seldom mentioned. It is easy therefore to gain the impression that we are dealing here less with a philosophy than with 'theological speculation'. Such an impression is unfounded: Just as Max Weber interpreted the cultural science which he propounded as a 'science of reality', Voegelin viewed himself as a strict empiricist. Furthermore, because he accepted the value beliefs of human beings and the reality experiences on which they were based similarly as 'real' and incorporated them into his analysis, whereas Weber had to a large degree evaded them or relegated them to the realm of the 'demonic', Voegelin considered his theory to be even more immersed in reality. This incidentally is one of the points at which Voegelin consciously distances himself from Max Weber—as a brief indirect reference to him shows.17 The incorporation of existential experiences threw up and continues to throw up, in addition, what is in fact the extremely awkward and difficult problem of their interpretation. The difficulty here has two layers: it initially presents itself to the theoretician himself, who must make transparent the empirically present symbolic orders, myths and images of the world based on experiences of reality. This demands a high degree of 16. See Hans-Christof Kraus, 'Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Ordnung: Theologische Spekulation als politische Philosophic bei Eric Voegelin', Criticon 120 (1990), pp. 177-81. 17. Voegelin, Die politischen Religionen, p. 13; Political Religions, p. 8. Cf. Peter J. Opitz, 'Max Weber und Eric Voegelin', in Volker Gebhardt, Henning Ottmann and Martyn P. Thompson (eds.), Politisches Denken: Jahrbuch 1992 (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1993), pp. 29-52.

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psychological sensitivity and can only be achieved by those who can themselves appeal to similar experiences of transcendence. If these conditions are not fulfilled, or if their interpretation is not carried out with the utmost intellectual probity, the very real danger exists of a slide into untenable and empty speculation. Secondly, this same difficulty confronts those who, conversely, wish to test the correctness of these interpretations, as this can essentially only be achieved through the application of a similar degree of sensitivity. At the end of the day this can only be tested through recourse to the sources and the existential experiences presented within them. Voegelin fully realized this problem, which also affects his conception of theory, and he grappled with them both—without succeeding in satisfying his critics, however.18 A third problem also results from the fact that in the further development of his concept of theory Voegelin did not limit himself to a simple incorporation and exposition of existential experiences, but increasingly concentrated on testing them for their reality and rationality and on setting them in relationship to one another. There emerge different types and levels of rationality, where the different levels of rationality result from the pervasion of reality structure in experiences.19 Within such a concept, a particularly high level of rationality is demonstrated by Jewish revelation, by Greek philosophy, and by Christian philosophy, which drew on both of these sources. AJ1 three represent a more or less radical break with the mythical-cosmological understanding of the world which preceded them, as a consequence of transcendence experiences in which the reason for existence is revealed as radically divine. One consequence of these experiences was to deprive the world of its divine nature, which for the first time

18. See also Eric Voegelin, Die neue Wissenschaft der Politik: Eine Einfuhrung (ed. Peter J. Opitz; trans. Use Gattenhof; Freiburg: Karl Alber, 4th edn, 1991 [1952]), pp. 99-105; in English, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), pp. 64-70. See also the letter of Voegelin to Alfred Schiitz of 1 January 1953 in Eric Voegelin, Alfred Schiitz, Leo Strauss and Aron Gurwitsch, Eric Voegelin, Alfred Schiitz, Leo Strauss und Aron Gurwitsch: Briefwechsel iiber 'Die Neue Wissenschaft der Politik'(td. Peter J. Opitz; Praktische Philosophic, 46; Freiburg: Karl Alber, 1993), pp. 105-20; in English, ' "On Christianity", Letter to Alfred Schiitz, 1 January 1953', in Peter J. Opitz and Gregor Sebba (eds.), The Philosophy of Order: Essays on History, Consciousness, and Politics (trans. G. Sebba; Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981), pp. 449-58. 19. These consequences can conversely be interpreted as lines of meaning, which then become the basis for a philosophy of history.

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permitted scientific inquiry in the modern sense. Another, earlier consequence was the formation of ontologies in which phases and structures of reality, rising out of inorganic being and culminating in a reason for existence which transcended the world, were formed. The development of his approach led Voegelin almost automatically towards classical Greek and Christian ontologies, and if he distanced himself from the dogmatic entrenchments that those systems experienced within the scholarship of later centuries and attempted to occupy counterpositions, he inevitably moved, through his recourse to classical and Christian philosophy, within range of the anti-metaphysical and anti-Christian criticism that has been prevalent since the Enlightenment and that has dominated the climate of thought within the social sciences. Against the background of this existentially charged concept of politics, the analysis of the 'political religions' becomes comprehensible, which in his essay Voegelin now carries out in the area of tension between the statement of the 'problem' and the 'Epilogue', and which in the end has the genesis and form of this 'earthly community' as its subject, which moves to the centre of the inquiry in Chapter 5. On first inspection a historical exposition is suggested here, beginning with the imperial theology of Akhenaton, then continuing with a large number of references to the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages, the start of the modern age, and finally leading to the fascist leagues and movements as the core of a new earthly ecclesia and at the same time new imperial organizations. A closer consideration shows that Voegelin's tendency is less historical than systematic in nature. Although the historical material does elucidate the wider spiritualhistorical horizon before which the phenomenon of the earthly community develops, the actual goal of the historical examples is to empirically shore up the core thesis of the hybrid religious-political nature of political communities and thus at the same time to make visible concrete modifications that history had produced using different symbolic formations— and therefore to develop a typology. This systematic intention becomes particularly clear in the elucidation of sacral symbols such as 'hierarchy', 'ecclesia', and 'apocalypse', with which the connection of the religious/divine with the human/political realm is expressed. Here the analysis is strongly orientated towards material, is 'objective' in the best sense of the word, and can also be followed by those readers who view the basic thesis with scepticism. The empirically available source material may be subject to various interpretations in its details, but it does confirm overall the serviceability of the religiously

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charged conception of politics that from now on would characterize Voegelin's work. Voegelin's attempt to produce an objective, material-based exposition of the processes which led first to the collapse of the Western ecclesia into individual state-based communities and eventually, following the decay of Christian substance in the course of an increasingly deep secularization, to the deification of earthly entities—nation, state, race or class—that now became reference points of a new earthly religiosity and gave substance, meaning and orientation to the individual, did not meet with universal agreement. In his foreword to the Stockholm edition of Political Religions, written in the United States, Voegelin defends his exposition of the worldviews and movements analyzed, and particularly his exposition of National Socialism, against the criticism that it was too objective and that the treatise lacked 'the definitiveness of judgment and condemnation' that his own opinion would place beyond doubt. The comment was an answer to Thomas Mann who, in a letter to Voegelin, had praised Political Religions as a Very stimulating, instructive and illuminating work', but had reproached its 'objectivity' and bemoaned the lack of'moral resistance'.20 In fact, Political Religions was not a manifesto in the conventional sense of the word. Only relatively late in it, specifically only in the last but most extensive main chapter, does Voegelin address the phenomenon of the 'earthly community'. And even this chapter initially concerns itself with the elucidation of important historical facts that led to the developments of the present. The analysis of these, too, is characterized by great sobriety and strict objective distance, which is adhered to even when the plane of symbolic forms is left behind and—within the logic of the new approach throughout—an ascent is made to 'impulses of the soul', 'from whose substance the symbols and historical reality of the earthly community are constructed'.21 Only in the concluding passages does the normative statement of opinion appear which, although it does not lack clarity, is in fact extremely brief. It is this undeniably Christian position from which Voegelin tackles the movement of earthly religiosity. From a dogmatic point of view this reveals itself to be a fall from God as a consequence of the deification of earthly entities, whereby the earthly community, like an earthly star moving in front of the sun, obscures the view of God's reality and thus pro20. Letter from Thomas Mann to Eric Voegelin of 18 December 1938 (Eric Voegelin Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Box 24, File 11). 21. Voegelin, Diepolitischen Religionen, p. 63; Political Religions, p. 77.

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vides a false image of total reality—with fatal consequences for human beings and for society. We would again encounter this same position a few years later in The New Science of Politics—though with an important difference: following the adoption of classical philosophy in the intervening period it was to take on a stronger philosophical hue and achieve greater consolidation. On the basis of classical philosophy, in particular the differentiated anthropology of Plato and Aristotle, Voegelin could now lay the foundations of his own 'new science'. A final point needs to be addressed: it relates to the motives lying at the heart of the formulation of Political Religions. These are addressed in the Foreword, in which Voegelin refers to the greater spiritual and spiritualhistorical environment, in which the phenomenon of National Socialism is grounded. He views this environment as being characterized by deep crisis, by 'a process of withering, which has its causes in the secularization of spirit, in the separation of a spirit which has thus become merely earthly from its roots in religiosity'.22 The diagnosis refers to its corresponding therapy: the reinstatement of the linkage between spirit and its religious roots. It is the task to which Voegelin dedicates himself from now on— first through a further elucidation of those physical forces and historical processes that led the Western world, in particular Europe, into this spiritual crisis; and secondly, through the search for paths out of the crisis. The latter occurs primarily through the development of a theory of consciousness, in which the being of human persons—the central reference point of every political order—is determined. The bloody collapse of the fascist and National Socialist movements in the Second World War was a first step, and the collapse of the communist regimes was a second step, on the way out of this crisis. Through these steps, an important turning point has certainly been reached, but in no way does this constitute the end of the spiritual crisis, which has become even deeper through the global proliferation of materialist civilization and whose dangers have grown still greater. To this extent Voegelin's Political Religions—read with reference to its central preoccupation—still has great relevance today.

22. Voegelin, Diepolitischen Religionen, p. 6; Political Religions, p. 3.

THE EXPERIENCE OF LIMITATION: POLITICAL FORM AND

SCIENCE OF LAW IN THE EARLY WRITINGS OF ERIC VOEGELIN Sandro Chignola (translated by Francesca Murphy)

1. Introduction 'The person is the experience of limits'.1 From the early 1930s Eric Voegelin proceeded from this awareness. The watershed and 'cutting point' (Schnittpunkf) of the dialectic between temporality and eternity, the order of the ontological relations experienced by the human spirit, will not allow itself to be marginalized. Only by putting the ontology of individuals into the wider context of an analysis of an order of reality that comprehends and controls them can one carry through the research that Voegelin dedicated to the Weberian theme of power (Herrschafi). Through the phenomenological analysis of consciousness in Augustine, Descartes and Husserl, Voegelin's political philosophy aims to dissolve the instinctual mechanistic assumptions (Triebmechanismus) through which the tradition—from Vierkandt to Spranger, from Weber to Scheler—analyzes the power/obedience relation. In political science, 'power' determines a sort of social bond between those who obey and those who command. The former interiorize the expression of the will of political power (Herrschafi) and act as if the

1. I take the citation from Eric Voegelin's unpublished Herrschaftslehre (Eric Voegelin Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Box 53, File 5), p. 7: 'Die Person, sagten wir, sei der Schnittpunkt von gottlicher Ewigkeit und menschlicher Zeitlichkeit; in ihr offenbart sich die Endlichkeit also das Wesen der Welt. Person ist die Erfahrung der Grenze, an der ein Diesseitig-Endliches sich gegen ein Jenseitig-Unendliches absetzt.' I owe a great debt to the courtesy of Professor Dr Peter J. Opitz, director of the Munich Eric-Voegelin-Archiv, for which I wish publicly to thank him. For manifold suggestions concerning this paper, I am also greatly indebted to Dr Geoffrey L. Price and to my brother, Dr Roberto Chignola. For the main lines of argument which follow, see Joachim Ritter, Uber den Sinn und die Grenze der Lehre vom Menschen (Potsdam: A. Protte, 1933).

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commanding will were of their own. The concept of power cannot therefore be studied solely in terms of politics. It should be investigated under the more general framework of ontology, where the notion of 'person' is made manifest and the aspects of social bonds can be analyzed. Under this perspective, power will appear as a limited phenomenon compared to the more important issue of order. If one examines it phenomenologically, 'power' by its nature exceeds legal forms and discloses a horizon of philosophical anthropology centred on the notion of the 'person'. Because of this, Voegelin insists on the theme of limits: the experience of the individual is bodily, fragmentary and earthly—the Augustinian *et meminisse me memini', which founds, in the enduringness of self-consciousness, the entrance of history into eternity. For this reason the whole journey of Voegelin's intellectual formation in the 1920s and 1930s is a formulation and a denunciation of a 'political science' (Staatslehre) considered in exclusively legal terms. Voegelin moves in this direction indirectly because the meditative analysis of consciousness follows a 'direction' (Richtung), but it is not directed to any preconstituted 'goal' (Ziel). His progress is indirectly and constitutively a turning to a transcendence of the world of immanence (which circumscribes a portion of the limits of human experience), a procession of consciousness as an irreducibile 'movement of soul' (Bewegung der Seele) that is carried out as the unveiling of an ontological order that transcends, by recapitulating within itself, the whole micro-system of law and politics: The path of meditation is established through the order of the world and culminates for the immanent world [das Diesseits] in a core, which is defined by means of the reorientation of the mind onto itself and ends with the clarification of being as that which, after overcoming the predicates and stuctures of present life, borders immediately on the immanent world. From the body to the soul, from the soul to the ego ipse, and from the ego ipse to God (if we leave out the intermediate stages), leads the path that has definitively found its end in the place which, after all that can be expressed 2 has been exhausted, is not a place in any clear, describable sense.

2. 'Der Gang der Meditation ist vorgeschrieben durch den Aufbau der Welt und gipfelt fiir das Diesseits in einem Kern, der durch die Rtickwendung des Geistes auf sich selbst definiert wird, und endet mit der Verdeutlichung des Seins, in dem die Pradikate und Strukturen des Diesseitigen aufgehoben sind, als jenem Sein, das an das Diesseitige unmittelbar angrenzt. Vom Korper zur Seele, von der Seele zum ego ipse, und vom ego ipse zu Gott (wenn wir die Zwischenstufen beiseite lassen), fuhrt der Weg, der eindeutig sein Ende gefunden hat, wo nach Erschopfung alles Aussagbaren

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The non-place of which Voegelin speaks coincides with the whole path of introspective meditation. It travels through the limits of expressibility without touching its extreme edges. The 'differentiating return of consciousness to itself (die Ruckwendung des Geistes aufsich selbsf) triggers a process of 'abolition' (Aufhebung) pointing to the search of the ground of being, which destroys the immanent order of history and the entire categorical system that expresses it. The immanent experience and the history of man is circumscribed and limited. It is circumscribed through its character of self-referentiality— since for Voegelin the structure of Western rationality itself has a 'finite' historicity and a historically recoverable genealogy—and is limited because it represents a simple fraction of an order of being of unfathomable depths, which Augustine found to coincide with God. Suspended between eternity and time, human beings constantly articulate their true experience of historicity and of politics. Interpreting its meaning with words, myths and symbols, the human centre of gravity is tacitly affiliated with philosophy or theology. It is certainly not exclusively tied to legal science (Rechtswissenschaft). This is so especially in times—and in academical and institutional places—in which the dominant doctrinal paradigm appears to turn to a sterile formal elaboration of system and of orders of law.3 The first stage of the journey of Eric Voegelin's thought was taken up in such a framework. Through his criticism of Kelsen's 'Pure Theory of Law' (Reine Rechtslehre) and his engagement with Weber's work, and through contacts with Max Scheler and with Carl Schmitt's Verfassungslehre (1928), this stage of the journey culminates in the non-juridical analysis of der Ort erreicht ist, der kein Ort in irgend einem anschaulichen Sinn mehr ist' (Herrschaftslehre, p. 3). 3. In the period 1919 to 1922 during which Voegelin was studying law in Vienna, the faculty of law was under the influence of Hans Kelsen and his school. The opinion of Voegelin on it is rather clear: 'Since in the conventional terminology of the time the field that Kelsen represented as a professor was Staatslehre (political theory), and since neo-Kantian methodology circumscribed by its method the logic of the legal system, Staatslehre-had to become Rechtslehre (theory of law), and everything that went beyond Rechtslehre could then no longer be a part of Staatslehre. That, of course, was an untenable position... It was obviously impossible to deal with the problems of the Staat, and of politics in general, while omitting everything except the logic of legal norms. Hence, my difference from Kelsen developed through my interest in the materials of a political science that had been excluded from Staatslehre understood as Rechtslehre' Eric Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections (ed. Ellis Sandoz; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), pp. 21-22.

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the mass movements of the 1930s and the religious symbolisms in which they were expressed. This led to Voegelin's Political Religions, published in 1938. From this point of view, Voegelin's formation has a strong appearance of continuity. Structured by an awareness of limits—which is the heart of an interpretation of the order of a finite, structured reality from the irreducible transcendence of its origin—the Voegelinian discourse concerning politics insists on beginning from the impossibility of 'self-transcendence'—such self-transcendence as appears to take place, for example, in the omnivorous pretence of rationalization in the Kelsenian Reine Rechtslehre, with its fetishism about norms,4 and in the immanentization of transcendent realities at work in the 'murder of God' (Dekapitierung Gottes) of Nazi totalitarianism.5 Politics is partly decisive but, because it is circumscribed by the human comprehension of order, it cannot pretend to get beyond the limits of its origin. It cannot make either transparent or rational the 'question' (Frage) that stands at the heart of the problem of power and of its pathogenesis: the permanence, as Voegelin said explicitly, of an unresolvable 'germ of evil' (Keim des Bosen) at the heart of every political form (das aller Macht anhaftef).6 Thus I shall argue that Eric Voegelin was forced to abandon the science of law—a further motivation being the tendency of current juridical antiformalism to move toward the totalitarian movements—and to begin progressively to move toward a more philosophical and historical interpretation of political symbols. When he began to make this transition in Political Religions, a consistent outcome was in view. After that, his reflection moved swiftly in the direction of an authentic and original philosophy of consciousness that centres on the experience of order and the dynamics of the process of the symbolization of history.

4. Eric Voegelin, Der autoritdre Staat: Bin Versuch uber das osterreichische Staatsproblem (Vienna: Springer, 1936), p. 157. In English, Voegelin, The Authoritarian State: An Essay on the Problem of the Austrian State (ed. Gilbert Weiss; trans. Ruth Hein; with historical commentary on the period by Erika Weinzierl; Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 4; Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), p. 219. On this point see Sandro Chignola, 'Fetischismus der Normen. Tra normativismo e sociologia: Eric Voegelin e la dottrina dello Stato (1924-1938)', Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia delDirittolti (1993), pp. 515-65. 5. See Eric Voegelin, Die politischen Religionen (ed. Peter J. Opitz; Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 3rd edn, 1993 [1938, 1939]), pp. 49-55. 6. Eric Voegelin, Herrschaftslehre, p. lOa.

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2. Anschluss and Exodus When, at the end of the 1930s, Voegelin decided to 'extend' the essay on Political Religions, certain bridges had already been crossed. Voegelin had already fully assumed the distance that by now separated him from his Austrian homeland. From the point of view of'place', he was preparing to emigrate to the United States—and, as we will see later, he was also distancing himself from the Austrian context theoretically and methodologically. The Nazi Anschluss of Austria became both the concrete reason for his flight from Vienna and the definitive cutting off point for Voegelin's first theoretical productions (the amazing particulars of his flight are narrated in his Autobiographical Reflections) 7 Voegelin lost the position that he held at the University of Vienna, and with it its purpose for public recognition of anti-Nazism. But what chiefly interests us now is to analyze the relation that the young Voegelin entertained with the tradition of German political science (deutsche Staatslehre), and to attempt to specify the theoretical motives that characterized Voegelin's dismissal of the discipline which he had cultivated in the first stages of his research. With Political Religions, Voegelin 'closed' one phase of work and, as it seems to us, opened another. Having gone as far as he could by taking the discipline of law to be methodologically central, he was disposed to investigate political reality from a radically different point of view: one that made it immediately and fully present to him—summarizing and going beyond the formal apriorism of the Pure Theory of Law8—through

7. For a reconstruction of Voegelin's overall biography, one may consult Ellis Sandoz, The Voegelinian Revolution: A Biographical Introduction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981); Gregor Sebba, Introduzione alia filosofiapolitica di Eric Voegelin (Rome: Astra, 1985); and Jurgen Gebhardt and Wolfgang Leidhold's summary 'Eric Voegelin', in Karl Graf Ballestrom and Henning Ottman (eds.), Politische Philosophic des 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1990), pp. 123-45. The essential line of Voegelin's biography—other than a presentation of his work and a complete bibliography—is exhaustively reconstructed in Gianfrancesco Zanetti, La trascendenza e I'ordine Saggio su Eric Voegelin (Bologna: Cooperative Libraria Universitaria, 1989). Voegelin's text Die politischen Religionen has been re-edited by Peter J. Opitz for Wilhelm Fink, Munich (see n. 5 above). An Italian translation may be found in Eric Voegelin, La politica: dai simboli alle esperienze. L Le religioni politiche 2. Riflessioni autobiografiche (ed. and trans. Sandro Chignola; Valori Politici, NS, 10; Milan: Giuffre, 1993). 8. Voegelin's relationship to Kelsen is very complex. Other than the pages dedi-

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recognition of the concreteness of the processes of identification that proceed through constitutional synthesis. Assuming this interpretative key, it is not important to verify the strength with which Voegelin now developed his analyses. It does not seem to me that this is the place at which we will recapture the force that his argument would eventually have. Rather, what I wish to do is summarily reconstruct the theoretical framework in which this work came together, to demonstrate the line of flight through which Voegelin liberated himself from the task of the 'reconstruction' of Staatslehre which had, for some time, represented itself to him as his theoretical vocation,9 and thus to interpret the 'turn' that made his mature work possible. Perhaps the modern, rationalist attempt to understand politics in exclusively juridical terms is impossible, except in a way that is dangerously 'empty' and structurally exposed to the risk of re-establishment in a totalitarian sense. This is Voegelin's important recognition, made in the middle of 1920s. For what is in question is the inexorable consummation of the crisis of modern political science, and the extreme extension of the latter through the neutralization and formalist exorcism of the concreteness of politics (das Politische). It is amid the scenario of this crisis that it is necessary, it seems to me, to place Voegelin's theoretical journey during the 1920s and 1930s. 3. Exceeding the Theory of Law: Toward a Reconstruction of Political Science The very early essay 'Reine Rechtslehre und Staatslehre' (1924), whose importance is shown by Voegelin's reference to it in his Autobiographical Reflections, testifies to a precocious reckoning of accounts. With this essay, though not in a completely mature form, Voegelin begins an enduring cated to it in his Autobiographical Reflections, one can look at Voegelin's 'Reine Rechtslehre und Staatslehre', Zeitschrift fur offentliches Recht 4 (1924), pp. 80-131; 'Kelsen's Pure Theory of Law', Political Science Quarterly 42 (1927), pp. 268-76; and Der autoritdre Staat, Chapter 6: 'Die Reine Rechtslehre Kelsens und das Problem einer osterreichischen Staatslehre', pp. 102-49 (in English, The Authoritarian State, Chapter 6: 'Kelsen's Pure Theory of Law and the Problem of an Austrian Theory of State', pp. 163-212). See also Dietmar Herz, Das Ideal einer objektiven Wissenschaft von Recht und Staat: Zu Eric Voegelins Kritik an Hans Kelsen (ed. Peter J. Opitz and Dietmar Herz; Occasional Papers, 3; Munich: Eric-Voegelin-Archiv, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat, 1997). 9. See Voegelin, 'Reine Rechtslehre und Staatslehre', p. 111.

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confrontation with Hans Kelsen. He fully recognizes, in fact, the power of the logical establishment of the normative 'machine' and describes with admiration the operational possibility of a theory of law constructed on the autonomy of legal principle (Rechtsat^, but Voegelin is from now on disposed to contest these presuppositions. He firmly denounces the limitations of the premises that permit Kelsen to restrict the jurisdiction of'theology' to a residue of anthropology. It is this premise that allows Kelsen to consider the State 'solely as the object of legal science', and that permits him to ignore the same element of the problem (as Voegelin explicitly states) regarding 'on what basis the State is able to be something different than a legal concept'.10 For Kelsen—and it is precisely this that creates great problems for Voegelin—the State and the legal order coincide at the point of the concept of sovereignty, leading back to a specific 'knowledge-sphere' (Erkenntnissphdre) of the science of law, which turns out to be a simple logical function, graspable in a simple 'observer hypothesis', 'from the outside' of the same political reality.11 Against this, Voegelin holds that most of the process of identification between the individual and the community cannot be simply re-described 'from the outside'. And this leads, above all, to the recognition of the decisive 'forming' (Gestaltung) of social relations thanks to the 'concretization' of the idea of community that made its conception possible. This recognition is what, within a few years, and indirectly, confirms the importance of Voegelin's debate with Kelsen, and turns into the 1933 books about the idea of race: Thus the idea of a community cannot be found anywhere except in the mind of the people belonging to the community and in their intellectual creations... The idea is real not only for the outside observer, but first and foremost for those living within it and creating it.12 10. Hans Kelsen, // problema delta sovranita e la teoria del diritto internazionale (trans. A. Carrino; Milano: Giuffre, 1989), p. 18. This is an Italian translation of Hans Kelsen, Das Problem der Souverdnitdt und die Theorie des Volkerrechts: Beitrag zu einer Reinen Rechtslehre (Tubingen: Mohr, 1920). See also Hans Kelsen, 'Gott und Staat', Logos: Internationale Zeitschrift fur Philosophic der Kulturll (1922-23), pp. 261-84. 11. Hans Kelsen, IIproblema della sovranita, pp. 24-25. 12. Eric Voegelin, Race and State (ed. Klaus Vondung; trans. Ruth Hein; Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 2; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), p. 120. In the original German: 'Die Idee einer Gemeinschaft also kann nirgends gefunden werden als im Geiste der Gemeinschaft zugehorigen Menschen und in ihren geistigen Erzeugnissen... Wirklich ist die Idee nicht fiir den Beobachter, der ausserhalb

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It is precisely this dense anthropological substrate—the making of ideas and of symbols that permanently reproduces the understanding that the community has of itself—that immediately necessitates Voegelin's methodological turn in the direction of a 'theory of ideas' (Ideenlehre), which will be more faithful to the specifically 'anthropological' quality of politics. It is through the process of'fulfilment' (Verwirklichung) of the idea— which takes place through the complex systems of acts of symbolization of order that make social bonds possible—that community makes itself concrete: 'Viewed objectively, the community is real as the realization of the idea.'13 And it is this same process—in which the difference between the subjective and the objective side of the consciousness of order is not presupposed; rather, the 'irruption of the idea' (Einbruchstelle der Idee) is analyzed in the concrete individual man—that destroys the possibility of a position like Kelsen's. In the much later 'What is Political Reality?' (1966),l4 Voegelin will return to this 'irruption of the idea' and re-elaborate the terms of this specific political reality. Political reality, constitutively a journey of a self-interpretative process that sediments symbols, myths and ideas of order, cannot simply be studied 'from the outside'; neither can it be compressed into select, formal terms. For Kelsen, however, the same 'attribution' of sovereignty to the system of the rules or to the State represents only a 'presupposition of consideration and of evaluation'—made from the outside and from a supposedly neutral point of view—on the reality of the rules. According to Voegelin, such a theoretical move excludes from consideration all those concrete political elements which, with the full weight of their 'richness of content' (inhaltliche Fiille), expand beyond Kelsen's reductionist methodology, and which are the stuff of the political experience of the community:

ihrer steht, sondern zuerst und vor allem fur den in ihr Lebenden und sie Erzeugenden.' Eric Voegelin, Rasse und Staat (Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1933), p. 120. On this point, see Thomas W. Heilke, Voegelin on the Idea of Race: An Analysis of Modern European Racism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), pp. 55-57. 13. Voegelin, Race and State, p. 120; Rasse und Staat, p. 121: 'Objektiv gesehen, ist die Gemeinschaft wirklich als Verwirklichung der Idee.' 14. Eric Voegelin, 'Was ist politische Realitat?', Politische Vierteljahresschrift: Zeitschrift der Deutschen Vereinigung fur Politische Wissenschaftl (1966), pp. 2-54; in English, 'What is Political Reality?', in Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis (ed. and trans. Gerhart Niemeyer; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978), pp. 143-213.

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Kelsen's scheme of a meta-grammatical universal rule of law, which also includes the sanction norm, undoubtedly accomplishes what it sets out to do: it systematically reduces the legal system to a single sentence type. However, it is not asserted that this scheme is the only one of its kind nor, that among a number of such schemes, precisely this one is distinguished by its particular correctness.

For Voegelin, politics deals with the mechanisms of the symbolic identification of social communities. These mechanisms cannot simply be evaluated 'from the outside' of the political system. Contrary to Kelsen's view, the political reality of the State must be studied in sociological terms from 'historical concrete social situations' (konkreten historischen sozialen Situationen),16 which provide the foundations of its legitimacy. It is really on the question of method that Voegelin is able to measure the limitations of Kelsen's Reine Rechtslehre, there is inevitably operative in Kelsen's thought a progressive superimposition of the problem of method because of his pregiven methodological presuppositions concerning Stoatslehre (political science) and Rechtslehre (theory of law). As Voegelin says: 'My difference from Kelsen developed through my interest in the materials of a political science that had been excluded from Staatslehre understood as Rechtslehre'.17 Once one has shown the limits of an exclusively logicalcategorical approach to the phenomenon of the State, one can postulate the necessity of a reconstruction of the doctrine of the State on a different basis—the necessity of a new kind of Staatslehre. This is not the place to discuss the legitimacy of Voegelin's approach. Nor can I discuss how it perhaps does not fully comprehend the organizing power of the normative 'machine' in relation to the political dynamism that, between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, created an increasingly consistent separation of society and State, which also comes

15. 'Das Kelsensche Schema eines metagrammatischen Gesamtrechtssatzes, der auch die Sanktionsnorm einschliesst, leistet zweifellos was es leisten soil: die systematische Reduktion des Rechtsgebietes auf einen einzigen Satztypus; dass aber dieses Schema das einzige seiner Art ist, oder dass unter mehreren gerade dieses durch besondere Richtigkeit ausgezeichnet ist, wird nicht behauptet.' Eric Voegelin, 'Zur Lehre von der Staatsform', Zeitschrift fur offentliches Recht 6 (1927), pp. 572-608 (593). 16. Voegelin, 'Zur Lehre von der Staatsform', p. 594. 17. Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections, pp. 21-22. The judgment of Voegelin expressed in Der autoritare Staat, p. 105, is that Kelsen's system stems from the 'Positivierung eines kantischen Gedankens'.

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about through juridical science.18 It is not within my purpose to note how far Voegelin's polemics are in danger of attacking a partially misunderstood or stereotyped Kelsenism. What interests us, rather, is the outcome: namely, that in opposition to these ideas, Voegelin begins to set out his own theoretical proposals. For Voegelin, the most obvious defect of Reine Rechtslehre is its methodological superstructure. The reduction that, under the guidance of the neo-Kantian hypothesis, reconfigures the legal order to a transparent 'knowledge-sphere' (Erkenntnissphare), achieves an effect of complete evanescence: it culminates in the loss of the reality of the State, which is not only the sum of a process of natural jurisdiction, an organized political constitutional form, and concrete processes identified only on the basis of markedly 'sociological' or anthropological presuppositions. Transformed thus into a 'legal concept', the State and the ample political phenomenology that express it both undergo a drastic simplification. As Kelsen says: The legal norm is positive (literally, 'set') insofar as it is posited within the system of a particular legal order which, in its turn, is constituted and unified by being grounded in the juridical hypothesis of the basic norm. The legal norm which finds its place within a system, so constituted, is positive.19

To begin from this basis means to radically redefine the status of Staatslehre and to make it univocally coincide with the formal analysis of Normlogik. For Voegelin, it is precisely this reduction that is scientifically unsustainble. He attacks it in many of his essays of the late 1920s. Already in 18. On this point, see the very important observations of Antonio Negri, in Fabbriche del soggetto (Livorno: Edizioni del XXI secolo, 1987), pp. 86-87. On the same topic, see also: Ernst Wolfgang Bockenforde, Staat und Gesellschaft (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1970); Werner Conze, 'Das Spannungsfeld von Staat und Gesellschaft im Vormarz', in Werner Conze (ed.), Staat und Gesellschaft im deutschen Vormarz (Stuttgart: Klett, 1970), pp. 207-69; Manfred Riedel, 'Gesellschaft, biirgerliche', in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland (8 vols.; Stuttgart: Klett, 1975), II, pp. 719-862; and Peter Koslowski, Gesellschaft und Staat: Ein unvermeidlicher Dualismus (Stuttgart: Klett, 1982). 19. 'Positiv, das heisst wortlich 'gesetzt', ist somit die einzelne Rechtsnorm, sofern sie in dem auf der juristischen Hypothese der Ursprungsnorm einheitlich gegriindeten System einer bestimmten Rechtsordunug gesetzt ist, innerhalb dieses so konstituierten Systems ihren Platz findet.' Kelsen, Das Problem der Souverdnitdt, Chapter 4, §23, p. 93.

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'Reine Rechtslehre und Staatslehre' (1924), Voegelin is able to affirm decisively that the reality of the State exceeds the measure of a 'pure' 'logical form' because, as he explicitly says, 'the State is not a knowledge-sphere'.20 This reality must be investigated as the 'product' of a richer logic of a 'symbolic' type—as when, in 'Zur Lehre von der Staatsform' (1927), Voegelin describes a hermeneutical model that takes constitutional reality to be the result of a constant process of actualization: the State again and again undergoes the actualization of its proper symbols of reference.21 By replacing the Kelsenian concept of a unity of a logical order with the concept of the 'unity of sense' (Sinneinheif), Voegelin attempts to satisfy a double need: from one side to 'substantialize' the analytic of law with a historical and sociological analysis of political power, and from the other side to withdraw from the omnipervasive grasp of Rechtslehre the problem of the analysis of the material constitution of the State. Discussing the limits of an exclusively legal classification of types of constitution, Voegelin expresses the necessity of this type of analysis. The forms of constitution are not merely legal organs but symbolic expressions determining and conditioning politics as a whole. Voegelin introduces evidence that the structural elements expunged from the normative formalization of law—elements such as values, symbols and ideas, which for Kelsen are simply 'forms of representation', and not authentic 'contents' of reality22—operate concretely in the process of the constitutional definition of the character of the State. By taking this path, Voegelin sought to accept engagement with the reality that he would later say is fundamental to the constitutional synthesis. 'Symbol' and 'legal content' must, for him, stand in a proper relation to the foundation?^ From this point of view, by not showing himself immediately to be disposed to recognize an added value in the State, Voegelin assigns the task of giving an account of the identifications that forge constitutional bonds between the individual and the political community to a sort of'sociology of ideas' in the form of a 'theory of symbols' 20. 'Der Staat ist keine Wissenschaftssphare.' Voegelin, 'Reine Rechtslehre und Staatslehre', p. 123. 21. This, summarized to within an inch of its life, is the outcome of Voegelin's analysis in 'Zur Lehre von der Staatsform', in particular pp. 600-608. 22. See Kelsen, 'Gott und Staat'. 23. Voegelin, 'Zur Lehre von der Staatsform', p. 600: 'Symbol und Rechtsinhalt stehen nicht im Verhaltnis von Gegenstand und Merkmal zueinander, sondern in dem der Fundation'.

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(Symbollehre): cln the sphere of the historical event the symbol is the more or less appropriate expression of the idea: an expression that, taken psychologically, builds itself up in the value judgment, which belongs to the individual within the state.'24 This has important consequences. First, the 'anchoring' (Verankerung) of the doctrine of the State in what Voegelin calls a 'theory of ideas' (Ideenlehre) brings about a definitive de-legalization of political science. In other words, it obliges one to assume the social relevance of the phenomena of the actual identification of complexes of symbols and 'evaluations' (Wertungen) that structure, each time in a different way, the 'unity of sense' (Sinneinheif) that is the State. And secondly, through this route one makes possible a methodological opening that enables one to analyze the State in its proximity to other forms of culture, in the pursuit of a more ambitious project of systematic 'social philosophy' (Gesellschaftsphilosophie)? 4. A Crisis of Politics and a Crisis of Science One barely needs to point out that this 'methodological' necessity simultaneously expresses both a strong inclination and a decisive political option. In the following years, after the first stay in America and the year spent in France, and after the publication of the two volumes on the 'Race Idea' (Rassenidee)26 —which come closer to an anthropologically oriented 24. 'Das Symbol ist in der Sphare des historischen Geschehens der mehr oder minder adaquate Ausdruck der Idee; ein Ausdruck der sich, psychologisch angenommen, aufbaut in den Wertungen den einem Staat angehorenden Individuen.' Voegelin, 'Zur Lehre von der Staatsform', p. 602. 25. Voegelin, 'Reine Rechtslehre und Staatslehre', p. 131. For a different perspective on the theme of a 'geitesgeschichtlich argumentierende Begriindung einer neuen Theorie der Politik in Voegelin in the late 1930s, see Dietmar Herz, 'Der Begriff der "politischen Religionen" im Denken Eric Voegelins', in Hans Maier (ed.), Totalitarismus und politische Religionen: Konzepte des Diktaturvergleichs (Padeborn: F. Schoning Verlag, 1996), pp. 191-209. On the same theme, see also Jiirgen Gebhardt, The Vocation of the Scholar', in Stephen A. McKnight and Geoffrey L. Price (eds.), International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Eric Voegelin (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), pp. 10-34. 26. Voegelin, Rasse und Staafi, and Eric Voegelin, Die Rassenidee in der Geistesgeschichte von Ray bis Cams (Berlin: Junker and Diinnhaupt, 1933). In English, Voegelin, Race and State; and Eric Voegelin, The History of the Race Idea from Ray to Cams (ed. Klaus Vondung; trans. Ruth Hein; Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 3;

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model of political science—Voegelin confronted the constitutional dynamism of the authoritarian State.27 And on this occasion Kelsen returns to the scene as a direct target of polemical reference. The volume, which reconstructs the constitutional history of Austria beginning from the crisis of the Empire, analyzes the 'administrative style' of the Austrian monarchy and its coherence in relation to Kelsen's model, and denounces the weakness and the political impotence of both the one and the other: We are confronted with the mystery of why people in full possession of their mental powers should comply with a 'norm', a 'constitutional norm' that has no other legitimation than the basic norm. For pure theory of law the problem of legal continuity is reduced to the demand that a 'norm' should be obeyed; the 'norm' becomes a fetish—and we are faced with the task of wresting a meaning from this seemingly incomprehensible fetishism.28

What is in question is the possibility of tracing a line of development, from the passage of heredity monarchy to the constitutional reality of 1933, enabling one definitively to deal with Reine Rechtslehre by confronting the theoretical style with the structural processes and the constitutional dynamism of the authoritarian State—and all this with the aim of denouncing the delay and weakness with which the public-law paradigm of the Pure Theory of Law faced the transition of 1933, namely, the transformation of a parliamentary democratic regime into that of an 'authoritarian State', and the decisive overcoming of politics, on the part of the latter, with the 'administrative style' that was the legacy of the Habsburg monarchy. The Pure Theory of Law, with its analysis of the 'machine' of the State and its intrinsic operational rationality, is recognized by Voegelin as the Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998). On this theme, see Heilke, Voegelin on the Idea of Race. 27. Voegelin, Der autoritare Staat (The Authoritarian State}. On this point, which here I can only note briefly, allow me to recommend my own Pratica del limite: Saggio sulla filosofiapolitica di Eric Voegelin (Padua: Unipress, 1998), Chapter 2. 28. Voegelin, The Authoritarian State, p. 216. In the original German: 'Wir stehen vor dem Ratsel, warum im Vollbesitz ihrer geistigen Krafte befindliche Menschen eine 'Norm' eine 'Verfassungsnorm', die durch nichts legitimiert ist als durch die Grundnorm, befolgen sollen. Das Problem des Rechtskontinuums lost sich fur die reine Rechtslehre in die Forderung auf, dass eine 'Norm' befolgt werden soil; die 'Norm' wird zu einem Fetisch—und wir stehen vor der Aufgabe, diesem anscheinend unbegreiflichen Fetischismus einen Sinn abzugewinnen.' Voegelin, Der autoritare Staat, p. 153. On this theme, see my own 'Fetischismus der Normen'.

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reigning constitutional science in Austria (die herrschende Verfassungslehre) because of the immediate rapport that bound Kelsen's analytic of Normlogik to the intervening administration which had exhaustively defined the formal constitution of the Habsburg Empire.29 In Der Autoritare Staat, Voegelin analyzes this complete mutuality of style and intent, together with the political weaknesses of both. Perhaps at the price of confusing theory and concrete practical politics—and of 'betraying' the philosophical tenet of keeping 'theory' and 'praxis' apart—the constitutional structure put in place by Dollfuss's 'authoritarian direction' (autoritdren Kurs) was given the task of initiating the auspicious process of renovating this same constitutional science (Staatslehre). During the rest of the 1930s Voegelin developed this project. The criticism of Kelsen's formalism was accompanied by a denunciation of the political weakness of the Austrian monarchy in its confronting of the process of transition toward a nation-State.30 A constitutional reality had come into being which it had now became necessary to defend on two flanks. It had to be defended from ideological aggression—which Voegelin retrospectively called Nazism and Social Democracy—and, above all, from the risk of the same metamorphosis into Administration which, in keeping with Austrian constitutional history, had immediately weakened and delegitimized the new State, although Voegelin considered this State to be

29. Voegelin, The Authoritarian State, p. 51: 'And the dominant constitutional theory of this political construct, pure theory of law, manifests—as ideal type—the traits we have just shown to be those of the "administrative style".' In the original German: 'Und die herrschende Verfassungslehre dieses politischen Gebildes, die reine Rechtslehre, zeigt in idealtypisch vollkommener Weise die Ztige, die wir eben als die des administrativen Stils herausgearbeitet haben.' Voegelin, Der autoritare Staat, p. 3. On the legal theory and the administration in Austria in the immediate postwar years, see Bernardo Sordi, Tra Weimar e Vienna: Amministrazione pubblica e teoria giuidica nelprimo dopoguerra (Milano: Giuffre, 1987). On this theme, see also Richard Tur and William Twining (eds.), Essays on Kelsen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 30. See Eric Voegelin, 'Die osterreichische Verfassungsreform von 1929', Zeitschrift fur Politik 19 (1930), pp. 568-615; and Volksbildung, Wissenschaft und Politik', Monatsschrift fur Kultur und Politik 1 (1936), pp. 594-603. On this point, see also Jiirgen Gebhardt, 'Zwischen Wissenschaft und Religion: Zur intellektuellen Biographic E. Voegelins in den 30er Jahren', in Karl Graf Ballestrom, Volker Gerhardt, Henning Ottmann and Martyn P. Thompson (eds.), Politisches Denken: Jahrbuch 1995/96 (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1996), pp. 283-304 (301-302).

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the centre of the authoritative stabilizing of conflict and as the hinge of concrete national unification. From this point of view, many lines of continuity are present in Voegelin's first works and they partly defend the thesis that Voegelin many years later brought forward in order to assist in the correct interpretation of Austro-Fascist theory. To justify this interpretation (which goes well beyond the single case of the 1936 volume) on the basis of the concrete situation that would be determined by the Anschluss—for Voegelin preferred a fascist Austria to the 'worse evil' represented by Hitler31—we will have to evaluate and take seriously the stages of his journey through the field of'political science' (Staatslehre). Voegelin's abandonment of the prospect of its 'renewal' would otherwise remain incomprehensible. The problem regards, above all, the progressive 'obsolescence' of this perspective. The legal non-formalism supported by Voegelin by now has had to intimately engage the Nazi ideology that has brought Germany to conquer Austria and to destroy its parliamentary institutions. Once Voegelin has seen in the Anschluss the political defeat of the genuine political option, he does not remain cut off in the role of the detached investigator of symbolic processes, but returns to the science of politics as the ground of the mechanism of self-understanding that creates political identity. The analysis of 'leadership' (Filhrerschafi) conducted in Political Religions radicalizes this new perspective. Abandoning the possibility of intervening in the statutes of Staatslehre to create public law—and it may seem to us that it is in this light we should read Voegelin's ambivalent judgments about the work of Carl Schmitt, whose concepts, notwithstanding their non-formalism, are for Voegelin 'still under the restraint of the collective idea and not completely separated from the world of legal thought'32—Voegelin dedicated himself, 31. This view is expressed in Autobiographical Reflections, p. 40. 32. '...noch im Zwang der Einheitsvorstellungen und losen sie sich nicht ganz aus dem juristischen Denkraum'. Eric Voegelin, 'Die Verfassungslehre von Carl Schmitt: Versuch einer konstruktiven Analyse ihrer staatstheoretischen Prinzipien', Zeitschrift fur offentliches Recht 11 (1931), pp. 89-109 (99). Voegelin's complex criticism of Schmitt's role as 'political theorist' (politischer Theoretiker] of law is very much connected to the progressive absorption of science by practical politics, such as came about during the crisis of the Weimar Republic. On the relation between Voegelin and Schmitt, see also Sandro Chignola (ed. and trans.), 'Eric Voegelin-Carl Schmitt: Un carteggio inedito (lettere 1931-1955)', Filosofiapolitica 1 (1991), pp. 141-51. On this theme, see also Giuseppe Duso, 'Die Krise des Staates als Rechtform und die politische Philosophic: Eric Voegelin und Carl Schmitt', unpublished paper presented at the

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with great intellectual honesty and enviable alacrity, to the task of nonpolitical comparative analysis of symbolic phenomena. Although the Schmittian sociology of legal concepts is programmatically 'open' in the direction of the 'origin', Schmitt remains for Voegelin too immediately bound to the dynamism of the 'production' of modern political forms. From this point of view, although the concept of'representation' (Reprdsentation) in Schmitt's Verfassungslehre (1928)33 is theoretically coherent with the process of the 'making visible of ideas' (Sichtbarmachung der Idee) of which Schmitt speaks in Romischer Katholizismus undpolitische Form (1925) and in other early writings,34 he could only have succeeded in realizing this theoretical potential by freeing himself from the logic of legal categories that translate the complex phenomenology of politics into statutes. For Schmitt, the jurist, the origin of the constitutional form and obligation is joined to the question of the foundation of political power. And this will end in the drastic reduction of this

'Zweites Internationales Eric-Voegelin-Symposium', at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat, Munich, 9/10 December, 1993; Giuseppe Duso, 'Filosofia pratica o pratica della filosofia? La ripresa della filosofia pratica ed Eric Voegelin', in Giuseppe Duso (ed.), Filosofia politica e pratica delpensiero: Eric Voegelin, Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt (Milan: Angeli, 1988), pp. 159-92; Chignola, Pratica del limite, Chapter 2; Carlo Galli, Genealogia della politica: Carl Schmitt e la crisi del pensiero politico moderno (Bologna: II Mulino, 1996), pp. 396-98; and Mendo Castro Henriques, A Filosofia Civil de Eric Voegelin (Lisbon: Universidade Catolica Editora, 1994), pp. 37-40. For the importance of the relation between Voegelin and Schmitt in the context of the Italian reception of Voegelin, see Giuseppe Duso and Sandro Chignola, 'Die Rezeption Voegelins in Italien: Ein neuer Weg der politischen Philosophic', Zeitschrift fur Politik 37 (1990), pp. 394-403. The same criticism that Voegelin makes of Schmitt is levelled by others against Voegelin. See Richard Faber, 'Eric Voegelin: Gnosis Verdacht als polit(olog)isches Stratagem', in Jacob Taubes (ed.), Gnosis und Politik (Religionstheorie und Politische Theologie, 2; Munich, Padeborn, Zurich, Vienna: Ferdinand Schoning/Wilhelm Fink, 1984), pp. 230-48; and Richard Faber, Der PrometheusKomplex: Zur Kritik der Politotheologie Eric Voegelins und Hans Blumenbergs (Wiirzburg: Konigshausen and Neumann, 1984). 33. Carl Schmitt, Verfassungslehre (Berlin: Dunker and Humbolt, 1928). 34. Carl Schmitt, Romischer Katholizismus und politische Form (Munich: Theatiner Verlag, 1925); 'Die Sichtbarkeit der Kirche: Eine scholastische Erwagung', Summa 1 (1917-1918), pp. 71-80. On this theme, see Giuseppe Duso, 'La rappresentazione e 1'arcano dell'idea: Introduzione a un problema di filosofia politica', in Duso, Rappresentanza: un problema di filosofia politica (Milan: Angeli, 1988), pp. 13-54; Galli, Genealogia della politica, pp. 333-46; and Michele Nicoletti, Trascendenza e potere: La teologia politica di Carl Schmitt (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1990).

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same phenomenology to a single aspect—the legal—and in the flattening of questions about 'exceeding the origin' with regard to the genesis of the history of modern political forms. In Voegelin's opinion, Schmitt essentially remains tightly bound to an interpretation of the State as a mere legal 'type-concept' (Typenbegriff) ?^ In other words, Schmitt is much too heavily burdened with the weight of the institutional-legal element. Schmitt played two roles at the time of the Weimarian crisis, using the overlap and exchange (Verwechslung) of the two as a medium through which to interpret contemporary events, and his closeness to the existential matrix of the process of political unity perhaps makes him suspect: 'Schmitt approaches the problem of the State not as an external observer, but as someone who stands inside the State as an inventor of political ideas.'36 If Schmitt's Verfassungslehre redeems itself from the exteriority of the 'formal approach' (allrechtliche)—and this is what Voegelin most values in Schmitt's theory—his 'immanence' within the constitutional and political debate of the Weimar era prejudices his scientific detachment. In fact, according to what Voegelin says about him, Schmitt sums up a type of 'self-criticism' regarding the role of the legalist: he 'takes the constitution as it is and explores the spaces of its ideas, by which he is embraced. He never leaves this space, but remains immanent within its ideal vault.'37 This is precisely the point at which theory turns into concrete practical politics. Remaining immanent within its proper object, the scientific point of view risks confusing itself with being, and of making the hard work of criticism of concepts collapse into the production of ideology. It is just this 'collapse' that gives birth to modern political science. In this—beginning from the Hobbesian foundation, which reduces the problem of justice to that of the coherence of a formal deduction of a model taken to be exact—classical politike episteme turns into political theory directed to the production and organization of action. The 'just' order becomes that which most adequately fits the rational model, which must be organized in 35. Voegelin, 'Die Verfassungslehre von Carl Schmitt', p. 97. 36. 'Schmitt nahert sich den Staatsproblemen nicht als Beobachter von aussen her, sondern steht selbst im Staat als Schopfer politischer Ideen.' Voegelin, 'Die Verfassungslehre von Carl Schmitt', p. 107. 37. '...nimmt die Verfassung, wie sie vorliegt, und schreitet den Raum der Ideen ab, von dem er wie sie umfasst wird. Er verlasst diesen Raum nie, sondern arbeitet immanent dessen idealtypisches Gewolbe heraus.' Voegelin, 'Die Verfassungslehre von Carl Schmitt', p. 107.

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practice according to pregiven normative prescriptions of theory. As Hobbes writes: 'For though in all places of the world, men should lay the foundation of their houses on the sand, it could not thence be inferred, that so it ought to be. The skill of making, and maintaining Commonwealths, consisteth in certain Rules, as doth Arithmetique and Geometry; not (as Tennis-play) on Practise onely'.38 It is this overwhelming of theory by practice against which Voegelin reacts, with a sort of Nietzschean 'dissolving cruelty of intellectual conscience',39 in the 1930s. The restoration of politike episteme includes the introduction of the model of departure and of uninterrupted interrogation proper to philosophical zetesis—which, to occur successfully, must avoid giving the appearance that Voegelin is presenting his analysis as an immediately 'therapeutic' key for the political crises of modernity. Against every form of totalitarianism Voegelin opposes the strength of critical thought. Reopening the philosophical question of 'right' and 'good'—which is endless since it cannot be translated into the totalitarian dream of gaining the right order that ends history—philosophy assumes the task of understanding and criticizing every form of politics: 'In Plato's immediate environment the sophist is the enemy and the philosopher rises in opposition to him.'40 For Voegelin, philosophy is thus inadequate to solve crises— including the crisis of political science—but is rather elaborated beginning from the critical differentiation of each historical form of politics and of each doxic form of knowledge.41 In the years in which Voegelin was criticizing legal formalism and Schmitt, the compression of science into practical politics, and the yielding of theory to practice, are to be found the ciphers, the icons, of the failure of his effort to recover the 'pre-juridical' structure of theory of law 38. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), Part II, Chapter 20, p. 261. 39. Eric Voegelin, 'Nietzsche and Pascal', Nietzsche Studien 25 (1996), pp. 128-71 (153): 'From the fatality of the fundamental will there is no salvation; only its specific manifestations can be broken by the dissolving cruelty of intellectual conscience.' This essay also appears as the final chapter in Eric Voegelin, History of Political Ideas. VII. The New Order and Last Orientation (ed. Jtirgen Gebhardt and Thomas A. Hollweck; Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 25; Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), pp. 251-303(281). 40. Eric Voegelin, Order and History. III. Plato and Aristotle (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957), p. 63. 41. This is the very trace that guided my research on Voegelin. See Chignola, Pratica del limite, in particular Chapters 3 and 4, and Appendixes 1 and 3.

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(Rechtslehre). With its 'saturation' by unrefined Nazi symbols, the opportunity for true political science (Staatslehre) declined—the only space left being that of the formalism of the Pure Theory of Law, in which Schmitt was hopelessly entangled—and Voegelin's project of a 'theory of symbols' (Symbollehre) of constitutional phenomena began slowly, but surely, to develop in the direction of the history of ideas.

5. Politics and History Decisive to this development is the maturing of Max Weber's influence.42 Voegelin, who was attracted to the discipline of history, learned from Weber the detachment proper to a science of politics and the methodological need for a comparative analysis of cultural phenomena. This same detachment can be misinterpreted as a conniving with that which is taken as the object of research, as Voegelin's 'Preface' introducing the essay on Political Religions testifies: If my presentation awakens the impression that it is too 'objective', and 'campaigns' for National Socialism, then it seems to me that this is a sign that the presentation is a good one—for the Luciferian is not just a moral negative, a horror, but rather a force and indeed a very attractive force. The presentation would be bad if it called forth the impression that it only had to do with a morally insignificant, stupid, barbaric, despicable matter. The fact that I do not regard the force of evil as a force of good is evident from this treatise to anyone who is not insensitive to religious questions. 42. See Eric Voegelin, 'Uber Max Weber', Deutsche Vierteljahmchriftfilr Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 3 (1925), pp. 177-93 (178-83); 'Max Weber', Kolner Vierteljahreshefte fur Soziologie 9 (1930), pp. 1-16; 'Die Grosse Max Webers', in Eric Voegelin, Ordnung, Bewusstsein, Geschichte: Spate Schriften—Eine Auswahl(ed. Peter J. Opitz; Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1988), pp. 78-98. An English translation of the latter may be found as Chapter 8, The Greatness of Max Weber', in Eric Voegelin, Hitler and the Germans (ed. and trans. Detlev Clemens and Brendan Purcell; Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 31; Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), pp. 25773. On the relation between Voegelin and Weber, see, among numerous writings, Luigi Franco, 'Voegelin e Weber: ambiguita e trasparenza', // Mulino 35 (1986), pp. 775-97; Peter J. Opitz, 'Max Weber e Eric Voegelin', Filosofia politica 7 (1993), pp. 109-27; Peter J. Opitz, 'Nachwort: Max Weber und Eric Voegelin', in Eric Voegelin, Die Grosse Max Webers (ed. Peter J. Opitz; Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1995), pp. 105-33. The most thorough work is perhaps still William G. Petropulos, 'Die Rezeption von Max Weber in der politischen Philosophic von Eric Voegelin', MA dissertation, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat, Munich, 1984. 43. Eric Voegelin, Political Religions (trans. T.J. DiNapoli and E.S. Easterly III;

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Reconsidering this passage in 1973, Voegelin himself says he was motivated by the 'methodological' perspective of Political Religions which would later be abandoned.44 His belief in the possibility of investigating the political reality of Nazism and, more generally, of all 'political collectivism', as Voegelin called it, by tracing the line of continuity between the complex symbols that permeate the most diverse political experiences in history, will rapidly fade. And because of this Voegelin will give up trying to finish his History of Political Ideas.45 But in Political Religions there also appears to Voegelin the possibility of holding together, in the name of the homogeneity of the symbolic substrate that recurs in all political experience, phenomena like late mediaeval apocalypticism and the religious movement of Akhenaton in ancient Egypt, Hobbes's Leviathan and Gerhard Schumann's Lieder vom Reich, Dante's De Monarchia and some of the elements of 'light-metaphor' (LichtmetaphoriK) implicit in the Nazi ideology of 'leadership' (Fiihrerschafi)—and this perspective brings something new into the discussion. Its value is verified beginning from the second half of the 1950s, and it is this same journey that leads Voegelin to engage in the elaboration of a true philosophy of consciousness.46 Toronto Studies in Theology, 23; Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1986), p. 4. In the original German: 'Wenn meine Darstellung den Eindruck erweckt, als sei sie zu 'objektiv' und 'werbe' fiir den Nationalsozialismus, so scheint mir dies ein Zeichen dafiir zu sein, dass sie gut ist—denn das Luziferische ist nicht schlechthin ein sittliches Negativ, ein Grauel, sondern eine Kraft, und zwar eine sehr anziehende Kraft; und die Darstellung ware schlecht, wenn sie den Eindruck hervorriefe, als handle es sich nur um eine sittlich minderwertige, dumme, barbarische, verachtliche Angelegenheit. Dass ich die Kraft des Bosen nicht fiir eine Kraft des Guten hake, geht fiir jeden , der fiir religiose Fragen nicht stumpf ist, deutlich aus dieser Abhandlung hervor.' Voegelin, Diepolitischen Religionen, p. 7. 44. See Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections, pp. 50-51. 45. See Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections, Chapter 17: 'From Political Ideas to Symbols of Experience', pp. 62-69. On this point, see Peter J. Opitz, 'Erste Spurensicherung: Zur Genesis und Gestalt von Eric Voegelins "History of Political Ideas" ', in Volker Gerhardt, Henning Ottmann and Martyn P. Thompson (eds.), Politisches Denken: Jahrbuch 1993 (Stuttgart: J.B. Mentzler, 1993), pp. 135-56; and Peter J. Opitz, 'Metamorphosen eines Konzepts: Anmerkungen zum Aufbau und zur konzeptionellen Entwicklung von Eric Voegelins "History of Political Ideas'", in Eric Voegelin, Die spielerische Grausamkeit der Humanisten: Studien zu Niccolb Machiavelli und Thomas Morus (ed. Peter J. Opitz; trans. Dietmar Herz; Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1995), pp. 123-55. 46. See, again, the significant Chapter 17 (pp. 62-69) in Autobiographical Reflections: 'The pattern, then, cracked along other lines. I had written my History of Political

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Concentrating on human consciousness as the place of the originary experiences of the order (or the disorder) of reality upon which turn all interpretations of the reality of being—and of which, obviously, political and social order represent a simple articulation—Voegelin finds a way of arriving at a philosophy of history emancipated from a superimposed 'continuity'.47 Only now, with this transition of focus from the 'idea' to the 'experience' of reality, expressed by means of the idea time and time again, does Voegelin become fully aware of the necessity of setting aside the project of a history of ideas for the struggle of dedicating himself to a real 'philosophical inquiry' into human history.48 6. Drawing Conclusions Thus, the essay Political Religions—as the Autobiographical Reflections, which recalls its creation, shows—represents a transitional stage and a sort of'bridging work'. For all of the 1920s and 1930s Voegelin worked over the ground of political science (Staatslehre), looking at it from a sociological and an thro Ideas well up into the nineteenth century. Large chapters on Schelling, Bakunin, Marx, and Nietzsche were finished. While working on the chapter on Schelling, it dawned on me that the conception of a history of ideas was an ideological deformation of reality. There were no ideas unless there were symbols of immediate experiences (p. 63). Voegelin elaborates a proper philosophy of consciousness especially in Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis: Zur Theorie der Geschichte und Politik (Munich: R. Piper, 1966). On this point see Sandro Chignola, 'Ordine e ordinamento della storia: Note sulla filosofia della conscienza in Eric Voegelin', HMulino 35 (1986), pp. 749-74. 47. Voegelin's most important contribution to this conception is 'Configurations of History', in Paul G. Kuntz (ed.), The Concept of Order (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968), pp. 23-42. See p. 41: 'Therefore mankind does not exist, and cannot be the subject of history. It is not an empirical object. This would suggest, therefore, that ultimately the subject can only be Being in the most general sense, Being itself; that everything that happens and which we call history, including our idea of mankind, is a happening in Being itself, which is behind all specific things and all specific happenings. This means that the subject matter, the matter in which all these formal elements occur, is not a datum, and that the classical metaphysical categories of form and matter do not apply at all. But in this way the subject disappears, and we have left only relations.' This essay has been reprinted in Eric Voegelin, Published Essays, 1966-1985 (ed. Ellis Sandoz; Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 12; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), pp. 95-114 (113). 48. See Eric Voegelin, Order and History. I. Israel and Revelation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956), p. xiv.

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pological perspective, preparing to 'extend' this same perspective in the interpretation of Nazism (or of political collectivism), and above all to investigate the form by which cultural ideas enter political reality (Kulturobjektivatiori). The analytic efforts of the 1930s to integrate the doctrine of the State with a 'theory of symbols' (Symbollehre) defined in a 'sociological' (gesellschaftsphilosophiscti) sense had soon, however, to be drastically radicalized—because the type of analysis of symbols through which the bonds of identification between the individual and community are historically produced does not lead to a philosophy of consciousness or go beyond the terms of reference of a history of ideas, even if it is almost completely freed of the disciplinary bonds represented by the theory of the State (Staatslehre). Nor does it yet move toward the recovery of a more precise philosophical differentiation of the ontological status of symbols, and with it a more articulate awareness of the relation between the analysis of symbolic forms and the interpretation of history. When Voegelin, continuing to develop his methodological perspective, was brought to the concrete problem of thinking out this relation in depth, he found that he had once again to re-examine his true historiographical and theoretical project.49 On this point, the autobiography, written in 1973,50 does not help us. Progressively drawn to focusing ever more radically upon the experience of order as the dynamism of the process of symbolization, Voegelin had to re-examine not only the status of symbols in history, but also the value of the symbol 0/history as a directed and unilinear movement, which is assumed by human beings as a basic orientation in their interpretations of order.51 If 1933 shows the beginning of the re-examination of the relation between symbols and ideas that animated the attempt to renovate the 'methodology' of Staatslehre, after the drafting of the fourth volume of Order and History in the early 1970s—the volume on the age of ecumenic

49. This radical re-examination left a gap of thirteen years between In Search of Order (1987), the fifth and final volume of Order and History which was edited by his disciples after Voegelin's death, and the preceding fourth volume, The Ecumenic Age, published in 1974. Eric Voegelin, Order and History. IV. The Ecumenic Age (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974); Order and History. V. In Search of Order (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987). 50. The Autobiographical Reflections were dictated by Voegelin at Stanford in 1973 and transcribed by Ellis Sandoz, in preparation for Sandoz's The Voegelinian Revolution. 51. I have gone deeper into this point in my own Pratica del limite, Chapter 4.

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imperialism which Voegelin says in the Autobiographical Reflections he is about to publish—Voegelin finds a new necessity to completely redefine his true project, bringing all the fundamentals back into the discussion, and asking once again about the bases of his theory. The second issue is the validity of the symbols in the context of their historical equivalences. The symbols are new, but the experience in need of differentiating analysis is not; in fact, the effort to cope with the variety of its aspects is a millennial constant in the process of the quest for truth.

For Voegelin, the idea of the 'historical equivalence' of symbols excludes the possibility of a linear representation of history. This greatly increases the theoretical complexity of his own philosophy of history. The subject of history disappears, in a sense, while it still remains the everlasting human search for order. With the essay on Political Religions it is possible to confront one of the most important transitional stages in Voegelin's internal journey, made perceptible in the headings of Autobiographical Reflections, which indicate that the theoretical travail that accompanies harsh methodological 'reconsideration' and the indubitable efforts of philosophical radicalization are part of Voegelin's intellectual odyssey right to the end. Progressively Voegelin leaves behind—already, perhaps, in Political Religions—the possibility of an exclusively typological classification of phenomenological symbols. He sought throughout his life to attain a hermeneutical model that would remove, radically, the risk of making an unhistorical hypostasis of the categories of history. If, as Voegelin explicitly states in the pages of the Autobiographical Reflections, the discovery that set the whole of Order and History in motion coincides with the assumption that the basic theoretical data for a philosopher of politics and history are 'self-interpreting structures' of experiences of order,53 the essay on Political Religions must be interpreted as a witness 52. Voegelin, In Search of Order, p. 42. On the theme of'equivalence', see also Eric Voegelin, 'Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History', in Luigi Pareyson (ed.), Eternita e storia: I valori permanent! nel divenire storico (Florence: Vallecchi, 1970), pp. 215-34. This essay has been reprinted in Voegelin, Published Essays, 19661985, pp. 115-33. 53. See Autobiographical Reflections, p. 80: 'I had to give up "ideas" as objects of a history and establish the experience of reality—personal, social, historical, cosmic—as the reality to be explored historically. These experiences, however, one could explore only by exploring their articulation through symbols. The identification of the subjectmatter and, with the subject-matter, of the method to be used in its exploration led to

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to a method that by this time he had clearly left behind. But it remains, perhaps, the first instance of the distinctive questioning that characterized the dynamism of the development of Voegelin's historiographical project. The final pages of the Autobiographical Reflections confirm, if there is any need for it, that Voegelin had coherently considered his theoretical journey, a journey of constant philosophical radicalization of the questioning of human existence and of human experiences of order. Only in relation to the latter—to human experiences of order—and as a response to the constant questioning of reality, does Voegelin think it possible to adequately interpret political symbols and ideas. From the symbols to the experiences, in other words, the circuit must be made by any genuine 'political science'. Voegelin saw that the thread of his constantly re-elaborated method unwound in this direction; and this thread had already been adumbrated in the 1930s.

the principle that lies at the basis of all my later work: the reality of experience is selfinterpretive'

NATIONAL SOCIALISM AS POLITICAL RELIGION AND APOCALYPTIC WORLDVIEW* Klaus Vondung

On occasions such as the fiftieth anniversary in 1995 of the ending of the Second World War, we are reminded not only of the end of armed conflict in Europe, but also of the liberation from National Socialist terror and above all the end of the mass murder of the Jews and others whom the Nazis regarded as 'sub-human'. That event, the Holocaust, which so abominably and uniquely characterizes National Socialism and which differentiates it from other fascisms, can only be explained—if indeed an explanation in the sense of exposing motives and functions is possible at all—through the analysis of a syndrome whose nature is encapsulated by the term 'political religion'. The various theories of fascism, social-historical and sociological inquiries have in any case shed little light on the origins of the Holocaust. Voegelin's Political Religions of 1938 constitutes one of the first interpretations of National Socialism as a 'political religion', and also the first attempt at a theoretical clarification of the term.1 After Voegelin's analysis appeared, other authors drew attention to the quasi-religious character of Nazism. Kenneth Burke, writing in 1939, noted the recurrent religious images and symbols in Hitler's speech and concluded: 'Hitler's modes of thought are nothing other than perverted or caricatured forms of religious thought'.2 In 1941 Hermann Rauschning, former president of the Danzig

* This article is a translated and extended version of 'Die Apokalypse des Nationalsozialismus', in Michael Ley and Julius H. Schoeps (eds.), Der Nationalsozialismus alspolitische Religion (Bodenheim: Philo, 1997), pp. 33-52. 1. Eric Voegelin, Diepolitischen Religionen (ed. Peter J. Opitz; Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 3rd edn, 1993 [1938, 1939]); Political Religions (trans TJ. DiNapoli and E.S. Easterly III; Toronto Studies in Theology, 23; Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1986). 2. Kenneth Burke, 'The Rhetoric in Hitler's "Battle" ', The Southern Review 5 (1939), pp. 1-21; quoted from the translation in Burke, Die Rhetorik in Hitlers Mein

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Senate and erstwhile supporter of Hitler, identified as the root of the National Socialist struggle for world domination the 'Catholicity of the new belief in the embodiment of God in the Filhrer ? Following the war—to name but a few of the early works—Walter Kiinneth, in a 'historical-theological investigation', interpreted National Socialism as an imitation of the Catholic church.4 Albert Camus also understood National Socialism as a religion in his 1951 essay UHomme revoke-, his argument focused on the characteristics of the 'deification of the irrational' and a National Socialist 'mysticism'.5 In 1968 Friedrich Heer analyzed the 'political religiosity' of an Adolf Hitler who traced his roots to the AustroCatholic milieu^ However, these works, and other more recent inquiries into the religious aspects of National Socialism,7 have influenced scientific discussion only partially; in general, the attempt to apply the term 'religion' to political phenomena was widely rejected. Voegelin himself understood the opposition that his interpretation of a political movement as a religion would evoke, and he endeavoured to make the reasons for this opposition clear. Its source, he argued, lay in the symbolic usage of language which had arisen through the polarization of the institutions of 'church' and 'state' in the late mediaeval period which had witnessed the dissolution of the Western Christian empires and the emergence of the modern state system. Concepts of the religious and the political have followed their institutions and their symbols. They have entered the field of battle and placed themKampf und andere Essays zur Strategic der Uberredung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967), p. 14. 3. Hermann Rauschning, Die konservative Revolution: Versuch und Bruch mit Hitler (New York: Freedom Publishing, 1941), p. 11; in English, The Conservative Revolution: Make or Break with the Nazis (trans. E.W. Dickes; London: Seeker and Warburg, 1941), p. 12. 4. Walter Kiinneth, Der grosse Abfall: Eine geschichtstheologische Untersuchung der Begegnung zwischen Nationalsozialismus und Christentum (Hamburg: Wittig, 1947). 5. Albert Camus, Der Mensch in der Revoke (trans. Justus Streller; Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1969), pp. 145, 148, 150. 6. Friedrich Heer, Der Glaube des Adolf Hitler: Anatomie einer politischen Religiositdt (Munich: Bechtle, 1968). 7. On recent literature see Jean-Pierre Sironneau, Secularisation et religions politiques (Paris: Cerf, 1982); Hans Maier (ed.), Politische Religionen: Die totalitdren Regime und das Christentum (Freiburg: Herder, 1995); Hans Maier, Totalitarismus und Politische Religionen: Konzepte des Diktaturvergleichs (2 vols.; Paderborn: Schoningh, 1996, 1997).

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selves under the authority of the conflicting linguistic symbols, so that today, under the weight of their means of conception, distinctions can still be recognized. Perhaps through critical probing, however, at least some instances can be found of the effectiveness of closely related basic human forces.8

Nevertheless, Voegelin maintained, it was possible in modern political movements to identify the working of deeply-rooted human aspirations which demanded that the conditioned nature of human existence be transcended, sublimated and liberated in a universal entity at once beyond and greater than humanity: £ In all directions in which human existence is open to the world, the surrounding Beyond can be sought and found in the body and in the spirit, in the individual and in society, in nature and in God.'9 Aspirations which thus sought the fulfilment of the collective, or 'species-nature', experience of humanity, were recognized in Voegelin's analysis as forms of'religious experience'. Wherever something real is revealed in religious experience as something holy, it becomes the most real thing there is, the Realissimum. This essential re-orientation from the natural to the divine results in a sacred and valueoriented recrystallization of reality around that which is recognized as divine. Worlds of symbols, linguistic signs, and concepts arrange themselves around the divine centre, coalesce into systems, become imbued with the spirit of religious stimulation, and become fanatically defended as the 'right' order of Being.

It is evident, then, that Voegelin did not interpret National Socialism as a political religion simply because Nazis had appropriated Christian linguistic symbols and ritual forms of the Christian church. At the descriptive level, the fact of borrowing and imitation certainly could not be overlooked. However, the key reason why Voegelin understood National Socialism as a self-containing religious phenomenon was that at its root lay religious experiences that led to the manifestation of a new realissimum. In this context, a basic distinction had to be recognized between 'world-transcendent religions', such as Judaism and Christianity, and 'world-immanent religions' in which the divine was not to be found in a transcendent reason for existence, but rather in a subset of the contents of the world.11 Given this distinction, it was possible to classify the religious elements 8. 9. 10. 11.

Voegelin, Diepolitischen Religionen, p. Voegelin, Die politischen Religionen, p. Voegelin, Die politischen Religionen, p. Voegelin, Die politischen Religionen, p.

9; Political Religions, pp. 14; Political Religions, p. 15; Political Religions, p. 16; Political Religions, p.

5-6. 12. 13. 14.

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manifest in National Socialism, as being of the type of 'world-immanent religions'. The element of the worldly-contents which the movement had elevated to the level of a realissimum was the national community as a unit of common blood. Voegelin characterized the National Socialist national community as a 'particular Ekklesia (as contrasted with the 'universal Ekklesia proclaimed in Christianity), and as a 'completely closed temporal Ekklesia in which in 'the community itself stood in place of God 'as [the] source of justification for the communal person'.12 Among the symbols used by Nazism to represent the 'sacral substance' of the community, Voegelin identified—alongside other terms drawn from the vocabulary of German Romanticism—that of the 'national spirit'. This spirit functioned as a 'Realissimum lasting through the ages which becomes historical reality in individual men as members of their VW&and in their works'. The parts become a national community, the 'people of the union', a historical identity, 'through the political organization'. The organizer is the 'Fiihrer\ he is 'the place at which the spirit of the people breaks into historical reality'.13 Because the national spirit is a world-immanent sacral substance, namely one that is tied to blood, 'the Fuhrer becomes the speaker of the spirit of the Volk and the representative of the people by virtue of his racial unity with them'.14 I have outlined Voegelin's interpretation in some detail to show how it incorporated a fundamental, anthropologically based definition of the term 'political religion',15 which is of continuing originality and importance. I have also set out Voegelin's analysis because it forms the starting point for my own interpretation of the apocalyptic element that became apparent in National Socialism. The National Socialist 'apocalypse' I understand as the particular form in which the political religion of National Socialism finally manifested itself. I interpret the differences between this 'apocalypse' and the apocalyptic of the Jewish-Christian tradition as

12. Voegelin, Die politischen Religionen, pp. 47, 54; Political Religions, pp. 54-55, 66. 13. Voegelin, Die politischen Religionen, p. 55; Political Religions, pp. 67-68. 14. Voegelin, Die politischen Religionen, p. 56; Political Religions, p. 68. 15. This is Voegelin's real achievement, even if he was able to draw on antecedent works, for example an earlier interpretation both of Nazism and fascism as well as communism as political-religious movements: Etienne de Greeff, 'Le drame humain et la psychologic des "mystiques" humaine', Etudes Carmelitaines 22 (1937). Cited in Voegelin Die politischen Religionen, p. 65; Political Religions, pp. 81-82.

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similar to those between world-immanent political religions and worldtranscendent religions. As the characteristics of the National Socialist political religion form the basis for their apocalyptic character, I would like to illustrate this with a few examples before I turn to the apocalypse itself. The realissimum of the National Socialist religion was the shared blood of the people. In my judgment, the symbol of the 'national spirit' played a much less important role for most Nazis than Voegelin assumed. At most, the symbol of 'national spirit' was important for those members of the educated bourgeoisie who adhered to National Socialism and for whom it served as a bridge to the new faith. For example, Martin Heidegger, in his address as Rector of Freiburg University, proclaimed that the spiritual world of a people was 'the power of the deepest preservation of its soil and blood-bound forces as the power of the innermost stimulation and furthermost convulsion of its existence'.16 In this definition he succeeded not only in tying the symbol of 'national spirit' to those of 'blood' and 'soil', but also in expressing the religious excitations which knowledge of the realissimum entails. However, in most instances of popular addresses, it was not necessary to call upon the symbol of'national spirit'. Hitler himself almost always characterized the 'sacral substance' of the order of being which he had proclaimed in a very direct manner. For example, in a speech shortly before he seized power, he declared: 'Social rank passes away, classes change, human destinies are transformed, something remains with us and must remain with us: The people in itself as a substance of flesh and blood.'17 We can certainly rule out the possibility that Hitler understood differentiated conceptions of the philosophical term 'substance'. However, the sense of the sentence quoted makes clear—and Hitler's eclectic vocabulary corroborates this—that he did understand the meaning of 'substance' as something intrinsic and primary, even as something absolute and divine, and that it was this which he sought to express. It also becomes clear that in this sentence the people in fact are elevated to the level of an world-immanent Ekklesia, which is founded upon the realissimum of common blood which remains constant through time, and that this Ekklesia justifies itself by this means. The elevation of an world-immanent entity to the level of a realissimum entails, as Voegelin established, a sacral and qualitative recrystallization of 16. Martin Heidegger, Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universitdt (Breslau: Korn, 1933), p. 13. 17. Speech by Hitler on 2 November 1932. Quoted from: 'Das dichterische Wort im Werk Adolf Hitlers', Wills undMacht, 20 April 1938, n.p.

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reality and leads to the production of a large number of sacral symbols, which congregate around the 'holy centre'. Thus at the centre of Nazi symbolism stands the 'Blood'; then come the 'People' as the substantive bearer of the blood; the 'Soil', the land, which nourishes the people; the 'Reich\ in which it finds its political realization; the 'Fiihrer as the representative of people and Reich, the 'Flag' as the most holy symbol; and, in addition, symbols that are partly cosmological in character such as 'Sun' and 'Fire', and others that are partly historical in origin, such as the (Feldherrnhalle,where Hitler made his first attempt to seize power in 1923. These now-sacralized areas of reality come to possess the character of articles of faith. Subjective experience of that which is recognized as holy and its public proclamation come to appear as revelation and 'gospel preaching', to which submission as if to articles of faith is due. Thus in the choral poem Die Verpflichtung (Duty) by Eberhard Wolfgang Moller, heralds appear, demanding three times in succession that the revealed articles of faith be proclaimed: Tell what you saw, and proclaim what you believe, That we may avow what we wish to believe.

The 'gospel preaching' follows in three successive 'proclamations'; in each case it is followed by the declaration of faith which is spoken by all: We believe in the blood... We believe in the land... We believe in the people...

In other choral poems, Hitler himself is consecrated as a holy entity, sometimes through the use of Christian imagery: And know that we need him like bread and wine.20

Thus the Fiihrer appears as a new Messiah, who in actuality embodies the answer to the question of existence, both for individual and the community. As the incarnation of the realissimum, he also attracts confessions of faith:

18. Eberhard Wolfgang Moller, Die Verpflichtung (Berlin: Mullet, 1935), p. 7. 19. Moller, Die Verpflichtung, pp. 8, 10, 13. 20. Gerhard Schumann, Gedichte und Kantaten (Munich: Langen/Miiller, 1940), p. 44.

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Let us avow beneath the standard: We are German We follow our Fiihrer As the embodiment of the order Of a higher law, Which resonates above us and in us, Which we divine And in which we believe. We believe in our Fiihrer As a revelation Of this law For us His people.

The choral poems from which I have quoted, together with similar works, served as liturgical texts for the many and varied Nazi ceremonies. These ceremonies represented a cult in the strictest sense of the word; their function was, as those of the cults in other religions, to make the content of the faith real in the present, to consecrate it, and also to provide ritual forms for preaching and confession. The National Socialist cult, which I have examined extensively elsewhere,22 is the practical, socially relevant displacement of the Nazi religion. It is also weighty evidence in favour of considering National Socialism as in fact a functioning political religion. Let us now consider the apocalyptic aspects of Nazism. This, as I remarked at the outset, was the particular form in which the political religion of National Socialism finally manifested itself. I will now consider in detail the commonalities and differences between the Nazi apocalypse and Judaeo-Christian apocalyptic. The commonalities will be examined, in order to determine whether it is indeed justified to make use of the term 'apocalypse' from the Judaeo-Christian tradition to describe aspects of National Socialism. The elements of difference will be examined, in order to identify the particular features of the National Socialist apocalypse which I will then describe in detail.23

21. Herbert Bohme, Das deutsche Gebet (Munich: Eher, 1936), p. 7. 22. Cf. the study by the present author, Magie und Manipulation: Ideologischer Kult undpolitische Religion des Nationalsozialismus (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971). 23. An exhaustive exposition of apocalyptic phenomena in modernity against the background of the apocalyptic tradition can be found in the work of the present author, Die Apokalypse in Deutschland (Munich: Deutsch Taschenbuch, 1988).

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The apocalyptic visions in Judaism and Christianity emerged primarily in times of crisis, produced by men who in their whole existence—religious, political, social—found themselves endangered and humiliated, oppressed and persecuted. Well-known examples are the Book of Daniel, the first fully formed apocalypse, which emerged under Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the persecutor of those Jews who opposed Hellenization; and the Revelation of John of Patmos, which appeared during the persecution of the Christians under the Emperor Domitian, and provided then and thereafter the most important momentum to the Christian tradition of apocalyptic thought. The apocalyptic visionaries presented their experiences of suffering in such a way that the world in which they lived appeared corrupt and evil to the deepest core. They yearned for salvation, but they did not believe that anything could be achieved through changes here and there, through improvements or reforms, either in the political or social sphere. Salvation, they believed, could only be achieved through the fall of the old, corrupt world and the destruction of the 'evil enemy' which this corruption had incriminated. They experienced the crisis as universal and acute, and they saw the final judgment as inevitable and imminent. An apocalypse constitutes a particular vision of salvation, notwithstanding its varied and graphic depictions of the destruction of the world. It is marked by its strict dualism—namely, the radical and moralistic division between the thoroughly corrupt old world and the perfect new, between the 'evil enemy', incriminated through corruption, and the chosen people, who were still suffering but who would soon triumph—and secondly by the conviction that the fall of the old world and the utter annihilation of the 'evil enemy' must precede salvation. From this further characteristics follow: the inevitability, universality and imminence of the apocalypse. Linguistically, the peculiarities of the apocalypse reveal themselves in dramatic images of the approaching judgment as a bitter struggle, a final, terrible conflict. The anxiously and gleefully awaited fall of the old world is often presented through images of destructive natural forces, in pictures of floods and storms, fires and earthquakes. The strict dualism of the apocalypse, the radical and moral division between the defective old world and the hoped-for new circumstance, is expressed through images of filth and purity, illness and health, darkness and light. The 'evil enemy' is drawn as a beast, a gruesome and treacherous, repulsive and sickening animal. The desired transformation of reality and the whole of existence is encapsulated in the symbols of transformation and salvation, of renewal, rebirth and resurrection. The vocabulary of the absolute such as 'every-

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thing', 'the whole', 'the last' express the unconditionally of the apocalyptic perspective. The apocalyptic model, as I have outlined it with regard to JudaeoChristian apocalyptic, is also to be found in the political religion of National Socialism. The similarities, which in my judgment support the use of the term 'apocalypse' to describe elements of Nazism, relate in the main to the structure of the interpretative model, to individual interpretative elements and to various but significant images and symbols. To these common elements I will turn shortly. Meanwhile, it must be acknowledged that there are also important differences from Christian-Jewish apocalyptic: these relate primarily to content. The most important difference is that in the National Socialist apocalypse it is not God who intervenes to implement world judgment; rather, the task of accomplishing salvation is accorded to the Volk, the world-immanent embodiment of the true, everlasting community. Consequently, the future state of perfection is not presented as a heavenly Jerusalem, as in the Book of Revelation, but as a world-immanent salvation. A further important difference relates to the difference between occasions of experience and their apocalyptic exegesis. The portrayal of experiences of deficiency—for which there may be various kinds of historical and biographical causes—as utter crises which must lead to the apocalyptic cataclysm can obviously be more or less appropriate, more or less exaggerated, or even imaginary. It is our task to evaluate this, but also to bear in mind that the subjective experience of the apocalyptist and the faith in the authenticity of his experiential exegesis remains unaffected. Let us return to the points of similarity between the features of apocalypse in the ancient world and in Nazism. Two dimensions are particularly important for study: the historical-speculative and the existential. These dimensions have been significant for the apocalypse since time immemorial. First, I will consider the ways in which apocalypse is concerned with history. Clearly, it interprets history in a particular manner and it is therefore conditional upon a consciousness of history. Even the earliest apocalyptic texts of the Book of Daniel make this clear. However, it diverged profoundly from the symbols developed in the predominant experience of Israel. It is clear from the scriptures of the Old Testament that there was in Israel since the Exodus a conception of history, and indeed a conception of it as a process determined by the work of God. This conception consolidated itself over time to become a conception of history known as

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'salvational history': history as a chain of events directed by God from Creation through to salvation.24 By contrast, the genre of apocalypse, whose beginnings we can trace from between the second Babylonian exile (587-538 BCE) and the second pre-Christian century (167 BCE: religious edict of Antiochus IV Epiphanes), is characterized by a tension with the salvational-historical conception of history. Apocalypse is driven by the sense that the sequence of events—generally those surrounding a threatened people—lacks any meaning, and that a thoroughgoing crisis will shortly overtake all the actors on the human scene. Thus in Daniel 8, the angel Gabriel explains to Daniel that the dream he has received is a vision of the end-time. The two-horned ram and the goat that he has seen, together with the four horns that grew from one fragment, symbolize the kingdoms of Media and Persia, the kingdom of the Greeks, and the kingdoms that will succeed them. Events will then move to a climax: In the last days of those kingdoms, when their sin is at its height, a king shall appear, harsh and grim, a master of stratagem. His power shall be great, he shall work havoc untold; he shall succeed in whatever he does. He shall work havoc among great nations and upon a holy people. His mind shall be ever active, and he shall succeed in his crafty designs; he shall conjure up great plans and, when they least expect it, work havoc on many (Dan. 8.23-25).

We should note that, despite its despairing break from the symbolism of 'salvation-history', there remains a sense in which apocalyptic only functions in contrast to that symbolism. Apocalyptic reactions to the experience that history has no meaning, or that this meaning is under threat, are only understandable on this precondition. This point also applies to modern forms of apocalypse, which replace the salvation-historical concepts of Christianity with conceptions of history as a planned process of development and progress: despite the formal opposition at the level of content, the underlying assumption that history possesses a quality which today we refer to as 'meaning' remains constant. So far, I have been concerned with those aspects of apocalypse which are precipitated by particular historical circumstances and crises. When we turn to the second existential dimension of apocalypse, we find a somewhat different reality. Here there exists something like an 'anthropological constant'; however, this is not something specific to the apocalypse itself,

24. See initially Walther Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament (trans. J. Austin Baker; 2 vols.; London: SCM Press, 1961).

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but is rather an 'anthropogenic precondition' for the historically contingent phenomenon of apocalyptic. This issue will be considered further later. For now, I will consider the historical-speculative dimension of the National Socialist apocalypse, and the pertinent symbols of the apocalyptic interpretative model. In Mein Kampf and many of his speeches, Hitler developed an apocalyptic image of the world, in which he himself undoubtedly also believed. He viewed world history as being determined by the struggle between two universal forces, whose irreconcilability he chiefly expressed in the dualistic symbolism of light-darkness',25 and he believed the decisive battle to be close at hand, which would bring victory over the 'deadly enemy of all light' and keep it locked up 'until ages hence'.26 The 'power of evil' manifested itself for him in the Jews, the 'evil enemy of humanity',27 onto whom he transferred the guilt for all material deficits of the world, as well as other imaginary dangers and threats. Hitler viewed the well-being of the entire world as being dependent on Germany's victory in the final apocalyptic struggle: If our nation and our state becomes the victim of these bloodthirsty and avaricious Jewish tyrants of nations, the whole world will sink into the tentacles of this polyp; if Germany liberates itself from its clutches, this danger greatest for all nations will have been eliminated for the entire world.

Alfred Rosenberg also ascribed the role of the universal 'evil enemy' to 'World Jewry'; he assumed a 'worldwide conspiracy' between Jewish capitalism and Jewish bolshevism against the 'Nordic race of light'.29 Rosenberg fomented a fear of destruction by producing a terrifying vision of 'Jewish world revolution' which was the 'gigantically conceived, messianic attempt' to exact 'revenge on the eternally alien character of the Europeans, and not only the Europeans'; and he prophesied an apocalyptic

25. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf(2 vols.; Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP. Franz Eher Nachfolger, 1933), I, pp. 123, 216, 320, 346; II, pp. 421, 432, 724, 782. 26. Hitler, Mein Kampf I, p. 346; II, p. 752. 27. Hitler, Mein Kampf II, p. 724. 28. Hitler, Mein Kampf II, p. 703. 29. Alfred Rosenberg, 'Der entscheidende Weltkampf' (Speech by the Reichsleiter Alfred Rosenberg to the party congress in Nuremberg in 1936, Munich, n.d.), pp. 2, 4; Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts: Eine Wertung der seelisch-geistigen Gestaltenkdmpfe unserer Zeit (53rd-54th edn; Munich: Hoheneichen, 1935), pp. 28, 590.

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struggle, a 'decisive world war'.30 Just as Hitler did, Rosenberg attempted to convert the fear of the evil enemy into the will to destroy it: 'The overcoming of Bolshevik teaching is only and exclusively possible through a new faith, through a will to action which is born of this worldview and then through the decisive act itself.'31 The National Socialist apocalypse specified the promised renewal as 'purification', and at the same time it identified the enemy with 'filth'. Hitler promised salvation through 'maintaining the purity of blood'; he viewed the realization of this goal as a 'mission' entrusted to the German people by the 'Creator of the universe'.32 The mission was hampered by 'unpure' Jewry; Goebbels noted in his diary: 'The Jew is indeed the Antichrist of world history. Order practically disappears amid all the lies, filth, blood and bestial brutishness.'33 Rosenberg characterized the approaching 'final judgment' as a struggle against filth: 'Either we ascend...to a purifying achievement, or the last remnants of Germanic-western values of civilization and statehood will sink into the miry human tides of the metropolis.'34 Images of 'filth' for the enemy and 'flood' for defeat were often linked together in the imagery of the Nazi apocalypse. In 1943 the literary scholar Heinz Kindermann, with regard to the 1920s, wrote with revulsion of the 'rising flood of these savages', by which he primarily meant Jews.35 In order to make Jewry as the evil enemy appear particularly dangerous and objectionable, the image complex of 'filth and flood' was additionally associated with vermin. The film Der Ewige Jude [The Eternal Jew], for example, played out the historical migrations of Jews on a map of Europe and commented upon this again and again by fading in pictures of rats in flight. Of course, the National Socialist apocalypse reached its zenith only when the propagation of its worldview extended beyond the verbal— verbal excesses had existed previously in other political situations—to the implementation in fact of the apocalyptic fantasies of struggle against the 'evil enemy of mankind'. 30. Rosenberg, Der My thus des 20. Jahrhunderts, p. 12. 31. Rosenberg, Der My thus des 20. Jahrhunderts, p. 13. 32. Hitler, Mein Kampf I, p. 234. 33. Helmut Heiber (ed.), Das Tagebuch von Joseph Goebbels 1925-26 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2nd edn, 1960), p. 85. 34. Rosenberg, Der My thus des 20. Jahrhunderts, p. 82. 35. Quoted from Bernhard Zeller (ed.), Klassiker in finsterer Zeit, 1933-1945 (Marbach, Exhibition Catalogue; 2 vols., 1983), I, pp. 22-26.

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An obvious symbol of the means with which the 'purification' of the world propagated by Hitler, Rosenberg and others was to be realized, and simultaneously also the actual means of eradication of the 'evil enemy', was fire. The convergence of symbol and action occurred for the first time—as an apocalypse 'in miniature' so to speak, presaging the more farreaching version—in the book burnings of 10 May 1933. In the speeches and addresses associated with these auto-da-fes, the familiar symbols of apocalyptic faith are to be found. Thus there is talk of the 'inner transformation of the German people', of the book burning as a symbol not only of 'the downfall of the old epoch, but also of the rise of the new': 'Youth burned the works of the old age in order to proclaim the dawn of the new'. Again and again the 'rebirth' of the German people and of the 'German spirit' is invoked; the educated bourgeoisie were still considerably involved in the book burnings. From the flames of the incinerated books by Jews and opponents of the regime the 'phoenix of a new spirit' was seen to rise.36 These fires paved the way to the burning of synagogues in 1938 and then to the incinerators of the extermination camps, the murderous zenith of the National Socialist apocalypse. What can be determined about the existential motivation of the apocalyptists? The existential dimension of the apocalypse is, I maintain, an anthropogenic precondition for the occurrence of apocalyptic outlooks, which themselves occur under historically contingent circumstances. This precondition I understand as integral to the condicio humana\ an existential tension between deficiency and plenitude. I will now explicate what is meant by speaking of 'tension' in this way, and explain its relation to the symbolism of apocalyptic. None of us are spared from experiences of deficiency and plenitude: they occur on all levels of human existence and activity. They range from experiences of failure in everyday life and personal deficiency, through such things as material deprivation or social disadvantage, to experiences of existential danger through persecution or war and the all-pervading 36. Hans Naumann and Eugen Liithgen, Kampf wider den undeutschen Geist: Reden, gehalten bei der von der Banner Studentenschaft veranstalteten Kundgebung wider den undeutschen Geist aufdem Marktplatz zu Bonn am 10. Mai 1933 (Bonn, 1933), pp. 4, 11; 'Die Verbrennung des undeutschen Schrifttums: Reichsminister Goebbels an die deutschen Studenten', Deutsche Kultur-Wacht 10 (1933) pp. 10-22 (13); Werner Schlegel, Dichter aufdem Scheiterhaufen (Berlin: Verlag fur Kulturpolitik, 1934), pp. 16, 53, 56; cf. Heinz Kindermann (ed.), Des deutschen Dichters Sendungin der Gegenwart (Leipzig: Philipp Reclam, 1933), pp. 8-9, 119, 265, 279, 283.

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experiences of transience, loss and death. But we are also permitted experiences of plenitude, which also range through various levels. Nature can give us the impression of plenitude and the experience through bodily and physical well-being of feeling cin tune with the world', of partaking in the plenitude of the cosmos. Material good fortune, the feeling of one's own strength and power, union with other people in the bond of love can provide experiences of plenitude. And finally, the presence of a transcendent rationale for all plenitude may be illuminated within the experience of plenty. Experiences of plenitude are not stable; again and again their place is taken, often abruptly, by experiences of deficiency. This shift is experienced as a tension. More precisely, we can say that what we experience are movements in a field of tension between the poles of deficiency and plenitude; we do not experience 'deficiency' on the one hand, and 'plenitude' on the other hand, in mutual exclusivity. Even when we draw very close to one pole or the other, the tension remains with the other pole as a painful or desired possibility. The movements in the field of tension between deficiency and plenitude are not directionless; the tension is directed towards the pole of plenitude; we strive towards the most perfect and permanent possible state of plenitude and happiness, although or even because we cannot escape from the experience of deficiency. Now this tension between deficiency and plenitude can be experienced and construed in extremely varied ways. I understand the apocalypse as the symbolism of one specific kind of construction of such experiences of tension. Specifically, the apocalyptist is obviously so overwhelmed by experiences of deficiency that he is no longer able to endure this tension. He attempts to abolish it by interpreting the field of tension between deficiency and plenitude in a dualistic manner and by hypostatizing the poles of tension into entities, which stand against one another as irreconcilable forces of good and evil. This interpretation is simultaneously put into a temporal perspective—that is, the past, the 'old world' in its entirety, is declared deficient, and plenitude is prophesied for the future. This particular type of interpretation of experience with its corresponding symbols differentiates the apocalypse from other possible constructions of experiences of tension, as found for example in Jewish prophecy or the work of Plato. The step from experiences of overwhelming deficiency to the developed outlook of apocalypse is not inevitable, but arises in historically contingent circumstances. Following the First World War, many people in Germany

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took this path. The feeling was widespread that one had arrived at a nadir of deficiency. This sense was induced not only by defeat in war, but also by the material want and social insecurity that followed it. The formal structuring of society and its unspoken norms was threatened; the withering of values and institutions which had previously provided meaning and stability produced the feeling of a fundamental absence of sense and lack of orientation, of an all-encompassing social and political, but above all existential, imperilment. For the writer Rudolf G. Binding, for example, the experiences of lack and loss crystallized into a feeling of 'nonexistence' which caused him 'mental torture'.37 In his diaries of the mid1920s, the young Goebbels betrayed his suffering due to the deficiency of the world and the inadequacy of his own existence: Oh, this terrible world!— Miserable loneliness. I am close to despair.— We are all ill. We are being consumed from within.— Is the whole world then destined for ruin?

The reaction to such despair and torment carried all the signs of panic. Binding confessed to a 'furious yearning' to overcome this terrible circumstance.39 Goebbels brought this desire straight to the point: 'When are we to be saved?' he asked in his diary. 'When will this poor devil be saved?'40 In the aftermath of war, this hope for salvation was universal. It extended far beyond the hope for change in political and social relations that Heinz Kindermann apostrophized as 'national salvation',41 and included the hope for existential salvation. Many people, including many young people, channelled this comprehensive demand for salvation into National Socialism as a political religion and towards its representative, Adolf Hitler, as the incarnation of the new realissimum. Typical of this mood is the way in which the 19-year-old poet Gerhard Schumann stylized Hitler's political struggle on the model of Jesus' nocturnal fight in the Garden of Gethsemane, and thus lent it the aura of an apocalyptic event. His sonnet is suffused with the dualistic symbolism of 'night' and 'light'. This is used to portray the qualitative contradiction between two 37. Seeks Bekenntnisse zum neuen Deutschland: Rudolf G. Binding, E. G. Kolbenheyer, the 'Kolnische Zeitung, Wilhelm von Scholz, Otto Wirz, Robert Fabre-Luce antworten Romain Rolland (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1933), p. 17. 38. Heiber (ed.), Das Tagebuch von Joseph Goebbek pp. 25, 35, 52. 39. Seeks Bekenntnisse zum neuen Deutschland, p. 18. 40. Heiber (ed.), Das Tagebuch von Joseph Goebbels, pp. 20, 25. 41. Kindermann (ed.), Des deutschen Dichters Sendung in der Gegenwart, p. 122.

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forms of existence in historical terms: as the contrast between the deficient existence of the past, and future expectations of abundant existence, whose hoped-for attainment is accorded the symbol 'salvation'. And so night came. The One stood up and fought. And blood flowed from his eyes which, beholding Were awestruck before the terrifying horror Which broke forth from valley to peak. A cry of Distress broke harshly and in fear Despair grasped the emptiness with its last breath. He convulsed, trembling from the weight.— Until the command forced him to his knees. But as he rose the halo of the chosen one Surrounded his head. And, descending, He carried the torch onwards into the night. The millions bowed to him in silence. Salvation. The skies flashed with the pale of morning. The sun rose. And with it rose the Reich.

Night and light are also symbols for death and life. The association with Jesus which Schumann drew implied that Hitler, like Jesus, had conquered death. The apocalypse promises to fulfil even the highest hopes of existential salvation. Here, we should remember that even the Revelation of John of Patmos blotted out the primary human experience of deficiency in its overwhelming apocalyptic vision: 'And God will wash all the tears from their eyes, and there will be no more death5 (Rev. 21.4). Although the Nazi apocalypse is world-immanent in nature, it also offers a comparable escape from the limitations that surround human existence. In a mystery play with the appropriate title Death and Life, Gerhard Schumann has the faithful gathered around the Nazi flag achieve victory over death. The faithful Nazi declares to the figure of Death: As the shaft reaches up to heaven Do you still believe that you can win? The cloth which resurrects the dead 43 Calls you to duty also. 3

42. Gerhard Schumann, Die Lieder vom Reich (Munich: Albert Langen, Georg Miiller, 1936), p. 20. 43. Gerhard Schumann, Siegendes Leben: Dichtungen fur eine Gemeinschaft (Oldenburg: Gerhard Stalling, 1935), p. 25.

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And the young Nazi writer Herbert Bohme wrote of the Fuhrer: You walk among the people as their saviour Because you are possessed of the faith No need to tremble or fear any longer: 'If you believe, I have conquered death' 44 You tell us, 'even if my body passes away'.

The apocalypse promises salvation through the destruction of human limitations. This nexus of expectations is fatal, even in Judaeo-Christian apocalyptic, and it has filled many Jews and Christians with scepticism with regard to apocalyptic visions. However, we should note crucial differences between the Nazi form and the assumptions that underlie Jewish and Christian apocalyptic. There, the judgment of the world is placed in God's hands and trusted to his inscrutable ways. The apocalypse can only give comfort to those to whom salvation is promised as long as God remains distant, and does not actually intervene in the experienced crisis of historical events. To the waiting believer, the appeal is to be tolerant and stoic while enduring their present state of distress. Thus in the Book of Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego are thrown into the furnaces because they refuse to pray to the golden image, the worship of which has been ordered by Nebuchadnezzar (Dan. 3). Daniel, who is thrown into the lions' den because he prays to his God, also places the divine law higher than the commandment of King Darius (Dan. 6). The two stories are obviously intended to serve as an example to the Jews in Seleucus's empire to remain close to their faith under difficult circumstances, while the Jewish cult was forbidden under the reign of Antiochus IV. In Revelation, John admonishes the Christian congregations that they should not submit to the power of evil, represented by the Roman Empire and its laws, but remain faithful to God (Rev. 2, 13). In both cases, of course, infringement of the laws of the earthly power and obedience to the higher law of God brings with it punishment and suffering, and even death. Now in the National Socialist apocalypse, the faithful also appeal to a higher law, as the poetic confessions of faith quoted above indicate. But here the appeal to the higher law serves to justify the persecution and killing of others, others who are also defenceless. The tracing of all deficiencies back to the Jews as the 'power of evil' is a projection. The sacralization of

44. Bohme, Das deutsche Gebet, pp. 14-16.

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'Blood' and 'Nation' and the elevation of the 'race law' to the level of absolute values justify every conceivable means of extermination of the 'evil enemy'. Furthermore, the internally generated fantasy that crucial decisions regarding the prosperity or otherwise of the entire world lie in one's own hands releases monstrously excited waves of affect. These waves of apocalyptic yearning once again find their appropriate symbolism in fire. A spoken chorus in a poem by Kurt Eggers commands the participants to Throw fire under the cauldron And let the flames crackle The fires under the cauldron The fires which liberate the force Liberate us also.45

It is crucial to recognize that the National Socialist apocalypse is rooted in religious excitations, but that the realissimum in which these excitations are resolved is not God, as in the Jewish and Christian experience. Rather, they are, as Voegelin pointed out in Political Religions, 'the people and the brotherhood of the sworn companions', and the 'ecstasies are not spiritual, but rather instinctive, and find an outlet in the racial intoxication of the deed'.46 The world-immanent apocalypse does offer a vision of salvation, and even aims to conquer death; however, its starting point is always experiences of collapse and deficiency. Again and again it produces death, it must produce death if the apocalyptic transformation is itself to be produced by men. It is conspicuous that in the numerous ceremonies that served as ritual manifestations of the National Socialist political religion, death is omnipresent. Many of these ceremonies amounted to a veritable 'cult of death', as for instance the yearly ceremonies commemorating Hitler's Putsch of 1923 when 16 of his followers were killed in front of the Feldherrnhalle in Munich. The liturgical texts written for these ceremonies interpreted the Putsch as an apocalyptic event that promised national salvation. But at the same time the death of the National Socialist rebels was presented as a 'sacrifice' that had to be repeated by the living:

45. Kurt Eggers, Sturmsignale: Revolutiondre Sprechchb're (Leipzig: A. Strauch, 2nd edn, 1936), pp. 18-20. 46. Voegelin, Diepolitischen Religionen, pp. 57-59; Political Religions, p. 70-71.

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The steps of the Feldherrnhalle are an altar now, an altar that secretly burns with their ardour, and what they did not create with their fists 47 is now erected from their blood. We erect the eternal Feldherrnb alien of the Reich, the steps into eternity, until the hammers slip out of our fists, then immure us into the altars.48

This fixation with death and destruction reflects back on the initiators; the National Socialist apocalyptists were sucked into the destruction that they themselves had unleashed. For us later to understand this is, of course, no consolation for the millions who fell victim to the National Socialist apocalypse. However, it is hopefully a lesson, that no salvation is possible through annihilation; rather, that path is the path to murder, to the murder of human beings and of humanity.

47. Herbert Bohme, Gesdnge unter der Fahne: Vier Kantaten (Munich: Eher, 1935), p. 39. 48. Gerhard Schumann, Heldische Feier (Munich: Albert Langen, George Miiller, 1936), p. 7.

THE RELIGIOUS DIMENSION IN THE WORKS OF DIETRICH ECKART, JOSEPH GOEBBELS, ALFRED ROSENBERG AND ADOLF HITLER* Claus-Ekkehard Barsch

1. The German Volk and its Future Status: The 'Third Reich' The concept of the Third Reich' affects the entire National Socialistic consciousness of history, and in particular it shapes its characteristic understanding of the relation between the present and the future. In order to set out fully the religious dimensions of National Socialist ideology, we must examine this concept in detail, because it brings together all the features of the time of National Socialist rule. The works of the poet Dietrich Eckart (1865-1923) and of Joseph Goebbels, the later Minister of Propaganda, enable us to identify and understand how the crucial symbols 'God—History—Humanity' are reworked in the National Socialist movement. We commence our study with the works of Eckart, because he was the founding father of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP), the first editor-in chief of the Volkischen Beobachter, and—through his essays in the journal Aufgut Deutsch—co-founder of the National Socialist ideology. As 'poet', Eckart's ideological productions were certainly catchy, and they contain all the characteristic elements of the National Socialist ideology: he was the writer of the well-known Stormtroopers (SA) marching song Sturmlied. Above all, however, Eckart had already in 1919 established the toposofthe 'Third Reich', as a key part of the vocabulary of the National Socialist ideology. Both in the structure of Eckart's writings, and in direct references within his work, the presence of the apocalyptic symbolism of the 'thousand-year empire' can be found. Dietrich Eckart quotes from the Apocalypse of St * This article presents in outline the conclusions of the author in Claus-Ekkehard Barsch, Die politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus: Die religiosen Dimensionen der N.S. Ideologic in den Schriften von Dietrich Eckart, Joseph Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg und Adolf Hitler (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1998).

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John, and directly compares the contemporary situation to an apocalyptic period of crisis. Moreover, he concentrates the multiple poles of existence, Humanity-Society-Present-Future-God, onto the single entity of the German Volk (People). Eckart believes that Christ lives in all Germans: cln the German essence Christ is our guest: that is why the Antichrist hates the Germans.'1 Within the symbolism of Christianity, it is possible for any human to become the Antichrist: each person is held to be capable of being an opponent of Christian redemption. In contrast, Dietrich Eckart regards one entity alone—the collective existence of the Jews—as being the incarnation of the powerful, satanic counterforce to God, the Antichrist. He calls their power 'devilish'. He claims that they are determined by the celestial power of Satan. To Eckart, the Jews personify the satanic-andmighty Beast of the Apocalypse. As organs of the devil, they are liars and murderers. They have no soul, and all their doings lead to chaos and emptiness. It is evident that within this substantial dualism between Light and Darkness, God and Satan, Christ and Antichrist, the foundation is already laid for the destruction of the Jews, because Eckart—like all apocalyptics—was convinced that such dualisms had to be dissolved. For him, the first World War represented, in strict application of the apocalyptic pattern, a religious war,2 a 'War between light and darkness, truth and lie, Christ and Antichrist'.3 According to this view, when the light clashes with the forces of darkness, the struggle is one of life and death, ending in the destruction of the one element or the other. In Eckart's view, the war of 1914—18 had been a religious war, and it had not yet reached its completion. He posits the notion of a fundamental conflict within his contemporary situation, a view with which the National Socialists also came to concur. Thus he wrote: The hour of decision is upon us: the choice between reality and appearance, between our German character and Jewishness, between universe and nothingness, between truth and lie, between inwardness and outwardness, between right and arbitrariness, between mind and insanity, between goodness and murder. Now is the hour when humankind must choose!4

1. Dietrich Eckart (ed.), Aufgut Deutsch, no. 4 (1919), p. 60. 2. Eckart, Aufgut Deutsch, p. 20. 3. Eckart, Aufgut Deutsch, p. 84. 4. Alfred Rosenberg, Dietrich Eckart: Ein Vermdchtnis ([pub. unnamed]: Munich, 1935), p. 86.

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The religious symbolism that Eckart developed also explained his belief in the charisma of a political leader. Long before he knew Hitler, he had expressed the hope for a new leader in the terminology of the Apocalypse of St John. The Fuhrer comes out of the Volk, a 'nameless one' who is preparing himself first of all 'in silence and quiet' for the ultimate 'retaliation'. The Fuhrer is a 'saviour': a figure that in the apocalyptic context is characterized by an intensive, particular relation to God. The Fuhrer s function for the Volk is grounded in the relation of Present to Future. He is the one who 'has the power, which guarantees us Victory: the power before which even the powers of Night will flee', as Eckart declared in lines written for Hitler's thirty-fourth birthday.5 Eckart's speculations take the form of a 'translatio'. He transfers particular classifications, without any specific conceptual or reflective justification. His words are immediately comprehensible to the common person, because they abstain from all explanations, justification or argument. For Eckart, God is not experienced only in the realm beyond death. Rather, he reduces the distance and tension between God and human existence, as in the tradition of German mysticism. But when Eckart speaks about the 'God within us' and alludes to the words of the late-mediaeval Angelus Silesius, he is not speaking of the divinization of all humanity, but only of those of Aryan origin. The apocalyptic symbolism of the Third Reich is also to be found in clear, simple and unambiguous form in the writings of Joseph Goebbels. The use of the secularized term 'propaganda' to describe Goebbels's work has obscured the fact that Goebbels's activity was at root a spreading of the substitute faith, organized in the same way that the papal church had established the Congregatio de propaganda fide m the seventeenth century. It is notable that in an essay of 1926, Goebbels correctly recognized Hitler's underlying intentions as a 'Catechism of a new political faith'. That Goebbels's own ideology was also faith in a political religion can be established through the religious confessions in his diaries, which he wrote before and after he joined the NSDAP. There, he expressed his ideology in the form of a prayer. He believed in Fuhrer, Volk and Fatherland, and, like most Germans, in an exclusive connection between God, Volk and Fatherland. But in his diary for 9 June 1926, when he was already a member of the NSDAP, he links his own faith to the passage in 1 Corinthians 13 that is foremost in the Christian understanding of virtue: '"And now faith,

5.

Rosenberg, Dietrich Eckart: Ein Vermdchtnis, p. 149.

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hope and love abide, these three: and the greatest of them is love." I love my people and my Fatherland.^ Moreover, in Goebbels's expectation of a qualitative jump from the need of the present to the realm of redemption within the Third Reich', we can detect once again the underlying antagonism of Light-Darkness, God-Satan, Christ-Antichrist. In effect, Goebbels manifests a deeply-rooted 'catastrophe-consciousness'. Like Eckart, he interprets human beings, society and history within an apocalyptic pattern. In his political vision, the hope for victory and salvation which is evident in all apocalypses finds its ultimate reason in God. Goebbels makes the overcoming of the fundamental dualism the central principle of his political hopes, and his political hopes are read back into his religious expectations. He emphasizes particularly that the realization of the longed-for goal depends upon the energy of the people, who in turn become the instrument of the divine will.7 The faith of the Catholic-educated Goebbels, once it had cut free from the restraints of scholasticism, confronted a problem which is fundamental to all strategies of redemption in this world. Can the kingdom of God be built without completely eliminating the incarnations of evil in this world? Just as Goebbels believed in God ('Nothing at all exists outside of God'), he believed also in the all-pervading principle of evil, and in the influence of Satan's celestial power over the nature of human beings and of society. The struggle between the celestial forces determines the historical relation between the present and the future, and both complexes determine the predestination of peoples, societies and Volkern. Thus Goebbels chose the symbol 'Third Reich' to describe the world he expected, a world within which only the German Volk would be redeemed. 'We seek to mold German thought anew, in the pattern of the Third Reich.' The 'Third Reich' has the quality of redemption. At the head of a collection of his essays titled 'Ways to the Third Reich', Goebbels places the aphorism, 'Only he who redeems himself can redeem others'. In the essay entitled 'Thinker or Preacher', Goebbels rejects the 'thinkers', and he demands and prophesies:

6. Helmut Heiber (ed.), Das Tagebuch von Joseph Goebbels 1925-26 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1960), p. 118. 7. For the following quotations from Goebbels, see Barsch, Diepolitische Religion des Nationalsozialismus, pp. 91-131.

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POLITICS, ORDER AND HISTORY Then we must strive to live in peace with our demon that lashes and hustles us forward. Then we must conquer, that we ourselves become unconquerable. Thus will there be fulfilled in us, the inner mystery of history. Thus shall we become part of the redemption of the Reich that is to come.

Like Dietrich Eckart, Goebbels applied the Christian symbolism to Adolf Hitler: he is 'Half man of the people: half God! The very Christ: or naught but John the Baptist?' What goes for Hitler—'that he is but an instrument of the divine will that shapes the course of history'—goes also for the members of the future movement. They are 'also but vehicles.. .and instruments for each movement of the Will that shapes the future'. Correspondingly, the Jew—who according to the notes in Goebbels's diary is the 'Antichrist of world history', the powerful counterforce of the redemption portrayed in the Apocalypse of St John—must be exterminated. Goebbels expressly demands their extermination. In the published speech 'Lenin or Hitler?', he declares 'international Jewry' to be the 'enemy of the world'. Of the German people he declares: 'This people must be ready and prepared, to plunge the dagger into the heart of the enemy.' In this representative document of National Socialistic ideology, Goebbels articulates the connection that is typical of the movement: God and the German Volk on the one hand, the Jews and the devil on the other: 'Whoever cannot hate the Devil, cannot love God either. Whoever loves his own Volk, must hate to the very depths of his soul, those who would bring it to naught.' In summary, then, we may say that the unifying symbol 'Third Reich' contains the following characteristics: (1) (2) (3) (4)

(5)

The 'Third Reich' is a realm of the future, which is qualified by a state of redemption. Present and future are fundamentally different; the present is a time of crisis and catastrophes. The present struggle is unlike any other struggle: it is a fight against evil itself. The National Socialists believe that they themselves, the German people and especially Adolf Hitler, are instruments realizing the will of God in history. The 'Jew' is the incarnation of evil. In the minds of Goebbels and Eckart, the 'Jew' is the Antichrist. As the Antichrist, the 'Jew' must be destroyed.

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2. The German Volk and its Communicator Adolf Hitler: The Fuhrer It is well known that princes, priests, proletarians, professors, plutocrats, bourgeois, bishops, peasants, civil servants and self-employers—indeed, men and women of all walks of life—gave such boundless honour to Hitler, that in this act they existed as if in a single mass. Even in the aftermath of the war, this intense focus on the single individual persisted: there is an extreme concentration on Hitler himself to be found in the published literature after 1945, a concentration that could itself be an independent subject for a research project.8 Nevertheless, as Gerhard Schreiber has emphasized in his excellent study of this entire literature, the 'underlying premises for the rise of Hitler', and in particular the 'social-psychological preconditions', have still not received sufficient attention.9 One major challenge—indeed, perhaps the most obvious from a social-scientific viewpoint—is to understand the economic, social, psychological and cultural factors that led people to join the NSDAP long before it became the biggest party in Germany. This question has now been addressed in detail, using as evidence the written sources of high ranking functionaries.10 Despite the limitations of these sources—both quantitative and qualitative—they neverthlesss give evidence of the existence of some ideal-typical constellations of attitudes. An understanding of these constellations can then be used for further research about the personality cult. First and foremost, I have sought to identify the characteristics that key high ranking functionaries ascribed to Hitler. Were the alleged qualities of Hitler of a religious nature? or were they defined in biological terms? or were they related to the consciousness of society and history? The first step in approaching these questions is to examine the meaning of the salute l Heil Hitler, in view of its strongly intersubjective character. Immediately after the war, the philosopher-theologian Romano Guardini emphasized how fully this salute had replaced Jesus Christ with the name Hitler.11 But

8. On this point see Gerhard Schreiber, Hitler-Interpretationen 1923—1983: Ergebnisse, Methoden undProbleme der Forschung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2nd edn, 1988 [1984]). 9. Schreiber, Hitler-Interpretationen 1923-1983, p. 305. 10. Barsch, Die politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus, pp. 136-88. 11. Romano Guardini, Der Heilbringer in Mythos, Offenbarung und Politik: Eine theologisch-politische Besinnung (Stuttgart: Deutscher Verlag, 1946), p. 42.

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such ascriptions could be found long before the war, in expressions of Volkisch piety that have hitherto been disregarded: •

•

•

•

In the writings of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Richard Wagner's son-in-law, who became infamous as an influential advocate of racism, there is a clear connection between his personal conception of Christology and the attributes bestowed upon Hitler. In writings never previously subjected to study, Chamberlain can be found praising Hitler without saying a word about the Aryan character of Hitler nor any physical attribute.12 During the first World War, the poems of Dietrich Eckart evoked the longing for a Fuhrer as saviour, in a context which was clearly apocalyptic. The connections between his Trinitarian mysticism—emphasizing the experience of the Son of God within the soul—and the later Hitlerkult should never be underestimated.13 In the letters of Rudolf Hess, only a general, unspecific religious outlook can be identified. Nevertheless, it is evident that the condition for his belief in Hitler was that he thought Hitler was deeply religious. Indeed, Hess was actually convinced of Hitler's magic quality. Hess also admired Hitler's ability to unite the entire people in a single entity.14 The elementary school teacher and Gauleiter Julius Streicher, notorious for his anti-Semitism, gave priority to the collective existence of the Volk in his apocalyptic visions of the future. And it was in the context of this homespun religiousness, which left him utterly convinced of the victory to come through Adolf Hitler, that he decided in 1922 to integrate his own party into the NSDAP. In Streicher's view, Hitler was blessed and sent by God, and was a mediator between God and the Volk. Transferring these symbols to the political realm, he believed in consequence that Hitler could redeem the Volk. Streicher also believed that the power of evil was manifest in contemporary society: he would never have become a fanatic

12. Barsch, Diepolitische Religion des Nationalsozialismus, pp. 139-45. 13. Barsch, Die politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus, pp. 145-49. 14. Barsch, Die politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus, pp. 149-58.

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•

•

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follower of Hitler without the motive of anti-Semitism to which his dualistic vision of society inexorably led.13 In the writings of Baldur von Schirach, the longing for a deep faith is evident, expressed within a 'pansophist' hope for the reconciliation of God, cosmos, human beings and nature. Here, the reciprocal combination of the symbols of God, crucifix, sacrifice, Saviour, human being, Volk and Hitler is especially powerful. Clearly in evidence also is a strong correspondence between these symbols and the function ascribed to Hitler as the great Communicator.16 In the statements of Heinrich Himmler, we note the frequency of the constellation of Sieg and Heil—'Hail to the Coming Victory!'—in connection with Hitler. But even in Himmler, who was well known for his rough racism, we find the belief that Hitler was chosen for 'us' from 'God'. Although Himmler preferred the model of Karma in his fantasies about reincarnation, he compared Hitler with Christ, and was moreover convinced that 'it is only once in a few thousand years, that the hand of Fate, the Lord himself, is so merciful as to send a Fiihrertoz Volk\11 Goring, though well known for his cynicism, was not antireligious and retained his Protestant allegiance. In his statements can be found the open declaration that God had sent the Fiihrerto bring about the resurrection of the German Volk. If we conclude that these declarations were made with demagogical intent in the pursuit of political power, there is still every reason to believe that Goring thought his audience was convinced by this faith. Even if we estimate Goring as merely a clever power politician, the presence of these declarations in his speeches is nevertheless a strong indication that faith in the religious qualities of Hitler was widely held within the Volk that he addressed.18

In the attributes that Joseph Goebbels conferred on Hitler, we find virtually an ideal-typical exemplar of these National Socialist attitudes found in the writers examined above. Goebbels's early diaries are particularly 15. 16. 17. 18.

Barsch, Diepolitische Religion des Nationalsozialismus, pp. Barsch, Die politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus, pp. Barsch, Die politische Religion des Nationahozialismus, pp. Barsch, Die politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus, pp.

158-62. 162-66. 166-69. 169-72.

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valuable as a source. They give indisputable evidence of the intermixing of psychological and religious motives. Nonspecific expressions of longing for a Fuhrer are in evidence well before Goebbels joined the NSDAP. His desires for omnipotence and redemption are intermixed with apocalyptic interpretations of political existence in the time to come. For Goebbels, Hitler was the mediator between present, future and God, and in conseqence Hitler could also fulfil the function of mediator in the constitution of the identity of the Volk. Had it not been for his belief in God and his wish for salvation, had he not had as his goal the establishment of a homogeneous Volk superior to all Volkern, had he not defined the Jew as his enemy, and had he not longed for power, Goebbels would never have turned the man Adolf Hitler into the Fuhrer—'half plebeian, half God', the 'instrument chosen by divine will for the fulfilment of history'.19 Overall, all the functionaries we have considered are found to have interpreted their existence in religious categories. We stress that nowhere is Hitler ascribed the predicates of Fuhrer on the basis of a racial-biological characteristics. All the leading National Socialist figures we have examined described Hitler in terms that, evoking Max Weber's term, we may call 'charismatic'. That they believed in the charisma of Hitler was one crucial precondition that enabled him to come into power and to preserve this power.20 But to judge a leader as having charisma is to put him beyond the control of reason. In the charisma ascribed to Adolf Hitler we may explain not only the decline of politics under National Socialism, but also all the criminal consequences of its volkischer politics. 3. V07&£tt*&-Religious Racism: The Polarity between 'Divinized' Aryans and 'Satanized' Jews The topic to which I now turn is racialism, that aspect of the consciousness of society in which anti-Semitic racism flourishes. I am concerned to establish whether Rosenberg and Hitler perceived the terms Volk and Nation as categories of identity, unity and homogeneity. I seek to understand how they conceived the historical continuity of the social collective as its ultimate justification, and how they distinguished members of their 19. Barsch, Diepolitische Religion des Nationalsozialismus, pp. 172-78. 20. The question that 'postmodern' intellectuals ask, 'How could Hitler become the highest protagonist of the Volk, even though he had not fulfilled the visual characteristics of race?', shows that they have not read Mein Kampf. The message the work conveys alters all the a priori assumptions of the reader, and acts from within.

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own society from other collectivities. In particular, I ask whether in fact we find in their writings that race is asserted as the original essence of the German Volk and the basis for a future collective identity? Undoubtedly, Rosenberg and Hitler used the term 'race' in a biological sense. They held that populations exist that differ in the frequency-distribution of their genes.21 They assumed that specific features were transmitted by biological heredity, and they took for granted the influence of this heredity upon the total behaviour of a people. But this definition of race is itself insufficient to account for their racism, to which they adhered as a total worldview. In analytic terms, the transition to racism as an ideology occurs if and when the claim is made that all members of one and the same collective have the same genetic potential. Those who make this claim then understand themselves in opposition to all members of other collectives, and will maintain that from the very origin of things they have been absolutely superior to their rivals. They will claim that members of so-called 'different' races are predestined to be inferior, that they are to be discriminated against as foreigners, that they are completely different or substantial enemies, and that they are rivals against whom one must fight to the finish. In grasping what the racism of Hitler and Rosenberg entailed, we cannot succeed if we consider the purely biological elements evident in their understanding of the differences between peoples. Rather, we must recognize the religious dimensions that they ascribed to Aryan existence, and the contrasting demonic attributes that they employed in negating the existence of the Jew. In fact, in the analysis of Rosenberg and Hitler concerning the correlation between Volk and race, we find that their understanding of religion, and their preferences in the sphere of worship, is a basic starting point. We find also that their definition of religion is inextricably linked to their understanding of the differences between 'Aryan' and 'Jew'. In their thought we find also the element of apocalyptic: Rosenberg and Hitler evinced a sense of history that judged the era prior to 1933 as an era of catastrophe, the recent present as deficient, and the expected future era as perfect. And in this form of historical imagination, just as in their idea of racial distinctiveness, they seek to answer the question, 'Who are we?' by focusing on the question, 'Where have we come from? 21. On the scientific term of 'race', see Lesley Clarence Dunn and Theodosius Dobzhansky, Vererhung, Rasse und Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1970); and Leon Poliakov, Christian Delacampagne and Patrick Jirard, Uber den Rassismus: 16 Kapitel zur Anatomie, Geschichte und Deutung des Rassewahns (Stuttgart: Klett, 1976).

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By writing The Myth of the Twentieth Century, Rosenberg sought to bring about the reincarnation and the re-constitution of the collective identity of the Germans.22 Rosenberg's generic term is Weltanschauung, which subsumes religion, science and art. His term 'religion' refers both to professed belief in God, and to the inner bonds of the soul to God.23 He is convinced of the necessity of a 'new religion', and he makes it his duty 'to take a lead in the preparations'.24 He sets his hopes on a 'German religious movement, out of which a VW&f-church will develop...'25 For Rosenberg, 'true religion' can never be proved or disproved by 'sciences'.26 There is no 'presuppositionless knowledge, but merely knowledge with presuppositions...'; furthermore, 'true knowledge' cannot dethrone a 'genuine religion', and true knowledge has only to do with the sciences of mechanics, physics, chemistry and biology. Darwinism and positivism are expressly described as depraved forms of science.27 Rosenberg thinks about the tension between this life and the hereafter, but he refuses to concede that the human being lives 'within the sphere of an absolute, distant, all-ruling God'. Rosenberg immanentized the eschaton: 'Religion is concerned only with "heaven within us"' ('Religion hat nur mit dem "Himmelreich in uns" zu tun').28 Rosenberg is, in accordance with Clause 24 of the NSDAP party programme, an advocate of a 'positive Christianity'. Indeed, he emphasizes the contrast between 'positive Christianity' and its rivals. They have, he maintains, been in conflict from the earliest times: Jesus was not a Jew.29 To establish a 'positive Christianity', he demands to write a 'fifth Gospel'. The elements of the new faith can already be found in two of the canonical Gospels. In the writings of St Mark in particular, the 22. Alfred Rosenberg, Der My thus des 20. Jahrhunderts: Eine Wertung der seelischgeistigen Gestaltenkdmpfe unserer Zeit (207-2 llth edn; Munich: Hoheneichen, 1943), pp. 15, 699. On Rosenberg, see Barsch, Diepolitische Religion des Nationalsozialismus, pp. 192-267. 23. Alfred Rosenberg, 'Weltanschauliche Thesen', in Hans-Giinther Seraphim (ed.), Das politische Tagebuch Alfred Rosenbergs aus den Jahren 1934-35 und 1939-40 (Gottingen, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main: Musterschmidt, 1956), pp. 197-212 (199200). 24. Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts, pp. 601, 620. 25. Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts, p. 608; see also pp. 512, 601-602. 26. Rosenberg, 'WeltanschaulicheThesen, pp. 199, 209-10. 27. Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts, pp. 22, 119, 135, 600. 28. Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts, pp. 135, 246; on the topic The Kingdom of Heaven within us', see pp. 218, 235, 601. 29. Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts, pp. 76, 78, 79.

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'source-gospel' is to be found—the 'Ur-Markus-Evangelium'. In this gospel, 'the real core of the message of the children of God' can be found. In the Gospel of St John, 'the polarity between good and evil' was revealed. The Christian church, ever since St Paul, had given a false 'representation of the message of the Kingdom of Heaven within us, of fellowship with God, of service for the good and of fiery defences against evil'.30 The Christian churches had been Pauline at heart. Whatever is Pauline is not Christian: the Pauline element is Jewish, not Christian, and in consequence is the inverse of Christianity.31 Genuine religion was, for Rosenberg, that found in Meister Eckhart, in whom are found the true qualities of spiritual existence.32 He wrote of Meister Eckhart as 'the greatest apostle of Northern Europe, who had given us our religion'. Even in this expression of Rosenberg's regard for the mysticism of Eckhart, his racial doctrines were inextricably interlinked. For he continues: 'In Meister Eckhart, the northern soul came for the first time to a consciousness of its inner being. Within his personality, all our later great leaders lay latent. From his great soul, the German faith can— and will—be born again.'33 By referring to the mystic he so admires, Rosenberg articulates his political goal as the achievement of collective identity. In the people's quest for identity, the people's goal is 'to become "one with one's own self ", as Meister Eckhart aspired'.34 But why is Rosenberg convinced that the German people is able to achieve all its goals? The answer can be found in his special doctrine of race. Central to this doctrine is the integration of the notion of soul into racial doctrine, and the idea of the quality of the Nordic soul. 'Soul means race seen from the inside. And inversely, race is the exterior appearance of soul', Rosenberg writes. He expressly rejects the use of the logic of philosophy, or the reasoning of the laws of nature, as a basis for the determination of race. The 'life of a race' is a 'mystic synthesis, an activity of the soul'.35 Rosenberg exclusively ascribes the qualities of the soul found in Eckhart's mysticism as qualities only of the Nordic soul. The essential predicate of the Aryan-Nordic soul is its 'godlikeness'.36 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

Rosenberg, Rosenberg, Rosenberg, Rosenberg, Rosenberg, Rosenberg, Rosenberg,

Der Mythus Der Mythus Der Mythus Der Mythus Der Mythus Der Mythus Der Mythus

des 20. Jahrhunderts, des 20. Jahrhunderts, des 20. Jahrhunderts, des 20. Jahrhunderts, des 20. Jahrhunderts, des 20. Jahrhunderts, des 20. Jahrhunderts,

pp. 603, 604, 607. pp. 235, 606. p. 218; see also p. 618. p. 259. p. 699. pp. 2, 117. pp. 218, 234, 246, 618.

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Rosenberg negates 'the difference between I and God', and emphasizes the 'equivalence between soul and God'.37 It is clear that his term 'godlikeness' is not only a quality of the soul, but also of the blood. He writes: Today a new faith is awakening—the myth of blood—the faith to defend the divine entity of the human being with the blood...' And he continues: 'the Nordic blood represents that mystery, which substituted and conquered the old sacrament'.38 The unity of divine and human nature is the principal configuration of the racial primal substance of the German Volk. Because these potencies of the soul are present in all Germans, the whole people—those who have died, those who live and those who are yet to be born—are in communion as a single being. But why has it not been possible to realize the divine potentiality of the Nordic race until now? Rosenberg believes in the concrete existence of evil,39 and of an anti-race (Gegenrasse). Only the Jewish race is the 'antirace',40 and only the Jew is the 'child of satanic nature'.41 In summary, then, we find that the concept of race is, for Rosenberg, equivalent to a megapsyche. The superiority of the German Volk, and therefore the superiority of all Germans over the members of all other collectives, is articulated in the modus of a religious interpretation of existence. In order to understand how Rosenberg, Deputy to the Fiihrer with responsibility for party ideology and education, perceived the existence of Jews, particularly during the time of the Holocaust, we must recognize that he thinks in terms of'consubstantiality'. This is the source of his terminology. 'Self-realization',42 'self-opening',43 'self-consciousness',44 'selfawareness',45 'self-fulfilment'46 and 'self-determination'47 refer to his doctrine of the affinities of the soul with the divine. It refers only to those who possess the Nordic capacity of soul-fellowship. In opposition to them stand the Jews. The struggle of the German people against the Jews is, in these terms, absolutely necessary, as a struggle between God and Satan, 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

Rosenberg, Der Mythus Rosenberg, Der Mythus Rosenberg, Der Mythus Rosenberg, Der Mythus Rosenberg, Der Mythus Rosenberg, Der Mythus Rosenberg, Der Mythus Rosenberg, Der Mythus Rosenberg, Der Mythus Rosenberg, Der Mythus Rosenberg, Der Mythus

des 20. Jahrhunderts, des 20. Jahrhunderts, des 20. Jahrhunderts, des 20. Jahrhunderts, des 20. Jahrhunderts, des 20. Jahrhunderts, des 20. Jahrhunderts, des 20. Jahrhunderts, des 20. Jahrhunderts, des 20. Jahrhunderts, des 20. Jahrhunderts,

pp. 222, 223. p. 114. pp. 33, 130, 167. pp. 462, 686. p. 265; see also pp. 264, 460. pp. 248, 685, 589. p. 691. pp. 8, 223, 259. p. 700. p. 684. p. 222.

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lightness and darkness.48 Thus Rosenberg's anti-Semitism is not grounded in a social-Darwinistic or a biological outlook: rather, it articulates a particular religious interpretation of existence. But the National Socialist ideology is only a political religion if Hitler determines the collective identities of the Germans and the Jews in a religious sense. In Mein Kampf, Hitler uses the term 'faith' in central passages where he sets out the characteristics of the National Socialist world-view, which is for him a volkische Weltanschauung.^ He finishes his chapter 'Weltanschauung and the Party' with the express intention that the key task at stake within the NSDAP is the formation of a 'political understanding of faith'. According to Hitler, 'out of the range of general world-views, a distinctively political faith must be shaped...' Hitler uses the term 'faith' not in general, but in the context of describing the predicates 'volkisch and 'religious'. What matters for him in the 'recognition of fundamental religious outlooks' is the 'ordering power of the apodictic faith'. In Hitler's usage, the expression 'religious' generally indicates basic thoughts or convictions: as in belief in the 'eternity and indestructibility of the soul, the existence of a higher being', etc.50 Hitler uses the term 'religion' therefore in a conventional sense. The religious content to which Hitler's general argument refers is not neopagan. He makes fun of those 'nature-lovers' and 'pipe-smoking old-beards' whose 'hearts throb with old-fashioned German heroism', who with 'antiquated, carefully restored brass trumpets, cast their gestures about in the air'.51 In his speeches, Hitler talked constantly of the 'Almighty' and the 'Allseeing'.52 Hitler believed that he had a special relation to God and that his personal fate corresponded with the will of God. He also believed that God created the German Volk which will live forever. The German Volk is mighty because God is almighty: 'When the Almighty blesses a work, as He has blessed our work, then there is nothing that men can do to destroy

48. Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts, pp. 130, 460. 49. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (671-67 5th edn; Munich: Eher, 1941), p. 424. On Hitler, see Barsch, Die politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus, pp. 267-325. 50. Hitler, Mein Kampf pp. 416, 417, 418, 424. 51. Hitler, Mein Kampf p. 396. 52. Max Domarus, Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen 1932-45 (4 vols.; Munich: Siiddeutscher Verlag, 2nd edn, 1965 [1962-63]), I, Part 1, pp. 17, 95, 135, 208; I, Part 2, pp. 609, 704, 849; II, Part 1, p. 1442; II, Part 2, pp. 1942, 2074, 2196, 2198.

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it.'53 Hitler transfers his view of the struggle for existence onto the struggle of the survival of races, but he still thinks that the victory of the Jewish race is possible, and he is terrified that the Jew will be victorious and that the Aryan will disappear from the earth. For Hitler, the will of nature and the will of God coincide. He wants to create the conditions 'in which our People will fulfil the mission to which the Creator of the Universe has called us'.54 The German Volk can fulfil this mission, because it possesses the crucial substance, that of the Aryan race. The Aryan is a 'founder of culture' because 'he alone is the founder of the highest human type', and the 'prototype' of'everything which we understand by the word 'Menscti'. Like 'the Prometheus of mankind, from this shining star, sprang the spark of genius of all the ages to come'. Moreover, the Aryan has the capacity to be 'the highest image of God'.55 The Aryans are the 'family of God'.56 Hence for Hitler, both religion and culture are the decisive criteria that determine the collective identity of the German Volk. Hitler's opinions on the racial problem are linked inseparably to his view of the Jews. As with Rosenberg, his view is not grounded in Darwinian conceptions of biological evolution.57 The link is reciprocal: for Hitler declares that 'the Jew represents the greatest possible contrast to the Aryan'. If the Aryan is the founder of culture, then the Jew is its destroyer.58 'Whoever lays a hand upon the supreme image of the Lord, sins against the good Creator of this wonder, and paves the way for their expulsion from paradise.'59 Evil, thus personified, is the most powerful opposite to the almighty Creator, a power with the ability for the destruction of light, of truth and of life. Hitler is utterly convinced that all Jews are evil by their very identity. In Mein Kampf, he literally declares the Jew to be the 'scourge of God', the 'personification of the Devil as the symbol 53. Domarus, Hitler: Reden undProklamationen 1932-45,1, Part 1, p. 187; I, Part 2, pp. 700, 849. 54. Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp. 234, 438. 55. Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp. 317, 421; on the topic of the 'Image of the Lord', see pp. 196, 445. 56. See the fragment of Hitler's Monumentale Geschichte der Menschheit, in Werner Maser, Adolf Hitler: Legende, Mythos, Wirklichkeit (Munich: Bechtle, 1971), p. 293. 57. 'Ohne klarste Erkenntnis des Rassenproblems, und damit der Judenfrage, wird ein Wiederaufstieg der deutschen Nation nicht mehr erfolgen' ('Without the clearest grasp of the race problem, and with it the question of the Jews, a renaissance of the German nation will not come about'). Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 372. 58. Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp. 318, 329. 59. Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 421.

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of evil', the 'image of the power that will establish evil and will banish the good'; as the inventors of Marxism, the Jews are the 'true Devil'.60 The essential criterion for distinguishing between Jews and Aryans is whether they have religion.61 While the Aryan makes a 'sacrifice' out of himself, the Jew lives out of an instinct of self-preservation: 'Among the Jews, willingness for self-sacrifice never emerge from under the naked pursuit of self-interest.' Jewish religious education is 'an obligation of the highest importance, to fulfil the purification of the blood of Jewry'.62 Their lack of belief in the existence of a world to come is the decisive indication that the Jews have no religion, in contrast to the Aryan.63 Christ, the 'essence of a new, originating nature', was a stranger to the Jewish way. Christ had recognized the way in which Jewish existence confined its concerns to the present life.64 His murderers were therefore the 'gainsayers of all true humanity'.65 We see here in Hitler's phrases, how anti-Semitism consti-

60. Hitler, Mein Kampf pp. 68, 332, 339, 355. 61. 'Das Judentum war immer ein Volk mit bestimmten rassischen Eigenarten und niemals eine Religion' ('The Jewish way has always been that of a people with marked racial peculiarities, and does not in any way constitute a religion'). Hitler, Mein Kampf p. 335. 62. Hitler, Mein Kampf pp. 329, 336. 63. 'Aus dem urspriinglichen eigenen Wesen kann der Jude eine religiose Einrichtung schon deshalb nicht besitzen, da ihm der Idealismus in jeder Form fehlt und damit auch der Glaube an ein Jenseits vollkommen fremd ist. Man kann sich aber eine Religion nach arischer Auffassung nicht vorstellen, der die Uberzeugung des Fortlebens nach dem Tod in irgendeiner Form mangelt' ('Right from the very beginning of his existence, the Jew is nevertheless unable to adopt a religious way of life, for he lacks any form of idealism, and the belief in a life to come is far from his consciousness. But it is impossible to imagine a religion within Aryan conceptions, which lacks the conviction of life continuing after death, in some form'). Hitler, Mein Kampf p. 336. 64. 'Sein Leben ist nur von dieser Welt, und sein Geist dem wahren Christentum innerlich so fremd, wie sein Wesen es zweitausend Jahre vorher dem grossen Griinder der neuen Lehre selber war' (Their [the Jews'] life is only of this world, and inwardly their spirit is thus remote from true Christianity, just as their way of life was two thousand years before those who founded the new teachings'). Hitler, Mein Kampf p. 336. 65. 'Freilich machte dieser aus seiner Gesinnung dem jiidischen Volk gegeniiber keinen Hehl, griff, wenn notig, sogar zur Peitsche, um aus dem Tempel des Herrn diesen Widersacher jedes Menschentums zu treiben, der auch damals wie immer in der Religion nur ein Mittel zur geschaftlichen Existenz sah. Dafiir wurde dann Christus freilich an das Kreuz geschlagen' (Those whose mind is thus set against the Jewish people, do not hesitate: ready when necessary even to use the whip in order to drive out of the temple these gainsayers of all humanity, who today as always only see in

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tutes an essential part of National Socialist ideology as a political religion. The collective identity both of the Aryan and of the Jew is assumed to be grounded in the religious world that each shares. The Jew is thus defined as the antagonist of every aspect of true manliness and the antagonist of Christ and, because of that, the potential murderer of the divine Aryan and of the divinely-ordained German Volk. Hitler projects the essence of evil onto Judaism in racial doctrines whose religious origin is openly declared. We find, then that the arguments of both Hitler and Rosenberg reveal a use of the terms 'race' and 'Aryan' that goes far beyond the biological criteria of blood-inheritance or disposition through heredity and genes. The religious element in their racism has so far been underestimated, whether in its importance for the shared meanings that came to pervade public concepts of social reality, or in the constitution of political power. Insofar as the formation and the effect of ideologies can only be explained through the functions of human thinking, above all through the connection of emotion and cognition, it is evident that further consideration must be given to particular problems in this area. In particular, I suggest that the usage of the ideological symbol 'Aryan' in National Socialist thought should be recognized as a symbol not of something that is noticeable or describable, but rather of outlooks that must be ascertained in mental or cognitive orientations. If this is not done, the ideological symbol of 'race' will be understood in a way that draws into it other complexes, and thus has its meaning altered. It is not possible yet fully to work out the ways in which the symbols, metaphors and expressions that are used to express the ideology of racism are interconnected. Nevertheless, the following verbal usages, and their cross-linkages, can be recognized. The ideological symbol 'Aryan' articulates the entire social existence of the Volk and the Nation. The German Volk is a representation of a substance, the Aryan race; through this symbol, the shared mental sense of the unity of the people is personified. The term Volk includes all the members of the collective: dead, alive or unborn. A still more radical sense of the term Volk is articulated through the frequent emphasis on tracing the existence of the people back to its remote roots. This emphasis is frequently formulated through the weighting of nouns with the prefix 'ur', or 'primal'. Hitler uses the words 'primal type' and 'primal element'; Rosenberg even speaks of 'primal substance' religion a means through which to carry out business life. For that it was of course that Christ was broken on the Cross'). Hitler, Mein Kampf p. 113.

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(Ursubstanz) or 'primal phenomenon' (Urphanomeri). Hitler and Rosenberg represent an understanding of culture in which the connection of things to their origins has overwhelming weight. So for them, the 'primal ground' (Urgrund) is always the original and the better, the real and the genuine. Original unity, purity and power constitute the measure of all things and the goal of all intentions. Hitler and Rosenberg are both equally convinced that the 'primal ground' holds within itself the source of all later appearances, which emerge from within itself. They recognize also the possibility of a break with the 'primal ground' so radical as to lead to the abyss: and they envisage ways in which the purity of the 'primal ground' can be regained through the rise of the people in history, through reincarnation, or in the strictest terminology, revolution. Speculation on the underlying powers of the 'primal ground', they believe, is able to account for the connections between cause and effect. Through it, specific judgments concerning the causal reasons for the content and form of things can be firmly established. These judgments are possible because of the original, native ability either of the collective, or of one individual. Thus the notion of the 'primal ground' provides a unifying 'explanation' for the identity of the collective. This all-embracing assumption of the existence of an 'original substance' makes it possible to overlook counter-evidence from all the diverse circumstances that may arise. Plans for the future may come to be judged hopeless, Utopian and dream-like under the constraints of pragmatic reality that affect even the racist thinker. But if the presence and effect in reality of the 'primal ground' are assumed to be true, then the ideological thinker can be convinced that these things which hardly look possible in the present are possible, and that things that once existed can be brought into existence again. After all, the 'primal ground' of the soul is thought of in personified terms, centring on the symbol 'Aryan'. As we have already seen, for Rosenberg, the soul represents the 'inwardness' of race; for Hitler, the existence of the Volksseele is a primary tenet. In the use of the symbol 'race' linked to 'soul', we can find the basis of perhaps the most important—even though overlooked—symbolic function of the ideological symbol 'Aryan'. Taking it for granted that the formation and acceptance of an ideology is always a psychological process in the sense of affecting the ensemble of internal functions, I draw attention to the existence of the following social-psychological complexes in National Socialist thought. The ideology of 'race' enables the realization of symbiotic longings. Through the symbol 'Aryan', feelings of might, great-

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ness and power can be experienced. Through imagined participation in a core of genius within the collective, the gap between narcissistic ideals and non-existent capabilities can be closed. Thus deductions like the following unquestionably arise: • • •

Goethe is part of the timeless genius of the German Volk', Goethe is a genius; I (or the reproduction of my ego in my children) are part of the 'gene-pool' of genius (blood) of the society to which I belong through birth.

Nothing is more important for those who experience an inferiority complex than such feelings. The ideological symbol 'race' can readily convey to the imagination membership in a divinely empowered Volk. It makes it possible for one to distance oneself from the disadvantages arising from life in certain social strata, or from the constraints of money, education, or family background. It should be noted that the ideological symbol 'race' as we have examined it here in National Socialist writers has a function still more powerful than that of the presumed motive of resentment. 'Race' allows the individual to be released from the intellectual demands of notions of responsibility and conscience. Conveying belief in participation in the original force of the Volk, the symbol 'race' allows the release of all the vital urges, the aggressive elan of the people—a release that they will represent as 'emancipation'. Certainly the critical reader has good grounds for maintaining that the symbol 'race' as found in National Socialist ideology is a phenomenon of a neurotic culture. At any rate, the volkischewoAd-view of Rosenberg and Hitler is not a biological racialism. 4. The Connection between the Complexes Volk, Race, Reich, Heil Hitler, Sieg and Heil, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust The inner correlation between the different complexes of National Socialist ideology results in the connection between the conception of collective identity and the religious dimensions of the concepts of Volk race, Father of the Reich, Aryan and Jew. The 'Third Reich' is a Reich of the future, to which the term 'redemption' is the most frequently applied, and through which the consciousness of society is determined. In National Socialist thought, the present is separated from the coming era through a qualitative leap. The event that will achieve this qualitative leap is thought of as preceded by a time of crisis and catastrophe. During this time, a struggle

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has to take place, to open the way to the redemption that is to come, thus the way to the empowerment of the Volk and the establishment of unity and purity in the whole collective. This struggle is unlike any other: it represents conflict between the manifest powers of God and evil. The society that undertakes this struggle is not constituted through one single person as its embodiment. Rather, the synthesizing function of a Fiihrer is achieved in the imagination of the many. So it is that the one Fiihrer functions as mediator between God and the Volk. The National Socialists do not interpret themselves only as instruments of the divine will of history. As well as engaging in the historic and cosmic fundamental conflict between God and evil, they are bringing their collective subjectivity to fruition in tangible, substantial events, thus manifesting and strengthening both their identity and their might. The German Volk can imagine itself as the subject of its own sacred history because it assumes itself to be of the divine substance transmitted through the Aryan race. The ideological symbol 'Aryan' articulates the religious longing for the presence of divinity within history: it finds its satisfaction by positing the presence of the divinity within the Volk. The age-old question, who is the true Volk of God, receives a material response. The bond between God and the Volk is assumed to be quite unlike that between any other earthly and celestial powers. In the National Socialist sources that we have dealt with, the Aryan is a God-human, a godlike 'Makroanthropos', the very personification of God manifest in a particular part of humankind. The real presence of God is held to have taken place in the blood, and not in the collective megapsyche of the race. Men and collective are not merely understood as analogues to God: rather, it is held, the race is in essence God-like. The inverse of these beliefs also holds. Just as the Aryan-Nordic soul is held to carry the Kingdom of Heaven within its very being, so there is posited a collective manifestation of evil. The collective subject called 'the Jew' is substantialized as the satanic 'anti-race'. These declarations are not founded upon purely biological reasons. Rather, the heteronomy of all Jews has the function of a 'counter-idea', as Eric Voegelin recognized early on.66 As we have found, Hitler and Rosenberg describe the Jew as uniting Satan and human existence in one substance. Dietrich Eckart and Joseph Goebbels 'satanized' the Jews literally, by applying to them the term 'Anti66. Eric Voegelin, Rasse und Stoat (Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1933), p. 181; in English, Eric Voegelin, Race and State (ed. Klaus Vondung; trans. Ruth Hein; Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 2; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), p. 180.

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christ'. Rosenberg, who denotes the enemies of 'positive Christianity' as satanic, and Hitler, who describes the role of the Jews in the death of Christ as 'gainsayers of every person5, also impute the role of Antichrist. We emphasize in conclusion how all the thought-complexes that characterize National Socialist ideology have a religious dimension. Because the National Socialistic consciousness of men, society and history is mainly determined through a religious interpretation of existence, and because its valuation of power, rule, state and law depends upon this interpretation, National Socialist ideology has the quality of a political religion. Without the religious dimensions of the categories of existence employed in National Socialism—without the resulting connections between imagination and the political—there would be no connection between identity and substance, between Volk and the Reich, between the Fuhrer and the mass of the people, and between every single member of the community. In light of the work of Eric Voegelin, we can assume that the Holocaust is the consequence of a certain immanentization. Hitler's axiom that the potentiality of the German people is based on the divine core of the Aryan race is a case of Gnosis. Hitler was absolutely convinced that the Jewish people were the incarnation of evil. The divine potentiality can only be realized if this evil is annihilated. Hitler, then, was absolutely forced to conclude that the Jewish people had to be wiped out: 'The soul of our people can only be won, if in a positive fight for our own objectives the enemy of these objectives is also annihilated.'67

67. 'Die Gewinnung der Seele des Volkes kann nur gelingen, wenn man neben der Fiihrung des positiven Kampfes fur die eigenen Ziele den Gegner dieser Ziele vernichtet.' Hitler, Mein Kampf p. 371.

POLITICAL REALITY AND THE LIFE-WORLD: THE CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN ERIC VOEGELIN AND ALFRED SCHUTZ, 1938-59 Gilbert Weiss

1. Dialogue and Discourse Speaking of the relationship between Eric Voegelin and Alfred Schiitz means speaking not only of a friendship 'having lasted for a lifetime' (Voegelin) but also and foremost of an intellectual interactive speech community. During their time in Vienna the two social scientists had first met in courses at university given by the lawyer Hans Kelsen and the sociologist Othmar Spann. They were also regular guests at the famous discussion circles of the time (Geist-Kreis, Mises-Privatseminar)1 and often exchanged ideas in discussions that lasted throughout the night. According to an anecdote by Lissy Voegelin, these talks between her husband and Schiitz would usually start at the famous Cafe Herrenhof, a cafe just behind the Hofburg, in the inner city of Vienna, which had also regularly attracted the two writers Robert Musil and Hermann Broch. After closing hour one of the two, for example Voegelin, would first accompany the other one, Schiitz, home, and after having arrived there their conversation often had not come to an end and therefore they would both walk back to Voegelin's home. Then, however, their discussion would still be so lively that they would once more walk back to Schiitz's home and sometimes would continue walking back and forth until the desire for sleep would put a stop to their nocturnal marathons. After the annexation of Austria to Hitler's Germany their interactive speech community came to an abrupt end and both Voegelin and Schiitz had to leave Austria. In 1938 and 1939, respectively, Voegelin and Schiitz 1. Voegelin also regularly participated in the Kelsen circle on 'Pure Theory of Law' and in the Spann-Kreis. For a general overview of the Vienna circles in the 1920s, see Christian Fleck, 'Zum intellektuellen Umfeld der Wiener Jahre von Alfred Schiitz', in K.R. Leube and A. Pribersky (eds.), Krise und Exodus (Vienna: Wien Universities Verlag, 1995), pp. 98-116.

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emigrated via Paris to the United States. Since Voegelin eventually lived in Louisiana while Schutz resided in New York, their dialogue was now predominantly carried on through an exchange of letters, which was only interrupted by Voegelin's visits to the East Coast. The entire correspondence lasted from 1938 to the year of Schiitz's death in 1959, that is, for 21 years. Fortunately, the major part of it is preserved in two archives,2 containing 231 letters (131 by Voegelin and 100 by Schutz), with roughly two-thirds of these being handwritten and onethird typed. Apart from a few short messages, all letters are written in German. They vary considerably in length and topic. Subject matters include detailed theoretical discussions as well as descriptions of personal life circumstances and short messages dealing with the delivery or the request for manuscripts or the arrangement of a future meeting. Generally speaking, however, the amount of information delivered in the correspondence is extremely high—both biographically and theoretically. The letters are very rich in content. Not surprisingly, the frequency of the letters does not adhere to an orderly pattern. There were some years of intensive correspondence (1943: 29 letters; 1945: 25; 1948/49: 14/12; 1951/52/53: 11/11/17; 1958: 17) and also years in which not more than half a dozen letters were written (1944: 5; 1947: 6; 1950: 4; 1955/56: 6/5). Interestingly enough, the years in which the two friends met personally were also the years of intensive written exchange. The reason was not, as one might suspect, the additional letters required for the arrangement of the meetings, but rather the intellectual stimulus that each of them had received during their extensive talks. This stimulus was effective far beyond their personal discussions and not infrequently required some immediate written continuation of the exchange of ideas. The phases of exchange of most interest theoretically were regularly preceded by personal encounters. This is true for the years 1943/45/49 and 1952/53. There is a clear correlation between the 'heart to heart talks' (Schutz) and the intensity of the written theoretical discussions. In this context one might note the metaphor once used by Voegelin: 'einen Floh ins Ohr gesetzt bekommen' ('to put an idea into somebody's head').3 In fact, both had repeatedly put ideas into the other's

2. Eric Voegelin Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Box 34, Folders 10 and 11; and Schutz Archives, Sozialwissenschaftliches Archiv, University of Konstanz (Germany). 3. Voegelin-Schutz, 3 October 1949.

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head, leading to a kind of productive unrest, and finally resulting in further written theoretical discussion. Concerning the longer time intervals between individual letters, we can see that Schutz seemed to have been the 'lazier' and more unreliable of the two correspondents. On the one hand his 'laziness' might have been due to his double burden of having to make a living as a banker and of being simultaneously engaged in science; alternatively it might have been caused by his continued worries about the severe eye-disease of his son.4 Thus many of Schiitz's letters start with confessions, like 'business-wise I'm in a kind of witches' kitchen and this is the reason for my silence';5 or 'I've been a bit out of touch';6 and even more obvious: 'Unfortunately one has to manage one's time according to the principle of marginal utility, and there are too many duties in my life being imposed on me by outside.'7 This multiple load augmented at the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s when Schutz increased his lecturing activities at the New School for Social Research. His restlessness, his workaholic nature and his stress might finally have accounted for his early death. In view of all his duties it is amazing that Schutz did find the time to correspond intensively with friends like Voegelin, Aron Gurwitsch or Fritz Machlup. However, Voegelin and Gurwitsch especially were not only close friends, but also irreplacable dialogue-partners in the fields of theory and science. For Alfred Schutz, a letter did not simply constitute a medium of communication, but also a platform for ideas, the locus of theory itself. Since Schutz did not—for the major part of his life—speak within the safe walls of academic insitutions and was not an 'official member' of the scientific discourse, he primarly relied on personal dialogue to allow his thoughts to bear fruit. Following Richard Grathoff, we may say that a distinguishing characteristic of Schiitz's work is that it did not come out of the context of the academy, but out of that of discussion, correspondence and dialogue. 'The decisive biographical stages of his development are philosophical

4. In fact Schiitz's double burden was a triple burden, because in contrast to Voegelin he also had a family with two children. 5. 'Ich bin geschaftlich in einer Art von Hexenkessel und dies ist der Grund meines Stillschweigens.' Schutz-Voegelin, 16 April 1946. 6. 'Ich bin der Welt ein bisschen abhanden gekommen.' Schutz-Voegelin, 25 May 1947. 7. 'Leider muss man auch seine Zeit nach dem Grenznutzenprinzip bewirtschaften und es gibt in meinem Leben zuviele von aussen auferlegte Verpflichtungen.' Schutz-Voegelin, 11 May 1953.

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encounters, resulting partly in lifelong relationships... In the correspondence with his friends the basic themes of his scientific work become clear through talk and critical countertalk.'8 Schiitz's main objective in his theoretical work, namely the foundation of social sciences on the 'prepredicative' experience of the Other, that is, the placing of the origin of the social world in the 'pure We-relation' which is constituted in the reciprocal 'Thou-orientation', stems from his biographical experience and permeates his whole way of thinking: The Thou-orientation is the general form in which any particular fellowman is experienced in person. The very fact that I recognize something within the reach of my direct experience as a living, conscious human being constitutes the Thou-orientation. In order to preclude misunderstandings, it must be emphasized that the Thou-orientation is not a judgment by analogy. Becoming aware of a human being confronting me does not depend upon an imputation of life and consciousness to an object in my surroundings by an act of reflective thought. The Thou-orientation is a prepredicative experience of a fellow being. In this experience I grasp the existence of a fellow man in the actuality of a particular person... 9

The development of Schiitz's theoretical ideas is bound closely to the dialogical experience. Especially in regard to the emergence of thematic positions and reflexive self-ascertainment of his theoretical views, Voegelin appears to have been of invaluable worth for him. In contrast to, for instance, Aron Gurwitsch, Voegelin did not regard himself as a phenomenologist; indeed, he had severe reservations about the phenomenology of Husserl. On the other hand, the fact that he knew in detail the work of Husserl that had been published up to that time established an ideal basis for a critical discussion, during which Schlitz was repeatedly drawn out of his phenomenological 'reserve'. Whereas the discussion with Gurwitsch can be called phenomenologically immanent, yet not uncritical, in the argument with Voegelin even the basic principles of phenomenology are challenged. Voegelin's interventions imply for Schutz an accentuation of the historic or geistesgeschichtliche dimension of his life-world concept. This becomes prominent when, in the 1950s, Schutz explicitly borrows 8. Richard Grathoff, Milieu und Lebenswelt: Einfuhrung in die phanomenologische Soziologie und die sozialphdnomenologische Forschung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), p. 20. 9. Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers. II. Studies in Social Theory (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), p. 24.

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Voegelin's term 'cosmion' in order to strengthen the meaning of the lifeworld as a symbolic, culturally and historically grown world. 'As Eric Voegelin has pointed out', he writes, 'any society considers itself as a cosmion, a little cosmos, which is illuminated from within and which requires symbols connecting its order with the order of the cosmos'.10 Although Schiitz, as we will see immediately, had severe objections to Voegelin's transcendental approach to symbols, he was perfectly aware that the symbols of the social cosmion could only be fully understood when being approached historically and intellectual-historically on the basis of a philosophical anthropology. Schiitz's presence as a permanent point of reference was also extremely important to Eric Voegelin. Not only did the discussions of Husserl's phenomenology stimulate Voegelin, but he also engaged with Schiitz's own writings, of which in most cases, as one of Schiitz's primary colleagues, he received the manuscripts directly. Moreover, Schiitz served as an influential authority when it came to evaluating Voegelin's 'main enterprise' ('Hauptgeschaft'), the History of Political Ideas.11 Again and again Schiitz was asked for feedback concerning the content, style and organization of the History. Especially when dealing with socio-theoretical fundamental problems, Voegelin requested a 'critique as annihilating as possible' ('eine moglichst vernichtende Kritik') because 'you are the only person I know that understands these issues'.12 Even after Schiitz's death in 1959 Voegelin always remained aware of the importance of his friendship to Schiitz for his own development of theory. He declared in his Autobiographical Reflections, recorded in 1973, that an 'important development in my understanding of the problems that worried me throughout the 1940s and well into the writing of Order and History was marked by my correspondence with Alfred Schiitz on the problems of consciousness'.13 Earlier, at the beginning of his Anamnesis of

10. Schutz, Collected Papers, II, pp. 244-45. 11. Written between 1939 and 1950. Now in print as Eric Voegelin, History of Political Ideas (8 vols.; series ed. Ellis Sandoz; Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 1926; Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997-99). 12. 'Sie sind der einzige, den ich kenne und der von solchen Dingen etwas versteht.' Voegelin-Schiitz, 15 April 1951. 13. Eric Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections (ed. Ellis Sandoz; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), p. 70; in German, Autobiographische Reflexionen (ed. Peter J. Opitz; trans. Caroline Konig; Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1993), p. 90.

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1966, Voegelin had included a personal tribute to his friend: In Memoriam Alfred Schutz'. Of their relationship, he wrote: The philosophical dialogue ended with Schtitz's death. But did it end? Nearly four decades of shared thinking and mutual criticism do not only leave their marks upon one's work, they also leave behind the habit of asking oneself, throughout that work, what the other person would say about it. One of the keenest philosophical minds of our time is still the silent partner in my thinking. 14

Overall, it is clear from the quotations above that this correspondence is a documentary record which, from a scientific and historical perspective, is something extraordinary, if not unique, as it demonstrates in an impressive way the intrinsic relation between scientific discourse and life-world dialogue. Certainly it is a record that is influenced by the specific relationship between science and emigration which was typical for the generation in which Voegelin and Schutz lived. The results of research on emigration have shown that the experience of exile considerably intensifies informal channels of communication and of discussion of theoretical positions, mostly with representatives of the same generation.15 From this perspective, an exchange of letters such as that which occurred between Schutz and Voegelin can be understood as indispensable to their lives. Moreover, this lively dialogue between these two social scientists is an impressive example of how fascinating and exciting the social sciences can be when they aim to transcend their disciplinary boundaries and refrain from hiding behind the rules of academic discourse. It is generally agreed that access to letters is an aid in the genetic analysis of theories that should not be neglected. It allows us to grasp a view behind the scenes, to clarify motivations and to show the theoretical attempts of the authors in 'statu nascendi'. The closed character of designed theory-systems falls apart, and we suddenly recognize their fragmentary pieces, testifying to the pain of their development, to thinking as an act, and to theory as 'work in progress'. Intellectual tensions that often remain unnoticed in the cool stringency of formulated theorems are disclosed. Whenever authors in their correspondence approach their inner thoughts through the challenge of the other—as it were 'from the outside' 14. Eric Voegelin, 'In Memoriam Alfred Schutz', in Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis: Zur Theorie der Geschichte und Politik (Munich: R. Piper, 1966), pp. 17-20 (20); in English, 'In Memoriam Alfred Schiitz', in Peter J. Opitz (ed.), 77?? Philosophy of Order: Essays on History, Consciousness and Politics (Munich: Klett-Cotta, 1981), pp. 463-65 (465). 15. Cf. Grathoff, Milieu undLebenswelt, p. 124.

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(which is always a challenge, as it means leaving the comfort of the theoretical system behind)—then the pulsating space between inner and outer worlds, in which critical self-reflection is taking place, is widened. Thus the discourse finds its precondition in the dialogue, which makes it less susceptible to being transformed into an independent monologue. In the case of the correspondence between Schiitz and Voegelin, the inclusion of the letters for the reconstruction of theory is not only a considerable aid, it is indispensable. For both of their respective developments at the theoretical level owe a great deal of their dynamics, right from the start, to the dialogical interventions of the other. Referring to his correspondence with Franz Rosenzweig, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy once employed a wonderful metaphor of two billard-balls which, when colliding, transmit their 'effects' to one another.16 This metaphor holds true for the Schiitz-Voegelin correspondence. Even though one should not exaggerate Schiitz's influence on Voegelin's theory-building process,17 I maintain that the opposite error—underestimatingSchiitts importance—would lead us to neglect the importance of the interpersonal dialogue that preceded the theoretical discourses. To do this would—phenomenologically speaking—deprive science of its lifeworld-like foundation. Indeed, it would not only be unphenomenological, but also against all anamnetic reason in Voegelin's sense. For in his Anamnesis of 1966, Voegelin showed that a productive discussion about the structures and processes of consciousness does not begin with the abstract/ philosophical/scientific entity 'consciousness', but at the 'radices of philosophizing in the biography of the philosophizing consciousness',18 that is, with the experiences and personal encounters initiating theoretical reflections. Neither autobiography and theoretical reflection, nor life-world dialogue and scientific discourse, can be separated from one another. Neglecting the importance of Alfred Schiitz for Voegelin's theory-development would be a characteristic feature of the scientific withdrawal from life-world reality, in which Voegelin as well as phenomenology have recognized one of the main evils of modern science. To uncouple Voegelin's 16. Cf. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, ]a und Nein: Autobiographische Fragmente (ed. GeorgMuller; Heidelberg: L. Schneider, 1968), p. 170. 17. It is well known that Voegelin quotes his friend only in his autobiographical writing, but not in his theoretical work. 18. Voegelin, Anamnesis: Zur Theorie der Geschichte undPolitik, p. 61; in English, see Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis (ed. and trans. Gerhart Niemeyer; Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1978), p. 36.

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thinking from his personal friendship and intellectual speech community with Schlitz would mean taking up a position in which the life-worldly basis of all theoretical reflection has been forgotten. Rather than do that, we should stick to Voegelin's own remarks on this matter. His statements quoted earlier concerning 'shared thinking and mutual criticism' speak for themselves. We should not, however, forget that letters are personal documents. They require a different reading than the published works. Authors can take personal responsibility for statements in science only when having published them themselves. What is said in the correspondence between Voegelin and Schlitz is said between friends and not intended for publication. We must continuously keep this point in mind. 2. The Problem of Relevance In the following section I will concentrate on the contents of the discussions between Voegelin and Schiitz, and especially on their different theoretical positions. The scope of this paper forces me to give a brief description, which can hardly do justice to the argumentative dynamics and the dialogical rhythm of their discussions. The rhythm and ambiance of their correspondence can only fully be grasped and comprehended when the reader is immersed in the actual letters themselves. In my dissertation19 I have distinguished four crucial phases of the theoretical discussion between Voegelin and Schiitz. In chronological order these are: (1) Edmund Husserl—Consciousness and History (1943); (2) Multiple Realities: Sentiment and Rationality, Phenomenalism and Hiroshima (1945); (3) The Texture of History and the Historicity of Truth (1948-49); (4) A 'New Science' and the old problems (1951-53). There are various problems we encounter when attempting to divide the whole correspondence up into its individual components. As one might 19. Gilbert Weiss, Theorie, Relevanz und Wahrheit: Eine Rekonstruktion des Briefwechsels zwischen Eric Voegelin und Alfred Schutz (1938-1959)', PhD dissertation, Vienna, 1998. See also, as a summary of my dissertation, Gilbert Weiss, Theorie, Relevanz und Wahrheit: Zum Briefwechsel zwischen Eric Voegelin und Alfred Schutz (ed. Peter J. Opitz and Dietmar Herz; Occasional Papers, 6; Munich: EricVoegelin-Archiv, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat, 1998).

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expect, the topics covered in the correspondence can neither thematically nor chronologically be clearly separated, but rather merge into one another.20 It is not feasible here to describe each and every phase of the discussions in detail. Instead I will focus on their underlying theme—the problem of relevance—which runs through the correspondence like a red thread. This central issue allows us to demonstrate the differing theoretical positions of Voegelin and Schiitz. The crucial point of the 1943 discussions about Husserl is not primarily the latter's construction of history in his Crisis-essay.21 That issue is only the initiator; the problem with which Voegelin and Schiitz are centrally concerned is the fundamental hermeneutical problem of judging a theoretical or philosophical position and its 'relevance'. Voegelin is severely critical of Husserl. He states that the transcendental-philosophical epistemology proposed by Husserl—following in the tradition of Descartes— might with its clearly defined scope of problems be one legitimate philosophical subject, but was certainly not the central issue of philosophy. Questions on the objectivity of cognition and on the foundations of transcendental subjectivity are not a primary problem of philosophy, but rather a secondary one, a derivative, so to speak. Voegelin declares, indeed, that these questions actually owe their higher status as the central subject matter of contemporary philosophy to the crisis that they were initially supposed to overcome. For Voegelin, Husserl truly clarifies this secondary problem, but fails to touch upon the primary and fundamental issues. Therefore the Crisis-essay can—just like the Logischen Untersuchungen and the Ideen—only be called a 'prolegomenon to a philosophy, but is not itself the undertaking of an established philosophy'.22 In response, Schiitz stresses that he would not want to act as the 'defender of transcendental phenomenology' because T fear that it has failed to provide convincing answers to some important questions.'23 He

20. After all, the topic that dominates the discussions by far is Edmund Husserl. His name is mentioned in 43 letters, extending from the beginning to the end of the correspondence. 21. Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europdischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phanomenologie (ed. Elisabeth Stroker; Hamburg: Meiner, 2nd edn, 1982). 22. 'Ein Vorwort zu einer Philosophie, aber nicht selbst ein fundiertes philosophisches Unternehmen.' Voegelin-Schutz, 17 September 1943. 23. 'Ich befiirchte, dass sie an entscheidenden Punkten gescheitert ist.' SchiitzVoegelin, (n.d.) November 1943.

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argues that it is primarily a 'matter of personal valuation when disputing the status of an epistemological achievement as philosophy'.24 For Schtitz this does not mean that there are not fundamental philosophical questions beyond epistemology, questions which cannot be answered satisfactorily by using the transcendental phenomenological method alone. In order to approach these questions some 'courage towards metaphysics' (Mut zur MetaphysiK) might indeed become necessary. Even though Husserl disappoints expectations in this respect, one could do justice to his work by taking his perspective seriously and by refraining from disavowing it beforehand. In this response, Schiitz is severely critical of Voegelin's stance: For the present purpose we have to take an interest in the problem being posed in the [Crisis-]essay. Nothing is more unyielding than to accuse an author of dwelling on a problem that is of no importance to the reader, and thus to confront the author with the reader's disappointment that he did not see the world from the reader's perspective and did not consider the same issues to be relevant.

This accusation from his friend leads Voegelin to be anxious that 'on some matters we do not communicate effectively due to the fact that for a philosophical interpretation in general we do not employ the same basic presuppositions'.26 In this context Voegelin also refers to the consequences of Schiitz's relativization and his neutralization of the idea of relevance. In his view, one endangers the existence of a 'community of philosophizers' (' Gemeinschaft der Philosophierenderi) if one is not allowed to question beyond the specific subjective relevances: Naturally every philosopher must consider something to be relevant— otherwise he would not start to engage in philosophical reasoning. But could he not be mistaken? Could he not possibly consider something to be

24. 'Es ist vor allem Sache personlicher Bewertung, ob man einer erkenntniskritischen Leistung...den Rang einer Philosophic absprechen will.' Schiitz-Voegelin, (n.d.) November 1943. 25. 'Zu diesem Zweck aber miissen wir uns das in diesem Aufsatz gestellte Problem zu eigen machen. Denn nichts ist unfruchtbarer als einem Schriftsteller vorzuwerfen, er habe sich fur ein anderes Problem interessiert als der Leser, und nun den Autor des Lesers Enttauschung entgelten zu lassen, dass er nicht die Welt mit des Lesers Augen gesehen und nicht die gleichen Dinge wie er fiir relevant gehalten hat.' SchiitzVoegelin, (n.d.) November 1943. 26. 'Dass wir in manchen Punkten aneinander vorbeireden, weil wir fur eine philosophische Interpretation im allgemeinen nicht die gleichen Grundsatze anwenden.' Voegelin-Schutz, 28 December 1943.

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of relevance, which from an objective viewpoint was irrelevant? Are there no rules of choice? Is a scheme of relevance an irrational factum which cannot rationally be criticized or discussed? Is each and every philosopher a monad of relevance?... Is there no hierarchy of philosophical problems?—Can the problems of such an hierarchy not be discussed in rational arguments? By posing these questions I do not intend to have said anything 'in concrete' about the justification of any judgment on relevance; instead, my intention is to show that an entire aspect of factual discussion would be destroyed if one would resort to the comforting position of a person claiming that 'what one considers to be relevant is a matter of personal valuation and not a matter of rational argument'. Although this viewpoint might seem trivial at first, it is of cardinal importance for the entire process of our discussion. Only under the assumption that there is something worth discussing in this subject matter, does the discussion begin to make sense. If relevance should be a more formal term for 'taste', then the discussion of a 27 thought being considered relevant turns into a game.

After this general statement on the problem of relevance, Voegelin does proceed with more concreteness and eventually clarifies what to him is a fundamental philosophical problem. Here he takes his starting point—just like Husserl—from the general situation of the crisis. For Voegelin the term 'fundamental' can be applied to the problem associated with the re-ordering of human existence only against the background of the destruction of its traditional (self-)interpretation. In other words: what philosophy can put at the disposal of humanity in its present urgent crisis is not simply a reflection on the basis of human cognition, but rather an 27. 'Selbstverstandlich muss jeder Philosophierende irgendetwas fiir relevant halten,—sonst kame er ja nie bis zum Philsosophieren. Aber kann er sich nicht irren? Kann er nicht etwas fiir relevant halten, was objektiv irrelevant ist? Gibt es keine Regeln der Auswahl? Ist ein Relevanzschema ein irrationales Faktum, das nicht rational kritisiert und diskutiert werden kann? Ist jeder Philosophierende eine Relevanzmonade?... Gibt es keine Hierarchic philosophischer Probleme? Ist das Problem einer solchen Hierarchic nicht diskutierbar in rationalen Argumenten? Ich will mit diesen Fragen im Augenblick nichts iiber die Berechtigung eines Relevanzurteils in concrete gesagt haben; ich werfe die Fragen nur auf, um zu zeigen, dass es hier einen Bereich sachlicher Diskussion gibt, der zerstort wiirde, wenn man sich in die Position zuriickzieht: was einer fiir relevant halt, ist Sache der personlichen Bewertung, kann aber nicht Sache rationalen Arguments sein.—So trivial dieser Punkt in der Formulierung scheinen mag, so kardinal wichtig ist er fiir den ganzen Gang unserer Diskussion. Denn nur unter der Voraussetung, dass es etwas in der Sache zu diskutieren gibt, hat die Diskussion einen Sinn. Wenn Relevanz ein gewahlterer Ausdruck fiir "Geschmackssache" sein soil, wird die Durcharbeitung eines fiir relevant gehaltenen Gedankens zum Spiel.' Voegelin-Schiitz, 28 December 1943.

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inquiry into the basis of human life in society and history as a whole. Reformulated, this means that the challenge of reliable thinking in view of the universal crisis experienced in the year 1943 cannot simply aim at proving a transcendental ego of cognition before all empirical experience. Rather, it must aim at explaining how the empirically concrete T successfully solves the existential problems of the situation. If a rational discussion of questions related to relevance is to be possible, the urgency of the situation ought naturally to influence any judgments on the relevance of a theoretical problem. This controversy of 1943 clearly shows the different schemes within which Voegelin and Schtitz respectively understand relevance. To Voegelin, relevance is a normative category, a rationally ordered pattern, establishing a hierarchy of philosophical problems. The vital contribution to the restructuring of human existence at a moment of crisis is the provision of a standard of philosophical thinking. Generally speaking, for Voegelin the act of philosophical reflection starts with the realization of the 'drama of humanity', with the 'experience of [a person's] life in precarious existence within the limits of birth and death' and with 'the wondering question about the ultimate ground, the aitia or prote arche, of all reality and specifically his own'.28 The twentieth century totalitarianisms and their speculative predecessors have eclipsed this basic experience and have uncoupled man from the divine ground of his existence. By doing so they have destroyed man's 'centre of reality'. This is the precondition of Voegelin's philosophizing: the degradation of man. Voegelin is a philosopher of the crisis, an analyst of the twentieth-century tragedies—maybe comparable to Albert Camus or Franz Rosenzweig, both admired by him. In view of the situation of crisis one has to make decisions—especially when it comes to the relevance of philosophical or political positions. A neutral scheme of subjective relevances would not be of much help here; what is needed is decisiveness and reliable judgment on what is of more or of less relevance in order to find a way out of the crisis. Voegelin once unmistakably points out that one has to take sides: for Socrates or for Athens, for or against the truth.29 Alfred Schiitz, by contrast, attempts to develop a scheme of relevance that in its nature is not normative and judgmental, but neutral and 28. Eric Voegelin, 'Reason: The Classic Experience', in Eric Voegelin, Published Essays, 1966-1985 (ed. Ellis Sandoz; Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 12; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), pp. 265-91 (268). 29. Voegelin-Schutz, 11 January 1954.

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descriptive. He is most concerned with the sociological question of how social actors coordinate their actions in everyday life so that a social world is reasonably constructed. Central for him is the problem of (not necessarily conscious) selection, because opting for a specific action always implies not opting for possible others. In this context it is important to view the selected or relevant action in relation to the other non-relevant actions, and also always to see the 'problematic' aspect in relation to the world taken for granted as the general field of'open possibilities'. In Husserl's terminology, this is referred to as 'theme' (centre) of consciousness on the one hand, and 'marginal zones' or the 'horizon' of consciousness on the other. In his late works, Schiitz differentiates between three different levels of relevance: one related to theme and content, one related to interpretation and method, and one related to motivation.30 This differentiation—what has been chosen as theme, what is the motivation of the choice, and what is the method employed—forms the foundation of his 'general theory of relevance'. Although Schiitz utilizes this scheme in his discussions with Voegelin as a hermeneutic scheme for the history of philosophy, he originally intended it to be a social hermeneutical instrument for the comprehension of social actors' everyday-life processes of constituting meaning. (And as such it became famous). We see clearly in these exchanges on the problem of relevance that Schiitz is a sociologist, not a philosopher of history. His theme is social everyday life, its routines and its horizons of meaning and knowledge—or, to put it in a programmatic phrase, 'the natural attitude of man'. When Schiitz speaks of relevance, he primarily means 'the system of relevances by which man within his natural attitude in daily life is guided'.31 In spite of the fact that Schiitz knew very well that there is a level of transcendence outside of the mundane 'structures of the life-world', he does not address—or only rarely addresses—that level as a specific topic. His scheme of relevance manages very well without questions regarding transcendence, truth and the tension toward the divine ground of human existence. From his action-theoretical and cognitive-sociological perspective, he is not so much interested in the question of which decision is the right one (to stick to the above-mentioned example, the decision for Socrates or for Athens), but rather in the question of why, under which circum30. Alfred Schiitz, Das Problem der Relevanz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982). 31. Alfred Schiitz, Collected Papers. I. The Problem of Social Reality (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), p. 228.

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stances, and for what reason a specific decision has been opted for and not another. From a cognitive-sociological viewpoint, such a procedure is fully legitimate. A philosophy of politics, however, needs to address the tension between immanence and transcendence if it desires to understand the roots of ideologies as innerworldly eschatologies. Voegelin—unlike any other political philospher of the twentieth century—has made that clear. The question of relevance, which first emerges in the discussions on Husserl in 1943, runs through the correspondence like a red thread. In the discussions at the beginning of the 1950s it becomes more and more virulent. This is the time when a certain aggressiveness in tone might be detected in the letters. In one letter, of 15 September 1952, Voegelin accuses Schtitz of not taking into account in his theory of relevance the theories of goods and virtues in their classical sense. Why on earth should ethics be mutilated and be reduced to a theory of rational purpose-oriented action lacking substance? If a positivist employs such limitations because of his regarding the problems of ethics and metaphysics as fictitious problems, I can fully understand though not approve of it. But why do you do that? 32

Schiitz replies: If you regard the theory of virtues as the most important part within the theory of action, then from your understanding of the scope of the problems... this undoubtedly is correct. However, my intention is a completely different one, a much lesser or maybe much more ambitious one. First and foremost I am interested in clarifying the prescientific disposition of the everyday-world that is 'given without question' and from which our actions, 33 being seemingly detached from highest values, arise.

32. 'Warum soil die Ethik verstiimmelt und auf eine substanzleere Theorie des zweckrationalen Handelns reduziert werden? Wenn ein Positivist solche Einschrankungen vornimmt, weil er die Probleme der Ethik und Metaphysik fur "Scheinprobleme" halt, so kann ich das verstehen, wenn auch nicht billigen. Aber warum tun Sie das?' Voegelin-Schiitz, 15 September 1952. 33. 'Wenn Sie die Tugendlehre fur das wichtigste Stuck einer Theorie des Handelns halten, so ist dieser Auffassung vom Rahmen der von Ihnen verfolgten Probleme zweifellos zuzustimmen. aber mein Absehen geht in eine ganz andere, viel weniger oder vielleicht mehr ambitionierte Richtung. Ich will vor allem die vorwissenschaftliche Interessenlage aufklaren, aus der, weil sie einfach als "fraglos gegeben" angesetzt wird, unsere scheinbar von alien obersten Werten ganz losgelosten Handlungen in der sozialen Alltagswelt entspringen.' Schiitz-Voegelin, 10 October 1952.

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Later on, Schiitz emphasizes that he would not disqualify the classic theory of virtues as would a 'positivist'. In his opinion 'the category of relevance is wide enough so that value-systems defined by theories of virtue or imaginations of happiness can and must find their place within it'. Furthermore, he continues, in his view relevance is not at all limited to purposeoriented rational action. At the end of this letter Schiitz becomes even more explicit: You know how much I admire your work. I esteem it so highly that it does not need any justifications. But why, why, why do you take such a monopolistic-imperialistic attitude? In life as much as in science everybody works within his own boundaries, which he himself, or his own demon have established; one does not transcend them without any danger. But one should not without danger forget that there are many apartments in our 34 father's home.

Voegelin then stresses that their differing points of views might originate in the fact that 'you are interested in developing a general theory whereas I am concentrated on a theory of politics'.33 For a theory of politics it is necessary to grasp not only the formal structures of actions, but also the contents of specific historical situations in order to avoid a historical relativism: It is not the same when Plato critically reflects on a decaying Athens and when Nazis and communists aim at destroying the classic-Christian tradition. If I have understood you correctly, a general theory of relevance would 36 run into the danger of declaring this specific problem to be irrelevant.

We could of course now debate whether or not Voegelin has at this point misinterpreted Schiitz. In my judgment, he has done so. First of all, 34. 'Sie wissen wie sehr ich ihr Werk bewundere. Es steht viel zu hoch, um gerechtfertigt werden zu miissen. Aber warum, warum, warum nehmen Sie eine so monopolistisch-imperialistische Haltung ein? Im Leben wie in der Wissenschaft arbeitet jeder innerhalb der Grenzen, die er sich, oder die ihm sein Damon steckt. Man iiberschreitet sie nicht ohne Gefahr. Aber es ist auch nicht ohne Gefahr zu vergessen, dass es im Hause unseres Vaters viele Wohnungen gibt.' Schiitz-Voegelin, 10 October 1952. 35. '...dass Sie eine allgemeine Theorie ausarbeiten wollen wahrend ich mich speziell auf eine Theorie der Politik konzentriere...' Voegelin-Schiitz, 1 January 1953. 36. 'Es ist nicht dasselbe, ob Platon iiber ein verfallendes Athen hinausdenkt, oder ob Nationalsozialisten und Kommunisten die klassisch-christliche Tradition vernichten wollen. Eine allgemeine Relevanztheorie [immer vorausgesetzt, dass ich Sie richtig verstanden habe] ware der Gefahr ausgesetzt, dass sie diese konkretere Problematik als irrelevant erklart.' Voegelin-Schiitz, 10 January 1953.

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rational purpose-oriented action is not in the centre of Schiitz's argument. He focuses more than anything else on the—in his words—pragmatische Wirkensbeziehung as the characteristic of the everyday-world, that is, on the communicative actions within and the changes of the outer world, be they intended or not.37 Secondly, the notion of relevance does indeed seem to be wide enough to include the ideas of virtue and goods—a fact that is admitted by Voegelin in a different paragraph of his letter. However, Voegelin's criticism does touch upon a central problem of Schiitz and of phenomenology, or socio-phenomenology, in general: on the neglect of the political. Life-world as a phenomenological concept is— unlike in Habermas's theory, in which the term has been completely transformed—an unpolitical category. In its original sense it does not denote an entity, but a state of consciousness—a distinctive 'attention a la vie' as Schtitz, following Bergson, states. This state of consciousness of social actors is formed by the mundane-intersubjective constitution of meaning. In a way, 'life-world' is a socio-ontological indicator for the stability of social reality. The issue of stability and order within society as a political problem is not or is only partly dealt with in phenomenology. This is exactly the issue Voegelin draws attention to: social reality is more than a mundane-intersubjective disposition; it always occurs within a political framework which has a strong influence on how firm and stable an order it is—not only as a social order, but also and especially as an order of consciousness. And this framework is essentially defined by the symbolic interpretations of the tension between mundaneity and transmundaneity, between temporariness and eternity, between immanence and transcendence, or between a person and the ground of his or her existence. This is precisely the point of Voegelin's programmatic term 'political reality'. It refers to the fact that the configurations of meaning, the passions and actions in the social world, are substantially structured by experiences that the concept of'life-world' does not bring into view. This becomes obvious in Voegelin's and Schiitz's differing uses of the notion of'meaning' or 'sense'. For Schiitz, the constitution of meaning (Sinnkonstitution) refers only to mundane processes of reciprocal interpretation and action. In contrast, Voegelin regards the constitution of meaning primarily as an eschatological problem. As a political thinker, he is interested in the transformations of religious into political sense-creating (Sinnstiftung). To him this problem is firmly connected with existential

37. Cf. Schutz-Voegelin, 8 August 1945.

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questions of human hope, mortality and salvation, and with their ideological-speculative deformations. An analysis of totalitarianism and its pathogenic substance demands the wide range of a historic, cultural and political framework, exploding the categories of phenomenology. 3. Conclusions Throughout their correspondence, both Voegelin and Schiitz repeatedly attempt to mention their 'common fundamental attitude' ('gemeinsame Fundamentaleinstellung)', yet their differences are clearly visible. The differences result, as has been shown, and as Voegelin himself especially emphasizes, from different thematic interests. However, beyond these thematically differing interests there are also points at which the two theories substantially differ. For Voegelin it is undisputed that all terms of social science must rest on an ontology 'in which experiences of transcendence are seen as the distinctive characteristic of man'.38 It is this reference that for Voegelin, first and foremost, legitimizes theory. In contrast, Schiitz bases his sociological concept on a philosophical anthropology that puts the mundane existence of man into its centre. Obviously, numerous consequences relating to the conceptual structure of theory result from these different pre-decisions. It is beyond the scope of this paper to dwell on these consequences in greater detail. They do, however, refer not only to the problem of relevance, but to the criteria of the whole formation of categories, for example, Schiitz's concentration on the intentional dimension of consciousness and Voegelin's focus on its participatory dimension. This results in completely different categorical approaches to, for instance, the so-called 'Thou-problem' in Husserl's work, which for Voegelin is an artificial problem developed out of the Cartesian-phenomenological isolation of a monadic consciousness. Once this problem has been created, a number of other problems naturally follow; for example, the monads of consciousness have to be forcefully interlinked via the term of intersubjectivity. This view is challenged by Voegelin's idea of the 'primordiale Seinsverbundenheit\ the 'consubstantiality' of man, world and God, preceding the differentiation of the I and the Thou. One could easily continue this list of differences in category. Neverthless, in spite of all the thematic and theoretical differences between the political philosopher Voegelin and the sociologist Schiitz, 38. 'In der die Transzendenzerlebnisse als Wesensbestand des Menschen anerkannt sind.' Voegelin-Schutz, 30 April 1951.

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between pneumopathology and phenomenology, the two friends managed to engage in an intellectual dialogue for more than twenty years: a dialogue of a unique kind in the scientific community, and in which both of them complemented and repeatedly challenged each other. On the one hand, Schiitz, the sociologist of everyday life, was the analyst of the natural attitude in which the world is taken for granted, that is, in which any doubts or fundamental questions about its existence is put in brackets. His aim was to systematically investigate the social cosmos in its individual parts and details. He was a specialist for the microscopic analysis of social courses of action and for the the world 'within the reach of my direct experience'.39 In a theoretical-technical sense he was more diligent, systematic and more consistent than Voegelin, a point that the latter once put forward himself.40 On the other hand, in opposition to Schiitz, Voegelin's starting point was not everyday life, not the natural attitude, but the crisis in a comprehensive sense. This is something substantially different. Voegelin was a philosopher of the crisis of the contemporary human situation, and of the exodus out of that crisis. His study of pneumopathology clearly presupposes the perception of that crisis: without it, it would not make sense. Voegelin's major strength as a political philosopher was in macroscopic analysis, in the range of his historical and philosophical perspective, and in his ability to draw an impressive panorama of intellectual history. He managed to portray the structural relations (Strukturverwandtschaften) of historical, political and social phenomena. Despite these differences, both thinkers radically condemned and fought against all forms of positivism. They shared the conviction that the social sciences must be securely anchored within a philosophical anthropology (although they were of different opinions on fundamental anthropological principles), and also that one has to proceed to the pretheoretical and pre-logical horizons of experience and structures of meaning in order to adequately comprehend social reality.

39. Alfred Schiitz, Collected Papers, II, p. 24. 40. Cf. Eric Voegelin, 'Vorwort', in Voegelin, Anamnesis: Zur Theorie der Geschichte undPolitik pp. 7-13 (13); in English, 'Consciousness and Order: Foreword to "Anamnesis" (1966)', in Fred Lawrence (ed.), The Beginning and the Beyond: Papers from the Gadamer and Lonergan Conferences (Supplementary Issue of Lonergan Workshop, 4; Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1984), pp. 35-41 (41).

Part II

POLITICAL RELIGIONS IN A SECULAR AGE

THE COLD WAR, THE DECLINE OF THE WEST, AND THE PURPOSE OF 'CONTAINMENT': THE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF GEORGE F. KENNAN* Stefan Rossbach

1. Introduction One of Eric Voegelin's most controversial contributions to political philosophy and its history is his interpretation of the 'growth of gnosticism' as the 'essence of modernity'.1 Drawing on the work of Ferdinand Christian Baur, Voegelin occasionally outlined—but never fully developed—a historical continuity from the Gnostic systems of late antiquity to the ideologies of the modern period.2 While Baur presented his argument as a history of ideas, Voegelin preferred to investigate this continuity in terms of the activity, migration and ramification of concrete religious and political movements. Voegelin's thesis is the subject of intense controversy for a number of reasons. First of all, he never provided a systematic or historical discussion of Gnosticism. Originally, it seems as if he used the notion of Gnosticism as a more precise characterization of what he had earlier called 'political religions'. The historical aspects of his argument are best spelled out in his The People of God, written (as part of his History of Political Ideas) before he began to apply Gnosticism to modern ideologies in The New Science of Politics. He attempted a more systematic definition of Gnosticism in his 'Ersatz Religion: The Gnostic Mass Movements of Our Time'.3 Here, * This essay appeared in a revised version as a chapter in Stefan Rossbach, Gnostic Wars: The Cold War in the Context of a History of Western Spirituality (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999). 1. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), p. 126. 2. Ferdinand Christian Baur, Die Christliche Gnosis oder Die Christliche Religionsphilosophic in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung (Tubingen: Osiander, 1835). 3. Originally published as Eric Voegelin, 'Religionsersatz: Die gnostischen Massenbewegungen unserer Zeit', in Wort und Wahrheit 15 (1960), pp. 5-18; in English, 'Ersatz Religion', in Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics and Gnosticism: Two Essays

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Voegelin delineates six characteristic features of 'Gnosticism'. First, the Gnostic was dissatisfied with his situation. Secondly, the Gnostic believed that the inadequacy of the situation could be attributed to the fact that the 'world was intrinsically poorly organized'. In other words, the responsibility for evil was always with the world rather than with the one who experiences evil. Thirdly, the Gnostic insisted that salvation from the evil of the world was possible. Hence, and fourthly, the 'order of being [would] have to be changed in an historical process'. Fifthly, according to Voegelin, the activist stance of Gnosticism was reflected in the assumption that a change in the order of being lay 'in the realm of human action'. And if all this was taken for granted, it follows that knowledge—gnosis—of the method of altering the order of being was the central concern of the Gnostic.4 All of these attempts remained sketchy at best; and Voegelin's definition of Gnosticism is impossible to defend even as an 'ideal type'.5 Voegelin eventually qualified his views on the 'corrosion of Western civilization through gnosticism'.6 In the Autobiographical Reflections, he assigned equal relevance to 'other factors to be considered in addition' and referred to apocalypticism and the revival of neo-Platonism in the Renaissance as independent strands in the process of 'immanentization' which shaped and shapes modernity.7 Moreover, there is a rumour that Voegelin retracted his views on Gnosticism in private conversations shortly before his death. It may well be impossible to resolve the controversy around Voegelin's use or misuse of 'Gnosticism' as a characterization of modernity. But the issue at hand is too important to become a mere exercise in the proper exegesis of Voegelin's work. For at least some time, 'Gnosticism' was Voegelin's answer to a question, and we must not dismiss the question together with a faulty answer. Whatever the flaws of his analysis, and whatever his final attitude towards his earlier work on Gnosticism, Voegelin's struggle with the question is illuminating and instructive. But what is the question? In its most general form, the question (Chicago: Henry Regnery, Gateway Edition, 1968), pp. 81-114. 4. Voegelin, 'Ersatz Religion', pp. 86-88. 5. See Michael Allen Williams, Rethinking 'Gnosticism': An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 6. Voegelin, New Science of Politics, p. 188. 7. Eric Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections (ed. Ellis Sandoz; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), pp. 66-67.

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concerns the conditions of emergence of a form of 'derailment' consisting of what Voegelin called the denial or perversion of the 'life of reason'. He explained that the 'life of reason' was a way of life in which man's participation in the transcendent logos is made 'sufficiently important so that it becomes an influence on the development of character'.8 The problem is to account for a form of disorder that can be characterized by a variety of interrelated manifestations: the closure of the soul, the inability to apperceive, and the tendency to an externalization of evil. The difficulty is clearly addressed in Plato, and Voegelin occasionally presented his own enterprise as an attempt at the restoration of classical political science.9 Voegelin's struggle with the problem is characterized by two assertions. First, his work is strictly historical and, moreover, genealogical. One of the reasons why he rejected a 'history of ideas' as the suitable literary form for his enterprise was that the experiential basis or 'essence' of both the life of reason and its perversion could never be fully identified with any set of symbols, ideas or concepts which were used to express them at a particular moment in time. The analysis could not proceed by extracting from the historical evidence an ideal-typical 'definition' or 'description' of the phenomena under investigation and then identifying them in other periods by checking for congruence with the original ideal-type. Hence, whatever could be found as historical evidence represented 'only' variations or versions of phenomena whose essences could not be described in themselves. Voegelin was aware of these problems already at a very early stage in his project.10 Hence, the only way of establishing the very existence of such phenomena resides in the examination of historical links between their various manifestations. In other words, the unity of the phenomenon to be studied should not be established by the investigator but, instead, its variations should identify themselves precisely as variations of a theme that concretizes itself as a historical tradition. The analysis had to proceed

8. Eric Voegelin, 'Industrial Society in Search of Reason', in Raymond Aron (ed.)> World Technology and Human Destiny (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963), pp. 31-46 (34). 9. Voegelin, New Science of Politics, 'Introduction', pp. 1-26. 10. See for example the methodological sections in Eric Voegelin, Uber die Form des Amerikanischen Geistes (Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1928); in English, Eric Voegelin, On the Form of the American Mind (ed. Jiirgen Gebhardt and Barry Cooper; trans. Ruth Hein; Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 1; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995).

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along 'lines of meaning' which were evoked by those who intended to continue or discontinue them. By following such lines of meaning and by comparing the various phenomena linked through them, the investigator would be able to reveal and illuminate what made the establishment of such lines of meaning possible in the first place even though he may never be able to define the essence of these lines abstractly as an ideal type. Such lines of meaning' clarify themselves within history.11 Voegelin's approach is not just 'historical' but it is genealogical in the sense that it has self-referential implications.12 For his work is conducted from the perspective of the life of reason. But the meaning of this perspective—reason as 'the classic experience'—is itself clarified during the investigation. Reason itself is implicated in the investigation of the historical manifestations of its perversion; and Voegelin's work is implicated to the extent that the investigation extends into the present. This self-reference is not a tautology but one of the creative driving forces of Voegelin's project. The second assertion that is implied in Voegelin's thesis on Gnosticism is that the roots of the problem of'derailment' are not institutional or conceptual but spiritual. At stake is, ultimately, man's place in relation to the cosmos and the divine. If the investigation is pursued at this level—the ontological level—it is clear that it must refer to specific civilizations, especially to those in which the life of reason was able to flourish, and to those historical moments of transition that initiated and then affected man's self-understanding. The analysis will find its natural focus points in such 'axial' or 'liminal' moments in which civilizations are formed in response to dissolutions of order.13 11. For a more sophisticated elaboration of these problems, see Eric Voegelin, 'Aquivalenz von Erfahrungen und Symbolen in der Geschichte', in Eric Voegelin, Ordnung, Bewusstsein, Geschichte: Spate Schriften—Eine Auswahl (ed. Peter J. Opitz; Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1988), pp. 99-126. This is a German translation, by H. Wintertholler, of Eric Voegelin, 'Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History', first published in 1970 and reprinted in Eric Voegelin, Published Essays, 1966-1985 (ed. Ellis Sandoz; Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 12; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), pp. 115-33. 12. On the methodological principles of'genealogy', see Arpad Szakolczai, 'Nietzsche's Genealogical Method: Presentation and Application' (Florence: European University Institute/ Department of Social and Political Sciences Working Paper No. 93/7). 13. See for example S.N. Eisenstadt, 'Comparative Liminality: Liminality and Dynamics of Civilization', in Religion 15 (1985), pp. 315-38; and S.N. Eisenstadt,

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2. The Relevance of the Cold War Voegelin's analysis of the 'denial of the life of reason' is related to a diagnosis of the present in an obvious way given that the twentieth century has been dominated by ideologies that transformed the above mentioned 'derailment' into mass phenomena with destructive consequences of hitherto unknown proportions. As he began to interpret modern ideological mass movements in terms of Gnosticism, Voegelin was able to proclaim that the 'totalitarianism of our time' had to be understood as 'journey's end of the Gnostic search for a civil theology'.14 In the sporadic references to the paralysis of the Cold War confrontation in Voegelin's writings, he made clear that the conflict could not be understood as a conflict between the forces of reason and its 'derailment'. On the contrary, the confrontation with Russian Communism only signified that the corruption of Western culture of the nineteenth century had come 'home to us with a vengeance'.15 If liberalism was understood as 'the immanent salvation of man and society', communism was its 'most radical expression'.16 The conflict as a whole, not just one or the other of the ideological positions adopted within it, was a symptom of crisis. I am not aware of any systematic treatise by Voegelin on the Cold War. Yet, for a number of reasons, the conflict seems to lend itself to an analysis within Voegelin's framework. Most obviously, the division of the world into 'two universal armed camps engaged in a death struggle against each other' can almost too easily be interpreted as the implementation of the dualism that Gnostic mysticism often incorporates. But the bi-polarity is not the crucial issue here. Rather, the true fatality of contemporary wars and the Cold War stemmed from their 'character as Gnostic wars, that is, of wars between worlds that are bent on mutual destruction'.17 As wars between exclusive meaning worlds, they are wars without limits. Secondly, the widespread acceptance of the threat of nuclear annihilation in the context of a defence of ideas and ways of life manifests a certainty at the level of ideas on how to live which, if anything, expresses the inability to apperceive on both sides of the conflict. The willingness, in other words, to defend one's life-conduct at the expense of the destruction 'Axial Age Sectarianism and the Antinomies of Modernity', Chapter 9 in this volume. 14. Voegelin, New Science of Politics, p. 163. 15. Voegelin, 'Industrial Society in Search of Reason', p. 45. 16. Voegelin, New Science of Politics, p. 175. 17. Voegelin, New Science of Politics, p. 151.

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of the one and only natural environment in which civilization can flourish presupposes a particular self-understanding of man characterized by the inability to accept limits in the imposition of human designs on the world. This last observation draws our attention to the spiritual dimensions of the conflict. The growing literature on the Cold War typically neglects this aspect. Published under headlines such as 'international relations' or 'international polities', attempts to read the Cold War as an epoch of its own focus on economic, political, diplomatic and sometimes ideological issues.18 The very nature of these concerns ensured that the sense of epoch evoked by the end of the Cold War was not translated into an overcoming of the past but into policy-relevant anticipations of possible futures. The task of assigning meaning to the Cold War experience is pushed out of sight by pragmatic pressures. But there is a third important reason why the interpretation of the Cold War ought to be placed on a philosophical basis. For the only treatment of the Cold War experience with philosophical aspirations that has aroused the interest of political scientists so far is, arguably, Francis Fukuyama's Hegelian speculation about the manifestation of the logos in history through Western liberalism.19 Instead of attempting to reveal the underlying 'disease of the spirit' of which the conflict was a symptom, intellectuals proceeded to take its end and outcome as a confirmation of one of

18. A non-representative selection: Pierre Allan and Kjell Goldmann (eds.), The End of the Cold War: Evaluating Theories of International Relations (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1992); Geir Lundestad and Odd Arne Westad (eds.), Beyond the Cold War: New Dimensions in International Relations (Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1993); Chester Hartman and Pedro Vilanova (eds.), Paradigms Lost: The Post Cold War Era (London: Pluto Press, 1992); Michael J. Hogan, The End of the Cold War: Its Meaning and Implications (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, We All Lost the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); and John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). But outside the discipline of'international relations', a literature is now emerging that examines the impact of the Cold War on culture and society. See for example Fred Inglis, The Cruel Peace: Everyday Life and the Cold War (New York: Basic Books, 1991); Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); and Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). 19. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History?', The National Interest 16 (1989), pp. 3-18; and with significant modifications and qualifications, Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1992).

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the worlds involved. Accordingly, the end of the Cold War engendered confident speculations about 'new world orders' and 'globalizations' as the contemporary versions of the belief in the imminent and immanent renovatio mundi. There is a sense, then, in which the end of the paralysis has made it even more difficult for philosophy to find an audience. 3. George F. Kennan and the Cold War The 'totalitarianism' implicit in the Cold War conflict, its spiritual dimension, the failure of intellectuals to transform its end into an occasion for introspection rather than confirmation—all these are good reasons why the Cold War should be included in a more methodical manner in the scholarly enterprise started by Voegelin. At stake here is not to prove or disprove Voegelin's thesis on Gnosticism. Neither the validity of my assessment of the relevance of the Cold War experience nor the relevance and feasibility of Voegelin's enterprise depend on his use or misuse of Gnosticism. The 'derailment' that we are about to explore has been recognized in many other formulae such as Hobsbawm's 'Age of Extremes' and Wolf Lepenies's notion of'Western fundamentalism'.20 But, as I will argue below, there is another reason why the Cold War should be of interest to political philosophers. For the perspective that I suggest to employ for the investigation of the conflict does not have to be added to the Cold War situation from the outside but was used by one of its key participants. In the following, I will use the life experience and work of the American diplomat, historian and writer George F. Kennan as a lens through which to look at the spiritual dimension of the conflict and its political manifestations. Kennan was fully aware of the spiritual aspects of the conflict. Warning from the outset that the greatest danger for the Americans was to become like their adversaries, he saw his worst fears confirmed in the nuclear arms race between the superpowers. The spiritual disease that, according to Kennan, not only affected the two main protagonists of the conflict but Western societies in general was the tendency to the 'total externalization of evil', amounting to a 'failure of self-knowledge' which he found 'pro20. Hobsbawm compares the conflict between 'capitalism' and 'socialism' to the sixteenth and seventeenth century wars of religion and to the Crusades. Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short 20th Century 1914-1991 (London: Joseph, 1994), p. 9. Lepenies writes about Western fundamentalism in Wolf Lepenies, 'Le fondamentalisme occidental est depasse", in Le Monde, 17 February 1996.

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foundly un-Christian'. Kennan developed his analysis of the Cold War into a general diagnosis and criticism of the spiritual condition of Western society. As is well known, Kennan was instrumental in shaping American policies towards the Soviet Union after the Second World War. The precise nature and extent of his influence, however, has been a matter of contention among diplomatic historians. Apart from the brief but crucial period from Kennan's Long Telegram to the end of his time as the Director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, Kennan was generally at odds with American foreign policy during the Cold War. Yet even during the years when his voice did have institutional authority, Kennan's line of reasoning was often prone to misunderstandings. For later commentators, especially for those who came to accept the derangement of the Cold War as a normality, Kennan's position seemed incomprehensible and incoherent enough for him to be accused of schizophrenia.21 Some biographical work has been done on Kennan but it typically focuses on the influence or lack of influence he has had as a diplomat and foreign policy advisor.22 In response to such efforts, Kennan published in 1993 fragments of a personal and political philosophy'.23 However, there has been little interest so far in Kennan as a political philosopher. The present chapter brings the various aspects of his writings together in an

21. See for example Leopold Labedz, 'The Two Minds of George Kennan', in George Kennan et aL, Encounters with Kennan (London: Cass, 1979), pp. 131-58. 22. C. Ben Wright was the first to embark on a biography of Kennan. But his views, summarized in 'Mr. X and Containment', Slavic Review 35 (1976), pp. 1-31, provoked a hostile response from Kennan (pp. 32-36). Wright's project was never completed but has been an important source of information for subsequent 'Kennanscholarship'. Works on Kennan include Barton Gellman, Contending with Kennan: Toward a Philosophy of American Power (New York: Praeger, 1984); David Mayers, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Walter L. Hixson, George F. Kennan: Cold War Iconoclast (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); Anders Stephanson, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Michael Policy, A Biography of George F. Kennan: The Education of a Realist (New York: Mellen Press, 1990); and Wilson D. Miscamble, George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy 1947-1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). Very useful is Laurel F. Franklin's George F. Kennan: An Annotated Bibliography (Bibliographies of American Notables, 3; Westport: Greenwood Press, 1997). 23. George F. Kennan, Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy (New York: Norton, 1993).

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attempt to delineate Kennan's 'political philosophy' and, thereby, to highlight the spiritual dimension of the Cold War experience. My main argument is that Kennan's life experience offers an illuminating case study of the complex interaction between pragmatic and noetic reason. As such it provides a meaningful starting point for an analysis of the Cold War in terms of Voegelin's 'anthropological philosophy'. 4. Biographical Background Kennan was born on 16 February 1904 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He went to high school at St John's Military Academy, Delafield, and in 1925 obtained a BA from Princeton University. He became a foreign service officer in September 1926 and then, after six months at the Foreign Service School in Washington, served as vice-consul in Geneva, Hamburg, Berlin, Tallinn and Riga between 1927 and 1933. In this time period falls also a stay at the Oriental Seminary of the University of Berlin as Russian language officer. During these years Kennan established himself as a specialist in Russian and Soviet affairs. In 1933 Kennan had his first assignment at the Embassy in Moscow, where he worked as an aide and interpreter to Ambassador Bullit. After a year as consul and second secretary in Vienna, Kennan returned to Moscow in November 1935 (until August 1937) as second secretary, then again later in July 1944 (until April 1946) as minister-counsellor and charge d'affaires, and in 1952 as ambassador. The ill-fated ambassadorship ended after only a few months when the Soviet government declared him a persona non grata after Kennan publicly compared the treatment he received in Moscow with the treatment he received from the Germans during his internment in Bad Nauheim shortly after the American entry into the war.24 In between Kennan served at the Soviet desk in the State Department (October 1937August 1938), as second secretary and consul in Prague (from September 1938 for a year), as counsellor and charge d'affaires in Lisbon, and briefly as a counsellor to the European Advisory Commission in London. Kennan's career took a dramatic turn in response to his famous 'Long Telegram' which he sent from Moscow at the State Department's request in February 1946. The situation has been commented upon so many times that it is by now a commonplace to note the telegram's extra-

24. George F. Kennan, Memoirs. II. 1950-1963 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), p. 159.

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ordinary impact.25 Kennan was at odds with US policy towards the Soviet Union at least since he had come to Moscow to serve under Harriman in 1944. For reasons to which we will return later, Kennan felt that the American administration and public were unprepared for the 'problem of dealing with Russia'. Before the United States could face this problem, an entirely different approach to the 'wider problems and techniques of [American] foreign policy in general' was required, for the Soviet Union was not just any partner or opponent in world politics; it was a force animated by a metastatic faith in an imminent transfiguration of the world through revolution. In a letter of 21 January 1946 to Elbridge Durbrow, Chief of the Eastern European Division in the State Department, Kennan announced his resignation since the needed change in approach could not be initiated 'within the walls of a diplomatic chancery or in subordinate positions in the Department of State'. Kennan felt that he could have a greater effect on public opinion 'at home' if he left the Foreign Service.26 Less than two weeks later, after the Stalin speech of 9 February, the Treasury Department requested Kennan's view on why Moscow did not show more enthusiasm about the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Previously, Washington had never responded to Kennan's numerous cables analyzing Soviet developments, so that he was led to believe that he was entirely ignored. When the request eventually reached him, two weeks after despair had driven him into resignation, Kennan felt that he had nothing to lose: 'They had asked for it. Now, by God, they would have it/27 '[Fjilled with impatience and disgust' at Washington's naivete, Kennan composed a brilliantly written 8000 word telegram in which he analyzed the nature of the Soviet challenge. The fact that the Soviet Union was 'inaccessible to considerations of reality in its basic reactions', and that Soviet party line was 'not based on any objective analysis of [the] situation beyond Russia's borders', meant that the Soviet leaders could not be persuaded by rational argument in negotiations. In fact, 'the very disrespect of Russians for objective truth—indeed, their disbelief in its existence—leads

25. See for example John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War 1941-194?'(New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), pp. 302-304. 26. The letter is no»w in the George F. Kennan Papers, Box 28, Folder '1946', Seeley G. Mudd Collections, Princeton, New Jersey. 27. George F. Kennan, Memoirs. I. 1925-1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969), p. 293.

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them to view all stated facts as instruments for furtherance of one ulterior purpose or another'.28 Washington's reaction to Kennan's telegram 'was nothing less than sensational'.29 The State Department sent Kennan a message of commendation and sent copies of the telegram to diplomatic missions around the world. Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal had it reproduced and made required reading for hundreds, if not thousands, of higher officers in the armed services. Kennan believes that it was due to Forrestal's influence that he was assigned as a deputy commandant for foreign affairs to the National War College in Washington, and then later chosen by General Marshall to head the newly established Policy Planning Staff.30 As Director of the Planning Staff, Kennan was largely responsible for the design and implementation of the Marshall Plan. That there was a serious danger that his position could be misunderstood in a fundamental way must have become clear to Kennan at the latest after the publication of the famous 'X' article and the subsequent public uproar over its contents.31 Since attempts to conceal Kennan's authorship soon failed, the article got an unwanted and in many ways mistaken quasi-official character. Kennan was bombarded with press comments and felt 'like one who has inadvertently loosened a large boulder from the top of a cliff and now helplessly witnesses its path of destruction in the valley bellow, shuddering and wincing at each successive glimpse of disaster'.32 The irony, if not tragedy, of the situation was that Kennan failed to make his views clear; he became affiliated with the 'sweeping universalism' (Kennan) of the Truman Doctrine. The press picked up the concept of 'containment' and elevated it to the status of a 'doctrine' of which Kennan was considered the author. Kennan later self-critically identifies a number of deficiencies in his article. Most serious of all was his failure 'to make clear that what [he] was talking about when [he] mentioned the containment of Soviet power was not the containment by military means of a

28. The full text of the telegram is in US Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States 1946. VI. Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1970), pp. 696-709 (699, 701, 706). 29. Kennan, Memoirs, I, p. 294. 30. Kennan, Memoirs, I, p. 355. 31. Mr 'X', The Sources of Soviet Conduct', ForeignAffairsrs25 (1947), pp. 566-82. 32. Kennan, Memoirs, I, pp. 354-67 (356).

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military threat, but the political containment of a political threat'.33 By pointing out the specific nature of Soviet power, Kennan had demanded a different approach to US foreign policy. But at the same time, his presentation of Soviet Communism unwillingly aroused the proponents of America's missionary role in the exorcism of the world from evil. As we will see later in greater detail, this was the very opposite of what Kennan intended. As the 'oversimplified and highly militarized view of the Russian problem'34 came to dominate US policies towards the Soviet Union, Kennan's recommendations no longer carried the weight they once had. The new attitude was reflected in the tone and contents of NSC-68, the first document of the Policy Planning Staff prepared under Kennan's successor as director, Paul H. Nitze. In early 1950 Truman authorized precisely the kind of study that Kennan always resisted: a single, comprehensive statement of interests, threats, political and military options. NSC-68 offered the first systemic approach to the Cold War and therefore, at least in Kennan's views, contributed to its ossification. According to the authors of NSC-68, the Soviet Union posed an entirely new kind of threat because it was 'animated by a new fanatic faith' which was 'antithetical' to the American faith. The conflict amounts to a 'polarization' of the world into the forces of 'slavery' and 'liberty', which are represented by the Soviet 'design' and the American 'purpose' respectively.35 The Soviet 'design' is absolute in the sense that it 'seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world'. It 'calls for the complete subversion or forcible destruction of the machinery of government and structure of society in the countries of the non-Soviet world and their replacement by an apparatus and structure subservient to and controlled from the Kremlin'. At the same time, it was clear to the authors of NSC-68 that the idea of liberty was 'the most contagious idea in history'. The existence of the idea of liberty posed a permanent threat to the 'foundation of the slave society'. The Soviet Union's design must be expected, therefore, to include the complete eradication of liberty from the earth. The 'assault on free institutions is world-wide now, and in the context of the present polarization 33. Kennan, Memoirs, I, p. 358. 34. Kennan, Memoirs, I, p. 134. 35. Quotes from Richard Maidment and Michael Dawson (eds.), The United States in the Twentieth Century: Key Documents (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1994), pp. 279-98. The full text of NSC-68 runs over 70 pages.

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of power a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere'. In this Manichaean outlook on the world, it was impossible for the United States to remain passive. At stake was the very survival of the principle of liberty among mankind. Thus, holding out was not enough. '[B]eyond affirming our values our policy and actions must be such as to foster a fundamental change in the nature of the Soviet system...' Because it was not 'an adequate objective merely to seek to check the Kremlin design', the United States had to accept, in her own interest, 'the responsibility of world leadership' in order to 'bring about justice and order by means consistent with the principles of freedom and democracy'. The conflict was ultimately a struggle for the minds of men. There are other sections of the document that are far less sweeping. For example, it is acknowledged that the principle of liberty imposes limits on the availability of means employed to defend the American 'purpose' against the Soviet 'design'. The importance of leadership by example—a principle passionately upheld by Kennan—is emphasized. In fact, although Kennan played no direct role in the formulation of NSC-68, he had some indirect influence because Nitze drew on an earlier NSC document—NSC-20/4—which was based on a draft authored by Kennan.36 However, the new document's activist stance, its implied universal commitment to the cause of liberty, and in particular the overwhelming weight it assigned to military measures marked a significant departure from Kennan's conception of US interests. According to NSC-68, meeting the Soviet challenge necessitated above all 'a build-up of military strength by the United States and its allies to a point at which the combined strength will be superior...to the forces that can be brought to bear by the Soviet Union and its allies'. While still head of the Policy Planning Staff, Kennan had warned repeatedly that the militarization of the conflict would lead to its ossification.37 The political arithmetic of the military balance effectively replaced politics and diplomacy, and thus led to the closure of the Cold War system. For Kennan, the 'recklessness and willingness to subordinate everything to military considerations' as well as the blind determination to follow the 'compulsive logic of military equations' were indications of the generally poor condition of American society.38 The eagerness to accept 36. Miscamble, George F. Kennan, p. 310. 37. See, for example, The State Department Policy Planning Staff Papers. II. 1948 (New York: Garland, 1983), pp. 491, 494-95. 38. Kennan, Memoirs, II, pp. Ill, 137, 161.

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the 'false mathematics of relative effectiveness' of weapons as a guidance for foreign policy constituted a 'genuine national addiction' and manifested a loss of orientation.39 There was a 'distinct unreality about this whole science of destruction'.40 After leaving the Policy Planning Staff, Kennan took a long leave of absence and spent two years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton before he accepted, with some hesitation, the ambassadorship in Moscow. He hesitated for the simple reason that he 'had misgivings about undertaking to represent, in a capital as important and sensitive as Moscow, a policy' which by then he 'neither fully understood nor believed • ' 41 in . In the summer of 1953, Kennan retired from the Foreign Service and became a member of the Institute for Advanced Study. With the exception of a brief ambassadorship in Yugoslavia under the Kennedy administration (1961-63), Kennan avoided further direct involvements in politics and found a new home in the academic world of which he became a much respected member. Through his writings, lectures and public appearances, Kennan seems by now, in the words of Alex Danchev, the 'putative philosopher-king of the American republic'.42 5. Kennan as a Philosopher For Kennan the soul is the centre of man. In the final analysis, those who mistake the 'outer accidents' of life, the 'unimportant aspects which lie outside of the individual soul—the so-called social, economic, political realities—for' life itself are 'blind materialists'. Quoting from Isaiah Berlin, Kennan confirms that 'the individual experience, the specific relation of individuals to one another, the colours, smells, tastes, sounds, and movements, the jealousies, loves, hatreds, passions, the rare flashes of insight, the transforming moments, the ordinary, day-to-day succession of private data' constitute all that 'alone is genuine'. As a writer Kennan attempts to

39. George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 172. 40. George F. Kennan, 'Soviet Doves and American Hawks', in Martin F. Herz (ed.), Decline of the West? George Kennan and his Critics (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1978), pp. 49-60 (59). 41. Kennan, Memoirs, II, p. 105. 42. Alex Danchev, To and from Russia with Love', The Times Higher Educational Supplement, 5 July 1996, p. 22.

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deal 'with the inner souls of men rather than what Freud calls their personae' for we understand men only by 'stripping men of the external facade of personality, in showing them in all their shivering moral nakedness and helplessness, in their secret world of instincts and loves and fears and feelings, lost in the strange company of their own personal demons and protecting angels'.43 With the soul 'there developed in man...a capacity for self-awareness, for self-scrutiny, and for consciousness of the moral qualities of his own behaviour, and indeed a certain ability to perceive and hold in mind the distinctions between right and wrong'.44 Kennan sees the soul 'not only as a sort of self-awareness that was not present in the animal, but also as the emergence in individual man of a certain moral autonomy—an ability to make choices and to design, within the limits of his mortality and his semi-animalistic nature, his own path'.45 The soul has to operate inbetween two deities, the Primary Cause and the Spirit. The Primary Cause is the creator of the natural order of things and, in this role, is not entirely responsive to human desires. 'The Primary Cause must, after all, have had a great many other things to think about'. Hence, man is in no position to transgress the natural order of things—neither through actions of his own nor through prayers. But the soul is not alone in the order of things. 'Simultaneously with the emergence of the soul there seems to me to have become evident the existence, and the involvement with human life, of a Deity of another sort...filled with understanding and compassion for the agonies inflicted on man by the conflict between his two natures'—physical and spiritual. This Deity, 'if not indeed the creator of the innovation in man's nature called the soul, was and is the companion to it'. It is a 'loving and caring companion', and perhaps even more: 'a part of the human person itself, sharing in its trials and dilemmas, and lending the strength necessary for their endurance'. Referring to Jn 4.24, Kennan envisions this merciful Deity as a 'Substance, a Spirit, as Jesus himself is said once to have described it'. Kennan distinguishes the Spirit from the 'all-powerful Deity of established Christian doctrine' because the Spirit 'bears no responsibility for the natural order of things in which the human individual is compelled to live'. The Spirit regards this order as a '"given" factor in the defining of 43. George F. Kennan, 'History as Literature', Encounter 12 (1959), pp. 10-16 (14-15). 44. Kennan, Around the Cmgged Hill, p. 38. 45. Kennan, Around the Cragged Hill p- 44.

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the human predicament—as one of the inalterable terms of the human problem; and it starts from there in the search for a response to that problem'. The problem is reduced, then, 'to the question of how, within the framework of a natural order already established, the individual is to conduct himself in a manner consistent with the divine purpose'.46 In the context of this problem, of living in harmony with the 'divine purpose' in an order given to man, the Spirit's intercession is required and will be forthcoming 'if suitably asked for'. Kennan seems to suggest that the Spirit can speak to man in moments of despair. 'I, the Spirit says, am a part of you. I am partly outside you, but also partly within you.' The Spirit can help only to the extent that the believer welcomes this help and puts 'forward [his] best effort to help [himself]'. It is the believer who, 'by the dimensions of [his] own effort, definefs] the limits of [the Spirit's] usefulness'. The 'usefulness' of the Spirit lies in the fact that it is a 'fellow sufferer', that it gives 'understanding' and, 'to the extent that [the believer] deserve[s] it, compassion'. Because the Spirit is 'stronger' than the believer, It can give strength so that human efforts can 'extend' beyond mortality. The actions of the Spirit are not 'entirely intelligible' to humans. Some of them 'will have to be taken on faith'; in fact, they are offered only 'on the assumption that faith is forthcoming'. Kennan is at pains to point out that the tension between the given order of things and the merciful Deity is to be endured rather than artificially removed. There is hope, but no happy ending. Kennan 'decisively' rejects 'any and all suggestions' that mankind might be perfectible. Man was a 'cracked vessel'. There was 'a real flaw in human nature—a flaw that places definite limitations on man's happiness, whether personal or social, the correction of which lies in part beyond the limits of his own powers'. Man was not 'perfectible' for the 'fissures in the human psyche are profound and elemental', a fact which should 'warn us against any and every sort of Utopian purpose or expectation'. 'Marxists and the other materialists' failed to recognize that 'a measure of tragedy is built into the very existence of the human individual; and it is not to be overcome by even the most drastic human interventions into the economic or social relationships among individuals'. Hope can come only from the 'preeminent involvement and responsibility of the single human soul, in all its loneliness and frailty'.47 46. Kennan, Around the Cragged Hill, pp. 45-46. 47. Kennan, Around the Cragged Hill, pp. 27-28, 36, 258; see also George F. Kennan, Democracy and the Student Left (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), pp. 9-10.

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By establishing a strong link between the soul and the merciful Deity, Kennan presents the soul as man's sensorium of transcendence. The duality between the Primary Cause and the Spirit is not resolved in some cosmic drama—as for example in Gnostic mythology—but remains the fundamental condition of human existence. Man must bear the tension of standing in-between, of the Platonic metaxy. Kennan assures us that the human condition is no reason for despair. For the struggle 'can have, and does have, its glorious moments'. Moreover, 'true glory' will not be found in the Visible prospects of success' but in the 'inherent worthiness of the struggle'.48 Kennan explains that the 'problem of religious faith' concerns the 'effort of a single man to establish his relationship to forces beyond the reach of his own rational perception—forces upon the interaction with which he knew the ultimate value of his own life to depend'.49 Thus, it is not left to man to determine the ultimate value of his own life. Accordingly, in his own writings, Kennan tries 'to avoid judgements on [himself], [his] doings, [his] attempts to understand the life of [his] time', for 'all that would have to be left, [he] thought, to a deity held—if only by faith—to be benevolent'.50 Still, it is important to him that, at the moment of judgment, he will be able to say that he 'had, after all, simply done [his] best'.51 As a parrhesiast, Kennan acts on his own with 'nothing to look to but his own consciousness', but he still acts in front of God. The ultimate responsibility of the individual man for his actions, for the way in which he relates to other individuals 'in his daily duties and doings', is 'a responsibility before his conscience and his God; it is not polluted by association with that of other men for worldly purposes'. 'At least theoretically', Kennan wrote, 'the possibility of saintliness' lay in the extent to which man lived up to this responsibility.52 The Christian faith 'has its part' in life where man acknowledges that God's measure is 'unseen'. Awaiting judgment through a power bigger than him, man can do only what he can, 'with as much fidelity as [he] can muster to [his] own nature and [his] own values'. For men see 'only dimly, their justice is imperfect, and they do not really know what is right and 48. Kennan, Around the CraggedHill, p. 27. 49. Kennan, Around the Cragged Hill, p. 51. 50. George F. Kennan, Sketches from a Life (New York: Pantheon, 1989), p. vii. 51. Kennan, Memoirs, I, p. 156. 52. George F. Kennan, 'The Relation of Religion to Government', The Princeton Seminary Bulletin, Winter 1969, pp. 42-47 (44).

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what is wrong. They know only whether they have done their best.'53 We all carry individual responsibility for our deeds precisely because we can never be mere agents of divine will. God's purposes are not visible; and his ways are 'truly unfathomable'.54 A human being's soul gives them a sense of 'right' and 'wrong', a sense of their being subject to God's measure, the contents of which remain, however, elusive. 6. Philosophy, Politics and the Limits of Power In the political realm, the elusiveness of God's measure imposes philosophical'limits on the projection of US or Western power to the rest of the world. Not just pragmatic but moral reasons demanded that Americans appreciate the limitations of US power. In this context, it is noteworthy that Kennan was one of the earliest critics of the Vietnam War. He insisted that 'there are problems in this world that we will not be able to solve, depths into which it will not be useful or effective for us to plunge, dilemmas in other regions of the globe that will have to find their solution without our involvement'.55 'We must bear in mind that there are things we do not know and cannot know.' Therefore, 'we cannot conclude that everything we want automatically reflects the purpose of God...'56 In particular, it was beyond the 'political and moral possibilities' of the United States to 'govern, even temporarily, great numbers of people in other parts of the world'. Kennan's scepticism about foreign aid programmes is largely sustained by this outlook.57 If it is an essential aspect of the human condition that God's measure is 'unseen', then no people is justified in applying its own measure to other peoples of the world. 'No people can be the judge of another's domestic institutions and requirements', and Americans 'have no need to be apologetic to anyone, unless it be ourselves, for the things we do and the arrangements we enforce within our own country'. If Americans were able to act accordingly, to 'lay upon [themselves] this sort of restraint', and if in

53. Kennan, Democracy and the Student Left, pp. 238-39. 54. Kennan, Memoirs, II, pp. 166-67, 324; Sketches from a Life, p. x. 55. Kennan, American Diplomacy, p. 178. 56. George F. Kennan, 'Foreign Policy and Christian Conscience', Atlantic Monthly (May 1959), pp. 44-49 (45); George F. Kennan, 'World Problems in Christian Perspective', in Abraham S. Eisenstadt (ed.), American History: Recent Interpretations (New York: Crowell, 1962), pp. 460-76 (468). 57. Kennan, Memoirs, I, pp. 181,310; Around the Cragged Hill, p. 200.

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addition they were able 'to refrain from constant attempts at moral appraisal', then, Kennan suggested, 'posterity might look back upon our efforts with fewer and less troubled questions'.58 Moral crusades, which demand great changes in the lives of other people, were 'simply not in character' for the United States.59 Against the 'legalism' and 'moralism' of the immediate postwar period, Kennan proposed to 'get back more closely to some of the concepts of the Founding Fathers of this country if we are to cope with the problems of modern times'.60 His study of American diplomatic history showed Kennan that the 'lucid and realistic thinking of early American statesmen of the Federalist period' got lost in the 'cloudy bombast of their successors of later decades'. He traced the Utopian expectations, legalistic methodology, and moralistic demands of the post-Kennan American diplomacy back to the statesmen of the period from the Civil War to World War II. For Kennan, the annexation of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Hawaiian Islands represented a turning point 'in the whole concept of the American political system. They represented the first instance of sizeable populations being taken under our flag with no wide anticipation that they would ever be accepted into statehood.'61 Kennan sees here the first manifestations of'a sort of Rotarian idealism, a dogoodiness' in US foreign policy, which he relates to the late nineteenth-century outburst of missionary activities overseas. According to Kennan, it was the very same idealism that determined American attitudes towards World War I as the opportunity to make the world 'safe for democracy', that determined American policies behind the Kellogg Pact, the World Trade Organization, the United Nations and UNESCO.62 Kennan regarded such 'ostensibly idealistic and pretentious undertakings' as concealments for 'our failure to have a genuine foreign policy addressed to the real problems of international relations in a changing world'.63 Instead, statesmen devoted themselves to what Kennan calls 'the American dream'—the dream to appear (rather than to be) before 'the mirror of our own adolescent self58. Kennan, American Diplomacy, pp. 53-54. 59. Kennan, Sketches from a Life, p. 213. 60. George F. Kennan, Measures Short of War: The George F. Kennan Lectures at the National War College 1946-47 (ed. Giles D. Harlow and George C. Maerz; Washington, DC: National Defence University Press, 1991), p. 214. 61. Kennan, American Diplomacy, p. 14. 62. Kennan, Measures Short of War, p. 297. 63. Kennan, Memoirs, II, pp. 70-71.

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esteem' something 'lofty, something noble, something of universal significance'.64 Yet, in reality, the only way of exerting external influence that was cin character' for the United States was leadership by example. In a speech given at Scranton in January 1953, Kennan quoted the passage from John Quincy Adams about 'America being the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all, but the champion and vindicator only of her own'. He called upon his fellow-countrymen to 'take pride in our institutions and our political ideas', to 'commend them by their successful application in our own country'.65 Again and again, Kennan repeated that the power of example was far greater than the power of precept. 'The greatest service this country could render to the rest of the world is to put its own house in order and then make American civilization an example of decency, humanity, and societal success from which others could derive whatever they might find useful to their own purposes.'66 Kennan never departed from the principle of 'leadership by example'. It reappears in the early 1990s as 'the greatest help' Americans could give to the Russians after the end of the Cold War, though the example would, of course, 'depend upon the quality of our own civilization'.67 An important implication of the elusiveness of the measure is that, for Kennan, 'our belief in our own institutions is still something in the nature of faith, a habit and a predilection'. It was not a belief'which can be justified to others on incontestable empirical grounds'. Whether the American public institutions are able 'to bear society through the vicissitudes of social and economic change and to continue to provide a successful framework for progress in a society where the development of technology is placing ever greater strains on the structure of public authority' was, as Kennan wrote in 1950, the undecided issue of the present. In a 'changing and imperfect world', the issue will never be entirely decided so that 'our adherence to our own institutions must remain, legitimately and under-

64. George F. Kennan, Realities of American Foreign Policy (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. 15-16. 65. Kennan quotes from his own speech in Memoirs, II, pp. 171-73 (emphasis added). 66. Kennan, American Diplomacy, pp. 153, 178; Around the Cragged Hill, pp. 20910. 67. See for example George F. Kennan, 'Communism in Russian History', in Kennan, At a Century's Ending: Reflections 1982-1995 (New York: Norton, 1996), pp. 4361 (60).

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standably, an act of faith, not a pragmatic experience'. Therefore, again, 'any attempt on our part to recommend our institutions to others must come perilously close to the messianic tendencies of those militant political ideologies which say, in effect, "You should believe because we believe" '.68 7. Philosophical Leadership and the Need for Introspection In one of the papers of the Policy Planning Staff, Kennan argued that ca truly stable world order can proceed, within our lifetime, only from the older, mellower and more advanced nations of the world'. For these were the nations for which 'the concept of order, as opposed to power, has value and meaning'. Unless these nations, 'through that combination of political greatness and wise restraint which goes only with a ripe and settled civilization', find the strength to hold 'real leadership in world affairs today', Plato's vision that '...cities will never have rest from their evils,— nor the human race, as I believe' will come true.69 It is remarkable that Plato's Republic would find its way into the papers of the main advisory body of the State Department. The quote is very revealing for it was meant to place the (ongoing) European Recovery Programme (the Marshall Plan) into a context. The context becomes clear once we understand that Plato's warning in Republic 474d-e refers to a situation in which the city fails to combine philosophy and political power. In Kennan's analysis, then, the task of the Marshall Plan was to prepare the grounds for the reemergence of philosophical leadership among the nations of the world. As such it also expressed an acknowledgment that the 'fountainheads of most of [America's] own culture and traditions' lay in Europe. By abandoning Europe, 'we would be placing ourselves in the position of a lonely country, culturally and politically. To maintain confidence in our own traditions and institutions, we would henceforth have to whistle loudly in the dark.'70 In Kennan's outlook, then, the European Recovery Programme was based on philosophical and, therefore, civilizational concerns. For there was

68. 'Memorandum by the Counselor of the Department (Kennan) to the Secretary of State', Washington, 29 March 1950, in US Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States 1950. II. The United Nations, the Western Hemisphere (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1976), pp. 616-17. 69. The State Department Policy Planning Staff Papers, II, p. 126. 70. Kennan, Measures Short of War, pp. 167-68.

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involved in the continuation of the present conditions in Europe nothing less than the possibility of a renunciation by Europeans of the values of individual responsibility and political restraint which have become traditional to their continent. This would undo the work of centuries and would cause such damage as could only be overcome by the effort of further centuries.

In addition, the United States, 'in common with most of the rest of the world, would suffer a cultural and spiritual loss incalculable in its longterm effects'.71 The need to provide spiritual leadership by example imposes on American (and Western) society the need for introspection.72 £It is because no country can hope to be, over the long run, much more to others than it is to itself that we have the moral duty to put our own house in order, if we are to take our proper part in the affairs of the rest of the world.'73 In 1951, in a paper that Kennan considered to be a 'second "X"-Article', he was still sufficiently optimistic to assert that Americans, if in accord with themselves, could 'compel the respect and confidence of a world which, despite all its material difficulties, is still more ready to recognise and respect spiritual distinction than material opulence'.74 There followed much less optimistic assessments of the attraction of'spiritual distinction' later; in 1972, Kennan observed that Americans had 'simply not faced up successfully to [their] own internal problems' and had lost, 'just since World War II, a great deal of [their] value, and [their] potential influence, as an example to other people'.75 But Kennan continued to believe that the choice to depart from the 'materialism, greed, and decadence of modern society' and the choice to embrace the concern for 'the quality of man

71. The State Department Policy Planning Staff Papers. I. 1947, pp. 31 -32. 72. George F. Kennan, 'A New Philosophy of Defense: Review of Gene Sharp, Making Europe Unconquerable: The Potential of Civilian-Based Deterrence and Defence', The New York Review of Books, 33.2 (13 February 1986), pp. 3-6 (6). 73. Kennan, Around the CraggedHill p. 182. 74. George F. Kennan, 'America and the Russian Future', Foreign Affairs 29 (1951), pp. 351-70; here quoted from Kennan, American Diplomacy, pp. 129-54 (154). Foreign Affairs published excerpts from the same article again in Vol. 69, No. 2 (Spring 1990), pp. 157-66, in response to the events in Central and Eastern Europe. 75. George F. Kennan, ' "X" plus 25', Foreign Policy 1 (1972), pp. 5-21 (18). Kennan's text consists of written responses to questions posed by the Foreign Policy staff, Charles Gati and Richard H. Ullman.

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himself, primarily in his moral and spiritual' incorporation, remains our own.76 National strength 'is a question of political, economic, and moral strength. Above all it is a question of our internal strength; of the health and sanity of our own society/ For this reason, Americans could not afford 'to be indifferent to internal disharmony, dissension, intolerance, and the things that break up the moral and political structure of our society at home'.77 The picture of a 'harmonious' society Kennan takes from a book by Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (1938). The book contains an illustration of a 'holy procession' in mediaeval Florence which had no spectators. 'Everyone in town was in the procession, because everyone in town had some relation to the public life of the place.' 'Everybody fitted in somewhere.' According to Kennan, this is 'how life should be'. 'And this is what we have lost.. ,'78 The need for introspection and internal reform followed not just from the obvious lack of philosophical leadership in world politics. Kennan's prophecies gained an additional sense of urgency from his belief in the inevitability of decline. Unless precautions are taken, nature will always 'claim her own', 'in her usual implacable way, attacking the products of all human intrusions upon her favoured uniformities, cracking foundations, rotting walls, spreading spiderwebs, overgrowing lawns, meadows, and all other products of the human effort at "improvement" '.79 Kennan read Spengler's The Decline of the West at the age of 22, and is a great admirer of Edward Gibbon (1737—94), the chronicler of the fall and decline of the Roman Empire.80 'For years', Kennan admitted in the late 1960s, 'Gibbon's dictum that "under a democratical government the citizens exercise the powers of sovereignty; and those powers will be first abused, and 76. Kennan, Sketches from a Life, pp. 354-55. 77. Kennan, Measures Short of War, pp. 14-15. 78. George F. Kennan and George Urban, 'A Conversation', in Kennan et al, Encounters with Kennan, pp. 1-83 (34); George F. Kennan and Melvin J. Lasky, 'A Conversation', in Kennan et al, Encounters with Kennan, pp. 189-215 (204). Kennan acknowledged that Lewis Mumford had a 'formative influence' on his thought (p. 204). The illustration of the holy procession in Florence is in Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1938), p. 36. On Mumford see Thomas P. Hughes and Agatha C. Hughes (eds.), Lewis Mumford: Public Intellectual (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 79. Kennan, Sketches from a Life, p. 360. 80. On Kennan and Spengler, see John Lamberton Harper, American Visions of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 142, 160-61.

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afterwards lost, if they are committed to an unwieldy multitude" has lain at the heart of [his] political philosophy'.81 On another occasion Kennan quotes from Gibbon that 'from enthusiasm to imposture the step is perilous and slippery'.82 The implication of such views is that decline is inevitable unless American society takes care of itself. Kennan is adamant that the celebration of 'democracy' alone was not enough. 'Democracy in all its modern forms, and particularly as it now exists in the U.S., is not the final answer to political problems.' For 'the value of a democratic society in the Christian sense depends not just on the fact of its enjoying certain rights and liberties but on the nature of the use made of them'.83 Democratic liberties are meanS) not ends. And the question of ends—of improvement—naturally involves spiritual aspects of human existence. The response to the 'great social bewilderments of this age' must lie predominantly in the 'spiritual, moral, and intellectual shaping of the individual with a view to the development of his qualities of leadership, rather than on the prospects for unaided self-improvement on the part of the leaderless masses'.84 Kennan's criticism of democracy is in many ways analogous to Plato's. So is his insistence on the need for a meritocracy. Kennan openly commits himself to a form of 'elitism'. The required elite must be an elite 'of service to others, of conscience, of responsibility, of restraint of all that is unworthy in the self, and of resolve to be to others more than one could ever hope to be to one's self'.85 Responding to the problem of selection, Kennan reiterates Plato's advice of Republic 52 Ib, though with reference to Burke rather than Plato: '[He] profoundly believefs] in the Burkean view that only those are fit to exercise high office who hate it, and can only be persuaded to do it out of a sense of public duty.'86 8. Totalitarianism as the Corruption of the Soul According to Kennan, one of the most important and most disturbing hallmarks of Soviet totalitarianism, and indeed of any kind of totalitarianism, 81. The quote is from Kennan, Democracy and the Student Left, p. 206. For Kennan's admiration of Gibbon, see also Kennan, 'History as Literature', p. 12. 82. Kennan, American Diplomacy, p. 109. 83. Kennan, 'Foreign Policy and Christian Conscience', p. 45; 'World Problems in Christian Perspective', p. 468. 84. Kennan, Around the Cragged Hill, pp. 68, 258. 85. Kennan, Around the Cragged Hill, pp. 130-33. 86. Kennan and Urban, 'A Conversation', p. 29.

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is its opposition to the quest for truth. 'Persons really committed to Soviet ideology...could not simultaneously be committed to that rigid dogma and total intellectual discipline, on the one hand, and to the freedom of the mind in the quest for objective truth...on the other.'87 In their 'feverish political imaginations', Soviet leaders cultivate falsehood as a deliberate weapon of policy. 'They began by adopting an attitude of complete cynicism about objective truth, denying its value if not its existence, declaring the lie to be no less useful and respectable than the truth if only it served the purposes of the party.' Once the possibility of truth is denied, falsehood becomes a means for the Soviet leaders of 'deceiving others and exploiting their credulity' as well as of 'comforting and reassuring themselves'.88 Truth was not constant but 'was actually created'. Truth was nothing but 'the most recent manifestation of the wisdom of those in whom the ultimate wisdom is supposed to reside, because they represent the logic of history'.89 The resistance to the quest for truth is always followed by the creation of a 'second reality'. In tens of thousands of instances, over the course of the years, real events had to be denied, false ones invented, or true facts distorted beyond recognition, in order to produce a version that was compatible with the party's neurotic vision of the environment in which it lived and of its own reaction to that environment.

Kennan gives an example of this procedure in his memoirs. In the negotiations at Potsdam, Stalin complained that all ports of the Baltic freeze. Demanding at least one ice-free port at the expense of Germany, Stalin asked for the cession of the city of Konigsberg to the Soviet Union. Stalin's request went unchallenged. In his personal report on the Potsdam Conference, Truman later informed the American public that he had agreed to satisfy the 'age-old Russian yearning' for an ice-free port. But, as Kennan points out, Konigsberg is not ice-free. It lies 49 kilometres from the open sea, at the end of an artificial canal which is frozen several months of the year. However, the second, postwar edition of the Soviet Encyclopaedia, published in 1953, specifically describes Konigsberg as 'icefree'. The earlier edition made no such allegation. Kennan believes that 87. Kennan, Memoirs, II, p. 199. 88. George F. Kennan, Russia, the Atom and the West (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1974), pp. 20-21. 89. Kennan, American Diplomacy, p. 117. 90. Kennan, Memoirs, I, p. 245.

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the grounds for this assertion can be no other than Stalin's statement'. 'Geographic conditions' were apparently created by the 'political convenience of the Soviet government'. 'If anyone thought, after 1945, that he saw ice in the canal at Konigsberg, he didn't. It was an illusion fed by antiSoviet prejudice.'91 Kennan reflected on the philosophical implications of the Soviet denial of truth and its implications for American—Soviet relations in a long memorandum, 'Russia: Seven Years Later', written in September 1944 in Moscow. Kennan later explained that the memo was 'actually basic to the understanding of the later ones' written from the embassy in Moscow between 1944 and 1946. Hence, it must have been 'basic' also to the analysis of the Long Telegram.92 As a reflection on the changes that had occurred in the Soviet Union since Kennan's last visit in 1937, 'Russia: Seven Years Later' contains a remarkable discussion of the problem of the philosopher to distinguish shadows from reality.93 '...[RJight and wrong, reality and unreality, are determined in Russia not by any God, not by any innate nature of things, but simply by men themselves. Here men determine what is true and what is false.' This 'serious fact' was 'the gateway to the comprehension of much that is mysterious in Russia'. According to Kennan, 'Bolshevism has proved some strange and disturbing things about human nature. It has proved that what is important for people is not what is there but what they conceive to be there.' Given unlimited control over people's minds, it was possible to make them feel and believe 'practically anything'. And it made 'no difference whether that "anything" is true, in our conception of the word. For the people who believe it, it becomes true. It attains validity, and all the powers of truth.' The shadow that is taken for reality can arouse 'unspeakable violence' on the part of both those who fight for it and those who fight against it. Kennan concludes that the 'power of autosuggestion' played a 'tremendous part in Soviet life'.

91. Kennan, Memoirs, I, pp. 263-64. 92. See 'George Kennan to John Lukacs, January 18, 1995', in George F. Kennan and John Lukacs, George F. Kennan and the Origins of Containment 1944-1946: The Kennan-Lukacs Correspondence (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1997), p. 27. 93. The full text of the memorandum is published in Kennan, Memoirs, I, pp. 503531; excerpts are published in US Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States 1944. IV. Europe (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1966), pp. 902-14.

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So far, this is Kennan's depressing analysis of life in the cave of Soviet Russia of 1944. What did Kennan think, at that time, about the possibility of the philosophical ascent out of the cave? First, he warns Americans that they do not stand above 'these disturbing phenomena of the Russian world'. 'Unless he is a man of great mental obtuseness or of great mental strength', the American too, 'upon the first contact with Russian life, will begin to react strongly to these man-made currents, the reality of which he would have contemptuously rejected from a distance. He will soon take them as real forces, as real threats or as real promises.' In that, Kennan explains, he will be right 'but he will not know what he is doing. He will remain the tool, rather than the master, of the material he is seeking to understand.' Kennan concludes that there was 'little possibility that enough Americans will ever accomplish these philosophical evolutions to permit of any general understanding of Russia on the part of our government or our people'. The understanding of such 'disturbing phenomena', however, was not impossible even if'it would imply a measure of intellectual humility and a readiness to reserve judgment about ourselves and our institutions, of which few of us would be capable'. Hence, loneliness is the immediate implication of the 'apprehension of what is valid in the Russian world', an altogether 'unsettling and displeasing' experience. And whoever succeeds in this enterprise is unlikely to 'find his satisfaction in the achievement of anything practical for his people, still less in any official or public appreciation for his efforts'. 'The best he can look forward to is the lonely pleasure of one who stands at long last on a chilly and inhospitable mountain top where few have been before, where few can follow, and where few will consent to believe that he has been.'94 Kennan describes in these passages the loneliness of the philosopherdiplomat whose peculiar existence between (at least) two societies has given him insights that are unwanted in both of them. The degree of his depression is obvious in his negative assessment of the possibility of phronesis, of the philosopher's return to the cave. Reflecting on the text later in his Memoirs, Kennan felt that his melancholy was prophetic for himself. In other passages in his writings, however, Kennan never loses sight of the possibility of reform. Perhaps his life experience is not unlike Plato's, who, after a failed attempt at rejuvenating politics through philosophy, founded his Academy. Though he later wondered whether his

94. Kennan, 'Russia: Seven Years Later', Memoirs, I, pp. 529-31.

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departure from government service was perhaps too 'impulsive' or 'impatient', Kennan too found a home in academic life.95 The dismissal of the quest for truth corresponds to the systematic destruction of parrhesiam Soviet society. Once the Party committee has made its decision, 'it is incumbent upon the individual member to support that decision with every evidence of conviction and enthusiasm, no matter what may have been his feelings before that decision was taken'. As a result, the individual link in the chain of command enjoys the 'happy privilege of feeling no worry about that which has been done, and of being free to direct attention solely to the problems of the future'. If the collective decision turns out to be unfortunate, the individual conscience is absolved through the collective principle.96 Hence, Soviet society is geared towards the eradication of parrhesiasts, of people whose actions flow from their own individual conscience. Other features of Soviet totalitarianism include its 'exaggerated fear of the outside world', the 'universal pretensions' of its ideology, the 'jealous and intolerant eye of the Kremlin' which can distinguish, 'in the end, only vassals and enemies', its excessive secretiveness, and the fact that its leaders recognized 'no restrictions, either of God or man, on the character of their methods'.97 And because of the distorted relation Soviet ideologists had with truth, their 'suspicions' could not be 'altered or assuaged by personal contacts, rational arguments or official assurances'.98 Moreover, the Soviet perspective was self-confirming: 'It is an undeniable privilege of every man to prove himself right in the thesis that the world is his enemy; for if he reiterates it frequently enough and makes it the background of his conduct he is bound eventually to be right.'99 And if the Soviets are animated 'by implacable hostility to all that they do not control, they can only assume those whom they do not control are animated by a similar hostility toward them'. Thus, the Kremlin must conclude 'that their power must be absolute if it is to be effective'.100 Moreover, Kennan observed the intrinsic

95. Kennan and Urban, 'A Conversation', p. 35. 96. Kennan, Measures Short of War, pp. 124-25, 231. 97. Kennan, Memoirs, I, pp. 129, 227; American Diplomacy, pp. I l l , 115. 98. The Charge in the Soviet Union (Kennan) to the Secretary of State', 20 March 1946, in US Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States 1946, VI, p. 721. 99. Kennan, American Diplomacy, p. 112. 100. Kennan, Measures Short of War, p. 59.

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need for Soviet ideology to present itself in the form of an all-encompassing system, for 'a regime which forbids individuals to formulate their own political thought must itself always have an answer for everything...'101 With its denial of the quest for truth, the Soviet system was 'an attempt at the destruction of Western civilization', as Kennan remarked in a Policy Planning Staff paper.102 Nevertheless, he was confident that Communism had no future. It had no future because, as Kennan's friend Charles Bohlen once observed, 'it had no answer to the phenomenon of death'. The Marxist outlooks included no recognition that the individual human condition embraced within itself elements of tragedy (man's mortality was only one) that could not be overcome by even the most drastic manipulations of social environment.'103 The Kremlin leaders, though armed with a formidable ideology, had no 'answers to any of the great riddles of humanity, the riddles of birth and love and ambition and death which have accompanied man from the beginning of civilization'.104 And yet it was necessary to be on guard against the further spread of messianism, for those who are 'determined to achieve the elimination of evil and the realisation of the Millennium within their own time' do more harm than the efforts of those who 'have tried to create a little order and civility and affection within their own intimate entourage, even at the cost of tolerating a great deal of evil in the public domain'.105 Kennan is sometimes criticized for not having made a serious effort to study Marxism and the doctrinaire contents of Soviet ideology.106 However, Kennan rejected Soviet ideology not just for the contents of its claims but, before that, for the nature of its claims. He never went through a 'Marxist period', and his intellectual distaste for 'Russian Marxism' was not based, therefore, on disillusionment. He never had patience for Soviet ideology, for its 'pseudo-science, artificial heroes and villains', for its 'professed hatred and rejection of large portions of humanity, abundant cruelty, claims to infallibility, opportunism, unscrupulousness of method'

101. 'The Charge in the Soviet Union (Kennan) to the Secretary of State', Moscow, 4 October 1945, in US Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States 1945. V. Europe (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1967), p. 888. 102. The State Department Policy Planning Staff Papers, II, p. 393. 103. Kennan, Around the CraggedHill, p. 98. 104. Kennan, Measures Short of War, p. 85. 105. Kennan, Democracy and the Student Left, p. 9. 106. See, for example, Stephanson, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy, p. 30.

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and 'disregard for truth'.107 In his self-assessment, he belonged 'to that, for Marxists, most objectionable class of people who are neither Marxists nor anti-Marxists but live outside the entire conceptual framework of both'.108 To criticize Kennan for his failure to absorb the technicalities of Marxian doctrines is to misunderstand the philosophical basis underlying Kennan's rejection of ideology. Once it is established that a position is philosophically flawed, disputing its details is a waste of time. But there was another reason why it did not seem worthwhile to spend time studying Marx and Lenin. Soviet ideology, for Kennan, was a mere manifestation of a much deeper problem. Kennan identifies a continuity linking the concept of Russia as 'Holy Russia' and of Moscow as the 'Third Rome' to the 'messianic quality' of Soviet Communism. Behind those grim old walls surrounding the palaces and churches of the Kremlin was not a new revelation of human or divine genius, not a new idea destined to change the ethics of man and to open a brighter page in the history of humanity, but only. ..a streamlined version of a despotism as old 109 as human society itself

Soviet ideology purported to be a 'rival religion' but as such it was 'no less Byzantine in conception and no less Russian in method' than the Orthodox Church.110 Russia, Kennan explains, was never a territorial notion. Russia 'stopped where the infidel began'. 'There were no geographical barriers, no mountains, no seas, no fastflowing rivers to mark it. It was as limitless as the horizon of the Russian plain itself. And it is no wonder then that the Russians saw no final limit to the possible extension of their power.' Kennan quotes from an American envoy who reported from St Petersburg in the nineteenth century that 'these people are obsessed with a strange superstition that they are destined to conquer the world'.111 The historical continuity of Russian messianism implied that, at a deeper level, the problem of Soviet totalitarianism was not a problem of Marxist ideology. 'In summary, then, the role of ideology in Soviet political psychology, while of

107. Kennan, Memoirs, I, pp. 68-70; Around the CraggedHill p. 97. 108. Kennan and Urban, 'A Conversation', p. 82. 109. Kennan, Measures Short of War, pp. 84-85. See also Kennan, 'Communism in Russian History'. 110. 'The Charge in the Soviet Union (Kennan) to the Secretary of State', Moscow, 3 February 1945, in Foreign Relations of the United States 1945, V, p. 1117. 111. Kennan, Measures Short of War, p. 116.

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tremendous importance, is not primarily that of a basic determinant of political action.' Our analysis must shift, therefore, from Kennan's evaluation of Soviet ideology to the problem of totalitarianism in general. After having lived more than ten years of his life in totalitarian countries, there was no doubt in Kennan's mind that totalitarianism was 'the most shocking and cynical disservice one can do to the credulity and to the spiritual equilibrium of one's fellow men'.112 Totalitarianism was the 'social equivalent of mental illness'; both often began with 'the sense of being the innocent victim of unseen conspirational forces'.113 Thus, significantly, totalitarianism was not a national phenomenon; it is a disease to which all humanity is in some degree vulnerable. To live under such a regime is a misfortune that can befall a nation by virtue of reasons purely historic... Where circumstances weaken the powers of resistance, to a certain crucial degree, the virus triumphs.

The Russians, in other words, had become victims of a 'virus' that exploited 'the evil and weakness in man's nature'. It attempted 'to live by man's degradation, feeding like a vulture on his anxieties, his capacity for hatred, his susceptibility to error, and his vulnerability to psychological manipulation'.114 It was simply not true that 'the human impulses which give rise to the nightmares of totalitarianism were ones which Providence had allocated only to other peoples and to which the American people had been graciously left immune'. Moreover, there were 'openly totalitarian forces already working in [American] society'. In fact, 'there is a little bit of the totalitarian buried somewhere, way down deep, in each and every one of us. It is only the cheerful light of confidence and security which keeps this evil genius down at the usual helpless and invisible depth.' Those who think that the work of building freedom in the United States was accomplished completely and for all time by our forefathers 'lull themselves to sleep'. Quoting from Goethe, Kennan concluded that 'freedom has to be reconquered every day'.115 The vulnerability of the human soul to the dangers of totalitarianism created a bond between Russians and Americans. Kennan asked his com112. Kennan, Memoirs, II, p. 225. 113. George F. Kennan, 'The Ethics of Anti-Communism', in University: A Princeton Quarterly'24 (1965), pp. 3-5 (5). 114. Kennan, American Diplomacy, pp. 147-48. 115. Kennan, Measures Short of War, p. 168.

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patriots to 'rise above these easy and childish reactions and consent to view the tragedy of Russia as partly our own tragedy, and the people of Russia as our comrades in the long hard battle for a happier system of man's coexistence with himself and with nature on this troubled planet'.116 And because confidence—or faith—was decisive in fighting off the virus of totalitarianism, the threat 'which has lain behind Soviet armies...and behind the aberrations of confused American left-wingers, will not be overcome until we have learned to view ourselves realistically and to purge ourselves of some of our prejudices, our hypocrisies, and our lack of civil discipline'.117 In the end, the 'most important factor in determining the ultimate outcome of the Cold War was the spiritual distinction of our own civilization'. For 'whether we win against the Russians is primarily a question of whether we win against ourselves'. 'The fortunes of the Cold War will begin to turn in our direction as and when we learn to apply ourselves resolutely to many things that have, superficially viewed, nothing whatsoever to do with the Cold War at all.'118 As the greatest danger to virtuous republics, 'totalitarianism' occupies the place in Kennan's outlook that the notion of 'corruption' occupied in the philosophy of the Founding Fathers. The ossification of the Cold War, however, was strong evidence for Kennan that the Americans were failing in their efforts to avoid contagion with the virus of totalitarianism. The Marshall Plan was the appropriate beginning of the 'containment' policy, but it was meant to be precisely that: a beginning. 'It would lay the foundation for a new sense of purpose in Western society'—a sense of purpose needed 'not just for our protection against an outward threat but to enable us to meet a debt to our own civilization', 'to accomplish what we would have owed it to ourselves to accomplish, even had such a thing as international communism never existed'.119 AJ1 those things that needed to be done to combat communism needed to be done 'anyway—even in the absence of a Communist threat—to assure the preservation and advance of civilization'.120 116. Kennan, American Diplomacy, p. 147. 117. Kennan, Measures Short of War, pp. 86-87. 118. Kennan writes of'spiritual distinction' in a letter of January 1952, referred to in Memoirs, II, p. 84; the remaining quotations are from Russia, the Atom and the West, pp. 14, 96. 119. Kennan, Russia, the Atom and the West, p. 90 (emphasis added). 120. 'Draft Memorandum by the Counselor (Kennan) to the Secretary of State', Washington, 17 February 1950, in US Department of State, Foreign Relations of the

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This broader meaning of 'containment' brings the term close to the classical notion of arete, to a balanced existence, a taking care of oneself, the ability to preserve the openness of reality by resisting the slavery of addictions, and to virtue. Thus, beneath the problem of the relative importance of political and military means of containing the Soviet Union,121 there is a philosophical concern at the centre of Kennan's 'containment'. Kennan makes this concern explicit by acknowledging that 'we can no longer apply that term [containment] to the Soviet Union alone'. For 'there is much in our own life, here in this country, that needs early containment. It could in fact be said that the first thing we Americans need to learn to contain is, in some ways, ourselves.' '[O]ur own environmental destructiveness' and 'our tendency to live beyond our means' are just two examples of aspects of modern Western life that need 'containment'. Kennan proposes to 'develop a wider concept of what containment means, a concept more closely linked to the totality of the problems of Western civilization at this juncture in world history'.122 In this broader sense, 'containment' is directed against a form of existence that does not recognize limits. Limitless existence was partly the immediate consequence of the unconditional acceptance of the logic of the marketplace. 'A foreigner', Kennan wrote, 'easily gains the impression that we...have resigned ourselves helplessly to the workings of our economic system; and that we are content to move wherever that system carries us, regardless of the effect on the esthetic taste, the intellectual health, and the emotional freshness of our people'. Once man loses a sense of limits, he loses a sense of what should not be done, and hence becomes unable to understand how and, in fact, why he should direct his life in a purposeful and cautious manner. And once orientation has gone lost, one cannot give United States 1950. I. National Security Affairs, Foreign Economic Policy (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1977), pp. 163-64. 121. On the relative importance of political and military means of'containment', see John Lewis Gaddis, 'Containment: A Reassessment', Foreign Affairs 55 (1977), pp. 873-87; Eduard Mark, The Question of Containment: A Reply to John Lewis Gaddis', Foreign Ajfairs 56 (1978), pp. 430-41 (with a rejoinder by Gaddis on pp. 44041); George F. Kennan, 'Letter to the Editor', Foreign Affairs 56 (1978), pp. 643-45 (with a rejoinder by Mark on pp. 645-47); John Lewis Gaddis, 'Introduction: The Evolution of Containment', in Terry L. Deibel and John Lewis Gaddis (eds.), Containing the Soviet Union: A Critique of US Policy (Washington: Pergamon-Brassey's, 1987), pp. 1-12. 122. George F. Kennan, 'Containment: Then and Now', in Kennan, At a Century's Ending, pp. 110-15(114-15).

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an example to others: '[O]nly he is capable of exercising leadership over others who is capable of some real degree of mastery over himself.'123 In the context of American-Soviet relations, containment was never meant to 'perpetuate the status quo' but 'to tide us over a difficult period'. At one point in the mid 1940s, Kennan thought that this 'difficult period' should last about 10-15 years.124 The path of containment as envisioned by Kennan was left when 'containment' was transformed into a doctrine, into an 'indestructible myth'. This, Kennan believes, was one of the unfortunate effects of the 'X-Article'. In a sense, then, containment did not fail but the intended follow-up never occurred.125 Instead, as mentioned above, there followed the militarization of the conflict. From then on, Kennan was again at odds with American foreign policy. While the United States had failed to recognize that the 'Soviet Union [was] a new, different type of power' until 1946, she shifted to the opposite extreme after 1949. [T]here emerged one of those great and forbidding apparitions to the credence in which mass opinion is so easily swayed: a monster devoid of all humanity and of all rationality of motive, at once the embodiment and the caricature of evil, devoid of internal conflicts and problems of its own, intent only on bringing senseless destruction to the lives and hopes of others.126

Soviet power became so 'demonic, monstrous, incalculable, inscrutable' in American eyes that it was unthinkable that 'we admit to a share in the responsibility for [Soviet] behaviour'.127 To Kennan's dismay, Americans came 'unconsciously' to accept the Soviet thesis that 'every Soviet gain is automatically our loss and to see our salvation as dependent on our ability to outpace Russia in every single phase of her economic progress'.128 The Cold War, in other words, had become a zero-sum game for both players. 123. Kennan, Realities of American Foreign Policy, p. 114. 124. 'Memorandum of Canadian-United States Defense Conversations held in Ottawa in Suite "E", Chateau Laurier Hotel, December 16 and 17, 1946', in US Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States 1946. V. The British Commonwealth, Western and Central Europe (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1969), p. 70. 125. Kennan, Memoirs, I, pp. 356, 365. 126. George F. Kennan, 'The United States and the Soviet Union 1917-1976', Foreign Affairs 54 (1976), pp. 670-90 (680, 682). 127. Kennan, Measures Short of War, p. 5; Memoirs, I, p. 499. 128. Kennan, Russia, the Atom and the West, p. 9.

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Kennan felt it necessary to respond to these developments with a plea for 'a new act of faith in the ultimate humanity and sobriety of the people on the other side', a plea which, addressed to both sides, implied that the common bond of humankind had been broken between the two adversaries.129 Kennan complains about the subsequent intolerance, secretiveness, suspicion and cruelty Americans demonstrate in their relations to the outside world. The 'witch-hunting' of the McCarthy era brings out the worst in Americans: cheap provincial chauvinism, anti-intellectualism, mistrust of thought, a demand for uniformity, the tendency 'to draw about us the same sort of iron curtain that we resented when we saw it surrounding our communist adversaries'. Again Kennan recognizes the attempt to suppress parrhesia, but this time on the American side. In the hunt for Communist conspiracies, the accusers, 'like the victims of some totalitarian brainwashing', arrogated to their individual selves 'the powers of the spiritual and temporal law-giver, to make the definition of social conduct a matter of fear in the face of vague and irregular forces, rather than a matter of confidence in the protecting discipline of conscience and the law'.130 Moreover, as the United States assumed more and more responsibilities, the American 'administrative responses to world problems' were increasingly marked by 'the flight from the individual, the striving for the creation of machinery to replace individual insight and judgment, the labored diffusion of power'. In place of the parrhesia of the philosopher-diplomat, whose personality is 'revealed, tried and tested' in confrontation with the ' "differentness" of a foreign environment',131 the Foreign Service offered nothing but 'an uncomfortable sense of being at the mercy of forces unknown and unseen, a condition that grips subordinate and superior together in a sort of Kafka-esque nightmare to which there is no end and from which there is no escape'.132 The 'tendency to the total externalization of evil (in bodies of people just as in individuals)' had finally infected American society. 'Psychically

129. George F. Kennan, 'A European Settlement', in Edward Reed (ed.), Peace on Earth—Pacem in Terns (New York: Pocket, 1965), pp. 77-83 (82). 130. Kennan, Realities of American Foreign Policy, p. 118; Memoirs, II, pp. 223-25. 131. George F. Kennan, The Future of our Professional Diplomacy', Foreign Affairs 33 (1955), pp. 566-86 (572). 132. George F. Kennan, 'America's Administrative Response to its World Problems', DaedalusKl (1958), pp. 5-24 (14, 17).

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and practically' there was nothing more dangerous than this 'failure of selfknowledge'. For the struggle against evil was always in part 'an overcoming of self. 'We cannot for this reason identify ourselves self-righteously with all that is good and clothe whatever opposes us in the colors of unmitigated evil.'133 This externalization of evil was what gave the 'problem of SovietAmerican relations' its 'religious connotations'. The conflict seemed to lead 'to an effort on the part of a great many people to externalize evil, to attribute to the Soviet leadership and the Soviet people every sort of iniquity and indeed a sort of monopoly on iniquity; and what is worse, to see in their supposed total iniquity the proof of our own total virtue'. Kennan finds such 'monstrous oversimplifications' 'profoundly un-Christian'.134 For once man becomes unable to detect himself in the behaviour of others, 'human forces easily take on dark, sinister and repellent aspects'.135 Kennan drew the depressing conclusion that, while fighting the Soviets, the Americans increasingly became like them, a danger he had warned against already in the Long Telegram.136 'If one fought against an enemy ostensibly because of his methods, and permitted oneself to be impelled by the heat of the struggle to adopt those same methods, who, then, could be said to have won?... Whose outlook could be said to have triumphed?'137 This ironic success of Soviet totalitarianism turns Kennan into a prophet of the 'decline of the West'. The Cold War as a war between two similarly closed self-understandings of man showed the extent to which the contamination of civilization with the virus of totalitarianism had advanced. In the late 1960s Kennan warned that the very survival of Western civilization—in both the 'spiritual and physical sense'—was endangered, and that the dangers lay within rather than outside Western civilization.138 In the mid 1990s he concluded that the twentieth century was a 'tragic one in the history of European (including American) civilisation', a 'sad'

133. Kennan, 'The Ethics of Anti-Communism', p. 5. 134. George F. Kennan, 'Nuclear Weapons and Christian Faith', in Kennan, At a Century's Ending, pp. 69-71 (69). On the externalization of evil, see also George F. Kennan, 'Western Decadence and Soviet Moderation', in Herz (ed.), Decline of the West?, pp. 3-9 (8-9). 135. Kennan, Memoirs, II, p. 222; Democracy and the Student Left, p. 143. 136. Foreign Relations of the United States 1946, VI, p. 709. 137. Kennan, Memoirs, I, p. 198; II, p. 87; 'Foreign Policy and Christian Conscience', p. 45. 138. Kennan, Democracy and the Student Left, pp. 224-25, 228.

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and 'disturbing' century.139 On several occasions Kennan identifies as the major cause and symptom of the present crisis what was also, in a sense, the essence of totalitarianism: the inability to distinguish reality from unreality. In the present political world, Kennan writes in 1988, 'artificially created images are considered more significant than realities'. In our age, 'there is a real danger that we may lose altogether our ability to distinguish the real and the unreal, and, in doing so, lose both the credibility of true moral behaviour and the great force such behaviour is, admittedly, capable of exerting'.140 The ultimate consequence of this loss is that the Western world 'has lost a sense of the fitness of things, and that is the meaning of decadence'.141 In other words, the Western world has lost a sense of the measure, and it has promoted man as the measure of all things. In his definition of'decadence', Kennan agrees, again, with Plato. But the symptoms of the crisis went far beyond the realm of politics. Kennan refers to the 'appalling shallowness of the religious, philosophic and political concepts' that pervaded a society inflicted by 'sickly secularism'; he mentions 'overpopulation, precipitate urbanization, the feverish hyperintensity of communication, the destruction of the natural environment'. Again and again Kennan laments the destruction of urban life through the automobile, through the 'quiet nocturnal stream of temporary moving prisons'. Americans had succeeded in creating a 'fine end-of-theworld' in their cities. The 'sad climax of individualism' as well as widespread 'attitudes of hopelessness, skepticism, cynicism, and bewilderment' qualify this society 'as a "sick" one'. While Kennan considers the 'noise' of the present age 'a nightmare', Americans justify themselves 'by the fact that the sun shines and that life is easy'. They often do not really seem to live 'but to await death' in a 'sort of trancelike unreal state of existence, drugged by the sedatives of advertizing, TV, and the wheel of the automobile'.142 The 'decadence and demoralization' of American society was 139. George F. Kennan, 'Foreword', in Kennan, At a Century's Ending, pp. 7-13 (7, 11,13). 140. George F. Kennan, 'The Gorbachev Prospect', in Kennan, At a Century's Ending, pp. 219-29 (229), George F. Kennan, 'Morality and Foreign Policy', in Kennan, At a Century's Ending, pp. 269-82 (282). 141. Kennan and Urban, 'A Conversation', p. 20. The 'is' is italicized in the original transcript. 142. Kennan, Democracy and the Student Left, pp. 216-17; Sketches from a Life, pp. 43, 225, 288-89; Memoirs, II, pp. 81-82; Around the Cragged Hill, p. 158. See also George F. Kennan, 'To Prevent a World Wasteland', Foreign Affairs 48 (1970), pp. 401-413.

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partly due to the fact that 'the whole process of communication' was dominated by the 'advertizing industry'. The excesses of advertising posed a threat to civilization because they 'de-train people for any sustained attention to the truth'.143 Decadence is in turn what makes societies susceptible to the evil of totalitarianism. There was a direct correlation between the 'apocalyptic disasters of society' listed above and the degree of vulnerability to totalitarian tendencies. The establishment or maintenance of indigenous totalitarian systems is much easier, for example, for societies of a scale 'so vast and complicated that the individual can no longer sense or survey his relation to the whole and is obliged to feel himself...as a helpless and superfluous entity in the hands of demoniac forces beyond his power to understand or influence'. Similarly, if the pace of social change violates the 'continuity of the generations' or destroyed 'the individual's confidence in his environment', the 'totalitarian virus' would encounter much less resistance. 144 The clearest indication of spiritual decline for Kennan was the nuclear arms race. Nuclear deterrence manifested a spiritual and philosophical derangement of the first order; it was, literally, 'madness', 'a form of illness', 'morbid in the extreme'. It could be understood only as some form of 'subconscious despair on the part of its devotees—some sort of death wish, a readiness to commit suicide for fear of death', 'a lack of faith, or better a lack of the very strength that it takes to have faith, as countless of our generations have had it before us'.145 To threaten, by holding nuclear weapons, 'the very intactness of the natural environment in which, and in which alone, civilization would have a future' seemed 'to be "simply wrong", wrong in the good old-fashioned meaning of the term'. 'It involves an egocentricity on our part that has no foundation either in religious faith or in political philosophy.' Humans were too weak to manage or even deserve the power weapons of mass destruction placed in their

143. Kennan and Urban, 'A Conversation', p. 16. 144. All quotations in this paragraph are from George F. Kennan, 'Totalitarianism in the Modern World', in Carl J. Friedrich (ed.), Totalitarianism: Proceedings of a Conference held at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), pp. 17-31 (26, 28). 145. George F. Kennan, 'On Nuclear War', in Phil Braithwaite (ed.), George Kennan on NATO, Nuclear War and the Soviet Threat (Evesham: West Midlands CND Sales, 1985), pp. 33-39 (39).

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hands.146 The preposterous gesture of accumulating such power made humans lose their humanness. Already in the late 1950s, when the nuclearization of Europe was at its very beginning, Kennan felt tempted to join those 'who say, "Let us divest ourselves of this weapon altogether; let us at least walk like men, with our heads up, so long as we are permitted to walk at all"'.147 Kennan insists that 'warfare should be a means to an end other than warfare, an end connected with the beliefs and the feelings and the attitudes of people, an end marked by submission to a new political will and perhaps a new regime of life, but an end which at least did not negate the principle of life itself. What characterizes nuclear weapons is that they 'cannot really be reconciled with a political purpose directed to shaping, rather than destroying, the lives of the adversary'. Thus, 'they fail to take account of the ultimate responsibility of men for one another, and even for each other's errors and mistakes'. Therefore, 'they reach backwards beyond the frontiers of Western civilization, to the concepts of warfare which were once familiar to the Asiatic hordes'.148 To place the natural environment, the only environment that makes human existence possible, at stake 'just for the sake of the comforts, the fears, and the national rivalries of a single generation' involved an 'element of sacrilege'. Kennan anticipates that, in this modern age, his attitudes may be dismissed as 'religious'. He adds, therefore, that 'the renunciation of self-interest, which is what all morality implies, can never be rationalized by purely secular and materialistic means'. All morality rests, 'consciously or otherwise, on some foundation of religious faith'.149 And if the highest form of freedom was the successful containment of totalitarianism and decadence—two faces of one coin—then freedom had to entail 'a system of restraints', a sense of limits. These restraints had to be sought, Kennan explained, in 'the wisdom of the ages, and in the ethical codes

146. See for example George F. Kennan and Martin Agronsky, 'A Different Approach to the World: An Interview', The New York Review of Books 23.21 and 23.22 (20 January 1977), pp. 12-17 (14-15). 147. Kennan, Sketches from a Life, p. 294; Memoirs, II, p. 247; Russia, the Atom and the West, p. 54. 148. 'Memorandum by the Counselor (Kennan), Washington, January 20, 1950', Foreign Relations of the United States 1950, I, p. 39. On the same set of problems, see also Kennan, 'Foreign Policy and Christian Conscience', pp. 47-49; and 'World Problems in Christian Perspective', pp. 471-74. 149. Kennan, 'Morality and Foreign Policy', p. 281.

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that the great religions of civilization have developed'.150 Kennan, it must be reiterated, never lost the hope of the reformer. The decline of the West was not 'a fully accomplished fact'. And one could not 'regard American society as hopelessly diseased'.151 After all, there was his 'defiant faith—a desperate, unreasoning faith, if you will—but faith nevertheless in the endurance of this threatened world, faith in the total essentiality of historical continuity'.152 But at the same time, he never felt at home in the century in which he was born. He was, in his own words, 'an expatriate in time rather than in place', and felt like a 'disembodied spirit'. He could not 'help but regret that [he] did not live fifty or a hundred years sooner', for life was 'too full in these times to be comprehensible'. '[L]ife begins to seem like a movie, with hundreds of kaleidoscopic scenes flashing on and off our field of perception—gone before we have time to consider them.' It was not that Kennan had left the contexts with which he had once been familiar; it was the other way around. It was the world of his boyhood which had left him; it was the Europe about which he cared which left him, and it was the Wisconsin of the early twentieth century which left him.153 Though never without hope, Kennan acknowledged that the 'America of today' was not and could never be again 'wonderful old America'. Though the memory and inspiration of the past had to be preserved, it would be an escape from reality to belief in its restoration. 1S4 In response to the 'discomfort' he experiences as a contemporary of the twentieth century, Kennan tends to 'seek in the interpretation of history a usefulness [he] could not find in the interpretation of [his] own time'.155 But the writing of history is not an escape from the present. As the 'spectacular mechanical and scientific creations of modern man tend to conceal from him the nature of his own humanity and to encourage him in all sorts of Promethean ambitions and illusions', it is precisely history

150. Kennan, 'Totalitarianism in the Modern World', pp. 30-31. 151. Kennan and Urban, 'A Conversation', p. 63; Kennan and Lasky, 'A Conversation', p. 197. Emphasis added. 152. George F. Kennan, 'Acceptance Speech: Gold Medal for History' (1984), in Kennan, At a Century's Ending, pp. 307-308 (308). 153. Kennan, Sketches from a Life, pp. 7, 183, 363; Memoirs, I, p. 77; II, pp. 117, 311; George F. Kennan, 'Flashbacks', in Kennan, At a Century's Ending, pp. 30-42 (40). 154. Kennan, Realities of American Foreign Policy, p. 109. 155. Kennan, Memoirs, II, pp. 88-89.

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that can 'expose the nature of man as revealed in simpler and more natural conditions, where that which was elemental was less concealed by artificialities'. Modern man needs to be reminded 'of the nature of the species he belongs to, of the limitations that rest on him, of the essential elements, both tragic and helpful, of his own condition'.156 9. Epilogue The classical tradition in Western philosophy understands human existence as a communal strife for attunement to God's unseen measure, for example to the Platonic agathon, the Aristotelian nous, or the Thomistic ratio aeterna. For the classical thinkers of antiquity as well as for the scholastic thinkers of the Middle Ages, human action could be considered rational only if it was oriented beyond all intermediate ends and means to a last end, to a summum bonum. In many classical accounts, this highest end is referred to as eudaimonia, which is commonly translated into English as 'happiness'. In the same sense in which 'happiness' cannot be defined as an object or a proposition, the 'highest good' defies all human attempts to know or possess it as an object. Yet, 'happiness' is a recognizable state of mind, a state of the soul, and as such can be 'sensed'. The philosopher can 'sense' the direction in which to reach out for the highest good just as the wise man can 'sense' the direction in which to look for 'happiness'. This 'sense' or 'awareness' corresponds to a pragmatic wisdom based on experience. In the classical tradition, the elusiveness of the highest good implies a linkage between spirituality, politics and order. Kennan is linked to this tradition through the Founding Fathers.157 A more detailed exploration of Kennan's account of the Cold War and the twentieth century could be an important contribution not just for historiographical reasons as an analysis of the biography of a key participant; but also, as we have argued earlier, because it provides a starting point for a noetic reflection on the Cold War experience.

156. George F. Kennan, The Experience of Writing History', in Abraham S. Eisenstadt (ed.), The Craft of American History (2 vols.; New York: Harper, 1966), II, pp. 270-78 (277-78). 157. See John Zvesper, The American Founders and Classical Political Thought', History of Political Thought 10 (1989), pp. 701-18; and the brilliant discussion in J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).

RECOVERY FROM METASTATIC CONSCIOUSNESS: VOEGELIN AND JEREMIAH Geoffrey L. Price

1

Voegelin's diagnosis of modernity, outlined in The New Science of Politics, identified its leading features as equivalent to a heretical mutation of Christianity.1 This initial striking diagnosis is clearer still in the History of Political Ideas, where Voegelin follows Gibbon in tracing a direct line of continuity from the Paulician movement of the seventh century and its ramifications in the Bogomil sect, the Cathars of southern France, the Waldensians and Franciscans, the English Lollards and the Czech Hussites, to the final outburst of the Reformation movement of the sixteenth century.2 The suggestion has recently been made that Voegelin's 1952 diagnosis of the gnostic features of modernity had affinities to the highly polarized conceptions of political reality commonly used in the tense period of international relations within which he lived. It is argued that in the changed political situation since 1989, such conceptions can no longer be supported; that this confrontational element in Voegelin's thought is now passe; and that attention should rather be directed to his contributions to a positive conception of human universality.3 1. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), Chapter 4, 'Gnosticism: The Nature of Modernity', pp. 107-32. 2. Eric Voegelin, History of Political Ideas. IV. Renaissance and Reformation (ed. David L. Morse and William M. Thompson; Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 22; Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), Part 4, Chapter 3, 'The People of God', pp. 131-214; in German, Eric Voegelin, Das Volk Gottes: Sektenbewegungen und der Geist der Moderne (ed. Peter J. Opitz; trans. Heike Kaltschmidt; Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1994). 3. Michael G. Franz, Eric Voegelin and the Politics of Spiritual Revolt: The Roots of Modern Ideology (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993); Eugene Webb, 'Eric Voegelin at the End of an Era: Differentiations of Consciousness and the Search

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Far from it being possible to receive Voegelin's work adequately after excising the diagnosis of The New Science of Politics, I maintain in this paper that the endeavour undertaken in his entire subsequent project of Order and History is concerned with the recovery of the balance of consciousness over against its modern deformations into gnostic and apocalyptic schemes of thought. If we dismiss the initial diagnosis of 1952 as idiosyncratic or historically conditioned, we remove the whole issue to which Voegelin's subsequent work is addressed. That this is so is evident in view of the stage that Voegelin's work had reached two decades later. He was happy to admit, in a lecture of 1976, that he had initially 'paid perhaps undue attention to gnosticism in... The New Science of Politics, and that 'in the meanwhile we have found that the apocalyptic tradition is of equal importance, and the Neo-Platonic tradition, and hermeticism, and magic, and so on'.4 But this was not a concession of weakness in his argument, but rather an indication that the scope of his diagnosis had widened. In the Introduction' to The Ecumenic Ageof 1974, his historical enquiries had reached the point where he could indicate that the phenomenon of gnostic and apocalyptic deformations of consciousness had occurred not only in the period on which his original argument of 1952 had been focused—the late-mediaeval expansion of European city-states—but that it is a general response that arose from 'the interaction between expansion of empire and differentiation of consciousness' that occurred in the period from the rise of the Persian, to the fall of the Roman, empire. The ecumenic expansion of the Persians, of Alexander and his successors, and ultimately of the Romans destroys the cosmological empires of the Ancient Near East; and the ecumenic empires destroy each other down to the Roman victory... The divine authority of the older symbols is impaired when the societies whose reality of order they express lose their political independence, while the new imperial order has, at least initially, no more than the authority of power... Society and the cosmos of which society is a part tend to be experienced as a sphere of disorder, so that the sphere of for the Universal', in Stephen A. McKnight and Geoffrey L. Price (eds.), International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Eric Voegelin (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), pp. 159-88; Eugene Webb, 'Review of Michael G. Franz, Eric Voegelin and the Politics of Spiritual Revolt: The Roots of Modern Ideology, Voegelin Research News 3 (1997), archived at http://vax2.concordia.ca/^vorenews. 4. Eric Voegelin, 'Myth as Environment', in Eric Voegelin, Conversations with Eric Voegelin (ed. R. Eric O'Connor; Thomas More Institute Papers, 76; Montreal: Perry Printing Limited, 1980), pp. 113-54 (149).

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order in reality contracts to personal existence in tension toward the divine 5 Beyond.

By this stage, Voegelin was also in a position to give an account of gnosticism that was explanatory rather than descriptive. He distinguished two modes in which the one divine reality is experienced: the Beyond and the Beginning. The Beyond is present in the immediate experiences of movements in the psyche; while the presence of the divine Beginning is mediated through the experience of the existence and intelligible structure of things in the cosmos. The two models require two different types of languge for their adequate expression.

For many in the period of ecumenic upheaval, divine reality was experienced intensely in spiritual movements that had radiated both from Christianity and from hermetic texts such as the Poimandres. But this experience was primarily that of the luminous presence within the soul of the divine Beyond. The result was that the presence of the divine Beginning was occluded. The very intensity of the soul's experience of the eschatological Beyond had the effect of casting the very existence of the cosmos in a questionable light. 'Why should a cosmos exist at all, if man can do no better than to live in it as if he were not of it, in order to make his escape from the prison through death?' When the consciousness of the movement towards the Beyond was intensified to this degree, it was readily 'torn out of the context of reality in which it arises and made the autonomous basis for human action that will abolish the mystery'. It is this move that underlies the construction of systems of thought that are inherently unbalanced: The fallacy at the core of the Gnostic answers to the question is the expansion of consciousness from the Beyond to the Beginning. In the construction of Gnostic systems, the immediate experience of divine presence in the mode of the Beyond is speculatively expanded to comprehend a knowledge of the Beginning that is accessible only in the mode of mediated experience.

On the basis of this insight, Voegelin was able, by this point, to account for the otherwise confusing issue of the phenotypical differences between

5. Eric Voegelin, Order and History. IV. The Ecumenic Age (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), pp. 21-22. 6. Voegelin, Order and History, IV, p. 17. 7. Voegelin, Order and History, IV, p. 19.

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ancient and modern manifestations of gnosticism. It had an essential core and a wide variation of imaginative presentations. At its core was the enterprise of returning the human spirit—represented as in a state of alienation from a cosmos that was nothing but a disturbing mystery—to the divine spirit experienced as the Beyond. The basis of this return is always to be achieved by some form of special knowledge achieved in a speculative philosophical system. The language of such systems focuses exclusively on the Beyond: the aim is to return not to the creator-God of the Beginning, but to a wholly a-cosmic God of the Beyond.8 This essential core could be imaginatively expanded in many different ways—resulting, in the ancient world, in the complex pantheon of figures who act out the story of recovery in systems such as the psychodrama of Valentinian gnosticism, and in the modern world, in the systems of Schelling and Hegel who present their gnosis under the guise of 'third age' Johannine Christianity. The issue to which Voegelin's work was addressed was thus clarified. The manifold gnostic systems that claimed to resolve the spiritual search of individuals disoriented in the ecumenic period constituted a disturbance of consciousness through the loss of balance between the Beginning and the Beyond. How could the balance of consciousness be recovered? On this issue, Voegelin was obliged to confront the approach of the thinker who was his predecessor in attempting this task: Philo. We must follow the reasons why Voegelin rejected Philo's approach, as a preliminary to understanding the reasons for his own approach. 2

In the earlier phases of the struggle to regain the balance of consciousness in an ecumenic society, the encounter of Judaism with philosophy in Alexandria had been a critical episode. This encounter, Voegelin noted, had culminated in the work of Philo, whose literary method of a philosophical commentary on Scripture had set the pattern later followed by the Christian fathers.9 The overarching problem that Philo had had to face in an epoch of widespread imbalance in human consciousness, was to recover an awareness of the presence of the divine as mediated through the cosmos and through the intelligibility of its structure. In his On the Account of the World's Creation Given by Moses, it could be seen that Philo 8. 9.

Voegelin, Order and History^ IV, pp. 20, 26. Voegelin, Order and History, IV, p. 29.

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had taken the 'balancing' steps available within the Judaic tradition to counter extremes of spiritual consciousness. He asserted the authority of the received law against the prophets. Moreover, in directing attention back to Moses, he had immediately used the Genesis account of creation— an account free of cosmogonic elements—to show how man existed as an established citizen of the divinely created cosmos. While among other lawgivers some have nakedly and without embellishment drawn up a code of the things held to be right among their people... Moses...introduced his laws with an admirable and most impressive exordium... His exordium...is one that excites our admiration in the highest degree. It consists of an account of the creation of the world, implying that the world is in harmony with the Law, and the Law with the world, and that the man who observes the law is constituted thereby a loyal citizen of the world, regulating his doings by the purpose and will of Nature, in 10 accordance with which the entire world itself also is administered.

Philo's work had of course been extremely influential. Harry Austryn Wolfson has stressed how it had laid the foundation for seventeen centuries of religious philosophy in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, until Spinoza's Tractatus broke with the pattern.11 In Voegelin's judgment, the influence went still deeper. Philo's allegorical method of interpretation conceived philosophy to be the handmaid of Scripture. For Philo, the sacred Torah had an inner sense (hyponoia) hidden beneath the surface meaning. This concealed meaning could only be extracted by translation into the language of what Philo considered to be philosophy: the device of allegoria. The need for such a hermeneutic approach had already been apparent in the Alexandrian milieu of the first century BCE, but by the time of Philo, the allegorical approach was being systematized. What was the need that this hermeneutic had met? At this phase of history, Voegelin argued, the need was sensed to preserve the meaning of the older, more compactly expressed literature of Israel and of Hellas. If they were not to atrophy, and if the community

10. Philo, On the Account of the World's Creation Given by Moses (De Opificio Mundi), in Philo (trans. F.H. Colson and G.H. Whitaker; Loeb Classical Library; 10 vols.; London: Heinemann, 1929), I, pp. 1-137 (7) (Chapter 1, Sections 1-3). 11. Harry Austryn Wolfson, Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (2 vols.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1947), II, Chapter 13, 'Political Theory', Section 4, 'Conclusion, Influence, Anticipation', pp. 426-38.

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was not to lose its historical continuity, it was essential to recover the meaning preserved in more archaic form. How was this done? First, the symbolic language found in the sacred text was treated as 'Scripture'. Separated from the compact experiences that had engendered it, this language was declared to have a surface or 'literal' meaning of its own. Secondly, the interpreter undertook the task of discerning the underlying meaning—the hyponoia—by reinterpreting the now near-obscurity of the compact symbols of the original Torah in terms of his own more differentiated language of Hellenic philosophy.12 Philo's work was of great importance as an attempt at cultural integration: it represented the attempt of the Hellenistic empire to appropriate and assimilate the ancient Israelite-Judaic Torah. What, however, was the 'philosophy' within whose terms Philo's integrative activity was pursued? What was the 'Torah' whose inner meaning he sought to revivify through interpretation? Voegelin set himself to answer these questions. In doing so, he both pitted himself against Philo, and indicated the aims of his own work. Assessed against the noetic experience underlying the work of Plato, Voegelin found the 'philosophy' of Philo to be a contracted deformation. He conceded that the method of allegorical interpretation had had a long history in the centuries of imperial expansion. Theagenes of Rhegium had developed an allegorical reading of Homer and Hesiod in the late sixth century BCE; and centuries of Midrashic allegory preceded Philo's interpretation of the Torah. But that did not make the method philosophical in Plato's sense. Plato had had no use for allegorical interpretations of Homer and Hesiod. Voegelin openly took Plato's side in the matter. Plato, he wrote, experiences divine reality as the ordering force in the cosmos and in personal existence; he recognizes his dialectical exploration of structures in reality as a movement of thought in the Metaxy; and he knows that divine reality beyond the Metaxy, if it is to be symbolized at all, can be symbolized only by the myth. 13

Plato himself had encountered a situation where allegorical interpretations of the epic myths of Homer and Hesiod had become socially dominant. Literalizing meanings had—over the centuries—been extracted from the epic myths of the gods, and the experiences that underlay those studies 12. Voegelin, Order and History, IV, p. 35. 13. Voegelin, Order and History> IV, p. 36.

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had been lost. All that was left was stories of a divine pantheon whose members engaged in harsh and immoral actions, and inflicted war upon mankind. To such a deformation, the only response was that which Plato had made. [L]iteralism as a social force endangers the humanity of the young, because it converts the real truth which the symbols of the myth have as the real expression of a real experience of real divine presence, into the fictitious 14 truth of human propositions about gods who are objects of cognition.

What could be done if the faith of the people became undermined, when thus confronted with a variety of literalistic interpretations? Again taking Plato's view of the matter, Voegelin declared that nothing would be achieved by using an educational endeavour that used an allegorical interpretation of Homer, in an attempt to bring about theperiagoge or restoration of the youthful generation to reality. To do that would be to remain trapped in a method that could not reach down to the level of experiences of the divine.15 In developing his assessment of allegory, Voegelin made clear the aims of his own work. His argument is likely to provoke resistance: is it not too harsh to associate the interpretative method of Philo with the deadening effects of the allegorical interpretation of Homer and Hesiod on sixthcentury Athenian youth? On the one hand, as Voegelin readily conceded, Philo was a spiritually and intellectually sensitive thinker, who was familiar with the existential experience of tension in the search for the ground. Nevertheless, he maintained, the range of Philo's philosophic method had failed him, when confronted with the cosmogony of Genesis. When he praised the endeavour of 'Moses' in the opening chapters of Genesis, he described his words as 'ideas of great beauty'. 'Now it is true that no writer in verse or prose could possibly do justice to the beauty of the ideas [noematon] embodied in this account of the creation of the kosmos.'16 This reading Voegelin found inadequate. The creation story was not merely a noematon, a body of philosophical 'thoughts'; the cosmogony of Genesis represented a pneumatic myth of the Beginning. Philo, who knew the Timaeus, could have followed Plato's procedure in dealing with the issue of creation, and recognized its equivalent in Genesis; but the idea never crossed his mind. Was this a personal failing on Philo's part? No— 14. Voegelin, Order and History, IV, p. 37. 15. Voegelin, Order and History, IV, p. 38. 16. Philo, On the Account of the World's Creation, p. 9 (Chapter 1, Section 4).

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rather it represented the decline in analytical standards during the imperial period since Alexander. Plato's conceptual distinctions between dialectics and the philosopher's myth had been lost; and the likely myth of the Timaeus had become a nondescript 'philosophy of nature'. In Philo's language, the term myth strictly denotes a myth of the polytheistic type, while the term philosophy indiscriminately denotes anybody's thoughts about god and the world. Since he intended to make the creation story acceptable in the Alexandrian intellectual milieu in which this usage was current, the cosmogony could under no circumstances be a 'myth', but had to be a 'philosophy' like the Platonic, only better.17

Philo's failings were of great moment: his analysis had set the pattern of inadequate analysis that was taken over by the Christian thinkers, and transmitted by them, through the Middle Ages, into the modern period. Voegelin's complaint against Philo is that he deforms the symbols of the cosmogony of Genesis. 'Deformations of symbols already differentiated are indeed more difficult to understand than the original symbols themselves, because as a rule the deformers neither analyze their method of deformation themselves, nor are they informative about their motives.'18 Further, Voegelin finds this deformation one of the great obstacles to the recovery of reason in the present period. The technique of deformation had become established with the Stoic thinkers, and was to be found in the modern world in the deformation of philosophy by the modern ideologies which pretended to the self-sufficiency of human reason. In making this judgment, Voegelin declared that he was going one step further than Wolfson in estimating the historical consequences of Philo's work. The pattern set by Philo does not remain restricted to the religious philosophy of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It continues in the creation of ideological systems as new types of Scripture, in the use of philosophy as the handmaid to the new Scriptures, and in the conflict of reason with the 19 newly revealed truth.

This open confrontation with Philo is only made twenty years after the first formulation of Voegelin's diagnosis of modernity in The New Science of Politics. However, I suggest that this confrontation is central to the whole endeavour of his work and, further, that through it the centrality of

17. Voegelin, Order and History, IV, p. 31. 18. Voegelin, Order and History, IV, p. 38. 19. Voegelin, Order and History, IV, p. 29.

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Voegelin's critique of the gnostic features of modernity to all his subsequent work can be recognized. I suggest that Voegelin's whole endeavour in Order and History, with Israel and Revelation central to the task, may be read as taking up the challenge that Philo had attempted but failed to meet. Why is this so? The challenge posed by gnosticism, whether in the ancient or the modern world, arose from its emphasis on eschatological fulfilment. In consequence, the experience of divine order was contracted into the 'Beyond' of noetic consciousness, overshadowing the consciousness of divine presence in the cosmos, represented in the symbolism of the Beginning. This deformation, Voegelin pointed out, could even be found in Israel itself, where in Isaiah 7 and in Daniel 7 we encounter a form of faith in Yahweh that assumes that the present structures of the cosmos are without meaning, and that divine intervention is capable of changing the structure of reality itself, so that divine order can be reintroduced. Here, Voegelin wrote in 1974, [t]he consciousness of divine ordering reality has contracted into the visions of an apocalyptic thinker. The stage is set for the divine messengers who abandon created reality altogether and concentrate on the Gnosis of the redemptive exodus from the cosmos... The Israelite case leaves no doubt about the nature of the issue. The process of contraction is a disturbance of consciousness through the loss of balance between the Beginning and the Beyond.20

Earlier, in Israel and Revelation, he had been still more forthright about the consequences that had stemmed from this contracted consciousness, which he termed 'metastatic'. [T]he recognition of the metastatic experience is of importance for the understanding not only of Israelite and Jewish order but of the history of Western Civilization to this day. While in the main development of Christianity, to be sure, the metastatic symbols were transformed into the eschatological events beyond history, so that the order of the world regained its autonomy, the continuum of metastatic movements has never been broken. It massively surrounds, rivals and penetrates Christianity in Gnosis and Marcionism, and in a host of gnostic and antinomian heresies; and it has been absorbed into the symbolism of Christianity itself through the Old Testament, as well as through the Revelation of St. John.21

20. Voegelin, Order and History, IV, pp. 26-27. 21. Eric Voegelin, Order and History. I. Israel and Revelation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956), pp. 447-56 (454).

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Here in 1956, Voegelin had described the consequences in terms that summarized his then-recent diagnosis in 'The People of God' and in The New Science of Polities'. Throughout the Middle Ages, the Church was occupied with the struggle against heresies of a metastatic complexion; and with the Reformation this underground stream has come to the surface again in a massive flood—first, in the left wing of the sectarian movements and then in the secular political creed movements which purport to exact the metastasis by revolutionary action.

Two decades later, his diagnosis remained the same, despite changes of terminology. The deformed consciousness of gnosticism and magic pneumatism ...gives its addicts a sense of superiority over the reality which does not conform. Whether the addiction assumes the forms of libertarianism and asceticism preferred in antiquity, or the modern forms of constructing systems which contain the ultimate truth and must be imposed on recalcitrant reality by means of violence, concentration camps, and mass murder, the addict is dispensed from the responsibilities of existence in the cosmos. Since Gnosticism surrounds the libido dominandi in man with a halo of spiritualism or idealism, and can always nourish its righteousness by pointing to the evil in the world, no historical end to the attraction is predictable 23 once magic pneumatism has entered history as a mode of existence.

Clearly then for Voegelin, the phenomenon of gnosticism, representing loss of contact with the life of spirit and reason under the conditions of the cosmos in which humanity actually exists, was a perennial problem, not confined to the particular circumstances of civilizational decline in the Western later Middle Ages, which he had portrayed in The New Science of Politics. Rather, it represented a perennial temptation within human existence, in the face of which it was vital to maintain that [t]here is no alternative to an eschatological extravaganza but to accept the mystery of the cosmos. Man's existence is participation in reality. It imposes the duty of noetically exploring the structure of reality as far as it is intelligible and spiritually coping with the insight into its movement from the 24 divine Beginning to the divine Beyond of its structure.

22. Voegelin, Order and History, I, p. 454. 23. Voegelin, Order and History, IV, pp. 27-28. 24. Voegelin, Order and History, IV, p. 28.

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It is to fulfil this endeavour, on a basis more adequate than that of Philo, that the whole work of Order and History is devoted.

3 In Israel and Revelation, the compact structure of the eventual form of the Torah is not taken for granted. Voegelin uncovers the successive layers of historical experience from which it was eventually constituted. The goal of this work of recovery is the recovery of the noetic experience from which the actions of Moses had stemmed. Voegelin points out that it was in the crisis of Israel in the ninth century that the Book of the Covenant as we now have it in Exod. 20.23-23.19 was compiled. A burning interest in the law, as the measure of right living from which the people had departed, had risen through the cry of Hosea: Hear the word of Yahweh, O children of Israel For Yahweh has a quarrel with the inhabitants of the land There is no truth, nor kindness, nor knowledge of God in the land (Hos. 4.1).

Once the significance of the emergence of this new concern at this point is recognized, the problem of the competing constructions of Israelite history becomes more intelligible. Before the ninth century, little is to be heard of Moses and his work; the events of the Mosaic period belong to the past. Certainly it was alive in the very existence of Israel as a people under God; but the present was concerned with the survival of that people in competition and symbiosis with its neighbours, with the rise of the Davidic empire and its dissolution. But in the ninth century, the mundane existence of Israel had reached an impasse when it compromised with the foreign gods of the Phoenicians in the process of building a defensive alliance against Tyre.25 Only at that point, when the whole raison d'etre of the people was at stake, did the question of the very meaning of Israel's existence become topical. Through the combined work of the historians, prophets, and code makers the meaning of Israel's existence under the revealed will of God was clarified; and the work found its center in the figure of Moses, the original prophet and lawgiver, as the instrument of God in bringing the Chosen People into existence.26

25. See Voegelin, Order and History^ I, pp. 322-25. 26. Voegelin, Order and History, I, p. 328.

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So as the work grew, from the nucleus of the Book of the Covenant, the meaning of life in the presence of Yahweh could be expressed by the codemakers in systematically organized rules of conduct; and the historians could present the work as the acts and speeches of Moses until the whole approached its present form of the Pentateuch.27 Here, the crucial difference between Voegelin's approach to the figure of Moses and that of Philo becomes apparent. First, rather than taking the Torah in its present form at face value, he studies the historical circumstances under which it was first 'nucleated' in the Book of the Covenant and eventually grew to its present form. Then he removes the 'Moses' who is introduced as the speaker of the Deuteronomic discourses and as the author of the Pentateuchal Torah. Next, he discounts as stemming from the ninth century the body of traditions in which Moses appears with the characteristics of a nabi like Amos or Hosea. Lastly, he removes strata of presentation that associate Moses with thaumaturgical legends of the type arising in the circle of Elijah and the prophets at the court of Samaria. This task is not undertaken in the vain hope of isolating a 'historical image of Moses'; but neither is it an attempt to avoid the existence of Moses. For it was precisely because of his mediatory role that the immense transition that brought Israel into existence was accomplished: There never would have been a first-born son of Yahweh if the God had had to rely on the people alone; there never would have been an Israel without the leadership of Moses. If there was a clash between the orders of Israel and Egypt, it had its origin in an experience of Moses... The transformation of the indifferent and recalcitrant Hebrew clans into the Israel of Yahweh must have taken some time, as well as the efforts of a strong personality. It pressupposes the existence of the man who could bring the people into the present under God because he had entered into it himself.

Furthermore, Voegelin made clear that without the prophetic movement of the ninth century, we would probably know little about Moses and the events of his time. The 'historical Moses' question was of secondary importance compared to the real issue, which was 'the prophetic effort to regain, for the Chosen People, a presence under God that was on the point of being lost'. The recall of the work of Moses was not an end in itself. It served the purpose of awakening the consciousness of the Chosen People for the mode of its existence in historical form. The people had to be reminded, first, of its origin in the response of the 27. Voegelin, Order and History, I, pp. 328 and 355-79 passim. 28. Voegelin, Order and History, I, p. 392.

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fathers to Yahweh's revelation through Moses and, second, of the fact that its continued existence depended on its continued response to Yahweh's revelation through the prophets. 29

The recall of the past blends, therefore, into the call in the present. To argue this was not, for Voegelin, to identify uncritically with the prophetic movement in its entirety. Indeed, the reverse is the case: at the heart of his enquiry is a sharp engagement with the outlook of the prophet Isaiah. By examining this, we reach the key point in his search for the source of the disturbance of the balance of consciousness, to be found even within Israel. Voegelin clearly recognized, and demonstrated, that the prophets from Amos and Hosea to Isaiah and Jeremiah wanted to overcome the externalization of existence, and to evoke in the living hearts of the hearers a devotion to living according to the law of Yahweh. In their writings, violent rejections of the selfish behaviour of the strong and the rich, and of outward ritualism in worship, are to be found side by side with entreaties to follow Yahweh inwardly. 'But if he boast, let him boast of this, that he understands and knows me: How I, Yahweh, exercise mercy, justice and righteousness on earth.' 'For I desire mercy and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God, rather than burnt offerings' (Jer. 9.24; Amos 6.6). The assumption that the man who exercises these virtues becomes one who 'understands and knows' God moves the knowledge of God into the position of'a comprehensive, formative virtue of the soul', Voegelin pointed out. Although lacking an adequate vocabulary to explicate it fully, the prophetic understanding was comparable to the Platonic vision of the Agathon.30 Moreover, the prophets had great success. In their calls to the people to inner repentance and a return to Yahweh, '[t]hey disengaged the existential issue from the theopolitical merger of divine and human order; they recognized the formation of the soul through knowledge (Hosea) and fear (Isaiah) of God; and they developed a language to articulate their discoveries'.31 However, Voegelin pointed out, the prophets displayed no interest in finding a way from the order of the soul to the establishment of institutions compatible with the knowledge and fear of God: The prophets apparently were not only unable to see, but [were] not even interested in finding, a way from the formation of the soul to institutions

29. Voegelin, Order and History, I, pp. 428-29. 30. Voegelin, Order and History, I, p. 445. 31. Voegelin, Order and History, I, p. 446.

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This form of faith, with its strange conception of the order of being, was to be found most strikingly in the writings of Isaiah. In the face of military threats to Jerusalem, the prophet's advice to the King was cast in the tradition of long-dormant war rituals. In the past, the people who were encouraged by the prophets to have faith in Yahweh as one who would cast fear into their enemies had naturally also been a people with an inherent will to fight for their cause. However, on this occasion Isaiah called upon the people simply to have absolute faith in the divine power, and to do no more. Israel's strength lay in trust; in 'returning and resting', in 'sitting still in confidence'. They should realize that their enemies were but human: 'Egypt is man, and not God, / and his horses are flesh, and not spirit [ruach].^ The extension of faith to this extreme point rested on a belief that wars could be won by a means more certain than any army. An aura of magic surrounded such counsel, Voegelin pointed out, in that it assumes that the prophet has an insight into the divine plan, and that that plan conforms to the policies of Isaiah and the Chosen People. However, the phenomenon went further. It assumed that the act of faith was able to achieve a leap out of the autonomous order of the world. In the rhythms of cultic worship in the annual festivals of Israel, the immediate presence of Yahweh as a saviour-king amid the people, delivering them from the tribulations of their enemies, had regularly been the focus of hope and aspiration. Isaiah had taken this hope one step further in his call to the King and people simply to stand firm in absolute trust in face of their enemies. Here, the 'cultic restoration of cosmic-divine order becomes the transfiguration of the world in history when carried into the historical form of existence'.34 In the 'knowledge' of the prophet, a path is envisaged leading from the situation of the present—albeit filled with tangible political and military threats—to a transfigured world, where the Chosen People have won their victories without any intervening battle. Voegelin introduced the terms 'metastatic' and 'metastasis' to describe the change in the constitution of being implied in the prophetic vision.

32. Voegelin, Order and History, I, pp. 446-47. 33. Isa. 31.3; Voegelin, Order and History, I, p. 448. 34. Voegelin, Order and History, I, see pp. 282-310 and 451-52 (452).

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The premises of such a vision were, he was clear, entirely mistaken. From the outset, his study in Israel and Revelation had emphasized that experiences of conversion, the 'leap in being' in which an individual or a society responds in openness to the Divine being, did not constitute a leap out of existence. The emphatic partnership with God does not abolish partnership in the community of being at large, which includes being in mundane existence. Man and society, if they want to retain their foothold in being that makes the leap into emphatic partnership possible, must remain adjusted to the 35 order of mundane existence.

Against the vision of Isaiah, therefore, Voegelin insisted that [t]he constitution of being is what it is, and cannot be affected by human fancies. Hence, the metastatic denial of the order of mundane existence is neither a true proposition in philosophy, nor a program of action that could be executed. The will to transform reality into something which by essence 36 it is not is the rebellion against the nature of things as ordained by God.

It is of crucial importance, he emphasized, to recognize the nature of this metastatic experience and metastatic denial, not only for the understanding of Israelite and Jewish experience, but for the whole history of Western civilization to the present. Throughout the Middle Ages, the Church was occupied with the struggle against heresies of a metastatic complexion; and with the Reformation this underground stream has come to the surface again in a massive flood—first, in the left wing of the sectarian movements and then in the secular creed movements which purport to exact the metastasis by revolutionary action.37

It is clear, however, that the detailed attention that Voegelin gave to the prophetic ontology of Isaiah was not undertaken simply for the purpose of historical analysis. In the Preface to Israel and Revelation, in a passage with clear allusion to the argument of The New Science of Politics, he stressed that the issue is one of great contemporary urgency. The passage deserves extensive quotation: I prefer...to draw the reader's attention to the analysis of the metastatic problem in the present volume...and he will see immediately that the prophetic conception of a change in the constitution of being lies at the root of our contemporary beliefs in the perfection of society, either through 35. Voegelin, Order and History, I, p. 11. 36. Voegelin, Order and History, I, p. 453. 37. Voegelin, Order and History, \, p. 454.

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POLITICS, ORDER AND HISTORY progress or through a communist revolution. Not only are the apparent antagonists revealed as brothers under the skin, as the late Gnostic descendants of the prophetic faith in a transfiguration of the world; it obviously is also of importance to understand the nature of the experience that will express itself in beliefs of this type, as well as the circumstances under which it has arisen in the past and from which it derives its strength in the present. Metastatic faith is one of the great sources of disorder, if not the principal one, in the contemporary world; and it is a matter of life and death for all of us to understand the phenomenon and to find remedies against it before it destroys us... Order and History should be read, not as an attempt to explore curiosities of a dead past, but as an inquiry into the structure of the order in which we live presently.38

4

How, though, are remedies to be found? To understand Voegelin's response to this question, we must follow him in his engagement with the aftermath of Isaiah's metastatic vision. The evidence suggests that no prophets emerged in the generation after Isaiah and Micah. Why was this? Voegelin pointed out that Isaiah had eventually articulated the metastatic vision to the point of a vision of enduring world peace. The nations would stream to the house of Yahweh, for instruction in his law; he himself would be the judge between the nations. In this vision, the normal provision of governmental institutions as a constraint on human order is no longer mentioned; rather, men will 'beat their swords into plowshares', and no longer learn the art of war (Isa. 2.4). What then was there left to do? Nothing: one could only sit down and wait for the miracle to happen. In the absence of the miracle, the prophet would die while waiting for its fulfilment. If the prophet left a group of disciples, it might take several generations before the validity of their article of faith could be re-examined. For the philosopher of the present, Voegelin insisted, life is lived amid the influence of the modern metastatic movements. The character of these is such that their visions are still largely unaffected by the lapse of time. For in these movements, the metastasis is operated not by the hand of God, but by human economic and political activity; hence their expectations have been able to live on 'in installments' for centuries.39 In pointing this out, Voegelin turns our attention to the fact that in Israel, a path was 38. Voegelin, Order and History, I, pp. xiii-xiv. 39. Voegelin, Order and History, I, pp. 481-82 n. 13.

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found to experiences that advanced the understanding of order beyond the visions of metastasis. How had this happened? The mere waiting for events that never occurred was probably insufficient to explain the apparent silence of prophecy after the visions of Isaiah. When prophecy was resumed in Deutero-Isaiah, after the lapse of about one and a half centuries, it bore the distinct mark of the work of Jeremiah. What then was the advance of understanding that Jeremiah had brought? Voegelin maintained that prior to Isaiah, the form that prophetic hope had taken in Amos and Hosea had been of a Messianic fulfilment of Israel in the future, under the institutional form of a people governed under a king after the model of David. In the vision of Isaiah, this expectation had been raised to the extreme of metastatic faith. When the king declined to act on it, Isaiah had 'neither abandoned the institutional form nor the metastatic will... [Rather] the metastasis had to be drawn out into the formation of a remnant by the prophet himself and its completion through the future appearance of a ruler'.40 Deferral of the vision into an indefinite future reached its limit in Isaiah 8, where the prophet, expecting a metastatic ruler, nevertheless resolves to withhold his prophecies from the public, and entrust them as a secret to his disciples: 'Bind up the testimony, seal the teaching among my disciples. I will wait for the Lord, who is hiding his face from the house of Jacob, and I will hope in him' (Isa. 8.16). As a remnant of Israel, Isaiah's disciples would preserve the secret of the vision through the coming political disasters. From that remnant, a new ruler would spring forth, a new king after the model of David.41 As Voegelin points out, in so far as being the carrier of the secret concerning the future ruler was the essence of the remnant, its formation had the characteristics of a first step toward the complete metastasis—in this respect the procedure of Isaiah 42 foreshadows the later types of metastasis by 'installment'.

How—in the heart of the experience of Israel itself—was this unbalanced, metastatic faith to be overcome, and the problem of the order of society once again to be faced in its concreteness? The turning point, in Voegelin's estimate, came in the person of Jeremiah, who enacted in his own life the crisis of Israel. At the command of 40. Voegelin, Order and History, I, p. 483. 41. Isa. 11.1-2; see Voegelin, Order and History, I, pp. 478-80. 42. Voegelin, Order and History, I, pp. 483-84.

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Yahweh, he lived without family, symbolizing the imminent breakup of social continuity as Israel faced exile (Jer. 16.2-9). He stood alone to declare to 'all the kingdoms of the North' the judgments that Yahweh pronounced upon them, to punish their defections (Jer. 1.14-19). Nevertheless, he bought landed property at a moment when all tangible assets seemed worthless, thus marking confidence in Yahweh's promise that, despite all appearances, there would eventually be a return of the people (Jer. 32.7-15). The life of Jeremiah, Voegelin argued, represented a new structure in the order of historical forces. The locus of divine action in history had contracted from the Chosen People into the personal existence of Jeremiah: He was the sole representative of divine order; and whatever the inscrutable will of God might hold for the future, the meaning of the present was determined by the Word that was spoken by the divine-human omphalos in 43 Jeremiah. The Chosen People had been replaced by the chosen man.

Evidence of this changed historical situation could be found in three successive oracles at the outset of Jeremiah's public life. The first spoke of Jeremiah as known by Yahweh from conception in his mother's womb, consecrated as a prophet to the nations. Then to Jeremiah in his anxiety Yahweh spoke reassurances that his words would be at the divine command, using terms evocative of those given at the call of Moses. Lastly, Yahweh, stretching forth his hand and touching the prophet's mouth, transferred authority to him to speak as one in charge of nations and kingdoms (Jer. 1.5, 7-8, 10; Exod. 3.13-14). It thus became evident, Voegelin argued, that the symbolism of divine sonship had moved from Israel the people and its king, to Jeremiah the prophetic outcast; that the concentration of authority in Jeremiah allowed him to evoke the authority of earlier carriers of authority, Moses being the foremost; and that in the crisis of events, Jeremiah had authority to speak on behalf of Yahweh as the universal God of history to all the nations.44 In these events, a new form of prophetic expression is apparent: 'What is new in his extant work are the pieces of spiritual autobiography, in which the problems of prophetic existence, the concentration of order in the man who speaks the word of God, become articulate.'45 In the fierce words of Jeremiah's Temple Address, the people had been warned to practise strict justice 43. Voegelin, Order and History, I, p. 467. 44. See Voegelin, Order and History, I, pp. 467-70. 45. Voegelin, Order and History, I, p. 485.

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among themselves, lest Yahweh decide not to make his home in their place of worship. The people had been so incensed that they had put Jeremiah on trial and demanded his death—only to be swayed by prudence against executing the threat (Jer. 7; 26.1-16). But Jeremiah's very existence raised the unavoidable question: What was it to be the people of Yahweh, if it was not to follow his Law? What was a covenant written on tablets, if it did not lead to a covenant written on the heart? 'The great motive that had animated the prophetic criticism of conduct and commendation of the virtues', Voegelin wrote, had at last been traced to its source in the concern with the order of personal existence under God. In Jeremiah the human personality had broken the compactness of collective existence and recognized itself as the authori46 tative source of order in society.

Jeremiah's confrontation with his enemies reached such a pitch that he had been forced to remonstrate with Yahweh about his sufferings. Only after much anguish did he realize that the suffering he experienced was as nothing compared to the suffering of Yahweh in face of the defection of Israel.47 It was in these experiences, Voegelin argued, that an advance on the metastatic visions of Isaiah was made. Jeremiah's struggle to represent divine order in society was enacted against the present injustices, inhumanities and idolatries that surrounded him. His call for a new Covenant was a call to existence in the present that would be guided and moulded by the commands of Yahweh. His concern was with the order of being in which those around him could either participate, or fail to understand. This awareness of the finite character of the order of being, is the great corrective for futuristic dreams... The fundamental concern of man is with the attunement of his existence, in the present tense, to the order of being. And Jeremiah indeed returned from the metastatic vision of 48 the future to the experience of the untransfigured present.

What Jeremiah had done was to reverse the futuristic projection of Isaiah. To do this, the symbols of divine kingship had been brought back into the present. This was done, Voegelin pointed out, when in the oracles of his call he transferred the royal symbolism to himself. The order of Israel was complete in the present again, though contracted 46. Voegelin, Order and History, I, p. 485. 47. Jer. 12.1-7; 15.10-19; see Voegelin, Order and History, I, pp. 485-88. 48. Voegelin, Order and History, I, pp. 482-83.

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POLITICS, ORDER AND HISTORY into the existence of the Jeremiah who enacted the fate of the people while 49 carrying the burden of the Anointed.

5 It is as if he himself were a second Jeremiah, that Voegelin undertook his own effort to rebalance the consciousness of his own age. In Israel and Revelation, the form in which the Mosaic experience has reached the present—the formalized narrative of Deuteronomy with Moses as its author— is dismantled layer by layer, in order to reach the primary encounter with Yahweh from which the existence of Israel stemmed.50 Against the Deuteronomic construction, accepted by Philo, of the Torah as a work written by Moses, Voegelin reacted vigorously. Concerning the elevation, stemming from the reforms of Josiah described in the second book of Kings, of the sacred traditions to the position of 'Scripture', and the subsequent canonization of the text, he was forthright in his identification with the prophet: The consequences of expansion and canonization made themselves immediately felt in the tension between the word of God that had been mummified in the sacred text and the word of God that continued to be spoken through the mouth of his prophets. One can imagine how horrified Jeremiah must have been when he saw conformity of action to the letter of the law supersede the obedience of the heart to the spirit of God. 51

His own purpose is clearly one that seeks to recover the prophetic impulse. The 'myth of the Word', as he terms it, led to confusion in which the historical circumstances in which the word of God is revealed to man are endowed with the authority of the word itself. It led to literalism in interpretation, and even to the 'canonization' of particular translations. Recalling the diagnosis of The New Science of Politics, Voegelin made it clear in Israel and Revelation that his own endeavour was intended as a direct engagement with the situation of the present, which he found to be likewise overlaid with the consequences of a comparable 'sacred incubus'. For the late-medieval fatigue of spiritual order led to a reform movement which, in a manner strangely resembling the Deuteronomic reform of the seventh century B.C., assigned to the New Testament the function of a Torah of true Christianity. And the vehement reassertion of the myth in the 49. Voegelin, Order and History, I, p. 484. 50. See Voegelin, Order and History, \, pp. 355-427 passim. 51. Voegelin, Order and History, I, pp. 366-67.

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Christian sphere was followed by the expansion of its form into the various Gnostic creed movements, as for instance in the Comtean creation of a Torah for the religion de rhumanite, or the formation of a Marxist Torah in 52 the Communist movement.

Twenty years later, Voegelin had not shifted from his judgment that this engagement involved confrontation with the legacy of apocalyptic. After a summary of his earlier study of metastatic faith in Israel and its aftermath in the apocalyptic form in the book of Daniel, he again maintained that in the visions of the apocalyptic thinker [t] he stage is set for the divine messengers who abandon created reality altogether and concentrate on the Gnosis of the redemptive exodus from the cosmos... The Israelite case leaves no doubt about the nature of the issue. The process of contraction is a disturbance of consciousness through the loss of balance between the Beginning and the Beyond.

Here, Voegelin continued, the source of the millennial disturbance was to be located: When Isaiah lets his faith culminate in the vision of the Prince of Peace who will set the act of faith which the pragmatic king rejects, he believes in the magic power of an act that will transmute the structure of reality, as well as in his own advice as a Gnosis of transmutation... Though Gnosticism is not a Jewish but a multicivilizational movement in an ecumenic empire, its peculiar fervor and secular momentum are hardly intelligible without the prophetic and apocalyptic prehistory, culminating in the epiphany of Christ, as an important genetic factor. 53

6 In Voegelin's own meditations on the Beginning and the Beyond, evoked in the concluding phases of his work, the same stance is present which he had found in the work of Jeremiah: the awareness that the fundamental concern of man is not with a metastatic future, but within 'the attunement of his existence, in the present tense, to the order of being'.54 Just as it is late in the prophetic movement that Jeremiah makes this advance, so Voegelin writes as one who, late in history, is able to elaborate the full consequence of the fact that £ [d]ivine reality is being revealed to man in two fundamental modes of experience: in the experience of divine creativ52. Voegelin, Order and History, I, p. 367. 53. Voegelin, Order and History, IV, pp. 26-27. 54. Voegelin, Order and History, I, p. 483.

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ity in the cosmos; and in the experience of divine ordering presence in the soul'.55 A crucial difference remains, however. Jeremiah had experienced in his own existence the presence of the divine as a tension ineluctably drawing him, but he had not been able to achieve any conceptual articulation of this existence in the language of philosophy. Voegelin, recognizing the presence of this same tension, was able to articulate and name the two directions in which the encounter with the divine is manifested, 'either in the direction of divine creativity toward a Beginning of things, or in the direction of the ordering presence within his soul toward a divine Beyond as its source'.56 In his 1977 essay 'The Beginning and the Beyond', and in the posthumously published In Search of Order, the fifth and final volume of Order and History, Voegelin bent his efforts to articulate this twofold discovery as fully as possible, against the modern equivalents of the canonization of Torah. He was able to do this because he knew that the differentiation of prophetic personalism cannot be reversed. He was thus unconstrained by the path that leads to the reworking of revelatory experience into the pseudo-compact form of Scripture; the path that had led to Midrashic allegoresis, to the philosophical allegoresis of Philo, or later to the Christian-philosophical allegoresis of the Greek and Latin Patres. He knew that, parallel in time to this 'congealing of the word', 'the prophetic insight into the illumination of consciousness as a personal encounter between God and the prophet remains at work and deepens to the insight into the universal presence of divine reality as the source of illumination in every man'.57 In conclusion, then, we may say that in Voegelin's endeavour to attain the 'balance of consciousness' that has been lost amid the metastatic dreams that animate modernity, a crucial step is his recovery of the prophetic consciousness of Jeremiah. To say this is not to say that this was the final step in his work; it remained the case, as he recognized, that in the experience of Israel [t] he accent in the divine-human encounter falls heavily on the revelatory irruption... The word from the Beyond is present, crushing all hesitations and doubts. This heavy accent on the divine irruption in the experience 55. Eric Voegelin, The Beginning and the Beyond: A Meditation on Truth', in Eric Voegelin, What Is History? And Other Late Unpublished Writings (ed. Thomas A. Hollweck and Paul Caringella; Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 28; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), pp. 173-232 (173). 56. Voegelin, 'The Beginning and the Beyond', p. 173. 57. Voegelin, The Beginning and the Beyond', pp. 182-83.

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remains a constant in Israelite-Judaic history and prevents the full differentiation of the two modes of the Beginning and the Beyond. 58

The task had therefore to move on, in the second and third volumes of Order and History, to the achievement of Hellas. Only after these further steps could Voegelin fully articulate how c [t]he differentiation of the Beyond as the answer to the quest for the divine ground of being has been achieved by the classic philosophers, by Plato and Aristotle'.59 However, the work as a whole could not have been carried forward had Voegelin not first learnt from the life of Jeremiah how to challenge the incubus of metastatic consciousness. Is there perhaps an autobiographical dimension to his words of 1956? Man exists within the order of being; and there is no history outside the historical form under revelation. In the surrounding darkness of Israel's defection and impending political destruction—darker perhaps than the contemporary earthwide revolt against God—the prophets were burdened with the mystery of how the promises of the Message could prevail in the turmoil. They were burdened with this mystery by their faith; and history continued indeed by the word of God spoken through the prophets. There are times, when the divinely willed order is humanly realized nowhere but 60 in the faith of solitary sufferers.

58. Voegelin, The Beginning and the Beyond', p. 186. 59. Voegelin, The Beginning and the Beyond', p. 187. 60. Voegelin, Order and History, I, p. 465.

QUEBEC NATIONALISM AND CANADIAN POLITICS IN LIGHT OF VOEGELIN'S POLITICAL RELIGIONS Barry Cooper

What do we want? An independent Quebec within a strong and united Canada. —Yves Deschamps, Quebec comedian

1 Tr, 1the Preface to the second printing of Political Religions, Eric Voegelin In responded somewhat obliquely to reviewers of the earlier edition, which had been confiscated by the Gestapo. There was some concern, he said, that his treatment of National Socialism was too 'objective'. The only proper attitude one could adopt towards the National Socialists, according to his unnamed critics, was to denounce them; accordingly it was wrong to consider the bases of the significance of Nazism a serious topic for analysis or scientific investigation. Voegelin replied that his opposition to Nazi collectivists would be obvious to anyone who knew how to read, let alone to anyone familiar with his previous work. But adopting the position and rhetoric of a moralizing intellectual would, in Voegelin's view, obscure rather than clarify the problem. Unless one knew what and not merely who the enemy was, the purpose of one's opposition would remain unclear. Political collectivism of the National Socialist type, Voegelin said, was not simply a politically aggressive or morally dubious enterprise. It was also a 'religious' movement. Political and moral denunciation, therefore, may obscure this more fundamental aspect, and thereby obscure as well the emotional depths that motivate and sustain the Nazis' effective political action in the world. Those inspired by religious fanaticism, other things being equal, are bound to overwhelm those who are capable of voicing a merely moral or political objection. For Voegelin, therefore, the evil of the Nazis was not simply a consequence of their lack of political prudence or of their immoderate conduct of foreign relations. Rather, evil

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was 'an effective substance and force in the world...a religiously evil satanic substance that can be effectively opposed only by a religiously good force of resistance'.1 In their enthusiasm to denounce the obvious, moralizing intellectuals ignore the more fundamental problem. This was not the first occasion when moral indignation eclipsed intellectual clarity. Nor was it the last. Over the past generation, Canadian citizens and, perhaps more significantly, Canadian scholars, intellectuals and journalists have been faced with the excrescence of a new political religion; it is conventionally identified as 'Quebec nationalism' or, to use a more narrow and legalistic formula, with 'Quebec separatism'. Given the longstanding tradition of discussing the politics of federalism in terms of ss. 91-2 of the Constitution Act 1867, it is to be expected that most of the discussion of this phenomenon has taken place in the context of attempts to find a correct or even an adequate adjustment of the law of the constitution to the new political reality. The purpose of such an adjustment or amendment to the existing constitution is to provide Quebec nationalists with a sense of security regarding the distinct language and culture of the province. When that happens, according to this vision of events, Quebec's government will no longer seek to become sovereign. Advocates of this interpretation are, generally speaking, federalists rather than sovereigntists. Accordingly, one may perhaps suspect that it is less a genuine analysis than advocacy of a policy that employs the rhetoric of analysis. However that may be, it remains an interpretation that has led to a pusillanimous as well as an ineffective political strategy. This has been pointed out on several occasions, and there is no need to repeat the arguments here.2 Instead, I would like to apply Voegelin's notion of political 1. Eric Voegelin, Die politischen Religionen (Stockholm: Bermann-Fischer, 2nd edn, 1939 [1938]), p. 8. The edition used has been bound together with the English translation in Eric Voegelin, Political Religions (trans. TJ. DiNapoli and E.S. Easterly III; Toronto Studies in Theology, 23; Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1986). All translations that follow are my own. 2. For details, see David Bercuson and Barry Cooper, Deconfederation: Canada without Quebec (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1991); Bercuson and Cooper, Derailed: The Betrayal of the National Dream (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1994); Cooper, 'Looking Eastward, Looking Backward: A Western Reading of the Never-Ending Story', in Curtis Cook (ed.), Constitutional Predicament: Canada after the Referendum of 1992 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1994), pp. 89-108; Theoretical Perspectives on Constitutional Reform in Canada', in Tony Peacock (ed.), Rethinking the Constitution (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 217-32; 'Canadian Issues and Political Science, 1970-1995', The Political Science Reviewer 25 (1996),

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religion to this question. Voegelin was obliged to point out the obvious, that he was an opponent of Nazi collectivism; so as to forestall any gross misunderstanding, it may be necessary to point out the obvious in the present context as well: Quebec nationalism has nothing in common with the 'Satanic substance' of National Socialism. Quebec nationalism does, however, have a substance, and using the approach developed by Voegelin in Political Religions one may describe it. Voegelin's book was written under a strenuous complex of circumstances. He employed a vocabulary that subsequently underwent considerable refinement. The comparatively uncomplicated language, however, also renders Voegelin's argument more accessible to political scientists than his later work, which relies on a highly specialized terminology. Even in 1938, however, Voegelin's approach must be considered innovative. This is why he began with a justification of the approach he proposed to take. The term, 'political religion', does not refer to a self-evident, conventionally understood complex of political or religious phenomena. Modern political language connects politics to the state and religion to the church or churches. At the same time, however, we conventionally speak of 'new age' religions that have clear political or cultural purposes, and ideological movements have for many years been likened to religious revivals. There are equally obvious reasons for this usage. Comtean positivism or Marxist socialism, for example, were deliberately established in opposition to existing religions. Taking a longer historical perspective, the state and the worldly or intramundane spirit that animates it emerged from the great struggles against the mediaeval sacred empire. The linguistic term itself, 'state', which was formed in a specific historical context of opposition, now exists on its own, so to speak, in a context without apparent opposition. Historically speaking, however, the state is not simply a neutral concept of political science; even today it is not simply the expression of political reality. On the contrary, it still retains the mark of opposition that attended its origin. This is a problem for political analysis on two counts: first, religion is not exhausted by the great redemptive institutional religions such as Christianity or Islam, and secondly, the state is not merely a secular organization of power. To give just one example. A common textbook definition of the state, pp. 100-126; 'Taylor-Made Canada', The Literary Review of Canada 5 (February 1996), pp. 19-22. Alone, or with David Bercuson, I have made the argument many times in the popular media as well.

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which apparently makes no religious claims, says the following: 'A state is defined by the united presence of three factors: population, territory and sovereignty.'3 The first two elements, population and territory, refer to common realities of everyday experience, but what of sovereignty? The textbook definition indicates 'a bundle of powers associated with the highest authority of government'.4 The association of powers somehow leads to a superlative, to a power above other powers. In any particular state, however, there are limits to power, either internal ones that are made evident when rulers are removed—in elections, for example, or by revolution—or external ones imposed by other ruling powers. The existence of a plurality of powers, whether constitutionally defined or merely de facto, raises inevitably the question of their order, their relationship to one another, and their legitimacy. For a political thinker standing at the beginning of the historical process that ends with the textbook definition, matters looked rather differently. For Dante, for example, it was self-evident that what was required was a formula to relate the plurality of powers to a divine supreme power.5 In contrast, the Constitution Act 1982 conforms to the textbook understanding, notwithstanding the preamble, which states: 'whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law'. Neither the reference to God nor to the rule of law, Peter Hogg has observed, is 'helpful' as a guide to interpretation.6 The question raised by the contrast between the position of Dante's De Monarchia and the Constitution Act 1982 is this: what happened to the highest power, which Dante symbolized as a head? According to Voegelin, 'the completely articulated order of creation is thereby decapitated, and the state stands in the place of the world-transcendent God as the final requirement [die letzte Bedingung] and the source of its own being'.7 The contrast is, perhaps, more clearly made between Dante and Hegel than between Dante and the Constitution Act 1982, but that is only because Hegel still felt obliged to argue rather than merely assert. For him, the state was the final form of the world-spirit, the immediate reality of which 3. This particular definition is taken from the well-known introductory text of my colleagues, Mark O. Dickerson and Thomas Flanagan, An Introduction to Government and Politics (Toronto: Nelson Canada, 3rd edn, 1990), p. 39. 4. Dickerson and Flanagan, An Introduction, p. 36. 5. Dante, De Monarchia 1.8; 3.16. 6. Peter W. Hogg, Canada Act 1982 Annotated (Toronto: Carswell, 1982), p. 9. 7. Voegelin, Diepolitischen Religionen, p. 13; Political Religions, pp. 7-8.

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was the Volk and, as immediate, also absolute. Through a long and complex argument that, according to Hegel, expressed the development of historical reality, one arrived at the final and culminating historical reality famously identified by Kojeve as the universal and homogenous state.8 The understanding of the state, Voegelin concluded, is not concerned with a textbook definition but with life and death: 'it is concerned with the question of whether a human being may exist as an individual person or whether he has dissolved into a suprapersonal ultimate reality [ein uberpersonliches Realissimum\\ To postulate the sovereignty of the state without further consideration, therefore, is not simply to make an observation about the legal relations of citizens, but to affirm 'the dogma of the believer'.9 The affirmation, moreover, is real, and it has real consequences. Specifically, the human being who makes it loses his or her sense of their own reality as an 'individual person'. In place of the individual person, the state appropriates human reality in order to become what is 'truly' real, the 'suprapersonal ultimate reality', whence flows a vitalizing energy that transfigures human beings and turns them into constituent elements of the new reality. 'We have now come upon the innermost part of a religious experience and our words describe a mystical process.'10 In the same way that the individual human personality is swallowed into the Hegelian Volksgeister, these spiritual entities are constituents of the one Weltgeist. The rise and fall of states, therefore, is simply the verdict of that unified collective spirit, before which every Volksgeist is condemned to perish when its earthly time is complete, until, at the end, these several entities are finally and fully actualized as the universal and homogeneous state. Whatever else one makes of the experience that is expressed in the foregoing Hegelian language, it is not misleading to describe it as evoking spiritual realities.

8. This 'reading' of Hegel is, of course, controversial. I have discussed the problem at length in Barry Cooper, The End of History: An Essay in Modern Hegelianism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984). See also Eric Voegelin, 'On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery', in Eric Voegelin, Published Essays, 1966-1985 (ed. Ellis Sandoz; Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 12; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), pp. 213-55; Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992); and Barry Cooper, 'The End of History: Deja-vu all over again', History of European Ideas 19 (1994), pp. 377-83. 9. Voegelin, Diepolitischen Religionen, p. 14; Political Religions, p. 9. 10. Voegelin, Die politischen Religionen, p. 14; Political Religions, p. 9.

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A significant methodological principle follows from this observation: phenomena that are peripheral for a study of political things that proceeds on the basis of an uncritical acceptance of political structures, such as are described in the textbook definition of the state, may become central when the focus of analysis shifts to other, spiritually charged questions. That is, the given structures of government may be considered contingent and problematic if one is concerned to describe the spiritual realities that are expressed through them. And likewise, when one is concerned with an understanding or a description of the bearing of religions or spiritual realities on politics, the importance of governmental structures, the law of the Constitution, for example, is transformed. The most obvious evidence for this is found in the use of language symbols. Whenever phenomena such as the nation are imaginatively transformed into a 'suprapersonal ultimate reality', that is what they actually become for the individuals who undertake the imaginative exercise. In Voegelin's language, this fundamental reorientation from the natural to sequel the sacred and value-enhanced recrystallization which is recognized as divine. Worlds of symbols, concepts order themselves around the sacred center, become infused with the spirit of religious excitement in their defense of the 'right' order of being.11

the divine has as its of reality around that linguistic terms and harden into systems, and become fanatical

One of the consequences of this 'spirit of religious excitement' in the context of Quebec nationalism in contemporary Canada is that it has become increasingly difficult to communicate with members of the nationalist spiritual community. The problem began a generation ago when the claim was made that in French la nation means something profoundly cultural whereas in English the word nation is merely juridical. With his characteristic wit and insight, the late Senator Eugene Forsey pointed out the spuriousness of this distinction; he was thereupon roundly criticized by French-speaking Canadians. He then made the following response: We English-speakers have been told ad nauseum that we do not understand French; that the French word 'nation' means 'a cultural and sociological group'. Yes. But it has also a political meaning. It is all very well to tell me that I don't understand French. But it would hardly have done to tell General De Gaulle that he didn't. Yet on 16 January 1964, he told Mr. Pearson that he wanted Canada to be 'une nation forte et unie\ a strong and

11. Voegelin, Diepolitischen Religionen, pp. 17-18; Political Religions, p. 13.

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More recently, Canadians have been told that the term 'distinct society' implies superiority in English whereas 'la societe distincte implies equality in French. This, too, is 'blatant nonsense' because the entire debate over the 'distinct society clause' of the 1987 Meech Lake Constitutional Accord concerned the equal application of the law. Accordingly, the argument was made that s. 2(l)(b), which required that 'the Constitution of Canada shall be interpreted in a manner consistent with...the recognition that Quebec constitutes within Canada a distinct society', had the force and effect of granting unspecified constitutional jurisdiction to one province, Quebec, that would be withheld from all other provinces. This was stigmatized in English-speaking Canada as 'special status'. There are additional examples as well, but the general point is clear: meanings that once were common have since divided along political or politico-spiritual lines.13 As a result, Canadian political discourse is conducted in languages the meaning of which is in dispute. Accordingly, one finds considerable resistance to the kind of analysis that I am proposing here and that Voegelin proposed in 1938. Voegelin argued that a partial solution to the problem could be found by distinguishing between those religions that found 'suprapersonal ultimate reality' in the divine ground of all being, and those that found it in 12. Eugene Forsey, A Life on the Fringe: The Memoirs of Eugene Forsey (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 212-13. Forsey originally raised the issue in his presidential address to the Canadian Political Science Association in 1962, which was also his farewell apologia to the New Democratic Party. It is reprinted in Forsey, Freedom and Order: Collected Essays (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1974), Chapter 20. 13. There are, for example, the Anglophobic terms Quebecois pure laine or de la vielle souche or sometimes just de souche which have proved effective in distinguishing one segment of Quebec society. They were used widely during the 1980s but have become somewhat politically incorrect in the 1990s, at least in polite and in academic circles in Quebec. As late as the campaign prior to the 30 October 1995 referendum on independence, however, they were still being used to great effect. The first, which is taken from bilingual labels sewn into sweaters in Canada, means 'pure wool'; the second means 'old stock'. It is, however, close to another expression, vrai souche, which means 'blockhead', a term that is sometimes used, in English, to refer to the one-time leader (head) of the Bloc Quebecois, Lucien Bouchard, who has subsequently become Premier of Quebec.

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the things of the world. The former he called world-transcendent religions; the latter were world-immanent religions. Political religions can be of either type, depending upon the spiritual sensitivity and intellect of their founders and followers. Before specifying the attributes of Quebec nationalism in light of Voegelin's argument, it may be useful to refer to a few pertinent political facts and provide a few additional methodological remarks. 2

The 1993 national elections brought into focus for the first time since the 1920s the connection between regional identity and the representativeness of the party system.14 In place of an inter-regional coalition within one of the two major parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives, the latter were essentially eclipsed by two new parties, the Reform Party and the Bloc Quebecois. The former drew its strength chiefly from the West and the latter, as its name suggests, from Quebec. The Liberal Party swept Ontario and the poorer eastern provinces along the Atlantic seaboard. The external distribution of seats in large measure reflected the internal sense of the electorates, particularly in Quebec and the West, their sense of collective purpose and meaning. This distinction between internal and external was discussed by Voegelin in a well-known passage in The New Science of Politics. 'Human society', Voegelin wrote, is not merely a fact, or an event, in the external world to be studied by an observer like a natural phenomenon. Though it has externality as one of its important components, it is as a whole a little world, a cosmion, illuminated with meaning from within by the human beings who continuously create and bear it as the mode and condition of their self-realization. It is illuminated through an elaborate symbolism, in various degrees of compactness and differentiation—from rite, through myth, to theory—and this symbolism illuminates it with meaning in so far as the symbols make the internal structure of such a cosmion, the relations between its members and

14. Previously the topic had been examined indirectly by means of an analysis of the Canadian electoral system which combines single-member constituencies, a plurality needed to elect, and discipline parliamentary parties. See Alan C. Cairns, The Electoral System and the Party System in Canada, 1921-1965', reprinted in Douglas E. Williams (ed.), Constitution, Government and Society in Canada: Selected Essays by Alan C. Cairns (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1988), pp. 111-38.

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The external aspect of politics exists because human beings participate bodily in the biological and physical externality of the world. A political order can accordingly be dissolved through the dispersion of the bodies of its members so that communication is impossible, through enslaving or exterminating its members, or perhaps by the destruction of only its politically visible members. But externality is only part of political life. In Voegelin's language of 1938, 'the life of human beings in the political community cannot be differentiated as a profane locale [Bezirk] where we are concerned only with questions of law and the organizations of power'. The political community is also a domain (Bereich) of religious order. Accordingly, knowledge of the political situation is incomplete if one does not include the religious forces of the community and the symbols by which they find their expression or if one translates them into non-religious categories.16 In terms of the theoretical concerns of political science, therefore, the external existence of human society is less significant than the self-illumination of society by means of the aforementioned symbolisms. In particular, ritual and especially myth provide an accessible means for individuals to participate in the inner meaning of their social and political order, as well as in meanings that transcend their social order and are conventionally indicated by the term 'religion'. The modes of transcendence reflect the range of human spiritual sensitivity indicated earlier, under the categories of world-transcendent and world-immanent political religions. The examples Voegelin used to illustrate this point in Political Religions indicates the possibility of a kind of horizontal transcendence of the existing world or of existing arrangements into a changed or perhaps merely future arrangement. The realms from which ecstasies arise in the soul and the experiences by which human beings transcend their existence vary widely: from the mystical union in the spirit to the intensity of a communal festival and the devotion to the brotherhood of the departed, from the loving extension of oneself into the landscape, flora and fauna, to the instinctive animal convulsions of the sexual act and blood lust.17 15. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), p. 27. 16. Voegelin, Diepolitischen Religionen, pp. 63-64; Political Religions, p. 77. 17. Voegelin, Die politischen Religionen, p. 19; Political Religions, p. 15.

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Both the ecstasy of mystical union and the ecstasy of blood lust can be expressed in stories, myths, rituals and so on, and those expressions in turn may be subjected to rational analysis. At this point it may be useful to recall another Voegelinian distinction, between the symbols of social self-interpretation and the theoretical symbols, or concepts, of political science. Following the procedure developed by Aristotle in the Politics (1280a et seq.}, the latter may be refined from the former by means of rational analysis. That is, symbols that express pretheoretical meanings are part of the political reality to be studied by means of the theoretical concepts of political science. Regionalism or regional identity in Canada is both a symbol that expresses an important element of political reality and a term that can be critically clarified to the point that it can bear a limited theoretical meaning within the cognitive discourse of political science.18 Politics in Canada as in other places initially appears to be conflict over what is right or just, which often seems to be the defense of one's own interests. More than the conciliation of conflicting interests is involved: controversy, that is, speech among and within groups struggling for power and for what is right within the political community, is also a central constituent of politics. In Western Canada, for example, what began as a political objection to Dominion lands policy or to the freight rates of the Canadian Pacific Railway may become part of a story and the revelation of a meaning. The transformation of fact or narrative into a typical example distinguishes political history from political myth. The two literary forms overlap to some degree: political myths often contain a good deal of political history, in the sense of res gestae, and historiography is often structured to conform to mythic conventions. Even so, as Northrop Frye once said, history aims at telling what happened, whereas myth aims at telling what happens all the time. The privileged discursive vehicle for recounting political myths is imaginative literature.19 Canadian literature in particular expresses a sense of identity. In Frye's words, 'identity is local and regional, rooted in the imagination and in works of culture; unity is national in reference, international in perspective, and rooted in a political feeling'.20 The distinction 18. Particularly useful in this respect are the remarks of Rudolf Heberle, 'Regionalism: Some Critical Observations', Social Forces 21 (1943), pp. 280-86. 19. See Seymour Martin Lipset, Continental Divide (Toronto: C.D. Howe Institute, 1990), Chapters 3-4. 20. Northrop Frye, The Bush Garden (Toronto: Anansi, 1971), p. ii.

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between regional identity and national unity is, in my opinion, of considerable importance and theoretical significance. Indeed, the tension between regional identity and national unity has constituted the historical substance of Canadian political life. Characteristically, that tension has dissolved in one of two ways: either politics usurps the place of culture and the government of the day embarks on a fruitless quest for national identity, or a parochial regional identity endows itself with political aspirations devoted to cultural unity. Quebec nationalism may be seen as a political effort directed at securing a kind of cultural unity. For want of a better term, one might evoke the myth of an ethnic garrison as the foundation myth of nationalist Quebec.21 The most thorough, and controversial, discussion of the myth of the ethnic garrison is by William Johnson.22 According to Johnson, the myth took on recognizable form in the wake of Lord Durham's famous Report (1839). Durham shocked a generation of French Canadian political and intellectual leaders by pointing out their inherent bad faith. They were themselves urban and educated liberals, but they appealed to the non-liberal sentiments and emotions of their rural and ignorant supporters. Durham also pointed to the obvious solution to this ongoing political problem, namely greater liberalization, not a return to the pre-liberal world of quasi-feudal and rural life.23 Before the ink was dry on Durham's Report, came the reply. In 1840, Fran^ois-Xavier Garneau published Louise: Une Legende canadienne and five years later his monumental Histoire du Canada. The Histoire, in particular, set the pattern for nearly all subsequent French Canadian histori21. Frye introduced the concept of a 'garrison mentality' to characterize what he took to be the Canadian imagination. In my opinion it is, properly speaking, confined to the Loyalist heartland of southern Ontario. See Barry Cooper, 'Western Political Consciousness', in Stephen Brooks (ed.)> Political Thought in Canada: Contemporary Perspectives (Toronto: Irwin, 1984), pp. 213-38; and The West: A Political Minority', in Neil Nevitte and Allan Kornberg (eds.), Minorities and the Canadian State (Oakville, ON: Mosaic, 1985), pp. 203-20. 22. He made his analysis in two books: the first written in French, William Johnson, Anglophobic, Made in Quebec (Montreal: Stanke, 1991), and the second written in English, A Canadian Myth: Quebec, between Canada and the Illusion of Utopia (Montreal: R. Davies, 1994). Neither has received much attention from Quebec or Canadian intellectuals or scholars. 23. This interpretation of the Report was recently restored to public visibility by Janet Ajzenstat in her splendid study, The Political Thought of Lord Durham (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1988).

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ography, inspired a school of patriotic poetry and the plot-lines of innumerable historical novels: the English sought to suppress the French, that is, evil sought to destroy goodness—and yet goodness survived and endured and one day would triumph. The key to survival was to cling to tradition, to change nothing, and to resist the temptation of 'English' liberalism. Liberalism was a temptation because it promised prosperity, just as Durham had said. The formular novels of the mid-nineteenth century disclosed a variation on the following story: a young French-Canadian man abandons the farm, lured by an urban Anglaise temptress. In the city he is degraded: he learns to swear, drink, smoke and brawl but is saved by a virtuous French-Canadian girl who brings him back to the rural paradise, saves his soul and ensures continued ethnic survival. The plot was a central theme as late as the novel by Abbe Groulx, who is often identified as the patron of contemporary Quebec nationalism. Groulx's UAppel de la Race (1922) was the story of a French-Canadian youth who actually married an Anglaise. She converted to Catholicism, so the Abbe's story was not simply a moral fable. Rather the young man learns he has betrayed his ancestors and la race, a term that is currently as embarrassing in French as in English. The mongrel children, especially the ones who reflect their mother's background, are nasty, mean and confused. According to Abbe Groulx, this is because mongrel children have two souls fighting within, rather as Durham put it in his Report, and can never form a stable, pious and integrated personality. The hero returns to his village, meditates in the graveyard surrounded by the ghosts of his ancestors, is mystically transformed and discovers his national soul. He returns to Ottawa, where he practices law, purges his home of all traces of English culture and cultivates only French-speakers. His Anglaise wife leaves him (so he need not leave her; but they must part if he is to recover his French soul). The two 'English' mongrel children turn against him, but he is able to save the two 'French' mongrels for French culture. He then becomes a French-Canadian nationalist in the heart of 'English' Ontario, and nurtures irredentist ambitions. A generation later, the contrast between the corrupt but rich urban 'English' and the virtuous but poor rural French had turned into the contrast between rich corruption and poor virtuousness within the city. If it was not God's will that only the rural poor were virtuous, then another explanation had to be sought. Sociologically inclined historians supplied one. Michel Brunet, for example, explained the relative poverty of French

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Canadians in 1950 by way of the conquest of New France nearly 200 years earlier. The logic of Brunet's position was simple: the English are a majority and majorities rule in their own interest, which means suppressing the French. No need to examine evidence contrary to the thesis ever arose; indeed, historical facts, if chosen with sufficient care, could easily confirm it. The single cause of French poverty, the 'English', was balanced by a single solution for French poverty, independence, or failing that, as much political jurisdiction as possible. So long as Brunet's contemporary, the popular but hardly democratic Maurice Duplessis, remained premier and defended provincial autonomy, there was no need to question the internal organization of Quebec society and certainly not the role of the Church in the health, education and welfare areas of public policy. Castigating les Anglais has always been, and remains, preferable to proclaiming the need to reform Quebec's own institutions. The decline in the influence and importance of the Roman Catholic Church, which had its own sociological and historical causes, was followed by the famous Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. Pluralism, secularism, materialism, the rather mixed ethical bag that constitutes liberal democratic political life in industrial and technological societies, had apparently triumphed. Birth control, along with sexual permissiveness, small families and easy divorce ended the Catholic vision of life as something widely supported and believed in Quebec. No longer was the expression maudits Anglais, damned English, to be taken literally, but this did not mean it was abandoned altogether. A new doctrine replaced the old poetry, but the same villain remained. No longer did Quebec Catholicism alone provide French Canadians with a sense of their own moral superiority to the damned English; instead it competed with the secular doctrine of decolonization, borrowed from the revolutionary fantasies of Sartre and Fanon, to assure Quebeckers it was righteous to feel anger at the English. Following the bastardized Hegelian recipes of Fanon, the duty of the FrenchCanadian (or Quebecker, as increasingly the preferred self-definition) was to rebel, with violence, against the hated pseudo-masters, the English. By the mid-1960s, the conventional dogma of the Front de Liberation du Quebec, the FLQ, and of their supporters was expressed with great conviction in pamphlets and books, in public debates, poetry, plays and demonstrations, in TV specials and, on occasion, by bombs. Revolutionary consciousness turned out to be as stupid in Quebec as in France and the result was merely terror and the comedy of public posturing. Anglophobia and writing in joual were considered political

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acts.24 The story of De Gaulle's 'vive le Quebec Libre—or rather, 'vive le Quebec L-I-I-I-I-B-R-E'—speech, the conflicts between Prime Minister Trudeau and Premier Levesque, the FLQ crisis and the subsequent constitutional gavotte, are now all familiar episodes in recent Canadian history. The mythic element in Quebec nationalism, however, is often overlooked. For example, in the aftermath of the failure of the Meech Lake Accord, the Belanger-Campeau Commission was established by the Govrnment of Quebec: its premise was the Victimization' of Quebec by 'English Canada'.25 If one accepts the premise, the only solution that would ensure the survival of the ethnic Quebecois garrison would be independence. But acceptance presupposes a prior commitment to the myth that extends back to Garneau. William Johnson's concluding remarks, at the end of over 400 pages of analysis, are germane: Despite all the speeches, conferences, conventions, commissions, forums, accords, and referendums that have searched for a political settlement, the root cause of Quebec's discontent in Confederation has never been political. It was and is ideological—or, more accurately, mythological. Therefore, no mere practical solution, however ingenious, generous or dramatic, could ever assuage Quebec's discontents and restore stability to the federation. If a political solution could have been found, it would have been some time during these decades of ferment, with leaders of such outstanding ability as Jean Lesage, Pierre Trudeau, and Rene Levesque making it their highest priority.26

That Johnson is of the view that Quebec nationalists will abandon the ethnic garrison in favour of'pragmatic objectives inspired by the principles of liberal democracy' seems to me to be unrealistic, but the general point is clear enough: the garrison mentality that Frye found in the literature of Upper Canada and that may be extended to include the inhabitants of an ethnonationalist Quebec does not lead to the political unity promised, or 24. Joual is popular French; it derives from the rural dialect pronunciation of the French word for horse, chevaL In practice it is filled with anglicisms and with blasphemous swearing. 25. It may not be otiose to observe that the term 'English Canada' does not refer to anything ethnic or even linguistic or cultural. That is, it serves a symbolic or evocative rather than descriptive purpose, similar in principle to Voegelin's notion of the 'counter-idea', Gegenidee, of Passe und Stoat (1933). See Eric Voegelin, Race and State (ed. Klaus Vondung; trans. Ruth Hein; Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 2; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), Part II, Chapter 7: The Jews as Counteridea', pp. 180-206. 26. Johnson, A Canadian Myth, p. 400.

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at least sought, by the Fathers of Confederation. In short, the exclusiveness of garrison imagery and the particularist mentalite it expresses divide Canadian citizens one from another. The ethnic garrison of Quebec with its Anglophobic evocation of Quebecois pure laine or de la vielle souche is inherently divisive.

3 Lucien Bouchard once made the insightful observation that 'even the Quebec federalists are nationalists'. Whereas the sovereigntist nationalists seek political independence from Canada as the solution to their present discontents and justify their aspirations with a myth of an ethnonationalist garrison, the federalist nationalists find hope for the future in 'renewed federalism' and justify their aspirations with a myth of their own: the myth of two founding peoples. Historians with a concern for mere historical fact have pointed out that the notion of two founding peoples was invented during the heat of a Quebec provincial election campaign during the late nineteenth century.27 This is, of course, true, but it fails to address the reality of the myth as a vehicle that constitutes a people rather than describes its origin. The two-founding-peoples myth supplies the federalist nationalists with their own variation on Hobbes's 'theory' of a contractual basis to the political nation. In their natural condition, according to Hobbes, human beings obligated themselves through a contract to establish a sovereign to whom they transferred nearly all their natural powers. The essential feature of this myth lies not in the traditional biblical element of a contract, which may be traced to the Israelite covenant with Yahweh, but in the result of it: the previously formless association of peoples creates a new dualistic entity, 'Canada', which bears this peculiar two-part personality. This personality once established retrospectively by the mythic evocation (rather than by the British North America Act) then marches on through history untroubled and untouched by later events such as Eastern European and non-European immigration, the addition of other colonies and territories and the settlement of the west. Indeed, the myth overcomes even prior historical realities such as the existence of human beings already living in societies of various kinds prior to the arrival of Europeans in the territory later called 'Canada'.

27. See, for example, Forsey, Freedom and Order, Part 4.

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The structure of this myth, like that of exploitation by 'English Canada', is essentially Hobbesian. In Political Religions, Voegelin provided brief accounts of the principal sacred symbols by which the merely human political sphere is joined to the divine or to its ersatz substitute, the 'suprapersonal ultimate reality' discussed earlier. First, Voegelin discussed the symbolism of hierarchy. From the sun-cult of Akhenaton to the sunking Louis XIV, the identification of political with astronomical hierarchy has a long history. In nineteenth-century Quebec, the moral superiority of the rural habitant over the urban 'English' was justified in terms of God's will for his (French and Roman Catholic) people in North America; in the twentieth century the focus shifted from God's will to the will of the Quebec people who 'naturally' wish to be sovereign and self-sufficient. Hierarchy is preserved in the vanguard 'Quebec Party' understood as a Hobbesian collective persona existing in continuity with the mythic two founding peoples. The second religious symbol Voegelin discussed, the 'ekklesia, or sacropolitical community, is clearly expressed in the pure laine and de souche symbolism. Within the particularist Quebecois community, there is an implicit acknowledgment of the equality and brother-and-sisterhood of all members. This sense of equality is no doubt genuine. It endows with fervour, if not with plausibility, the words of Quebec nationalists, whether federalist or sovereigntist, that they are as liberal and as constitutional a community as the rest of Canada. And yet, to follow Voegelin's third symbol, the ekklesia is split into the 'true' sacramental community and the mundane but hostile powers. In political terms, the internal freedom and equality extends no further than the ethnonationalist community. As Mordecai Richler observed, when the streets of Montreal are filled with crowds on St Jean Baptiste day, thtfete national, and they are heartily chanting 'le Quebec aux Quebecois', it is unlikely that they have in mind men and women by the name of McGregor or Cohen, Ng or Manfredi. In the same spirit, when the sovereigntist Quebec Party lost the first independence referendum, Premier Rene Levesque declared a moral victory because the real Quebeckers, the true ekklesia, had supported independence; his successor, Jacques Parizeau, who led the Quebec Party to a second referendum defeat, this time by a much smaller margin, again claimed a moral victory and blamed explicitly 'money and ethnics' for the loss. The incarnation of the true ekklesia, like the Hobbesian commonwealth, is more than a configuration of political power operating within or along-

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side the existing constitutional rules. It is also a spiritual power in statu nascendi inasmuch as it aims at sovereignty; even in the absence of sovereignty, the state of Quebec has taken upon itself rights and obligations of judgment unknown in other provinces. These have been chiefly concerned with matters of language and have been justified, rather ominously, in terms of preserving and enhancing the unity of the commonwealth. Just as in Hobbes, the Leviathan is to rule on what one is permitted to utter; the formula is that of any modern minister of propaganda: because actions are determined by opinions, whoever guides the formulation of these opinions correctly, especially by guiding the language in which they are expressed, will direct human actions towards the great desiderata, peace and harmony. In order fully to achieve this apparently desirable state, debate with the vestige of the old order must be undertaken. Here the chief elements concern the betrayal of Quebec, from the Treaty of Paris in 1763, when France abandoned New France to the British in order to retain a few islands in the sun, to 1982, when the Constitution Act was 'patriated' from Britain without the agreement of the Quebec legislature, the National Assembly. The answer to this constant abuse of an innocent people is obvious enough to those who contemplate their own purity: a new covenant is needed, a covenant of sovereignty, that is expressed in the very name of the Quebec Party, le Parti Quebecois, a name that carries the implication that those who refuse it support are not genuine Quebeckers. Its most perfect expression, however, is to be found in the mind of the leader, a new Moses, who would lead his people from the darkness of Sheol-Canada to the sunny uplands of independence. A fourth symbolic dimension, beyond the differentiation of the ekklesia into the children of light and the children of darkness, focuses on the evocation of an apocalypse. The apocalypse provides an intelligible account of past events, an understanding of the current crisis and the promise of future resolution and relief. It does so, moreover, from the perspective of a participant in the field of spiritual conflict and political struggle. The textual origins of contemporary apocalyptic symbolic eruptions are found in the Bible, in the mediaeval Christian symbolism associated with the speculation of Joachim of Flora, and in any number of post-Renaissance schemes to assure human perfectability on earth. As Voegelin observed in Political Religions, the fundamental structure of this complex of politicoreligious symbolism has remained appreciably unchanged for nearly 400 years. What has changed is the actual content. The meaning infused into

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the notion of a 'suprapersonal ultimate reality' has grown increasingly remote from any sense of the divine. Instead, the 'things of the world', to use Machiavelli's felicitous phrase, constitute both the foundation for human knowledge and its highest objective. In Voegelin's words, 'scientific worldviews' come into being along with 'scientific socialism', and 'scientific race doctrines'. The 'world-riddles' are inventoried and solved. Meanwhile, knowledge of the fundamental questions of being declines and the language terms by which such questions are discussed is no longer common knowledge but is increasingly confined to a small circle. Indifference, 28 laicism and atheism become the publicly obligatory notions of the world.

From these observations Voegelin drew an important methodological principle, which underwent considerable refinement in his later work. In 1938 one can see, at least in outline, the formulations of his 1969 essay, 'The Eclipse of Reality'.29 When human beings attend exclusively to the things of the world, that is, to phenomena, the reality of the world and its divine foundation disappear into the background. This does not mean that the structure of reality is changed or that human beings can eliminate 'the problematics of their own existence'. All that happens is that intramundane pseudo-'transpersonal ultimate realities' are put in place of real ones. 'When the symbols of transcendent religiousness are banned, new ones, developed from the language of intramundane science, take their place.'30 The several nineteenth-century apocalypses, Voegelin said, are 'naive', in the sense that they advance their claims in good faith as scientific judgments favourable to their own cherished views.31 In the context of the current discussion of Quebec nationalism one finds an enthusiastic embrace of an intramundane religious sensibility. The transition from the French-and-Roman Catholic myth of Abbe Groulx to a modern secular myth has been completed. Pierre Trudeau was one of the last political intellectuals for whom the old nationalist myth was significant enough to be worthy of his opposition. The current discussion, as has been suggested, is oblivious to the larger experiential context. The

28. Voegelin, Diepolitischen Religionen, p. 50; Political Religions, p. 59. 29. Eric Voegelin, The Eclipse of Reality', in Eric Voegelin, What Is History? And Other Late Unpublished Writings (ed. Thomas A. Hollweck and Paul Caringella; Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 28; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), pp. 111-62. 30. Voegelin, Die politischen Religionen, pp. 50-51; Political Religions, p. 59. 31. Voegelin, Die politischen Religionen, p. 52; Political Religions, p. 61.

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only question worthy of attention is whether the Quebec nation is more perfectly actualized within Canada or independently.

4 There is an embarras de richesse concerning the sovereigntist perspective. Probably the most influential work is Fernand Dumont's Genese de la societe quebecoise?2 His language, no less than his doctrine, has been heavily influenced by Hegel. In the autobiographical preface, which he called his 'mise en scene', Dumont adopted a voice of great confidence. What he had to say is unambiguous, not to say self-evident. It is obvious (c'est entendii) that the present state of a society, he said, can be understood only by again raising the question of its past. By raising (remonter) the question of its past, Dumont meant both returning to the historical and elevating it to the dignity of a true story. History, he said, is not a chain of events punctuated by a few dramatic episodes that somehow ends up in the present. Following a more or less lengthy maturation, sometimes a turning [un tournant] is reached that is so decisive in the past of a collectivity that the very meaning of its becoming turns out to be changed. From a history long lived without focus, [the collectivity] has gained access to the political sphere; from the confrontation of ideologies has emerged a recollection of collective projects. Then, the society has been truly founded: with a character to which individuals and groups can relate themselves, an identity that they have had to define, a historical consciousness that gives them the more or less illusory feeling of making history and the more or less confident ability to interpret it.33

It was ever thus, Dumont assures his readers, from the ancient city to modern nations. Dumont's choice of terms was deliberate; the 'collectivity' is the basic unit, a quasi-organic entity that changes form, moving from 'a history without focus', to existence as a 'society', to a political nation. At the time 32. Fernand Dumont, Genese de la societe quebecoise (Montreal: Boreal, 1993). A very helpful discussion of the question of Quebec nationalism, and one that has guided this interpretation, is Max Nemni, 'Post-Ethnic Nationalism in Quebec: A Promise of History?', presented at the 66th meeting of the CPSA, Calgary, June 1994. Dumont is an important intellectual force in Quebec and is well known in the French speaking world of scholarship. In addition to major sociological and cultural studies, he has written on Christian theology as an homme defoi, and is a published poet. 33. Dumont, Genese, p. 9.

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of writing, Dumont was able to account only for the 'turning' from an unfocused collectivity to a society.34 The transitional character of the present epoch, from society to state, was emphasized by Dumont's analogy between the development of his own life and that of the collectivity. Most of his generation, he said, were children of the parish: church, school, factory, the corner store and the local garage provided stability in space; the eternal return of tide, season and festival expressed the stable rhythms of time. The radio, the newspapers and school books conveyed echoes of another world, but one that existed in continuity with the familiar everyday one. For a child, said Dumont, 'the world is a homeland', familiar and enchanting, but not simply closed upon itself because of the presence of the mysterious sphere of the sacred. 'The solemnity of the ceremonies, the strangeness of the texts and rituals introduced an element of difference that gradually unsettled this harmony with the immediate milieu.' And then another fissure appeared. In some respects, the factory was as much a part of the parish as the church, but even less than the Sunday liturgy, he said, was it a replica of the parish. From the managers up to the executives, the bosses were English-speaking; they lived on a plateau that dominated the village, in houses built in a different style than ours; they attended a little Protestant church that we never went near. Even less would we ever dare to speak a word to their tall blonde daughters upon whom we would gaze from afar, but who were forbidden to young natives... In this place to speak English was considered the height of 35 wisdom, tantamount to the mastery of metaphysics.

The transcendence Dumont experienced in the Church was a prelude to the otherness of the 'English', which in turn eventually provided a 'focus' for the history of the collectivity, namely a presence to be overcome. The beginning of World War Two provided the young Dumont with the confirmation and the continuation of another myth. His parents had spoken critically of the rare Frenchman they encountered, but they retained an affection for a France they never knew: it was 'the old country'. Then came conscription and public protests. 'For the first time I think I really grasped that there could be a story other than that of my village.' On applauding the anti-conscription speeches, Dumont discovered he was no longer 'a child of the parish but the son of a hypothetical country'. 34. The 'turning' is the Heideggerian Kehrewnt large. 35. Dumont, Gen£se,pp. 10-11.

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By the time of his adolescence, Dumont had begun to discover his own focus; he had commenced his own 'turning', away from the homeland of the parish that was simply or immediately accepted as given, towards a double transcendence, the transcendence of the sacred on the one hand, and of the world of the 'other', les Anglais, beyond the immediate homeland. The agency of the conscription debate, his 'confrontation of ideologies', led him eventually to recollect other 'collective projects', which were actualized in his later scholarly life. Dumont recalled these quite ordinary memories not to indulge his sense of nostalgia but because, in retrospect, it was his first encounter with history. His own 'turning' was a prelude to the 'turning' of his society. 'This passage from childhood to adolescence', he said, 'this transition from homeland to country is not without analogy with what, in the course of history, is the genesis of the nation'. The analogy, however, was imperfect: Dumont's maturation as a prominent scholar was not matched by the analogous maturation of his society. Just as with his own adolescent experience of the conscription conflict, Quebec remained a hypothetical country. Just as with his transition from adolescence to maturity, the road ahead was clear: Quebec would have to become a nation. Yet, it has not done so. There were, he said, many reasons for this arrested development, which Dumont likened to a deep wound. He considered them in the pages of his book, but he did so with a rare clarity in his perspective: the oft-told story of Quebec's religious origins, its struggle for survival, its constitutional conflicts with Canada and the other provinces, he said, has become a piece of romantic self-indulgence. The real story is that the transition from homeland to country has yet to be made. There is no doubt in anyone's mind that Quebec is a 'distinct society', but that status has become as much a roadblock as an achievement. Under such circumstances, therefore, a new self-consciousness that would complete the 'turning' from distinct society to nation can emerge only on the basis of a re-examination of the genesis of the collective identity that has now become exhausted. Dumont's argument follows a familiar Hegelian pattern. Each stage in the historical development of self-consciousness towards wisdom engenders its successor by providing an obstacle to be overcome. Just as a child cannot become a mature human being without coming to terms with the difficulties of growing up, neither can a society. Just as a mature individual takes charge of her life, so a society must take charge of its history: 'like all aspects of communal life, the nation cannot survive and develop without

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the support of the state'.36 This was for Dumont the final Aufhebung, the last historical overcoming, which corresponded to the new self-consciousness achieved through a re-examination of the genesis of the collective identity as set out in Genese de la societe quebecois. And yet (to repeat), this final overcoming has not taken place. Dumont has been able to evoke a goal or a purpose, what he called a ' Utopia', but he has not been able to account for its achievement. That is why his book is called The Genesis of Quebec Society, not The Genesis of the State of Quebec. Even so, he has a clear vision of what the state can (or must) do: the power of the state is instrumental in defining and maintaining the historical consciousness of the nation. The history of Quebec, therefore, is the story not of the birth of a nation but of the genesis of a society awaiting transfiguration into a nation. But this 'idealist' or purposive element in Dumont's argument also means that his is not a serious Hegelianism. According to Hegel, the social elements awaiting transfiguration will remain external to one another so long as the society in question is shielded from the experience of violence. Dumont does not discuss this zauberisch aspect of Hegelian political science, which may be just as well. The results, however, remain regrettably incomplete because, to retain the metaphor of birth, Quebec history is a series of abortions, beginning with the failure of New France to convert the Indians.37 Of course, Dumont argued, Quebec survived, but the catalyst for its survival was the 'English'. More to the point, the rebellion of 1837 in Lower Canada also aborted the realization of the connection between politics and the almost-nation. Responsible government was followed by a retreat into the ethnic garrison.38 Now what? Dumont had enough commonsense or perhaps enough Christian faith to shrink from the full-fledged Hegelian answer. Here the futile violence of the FLQ provided a cautionary tale. And yet ethnic survival is not enough because it still depends on the 'English'. The old problems, therefore, remain. Of course, 'survival has not ceased to require constant vigilance', but the Utopias of the quiet revolution are faded; the collective memory has been devastated; Quebeckers are slow to take in hand the indispensable mastery of politics which escaped them in the middle of the last century. It is true that the French language has become the only collective reference, 36. Dumont, Genese, p. 17. 37. Dumont, Genese, p. 55. 38. Dumont, Genese, pp. 254, 326-27.

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Hence the difficulty for which the metaphor of abortion is not inapposite. Quebec cannot become a nation without creating itself as a state; the lost opportunity of the nineteenth century, which was attended by the violence of 1837, seems lost forever; the current alternative, which conceives of a Utopian ethnic enclave dedicated to survival, can never move beyond a purely 'defensive strategy'. The political religion of Quebec intellectuals looks like nothing so much as chirping within Hegel's geistige Tierreich, the spiritual bestiary. A glance at the spiritual pupils of Dumont confirms their Hegelian status. Quebec nationalists, whether federalist or sovereigntist, share the opinion of Dumont that the Quebec collectivity has gradually transformed itself over the centuries from a failed missionary group to a distinct society en route to becoming a 'nation', with a political consciousness that eventually will find legal and constitutional form. Almost all Quebec nationalists share Dumont's opinion that ethnic solidarity is a temporary and defensive expedient to preserve the collectivity against the threat of erosion at the hands of the 'English'. Nearly all Quebec nationalists consider that the transition to a political unit either inside Canada or independent of Canada would mean the Aufhebung of the ethnic garrison. The charge sometimes levelled by liberal English-speaking Canadians against the 'racism' of the ethnonationalists of Quebec is, accordingly, misplaced. The limitations of a 'utopia' or of the geistige Tierreich remain. In Voegelin's terminology, the Quebec nationalist intellectuals are poised in expectation of an apocalypse. This consciousness, which is expressed in a subdued and scholarly way in Dumont, is given more enthusiastic expression in popular tracts: 1988, Leprochain rendez-vous: essai sur Vavenir du Quebec (Louis O'Neill); 1990, Maintenant ou jamais! (Pierre Bourgeault); 1990, Ma terre, Quebec: essai sur le Quebec en marche (Jean-Charles Claveau); 1992, Demain, la republique: le projet du Quebec profond (JeanLouis Bourque); 1993, Gouverner ou disparaitre (Pierre Vadeboncoeur). The titles are meant both to present the apocalypse in thought and to evoke the apocalypse in deed. The strong words—and Vadeboncoeur goes so far as to speak of genocide, a genocide en douce—do not, however, refer to the reality of strong deeds. We remain cooped up in the bestiary with 39. Dumont, Genhe, p. 335.

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noisy intellectuals going on and on about the 'naturalness' of the evolution of Quebec towards an independent state. The federalist nationalists among Quebec intellectuals have become, if not extinct, at best a vanishing breed. The great blow to their credibility and to their viability came with the defeat of the Meech Lake Accord, which would have given (in their view) constitutional form to the myth of the 'two founding peoples'. Following the demise of Meech Lake, the appeal of the 'Dumont paradigm', as Nemni called it, increased. Les Anglais had thwarted the aspirations of Quebec society once again; the only alternative, therefore, must be pursued. Accordingly, the federalist nationalists have turned to, and adopted, much of the rhetoric of the sovereigntist nationalists. Increasingly, they believe that the desiderata of all Canadians, namely civic nationalism in a pluralist society, can be achieved only within an independent Quebec state. Like the sovereigntist nationalists they increasingly believe that the only way to transcend ethnic nationalism is by establishing such a state. Indeed, they say, to the extent that ethnic nationalism still flourishes in Quebec, the reason for it lies in the refusal by Les Anglais of the 'last chance' that was symbolized by the Meech Lake Accord. That refusal has pushed many Quebeckers back into their ethnic garrison.

5 The self-serving circularity of this argument suggests that, perhaps, some crude Anglo-Saxon observations may be in order. First of all, the 'Dumont paradigm' is not a scientific proposition with which one may dispute on the basis of evidence. It is a dogmatic condition the acceptance of which forms the basis for further conversation. If one disagrees there is only silence: disagreement is a sign of enmity, disrespect, and probably a desire to humiliate. If the premises of this Hegelian enterprise cannot be called into question, the naive myth of historical evolution is simply transformed into the mauvaisfoiof a conscious myth. Here one says, even if it is not simply true that it is 'natural' for a collectivity to become a society longing to be a nation made conscious of itself as a state, it is certainly useful for those who wish to establish a state, for whatever reasons or motives, to say that this entire Hegelian account is 'natural'. So long as les Anglais form a generalized 'other', they can constitute a Voegelinian 'counter-idea', which is, of course, also useful for uniting the society into a nation in search of a state, even though the rhetoric

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is based on a scientifically, empirically and historically dubious proposition. In Voegelin's day Alfred Rosenberg introduced the notion of 'organic truth' to replace the previous justifications of divine revelation or scientific and philosophic argument. What is to count as true is what serves the united population. In this way the myth, whether naive or conscious, is removed from the field of rational analysis. People who subscribe to such myths can, at the same time, both be adept at knowledge of propaganda and the technologies of social diffusion and manipulation, and never let their awareness of the status of the activity as a confidence game destroy its proper purpose or disturb their larger faith. In Voegelin's words: The insights of depth psychology into the individual's instinctive life and the masses can be put to good technical use without the appeal to the instincts arousing resistance. Even so, insight into the motivation of instincts has no more led to the rational development of the personality than has an ideological critique led to the destruction of an innerworldly belief in revelation. On the contrary, it has led to the recognition that hate is stronger than love so that the release of aggressive instincts and the encouragement of attitudes of hate become means available for the 40 actualization of the goals of the community.

The eventual goal is not to achieve a pluralistic and peaceful state ordered by the moderate virtues of civic nationalism, but the creation of a new mystical body where human beings become cogs in a greater whole. When unforeseen or undesirable things happen, as the failure of the Meech Lake Accord was for many Quebec nationalists, this was not a mistake to be temporarily endured; even less was it to be discussed by conceding that opponents of the Accord might have valid misgivings. Rather, opposition to the 'natural' process of development becomes yet another obstacle to be overcome by the religio-ecstatic union of the nation with history. Because Canadians nevertheless raise questions of their own that have nothing to do with the myths of Quebec or the 'suprapersonal ultimate reality' that looms so large through those myths, it seems far from likely that either the symbolic or the constitutional conflict will draw to a close.

40. Voegelin, Diepolitischen Religionen, p. 54; Political Religions, p. 64.

AXIAL AGE SECTARIANISM AND THE ANTINOMIES OF MODERNITY* S.N. Eisenstadt

1

In this paper I would like to take up some themes that have been central to Eric Voegelin's work and which are crucial for understanding the dynamics of modern civilization and their historical roots in the Axial civilizations. The major theme of my paper will be the place of the sectarianism and heterodoxies of the Axial civilizations in the shaping of modern civilization. The starting point of my analysis will be the basic antinomies of the Great Civilizations, and the transformation of these antinomies in the Great Revolutions and in the cultural and political programme of modernity.

2 One of the distinctive characteristics of these civilizations is that there continually developed within them alternative, competing transcendental visions of the relation between the transcendental and the mundane orders. These alternative conceptions or visions crystallized around three several basic antinomies inherent in the very premises of these civilizations and in the process of their institutionalization—namely, first, around the awareness of a great range of possibilities of transcendental visions and of their implementation; secondly, around the tension between reason and revelation or faith, or their equivalents, in the non-monotheistic Axial civilizations; and thirdly, around the problematique of the desirability of attempts at full institutionalization of these visions in their pristine form. 1 * Work for this essay was supported by grants from the Israel Science Foundation and from the Chiang-Ching-Kuo Foundation. 1. Eric Voegelin's Order and History addresses all of these themes. See Eric Voegelin, Order and History. I. Israel and Revelation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State

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The awareness of a great range of possibilities of transcendental visions, of the very definition of the tension between the transcendental and the mundane order, and of the quest to overcome it (i.e., of the implementation of such visions), constituted an inherent part of their institutionalization in the Axial civilizations. Historically such a process of institutionalization of transcendental visions was never a simple, peaceful one. Any such institutionalization usually contained strong heterogeneous and even contradictory elements. It was usually connected with a continuous struggle and competition between many groups and between their respective visions. Because of this multiplicity of visions, no single one could be taken as fully given or complete. Once the conception of a basic tension between the transcendental and the mundane order was institutionalized in a society, or at least within its centre, it became in itself very problematic. The elaboration of any such vision attendant on such institutionalization in fully articulated terms generated the possibility of different emphases, directions and interpretations, all of which were reinforced by the existence in any historical setting of such institutionalization of multiple visions carried by different groups. The second basic antinomy inherent in these civilizations has been that between, on the one hand, reason, and on the other revelation and faith in the monotheistic traditions and some transcendental principle in the Confucian, Hinduistic and Buddhist ones. The premises of these civilizations—and their institutionalization—entailed a high level of reflexivity, including a second-order reflexivity about these very premises. Such reflexivity has been, of course, reinforced by the awareness of alternative visions. It necessarily entailed the exercise of reason not only as a pragmatic tool, but also as at least one arbiter or guide of such reflexivity—and often gave rise to the construction of 'reason' as a distinct category in the discourse of that developed in these civilizations. Hence, it may have easily endowed reason with a metaphysical or transcendental dimension and autonomy that did not exist in pre-Axial civilizations—and could generate confrontations between the autonomous exercise of reason and revelation (or its equivalents) in the non-monotheistic civilizations. Such confrontation was historically very central in the monotheistic civilizations as they confronted the only Axial civilization—the Greek one—that did indeed University Press, 1956); II. The World of the Polls (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957); III. Plato and Aristotle (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957); IV. The Ecumenic Age (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974); V. In Search of Order (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987).

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define reason, 'logos', as the ultimate transcendental value. But parallel confrontations—even if, needless to say, couched in other terms and in less confrontational ways—developed in the Axial civilizations. This antinomy was closely related to the third one that was inherent in the Axial civilizations, namely the one which focused on the problem of the desirability from the point of view of these visions of attempts at their full institutionalization in their pristine form. First, in most of these civilizations, it was strongly emphasized that there exists a sharp discrepancy between on the one hand the ideal order, as prescribed or envisaged by the transcendental visions prevalent in them, by the commandments of God, by the ideals of cosmic harmony or the like, and on the other hand the mundane order as constructed by the exigencies of social and political life, by the vagaries of human nature—often conceived as guided by purely utilitarian conditions or by considerations of power or of raisons d'etat. Accordingly, as we have seen, one of the core characteristics of all these civilizations were attempts to implement the transcendental visions in the mundane order. Secondly, however, there also developed within the reflexive traditions of these civilizations doubts, given the imperfectability of man, about the possibility—and even feasibility—of such full implementation of such vision. This view was not inherently exogenous to the basic conceptions and premises of these civilizations—it was indeed a basic, even if controversial, component of these premises. The very emphasis on the chasm between the transcendental and the mundane order entailed also the vision of the inherent imperfectability of man. It was accordingly often emphasized in the discourse that developed in these civilizations that such attempts at a complete overcoming of the chasm between the transcendental and the mundane orders could be very dangerous, that they could lead to attempts by fragile humans to abrogate for themselves divine power. Accordingly there developed within these civilizations strong emphases on the necessity to regulate mundane affairs without attempts at an extreme, totalistic implementation of pristine transcendental vision. The proper limits of such implementation, the scope of the arenas and aspects of social life that should be regulated according to such vision, as against those in which the more mundane concerns, economic or power ones, should be accepted—but also regulated by mundane means—constituted one of the major concerns of the reflexive discourse in all these civilizations. Augustine's famous distinction between the City of God and the City of

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Man is one of the best-known illustrations of this concern—as well as of the resolution of this problem in the direction of the separation of the two cities—which was challenged by many heterodox, among them gnostic, groups. Similar discourses can, however, also be found in other Axial civilizations. These concerns were closely related to the problem that was central in the discourse of all these civilizations, namely that of the evaluation of hedonistic and anarchic impulses and of the mundane interest of people. In all the discourses that developed in these civilizations, there developed a strong preoccupation with the relations between, on the one hand, these impulses and interests—between the egoistical, hedonistic and anarchic impulses of individuals and groups within the society—and, on the other hand, the upholding of the proper social order. In close relation to these considerations, there developed in many of these civilizations some kernels of the idea of a social contract, of the idea that the actual mundane, especially political, order is constituted through some implicit contract between different members of a society or between them and the ruler. Different variations of such an idea of social contract can be found in some of the great writings on political and social matters of the Asian civilizations, as for instance in the Arthasastra of Kautilya, in the work of Ibn Khaldoun, or in the work of Chinese thinkers like Mo-tzu or Hsun-tzu. Most of these discussions emphasized that such a contract with the rulers was based on some utilitarian considerations, as well as on fear. Such considerations were usually seen as being a natural part of the mundane order, based in the anarchic potentials of human nature, which had to be regulated by the laws or customs that hemmed in these anarchic potentials and (or by) the power of the rulers. The recognition of this necessity was often connected with the legitimation of political order based on considerations of power. A contract based on such considerations could be seen as legitimate, though certainly not as entailing the full implementation of the pristine transcendental vision; but its legitimacy could also be connected with the fear of attempts to implement totalistically the pristine transcendental vision. At the same time, however, the possibility was raised in this discourse that the regulation of such impulses could be best assured by the exercise of reason rather than by attempts to implement transcendental visions in a totalistic way.

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3 It was above all around the basic antinomies inherent in the premises of these civilizations that we have analyzed above that there developed within them the various alternative visions of the transcendental order and of its relations to the mundane one. These alternative visions with their strong antinomian possibilities usually entailed the reconstruction of both of the basic ontological conceptions of reality, the conception of the transcendental order as well as its relations to the mundane order, and especially to the political order and to the basic social formations that were institutionalized in these civilizations. Some such visions often denied the validity of the very definitions of ontological reality upheld in the respective civilizations. One direction of such denial was the reformulation of the tension between the transcendental and the mundane orders, as was the case in the Buddhist reformulation of the premises of Hinduism and in the Christian reformulation of the premises of Judaism. Such alternative visions could also promulgate the ideological denial of the very stress on the tension between transcendental and mundane orders and so a 'return' to a 'pagan' conception, a going back (as it were) to a pre-transcendental, pre-Axial stage to a conception of the mutual embeddedness of transcendental and mundane, and sometimes to a chthonic conception of the world. Another very strong trend or vision connected to the quest for the 'return' to such re-embeddedness, which often developed in these civilizations, was the gnostic one which attempted to imbue the world with a deep but hidden meaning. This quest could also become connected with the emphasis on the autonomy of reason and the legitimacy of mundane efforts. Such different alternative visions could become connected with the elaboration of a great variety of religious and intellectual orientations, especially mystical and esoteric ones which went beyond the established, routinized, orthodox version of implementation of the transcendental vision.2 All these visions with their very strong antinomian potentialities were usually articulated by special actors who presented themselves as the bearers of the pristine religious and/or civilizational visions of these civilizations. Illustrations of such carriers are the holy men of antiquity, the Indian or Buddhist renouncers, Christian monks, and the like—in other 2. See Edward A. Tiiyakian, Three Metacultures of Modernity: Christian, Gnostic, Chthonic', Theory, Culture and Society 13 (1996), pp. 99-118.

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words, religious virtuosi, who often stood in some ambivalent or dialectical relationships to the existing ways of institutionalizing the transcendental visions, often acting from within liminal situations, and often coalescing into distinct groups—sects or orders which could become heterodoxies. These actors often sought to combine the attempts to implement such visions with wider social movements, especially with movements of protest.3 Accordingly, such alternative visions indeed very often became combined with the perennial themes of social protest, with attempts to overcome or supersede the predicaments and limitations of human existence in general and of death in particular; with the tensions and predicaments inherent in the institutionalization of the social order, especially the tension between equality and hierarchy; with the tension between the complexity and fragmentation of human relations inherent in any institutional division of labour and the possibility of some total, unconditional, unmediated participation in social and cultural order; and with the tension between the quest for meaningful participation in central symbolic and institutional arenas by various groups in the society and the limitation on the access to these arenas. One of the most important outcomes of the combinations of such alternative visions with the problems of the implementation of the respective transcendental visions and with the universal themes of protest, was the emergence in these Axial civilizations of Utopian visions of an alternative cultural and social order.4 Such Utopian conceptions, such visions, often contained strong millenarian and revivalist elements that can also be found in pre-Axial Age or non-Axial civilizations such as Japan; but these Utopian 3. S.N. Eisenstadt, Reuven Kahane and David Shulman (eds.), Orthodoxy, Heterodoxy, and Dissent in India (New York: Mouton, 1984); S.N. Eisenstadt, 'Transcendental Vision, Center Formation, and the Role of Intellectuals', in Liah Greenfeld and Michel Martin (eds.), Center, Ideas and Institutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 96-109. 4. Adam B. Seligman, 'The Comparative Studies of Utopias', 'Christian Utopias and Christian Salvation: A General Introduction' and 'The Eucharist Sacrifice and the Changing Utopian Moment in Post-Reformation Christianity', in Adam B. Seligman (ed.), Order and Transcendence (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1989), pp. 1-44; S.N. Eisenstadt, 'Comparative Liminality: Liminality and Dynamics of Civilization', Religion 15 (1985), pp. 315-38; Melvin J. Lasky, The Birth of a Metaphor: On the Origins of Utopia and Revolution', Encounter 34.2 (1970), pp. 35-45, and 34.3 (1970), pp. 3042; Melvin J. Lasky, Utopia and Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).

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visions go beyond the millenarian ones by combining them with the search for an alternative 'better' order beyond the given one, a new social and cultural order that will be constructed according to the precepts of the higher transcendental order and that will negate and transcend the given one. Such Utopian visions often also contained very strong gnostic and eschatological components (Voegelin, Norman Cohn).5

4 These alternative visions, with their strong antinomian potentialities, were not confined to the purely intellectual realm—they could also have broader institutional and political implications. These implications were rooted in the fact that these visions usually entailed very strong orientations to the construction of the mundane world giving rise to the potential for dissent by the bearers of these visions. But beyond this, these visions as they were borne by the various actors, especially by religious virtuosi, sects, or potential heterodoxies, could also have more specific, direct—and potentially broader—institutional and political implications. The promulgation of these visions was closely connected to the struggle between different elites, making all these elites—to follow Weber's designation of the ancient Israeli prophets—into 'political demagogues',6 who could also develop distinct political programmes of their own. Such programmes could in principle—and under appropriate conditions—become very forceful challenges to the existing regimes, to the political and religious establishments. This political potential of these sects and of the alternative visions promulgated by them was rooted in the problems arising out of any concrete institutionalization in the Axial civilizations, out of the connection of such institutionalization to conceptions of the accountability of rulers to some higher order, especially of the relations of such accountability to the problems and possibilities and limits of the implementation of the pristine transcendental visions. Any such institutionalization naturally entailed some compromise of a pristine approach or vision with mundane, social 5. See Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952); Voegelin, Order and History, especially volume 4, The Ecumenic Age, and Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (New York: Harper, 1961). 6. Max Weber, Ancient Judaism (ed. and trans. Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale; Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1952).

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and political reality; the acceptance of the impossibility of a total bridging of the chasm between the transcendental and the mundane order; and the close interweaving of such partial implementation with the political order, with a concomitant emphasis on the importance of the maintenance of political order in order to maintain even partial implementation of the transcendental vision. At the same time, it was exactly such 'compromise' that could constitute the butt of the criticism of different, above all of sectarian, Utopian movements—those movements that promulgated Utopian visions aimed at the full bridging of the chasm between the transcendental and the mundane orders, at the full implementation of the transcendental visions, and at the construction of a political order that would assure such full implementation.

5 Although such alternative visions, sectarianisms and tendencies to heterodoxy crystallized in all these civilizations, there developed great differences between them with respect to the extent of the development of such Utopias and heterodoxies and the extent of their impact on the political scene, of the extent to which the existing institutional and political realities constituted a central focus of such sectarian heterodox orientations and activities, especially of Utopian and eschatological visions. Such differences were closely related to the conceptions and criteria of the accountability of rulers—especially to the extent to which the rulers were seen as responsible for the implementation in the society of the transcendental visions—and to the specification of the institutional loci and processes through which such accountability could be effected.7 The different ways in which the conceptions of the accountability of rulers were conceived in these civilizations were closely related first of all to the basic ontological conceptions of the nature of the chasm between the transcendental and the mundane spheres and of the ways of bridging this chasm—that is, to the different conceptions of the transcendental vision that were prevalent in these civilizations. Secondly, they were connected with and influenced by the conception of the place of the political arena in the implementation of the transcendental visions. And thirdly, they were shaped by the extent of the acceptance and possible legitimation of the utilitarian, egoistic dimensions of human nature. 7. S.N. Eisenstadt, 'Cultural Traditions and Political Dynamics', British Journal of Sociology 32 (1981), pp. 155-81.

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Whatever the differences between these Axial civilizations, the various sectarian heterodox groups constituted a continual component in the dynamics of these civilizations. In the realm of European-Christian civilizations, they constituted a central component in the crystallization of modern civilization, of modernity as it crystallized in the Enlightenment and in the Great Revolutions. Contrary to some simplistic interpretations of Weber's 'Protestant Ethic' thesis, these sectarian orientations did not give rise, as it were, to capitalism or to modern civilization in general. Rather, under very specific and distinctive institutional and geopolitical conditions, they constituted a very important component in this crystallization of modern civilization8—a component that entailed both a continuation and a radical transformation of the place of sectarianism and proto-fundamentalist movements in the dynamics of Great Civilizations.

6 The Great Revolutions can be seen as the culmination of the sectarian heterodox potentialities that developed in the Axial civilizations—especially in those in which the political arena was seen as at least one of the arenas for implementation of their transcendental visions, including otherworldly components or orientations. Such transformation entailed the turning upside down—even if ultimately in secular terms—of the hegemony of the Augustinian vision, and the concomitant attempt to implement the heterodox 'gnostic' visions and the sectarian visions that wanted to bring the City of God to the City of Man. The Great Revolutions can indeed be seen as the first or at least the most dramatic, and possibly the most successful, attempt in the history of mankind to implement on a macro-societal scale the Utopian vision with strong gnostic components. This vision shared many characteristics with the proto-fundamentalist movements—except that in the Revolutions, it was above all future-oriented visions that have become predominant and have become a central component of the cultural programme of modernity. It was indeed Eric Voegelin's great insight—even if he possibly presented it in a rather exaggerated way—to point out those deep roots of the modern political programme in the heterodox-gnostic traditions of

8. See S.N. Eisenstadt, 'Origins of the West: The Origins of the West in Recent Macrosociological Theory: The Protestant Ethic Reconsidered', Cultural Dynamics 4 (1991), pp. 113-47.

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mediaeval Europe.9 The modern cultural and political programme, the cultural and political programme as it crystallized with the Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment and above all in the Great Revolutions, was indeed greatly influenced by the sectarian proto-fundamentalist movements of the late mediaeval and early modern era. It is these historical roots of the Great Revolutions, and their transformation in the modern setting, that define some of their distinct characteristics which distinguish them from other movements of rebellion, protest or changes of rulers that can be found in most societies. These characteristics of the Great Revolutions are also very important for the understanding of the relations between these Revolutions and the political regimes and processes that crystallized after them.

7 This transformation of the sectarian activities that took place in the Great Revolutions was closely connected with the development of a new type of political activist and leader. The most central component of such leadership, the most central component in these revolutionary processes—and one that probably constitutes their most distinctive characteristic—is the role of specific cultural, religious or secular groups and above all intellectuals and political activists, among which especially prominent were the bearers of the 'gnostic' visions of bringing the Kingdom of God, or some secularized vision thereof, to Earth. The English and to a different extent the American Puritans; the members of the French clubs so brilliantly described by Albert Cochin and 9. See Eric Voegelin, From Enlightenment to Revolution (ed. John H. Hallowell; Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1975), which contains late chapters from Voegelin's 'History of Political Ideas'; Die politischen Religionen (ed. Peter J. Opitz; Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 3rd edn, 1993 [1938, 1939]), which appeared in English as Political Religions (trans. T.J. DiNapoli and E.S. Easterly III; Toronto Studies in Theology, 23; Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1986); Das Volk Gottes: Sektenbewegungen und der Geist der Moderne (ed. Peter J. Opitz; trans. Heike Kaltschmidt; Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1994), a German translation of'The People of God', Part Four, Chapter 3 in Eric Voegelin, History of Political Ideas. IV. Renaissance and Reformation (ed. David L. Morse and William M. Thompson; Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 22; Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), pp. 131-214; and The New Science of Politics. See also Roger V. Gould, Insurgent Identities: Class, Community, and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the Commune (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

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later on by Francois Furet, Mona Ozouf, and others;10 and the various groups of Russian intelligentsia,11 are the best and best-known illustrations of this social type. It was usually these groups that provided the distinctive element that transformed rebellions into revolutions. It was indeed the central role of autonomous intellectuals in all these revolutions that denoted a radical transformation of the political activities and orientations of major mediaeval heterodoxies and sects, of the nature of the political process, and of the place of intellectuals in this process. The essence of this transformation was that, as against the suppression or hemming in of the more radical sectarian and heterodox activities and orientations in special, highly controlled, spaces (such as monasteries, as was characteristic of the mediaeval scene), these activities and orientations were transposed, in the Revolutions and in the subsequent modern political process, into the central political arena. The Reformation 12 constituted the crucial point of the turning of 'Catholic' sectarianism in a this-worldly direction: Luther's famous saying regarding making the whole world into a monastery—while overtly oriented against the existing monastic orders—did denote a radical transformation of the hitherto prevalent hegemonic tendencies towards sectarian activities in Christianity. Such an idea of transformation was taken up even more forcibly both by the radical Reformation and by Calvinism—in

10. Augustin Cochin, La Revolution et la libre pensee (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1924); L'esprit du jacobinisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1979); Francois Furet and Denis Richer, The French Revolution (trans. Stephen Hardman; New York: Macmillan, 1970); Francois Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (trans. Elborg Forster; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Mona Ozouf, La Fete Revolutionaire, 1789-1799 (Paris: Gallimard, 1982). 11. Vladimir C. Nahirny, The Russian Intelligentsia: From Torment to Silence (Rutgers, NJ: Transaction Publications, 1981); Klaus-Georg Riegel, 'Der MarxismusLeninismus als politische Religion', in Hans Maier and Michael Schafer (eds.), Totalitarismus und Politische Religionen (Munich: Ferdinand Schoningh, 1997), pp. 75139; Philip Pomper, The Russian Revolutionary Intelligentsia (New York: Crowell, 1970); Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia (trans. Francis Haskell; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Manuel Sarkisyanz, Russland und der Messianismus des Orients (Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1955). 12. Heiko Augustinus Oberman, The Dawn of the Reformation: Essays in Late Medieval and Early Reformation Thought (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1986); The Impact of the Reformation: Essays (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994); The Reformation: Roots and Ramifications (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1994).

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which there developed a very strong emphasis on the bringing together of the City of God and the City of Man. But Lutheranism did not on the whole give rise to active autonomous political activities, and the radical Reformation and Calvinism were successful only for relatively short periods in relatively small communities—in Geneva, in some Dutch and Scottish sects, and in some of the early American colonies. All of these did indeed provide a very crucial background for the development of the Great Revolutions. But it was only in the Revolutions that such sectarian activities were taken out, as it were, into the general society and the centres thereof. It was only in the Revolutions that these radical sectarian orientations became interwoven with rebellions, popular uprisings, movements of protest and with the political struggle at the centre, and were transposed into the centre. In such interweaving it was the ideological, propagandist and organizational skills of intellectuals or cultural elites that was of crucial ideological and organizational importance. 8

It was through the activities of such activists and intellectuals that the modern cultural programme—the cultural and political programmes of modernity with their distinct antimonies—developed, and that this cultural programme was promulgated. The most important components of this programme were, first, the potential supremacy of reason in the exploration and even shaping of the world; the 'naturalization' of human beings, society and nature; and the emphasis on the autonomy of the individual. Humans and nature tended to become 'naturalized', tended to be increasingly perceived not as directly regulated by the will of God, as in the monotheistic civilizations, nor by some higher, transcendental metaphysical principles, as in Hinduism and Confucianism, nor by the univeral logos, as in the Greek tradition. Rather they were conceived as autonomous entities regulated by some internal laws which could be fully explored and grasped by human reason and inquiry. It was such a naturalization of cosmos and human beings that constituted the central turningpoint from premodern to modern cosmological and ontological visions and conceptions. Concomitantly, central to this cultural programme was the emphasis on the growing autonomy of the individual: that is, on his—or her, but in

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this programme certainly 'his'—emancipation from the fetters of traditional and political and cultural authority, and the continuous expansion of the realm of personal and institutional freedom and activity. Such autonomy entailed two dimensions—first, reflexivity and exploration; and secondly, active construction, mastery of nature and of society. But if the 'naturalization' of the cosmos was mostly conceived as being governed by some inherent laws or forces—whether the laws of nature which could and should be scientifically explored, or some kind of inner 'romantic' essence —the situation was more complicated with regard to human autonomy. Human naturalization and autonomy were conceived in two different, and as Kant has shown, contradictory directions.13 On the one hand, the human was seen as subject to the laws of nature—which humans themselves could explore. On the other hand, humans were characterized by moral autonomy, seemingly, at least, transcending these laws, and proceeding by a strong critical orientation as a basic component of the natural human order. The exploration of nature and the search for potential mastery over it tended also, at least in some versions of this new tradition, and especially in some sectors of the Enlightenment, to extend beyond technical and scientific spheres into the social sphere. Such a view led almost naturally to an emphasis on the exploration and investigation of human nature and of society. It could become connected with an emphasis on the importance and possibility of a growing application of such knowledge to the social sphere proper; and on the relevance of such information and knowledge for the management of the affairs of society and for the construction of the socio-political order. Such conscious effort could develop in two—sometimes complementary, sometimes conflicting—directions. One has been the 'technocratic' direction, based on the assumption that those in the know, those who have mastered the secrets and arcana of nature and of humans, could devise the appropriate schemes, the appropriate institutional arrangements, for the implementation of the human good, of the good society. The second such direction laid a great emphasis on the implementation of such a vision through the moral-rational endeavour of men. Out of the conjunctions of these different conceptions or orientations

13. Charles P. Bigger, Kant's Methodology: An Essay in Philosophical Archeology (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1996); Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

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there developed, within this new modern tradition or cultural programme, a belief in the possibility of the active formation, by conscious human activity and participation and by critical reflection, of cultural aspects of social, cultural and natural orders. Society itself had become an object of human activities of conscious human endeavour oriented to its reconstruction. Such reconstruction was often also seen as a basic component in extending the mastery of individuals over their own destinies.

9 Within the framework of this new cultural programme, there developed the specific political programme of modernity. The new ontological conceptions promulgated in the cultural programme of modernity necessarily transformed basic orientations to tradition and authority; the basic parameters and premises of the political order, of its legitimation, and of the conceptions of the accountability of rulers; and conceptions of the structure of centres and of centre-periphery relations. This new political programme, in close relation to the cultural programmes rooted in the Revolutions and to the institutionalization of the new political regimes that crystallized in their wake, entailed a radical transformation of the very conception of politics. It gave rise, perhaps for the first time in the history of humanity, to belief in the possibility of bridging through political action the gap between the transcendental and mundane orders, of realizing in the mundane orders, in social life, some of the Utopian, eschatological visions, and to belief in the possibility of the transformation of society through political action guided by a distinctive vision. As in the broader cultural programme of modernity, such a vision could be a technocratic, 'engineering' one, entailing the view that the political community is a self-constitutive and self-reflective entity, and that society may through political action continuously reconstitute itself in a consciously reflexive way. At the same time, in close relation to the Utopian component in modern political life, far-reaching transformations rooted in the imagery of the Great Revolutions took place in the symbolism and structure of the modern political centres as compared with their predecessors or the centres of other civilizations. The crux of this transformation was the charismatization of the centre as the bearer of the transcendental visions inherent in the cultural programme of modernity, and the concomitant incorporation of themes and symbols of protest as a basic and legitimate component of

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the premises of these centres and of their relations with the peripheries of their respective societies.14 In contrast with almost every previous civilization, themes and symbols of equality, participation and social justice became not only elements of protest oriented against the existing centre, but also an important component of the political legitimation of orderly demands by the periphery on the centre.15 They become central components of the transcendental vision that promulgated the autonomy of humans and of reason. Protest and the possibility of transforming some aspects of society's institutional premises were no longer considered to be illegitimate or at most marginal aspects of the political process. They became central components of modern political discourse and practice. The incorporation of themes of protest constituted a major component of the modern project of human emancipation, a project that sought to combine equality and freedom, justice and autonomy, solidarity and identity. It was indeed the incorporation of such themes into the centre that epitomized their status as central components of the transcendental visions of modernity, and that heralded the radical transformation of sectarian Utopian visions into central components of the political and cultural programme. Concomitantly, there developed continual tendencies to permeation of the peripheries by the centres and to impingement of the peripheries on the centres, to the concomitant blurring of the distinctions between centre and periphery, and to the incorporation of the symbols and demands of protest into the central symbols of a society. 10

The crystallization and institutionalization of this programme with its multiple and continually changing institutional implications from the 14. Eisenstadt, 'Transcendental Vision'; S.N. Eisenstadt, 'Frameworks of the Great Revolutions: Culture, Social Structure, History and Human Agency', International Social Science Journal 44 (1992), pp. 385-401; and S.N. Eisenstadt (ed.), Revolution and the Transformation of Societies: A Comparative Study of Civilizations (New York: Free Press, 1978). 15. See Eisenstadt, 'Transcendental Vision'; S.N. Eisenstadt, Modernization, Protest and Change (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966); Edward Shils, 'Primordial, Personal, Sacred and Civil Ties', in Edward Shils (ed.), Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), pp. 111-26; Michael]. Lacey and Knud Haakonssen (eds.), A Culture of Rights: The Bill of Rights in Philosophy, Politics, and Law: 1791 and 1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

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eighteenth century on, with its expansion from Western Europe to the Americas, Eastern Europe, and then to Asia and Africa, entailed, as did the institutionalization of any great transcendental vision of social order, multiple antinomies, tensions and contradictions, giving rise to one of the most intensive discourses and social and political dynamics in the history of mankind—discourses and dynamics that have naturally intensified with the continual development and expansion of modernity. Behind these antinomies and tensions there loomed some very powerful, even if sometimes hidden, different meta-narratives of modernity, to follow Edward A. Tiryakian's felicitous expression: the Christian, in the sense of affirmation of this world in terms of a higher, not fully realizable vision; the gnostic, which attempts to imbue the world with a deep hidden meaning; and the chthonic, which emphasizes the full acceptance of the given world and of the vitality of its forces.16 These basic antinomies and tensions in the cultural and political programme of modernity had their roots in those of the Axial civilizations analyzed above, especially in the tension between, on the one hand, the search for the implementation of the transcendental vision in the mundane world, and, on the other, the recognition of the imperfectability of man, which naturally bears on the possibility of such implementation in the cultural programme of modernity. In the cultural programme of modernity these antimonies and tensions became radically transformed into those between the different interpretations of (1) the autonomy and hegemony of humans and of reason, and of (2) the very possibility of grounding morality and moral order in such autonomy and hegemony. The basic premises of this programme constituted the cultural themes of continual discourse and criticisms that focused on these antinomies and their relations to the institutional developments in modern societies. The more radical criticisms of this programme—rooted in the metanarratives mentioned above and in the premises and antinomies of the 'premodern' Axial civilizations—denied the validity of the claims of the promulgators of this programme to ground its premises, and their institutionalization, in transcendental metaphysical principles, or to see them as epitomes of human creativity. The central point of most of these, as it were, 'external', radical criticisms of this programme, was the denial of the possibility of the grounding of any social order or morality or human creativity in the basic premise of the cultural programme of modernity,

16. See Tiryakian, Three Metacultures of Modernity'.

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especially in the autonomy of the individual and in the supremacy of reason. Closely related was the denial of the claims that the institutional development of modernity was rooted in transcendental visions and could be seen as the implementation of such vision and of human creativity. These criticisms asserted that, contrary to such claims, the institutionalization of these programmes denied human creativity; flattened human experience; and led both to the disintegration or erosion of the moral order and the moral—and transcendental—bases of society, and to the alienation of humans from nature and from society. These radical criticisms could be undertaken from two opposite—yet in some ways also sometimes curiously complementary—points of view. The first was the religious or traditional one, which espoused the primacy of tradition and of religious authority over the claims of reason and human autonomy. The other criticism of the primacy of reason could come from those proclaiming that such primacy denies the autonomy of human will and creativity. Side by side with these radical 'external' criticisms, and in fact very often closely connected with them, there developed internal tensions and contradictions within the cultural programme of modernity between its various premises and between these premises and the institutional developments of modern societies. The most important of such tensions and antinomies were, first, that between totalizing and more diversified or pluralistic conceptions of the major components of this programme, of the very conception of reason and its place in human life and society and of the construction of nature, of human society and its history; secondly, that between reflexivity and active construction of nature and society; thirdly, those between different evaluations of major dimensions, of human experience; and fourthly, that between control and autonomy, discipline and freedom. The central focus of the dichotomy between totalizing and pluralistic visions has been that between the view that accepts the distinctiveness of different values and rationalities as against the view that conflates the different rationalities in a totalistic way, which basically subsumes valuerationality (Wertrationalitdf) or rationalities under instrumental rationality (Zweckrationalitdt) either in its technocratic or moralistic-Utopian versions. This tension developed first of all with respect to the very conception of reason and its place in the constitution of human society. It was manifest, for instance, as Stephen Toulmin has shown, even if in a rather exaggerated way, in the difference between the more pluralistic conceptions of

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Montaigne or Erasmus as against the totalizing vision of reason promulgated by Descartes.17 This tension between totalizing and pluralistic conceptions of human existence and social life developed also with respect to the conception of the course of human history—of its being constructed by some overarching totalizing vision guided by reason or by the 'spirit' of different collectivities, against the emphasis on the multiplicity of such paths. The Utopian eschatological conceptions inherent in belief in the possibility of bridging the gap or chasm between the transcendental and mundane orders entailed also some very specific ideas of time, especially as related to the course of human history. Among the most important of these conceptions, many of which have been rooted in Christian eschatology but have included also far-reaching transformations thereof, was, first, a vision of historical progress and of history as the process through which the cultural programme of modernity, especially individual autonomy and emancipation, would be implemented. Such progress was defined above all in terms of universalistic values of instrumental rationality, such as of reason, science and technology. In this conception there developed a very strong tendency to conflate science and technology with ultimate values, to conflate Wertrationalitdt with Zweckrationalitdt, human emancipation with instrumental, even technical, rationality. But however future-oriented this programme was, it also developed references to an imaginary human communal past. It had as well a strong evangelistic and chiliastic trend, which, together with its 'this-worldly' orientation, gave it a very strong impetus to expansion.18 As against such totalizing visions of history there developed different visions—perhaps best represented by Vico, and later by Herder19—of the 17. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: Free Press, 1990). 18. Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Albert Salomon, In Praise of Enlightenment (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1963); The Tyranny of Progress: Reflections on the Origins of Sociology (New York: Noonday Press, 1955). 19. Mark Lilla, G.B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); 'Was ist Gegenaufklarung?', Merkur 566 (1966), pp. 400-11; Isaiah Berlin, 'Two Concepts of Liberty', in Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 118-72; Vico and Herder (New York: Hogarth Press, 1976); Against the Current (New York: Hogarth Press, 1980); The Crooked Timber of Humanity (New York: J. Murray, 1991); Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico (trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Harold

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existence of multiple paths of histories of different societies. This major opposite (romantic) tendency emphasized the autonomy of emotions and the distinctiveness of primordial collectivities, but it shared with the new major programme many of the strong Utopian, semi-eschatological conceptions, even if certainly not the idea of progress.20 The second tension that developed within the programme was that between different conceptions of human autonomy and of its relation to the constitution of society and of nature—especially between, on the one hand, reflexivity and exploration, and, on the other hand, active construction or mastery of nature and of human activity and society; between the technocratic-engineering, and the more explorative, reflexive, critical and morally autonomous conceptions of construction of society and attitude to nature. The emphasis on active construction of society and mastery of nature could become closely connected with the tendency, inherent in the cognitive instrumental conceptions, to emphasize the radical dichotomy between subject and object and between humans and nature—reinforcing the radical criticism that claimed that the cultural programme of modernity necessarily entailed an alienation of humans from nature and from society. The third major tension that developed within the cultural programme of modernity was that with respect to the relative importance or primacy of different dimensions of human existence. Of special importance in this context has been the evaluation of the relative importance of the autonomy and predominance of reason, as against the emotional dimension of human existence, the latter being often closely related to or identified with the aesthetic dimension, or with various vital forces, or with so-called primordial components in the construction of collective identities. Closely related were tensions between different conceptions of the bases of human morality, especially concerning whether such morality can be based on or

Fisch, from the 3rd edn; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Anchor Books Edition, abr. and rev. edn, 1961); Johann Gottfried Herder, J.G. Herder on Social and Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). 20. Toulmin, Cosmopolite Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (trans. Frederick Lawrence; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987); Hans Blumenburg, Die Legitimitdt der Neuzeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987); S.N. Eisenstadt (ed.), PostTraditional Societies (New York: Norton, 1972); Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Hegel and Modern Society.

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grounded in universal principles, or grounded in instrumental rationality, or grounded in the concrete experiences of different human communities. 11

Cutting across these tensions or contradictions in the cultural programme of modernity, there developed within this programme, and above all within its institutionalizations, a strong continual tension between control and autonomy, between discipline and freedom. This tension has two basic roots: The first, most general one was the fact that the institutionalization of any ontological vision by definition entails limitations through the exercise of social control in which power and trust are connected with the distribution of resources, limitations on human creativity.21 But beyond this general fact, and in a sense more central to the understanding of the dynamics of modernity, this tension has been rooted in the continual—even if continually changing—contradictions between the basic premises of the cultural programme of modernity and the major institutional developments of modern societies, which were to some extent at least inherent in this programme. The first such contradiction has been that between, on the one hand, the emphasis on autonomy, and on the other hand the strong restrictive control dimension rooted in technocratic and/or moral visionary conceptions of the institutionalization of this programme—a control dimension forcefully analyzed, even if in an exaggerated way, by Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault.22 Among the most important manifestations of this control dimension were the homogenizing tendencies of the modern states, especially the post-revolutionary nation-states, and the conception of what 21. In greater detail, see S.N. Eisenstadt, Power, Trust and Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), especially Chapter 3. 22. Norbert Elias, The Court Society (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983); The Civilizing Process (New York: Urizen Books, 1978-82); Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith; New York: Pantheon Books, 1973); Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton; Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988); Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975); Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (trans. Richard Howard; New York: Vintage Books, 1965); and see Cornelius Castoriadis, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy (ed. David Ames Curtis; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), especially Chapter 7: 'Power, Politics, Autonomy', pp. 143-74, and Chapter 8: 'Reflections on "Rationality" and "Development" ', pp. 175-218.

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being civilized means that crystallized in bourgeois society. Closely related have been the contradictions so strongly emphasized by Weber.23 Thus, the second such contradiction was that between the creative dimension inherent in the visions that led to the crystallization of modernity, the visions of the Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment and the Revolutions, and the flattening of these visions, the 'disenchantment' of the world inherent in the growing routinization and above all in the growing bureaucratization of the modern world. Third was the contradiction, also stressed by Weber, between an overarching vision through which the modern world becomes meaningful, and the fragmentation of such meaning generated by the growing autonomy of the different institutional arenas—the economic, the political and the cultural. Fourth, there was the contradiction between the tendency towards selfdefinition and the construction of autonomous political units—above all states and nation-states—and the continual growth of international forces beyond the control of such seemingly autonomous self-constituted political unities. Given the continual social and cultural changes inherent in the development of modern societies, this tension between control and autonomy constituted—as Peter Wagner has shown—a continuous component of these developments.24 12

These tensions and contradictions bore also on the political arena and became manifest in it. The bringing together, above all in the wake of the Enlightenment and the Great Revolutions, of the various ideological and institutional orientations and traditions analyzed above into common cultural institutional frameworks, generated continual ideological and institutional tensions that became inherent components of the cultural and 23. Max Weber, Die Protestantische Ethik: Kritiken und Antikritiken (Gtitersloh: Giitersloher Verlagshaus, 1978); Politik aus Beruf (Berlin: Dunker and Humblot, 1968); The Rational and Social Foundations of Music (ed. and trans. Don Martindale, Johannes Riedel and Gertrude Neuwirth; Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1958); S.N. Eisenstadt (ed.), Max Weber on Charisma and Institution Building: Selected Papers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); W.G. Runciman (ed.), Max Weber: Selections in Translation (trans. E. Matthews; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). 24. Peter Wagner, A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline (London: Routledge, 1994).

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political programme of modernity, of the political dynamics of modern regimes. These tensions have been greatly intensified by their combination with tendencies towards the charismatization of the centre, towards the absolutization of the major dimensions of human existence, along with the development of the new centre-periphery relations and a new type of political process in modern societies. The first such tension was that between a constructivist approach— which views politics as the process of the reconstruction of society, and especially democratic politics (to follow Claude Lefort's or Johann Arnason's formulations) as active self-construction of society—as against a view that accepts society in its concrete incorporation. The second such tension, closely related to the one that developed in the overall cultural programmes of modernity, was that between an overall totalizing vision—usually Utopian and/or communal, and usually entailing a strong constructivist approach—or, on the other hand, a more pluralistic view that, while not necessarily denying a constructivistic approach to politics, entails the acceptance of multiple patterns of life and traditions and conceptions of social interest. This tension often coalesced with that between the Utopian and the civil components in the construction of modern political arenas and processes—that between 'revolutionary' and 'normal' politics, with the latter's acceptance of society in its concrete composition.25

13 These tensions crystallized in the realm of political ideology in the tension between, on the one hand, the legitimacy of the plurality of discrete individual and group interests and of different conceptions of the common will, and of the freedom to pursue such interests and conceptions, and on the other hand the totalizing orientations that denied the legitimacy of private interests and of different conceptions of the common good and that emphasized the totalistic reconstruction of society through political actions. The central focus of these tensions was the problem of the place of a plurality of (individual) interests, and their relations to the constitution 25. Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory (trans. David Macey; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). See also Johann P. Arnason, The Theory of Modernity and the Problematic of Democracy', Thesis Eleven 26 (1990), pp. 20-46; John S. Dryzek, 'Political Inclusion and the Dynamics of Democratization', American Political Science Review 90 (1996), pp. 475-87; and John Dunn, The History of Political Theory and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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of the general will in the constitutions and workings of modern, extremely constitutional democratic regimes. The bearers of the pluralistic conceptions envisaged that whatever resolutions between these conceptions are possible, they will be attained through the political process as focused in the workings of representative and juridical institutions and through the continual interweaving between state and civil society. The mirror image of these pluralistic visions, of these different conceptions of the legitimacy of multiple private individual or group interests and of different conceptions of the common good that developed in connection with the tensions inherent in the political programme of modernity, were what may be called various collectivistic orientations or ideologies which espoused the primacy of collectivity and/or of collective vision. Two broad such types of orientations or ideologies were especially important. One was some form of ideology emphasizing the primacy of a collectivity based on common primordial and/or spiritual attributes of—above all— national collectivity. The other, and possibly distinctively modern orientation or ideology, rooted in the revolutionary ideology, has been the Jacobin one. The essence of such Jacobin orientations was the belief in the possibility of transforming society through totalistic political action. These orientations, the historical roots of which go back to mediaeval eschatological sources, developed fully in conjunction with the political programme of modernity, and they epitomized the modern transformation of the sectarian attitudes to the antinomies of the Axial civilizations. The Jacobin components of the modern political programme have been manifest in a very strong emphasis on social and cultural activism, on the ability of persons to reconstruct society according to some transcendental vision, and with the closely connected very strong tendency towards the absolutization of the major dimensions of human experience as well as the major constituents or components of social order, along with the concomitant ideologization of politics. Such Jacobin orientations tend to emphasize belief in the primacy of politics and in the ability of politics to reconstitute society. The pristine Jacobin orientations and movements have been characterized by a strong predisposition to develop not only a totalistic worldview, but also overarching totalitarian all-encompassing deologies, which emphasize a total reconstitution of the social and politcal order, and which espouse a strong—even if not always universalistic— nissionary zeal. These orientations have become visible above all in the attempts to

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reconstruct the centres of their respective societies; in the almost total conflation of centre and periphery, negating the existence of intermediary institutions and associations—of what can sometimes be called civil society—thus conflating civil society with the overall community. The homogenizing tendencies promulgated by most modern nation-states, especially those that crystallized after the Revolutions, were strongly imbued with such Jacobin orientations. The Jacobin orientation in its pristine modern form or version developed in the various 'leftist' revolutionary movements, which often conflated the primacy of politics with the implementation of progress and reason. The Jacobin component also appeared in different concrete guises and in different combinations with other political ideological components. Thus indeed, as Norberto Bobbio has frequently emphasized in his works,26 the Jacobin component has been present equally in socialist and in fascist and in nationalistic movements, and so these orientations could become closely interwoven, as was the case in many fascist and NationalSocialist movements, with the movements emphasizing the primacy of primordial communities. The Jacobin component constitutes also a very strong component of many populist movements.27 It can also become closely interwoven with the upholding of the primacy of religious authority, as in the fundamentalist movements. This component could also

26. Norberto Bobbio, // Futuro delta Democrazia (Turin: Giulio Einaudl Editore, 1984); 'Postfazione', in Norberto Bobbio, Profile ideologico del Novecento italiano (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1990), pp. 177-85; Nicola Matteucci, 'Democrazia e autocrazia nel pensiero dl Norberto Bobbio', in Luigi Bonanate and Michelangelo Bovero (eds.), Per una Teoria generate della politica: Scritti dedicati Norberto Bobbio (Florence: Passigli Editori, 1983), pp. 149-79. 27. On the Jacobin elements in modern politics, see Cochin, La Revolution et la librepensee*, L'esprit du jacobinism^ and Jean Baechler, 'Preface' in Cochin, L'esprit du jacobinisme, pp. 7-33; J.L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (New York: Praeger, 1960). See also M.L. Salvador! and N. Tranfaglia (eds.), II Modelo politico giacobino e le rivoluzioni (Florence: Nuova Italia, 1984); M. Salvador!, Europe, America, Marxismo (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1990), Chapter 8; and Ernst Fraenkel, 'Strukturdefekte der Demokratie und deren Uberwindung' and 'Ratenmythos und soziale Selbstbestimmung', in Ernst Fraenkel, Deutschland und die westlichen Demokratien (Frankfurt on Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), pp. 68-95, 95-137. A very strong statement against the emphasis on 'common will' in the name of 'emancipation' can be found in Hermann Lubbe, Freiheit statt Emanzipationszwang: Die Liberalen Traditionen und das Ende der Marxistischen Illusionen (Zurich: Edition Interfrom, 1991).

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become manifest in more diffuse ways, as for instance in the intellectual pilgrimage to other societies in attempts to find there the full flowering of the Utopian revolutionary ideal,28 or in many totalistic attitudes that flourish in different social movements and in popular culture. In all of these settings, the Jacobin component has become connected with their stance with respect to the different antinomies of modernity developed within them.

14 It is these different conceptions of the relation between the individual and the social order, of the different modes of legitimation of modern political regimes, that generated some of the basic tensions in modern political discourse and its dynamics. It was within the basic framework of the political discourse of modernity that the concrete tensions in the political programme of modernity developed—namely, those between liberty and equality, between emphasis on a vision of the good social order and the 'narrow' interests of different sectors of the society, between the conception of the individual as an autonomous sovereign and emphasis on the community, between the Utopian and the 'rational' or 'procedural' components of this programme; and also the closely related tensions between 'revolutionary' and 'normal' politics and between different bases of legitimation of these regimes. In the political programme of modernity, these tensions and antimonies coalesced above all in the tension (to follow Lubbe's terminology) between freedom and emancipation, which to some extent coincides also with Isaiah Berlin's distinction between negative and positive freedom.29 These various tensions in the political programme of modernity were closely related to those between the different modes of legitimation of modern regimes, especially but not only of constitutional and democratic polities—namely, between, on the one hand, procedural legitimation in terms of civil adherence to rules of the game or different 'substantive' terms, and, on the other hand, a very strong tendency to promulgate other modes or bases of legitimation, above all, to use Edward Shils's terminology, various primordial, 'sacred'-religious or secular-ideological components.30 28. Eisenstadt, 'Transcendental Vision'. 29. Berlin, 'Two Concepts of Liberty'; Lubbe, Freiheit statt Emanzipationszwang. 30. Shils, 'Primordial, Personal, Sacred and Civil Ties'.

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The contradiction between, on the one hand, the emphasis on an encompassing revolutionary or technocratic vision, and, on the other, the acceptance of the possibility of multiple views about matters political and social and of the legitimation of multiple patterns of life and interests, along with the strong emphasis on procedural rules that is of the essence of constitutional regimes, became fully visible in the later Russian, Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions—but its ingredients could be identified quite explicitly in the Jacobin groups and ideologies in the French Revolution and, more implicitly, in some Puritan groups in England, the US, the Netherlands, and (in a more tortuous way) France. In all the latter societies, it was the constitutional republican option that won the day. The recognition of the legitimacy of multiple interests developed despite the revolutionary origins—with their monolithic totalistic and exclusivist visions—in most of these constitutional-democratic regimes. Indeed one of the most important problems in the analysis of modern constitutionaldemocratic regimes is to understand how the recognition of the legitimacy of multiple views of the good society could develop from such revolutionary origins. But even when such recognition did develop, it could not obliterate the fear of the potential divisiveness that could arise out of the development of multiple conceptions of the general will, as well as from the emphasis on multiple, different interests. Whatever the concrete manifestations of this Jacobin orientation, it constituted a continual component of the modern discourse, of the discourse of modernity. It is indeed the continual confrontation between this component and orientation and the more pluralistic orientations, as well as between different Jacobin ideologies, that constitutes one of the central elements at the core of the discourse of modernity. The challenge of the contradiction between an encompassing, totalistic, potentially totalitarian vision—or primordial collectivity—and a commitment to pluralistic premises, constituted an inherent element of these constitutional regimes and a basic component of the political dynamics of the modern era. None of the modern constitutional and/or liberal democracies has entirely done away—or can even possibly do away—with the Jacobin component, especially with its Utopian dimension, with the orientation to some primordial components of collective identity, or with the claims for the centrality of religion in the construction of collective identities or in the legitimization of the political order.

ORDER AND HISTORY AS A RESPONSE TO THE THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL PROBLEMS CONFRONTING HISTORIANS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY* Stephen A. McKnight

1. Introduction While Voegelin's contributions to political science and philosophy are widely recognized, his contributions to the study of history are not nearly as well known or appreciated. In this essay I want to relate Voegelin's magnum opus, Order and History, to three theoretical and methodological issues facing historians in the twentieth century. The first is what Arnold Toynbee referred to as the problem of cthe intelligible field of historical study'. This issue, while always a basic one, became acute in the twentieth century due to the extraordinary expansion of data on some 26 known civilizations. While this empirical data provided an unprecedented wealth of facts, they did not automatically translate into a wealth of historical knowledge and insight. Before the wide-ranging data could be integrated into a coherent whole, an essential core or primary field had to be established which penetrated to the foundations of human existence and accounted for the principal epochal shifts in history while simultaneously demonstrating what remained fundamentally constant in human experience. The second major issue centred on the question of the appropriate method of historical analysis. The issue has been framed more specifically in the twentieth century as the question of how to conduct a scientific study of history. Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee both claimed that the new wealth of data available on a multitude of civilizations constituted an adequate empirical foundation for the scientific analysis of human history. Both Spengler and Toynbee proposed using the language and the models of natural science as the framework for developing the new science * This essay is adapted from my article, ' The Ecumenic Age and the Issues Facing Historians in the Twentieth Century', The Political Science Reviewer T7 (1998), pp. 6897.

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of history. Spengler spoke of the morphology of cultures and traced organic, biological rhythms of birth and decay. Toynbee based his study around a similar organic cycle and invoked his famous law of Challenge and Response as the key to understanding the birth and death of civilizations. The third major issue confronting historians in this century has centred on the search for the meaning of history. This basic issue is, of course, not unique to this century. The eighteenth-century philosophes and nineteenthcentury figures like Auguste Comte and Karl Marx devised patterns that purported to bring to light the meaning of human existence in history. The problem that the twentieth-century historians faced was that the linear, progressivist patterns employed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were shattered by totalitarianism and two world wars. While the breakdown of the progressivist constructions posed fundamental problems, early figures like Spengler and Toynbee were confident that they could master the civilizational data and create a science of history that would bring to light its basic pattern and meaning. In order to make clear Voegelin's advances in dealing with the basic historiographical problems of our time, I want to set his efforts in context by examining a bit more fully the work of Spengler and Toynbee. 2. Spengler's The Decline of the West and Toynbee's A Study of History In the Introduction to The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler claimed that his study constituted nothing less than the Copernican Revolution in Western historiography.1 While this claim overestimates his actual contribution and his subsequent reputation, his allusion to a Copernican Revolution offers an apt characterization of the shift in perspective and approach that set off twentieth-century historiography and philosophy of history from the progressivist constructions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Spengler's primary purpose in using the Copernican analogy was to challenge these progressivist constructions and to signal a fundamental revision in the understanding of the place of Western civilization in human history. The progressivist constructions linked the destiny of Western civilization to the evolution of human reason from infantile beginnings in myth and religion to its maturation in modern science, especially social science. This superiority of knowledge was supposed 1. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (trans. Charles Francis Atkinson; 2 vols.; New York: Knopf, 1968), I, pp. 25, 39.

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to be the distinguishing trait that made Western European civilization superior to all others and virtually guaranteed that it would avoid the pitfalls that led all other societies to destruction and annihilation. In the imagery of Spengler's analogy, Western civilization occupied the privileged central position in the progressivist historical universe, which was comparable to the earth's position in the Cpre-Copernican' geocentric system. All other civilizations were by contrast mere satellites repeating a constant cycle of generation and disintegration. Spengler, writing after the political catastrophes of the early part of the twentieth century, dismissed this optimistic, progressivist view as only a Faustian dream that had no more grounding in historical fact than the Ptolemaic cosmology had in astronomical fact. In reality, Western civilization was no different from other civilizations because it was subject to the same organic laws of growth and decay. To support his 'Copernican Revolution' Spengler analyzed the histories of the major known civilizations to demonstrate the presence of this basic pattern of birth and decay and, having established this 'law', he argued that Western civilization had unquestionably entered the final irrevocable stage of disintegration and decay. This effort to establish laws' of civilizational development brings to light the second important feature of Spengler's Copernican allusion. Copernicus's heliocentric theory, bolstered by Galileo's empirical studies, marks the beginnning of the Scientific Revolution. As such, it signals an epistemological and methodological breakthrough in the understanding of the physical world. Spengler, in claiming to be the Copernicus of history, is also claiming to be grounding historiography in the principles and procedures of empirical science. Two developments purportedly made his scientific advance possible: (1) the tremendous expansion of data on nonWestern civilizations in the early part of the twentieth century, and (2) the equally important advances in biological science which supplied the appropriate organic analogies of growth and decay. Spengler, as we have already noted, overstates his own contribution. On the other hand, he does accurately set out the issues and the concerns that have occupied historians and philosophers of history for most of the century. The breakdown of the progressivist constructions initiated an ongoing search for the principles of a 'new science' of history that could adequately analyze the condition of Western civilization and accurately situate it within human history. Perhaps the best-known effort to develop a new scientific approach

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during the first half of the century is Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History.2 Toynbee began his project shortly after Spengler began his, though the first volumes did not appear until 1934, and the last set was not published until twenty years later. Like Spengler, Toynbee begins his first volume with a harsh criticism of Western historiography and indicates that he intends to lay the foundation for a new 'science' of civilizational history. For Toynbee the availability of data on 26 different civilizations made a truly scientific approach possible for the first time. According to Toynbee, these materials supplied a sufficient database for the development of empirically based scientific laws of civilizational genesis and disintegration. Moreover, the analysis of the 25 other civilizations (that had completed their cycle) made it possible to acquire an accurate diagnosis of the fate of Western civilization.3 In this regard, it is worth noting that Toynbee's view differs distinctly from Spengler's. Spengler believed his scientific analysis demonstrated that Western civilization had entered an irrevocable stage of disintegration and decay. Toynbee, on the other hand, was convinced that his scientific diagnosis could lead to a prescription for curing Western civilization of its deadly disease. These brief descriptions are, admittedly, inadequate treatments of Spengler's and Toynbee's histories. They serve the present purpose, nevertheless, by setting out the basic issues that were in the foreground as Voegelin was attempting to formulate his own science of politics and history. 3. Voegelin's New Science of Politics and History Voegelin's writings in the mid-1940s and early 1950s show that he was concerned with the same fundamental issues as Spengler and Toynbee. The key works to emerge from this time are 77?^ New Science of Politics (1952) and the first three volumes of Order and History (1956-57). The emphasis on a new science is, of course, apparent in the title of the former, and its opening sentence makes it clear that Voegelin was concerned with both politics and history: 'a theory of politics, if it penetrates to principles, 2. Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History (12 vols.; London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1934-54). 3. Toynbee's claim to be a scientist and an empiricist runs throughout his Study and also appears in a brief essay published shortly after the Study was completed. See Toynbee, 'A Study of History: What I Am Trying to Do', International Affairs 31 (1955), pp. 1-4.

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must at the same time be a theory of history'.4 The programme outlined in Order and History makes the emphasis on history even more pronounced and contains direct comparisons with the efforts of Spengler and Toynbee. These writings also make it clear that Voegelin's primary aim, like that of Spengler and Toynbee, is to understand the origin and nature of Western civilization's contemporary 'time of troubles'. The analysis that follows has three purposes. The first is to show that from the outset Voegelin's understanding of the primary problems of the 'intelligible field of historical study' and the nature of a science of history surpassed those of Spengler and Toynbee. The second, which is directly related to the first, is to develop briefly the foundations of Voegelin's Order and History. This background will set the stage for a fuller analysis of the theoretical and methodological revisions introduced in The Ecumenic Age, and will help to underscore the continuities and differences between the first three volumes of Order and History published in the 1950s and this long delayed fourth volume. We will begin the first stage of our analysis by examining an essay prepared in 1944. This article, entitled 'Political Theory and the Pattern of General History', is particularly useful because it provides a concise outline of the theoretical issues of concern to Voegelin and identifies the historical issues he regarded as most important at the time.5 At the opening of this essay, Voegelin indicates that the 'prodigious enlargement of our knowledge of historical materials' makes a thoroughgoing retheoretization in politics and history necessary. He then identifies five areas in which this retheoretization is most urgently needed. First of all, the growing body of data from ancient civilizations provides irrefutable evidence of parallel non-Western patterns of political and historical development that cannot be subsumed under the conventional Western patterns of political theory and political history. The standard histories of political ideas at the time began with the Greek polis and focused their analysis on the evolution of concepts of governmental authority. According to Voegelin, the new focus must be on what he calls 'problems of community-substance'.

4. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), p. 1. 5. Eric Voegelin, 'Political Theory and the Pattern of General History', American Political Science Review 38 (1944), pp. 746-54; reprinted in Ernest Stacey Griffith (ed.), Research in Political Science (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948), pp. 190-201. Citations are from the latter.

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POLITICS, ORDER AND HISTOR In the initial phases of civilizational cycles, the problems of communitysubstance, of its creation, its delimitation, and its articulation, are of equal importance with the problems of source and scope of governmental authority; and the same is true for the periods of political crisis, as for instance the present, when the problems of spiritual disintegration and regeneration, and of the community-creating political myth, come to the fore. The adaptation of the history of political theory to the process of politics would require a well elaborated theory of the ideas concerned with the mythical creation of communities, and of the far-reaching theological ramifications of these ideas.6

The second subject needing thorough reassessment is Plato's philosophy of politics. The new analysis must treat 'Plato's philosophy as an attempt at a spiritual reform of Hellas and as an attempt to create a new community-substance'. The third area in need of major revision is the treatment of the Roman imperial period, which can no longer be viewed as the culmination of Hellenic society but must be seen as a new imperial order. The fourth area requiring revision is the treatment of Christianity, or more specifically the analysis 'of the pneuma of Christ and of its function as the substance of the Christian community'. In this analysis, Voegelin indicates that particular attention needs to be directed to the 'eschatological sentiments and ideas [that] are the great source of political fermentation and revolution throughout Western history to this day'. The fifth area is one opened by developments in mediaeval studies which brought to light the contribution 'of the Teutonic tribes which were the active nucleus in the formation of the Western Empire and of the later national states'. Other research pointed out the need to examine the community idea found in 'Joachitic and Franciscan spiritual literature, which marks the beginning of the ideas of a Third Realm and of possible new mystical bodies replacing the mystical body of Christ'.7 Those familiar with Voegelin's writings will recognize the parallels with both The New Science of Politics and the first volumes of Order and History. While The New Science of Politics is an aggressive attack on positivism, it is equally an elaboration of the new science that undertakes the analysis of'community substance'. In fact, Voegelin's original title for this work was Truth and Representation', which reflected his stress upon the symbolizing function of political orders. As symbolizations of order, each society—whether ancient or modern—is organized around its basic 6. 7.

Voegelin, 'Political Theory', pp. 191, 198. Voegelin, 'Political Theory', pp. 199-200.

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understanding of the interrelation of'god, man, world and society'. This same emphasis on 'community substance' is found in the first volume of Order and History in the famous metaphor of 'the drama of humanity'. Here humankind in history is likened to an actor in an existential drama whose ironic role is to discover and write the part to be played. In this effort humanity has only two clues to its own identity: (1) the clues left by the other human actors over the course of time and (2) its own understanding of the identities of the other actors in this historical drama: God, the world and society. It is worth noting that the five topics identified in the essay of 1944 closely parallel the subject matter outlined for the proposed six volumes of Order and History. The study on Order and History...is an inquiry into the order of man, society, and history to the extent to which it has become accessible to science. The principal types of order, together with their self-expression in symbols, will be studied as they succeed one another in history. These types of order and symbolic form are the following: (1) The imperial organizations of the Ancient Near East, and their existence in the form of the cosmological myth; (2) the Chosen People, and its existence in historical form; (3) the polis and its myth, and the development of philosophy as the symbolic form of order; (4) the multicivilizational empires since Alexander, and the development of Christianity; (5) the modern national states, and the development of Gnosis as the symbolic form of order.

From the 1944 essay, The New Science of Politics, and the brief outline above, we can already recognize one of his most important contributions to historical study—his emphasis on community substance and on symbolizations of order. In developing this emphasis on humanity's symbolizing activity as the intelligible field of historical study, Voegelin is influenced by not only the expansion of historical data on ancient civilizations that Toynbee and Spengler point to but also by the retheoretization going on in the scholarly analysis of these materials. Much of the earlier historical work had followed the Comtean progressivist model which portrayed the evolution of the human mind (and human society) from its infancy in myth and religion through its adolescence in metaphysical speculation to its maturity in science and social science. Under the 8. Eric Voegelin, Order and History. I. Israel and Revelation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956), p. x.

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influence of the pioneering work of Mircea Eliade, Henri Frankfort and others, however, the early mythic or cosmological civilizations came to be regarded as complex and sophisticated symbolic expressions of political order. The characteristic feature of these 'cosmions' was their compact, undifferentiated view of man, society, God and world. The principal historical task arising from this new view of ancient civilizations was the analysis of the differentiation of the underlying mythic conception of order into separate, but interdependent, modes of experience and symbolization as they unfold in history. Perhaps the most important task of all was to re-examine the relation of myth, philosophy, religion and science that had been so badly distorted by Comte's influential history. In discussing Voegelin's emphasis on the differentiation of symbolizations of order, it is worth noting affinities with the work of Ernst Cassirer. In 1923 Cassirer introduced his programme for a 'philosophy of symbolic forms'.9 In describing this programme, he explained that it was to constitute a fundamental re-evaluation of the relation of modern science to earlier modes of experience and symbolization. Interestingly, Cassirer explained that the impetus for this re-evaluation did not stem so much from new data on ancient civilizations as it did from epistemological shifts prompted by the 'new physics'. Until he realized the epistemological importance of these theoretical developments, Cassirer had been a traditional neo-Kantian, attempting to trace the stages in the development of human rationality from its primitive mythic beginnings up to its full development in science. The developments in science plus the opening of the historical horizon fundamentally changed his enterprise. First of all, it became clear that science was not 'the prototype of all cognition worthy of the name'.10 Science is instead a symbolic endeavour to describe phenomena which is shaped both by what the instruments of observation are able to detect and by the observer's capacity to organize and articulate the significance of the phenomena viewed. In a word, modern science is a symbolic activity, no different from any other mode of experience and symbolization (though its specific features can, of course, be differentiated 9. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (trans. Ralph Manheim; 3 vols.; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944). The German original appeared in three volumes published between 1923 and 1929. 10. For a useful discussion, see William Werkmeister, 'Cassirer's Advance beyond Neo-Kantianism', in Paul Arthur Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer (Evanston, IL: The Library of Living Philosophers, 1949), pp. 759-98 (761); especially pp. 761-77.

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from other symbolic modes). Recognition of this common symbolizing activity inspired Cassirer's monumental attempt to describe the basic character of each of these modes of symbolization, to identify their generic features, and to differentiate their specific characteristics. In 1944 Cassirer published a compact English version of the main elements of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms as An Essay on Man. He opened this essay by describing the ironic situation confronting philosophers and historians. At no other time in human history had such an extraordinary amount of data on the nature of humanity and history been available. On the other hand, this rich collection of data was virtually unusable because it lacked the basic theoretical orientation that could integrate it and make its significance known. Unless this 'thread of Ariadne' could be found, the data was relatively useless. The thread Cassirer proposed was an epistemological reformulation depicting man as 'an animate symbolicum'.n This description of Cassirer's enterprise suggests the basic connection with both Voegelin's historical analysis of political order and his critique of the epistemological flaws of positivist social science. Voegelin, like Cassirer, conceives of humankind as an animale symbolicum. That is, the unique feature of human existence and human history is the ongoing effort to understand and articulate the meaning and purpose of existence; and, like Cassirer, Voegelin departs from the positivist and neo-Kantian epistemological models by using new empirical data to examine the basic modes of symbolization and trace their historical differentiation. Another important parallel in their work is in the recognition that this new epistemology requires a substantial alteration of prevailing views of the evolution of modern rationalism, especially the view of positivistic science and its derivative, positivistic social science. This emphasis on a new under11. According to Cassirer, 'No former age was ever in such a favorable position with regard to the sources of our knowledge of human nature. Psychology, ethnology, anthropology, and history have amassed an astoundingly rich and constantly increasin body of facts. Our technical instruments for observation and experimentation have been immensely improved, and our analyses have become sharper and more penetrating. We appear, nevertheless, not yet to have found a method for the mastery and organization of this material. When compared with our own abundance the past may seem very poor. But our wealth of facts is not necessarily a wealth of thoughts. Unles we succeed in finding a clue of Ariadne to lead us out of this labyrinth, we can have no real insight into the general character of human culture; we shall remain lost in a mass of disconnected and disintegrated data which seem to lack all conceptual unity.' Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944), p. 22.

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standing of science is an important element of Voegelin's new science of politics and history and will be discussed later. At this point I need to complete this comparison of Cassirer's and Voegelin's theories of symbolization by pointing out a fundamental difference. Cassirer, in developing a philosophy of symbolic forms, is concerned primarily with the epistemological issues. Voegelin, on the other hand, attempts to situate this differentiation of modes of symbolization within the concrete societies in which they become manifest and within the general historical periods in which they occur. The effort to integrate this epistemological analysis with the analysis of the history of order and disorder is clearly demonstrated in the description of the contents of the six volumes of Order and History quoted above. Having presented a brief description of the key elements of Voegelin's science of history as it was developing in the 1940s and 1950s, we may usefully compare it to those of Toynbee and Spengler. As we have seen from previous discussion, both Toynbee and Spengler saw in the increase of historical data the prospects of developing a new science. In this sense, there is an obvious tie with Voegelin's work. But this connection makes all the more apparent the significance of Voegelin's theoretical advances. In both Spengler's and Toynbee's histories, the effort to develop a scientific study is in many ways a carryover of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century notions. That is, the effort to develop a science of history is modelled after the natural sciences. Spengler formulates a law of civilizational development that is analogous to the organic model of growth and decay. Moreover, he introduces into his description of the stages of civilizational development language appropriated from biological science, for example, pseudomorphosis. Similarly, Toynbee borrows the language of the natural sciences by describing the increase in historical data as establishing laboratory conditions' for the formulation of scientific laws of civilizational development. Moreover, his well-known law of challenge and response is an obvious parallel to the stimulus and response model of the biological sciences. Voegelin's development of a new science, as he explains in The New Science of Politics, reverses the prevalent practice of giving primacy to methodology. For Voegelin, the beginning of theoretical or scientific analysis is the identification of the proper subject of study and the subsequent determination of the best method to treat that subject. For Voegelin the fundamental subject to be studied is humanity in history. The field of study that brings the unique character of human existence to light is the

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symbolizations of order that represent the efforts of humankind to articulate the meaning and purpose of existence. The method for studying this subject is the comparative analysis of these symbolizations as they unfold in history. With this discussion of the issues facing twentieth-century historians in mind, it is possible to turn to The Ecumenic Age and explore how it modifies and refines Voegelin's conceptions of the intelligible field and the method of historical study as presented in the early volumes of Order and History. 4. Symbolizations of Order and the Breakdown of Cosmological Truth In the early volumes of Order and History, Voegelin examines the conceptions of order in the imperial civilizations of the ancient Near East, the conditions under which they break down, and the circumstances under which new symbolizations of order arise.12 Under cosmological, mythic experience, society is not conceived as a 'secular' power organization whose function is primarily pragmatic or utilitarian. A society is a 'cosmion', a vital part of the cosmos and of the consubstantial community of God and man, world and society. The rule of a king over his subjects is understood to be both analogous and complementary to the rule of the intracosmic gods over the rest of creation. The society, then, functions as the locus of meaning and the source of human self-understanding. The god who determines 'the borderline between the heaven and the nether world' determines thereby what is human order; the king as the mediator represents both god and man when, through his rule, he administers the cosmic order of reality; and the temple is the cosmic omphalos where the upper and the nether worlds meet... For the order of his humanity, man has still to rely on the rather compact borderline drawn by the summus deus of the empire and administered by the king; only in the form of empire can man Jive in the truth of his humanity under the gods. 13

12. Eric Voegelin, Order and History, I (1956); II. The World of the Polis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957); III. Plato and Aristotle (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957). 13. Though I am referring to the content of his earlier volumes, I am quoting from Eric Voegelin, Order and History. IV. The Ecumenic Age (Raton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), which offers a recapitulation of the empirical civilizations, cosmological truth, and 'the primary experience of the cosmos'. This passage is from The Ecumenic Age, p. 93. All subsequent textual references will follow the quotation

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Evidence of this interconnection between divine and human order is found, for example, in the Egyptian Memphite Theology. Political order is established through the action of the gods and then installed on the human level. In the Sumerian King List, kingship is created in heaven and lowered to earth (cf. pp. 68-69). Records of significant events in the human sector are made precisely because of their significance in the overall cosmic drama. The Hittite king Suppiluliumas, for example, referring to his victory over the Mitanni, speaks as executor of a divine decree and renders account to the storm god whose favourite he is. Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt, in similar fashion, understands the expulsion of the Hyksos as an event in the restoration of cosmic order; and the Behistun Inscription of Darius I reports the defeat of his enemies as a victory of the cosmic forces of order and truth over chaos and the lie (cf. pp. 68-69). It is important to underscore the intracosmic nature of this experience and symbolization. The gods referred to are nature forces—for example, the Hittite storm god, or the Egyptian Ra, the sun. Moreover, these gods are indistinguishable from the things themselves. They are not transcendent, supernatural beings. As we shall see, the intracosmic, consubstantial structure of the community of being must be understood if its subsequent breakdown and the rise of alternative modes of symbolization is to be properly understood. The cosmological empires and the cosmological style of truth break down for both pragmatic and experiential reasons.14 For the present purposes, the concern is the experiential breakdown, which occurs independent of and prior to the pragmatic. Voegelin's discussion of this topic in The Ecumenic Age is especially needed because a good deal of confusion and misunderstanding surround it—much of it centring on the concept of 'leaps in being', which appears in the earlier volumes. The compact, consubstantial experience is broken when the divine ground or source of cosmic order is experienced, not as intracosmic, but as separate from the existent things in the cosmos.15 In the first three volumes Voegelin refers and be put in parentheses. Unless otherwise identified, all quotations are from this volume. 14. Both causes are examined in detail in Order and History, IV, pp. 67-78 and 117-33. 15. While the first three volumes of Order and History examine the Hellenic experience of the ground as a non-existent arche and the Israelite experience of a transcendent creator-God, the spiritual eruptions do occur worldwide—for example, in India with the Buddha, and in China with Confucius and Lao Tse. These Eastern leaps

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to these theophanic, revelatory experiences as 'leaps in being' primarily because that is exactly the way they were experienced by their recipients. They result, not in a quantitative advance in cosmological understanding, but in a qualitative jump which transforms the previous style of truth into 'untruth'.16 The problem that many readers have had is to understand the experiential connections linking the cosmological and subsequent modes of understanding in a way that permits Voegelin to state that the study of order reveals cmen of the same nature as ours, wrestling with the same problems as ours, under the conditions of more compact experiences of reality and correspondingly less differentiated instruments of symbolization'.17 In order to clarify this common core of human experience, it is necessary to look further at 'the cosmological style of truth'. We have already seen that reality is experienced as consubstantial and intracosmic. In addition to this experience of the cosmos as the lasting ground of order for society, there is, at the same time, the awareness of the potential destruction, not only of social but also of cosmic order. Evidence of this is found in the records of political victories already alluded to. 'The pride inspiring the reports of victory can barely veil an undercurrent of anxiety, a vivid sense of existence triumphant over the abyss of possible annihilation' (p. 70). This sense of annihilation is not restricted to the political realm. The society is an analogue of the cosmos; therefore, the breakdown of an empire entails more than the murderous unpleasantness of political disorder; it is a spiritual catastrophe (cf. p. 93). 'In spite of its embracingness, the shelter of the cosmos is not safe—and perhaps it is no shelter at all' (p. 70). The evidence of the anxiety over cosmic instability is also found in the myth and rituals of social and cosmic renewal: [At] the center of the field of the cosmological myth... there opens the rich field of symbolism that Mircea Eliade has explored in his Mythe de Internal retour (1949). It is the field of the...rituals of renewal that has, as Eliade observes, the function of abolishing time, of undoing its waste and corruption, and of returning to the pristine order of the cosmos through a repetition of the cosmogonic act. He speaks of the purpose of the New Year rituals as the 'statisation' du devenir, as the attempt to bring becoming to a

receive attention in The Ecumenic Age, both in the terms of their characteristic features and their connections with the Western leaps. See Order and History, IV, pp. 272-336. 16. This transition from truth to untruth will be treated in some detail in the next section. 17. Voegelin, Order and History, II, pp. 5-6.

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(p. 73).

Voegelin has added to the pioneering work of Eliade by demonstrating that, in addition to the mythospeculation on the origins of existing 'things' in the forms of anthropogony, theogony and cosmogony, there is a complementary speculation on the ground of society. Voegelin calls this mode 'historiogenesis': its function is to move from the author's present back through mythic history to the beginning of the cosmos in order to align the social creation with the cosmic. The principal motive in historiogenesis is the same as in the other mythospeculative constructions. It is an attempt to supply a lasting, eternal ground for social order that will be able to resist the corrosive, destructive flow of time.18 This underlying awareness of existence situated over the abyss of non-existence Voegelin identifies as humanity's primary experience. The experience of a cosmos existing in precarious balance on the edge of emergence from nothing and return to nothing must be acknowledged, therefore, as lying at the center of the primary experience of the cosmos' (p. 73). The experience of nothingness, then, is not just a modern phenomenon. It is the primary experience of humanity at all times.19 The similarities and differences between the cosmological and subsequent modes of experience and symbolization now become clear. All share the same base, that is, the primary experience of the dipolar tension between existence and non-existence. The differences arise from the degree to which the dipolar nature of experience is fully and clearly articulated. In cosmological myth all reality is symbolized as a cosmos of intracosmic 'things'. The existent things are consubstantial patterns in the divinely ordered cosmos, and even the non-existent divine ground is symbolized as the intracosmic gods. The reality of life in the In-Between of existence and non-existence then cannot receive its full articulation as long as the divine arche is symbolized as an existent 'thing'. Now the need to underscore the 18. See Chapter 1, 'Historiogenesis', in Order and History, IV, pp. 59-113. In addition to this careful analysis of ancient historiogenetic speculation, Voegelin points to its presence in modern political ideologies and philosophies of history. 19. Voegelin's discussion of the primary experience as the constant in human consciousness is found in pp. 74-78. Here extremely helpful connections between ancient and modern symbolisms are drawn.

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intracosmic nature of divinity in the myth becomes clear. It is not until after the spiritual eruptions that the ground is fully experienced and symbolized as transcendent, non-existent, and a-cosmic. To summarize, then, the common experience of humanity is the dipolar tension of existence and non-existence. And, while there are several reasons for it, a fundamental cause of the breakdown of cosmological order is its inadequate and inaccurate expression of the reality of the non-existent ground. While the 'leaps in being' are experienced by philosophers and other spiritual leaders, their impact is by no means limited to philosophy or religion. The shifts in the understanding of the ground of being shake the foundation of the understanding of humanity, society and the world. The source of social order, for example, can no longer be a cosmic omphalos; and the expression of order cannot be in terms of vegetative and celestial rhythms. This is the great problem for Israel as it attempts to establish its constitution and monarchy. The Exodus experience is more than deliverance from physical bondage; it is also rescue from the falseness of Egyptian cosmological existence. While the Israelite experience is the most dramatic example, there are similar problems in Hellas when the cosmological myth breaks down and Hesiod and the Pre-Socratics begin a new search for the ground of personal and social order. This search culminates in the shift in understanding of political order as a microcosm. The flow of divine presence is relocated in the soul of man, and society becomes not microcosmic but macroanthropomorphic. As a consequence, political theory begins with a study of human nature and not the cycles of the cosmos. As the cosmological style of truth begins to break down under the impact of worldwide spiritual eruptions, it is almost simultaneously transformed by pragmatic political events. Multicivilizational empires expanding over the known world are created from the agglomeration of cultural, ethnic civilizations. The conflict and interaction of the ecumenic empires with the 'spiritual communities' formed under the influence of the 'leaps in being' is the specific subject matter of The Ecumenic Age. 5. Ecumenic Empires and Universal Humanity It is appropriate now to examine the basic meanings of ecumenic and ecumenic empire. In particular, it is important to note the connection between the expansion of empires over the known geography of the world and the burgeoning recognition of a universal humanity under one universal order.

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POLITICS , ORDER AND HISTORY For the enlargements of the social horizon from tribal society to city-state, and further on to an empire which comprises the whole area of a civilization, are not mere quantitative increases in the number of population, but qualitative jumps in social organization which affect the understanding of human nature. They were experienced as creative efforts by which man achieved a differentiated consciousness both of himself and of the divine origin of an order that is the same for all men. Through the hard reality of empire, there begins to shine forth, as the subject of history, a universal mankind under God (p. 95).

The pragmatic events of empire then serve as agents for the widening and deepening of the understanding of humanity, society and God and complement the revelatory, theophanic experiences occurring at the same time. They, in fact, become part of the spiritual exodus from cosmological existence. 'Under the successors of Cyrus the Great, the Achaemenian conquest of Babylon is metamorphosed into an exodus from its cosmological form, inasmuch as the new empire is conceived as the realm of peace and justice for all men under the universal Truth of Ahuramazda' (p. 212). Note well that the substance of order that fills the far-flung empire through the conquering and administrative action of the king is no longer cosmic, but rather the spiritual and moral substance of Ahuramazda. The Macedonian conquest of Alexander continues the exodus from the cosmological style of truth: [The] conception of an Homonoia of mankind does not continue the cosmological form of the older empires but moves on the line from the Platonic-Aristotelian to the Pauline Homonoia. Alexander certainly tried to transform his pragmatic conquest into an ecumenic community (koinonia) under the divine Nous, fortified by the older symbolism of God as the father of all men (p. 212).

Alexander's concern with the society of all humankind that had become visible beyond the confines of former concrete societies is expressed further in a speech attributed to him by Plutarch. Alexander bade his subjects consider the ecumene (oikoumene) their fatherland, his army their citadel (akropolis) and protection, all good men their kinsmen, and all bad men not of their kin (allophylous). They should not distinguish, as formerly, between Hellenes and barbarians by customs and apparel; rather what is excellent (arete) should be recognized as Hellenic, what is iniquitous (kakia) as barbaric (cf. pp. 153-65). The ecumenic expanse, while it opens the way for the recognition of a universal humanity under one pervasive order, also brings profound spiritual disturbances and identity crises. In fact, the overall impact, despite the

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intentions of the founders, is the contraction and fragmentation of humanity's experience of order and reality. Polybius dramatizes one of the basic problems in his famous account of the Roman general Scipio surveying the ruins of Carthage. The great general is not filled with the pride of victory. Instead, he begins to weep. Why? Because Rome awaits the same destiny as Carthage. The empires, despite their attempts to establish a permanent domain and become an imperium sine fine, rise and fall in rapid succession. Furthermore, the efforts to move from cosmological societies to a universal empire distributing the divine substance over the world fails miserably.20 As a result, their victims experience them as threats to order which destroy their own culture and leave nothing more than a cultural and spiritual vacuum. Consequently, the social realm is experienced not as the locus of the flow of divine order but rather as chaotic and even demonic. The realm of order contracts into the self. Mystery religions proliferate, attesting to the individual's sense of despair and the conviction that truth must be obtained through non-rational means. One of the most concise and striking demonstrations of the spiritual disturbances occurring in this epoch is revealed by Voegelin's analysis of the extraordinary change in the meaning of the key term ecumenefrom the time of Homer to Polybius (cf pp. 201-11). For Polybius, the term refers simply to the known geographic area of the Mediterranean and Near East. It is the 'inhabited world', the war theatre in which competing empires struggle for world domination. Originally, the symbol, along with its complement okeanos, expressed the wholeness and unity of cosmic order. In the Homeric epics the oikoumene is not a territory to be conquered together with its population. It designates the familiar habitat of man bounded by the okeanos which separates man's realm from the divine. The experience of the 'horizon' as the boundary between the visible expanse of the oikoumene and the divine mystery of its being is still fully alive; and the integral symbolism of oikoumene-okeanos still expresses the In-Between reality of the cosmos as a Whole (p. 203).

In the Odyssey, the okeanos marks the horizon where Odysseus finds the Cimmerians and the entrance to the underworld of the dead. It is also the boundary of the oikoumene beyond which lie the Islands of the Blessed. These integral symbols then express the primary experience of the cosmos 20. For Voegelin's discussion of the failure of syncretism and the symbolic problems of expressing a universal a-cosmic order through pro-cosmic means, see pp. 22-27 and 145-70.

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and the cosmological understanding of the familiar world bounded by the divine mystery. As imperial conquest and exploratory expansion open the geography, the okeanos symbol proves 'empirically' untenable. The terrain is bounded by the sea (thalassd) not the okeanos. The sea, while treacherous, is navigable. With the literalization of the symbol of divine mystery into a component in the familiar world, the engendering experience (primary experience) is lost. The ecumene becomes a field of human action, primarily the libido dominandi. Political action becomes conquest and expansion, and sound political action is measured in utilitarian or pragmatic terms, not as attunement to the arche.21 So the ecumenic expansion, which is potentially a great breakthrough in human consciousness, results in a contracted, deformed view of reality. While the events in the ecumene result in a division between the social and personal and between the secular and spiritual, the two realms, of course, never completely split. The effect of the spiritual eruptions on the understanding of empire have already been pointed out in the reference to the Persian and Macedonian conceptions. In like manner, the spiritual communities must evaluate the meaning of the events in pragmatic history. 6. Spiritual Eruptions: Prospects and Problems Paul, like Polybius, saw the Roman expansion as extraordinary and unprecedented. For him, it paved the way for the proclamation of the kerygma to the whole of humanity and was preparatory to the Eschaton or Parousia. His sense of ministry is rooted in this conviction. With great urgency, he travelled throughout the ecumene, visiting representative centres so that humankind might hear and accept the gospel. With the delay of the Parousia, the church eventually organizes itself into a power centre competing with the secular empires for control of the world. The tendency to contract universal humanity under God into the temporal ecumene, of course, is not limited to the Christian church. Throughout the East and West, religious communities forcefully spread their Truth' over the ecumene in the hopes of converting humankind and transforming society.

21. Voegelin furthers this analysis of changes in the understanding of order by examining the root concepts of man, society and history in the histories of Herodotus, Thucydides and Polybius. See pp. 171-92.

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At the same time, the senselessness of pragmatic history is felt by many spiritual communities and there emerges within them a yearning for escape. The ecumenic epoch is, therefore, the time of the outbursts of messianism, apocalypticism and gnosticism. Whether the yearning for release stresses the release of the individual from the prison of the world or the political reconstruction of society, the motivating experience is the same: the senseless chaotic nature of empire. Despair is not the only stimulus to apocalyptic and gnostic responses. The nature of theophanic experience is itself a contributing factor. As noted above, under theophanic experience, the locus of divine experience shifts from the cosmic omphalos to the human soul. Moreover, there is an accompanying 'de-divinization' of the cosmos due to the deepening awareness of the non-existent, transcendent ground or arche. As Voegelin succinctly states it, the sense of divine Beginning gives away in revelatory experience to the divine Beyond (cf. pp. 7-27). This new component of experience not only deepens and transforms the understanding of the community of being—if not kept in balance, the pull of the Beyond can become overwhelming. The world will, consequently, be viewed as demonic, and society as irredeemably corrupt. Gnosticism is, of course, the clearest instance. It separates the god of Beginning from the moral, transcendent God of the Beyond, and views the world and the flesh as prisons.22 These comments, though brief, are hopefully adequate to demonstrate that Voegelin recognized that the spiritual communities, under the combined impact of ecumenic expansion and theophanic experience, run the risk of distorting reality. Political expansion and exploration produced a diminution and disintegration of the boundary of the okeanos, and the social realm was 'secularized'. The spiritual communities ran a corollary risk of denigrating the status of the world and society because of the overwhelming experience of the Beyond. In both cases part of reality is lopped

22. While it would be desirable to examine Voegelin's analysis of the difficulties of maintaining the balance between the experiences of Beginning and Beyond, limitations of space prevent it. The basic argument is clearly and concisely stated by Voegelin in the following sections of The Ecumenic Age: 'The Tension of Consciousness: Plato, Aristotle, Israel' (pp. 11-20), 'The Balance Lost: Gnosticism' (pp. 20-27), 'The Balance Regained: Philo' (pp. 27-36), 'The Deformation of Philosophy into Doctrine' (pp. 3743), 'Religion' and 'Scripture' (pp. 43-57), and 'The Balance of Consciousness' (pp. 227-38).

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off. Both destroy the balance of the primary experience and initiate a long history of deformed symbolizations of order. 7. The Ecumenic Age, the Intelligible Field of Study, and the Science of History The growing recognition that the spiritual eruptions are sources of psychical and political disturbance and disorientation is a major factor in shifting the emphasis of Order and History from an analysis of representative political orders in Volumes 1-3, to a history of consciousness in Volume 4, The Ecumenic Age. In the original programme of Order and History, Voegelin proposed to analyze the ongoing search for order in history as it emerges in concrete political orders. However, the study of the ecumenic epoch proved the concentration on the order of empires untenable on two accounts. First of all, the significant events in the unfolding history of order are not always part of the order of empire. The spiritual eruptions, which occur independently of the social order, become primary forces in the search for meaning and order in society and history. Furthermore, political order and political history are not closed, self-contained fields of study. They do not contain within them all the factors necessary to make their creation and deterioration intelligible. We have seen, for example, that the formation of ecumenic empires is directly affected by the spiritual eruptions; and the cosmological empires are broken by both pragmatic and experiential factors. If the political orders are not intelligible in themselves, then they obviously cannot be the intelligible field of historical study. The field of study must, therefore, be opened to include such diverse phenomena as concrete political orders, events in philosophical consciousness, messianism and apocalypticism, and mysticism. Adequate analysis now requires the examination of the total configuration, that is, the pragmatic and the spiritual events that shape an epoch. Such disparate phenomena as cosmological empires, leaps in being, ecumenic empires, and modern ideologies may be comparatively analyzed because each offers an account of the structure of reality and identifies formative forces shaping humanity, society and history. Each, that is, offers a response to the primary experience of existence and non-existence. So, the intelligible field becomes expanded beyond its original conception. On the other hand, it remains essentially the same—that is, the key to understanding human history is still the symbolizations of order that emerge and shape epochal events, which run synchronically and diachronically through human experience.

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The second issue, the nature of the scientific study of human history, then remains basically the same: Humanity is an animate symbolicum, attempting to express the meaning and purpose of existence. This symbolizing activity is the universal future of existence. The variations in the nature of the experience and symbolization of order and disorder underlies the differences in historical epochs, civilizational development and spiritual insight. The third issue, the problem of meaning in history, is approached differently in The Ecumenic Age. In the Introduction, Voegelin admits that elements of a single line of meaning remained in his own work even as he attacked it in the work of others. In criticizing the single line of progress culminating in the modem West, Voegelin created a single line of disorientation and derailment that could not accommodate non-Western developments in the drama of humanity and could not adequately catalogue and analyze the forces shaping the modern West. So in The Ecumenic Age, he stressed that it is necessary for the historical analysis to move synchronically as well as diachronically, and the image of a single line must be replaced by the image of a web: In this new form, the analysis had to move backward and forward and sideways, in order to follow empirically the patterns of meaning as they revealed themselves in the self-interpretation of persons and societies in history. It was a movement through a web of meaning with a plurality of nodal points

(p. 57).

Thus, even though Voegelin was critical of the modern search for meaning in history, he did not succeed in completely breaking from it until The Ecumenic Age. 8. Summary and Conclusion While these shifts are highly significant, it is important to stress that they do not reflect a change in the basic intent and purpose of Voegelin's programme as formulated in the 1940s and 1950s. He is still concerned: (1) to provide an empirically based, theoretically sound analysis of the history of social order and disorder, and (2) to shed light on modern psychical and political disturbance and disorientation. The principles of Voegelin's science of history found in The Ecumenic Age may be stated as follows: 1. The first principle—that the substance of history is the ongoing search for order—is similar to the one set forth in the 1940s and 1950s. However, there is now no single locus of that unfolding drama of history.

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The field of study must, therefore, be opened to include such diverse phenomena as concrete political orders, events in philosophical consciousness, messianism and apocalypticism, and mysticism. Adequate analysis now requires the examination of the total configuration, that is, the pragmatic and the spiritual events that shape an epoch. 2. Such disparate phenomena as cosmological empires, leaps in being, ecumenic empires, and modern ideologies may be comparatively analyzed because each offers an account of the structure of reality and identifies formative forces shaping humanity, society and history. Each, that is, offers a response to the primary experience of existence and non-existence. 3. The search for meaning is the primary preoccupation of humanity, and history is a record of the attempts to articulate the meaning of existence. These efforts become the field of study for the historian. And, while the historian cannot construct or derive a pattern of meaning in history, symbolizations of order can be assessed with regard to their adequacy and accuracy in expressing this mystery of existence. Modern constructions are no different from other constructions in that all are symbolizations that attempt, insofar as humanly possible, to express the fundamental experience of reality. Of course, the attempt to express the truth about these ultimate matters does not guarantee that truth is indeed attained. In fact, in Voegelin's work he repeatedly emphasizes that a deformed, disordered construction can and has emerged in the course of history. At best all that can be attained is a likely truth (a myth). The task of the modern historian is to examine these symbolic structures, to understand their engendering experiences as far as possible, and to thereby explore the underpinnings of the experiences that stand at the base of the claims being made. 4. Voegelin's work from the 1940s through the final volumes of Order and History must be understood and appreciated as a rigorous attempt to re-establish a science of politics and history. This effort is consistent with both the classical, philosophical meaning of science and the current meaning of science in the post-Newtonian, post-Kantian sense. In classical philosophy, Plato explained that accounts of reality can at best be likely stories, myths. Philosophy, especially political philosophy, can never move beyond this limitation of human capability. On the other hand, the knowledge that human beings acquire can be used to assess the merits of the claims made by political and spiritual leaders to represent the truth of human existence. Similarly, the new physics's emphasis on relativity and uncertainty has undercut natural science's claim to establish laws or to penetrate to the ultimate structure of the natural world. Heisenberg's work

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demonstrates that there is an inherent problem with human observation and participation in analysis, and that ultimately what can be known is limited by our inability to fully comprehend data available and by our restricted capacities for experience. At the same time, while science admits that it is relative, it does not refrain from making fundamental judgments based on data available. Though the new physics is relative, there are no debates over the merits of Einsteinian physics as opposed to Newtonian physics. The data available and the theoretical insights available do not make this a viable question. By analogy, Voegelin proposes to restore the function of the scientific analysis of order and disorder. That is, while judgments must be relative, there are sufficient data and sufficient theoretical insights to reach some fundamental assessments. Therefore, Value free social science' is no science at all.

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Part III

ORDER AND HISTORY: THEMES AND VARIATIONS

REVISITING VOEGELIN'S ISRAEL AND REVELATION AFTER TWENTY-FIVE YEARS* Bernhard W. Anderson

1. Introduction The monumental character of Eric Voegelin's work, Order in History, is evident in the fact that some 40 years after the publication in 1956 of its foundational volume Israel and Revelation,1 this work has been the subject of two major symposia, one at San Francisco in 1996 during the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, and another at the University of Manchester, England, in 1997. The explanation for this extraordinary persistence of interest must lie, at least in part, in the philosophical boldness of the project and the creative imagination of a mentor who unleashed an 'impulse'2 that urges disciples to appreciate, re-evaluate, and go beyond. Revisiting Voegelin's Israel and Revelation after a quarter of a century is intellectually exhilarating. Normally we think that political science deals with, and is restricted to, pragmatic history; but here is a work, in the philosophical tradition of Plato, Aristotle and Augustine, that lures us into political philosophy. In a time when metaphysics has been put on the shelf in many citadels of learning, it is refreshing to be invited to think philosophically about 'the metaphysical source of order in history5. This kind of philosophical interest is rare in my field—so rare that when I, a modest biblical theologian, come into this professional company which speaks with philosophical charisma, the ancient proverb is relevant: 'Is Saul also among the prophets?' (1 Sam. 10.12). I am neither a political scientist nor a philosopher. My task is to respond to Voegelin's work as a biblical scholar, particularly as an Old Testament * An earlier version of this paper appeared in William M. Thompson and David L Morse (eds.), Voegelin's Israel and Revelation: An Interdisciplinary Debate and Anthology (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2000), pp. 47-60. 1. Eric Voegelin, Order and History. I. Israel and Revelation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956). 2. See Glenn Tinder, 'The Voegelinian Impulse', in Thompson and Morse (eds.), Voegelin's Israel and Revelation, pp. 88-104.

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theologian, as I did years ago in my essay 'Politics and the Transcendent'.3 In fact, the present essay is an extended footnote to that earlier essay. Essentially I stand by what I wrote then, although the discussion has to be qualified and updated in view of the vast changes that have taken place in the field of biblical studies in the past generation. It is important for this further review to take account of biblical scholarship, for Voegelin himself wanted to avoid reading extraneous meanings, derived from Christianity or philosophy, into the biblical historiographical work. Thus he said 'the interpretation must be kept as close as possible to the Biblical text'.4 Accordingly, he became a serious biblical student himself: many of his biblical excurses are quite illuminating. He even engaged in an extended 'note on the state of Old Testament science' since Julius Wellhausen, the founder of modern biblical criticism.5 2. Beyond History When Voegelin immersed himself in biblical studies in the mid-twentieth century, Old Testament research had already moved beyond the historicisms of Wellhausen, with its focus upon historical methodology and putative 'sources' (the documentary hypothesis), into a form-critical study of the preliterary and literary 'forms' (Gattungeri) in which Israel's faith found expression. It studied the history of traditions that led from early combinations and compositions of discrete literary units to the final canonical conclusion of the process (redaction criticism). The dominant figure in the field at that time was the eminent Old Testament theologian Gerhard von Rad, to whom Voegelin was profoundly indebted. Von Rad maintained that the subject of Old Testament theology is not pragmatic history but the 'history of traditions', that is, the study of how the Israelite story, found in core confessions of faith such as Deut. 26.5-9, was appropriated and 'made present' (vergegen-wdrtigen) in the changing circumstances of Israel's historical journey. On the American field in that period was the school of W.F. Albright, 3. Bernhard W. Anderson, 'Politics and the Transcendent: Eric Voegelin's Philosophical and Theological Analysis of the Old Testament in the Context of the Ancient Near East', The Political Science Reviewer 1 (1971), pp. 1-29; revised and updated version in Stephen A. McKnight (ed.), Eric Voegelin's Search for Order in History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), pp. 62-100. All further references are to the latter printing. 4. Voegelin, Order and History', I, p. 163. 5. Voegelin, Order and History, I, pp. 147-62.

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the distinguished archaeologist, who maintained that the biblical record is more closely tied to the pragmatic history that is open to historical inquiry and archaeological corroboration. The Albrightian view was given forceful theological expression in an influential monograph, God Who Acts by George Ernest Wright, one of his illustrious students.6 Israel's faith, he said, is not based upon creedal formulations but upon the recital of the 'mighty acts of God'—crucial events including the guidance of the ancestors, exodus from Egypt, taking of the land. Wright held that the magnalia Dei were not just a 'story' (Geschichte), but belong to 'history' (Historic), invoking the distinction drawn in those days. On this view, it was possible to speak of 'the revelation of God in history', a key theme of the Biblical Theology movement that flourished in the United States in the period immediately following World War II. Voegelin's work relies on the approach of this German school. Indeed, von Rad's emphasis on form criticism and tradition-history enabled Voegelin to interpret the history of Israel's traditions as a 'history of symbolization' from Moses through the Israelite experiment with monarchy and on to the emergence of Christianity out of Judaism. With his own philosophical accent, Voegelin drew a distinction between the transcendent order of the Kingdom of God and the mundane affairs with which the historian or political scientist deals. For various reasons, this view of God's revelation in history, whether understood as ordinary history or a history of traditions, was tried in the balance by subsequent scholars, and found wanting. Research showed that portrayals of God acting in history were not particularly unique with Israel; similar claims could be found, made on behalf of other deities of the ancient Near East.7 Also, the emphasis upon meaning in history or history moving toward a goal was difficult, if not impossible, to maintain in the face of the colossal violence of the twentieth century, including the holocausts of Auschwitz and Hiroshima and the apocalyptic threat of atomic disaster during the Cold War. Furthermore, there was a rising scepticism about the validity or viability of probing behind biblical documents, composed primarily to confess faith in God, in search of historical referents. The findings of archaeology, which is as close to historical science as one can get, complicated the picture, as in the case of the fall of Jericho or the 'conquest' of Canaan as a whole. 6. George Ernest Wright, God Who Acts: Biblical Theology as Recital (London: SCM Press, 1952). 7. Anderson, 'Politics and the Transcendent', pp. 70-71.

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In that situation, theologians like Paul Tillich insisted that faith cannot rest upon historical possibility, or at best, probability, which is all the historian can give us—as in the argument of Ernst Troeltsch. So, for various reasons, many biblical interpreters have revolted against the dominance of history and historical method and have adopted methodologies that deal with the biblical text, rather than a 'history behind the text'. Indeed, it is often now said that so-called 'historical criticism' is based on the rationalism of the Enlightenment, and is unsuitable for the 'postmodern' period that is dawning. The changed situation in the biblical field is well described in a recent book by Leo Perdue, The Collapse of History.s The most recent theological venture in the Old Testament field, Walter Brueggemann's Theology of the Old Testament? is very critical of the whole historical-critical enterprise, regarding it as a legacy of the Enlightenment and its Cartesian epistemology. Brueggemann maintains that Old Testament theology deals with Old Testament texts in their 'multiplicity' and 'density' (sounding here like a legacy from historical criticism!), rather than with some reality behind the text such as 'history' or 'being'. Under the influence of linguistic hermeneutics—for example the work of Paul Ricoeur—he insists that God is, so to speak, in the world of text, not behind or beneath the text in some other dimension. According to his scheme, (1) Israel makes its 'core testimony to God'; (2) then Israel (and the nations) makes a counter-testimony; (3) this linguistic dialectic leads to new advocacy of Yahweh's reality and sovereignty. Brueggemann finds a model of such theological presentation in the genre of the 'court trial before the nations', as in the poetry of Second Isaiah. In my judgment Voegelin's work is not fundamentally invalidated by the fate of historical criticism which I have outlined. He is not really interested in revelation in history, that is, a process of events, or even in sacred history (Heilsgeschichte), a sequence of crucial historical events charged with revelatory meaning. Rather, Voegelin is concerned with revelation in historical consciousness, or better, in the psyche of sensitive ('inspired') persons (Moses, Jeremiah, the 'genius' of the Suffering Servant, and above all Jesus)—persons who were so attuned to the order of being that their souls were 'a sensorium of the transcendent'. In a Voegelinian perspective, the hermeneutical disarray arising today from 'the collapse of history' and 8. Leo G. Perdue, The Collapse of History: Reconstructing Old Testament Theology: Overtures to Biblical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994). 9. Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997).

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the failure of the hermeneutic of the Enlightenment only goes to show that revelation does not occur in pragmatic history, or in any special sacred history. In the present period of hermeneutical confusion, Voegelin would probably advise the theologian to turn from the dead-end road of 'history' and concentrate on those persons, presented in the Bible though found outside it too, in whom the order of being, in which all human beings participate, becomes a powerful force to reshape society according to the transcendent will of God. This is a powerful challenge. I am deeply impressed with Voegelin's emphasis upon symbolization, which is a breath of fresh air after the literalism of conservatives (often 'fundamentalists') and the 'historicisms' of the liberal followers of Wellhausen. In the future, Old Testament theology must, I believe, take seriously the symbolic dimensions of Scripture.10 Furthermore, Voegelin witnesses effectively to the holy, transcendent God who cannot be imprisoned in creedal statements or—I should perhaps add—in human language, even the most poetic. Whether or not one follows Voegelin philosophically, the pressing issue is still whether the struggle for order in history has a transcendent dimension that is given expression in the biblical language. In his view, when one looks back over the biblical tradition, it is possible to trace 'the trail of symbols', as he nicely put it, that shows defection from and return to the transcendent ground of human history. 3. Theology and Ideology Since the rise of a sociological approach to biblical studies in the 1970s, the question of transcendence has been raised in a new way. Sociology attempts to reconstruct the history and religion of Israel by studying the changing forms of social organization. Biblical traditions, it is maintained, were produced by social groups and therefore reflect their needs and aspirations and how they perceive the world or 'construct' reality. A primary concern in this perspective is the sociology of knowledge, an approach advocated, for instance, by the sociologist Peter Berger.11 10. See Patrick Miller, 'Editorial: Revisiting the God who Acts', Theology Today 54 (1977), pp. 1-5, and Bernhard W. Anderson, Contours of Old Testament Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999). 11. See Peter Berger, Invitation to Sociology (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966); Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971); Peter

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Some sociologists, especially those under the influence of Karl Marx, go further. They maintain that the traditions of the Bible not only reflect the interests of social groups, but also disclose the interests of those in power, the so-called 'establishment'. For this view, in other words, theology may be an ideology, the attempt of the established powers to legitimate their authority and hold others in subjection. On the American scene, Norman Gottwald has been the primary protagonist for a liberation theology based on this view.12 He has been followed, though with some reservations, by Walter Brueggemann in his Theology of the Old Testament, to which I have referred. In this sociological perspective, the history of biblical traditions is understood as the history of a struggle for power—with the special twist that Yahweh, the God known and worshipped in Israel, is the God who takes the side of the powerless and creates out of Egyptian slaves an egalitarian society. Thus in Gottwald's view, the Mosaic 'revelation' was an Exodus (a real event in pragmatic history) from an imperial structure of power into a new form of social life in history, namely, a people's confederacy (qahal, assembly) based on a covenant (berith). The Israelite decision, under the pressure of pragmatic history, to have a king 'like the nations', was a fall from grace, a return to the alien ways of nation and empire. Prophets arose to appeal to the people to cast off the extraneous imperial symbolization and return to the conventional way of life. Voegelin, it will be recalled, gives a similar assessment, when he reflects on the problem of living the life of the spirit within the confines of mundane society. He is very critical of the Israelite experiment with monarchy, and the adoption of royal cosmological symbolism under David. This fateful development was tantamount to 'a re-entry into the Sheol of cosmological civilization' and hence a 'fall from being'. Furthermore, Voegelin maintains that the Kingdom of God enters the mundane sphere at a terrible cost: a 'mortgage' of pragmatic history upon the transcendent truth of being.13 This seems to be a philosophical way of speaking about theology becoming ideology: it arises in the attempt to legitimate the established power structure and its social or national interest. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967). 12. For an account and critical review of Gottwald's work, see Perdue, The Collapse of History, pp. 78-109. 13. Voegelin, Order and History, I, pp. 9, 142; see Anderson, 'Politics and the Transcendent', pp. 84-87.

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However, Voegelin is so concerned with the universal order of being that he is unable to deal constructively with the struggle for justice in the mundane sphere. The prophets, he maintains, emphasized 'the right order of the soul'.14 But a close reading of the biblical text shows that they called for social order based on a right relation with God manifest in caring for the orphan, widow and resident alien. Aaron Mackler called attention to this deficiency in an excellent paper at the 1996 San Francisco symposium. In contrast to Voegelin's approach, Mackler quotes with effect a passage from the classic study of the Jewish philosopher, Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets-. A student of philosophy who turns from the discourses of the great metaphysicians to the orations of the prophets may feel as if he were going from the realm of the sublime to an area of trivialities. Instead of dealing with the timeless issues of being and becoming, of matter and form, of definitions and demonstrations, he is thrown into orations about widows and orphans, about the corruption of judges and affairs of the market place. Instead of showing us a way through the elegant mansions of the mind, the prophets take us to the slums. 15

Voegelin, by contrast, is concerned with 'revelation'—the irruption of the order of divine being into history, manifest in the souls of persons like Moses. It is this irruption, as I understand him, that may lead to social change, in so far as sensitive individuals (poets, prophets) are prompted to speak a critical word against social abuses and power-holders and to fire the imagination with the 'ideal' of the Kingdom of God. When Voegelin speaks thus of 'revelation', he reaches beyond the competence of sociological method and, I may add, goes beyond most current discussions of biblical theology. A leading sociologist, Peter Berger, has written an interesting monograph, A Rumour of Angels, in which, addressing himself to theologians, he wonders whether there is any way out of the limitations of sociological method into the realm of'transcendence'. In our mundane experience he finds a few intimations of transcendence, one of which is the human longing for order. In this connection, Berger refers to Voegelin's 14. Voegelin, Order and History, I, p. 439. 15. Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1962), p. 3, cited in Aaron L. Mackler, 'Universal Being and Ethical Particularity in the Hebrew Bible: A Response to Voegelin's Israel and Revelation, Journal of Religion 79 (1999), pp. 19-53 (27). This paper is being republished as: 'Voegelin's Israel and Revelation after Forty Years: A Jewish Perspective', in Thompson and Morse (eds.), Voegelin'sIstad and Revelation, pp. 105-39.

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Order and History. In every age, he writes, human beings have believed 'that the created order of society, in one way or another, corresponds to an underlying order of the universe'. 'The human propensity to find order', he declares, is a 'signal of transcendence'.16 However, that little book does not give much comfort to the theologian, though it may relax somewhat the tension between science and faith. Such intimations of transcendence are a far cry from Voegelin's discussion of 'revelation', or, as he puts it, the irruptions of transcendence into the souls of person living in mundane society. Indeed, it is significant that the foundational work of Voegelin's massive study of history starts with Israel as the bearer of revelation. In this whole discussion, the fundamental issue is the relation between order and freedom. I commenced my original review essay on Voegelin's work with the remark: 'The task of government is to actualize the order within which people may live together in peace and justice.'17 Liberation theologians will find difficulty with Voegelin's work, because he gives a divine warrant for order, and is fearful of revolutionary expressions of human freedom which are aimed at taking power from the rich and established and distributing some of it to the poor and marginal. In contrast, Brueggemann holds that Israel's 'core testimony' is a revolutionary emancipation from the power structure of Egypt, showing that Yahweh is the God who demands and brings justice. In his discussion of theodicy, Brueggemann goes so far as to say that 'in its deepest vexation, Israel is able to make a distinction between Yahweh and the reality of justice. Justice is held up as ultimate, and Yahweh as an agent of justice is critiqued for failure about justice.'18 This is surely a one-sided reading of the Old Testament. For there are many texts (or 'counter-testimonies') in which Yahweh upholds and maintains order. There is a danger in placing too much emphasis on the revolutionary event of the Exodus and ignoring or discounting the corresponding account of the revelation at Sinai, where Yahweh gives the 'teaching' (torah] that provides order for the covenant community, an order that gives the shalom (peace) that means well-being, wholesome relations, and righteousness.19 16. Peter L. Berger, A Rumour of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural (New York: Doubleday, Anchor Books Edition, 2nd edn, 1990), pp. 6061. See my discussion of this question in an address given to the Catholic Biblical Association, 'Biblical Theology and Sociological Interpretation', Theology Today 42 (1985), pp. 292-306(297-98). 17. Anderson, 'Politics and the Transcendent', p. 62. 18. Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament, pp. 721-25.

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4. Jewish-Christian Relationship One of the major developments in the twentieth century has been that, despite the terrible tragedies brought about by anti-Semitism, supremely the Holocaust, relations between Jews and Christians have improved. Without surrendering their identities, Jews and Christians have worked together on biblical interpretations (as in the Society of Biblical Literature) and have engaged in constructive dialogue from their respective positions.20 As evident from the title of Voegelin's foundational work, Israel and Revelation, the phenomenon of Israel, especially in the biblical phase of its existence, is crucially important in human history. He maintains that in Israel the revelation of the order of being found expression, preparing for the supreme revelation in Jesus Christ. How, then, does Voegelin understand the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, or—to state the question another way—the relationship between the Old and the New Testaments? At first Jews and Christians shared the same body of Scripture (TaNaK); indeed, whenever the word Scripture(s) (graphe^ graphai) appears in the New Testament, it refers, probably without exception, to the Jewish Scriptures which in the Christian community were read in Greek translation (Septuagint). These two communities of faith, having the same Bible, somehow belong inseparably together in the mystery of God's purpose, as Paul argued in his agonized discussion in Romans 9-11.21 In Israel and Revelation, the relationship between Israel and Christianity proves to be a thorny problem, as William M. Thompson has observed in a perceptive paper.22 Thompson draws attention to 'the contentious page 144' where Voegelin attributes to Talmudic Judaism a failure to be the carrier of the truth of being for all humankind owing to inability to get rid 19. See Jon D. Levenson's forceful criticism of a one-sided emphasis on the Exodus, The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament and Historical Criticism: Jews and Christians in Biblical Studies (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), Chapter 6: 'Exodus and Liberation', pp. 127-59. 20. See Fritz A. Rothschild (ed.), Jewish Perspectives on Christianity (New York: Crossroad, 1990). The outlooks of five Jewish thinkers (Leo Baeck, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Will Herberg, Abraham J. Heschel) are presented, together with responses by Christian theologians. 21. Anderson, 'Politics and the Transcendent', p. 100. 22. William M. Thompson, 'Christ and Christianity in Israel and Revelation', in Thompson and Morse (eds.), Voegelin's Israel and Revelation, pp. 215-41.

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of the cultural mortgage, that is, the territorial claim on the land of Canaan and the ethnic ('communal') exclusivism that separates the Jewish community from humanity. Hence the promise to Abraham, originally intended to include all humankind, was forfeited to Christianity, which was able to free the truth of being from land and Volk. It is ironic that Voegelin, for whom revelation to Israel is the foundation and starting point, winds up with a negative assessment of the future of Israel in God's purpose. As a Christian, he finds much that is true and good, but those benefits are under the shadow of the 'mortgage' to the concrete realities of this world: social relations, ethical action, life on the land (earth). Hence, just as Israel made an exodus from cosmological civilization under Moses, it must—owing to the particularity of its existence in the mundane sphere—engage in an 'Exodus from itself. More than that, having accomplished its temporary purpose in the creation of living symbols, it is the destiny of Israel to die, and to be superseded by the universal revelation of God in Christ.23 As I see it, the relation between the Old and the New Testaments, and in a larger sense between biblical Judaism and New Testament Christianity, is a dialectical movement of continuity and discontinuity. The dialectic is clearly stated in Matthew, a Jewish gospel, where in the Sermon on the Mount (the new Sinai!) Jesus announces, 'I have not come to destroy but to fulfil the Torah and the Prophets'; yet almost in the same breath he says in radical reinterpretation of the Law, clt was said to you of old, but I say unto you...' (Mt. 5.17, 21-48). The dialectic of continuity/discontinuity is also expressed profoundly by Paul in his Epistle to the Romans. Converts to the Christian faith are children of Abraham in so far as they share Abraham's faith, yet the promises to Abraham are not limited by ethnicity. Moreover, God's promise to Abraham that he would inherit a land is endorsed by God's revelation in Christ, yet 'eretz is taken in its larger meaning of 'earth, world' to bring out the universal scope of the promise (Rom. 4.13).24 The irruption of the Kingdom of God in Jesus Christ has brought about a new mission for the New Israel: to proclaim 23. Voegelin, Order and History, I, pp. 314-15, 491, 506. See the discussion in Maclder, 'Voegelin's Israel and Revelation after Forty Years, pp. 105-39. 24. The divine promise of land/world is discussed further in my essay 'Standing on God's Promises: Covenant and Continuity in Biblical Theology', in Steven J. Kraftchick, Charles D. Myers, Jr and Ben C. Ollenburger (eds.), Biblical Theology: Problems and Perspectives: In Honor of]. Christiaan Beker (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995), pp. 145-54.

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the gospel to the world and to invite all into the community of faith where there are no boundaries: 'male nor female, Jew or Gentile, slave or free' (Gal. 3.28). The universal outreach and inclusivity of the Christian community, however, need not conflict with the special calling of Israel to be the people of the Torah. The two vocations could be complementary in the economy of God's purpose, as Franz Rosenzweig argued in his classic, The Star of Redemption.2^ On the 'contentious page 144', and perhaps elsewhere, Voegelin seems to get into trouble because he consistently stands by an ontology that is primarily personal (being of the soul) and only secondarily social (being in community). That personalism accounts for his dismissal of royal covenant theology, with its symbolization of king and temple, as a 'derailment' onto a false social track; and it stands behind his indictment of the prophet Isaiah for a 'metastatic faith' that envisions a transformation of society.26 In the background of this discussion lurks the threat of supersessionism; for if the truth of being received its maximum clarity in Jesus, divested of mundane attachment to promised land and ethnicity, why should we turn to earlier stages in the history of symbolization found in the Old Testament? I find two main difficulties with a hermeneutic based on this ontology. First, it is arbitrary to single out individuals, like Moses, and say that in them a 'leap of being' occurred. We know Moses only through the traditions in which he is portrayed, and in these portrayals Moses cannot be separated from the community of Israel and its aspirations for a promised land. Almost the moment Moses appears on the historical scene, the issue is God's promise to set Hebrew slaves free and lead them into a promised land, at the cost of the dispossession of the native populations (Exod. 3.78). God's revelation to Moses instilled in him a new consciousness of personal identity and vocation, but it did not free him from the territorial needs of pragmatic history and from ethical responsibility to his people. In sociological terms, theology was contaminated by ideology from the very first; in theological terms, the Word of God was given within the limitations of human words. Further, if Israel, as the carrier of revelation, was involved in defection from the truth of being owing to participation in pragmatic history, the same must be said of Christianity. The church, as 25. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971). 26. See my remarks in 'Politics and the Transcendent', pp. 86-89.

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the carrier of revelation, has boldly accommodated itself to the pragmatic history of nations, as we well know; even yet the church, represented by the Vatican, preserves some of the trappings of empire. Secondly, repeating what I said in my original essay,27 I am not satisfied with Voegelin's dismissal of the royal covenant theology as a derailment. Was not the association of Mosaic revelation with Canaan also a derailment? The adoption of cosmological symbolization was indeed a new step, which called for a new understanding of Israel's traditions and its covenant relation with God. This symbolization, however, did not replace the Mosaic symbolization, but ran parallel to it, or interacted with it, thereby enriching Israel's understanding of God's relation to the people, human society, and the whole creation. In his illuminating Introduction to Israel and Revelation, 'The Symbolization of Order' (pp. 1-11), where Voegelin discusses human participation in the order of being, he speaks about 'pluralistic' symbolization. 'Every concrete symbol', he writes, 'is true in so far as it envisages the truth, but none is completely true in so far as the truth about being is essentially beyond human reach'.28 Here Voegelin is speaking about the symbolization of the order of being found in Israel and elsewhere in the ancient Near East. But symbolic pluralism is also evident in the Bible itself—something that needs to be taken more seriously. In the Old Testament there are three major patterns of symbolization: (1) the priestly symbolization of the 'tabernacling presence' of God in the midst of the people that dominates the Pentateuch in its final priestly version; (2) the Mosaic symbolism of the Mountain of God and the covenant formulary (comparable to ancient suzerainty treaties) that governs Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic History of Joshua through to 2 Kings; and (3) the Davidic symbolization of monarch and temple that is dominant in the book of Psalms and the Chronicler's History. When one stands at the canonical conclusion of the history of traditions, looking back over the 'trail of symbols', to use Voegelin's nice expression, one sees a plurality of symbolic formulations. Each expresses distinctively the presence of the holy God in the people's midst, and all are necessary to express in human speech the revelation of the holy God whose being is beyond the reach of human conceptuality but who is nevertheless 'God with us'.29

27. Anderson, 'Politics and the Transcendent', p. 85. 28. Voegelin, Order and History', I, p. 7. 29. See Anderson, Contours of Old Testament Theology.

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5. The Role of the Messiah Judaism and Christianity share the mystery of the presence of the holy God 'in our midst' (cf. Hos. 11.9b). They differ over the christological confession that Jesus is the Christ. The question is whether the christological difference is reduced or sharpened by a Voegelinian ontology which posits the 'consubstantiality' of human being and primordial being, or of the human and the divine. Commenting on the trajectory of the title 'Son of God', which moves from the Egyptian Pharaoh to Israel (Hos. 11.1), from the people to the Davidic king (Ps. 2), and from the king to the prophet (cf. Jer. 1.5), Voegelin says that finally in the Christian revelation it becomes clear that 'only God can be the son of God'.30 Some years ago J.C. Rylaarsdam, a scholar at the University of Chicago, wrote an illuminating essay, 'Jewish-Christian Relationships: The Two Covenants and the Dilemmas of Christology'.31 He provided an excellent discussion of two symbolic trajectories, one associated with Moses and the other with David.32 The Mosaic pattern of symbolization moves in the horizontal dimension of history, from promise to fulfilment; the Davidic symbolization, on the other hand, moves in the vertical dimension of the primordial and the cosmic. His thesis was that the Jewish community flourishes in the Mosaic symbolic world, whereas Christianity is at home in the Davidic world. In the Davidic covenant theology, the key symbols are God as cosmic King (Isa. 6.1-5) and the City of God which signifies God's rule on earth through the Davidic king, called 'the Son of God' (2 Sam. 7.14; Ps. 89.26-27). This essay does not solve the problem of relation between the Jewish and Christian communities. The two patterns of symbolization are present, and interact, in both the Old Testament and the New. It is not a matter of either/or. However, the essay does lead to the christological question, specifically the question of whether God's revelation in Jesus Christ is to be understood in terms of Old Testament messianism or in 30. Voegelin, Order and History, I, p. 467. See the discussion in Thompson, 'Christ and Christianity in Israel and Revelation, pp. 225-27, 235-40. 31. J.C. Rylarsdaam, 'Jewish-Christian Relationships: The Two Covenants and the Dilemmas of Christology', Ecumenical Studies 9 (1972), pp. 249-79. 32. Discussions of Old Testament theology have largely ignored the priestly pattern of symbolization which focuses on 'the tabernacling presence'. See my discussion of'the priestly point of view', in Understanding the Old Testament (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 4th edn, 1986), pp. 454-65.

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the primordial perspective of creation. What is the meaning of Peter's confession at Caesarea Phillippi: 'You are the messiah, the Son of the Living God' (Mt. 16.16)? Does this refer to agency or being, to historical function or ontological relationship? It is well known that the Hebrew word mashiach, translated as Messiah or Christ, refers to function or role. The one who bears the title, whether the earthly Davidic king or the ideal king who is to come, is the Anointed One (the meaning of Hebrew mashiach), one who is anointed for a task. In this functional sense Cyrus of Persia could be called Yahweh's 'messiah' (Isa. 45.1), for the foreign king was chosen to be instrumental in God's saving purpose. In the New Testament, when people asked whether Jesus was the messiah, they wanted to know, at least initially, whether he was God's chosen agent through whom a new age ('the kingdom of God', or in apocalyptic terms the 'new creation') would be introduced. In the Matthean version of Peter's confession, the title 'Son of God' may seem, at first glance, to go beyond historical function to ontological status. The language echoes exalted language used of the king in ancient Israel. In royal psalms, the Anointed One is declared to be God's Son this day, originally the day of coronation (Ps. 2); he is portrayed as seated at the right hand of God sharing the divine rule (Ps. 110); and in one instance, if we follow 'the difficult reading' of the received text rather than sidestepping it (as in some modern translations), the king is addressed as divine: 'Your throne, O God, endures forever' (Ps. 45.6). Most scholars understand this language to be the hyperbole of oriental 'court style'. The king was extolled in extravagant terms, especially on festival occasions (enthronement, royal wedding). In the Old Testament there was no serious departure from the view that the king was God's agent, anointed for a task. This is undoubtedly true in the well-known messianic passage in Isaiah 9 ('Unto us a child is born, a son is given') where the coming king is given the most glorious throne-titles:'Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace' (Isa. 9.6). The king, even the One who was to come, was not regarded as consubstantial with deity. The theologian Elizabeth Johnson rightly says that 'Jewish scriptural symbols', such as Messiah and Son of God, do not 'connote divinity'. A significant step, she adds, was made when interpreters used Wisdom categories (for example, Prov. 8.22-31) to explore the messiah's 'ontological relationship with God' and the cosmic status of the messiah who is active with God in the creation.33 33. Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological

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The motif of the imago Dei is no exception (Gen. 1.26-28; cf. Ps. 8.58). In Genesis the view is that human being, mortal humanity ('adani), is commissioned to be God's representative. Humans, constituted as 'male and female', are crowned as viceroys who take part in God's administration of earthly affairs so that peace and righteousness may prevail.34 It was not in the Old Testament but in the New that a momentous shift took place: from a functional Christology inherent in the word Messiah or Christ to an ontological Christology concerned with the being of Christ in relation to God. This is evident when one moves from the symbolic world of the Synoptic Gospels to the quite different symbolic world of the Fourth Gospel, which is introduced by identifying Christ with the logos that in the beginning was 'with God' and 'was God'. This shift to ontology is also evident in Deutero-Pauline writings such as the Epistle to the Colossians, which declares that God created the world in Christ (Col. 1.15-17) and that in him 'all the fullness of deity' dwelt (1.19; 2.9). Statements like these have no real parallels in the Old Testament.35 Revisiting Israel and Revelation after all these years has helped me to see more clearly that there are two different ways of thinking christologically. One is to say with Saint Paul (as in 1 Cor. 15) that in Christ the New Age has begun, his resurrection being a foretaste or 'the first fruits' of that final historical consummation. The other is to say, with Paul Tillich, that in Jesus Christ the New Being has appeared, representing a personal life in which all are invited to participate by faith.36 Perhaps these two christological affirmations—one historical and the other ontological—belong together, as in the New Testament. That is a matter for theological reflection and debate. In any case, as others have observed, Voegelin's interpretation clearly moves in the direction of the Trinitarian discussion of the early Christian church.

Discourse (New York: Crossroad, 1994), p. 98. 34. This is discussed at length in my essay, 'Human Dominion over Nature', Chapter 7 in Bernhard W. Anderson, From Creation to New Creation: Old Testament Perspectives (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), pp. 111-31. 35. Voegelin strains exegesis when he argues in Order and History, I, p. 399, on the basis of the spokesperson simile used in the Exodus story (Exod. 4.16-18; 7.1), that although Moses is 'not God' he is 'something more than man'. 36. This is written in the light of a stimulating discussion by Victor Nuovo, Professor of Philosophy at Middlebury College, Vermont: 'Resurrection, Realism, and Truth: Reflections on Paul Tillich'. Unpublished typescript, June 1996.

VOEGELIN'S ISRAEL AND REVELATION: SOME OBSERVATIONS* Moshe Idel

1. Introduction Eric Voegelin's monumental Order and History is both a vast and a compact opus, replete with fine conceptual distinctions and original nomenclature, striving to cover the main spiritual development of humankind. This is an extraordinary intellectual enterprise, staggering because of the huge amount of primary material he inspected and because of its great diversity. A place of honour is devoted to the specific religious insight of Israel, as a decisive moment of transition from a mythological to a historical form of experience. Published in the middle of the 1950s, the first three volumes of the five-volume Order and History constitute a dramatic enterprise surveying, in a critical manner, the main phases of religious and philosophical developments as expressed in Near Eastern religions, in ancient Israel, in Greece and in Christianity. In the following pages, I shall present some reflections about the general scheme that informs Voegelin's discussions, as well as some reflections on some more specific topics related to Judaism. The more general observation will consist in a comparative analysis of the principal distinction between the different phases that inform Order and History and Gershom Scholem's theory of religion. The other part of the paper will deal with the place of metastasis in postbiblical Judaism. In a series of lectures, delivered in 1939 and first printed in 1941 by Schocken Books under the title Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem has enunciated a theory concerning a threefold evolution in matters of religion. (A second edition, containing substantial revisions and additions, was published in 1946.) Because of the paramount importance of this theory for a comparison to Voegelin's thought, I shall quote

* Thanks are due to Professor Tilo Schabert, who kindly read a draft of this paper and suggested improvements.

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extensively from this single exposition where Scholem has described his theory.1 It is hard to know when precisely Voegelin become acquainted with Major Trends, Scholem's masterpiece, which will be one of the focal points of our discussion below. What is absolutely certain is that Scholem's book, together with an earlier one, was quoted already in the second volume of Order and History, The World of the Polls.2 Was this book already known to Voegelin while writing, or even conceiving, his first, and most formative, volume of Order and History, Israel and Revelation?. I assume that a positive answer is quite plausible, and it can be shown that Voegelin even accepted a view that was formulated by Scholem in one of the quotes we shall consider in Section 5 below. It may be superfluous to remark that in the following the reader shall not expect to find a confrontation between 'Judaism as it was5 and the manner in which it was described by Voegelin. Rather, it is my understanding of this religion—fragmentary, biased and thus sometimes at least erroneous—which is compared to that of Voegelin's. However, I have attempted not to compare notes in an incidental manner, but to address issues that were crucial for Voegelin's theory. 2. First Stage: Myth and Nature Let me attempt, with the danger of simplification, to describe the main theological development as envisioned by Voegelin: the intracosmic gods of the mythological religions in the Near East become a transcendental God of a chosen people; later on He is discovered as the Ultimate Being addressing and addressed in the soul of mind of the individual. Forms of animism, then transcendentalism, and later on the Plotinian vision of the one approaching the One, are the main spiritual demarche of human insights discovering the order of being. Most of the significant first part of the opening volume of Order and History is devoted to the description of the first type of religious modality, 1. Gershom G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 3rd edn, 1967 [1941, 1946]). See David Biale, Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah and Counter-History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 137, 202-203; Nathan Rotenstreich, Judaism and Jewish Rights (Tel Aviv: Hakibutz Hameuchad Publishing House, 1959), pp. 119-20 (in Hebrew); Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism, Origins of the Fifth Century (New York: Crossroad, 1991), pp. 335-36; and Moshe Idel, Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), pp. 3-4. 2. Eric Voegelin, Order and History. II. The World of the Polis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957), pp. 135-36.

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the 'compact cosmological myth' characteristic of the Near East mythologies, especially as exemplified by the Mesopotamian and Egyptian religions. It is this compact religious modality that has been transcended by the process of differentiation that installed the historical form of existence, characteristic of the ancient Israelites. Voegelin strove, on the basis of his reading of the Bible and a long series of biblical scholarly works and through his study of Hebrew, to survey the major moments in the Israelite religion in a manner that is much more impartial than some of the other great surveys of the development of religion, like those of Hegel or Toynbee. I would like to emphasize the more positive attitude to Judaism, less informed than the other two authors by Christian visions of Judaism as an obsolete phase transcended by the next development, Christianity. Aware as I am of this much more positive attitude toward the main subject matter of Israel and Revelation, my strong impression is, nevertheless, that his main religious and intellectual positions, both as a Christian and as a philosopher, have inspired, not to say dictated, the nature of his analyses to a very great extent. However, before addressing what I see are some of the shortcomings of his portrayal of Judaism stemming from the particular Christian-philosophical perspective, let me survey his main points concerning the development of religion. As pointed out above, the Israelite religion is a moment of transition from the cosmic to an historical form of religiosity. This transition is the gist of Israel and Revelation, and there is no need to elaborate upon the topic in this context. Let me adduce only one sharp formulation, from the second volume: .

The radical break with the cosmological myth was achieved only by Israel. And the break was so thorough that at once history was established as the symbolic form of existence for the Chosen People in the present under God.3

Let me compare this move with the description of the different phases of religion in Scholem: The first stage represents the world as being full of gods whom man encounters at every step and whose presence can be experienced without recourse to ecstatic meditation. In other words, there is no room for mysticism as long as the abyss between Man and God has not become a fact of the inner consciousness. That, however, is the case only while the childhood of mankind, its mythical epoch, lasts. The immediate consciousness of the

3.

Voegelin, Order and History, II, p. 263.

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politics, order and interrelation and interdependence of things, their essential unity which precedes duality and in fact knows nothing of it, the truly monistic universe of man's mythical age, all this is alien to the spirit of mysticism. At the same time it will become clear why certain elements of this monistic consciousness recur on another plane and in different guise in the mystical consciousness. In this first stage, Nature is the scene of man's relation to God.4

There are several elements here that are reminiscent of Voegelin's descriptions of the undifferentiated, or compact period. Voegelin's term 'intracosmic deities' is reminiscent of Scholem's 'world being full of Gods', while the latter's 'monistic consciousness' is reminiscent of the compact view of the relationship between humans and being. Scholem's text already adumbrates Voegelin's later emphasis on differentiation: 'the abyss between Man and God has not become a fact of the inner consciousness'. Therefore, for Scholem, just as for Voegelin later on, the religious drama takes place in the deepening of the discovery of the distance between humans and God. What is surprising is the fact that Scholem, who conceived himself to be an historian, refrained from indulging in a precise historical periodization of his three stages, and neither has he committed himself to precise corpora that would illustrate his phenomenological scheme. Voegelin, however, who had many fewer historical pretensions, elaborated much more the phenomenological phases within much stricter historical terms. He identified the first stage with the pre-biblical cosmical mythologies, as exemplified by the Mesopotamian and Egyptian myths, while the next stages are described as related to the developments taking place in Israel and Greece. 3. Second Stage: History and Religion Two independent developments, one taking place in Israel, the other in Greece, constitute the second phase in Voegelin's scheme. He claims that 'the truth of revelation and philosophy has become fatal to the intracosmic gods'.5 The initial compactness of nature and intracosmic gods becomes a compactness of the collective in the Israelite experiences.6 A process of 4. Scholem, Major Trends, p. 7. 5. Eric Voegelin, Order and History. IV. The Ecumenic Age (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), p. 8. See below for Scholem's view of the relation between law and myth, quoted in Section 7. 6. Eric Voegelin, Order and History. I. Israel and Revelation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956), p. 439. On compactness and word, see also below in this section.

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differentiation has created the identity of a nation, what Voegelin refers to recurrently by the biblical term 'Chosen People', who experienced the main form of existence under God in history. Let us compare this view to Scholem's description of the second phase: The second period which knows no real mysticism is the creative epoch in which the emergence, the break-through of religion occurs. Religion's supreme function is to destroy the dream-harmony of Man, Universe and God, to isolate man from other elements of the dream stage of his mythical and primitive consciousness. For in its classical form, religion signifies the creation of a vast abyss, conceived as absolute, between God, the infinite and transcendental Being, and Man, the finite creature. For this reason alone, the rise of institutional religion, which is also the classical stage in the history of religion, is more widely removed than any other period from mysticism and all it implies. Man becomes aware of a fundamental duality, of a vast gulf which can be crossed by nothing but the voice, the voice of God, directing and law-giving in His revelation, and the voice of man in prayer. The great monotheistic religions live and unfold in the ever-present consciousness of this bipolarity, of the existence of an abyss which can never be bridged. To them the scene of religion is no longer Nature, but the moral and religious action of man and the community of men, whose interplay brings about history as, in a sense, the stage on which the drama of man's relation to God unfolds.

Let me start by pointing out some differences between Scholem's terminology and Voegelin's. The former describes man as conceived in opposition to the transcendental being, while Voegelin deals almost always with the possibility of a noetic relationship between the two. Scholem's abyss is much more radical than Voegelin's differentiation. Nevertheless, both described history as the new arena of differentiation. Cosmological myth moves, in the writings of both thinkers, into history. Both Scholem and Voegelin spoke, when referring to the second stage, about institutionalization, and both would regard this development as harbouring also negative aspects of religious routinization. Interestingly enough Voegelin, like Scholem, emphasizes the centrality of the word in the second stage: 'the change...from the compact imagery of elemental, physiological, sexual, or materially demiurgic creativity to the symbolism of the creative word'.8 7. Scholem, Major Trends, pp. 7-8. Compare this passage to that quoted below from Order and History, I, pp. 412-13. 8. Eric Voegelin, The Beginning and the Beyond: A Meditation on Truth', in Eric Voegelin, What Is History? And Other Late Unpublished Writings (ed. Thomas A.

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4. Third Stage: Soul and Mysticism Voegelin's third phase, which is conceived as transcending the second one, assumes the dissolution of the communal compactness, and the discovery of the individual soul. So, for example, he writes, in a particularly dense and important passage, that the soul must have disengaged itself sufficiently from the substance of particular human groups to experience its community with other men as established through the common participation in the divine Nous. As long as the spiritual life of the soul is so diffuse that its status under God can be experienced only compactly, through the mediation of clans and tribes, the personal love of God cannot become the ordering center of the soul. In Israel the spirit of God, the ruach of Yahweh, is present with the community and with individuals in their capacity as representatives of the community, but it is not present as the ordering force in the soul of every man, as the Nous of the mystic-philosophers or the Logos of Christ is present in every member of the Mystical Body, creating by its presence the homonoia, the likemindedness of the community. Only when man, while living with his fellow men in the community of the spirit, has a personal destiny in relation to God can the spiritual eroticism of the soul achieve the self-interpretation which Plato called philosophy. In Israelite history a comparable development was impossible.

Mysticism—though strongly related to philosophy in Voegelin's opus— is therefore, according to this view, impossible in Israelite religion, and it emerges only when the Greek, mostly Platonic10 concepts of the soul as individual crystallize. From many points of view, I see this statement as containing a major historical and phenomenological insight which can be corroborated by later developments in Judaism where the more individualistic conceptions had been inspired by Greek sources.11 Nevertheless,

Hollweck and Paul Caringella; Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 28; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), pp. 173-232 (186). On compactness in the second stage, see above. 9. Voegelin, Order and History, I, p. 240. 10. See Voegelin, Order and History, I, p. 245; and Glenn Hughes, Mystery and Myth in the Philosophy of Eric Voegelin (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), pp. 54-55. 11. See, for example, Moshe Idel, 'Sexual Metaphors and Praxis in the Kabbalah', in Mortimer Ostow (ed.), Ultimate Intimacy: The Psychodynamics of Jewish Mysticism (London: Karnac Books, 1995), pp. 217-53 (219-23).

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insightful as it is, this statement precludes in fact the emergence of mysticism in societies that were less resonant to philosophical concepts, an implication that I see to be problematic. Let us compare this paramountly important passage to Scholem's description of the third stage of religion: And only now that religion has received, in history, its classical expression in a certain communal way of living and believing, only now do we witness the phenomenon called mysticism; its rise coincides with what may be called the romantic period of religion. Mysticism does not deny or overlook the abyss; on the contrary, it begins by realizing its existence, but from there it proceeds to a quest for the secret that will close it in, the hidden path that will span it. It strives to piece together the fragments broken by the religious cataclysm, to bring back the old unity which religion has destroyed, but on a new plane, where the world of mythology and that of revelation meet in the soul of man. Thus the soul becomes its scene and the soul's path through the abysmal multiplicity of things to the experience of the Divine Reality, now conceived as the primordial unity of all things, becomes its main preoccupation. To a certain extent, therefore, mysticism signifies a revival of mythical thought, although the difference must not be overlooked between the unity which is there before there is duality, and the unity that 12 has to be won back in a new upsurge of the religious consciousness.

The importance of the move from the communal scene, characteristic of the second stage, to the soul, in the third one, should be emphasized. This major religious move is shared by Scholem and Voegelin. With the soul, the individual enters the picture, though Scholem did not stress this topic too much. Scholem, unlike Voegelin, was less eager to allow the philosophical elements a constitutive role in the emergence of mysticism, though in my opinion, they indeed played an important role.13 From this point of view, it seems that Voegelin was right. More inclined to see in the resurgence of myth the constitutive catalyst for the emergence of mysticism, Scholem was sometimes bemoaning the Platonic influences on the nascent Kabbalah. 5. The Return of Myth? What seems to be crucial for Scholem is the fact that mythology returns and plays a major role in the third stage, after it has been obliterated in the 12. Scholem, Major Trends, p. 8. 13. See Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 35-73.

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second one. The process of remythification of theology, and of the vision of creation, is a major characteristic of Scholem's view of Jewish mysticism in general. We shall have more to say later on this issue. Now I would like to quote Voegelin's reaction to this return of the myth in monotheism, and succinctly point out its importance. When dealing with the Kabbalistic description of the emergence of the divine nought from the absolute Nought, he wrote: While this is not the place to develop the problem further, the suggestion may be thrown out that gnostic speculation, when it appears as a theosophic movement within a monotheistic culture, is a reversion to myth. The demythization of the world is not an unbroken process; there may break through again, in the monotheistic phase of religiousness, a desire for 4 remythization on the highest level of intellectual speculation.1

Therefore, in this footnote where Scholem's Major Trends is explicitly quoted, Voegelin mentions the possibility that monotheism does not mean an automatic and absolute break with myth, which can return, even centuries after the break. Therefore, though the gist of Voegelin's theory is different from Scholem's, he nevertheless accepted, at least succinctly, the possibility of the return of the cosmological myth, in the way mentioned by Scholem, and evidently under his influence. Moreover, as Voegelin indicates, it is not only the monotheistic turn, as represented by a mediaeval form of Judaism, that accepted the return of myth, but also an intellectual development of this religion described as on the 'highest level'; there is good reason to assume that he refers to the Greek noetic discovery, accepted also by the Kabbalists, which did not impede the mediaeval Jewish mystics from accepting the return of myth. Unfortunately, I am not aware if Voegelin did find a proper place to deal with the question of remyt hologization in a more systematic manner. Indeed, Voegelin seems to hesitate accepting Scholem's vision of myth as central for monotheistic theosophy, since he uses the phrase, 'a desire for remythization', while Scholem speaks about full-fledged myths. Indeed, it is conspicuous that the gist of the Voegelinian interpretation is not welcoming to these phenomena of reversion, given the more essentialistic approach of this thinker.15 Though he could accept the lingering of one form of religiosity into the other immediately following it, as is the case with the cosmological symbols

14. Voegelin, Order and History, II, p. 136 n. 22. 15. See, for example, Voegelin, Order and History, II, p. 51, to be discussed below.

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that were accepted and transformed in the historical religion,1 the return of the first stage within the third one was conceived of as much more problematic. 6. Converging and Diverging Views of Gnosticism Both Scholem and Voegelin considered Gnosticism a very important factor on the stage of Western religion, influential much beyond its first historical manifestations in late antiquity.17 Both were concerned with the reverberations of Gnosticism in larger phenomena in mediaeval and premodern Europe, though their attitudes to what they described as Gnosticism differed dramatically. While for Scholem Gnosticism is the catalyst of developments which altered the course of institutionalized religion, and thus he conceived the Gnostic elements to be a positive element that fertilized stagnant Rabbinism,18 for Voegelin on the other hand Gnosticism, with its metastatic proclivities, is a negative approach, which attempts to change Being rather than to understand it. However, both envisioned Gnosticism and its alleged Kabbalistic offshoots as metastatic. According to one passage in Major Trends, the whole meaning and purpose of those ancient myths and metaphors [of Gnostic mythological religiosity] whose remainders the editors of the book Bahir, and therefore the whole Kabbalah, inherited from the Gnostics, was simply the subversion of a law which had, at one time, disturbed and 19 broken the order of the mythical world.

16. Voegelin, Order and History, I, pp. 299-303. 17. Voegelin, Order and History, I, p. 454. For a discussion and critique, see Michael Franz, Eric Voegelin and the Politics of Spiritual Revolt: The Roots of Modern Ideology (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), pp. 131-33; and loan Couliano, The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism (trans. H.S. Wiesner and loan Couliano; San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1990), pp. 258-60. 18. On Scholem's views on Gnosticism, see Moshe Idel, 'Subversive Katalysatoren: Gnosis und Messianismus in Gershom Scholems Verstandnis der jiidischen Mystik', in Peter Schafer and Gary Smith (eds.), Gershom Scholem: Zwischen den Disziplinen (Frankfurt am Main: Edition Suhrkamp, 1995), pp. 80-121 (83-96). 19. Scholem, Major Trends, p. 35. The term 'order' occurs already in the very early theses Scholem formulated in 1918. See Gershom Scholem, '95 Thesen iiber Judentum und Zionismus', in Schafer and Smith (eds.), Gershom Scholem: Zwischen den Disziplinen, pp. 287-95 (289, theses 10, 12; and 293, thesis 73).

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I would emphasize Scholem's resort to the term 'order' here in order to point to the structure of a certain form of thought, reminiscent of Voegelin's most important term in his Order and History. Like Voegelin, in a passage quoted above, the historical mode was fatal for the cosmological, though the latter returned in the mediaeval Kabbalah in order to break the order of Law. Gnosticism is for Scholem, just as it is for Voegelin, quintessentially metastatic. Here there is a basic convergence, which shows a common intellectual universe, beyond the substantial differences between these two great scholars. This becomes more evident in Scholem's historical picture of the emergence of the Gnostic elements in Kabbalah: they are not only in conflict with the rabbinic order, but indeed stem from non-Jewish sources. The alien source of Gnostic myths, and thus their antinomian nature, is well illustrated by the following passage: Foreign mythical worlds are at work in the great archetypal images of the Kabbalists even though they sprang from the depth of an authentic and productive Jewish religious feeling. Without this mythical contribution, the impulses of the Kabbalists would not take form. Gnosis, one of the last great manifestations of myth in religious thinking, conceived at least in part as a reaction against the Jewish conquerors of myth, gave the Jewish mystics their language.

It seems conspicuous that Scholem considered historical Gnosticism, not only the phenomenological parallelism between it and mediaeval Kabbalah, as significant for the emergence of the early Kabbalah. In fact, this can be easily shown by even a superficial inspection of the sources adduced by Scholem when discussing the origins of Kabbalah; they are, in the great majority of the cases, brought from the Gnostic literature, while ignoring other forms of ancient esoteric literature that have some conceptual parallels to Gnosticism. It was the antinomian aspects of Gnosticism that fascinated Scholem, just as the metastatic nature of Gnosticism repulsed Voegelin. So, for example, the less antinomian ancient sources, like Philo's writings or the Chaldaean Oracles, both analyzed in such a brilliant manner by Hans Lewy, Scholem's distinguished colleague in Jerusalem, are never mentioned in Scholem's writings as possible important sources for Kabbalah. Thus, Scholem created a stream of Gnostic influences from the

20. Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism (trans. Ralph Manheim; New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 98.

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very beginning of Kabbalah until eighteenth-century Hasidism, in a manner that is reminiscent of Voegelin's broad reading of the different movements he categorized under the label 'Gnosticism'. 7. Ritual, Theurgy and Metastasis One of the common denominators of Scholem's and Voegelin's schemes is the marginalization of ritual in the general economy of Judaism. For both, the discovery of a new insight regarding the nature of God and of humanity vis-a-vis ultimate Being is a noetic or pneumatic experience. Both stressed the importance of the myth as the main category which differentiates the first from the second phase of development. This preference of myth as the key explanatory category in understanding religious development is evident also in one of the major sources of Voegelin's vision of religion, Mircea Eliade's thought;21 in a representative sentence, Eliade summarizes his stand very aptly: 'Symbol and myth will give a clear view of the modalities [of the sacred] that a rite can never do more than suggest.'22 Seen from the perspective of the role played by myth in the general economy of religion, the changes discerned by Voegelin and Scholem may be a matter of debate, and I am not going to do it here.23 However, what I would like to emphasize in the following is the common perspective chosen by the two distinguished scholars as just one out of many, and one which fits the mentalistic approach of these two European thinkers, who emphasize the cognitive realm as the most significant arena of changes. Forms of cognition represent, in their writings, the main criteria for discerning the shifts between different forms of religious lives. In other words, their analysis starts with ways of conceptualizing the supernal as the decisive elements in religion. What basically inform, or even dictate, reli21. Eliade is quoted several times in Voegelin's work. See, for example, Voegelin, The World of the Polls, p. 50; and Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis (ed. and trans. Gerhart Niemeyer; Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), p. 113. 22. Mircea Eliade, Traite d'histoire des religions (Paris: Payot, 1949), p. 22. See also Joachim Wach, The Comparative Study of Religions (ed. Joseph M. Kitagawa; New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), p. 63; and Eliade's essay, 'Methodological Remarks on the Study of Religious Symbolism', in Mircea Eliade and Joseph M. Kitagawa (eds.), The History of Religions: Essays in Methodology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), pp. 86-107 (98). 23. See Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives, pp. 33-34; and Moshe Idel, 'Rabbinism versus Kabbalism: On G. Scholem's Phenomenology of Judaism', Modem Judaism 11 (1991), pp. 281-96.

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gious life for them are the metaphysical or the theological assumptions that describe the order of being as a given. This is especially evident in Voegelin's anti-metastatic stand, which was expressed in numerous writings. Let me quote a relatively late and very dense one: The aim of parousiastic gnosticism is to destroy the order of being, which is experienced as defective and unjust, and through man's creative power to replace it with a perfect and just order. Now, however the order of being may be understood—as a world dominated by cosmic-divine powers in the civilizations of the Near and Far East, or as the creation of a world-transcendent God in Judaeo-Christian symbolism, or as an essential order of being in philosophical contemplation—it remains something that is given, that is not under man's control.

Thus, the gist of Voegelin's conception of ultimate being is a static one; thus, ultimate being is beyond human control. Indeed, reality may change, given the fact that human understanding changes, and with it the reality itself. However, it is understanding, a mental act, rather than any attempt to operate by bodily deeds, that is the most important human faculty. This restriction, which problematizes the role of action, is, in my opinion, part of Voegelin's fundamental credo, which is fine with me as long as it remains a personal one, but becomes much more problematic when it is imposed on the description of the historical developments in religion. What would happen if we examine Judaism, while resorting to Voegelin's terminology, but interrogating other aspects of this religion? For example, would the term 'compact', which describes the dense cosmological myths of the ancient Near East and is assumed to be irrelevant for a differentiated form of religious life, as the Israelite emphasis on history is conceived to be, perhaps be quite relevant, in fact, for the description of Israelite ritual? Or, to formulate the question otherwise: the compact myths of the Near East were accompanied by a variety of rituals, and the extensive studies of the various branches of myth-and-ritual have proven the close relations between the two forms of religion. Voegelin was acquainted with this school, which he mentions several times in Israel and Revelation^ Nevertheless, a superficial inspection of the Index of Subjects 24. Eric Voegelin, 'Science, Politics and Gnosticism', in Science, Politics and Gnosticism: Two Essays (trans. William J. Fitzpatrick; Chicago: Henry Regnery, Gateway Edition, 1968), pp. 1-80 (53). 25. See, for example, Voegelin, Order and History, I, pp. 77-79, 115, 138, 274-75, 278, 280, 283-91, 293-94, and 507. On the myth-and-ritual school, see Sigmund Mowinckel, He that Cometh (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1959); Sigmund Mowinckel,

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and Names in Israel and Revelation will demonstrate the recurrent concern with symbols and cosmological myths, while there is not one item dealing with commandments, cult, rite or rituals. In other words, what counts for Voegelin are not the specific religious precepts or obligations as determined in the details of the commandments as prescribed in the Pentateuch, but the more theoretical monotheistic and transcendental insights of biblical Judaism. This propensity toward the intellectual and spiritual can be easily demonstrated by his numerous discussions on the compactness of the Decalogue,26 which is much less performative than the other biblical commandments. Voegelin preferred a non-theurgical and nonmagical religiosity, which is also non-metastatic. I assume that by doing so he accepted a basically Greek-philosophical understanding of what is important, at least according to the perceptions of the Greeks as described in one of the major writings of Dame Frances A. Yates: Fundamentally, the Greeks did not want to operate. They regarded operations as base and mechanical, a degeneration from the only occupation worthy of the dignity of man, pure rational and philosophical speculation. The Middle Ages carried on this attitude in the form that theology is the 27 crown of philosophy and the true end of man is contemplation.

One of the main assumptions of Voegelin's system, and to a certain extent also of Scholem's vision of religion as explicated above, is the objective, and immutable structure of the Ultimate, or of Being. Closeness, distance, and regaining some form of closeness is the main structure of Scholem's scheme. With Voegelin, it is the continuous discoveries of something that is already there within the order of Being, that are the main moments in the history of humanity's spiritual history. The human spirit is described either as being vis-a-vis Being, or as searching to close the gap created by religion as institution, in Scholem's scheme. Or the individual, as part of The Psalms in Israel's Worship (trans. D.R. Ap-Thomas; 2 vols.; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1992); Raphael Patai, 'Hebrew Installation Rites', Hebrew Union College Annual 20 (1947), pp. 143-225; Aage Bentzen, King and Messiah (London: Lutterworth Press, 1955); Ivan Engnell, Studies in Divine Kingship in the Ancient Near East (Uppsala: Almquist & Wiksells, 1943); Henri Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods: A Study of Ancient Near Eastern Religion as the Integration of Society and Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948); and Moshe Idel, Messianic Mystics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 26. Voegelin, Order and History, I, pp. 329-32, 431-32, 439-40. 27. Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), pp. 155-56.

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Being, is conceived of as changing it by moments of discovery regarding the structures of Being, and so enriching it, in Voegelin's scheme. It seems that in Voegelin's theory it is the moment of awareness, either noetic or pneumatic, that is the only arena of changes in reality that are deemed possible and licit. He formulated his view of man as participating in 'the process of reality' as follows: 'Man is conscious of reality as a process, of himself as being part of reality, and of his consciousness as a mode of participation in its process.'28 Therefore, by his noetic change, man, already a part of reality, changes reality. The major locus of the change is therefore human consciousness. Mysticism, therefore, in the two modes of the noetic and the pneumatic, deals more with forms of cognition and closeness to divine presence than with forms of activity that may have an impact on the ultimate Being. Both Scholem and Voegelin described different types of relations: the former scholar would emphasize the last stage of religion, mysticism, as bridging a gap, while Voegelin would see increasing differentiation as the vector of spiritual development. What I would like to emphasize is that out of the two main poles involved in religious processes, God and Man, the first is conceived of as being constant, while only the mystic is conceived of as a fluctuating entity. The attempt of the human pole to change the divine pole would constitute, for Voegelin, an utmost effort of metastasis. In my opinion, the post-biblical forms of Judaism, which did not attract the attention of Voegelin, with the important exception of Philo of Alexandria, can be described as either coming closer to the Greek noeticstatic model, as the various forms of Jewish mediaeval and modern philosophy assume, or to the opposite, namely to the metastatic model, represented by some forms of Rabbinic thinking and by many of the Kabbalistic schools, those that I have proposed to describe as theosophicaltheurgical.29 In other words, if some forms of Judaism absorbed systems of thought that assume stable structures of Being much closer to Platonic, Plotinian and Aristotelian thought, as we shall see in the next section other forms went in the opposite direction, which would be described by Voegelin as Gnostic. Indeed, significant forms of Rabbinism, and their Kabbalistic reverberations, which assume that the performance of the commandments have an impact on high, namely on the divine Dynamis, 28. Eric Voegelin, 'Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History', in Eric Voegelin, Published Essays, 1966-1985 (ed. Ellis Sandoz; Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 12; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), pp. 115-33 (120). 29. See Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives, pp. xi-xvi.

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would be close to what Voegelin would conceive as the quintessence of Gnosticism. Here, Scholem and Voegelin would contradict each other in a dramatic manner. For Scholem, Rabbinism obliterated the Gnostic myth and participated in the creation of the gap between man and God, and is therefore an anti-Gnostic move par excellence; while for Voegelin, Rabbinism would be the greatest of the possible departures from the biblical discovery of transcendence. Voegelin, who was interested in experience and flow,30 was concerned only with transient states here below, but not on high, in the transcendent. 8. Voegelin's and Other Interpretations of 'Ehyeh 'Asher 'Ehyeh Let me address the different forms of the Voegelinian understanding of Judaism, and that of some Rabbinic sources. I propose to exemplify the more static, mentalistic approach of Voegelin, evidently nourished by Christian and Greek sources, to that expressed in many Rabbinic and Kabbalistic passages. In Israel and Revelation he resorts to two Christian authors who dealt with the meaning of the enigmatic Hebrew divine name 'Ehyeh 'asher 'Ehyeh, occurring in Exodus 3. The number of theological explanations of this divine name is huge,31 and the decision to adopt the explanation he does is therefore a dramatic decision by Voegelin, a choice which means, in my opinion, the acceptance of an ultimately Greek, metaphysical interpretation. Voegelin quotes John of Damascus, who claims that 'The foremost of all names applied to God is "HE WHO IS." For, as it comprehends all in itself, it includes being itself as an infinite and indeterminate ocean of substance.'32 Then he resorts to the view of a modern Christian scholar, Etienne Gilson, who has created a whole philosophy based on an interpretation of this divine name: 'One can, of course, not maintain that the text of Exodus bestowed a metaphysical definition of God on mankind. Still, if there is no metaphysics in Exodus, there is a metaphysics ^Exodus.'33

30. See, for example, Voegelin, Anamnesis, pp. 16-20. 31. For a recent collection of articles on this issue, see Alain de Libera and Emilie Zum Brunn (eds.), Celui qui est: interpretations juives et chretiennes d'Exode 3-14 (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1986); and see also, more recently, Stephane Moses, ' "Je serai qui je serai": La Revelation des Noms dans le recit biblique', Archivio di filosofia 62 (1994), pp. 565-76. 32. Voegelin, Order and History, I, p. 410. 33. Quoted in Voegelin, Order and History, I, p. 410.

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Voegelin follows Gilson, claiming that 'While the Exodus passage is not a metaphysical proposition, it contains in its compactness the meaning differentiated by the Christian philosophers.'34 Immediately afterwards, Voegelin summarizes Thomas Aquinas's views of this name, and then offers his own understanding of the philosophical implications of the compact biblical expression, in a passage that represents a compact expression of Voegelin5s theory: [The name is] an effort to articulate a compact experience of divine presence so as to express the essential omnipresence with man of a substantially hidden God. The 'I will be with you', we may say, does not reveal the substance of God but the frontier of his presence with man; and precisely when the frontier of divine presence has become luminous through revelation, man will become sensitive to the abyss extending beyond into the incommunicable substance of the Tetragrammaton... The revelation of the hidden God, through Moses, reveals his presence with his people; revelation and historical constitution of the people are inseparable.

This passage is reminiscent of some of the themes mentioned by Scholem in the passage that describes his second phase, that of the constitution of religion, which has already been quoted above. Both thinkers mentioned in rather short passages the same cluster of themes: transcendence, abyss, history, community and revelation. Voegelin, who might have been influenced by Scholem's description of the second phase of religion, is concerned here more with the topic of distinction, what he calls the 'differentiation' between the 'being of the substance' and its 'order [that] flows through the world'.36 The philosophical structure of Voegelin's discourse is obvious: nothing in the Hebrew text implies a negativity, a transcendence, an abyss, but just a revelation of an as yet unknown divine name, or even of a divine structure. By accentuating the apophatic themes, Voegelin follows the Christian theology, influenced by Greek philosophy. In fact, St Thomas Aquinas's view is not new but is an adaption of an understanding of this name as explicated by the most influential Jewish philosopher and theologian, Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, known as Maimonides.37 In his religious system, he combined Greek metaphysics with 34. Voegelin, Order and History, I, p. 410. 35. Voegelin, Order and History, I, pp. 411-12. See also Voegelin, Anamnesis, p. 198; and Hughes, Mystery and Myth, pp. 57-58. 36. Voegelin, Order and History, I, p. 411. 37. Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed (trans. Shlomo Pines; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), pp. 152-56 (Part I, Chapters 62-63). On this issue see

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Jewish biblical thought, and contributed to the emergence of a theology that emphasizes the apophatic and static aspects in Judaism, and there is no doubt that St Thomas was strongly influenced by his interpretation of the divine name we are discussing here. Therefore, Voegelin, by following St Thomas, is in fact accepting Maimonides' lead, which constitutes, in my opinion, an innovative interpretation in Judaism. Other Jewish interpretations are much less concerned with the apophatic elements, but stress more the kataphatic, and sometimes also the metastatic, aspects of religion. Let me adduce a Jewish approach to this divine name. In a passage from Midrash Hashkem, we read: 'God said to Moses: Go, say to Israel that my name is 'Ehyeh 'asher 'Ehyeh—that is, just as you are present with Me, so am I present with you'.38 What is crucial for this interpretation is the moment of reciprocity: not only is God present with the people, but also the people is with God. In other words, the divine presence with the people is not an unchangeable order but depends upon the people's being with God. What constitutes the nature of this being with God is not clear in this fragment. However, there are good reasons to assume, based on similar statements, some to be introduced below, that this being is related to human actions. In another Midrash we learn that The Holy One blessed be He, said to Moses: Moses, tell to the children of Israel: 'My name is 'Ehyeh 'asher 'Ehyeh, as you are present with me, so I am present with you. I have given to you two good attributes law and justice. If they mete the law, should I not mete the law and emanate good things upon them. But if they do not mete the law, I shall mete the law and destroy the world. Likewise in the case of Tzedaqah: if they open their hands and give [alms] I shall also open for them'... This is why the Holy One said: 'Ehyeh 'asher 'Ehyeh, as you are present with me, I am present with you. So said David, 'God is your guardian, God is your shade on your

Shlomo Pines, 'Dieu et 1'etre selon Mai'monide: Exegese d'Exode 3,14 et doctrine connexe', in Libera and Brunn (eds.), Celui qui est, pp. 15-24; and, more recently, Yossi Schwartz, 'Between Negation and Silence: Maimonides in the Latin West', lyyun 45 (1996), pp. 389-406 (in Hebrew), who deals specifically with the influence of Maimonides' interpretation of the divine name on St Thomas on pp. 397-400. 38. H.G. Enelow, 'Midrash Hashkem Quotations in Alnaqua's Menorat HaMaor', Hebrew Union College Annual^ (1927), pp. 311-43 (319). 39. Tzedeq. However, it seems, on the basis of both the preceding and the following discussions, that the meaning is charity, Tzedaqah. See Jer. 9.24, and the analysis of this text in Voegelin, Order and History, I, p. 445.

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POLITICS, ORDER AND HISTORY right hand.' As your shade: Just as your shade, if you are laughing to it, it is laughing to you, if you weep to it, it is weeping to you, if you show to it an angry face, it reflects to you likewise, and if your face is welcoming, it also is so, just so the Holy One said, 'as you are present with me, so I am 41 present with you'. This is why Israel must do justice.

An early sixteenth-century Kabbalist active in the Ottoman Empire, Rabbi Meir ibn Gabbai, quotes a Midrash, which is surprisingly similar to the last passage: In the Midrash, [we learn] that the Holy One, Blessed be He, said to Moses: 'Go, tell Israel that my name is 'Ehyeh 'asher 'Ehyeh.' What is the meaning of 'Ehyeh 'asher 'Ehyeht Just as you are present with me, so am I present with you. Likewise David said: 'The Lord is thy shadow upon thy right hand.' What does 'the Lord is thy shadow' mean? Like thy shadow: just as thy shadow laughs back when you laugh to it, and weeps if you weep to it, and if you show it an angry face or a pleasant face, so it returns, so is the Lord, the Holy One, Blessed be He, thy shadow. Just as you are present 43 with Him, so is He present with you.

Indeed, the metaphor of the mirror that describe the human—divine relationship is not exceptional. In a Midrashic statement, preserved in a thirteenth-century Midrashic compendium known as Yalqut Shimonl. we read: The Holy One, Blessed be He, appeared to them on the [Red] Sea as a mighty warrior, and He has revealed Himself at Sinai as a Scribe, who teaches the Torah, and he revealed to them in the days of Daniel as an elder man, full of compassion. He said to them, because you see many appearances, [there is a multiplicity] but I am on the sea, I am at Sinai, 'I am your Lord'. Rabbi Hiyya bar Abba said: In accordance to each and every topic, in accordance to each and every thing, He was revealing to them.

40. Ps. 121.5. 41. Israel Me'ir Freimann (ed.), Midrash Ve-Hizhir (2 vols.; Leipzig, 1873), I, fol. 43a. This text is one more example of the affinity between Midrash Hashkem and Midrash Ve-Hizhir, see the preface of the editor, pp. vii-viii. See also Nahmanides' quotation from Midrash 'Aggadah in his Commentary on the Pentateuch in the context of his discussion of Exod. 3.14; and also the significant remark of Menahem Kasher, Torah Shelemah (44 vols., 1938-; Monsey, NY: American Biblical Encyclopedia Society, 1944), VIII, p. 153 n. 188 (in Hebrew). 42. Ps. 121.5. 43. Sefer Tola'at Ya'aqov (Constantinople, 1560), fol. 4a. 44. demuyyot. 45. Yalqut Shimoni on Exodus, §286.

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Therefore, the Midrash does not speak about an order that flows from an unknown substance, but rather about the different appearances that are appropriate to different historical occasions. These are not mere appearances, or docetistic manifestations, but revelations of the one God. No transcendence, no abyss is surmised in those discussions, but a theory of divine accommodation which does not imply an ontic abyss, but rather changing circumstances. However, the Midrash continues as follows: 'I am your Lord'—Rabbi Hanina bar Papa said: the Holy One, blessed be He, has shown to them a face of anger, a face of welcoming, a moderate face, and a laughing face. A face of anger—[corresponds to] the Bible, because when a person teaches the Bible to his son, he has to teach him with awe. A moderate face—to the Mishnah. A face of welcoming—to the Talmud. A laughing face, for 'Aggadah. The Holy One, blessed be He, said to them: despite you have seen all these appearances, 'I am your Lord'.

Unlike the first quote, which deals with biblical situations, where the divine appearance is conceived of as independent of human actions, but is accommodated to the different kinds of occasions, in the second quote human actions, namely the study of the different parts of the Jewish canon, are related to the divine appearances. Just as the faces of the teachers are changing according to the different topics, so also the divine faces are envisioned as changing. God is therefore not flowing down as a type of predetermined order but as a configuration which is responding to human action by an appropriate facial revelation. The divine face, as in the passage from the Midrash, reflects the form of presence of the divine, but this presence is conditioned, as in the quote from Midrash Ve-Hizhir, by the preceding human actions. This is the main direction adopted from the earlier sources by many Kabbalists, who interpreted the relations between the intradivine powers, the sefirot and the divine actions, as follows: 'the supernal entities to the lower entities are comparable to the shadow [compared] to the form; just as the form stirs, thus the shadow stirs'.47 This Kabbalistic interpretation, which I have defined as 'theurgical', assumes that a Kabbalist is able to affect the divine structure by his performing the ritual. However, even in a non-theurgical form of Kabbalah, 46. Yalqut Shimoni on Exodus, §286. See also Yochanan Muffs, 'Joy and Love as Metaphorical Expressions of Willingness and Spontaneity in Cuneiform, Ancient Hebrew and Related Literatures', in Jacob Neusner (ed.), Christianity, Judaism and Other Greco-Roman Cults: Studies for Morton Smith at Sixty (4 vols.; Leiden: EJ. Brill, 1975), III, pp. 1-36 (10-1 I n . 21). 47. Sefer Tola'at Ya'aqov, fol. 4a.

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the priority of the human act is obvious. In an anonymous Kabbalistic treatise, written either at the end of the thirteenth century or the beginning of the fourteenth century, which belongs to the ecstatic Kabbalah, we read: The sages thusly interpreted the secret of name 'Ehyeh 'asher 'Ehyeh: that the Holy One, Blessed be He, said to Moses: 'Moses, be with Me and I shall be 48 with you.' And they adduced as proof [for this interpretation] the verse: 'The Lord is thy shadow upon thy right hand', as it is expounded in Mid49 rash Hashkem.

Unlike the metaphysical interpretation, or even the participatory interpretation, these adduced above, which can easily be multiplied, assume an ascending, rather than descending vector. It is not a revelation of the hidden God, or of a God who participates in the fate of his people, but a God that is affected by the Jewish ritual, and his appearance depends upon human religious performances. The post-biblical God reacts to human acts, while in the biblical episodes he was described by the Midrashic sources as voluntarily changing his appearances in accordance with the occasions. This metastatic understanding of some main forms of Rabbinic and Kabbalistic literature is strongly connected to the emphasis on human actions, rather than human cognition, as the main form of religious activity. Seen from this perspective, which emphasizes the myth-and-ritual approach over the theological one, the change between the pre-biblical forms of religion and the Rabbinic and Kabbalistic one is much less significant than Voegelin would assume. Not that there are no changes between the compactness of the Mesopotamian religion and the Rabbinic and Kabbalistic one: the former sees God as the source or the form, and man as his shadow, while in the Jewish sources dealt with above the roles have been inverted.50 This means an even greater role attributed to ritual than earlier, and at the same time, a weaker divinity. More than the order of being was discovered as part of the religious revolution; it was discovered that the order of action, both bodily and mentally, orders divinity and affects his appearance. In other words, metastatic belief is not only a

48. Ps. 121.5. 49. Sefer ha-Malmad (Ms. Oxford 1649), fol. 205b. On other interpretations of this divine name in early Kabbalah, see Nicolas Sed, 'L'interpretation Kabbalistique d'Exode 3:14 selon les documents du Xllle siecle', in Libera and Brunn (eds.), Celui qui est, pp. 25-46. 50. See Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives, pp. 173-81.

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matter of the prophet (Isaiah according to Voegelin),51 but also, as we shall see in more detail below, of the Rabbinic and Kabbalistic conceptualizations of action, which can be perceived as metastatic. A differentiation indeed was achieved by this concept of the difference between the original form and the shadow, but its nature is less noetic or pneumatic than performative. Voegelin introduced the metaphysical understanding of the divine name in order to differentiate a meaning implied, according to his view, in the compact biblical passage. I have introduced above another reading, one found in some Rabbinic and Kabbalistic texts. I do not claim that this Jewish post-biblical approach is more correct or appropriate than the philosophical one. However, by introducing it I wish to create the possibility for a claim that differs from Voegelin's understanding of Judaism as a basically unchanging compact collective that lives under the presence of the one historical insight. In fact, the emphasis on ritual, as seen above in some quotes, may be understood as an attenuation of the importance of history. If the historia sacra and the commandments are the two main revelations that constitute the Hebrew Bible, the Rabbinic, philosophical and Kabbalistic forms of Judaism were much more concerned with the meaning of ritual than with the meaning of history. Moreover, the compact collectivism, based upon common ways of religious behaviour, is sometimes coupled with much more individualistic approaches. So, for example, we read in the immediate continuation of the last quote from Yalqut Shimoni cited above, the following passage: Rabbi Levi said: The Holy One, blessed be He, has shown Himself to them as this icon that is showing its faces in all the directions. Thousand people are looking at it and it looks to each of them. So does the Holy One, blessed be He, when He was speaking each and every one of Israel was saying 'the speech was with me'. I am God, your Lord is not written, but I am God, your Lord. Rabbi Yossei bar Hanina said: according to the strength of each and every one, the [divine] speech was speaking.55

The aural revelation at Sinai, like the visual one related to the eikon that serves as an illustration to its polymorphism, presupposes an individual rather than a group submitted to one compact revelation. Differentiation 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

Voegelin, Order and History, I, pp. 452-53, 465. Yiqonin. The first form is plural, while the second one is in the singular, as in the Bible. Left koho. Yalqut Shimoni on Exodus, para. 286, p. 172.

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is quite evident in this passage. Again, just as in other discussions adduced above, the transcendental aspect of the divinity is not accentuated, but rather the intimate and special relationship between one God and each and every one of the people of Israel. What is conceived of as a communal revelation, directed to the compact collective, was understood in some Rabbinic texts as dealing with a differentiated series of individuals.56 In other words, the Rabbinic thought includes both the collective compactness, correctly attributed to it by Voegelin, the more individualistic approach which has nothing to do, in my opinion, with Christian or Greek sources, and the metastatic view, the latter two not addressed at all by Voegelin in the context of Judaism. Therefore, the distribution of certain forms of achievements according to geographical or cultural areas, which is characteristic of Voegelin's approach, is hardly tenable if someone takes into consideration not only the beginning of a certain religion or religious insight, but also its much later developments. One of the implicit assumptions that informs Voegelin's phenomenology of religion is a certain essentialistic vision, which assumes that a certain religion has one main message that is characteristic, and that in principle—despite its possible routinization and institutionalization—a religion remains the same. Thus, when comparing the Israelite to the Greek relation to history, he sees the latter as becoming aware of history retrospectively, while the Israelites were aware of history from the very beginning: And the Israel that existed as the Chosen People under God, while it had a beginning in historical time, could have no end because the divine will, which had created Israel as the omphalos of salvation for all mankind, was irreversible and remained unchanged beyond both the rhythms of the 57 cosmos and the phases of history.

Therefore, history is a belated discovery in the general development of Greece, while it was formative from the very beginning in the case of the Israelites. What the meaning of Israel is, whose 'irreversible' theological discovery advanced humankind's spiritual development, we learn from an important passage in Israel and Revelation. History, once it has become ontologically real through revelation, carries with it the irreversible direction from compact existence in cosmological form toward the Kingdom of God. 'Israel' is not the empirical human

56. See the texts referred by Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews (7 vols.; Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1968), VI, p. 40 n. 16. 57. Voegelin, Order and History, II, p. 51.

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beings who may or may not keep the Covenant, but the expansion of divine 58 creation into the order of man and society.

Here Voegelin distinguishes between the message, designated as 'Israel', and the historical bearers of this message, with the message conceived to have been betrayed by its initial enunciators. This vision of the ideal Israel as the revealer of the kingdom of God in history is strangely reminiscent of mediaeval Jewish views, which identified both the term 'Israel' as a symbol for the Agent Intellect, and the kingdom (malkhut) with the same divine attribute, the last sefirah.59 This allegorical reading was, nevertheless, not coupled—at least not directly—with a possible radical separation between the older Israel and a new one. Voegelin's identification of the message with 'an expansion of the divine creation in man and society' is a perfect example of mediaeval allegorization of the Scriptures.60 Is not Voegelin's vision, dealing much more with the nexus between an idea and a nation, a more sophisticated formulation of the classical Christian claim of being versus Israel? 9. The Death of God Voegelin describes the development of theology as a movement from polytheism, recognition of intracosmic gods, to revelation of a more personal God in Israelite monotheism, and then to an even more metaphysical transcendental concept, alluded to in the Bible (as seen above), but much more clearcut in Greek philosophical metaphysics and in Christianity. The cosmic gods were gradually understood as the Ultimate Ground of Being. From a strong dynamic theology, characteristic of the first two stages of religion, different as they were, 'humankind' moved toward a much more static philosophical theology. Envisioning the divine not as personalities that act in nature, as the intracosmic gods do, nor as a personal God as in Israelite monotheism, an entity that changes its attitude in accordance to human behaviour, but rather as the ground of Being, this more advanced theology cannot adopt either a plurality of gods or a God as quintessen58. Voegelin, Order and History, I, p. 464. On irreversibility, see also p. 465. 59. See Scholem, Major Trends, pp. 143-44; and Moshe Idel, The Mystical Experience in Abraham Abulafia (trans. J. Chipman; Albany: SUNY Press, 1987), p. 187. 60. Compare above the Thomistic interpretation of the name 'Ehyeh, as dealing with the 'order' that flows through the world, quoted from Order and History, I, p. 411.

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tially Will.61 Implicitly, the two earlier forms of theological insight are deemed to be obsolete (though, as seen above in Section 5, Voegelin was compelled to acknowledge that older forms of thought may return even in the bosom of the more advanced theological thought) and superseded by Greek metaphysics as formulated by Plato and Aristotle and their various followers. This irreversible vector62 was conceived by Voegelin as an appropriate form of development in knowing reality, though it is not the single form of development in theological thought. Already in Israel and Revelation*^ he had addressed the theology concerning the 'death of God' in Hegel and Nietzsche as pointing to a form of crisis. He elaborated more on this issue in the context of a mediaeval version of the Golem legend, and I would like to succinctly address this treatment.64 The gist of Voegelin's argument is that 'the magic opus presupposes the murder of God'.65 Analyzing the view of homo novus in Marx and Nietzsche, he concludes that it is man who has made himself God.66 This is an extreme formulation of a view that has already been discussed above as informing the theurgical opus in some main forms of Kabbalah. Let me adduce one quote to this effect. In the anonymous Sefer haNe'elam, written at the end of the thirteenth century in Spain, which explains the Kabbalistic significance of the interdiction to kill, we read: Man is comprised of all the spiritual entities, and he is perfect [containing] all attributes, and he was created with great Wisdom...for he comprises all 67 the secrets of the divine chariot and his soul is linked therein, even though 68 man is in this world. Know that, unless man would be perfect [containing] all the forces of the Holy One, Blessed be He, he would be unable to do as He does. And it is said that Rava created a man, and if the righteous wished they could create worlds. [All these] demonstrate to you

61. For Voegelin, the will of God itself seems to be sometimes more a form of order, rather than a free agent. See Order and History, I, p. 465. To a certain extent, this is a view found in Maimonides's understanding of the divine Wisdom as Will. 62. Voegelin, Order and History, I, pp. 464-65. Compare, however, above, Section 5. 63. Voegelin, Order and History, I, p. 465. 64. Voegelin, 'Science, Politics and Gnosticism', pp. 53-73. 65. Voegelin, 'Science, Politics and Gnosticism', p. 64. 66. Voegelin, 'Science, Politics and Gnosticism', p. 65. 67. Merkavah, which means in this context the sefirotic realm. 68. This formulation seems to reflect the Plotinian psychology of the connection of the human soul to the Universal soul even during its sojourn in this world. 69. b.Sanh., 65b. On the context of this passage and its significance, see Scholem,

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that there is a great supernal power in men, which cannot be described, and as man possesses such a great perfection, it is not just to destroy his form and his soul from the world. And one who kills a person, what is the loss he 70 brings about? He sheds the blood of that [man] and diminishes the form, 71 that is, diminishes the power of the Sefirot.

I have adduced a 'strong' passage, which is nevertheless representative of many Kabbalistic schools and, in a more moderate manner, is found even in some Rabbinic discussions.72 It assumes that the order of being is the ten sefirot, which are contained in man, conceived of as comprising the 'secrets', namely the supernal divine powers, in a long series of Kabbalistic texts.73 By killing a man, someone is conceived of as diminishing the divine power on high. Thus, together with Kabbalistic theurgy, which deals with affecting the divine structure, two magical operations are mentioned: the possibility to create worlds, and that of creating a Golem. Thus, both Talmudic authors and mediaeval Kabbalists—though certainly not all of them—concur on the metastatic claim that man, if perfect, is able to compete with the divine creation. I would like to emphasize the historical aspect of this issue: numerous orthodox Jewish authors—if we may use the term orthodoxy for those periods of time at all—who believed in God, did nevertheless refrain from exposing strongly metastatic concepts. The death of God is only one option among the metastatic impulses: on the contrary, they may betray 4 efforts to enhance divine energy.7 The two Golem legends to which Voegelin had access via Scholem's study on the subject represent a small On the Kabbalah, pp. 165-66; and Moshe Idel, Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), pp. 28-31. 70. Namely the divine forms. 71. Sefer ha-Ne'elam (Ms. Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale 817), fol. 73b. On this work see Asi Farber, 'On the Sources of Rabbi Moses de Leon's Early Kabbalistic System', in Joseph Dan and J.R. Hacker (eds.), Studies in Jewish Mysticism Presented to Isaiah Tishby (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1986), pp. 67-96 (in Hebrew). 72. On Rabbinic material, see, recently, Yair Lorberboim, 'Imago Dei: Rabbinic Literature, Maimonides and Nahmanides' (PhD, Hebrew University, 1997) (in Hebrew). On Kabbalistic theurgy, see Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives, pp. 173-99; and Charles Mopsik, Les Grands Textes de la Kabbale (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1993). 73. See Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives, pp. 118-19, 180; and from the Tdra' Rabba', in R. Margoliot (ed.), Zohar (3 vols.; Jerusalem: Mossad ha-Rav Kook, 1978), III, fol. 135a. 74. See Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives, pp. 181, 184-91; and Idel, Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah, p. 19.

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percentage of the vast literature on the Golem in Jewish speculative literature.75 Apprehensions of possible implications of magical actions due to fear of murdering God are not representative of the much wider corpus of discussions on the Golem. In other words, the opposition between theurgical and magical action on the one hand, and religion on the other, does not withstand the examination of the historical material insofar as Judaism is concerned. The growing importance of religious acts which are conceived to have an impact on reality or on God Himself, as documented succinctly above, represents a principal challenge to the description of the evolution of religious awareness as portrayed by Voegelin. Let me conclude this section by stressing the major issue that problematized Voegelin's understanding of Israelite Judaism and its later reverberations: it was written from too strong a Greek-philosophical and Christiantheological point of view, which marginalized the role of rituals—both nomian and anomian76—and their metastatic interpretations. The performative aspect of religion poses problems which are difficult to be solved by approaches which are so strongly inclined to noetic and pneumatic forms of perception. Though Voegelin, like Scholem, complained about the negative implications of theology,77 he nevertheless subscribed to a unilateral vision of the development of the nature of religion, as much more noetically oriented than ritualistically performative. The noetic function is one of the main reasons for the paramount importance of symbols in Voegelin's thought—a fact paralleled also in Scholem's pansymbolic vision of Kabbalah.78 By emphasizing the noetic faculty of man as the highest human function, and the sole one that best expresses the religious experience of the static ground of being, other aspects of humanity, and of 75. Voegelin, 'Science, Politics and Gnosticism', pp. 56-60; Scholem, On the Kabbalah, pp. 56-60. 76. On these terms see Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives, pp. 74-75. 77. Gershom Scholem, 'Mysticism and Society', Diogenes 58 (1967), pp. 1-24 (16). Compare also to Major Trends, p. 11. According to another formulation, complete union is denied by Kabbalistic theology; see Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York: Schocken Books, 1972), pp. 203-204. 78. See Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives, pp. 200-34; and Moshe Idel, 'Introduction to the Bison Book Edition', in Johann Reuchlin, On the Art of the Kabbalah (trans. Martin and Sarah Goodman; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, Bison Book Edition, 1993), pp. v-xxix (xv-xvi). The possible nexus between the two authors' emphases on both Gnosticism and symbolism is an issue that requires a more detailed analysis. See meanwhile Moshe Idel, 'The Function of Symbols in G.G. Scholem', Jewish Studies 38 (1998), pp. 43-72 (in Hebrew).

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religious life, are marginalized. Ritualistic experiences, which seem to be one of the most common forms of experience in so many religions, are much less important for Voegelin's analyses, apparently because of his great concern with the experience of transcendence. However, unlike his overt critique of the dogmatic aspects of religion, he apparently was less explicit about the status of the performative and ritualistic aspects of religion in his developmental scheme. One would expect that such a great critique of theology would be open to both the free thought that constitutes the essence of philosophy, according to Voegelin, and other, less theological, aspects of religion as rites. However, he preferred the former and minimized the latter. It should be emphasized that this limitation of Voegelin's understanding of Judaism as a spectrum of different forms of religiosities, and in my opinion his understanding of religion in general, is shared, in a more moderate manner insofar as Judaism is concerned, also by the two most influential scholars of Judaism in the twentieth century: Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem. This is part of their appropriation of visions of perfection inspired by Greek philosophy, on the one hand, and their overemphasis on the importance of history for the understanding of religion, on the other. 10. A Hypothetical Alternative? The question is whether Voegelinian nomenclature can serve as a rough framework for describing a development of Judaism as adumbrated in some of the above remarks. Would it be possible to write another Israel and Revelation by resorting to some of the main concepts introduced by Voegelin? In my opinion the answer is positive, and in the following short paragraph I would like to delineate such a hypothetical version of Israel and Revelation. The king-ideology of the ancient Near East, whose details have been described by the myth-and-ritual schools alluded to above,79 represents a ritual concentrated on an individual, the half-divine king, an example of a compact myth which assumes intracosmic gods. The Israelite religion, though presumably influenced by this concept and ritual, is nevertheless much more concerned with a more popular and democratic form of religion, in which all the members of the corporate entity cooperate. These

79. See nn. 25-26 above.

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are rites, amounting to several hundreds of biblical commandments, which organize religious life not only during the New Year festival, paralleling the Akitu festival, but throughout the entire year and during the whole day. Nevertheless, the centrality of the Temple rites is paramount, and they are a quintessential aspect of the religious identity. In the Rabbinic forms of Judaism, the number of the rites and customs increased, and unlike the biblical phase, it is now the human rabbis, rather than God, who are the immediate source for the new commandments, what is called by the rabbis mitzvot de-rabbanan. It is in this phase that a stronger differentiation between God and the rabbis is evident, as God is no more allowed to intervene in the legalistic discussion, even when it deals with biblical issues. It is in this phase that a certain form of 'discovery of the individual' takes place: a learned person often expresses a stand that may be independent not only of God's, but also of all the other rabbinic authorities, and his view, even when becoming a minority stand, is still conceived of as deserving of being mentioned and studied for centuries. The exegetical freedom of the Midrash as well as the innumerable legal controversies document a new phase of Jewish religion, less dominated by an ancient revelation to be conceived of as final, or by a central religious figure, as the founder of a school in Greek philosophy or the Christ in Christianity. Rabbinic Judaism was much less dogmatic than both Greek philosophy and Christianity, and it is only much later, in the Middle Ages, that formulations of dogmas became accepted by Jewish thinkers, especially by Maimonides, under the influence of Muslim theology. Mediaeval speculative literary corpora addressed the issue of the individual experience even more, oftentimes under the impact of Greek types of philosophies. Nevertheless the interplay between the individual and the community remained on the agenda of many Jewish thinkers, philosophers and Kabbalists, resisting a complete atomization of the concept of nation into discreet individuals. Those are some main and rough lines that may inform another version of Voegelin's description of Judaism informed by his terms and questions. But for writing such a version of Israel and Revelation, someone must be another Voegelin, which, alas, is far from being an easy task.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF PLATO'S TIMAEUSAND CRITMSIN ERIC VOEGELIN'S PHILOSOPHY Zdravko Planinc

In one of Voegelin's first published remarks concerning the Greek philosophers, he writes: A recent historian has determined in [Socrates], as in Plato and Aristotle, a Jess developed level of spirituality compared to that of the Christian era, because it was as yet impossible for these philosophers to breach the bounds of the sacro-political, world-immanent community and to recognize the 1 possibility of an unmediated religious existence in God.

It may seem a forgivable sin of progress—in the sense that Augustine describes in the Confessions—for the young Voegelin to have accepted on authority the conventional scholarly understanding of the Greeks as unable to transcend the boundaries of cosmos and polis. By the time of his later writings, he had come to recognize this as a rather common Enlightenment error, originating in the claims of the Church fathers that no one could have anything like 'an unmediated religious existence in God' who did not accept Jesus as God. In the magisterial opening sentence of Israel and Revelation (1956), Voegelin argues instead that 'God and man, world and society form a primordial community of being'.2 In other words, Voegelin understood the 'quaternarian structure' of the community of being as a constant, within which all human history and indeed every human experience occurs: human being always stands in relation to world and God; God is always the ground of being for world and human being; society is always

1. Eric Voegelin, Political Religions (trans. TJ. DiNapoli and E.S. Easterly III; Toronto Studies in Theology, 23; Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1986), p. 33. In German, Eric Voegelin, Die politischen Religionen (ed. Peter J. Opitz; Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 3rd edn, 1993 [1938, 1939]), p. 32. 2. Eric Voegelin, Order and History. I. Israel and Revelation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956), p. 1.

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human being, in its relation to world and God, writ large; and history— both the history of individuals and the history of humankind—occurs within this unchanging and ultimately mysterious order. The better Greek poets and philosophers experienced and described the relations of human beings to God within the quaternarian structure, as they experienced and described cosmos/world and polls/society; and similarly the better Christian theologians experienced and described the relations of human beings to cosmos and society within the structure, just as they experienced and described human relations to God, though in their theology they often assume the latter to transcend any constant community of being. Voegelin in mid-career began to discuss 'equivalences of experience' within the quaternarian structure, or the metaxy, as he came to call it more frequently: Plato's writings on Socrates and Paul's on Jesus were 'equivalent' in their similar attempts to account for the full amplitude of human experience within the quaternarian structure, including its normative order, despite differences in emphasis and detail and, more importantly, despite the significant differences in literary form and expression that have often misled readers about the substances of the texts. Such radical claims challenged, and continue to challenge, all the interpretative traditions through which philosophy and theology are presented to us today. From such an understanding, it would seem to be impossible to assert that the Greek philosophers could not 'breach the bounds of the sacro-political, world-immanent community and to recognize the possibility of an unmediated religious existence in God', or, conversely, to claim that those who accepted Jesus as God succeeded in breaching those bounds in the manner in which they claimed to be possible. Indeed, the comparative studies of the Platonic and biblical texts that Voegelin did at this time seemed to suggest—if only through the many Platonic terms presented as acceptable critical categories for Voegelin's developing philosophy of consciousness—that Plato's account of God and human being, world and society was, all things considered, superior. And yet, throughout all his later writings, Voegelin continued to defend the understanding that he had injudiciously accepted on authority as a young scholar, and apparently given up as a mature philosopher, that the Greek philosophers, including Plato, were unable to transcend the boundaries of cosmos and polis. In his earliest published article on Plato, 'Plato's Egyptian Myth' (1947), Voegelin had claimed, quite conventionally, that Plato's break with mythopoesis was an 'advancement...in the spiritual history of mankind, or rather the first act of this event, to be completed by

Planinc THE SIGNIFICANCE OF PLATO'S TIMAEUSAND CRITIAS 329 329 Christianity'.3 This claim was repeated in 'The Gospel and Culture' (1971), written during Voegelin's mid-career: Plato's spiritual man, the daimonios aner [of the Symposium], is not the Christ of Colossians, the eikon tou theou. Plato reserves iconic existence to the Cosmos itself... [I]t is the one and only begotten (monogenes) heaven whose divine father is so recondite that it would be impossible to declate him to all men (Timaeus 28-29, 92c). In the contraposition of the monogenes theos in Plato's Timaeus and John 1:18 the barrier becomes visible which the movement of classic philosophy cannot break through to reach 4 the insights peculiar to the gospel.

And similar claims were made in Voegelin's last works. In the opening remarks of'Quod Deus Dicitur' (1985), written shortly before his death, Voegelin discusses 'the emergence of the "God" from the polytheistic symbolism in Hellenic culture', by which he means little more than the development of monotheism from polytheism or, in different words, the experiential and historical 'struggle for a language of the one God beyond the gods' in which Plato stands half-way between Hesiod and Christianity.5 In the final volume of Order and History, entitled In Search of Order (1987), Voegelin acknowledges the superficiality of the 'generally accepted, numerical cliche of "monotheism" and "polytheism"', but he nevertheless restates its substance: Plato's fides is of a Cosmos that reveals its divinity through the presence of a divine, intelligible order. The Platonic Cosmos is a 'god'. Under this aspect, the fides is quite close in its structure to the Hesiodian eonta... Plato is struggling for a language that will optimally express the analytical move-

3. Eric Voegelin, 'Plato's Egyptian Myth', Journal of Politics 9 (1947), pp. 307-24 (324). Compare the remark from his essay 'On the Theory of Consciousness' (1943), the second chapter in the English-language version of his Anamnesis (1978): The great defect of [Plato's] creation roots in Plato's incapacity to make a radical break with the polis and to see the new spiritual man as a member of a new type of community rather than of a regenerated polis.' For Voegelin, at this time, the first to break properly with the polis was Zeno the Cynic. Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis (ed. and trans. Gerhart Niemeyer; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978), pp. 14-35 (34). 4. Eric Voegelin, 'The Gospel and Culture', in Eric Voegelin, Published Essays, 1966-1985 (ed. Ellis Sandoz; Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 12; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), pp. 172-212 (194). 5. Eric Voegelin, 'Quod Deus Dicitur', in Published Essays, 1966-1985, pp. 37694 (377, 392).

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It would seem that, from his first publication to his last, over a period of almost half a century, Voegelin frequently defends a cliched understanding of Plato's philosophy, and what is more, a cliched understanding that stands in opposition to both Voegelin's own account of the permanence of the community of being and Voegelin's frequent praise of the lucidity of Plato's exploration and description of its quaternarian structure.7 How can this be explained? A comprehensive answer to this question, requiring a good deal of 6. Eric Voegelin, Order and History. V. In Search of Order (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), pp. 90-91, 98. 7. A similar argument could be made for Voegelin's understanding of Homer. In 'The World of Homer', an article taken from Voegelin's History of Political Ideas manuscript and published without substantive change in 1953, Voegelin claims that 'Homer wrote before, while Plato wrote after the discovery of the psyche'. Eric Voegelin, The World of Homer', Review of Politics 15 (1953), pp. 491-523 (522). Voegelin claims, in other words, that the most significant experiences of the order of being described in the Platonic dialogues were not available to Homer, primarily on the evidence that Homer does not use the term psyche in a technical sense. This is, of course, very unconvincing literary criticism. (The only cited authority for Homer's 'anthropology' is Bruno Snell's notorious work, The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought [trans. T.G. Rosenmeyer; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953]; Voegelin refers to the 1946 Geman edition in 'The World of Homer', p. 515 n. 32.) Voegelin repeats the claim in 77?^ New Science of Politics: in Plato's writings, he states, '[T]he psyche itself is found as a new center in man at which he experiences himself as open toward transcendental reality... With due regard for the problem of compactness and differentiation, one might almost say that before the discovery of the psyche man had no soul.' Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), p. 67. Hannah Arendt rightly criticizes him for such loose, seemingly precise formulations in her reply to Voegelin's review of her The Origins of Totalitarianism. See Eric Voegelin, The Origins of Totalitarianism', with 'A Reply' by Hannah Arendt and 'Concluding Remark' by Voegelin, Review of Politics 15 (1953), pp. 68-85 (83). It may be that Voegelin never reconsidered his view of Homer: in a late essay, 'Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme: A Meditation', Voegelin claims that similar literary features in the Iliad and Plato's Laws, the latter being based deliberately on the former, do not indicate an equivalence of experience or symbolization. Plato's work is not 'naively Homeric'. Eric Voegelin, 'Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme: A Meditation', in Published Essays, 1966-1985, pp. 315-75 (342). But the Iliad cannot be said to be naive in any sense, or compact in its literary form, or evidence that its poet was incapable of reflective, differentiated, analytic or historically sensitive insight.

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textual exegesis, is beyond the scope of the present study, but I think that the basic features of such an answer, capable of bearing the weight of argument, can be stated simply. First, there is a fundamental contradiction, and not a tension, between Voegelin's recognition of 'equivalences of experience and symbolization' within the order of the community of being, on the one hand, and Voegelin's uses of various linear or developmental schemes—some modern, some Christian, and some of his own design—to order the data of human history, on the other. Those who study Voegelin's work usually assume, following his own prompting, that the break between the latter approach and the former is marked by his explication of the philosophic significance of 'historiogenesis' in the Introduction to the fourth volume of Order and History, The Ecumenic Age* and that the break is decisive.9 It seems better to say, however, that a break comes in his analysis of equivalences of experience and symbolization; that the full significance of this analysis is not sufficiently recognized and developed in his later works, or in reworkings of earlier studies; and, consequently, that his break with conventional developmental schemes is not decisive. Secondly, the fundamental contradiction between these two aspects of Voegelin's work is only confused, and not clarified or resolved, by his frequent recourse to the distinction between compactness and differentiation. In its narrowest or most precise sense, the distinction between compactness and differentiation is apparent only at the level of symbolization or expression of equivalent experiences. But once the distinction is allowed, even in this manner, it reintroduces a developmental scheme at the level of experience. Indeed, that may be its main function. It serves no good critical purpose in the analysis of symbolization; in other words, it is inadequate for the purposes of textual exegesis, often to the point of being misrepresentative when it is not merely trivial or irrelevant. Be that as it may, Voegelin uses it most frequently to speak of the difference between compact and differentiated experiences, not symbols.10 Thirdly, Voegelin's frequently repeated claim that Plato was unable to 8. Eric Voegelin, Order and History. IV. The Ecumenic Age (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), pp. 1-6, 57-58, 59-60. 9. For further discussion, see Barry Cooper, 'Voegelin's Conception of Historiogenesis', Historical Reflections/ReflexionsHistorique ^ (1977), pp. 231-51. 10. These matters are discussed at greater length in my article, The Uses of Plato in Voegelin's Philosophy of Consciousness', Voegelin Research News 2 (1996), archived at http://vax2.concordia.ca/^vorenews.

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transcend the boundaries of cosmos and polls is almost always supported with evidence from the Timaeus and Critias. I think it is evident that, throughout his life, Voegelin never fundamentally reconsidered his initial understanding of those dialogues as expressed in Political Religions. The conventional scholarly account of the limits of Plato's philosophy, ultimately derived from Christian accounts of the inherent inability of pagans to transcend natural philosophy, even appears in the exegesis of the Timaeus that concludes Order and History, although it is there presented as part of a study of Plato's historically contingent difficulties in differentiating certain experiences 'within the limits of a fides of the Cosmos'. Voegelin's breakthrough in recognizing the significance of equivalences of experience and symbolization was jeopardized when it became associated with the unhelpful distinction between compactness and differentiation. And Voegelin did not adequately reassess his previous studies of the Platonic dialogues and the history of their interpretation in the light of his important discovery: not only did he allow the analyses of the dialogues contained in his projected History of Political Ideas to appear without substantial revision in volume 3 of Order and History (1957), he also restricted any extensive reassessment of Plato's works to a repetition, albeit in his later, meditative style, of conventional misunderstandings of the relation between the Timaeus and the Gospels. These are far-ranging claims that cannot be argued beyond doubt in a few pages. It is the purpose of this study, however, to demonstrate what I take to be the most important point of the argument: the consistency of Voegelin's reading of Plato's Timaeus and Critias. Voegelin's earliest work on the Timaeus and Critias, 'Plato's Egyptian Myth' (1947), is consistent with his final work, the discussion of the Timaeus that concludes In Search of Order, and so much so, that the analysis of Critias's storytelling in the former study may be seen as the perfect complement to the analysis of Timaeus's cosmology in the latter.11

11. Although the scope of the present study is limited to a discussion of Voegelin's understanding of the Timeaus and Critias, it necessarily addresses a broad range of related topics, and in particular, Voegelin's understanding of Christianity and philosophical anthropology. For an excellent discussion of Voegelin's understanding of Christianity, see James Rhodes, 'Voegelin and Christian Faith', in John A. Gueguen, Michael Henry and James Rhodes (eds.), The Good Man in Society: Active Contemptation: Essays in Honor of Gerhart Niemeyer (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989), pp. 255-300; and also James Rhodes, 'Philosophy, Revelation, and Political Theory: Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin', Journal of Politics 49 (1987),

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1. 'Plato's Egyptian Myth' (1947) 'Plato's Egyption Myth' was published sometime after Voegelin had decided that the project of his History of Political Ideas was unworkable. His decision was prompted, in part, by his study of Friedrich Schelling, the subject of the History's last chapter. As far as can be determined, the article on Plato is a fragment of the History that Voegelin allowed to be published without major revision. In other words, even though his study of Schelling had led him to understand that the premises of his project were unsound, in that they uncritically reflected modern assumptions concerning the progress of history, Voegelin did not consider it necessary to revise his interpretations of Plato's dialogues. The only evidence of any revision in his understanding appears at the conclusion of the article in a lengthy footnote concerning the 'quarrel between philosophy and poetry' and an awkwardly appended 'Note' concerning the similarities between Plato and Schelling. Yet the evidence is sufficient to leave the reader with a relatively clear impression: Voegelin was, in the final analysis, uncertain of his opinion about Plato, but the uncertainty did not trouble him enough to compel him to resolve it through a revision of his earlier textual exegesis. The Schelling chapter in Voegelin's History contains two important remarks about Plato that reveal something of the nature of Voegelin's uncertainty. At one point Voegelin writes: 'We may...compare Plato's evocation of the politeia of the well-ordered soul functionally with Schelling's evocation of the Covenant of the People through inner return'. In this brief remark we see Voegelin coming to an understanding of the equivalence of Platonic philosophy and Israelite and Christian revelation, in both their spiritual and political aspects, although the equivalence is obscured somewhat by the topic of Schelling's attempted synthesis of the Greek and biblical traditions. However, Voegelin immediately qualifies the equivalence, repeating the conventional arguments: Plato had not yet the Christian dimensions in the understanding of the universe and of history; whenever he touches on the meaning of existence

pp. 1036-60. For an equally insightful discussion of Voegelin's philosophical anthropology, see Eugene Webb, 'Eric Voegelin at the End of an Era: Differentiations of Consciousness and the Search for the Universal', in Stephen A. McKnight and Geoffrey L. Price (eds.), International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Eric Voegelin (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), pp. 159-88.

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poitics, order and history beyond the limits that are drawn by the political type of the polis, he has to resort, therefore, to the 'myth' as his instrument of expression—in the 12 Politeia, in the Politikos, and in the Timaios.

The conventional arguments are repeated, but with a new twist. Instead of stating the matter simply in terms of experience—as in the claim, made in Political Religions, that it was 'impossible' for pagan philosophers 'to recognize the possibility of an unmediated religious existence in God'13— Voegelin now states it by way of blurring the distinction between experience and language. Were certain experiences impossible for Plato? or did he have the experiences, but find himself unable to speak of them adequately? Other questions suggest themselves as well: If the universe and history, or cosmos and society, are constants, how is it that the Christian understanding of them is superior to Plato's? Do the Christians not speak of these matters in 'myths'? and if they do not, is it not the case that their non-mythical accounts are derived from Platonic philosophy by way of the Hellenistic schools? Similar ambiguities emerge in Voegelin's attempt to distinguish Schelling from Plato: 'For Schelling, the soul has penetrated universe and history; he does not need the myth but can translate his experience of the soul completely into the dialectic of the Potenzenlehre.'14 Similar ambiguities—but even more questionable, in that the difference between Plato and Schelling is no longer one between a pagan and a Christian, but rather one between an ancient and a modern dialectician. In the 'Note' appended to 'Plato's Egyption Myth' there is no trace of a flirtation with modern dialectics. There is, however, discussion of 'the parallel in the historical positions of the two philosophers': in terms taken from Oswald Spengler's theory of civilizational cycles and Karl Jaspers's theory of the axis-time of human history, Voegelin describes Plato and Schelling as philosophers of the unconscious, reacting to the ages of Enlightenment in the decline of their respective societies. Voegelin claims that Plato's attack on mimetic poetry in the Republic is evidence that he had 'advance[d] from the myth of the people to [a] new level of spiritual consciousness'; but also that this advance 'in the spiritual history of mankind' was somehow insufficient and remained 'to be completed by 12. Eric Voegelin, History of Political Ideas. VII. The New Order and Last Orientation (ed. Jiirgen Gebhardt and Thomas A. Hollweck; Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 25; Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), Part VIII, Section 2: 'Schelling', pp. 193-242 (236, 237). 13. Voegelin, Political Religions, p. 33; Diepolitischen Religionen, p. 32. 14. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas, VII, p. 237.

planthe signieicance ofplato;s timaeus and critias 335 cplanthe signieicance ofplato;s timaeus and critias iplanthe signieicance ofplato;s timaeus and critias earlier textual exegesis, written well before the Schelling chapter and the 'Note', was not presented in such softened, muted tones: Plato did not have 'at his disposition the idea of a transcendental destiny of the soul... [His] solution [had] to be found within the myth of nature and its cosmic rhythms'.16 In hindsight, however, Voegelin thought it possible to appropriate his earlier reading for his new understanding: the 'idea and its relation to the unconscious' seems to appear in Timaeuss cosmology and its relation to Critias's anamnetic storytelling, while the limitations of Plato remain the conventionally accepted ones—an inability to rise above natural philosophy and myth, even while 'sing[ing] the poem of the idea' in epic fashion.17 As Voegelin would later argue, any assumption of a progress in history necessarily distorts one's understanding of any event in history, no matter how accurate one's understanding of the event may be in detail. In terms of their progressivist assumptions alone, however, there is nothing to choose between the theories of Hegel, Schelling, Spengler, Jaspers or, for that matter, George Sabine, whose History of Political Theory1^ served as one of the models for Voegelin's project: each of the theories will, and does, misrepresent Plato in some fundamental way, even though it might represent certain features of the dialogues accurately. The same may be said for Voegelin's post-Schellingian reassessment of Plato: there is nothing to be gained in turning over a conventional historiographic approach to Plato for a mythopoetic approach with similar progressivist assumptions; indeed, on the evidence, there is something to be lost, in that the latter interpretative method seems to obscure the difference between 15. 'Plato's Egyptian Myth', pp. 323-24. Note that the other side of the parallelism might be explored with interesting results. If Platonic philosophy required an Aristotelian development of the idea and a Christian development of the spirit, then Schelling's philosophy, articulated in similar world-historical circumstances, would require similar development: not another Hegel, whose synthesis of pagan and Christian Schelling rejected, but rather a 'new Thomas', as Voegelin was to describe it. Voegelin's puzzling reluctance to discuss Schilling's philosophy at length at any time after abandoning his History, therefore, might not indicate a lack of interest, but might rather be related to his turns to Aristotelian philosophy in Anamnesis and the Gospels in several contexts, to say nothing of his critique of Hegel. 16. Voegelin, 'Plato's Egyptian Myth', p. 312. 17. Voegelin, 'Plato's Egyptian Myth', p. 320. 18. George H. Sabine, History of Political Theory (London: George Harrap, 1937).

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experience and literary expression while claiming to clarify it. Voegelin's few remarks concerning his hermeneutic method leave a good deal to be desired. His most general statements, for example, are selfcontradictory. After claiming that 'we have to take our position outside the dialogue' in order to understand its 'meaning...as a creation of Plato', he immediately goes on to state the opposite: 'For the meaning of the dialogue we must not search outside the dialogue itself.'19 Although anything might follow from contradictory premises, Voegelin has a specific manner in which he understands the relation of what is inside to what is outside the text. Despite the hermeneutic commonsense that reminds a reader that Homer is neither Achilles nor Odysseus and Shakespeare is neither Hamlet nor Claudius, Voegelin argues that the characters Timaeus and Critias—but not Socrates—are Plato. Although it is certainly not evident from 'within', Voegelin uses this assumption to speculate on a matter far 'outside' the dialogues themselves, namely, the 'drama within the soul of Plato': It is Plato [in the person of Critias] who finds Atlantis through anamnesis; and the youth in which he finds it is neither that of Critias, nor his own in a biographical sense, but the collective unconscious which is also living in him. The story of the transmission [of the Atlantis story] symbolizes the 20 collective level of Plato's unconscious.

It would be difficult to find clearer evidence of a hermeneutic of suspicion that entirely ignores the interpretative problems presented by the texts themselves in order to discover in them a meaning that the reader projects from without. It is far simpler to study what Socrates, Timaeus and Critias actually say in the dialogues than it is to plumb the depths of Plato's unconscious, with or without Jungian equipment. Plato's unconscious is not available to us at all. In the lengthy footnote criticizing contemporary interpretations of the 'quarrel between philosophy and poetry' mentioned in the Republic (607b), Voegelin argues brilliantly that Plato's reference is only 'to the attacks of Heraclitus and Xenophanes on Homer and Hesiod', and is not the statement of a categorical distinction.21 There is an undeniable affinity between the dialogues and the poetry of Homer and Hesiod, but Voegelin squanders this excellent insight by using it as licence to indulge in evocative and 19. Voegelin, 'Plato's Egyptian Myth', pp. 315-16. 20. Voegelin, 'Plato's Egyptian Myth', p. 316. 21. Voegelin, 'Plato's Egyptian Myth', p. 321 n. 3.

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resonant prose of his own instead of putting his hand to working out its consequences by means of the more pedestrian techniques of literary criticism. Plato is as good an epic poet as Homer, it is true; but for Voegelin this is true only insofar as Plato's poetry is strictly identifiable with the narratives of his characters, Timaeus and Critias: 'Timaeus-Plato...sing[s] the poem of the idea', and Critias-Plato narrates the 'true story' of the embodiment or realization of the idea in epic form.22 In Voegelin's use of the term, 'the idea' summarizes all of the political and philosophic content of the Republic. Until quite recently, commentators had assumed that Critias's claim to be able to describe the 'city in speech' of the Republic in action indicated, first, that the Timaeus and Critias were set on the day immediately following the Republic, and secondly, that the Critias of the dialogue was therefore Plato's uncle Critias, one of the most ruthless of the Thirty Tyrants. Voegelin instead accepts contemporary philological speculation identifying the Critias of the dialogue as the grandfather of the tyrant Critias. He does not accept the consequence, however: he continues to argue that the Timaeus and Critias follow the Republic dramatically—in other words, that the Critias of the dialogue can still be said to realize 'the idea' of the Republic. The argument can only be defended on rather dubious grounds: Voegelin assumes that the elder Critias is a literary cipher; that Plato's intent in creating him was to acknowledge his debt to his aristocratic Athenian family; and consequently, that the Critias of the dialogue may indeed be understood as representing Plato's uncle, the tyrant Critias, indirectly. The end result of this argument is more important than the round-about manner of attaining it, and perhaps Voegelin's rather far-ranging speculations do too much to obscure the significance of his bold claim: the tyrant and sophist Critias is best understood as a 'poet and statesman', and Critias's understanding of politics is an integral part of Plato's political philosophy. For Plato, a tyrant is not a statesman and a sophist is not a philosopher. The distinctions are categorical and antithetical in the dialogues, and it takes a good deal of extrinsic argumentation to blur them into one another. In 'Plato's Egyptian Myth', Voegelin associates Critias the tyrant with Plato in two main ways: through extrinsic biographical and historical speculation of the sort common to modern philology; and through the textual ambiguity caused by presenting Critias and Plato alike as poets. Socrates tells a story in the Republic, Plato tells the story of Socrates' story.

22. Voegelin, 'Plato's Egyptian Myth', pp. 311, 315-16, 320.

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Critias tells a story in the Timaeus and Critias\ Plato tells the story of his story as well. A narrative and meta-narrative emphasis equates Socrates, Critias and Plato as storytellers, but it entirely obscures the substantive differences between the stories presented in the dialogues. And how is difference to be reintroduced? By accepting Critias's word as Plato's theory: Critias claims his own account is a 'true story' (alethinos logos'. Timaeus 26e), and not 'an invented legend' (mythos) or a 'fable, or fiction', of the sort Socrates recounted; and Voegelin infers from Socrates' silence that Plato makes this claim in his own name, distancing himself in a more mature political philosophy from his earlier idealistic excesses.23 The Republic 'as a whole is a moment of suspense between the evocation of the idea and its realization in political action'; it takes Critias's insight to achieve the 'embodiment' of the idea 'in reality'.24 And more: Critias teaches Plato things about the psyche that Socrates did not know. In Critias's storytelling we have moved beyond the mythical forces of Thanatos, Eros and Dike, that is the forces of the Socratic soul... [T]he mythical forces which orient the individual soul toward the Agathon are now supplemented by the mythical forces of the collective soul which reaches, in its depth, into the life of the cosmos.

However, there is no lack of a 'Socratic' account of such matters in the dialogues. They are neither absent nor 'foreshadowed in the Republic, requiring Critias's elaboration.26 Indeed, the psychic forces opposed to the orientation toward the agathon are quite explicitly discussed in the Symposium, Phaedrus, Theaetetus and Laws, and the discussions in those dialogues do not necessarily support the Jungian twist Voegelin gives to Critias's remarks, using the licence of Socrates' silence. If anything, Socrates' silence in the Timaeus and Critias is better understood as evidence of Plato's critique of his uncle's sophistic techniques and tyrranical soul. When Critias and the others accept as perfectly adequate a summary of the discussion presented in the Republic that includes no mention of its most important topic—the psyche and its relation to the agathon— what is there for Socrates to do but keep his tongue (Timaeus 17a-19b)? And what more need Plato do than simply show Socrates falling into

23. 24. 25. 26.

Voegelin, Voegelin, Voegelin, Voegelin,

'Plato's Egyptian Myth', pp. 311, 315. 'Plato's Egyptian Myth', p. 311. 'Plato's Egyptian Myth', p. 317. 'Plato's Egyptian Myth', p. 317.

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silence in their company? I can think of few better ways to respond to, and portray the anamnetic failings of, a sophist and tyrant, even if a poetically talented one.27 2. Order and History, Volumes 2 and 3 (1957) Although Voegelin's study of Schelling ostensibly led to the abandonment of his History of Political Ideas project, his later article, 'Plato's Egyptian Myth', did not give evidence that his understanding of the Timaeus and Critias had changed. Similarly, although Order and History was ostensibly undertaken to rework the premises and analyses of the History of Political Ideas, and although the volumes of Order and History dealing with the Greeks were published subsequent to the appearance of the new project's introductory remarks concerning the quaternarian structure of the community of being, there is again no evidence that his understanding of the dialogues had been reconsidered substantively.28 'Plato's Egyptian Myth', a fragment of the original History of Political Ideas, is republished in volume 27. Voegelin explicitly associates his own understanding of recollection or remembrance with Critias's storytelling in his introductory remarks to the original, Germanlanguage version of Anamnesis (1966). He claims that Plato's understanding 'gains in depth, from the early to the late dialogues... In the Republic, the tradition of myth changes to the form of philosophical mythopoesis... In the Timaeus-Critias... remembrance raises the comprehending knowledge of human-social existence attuned to the order of history and the cosmos from the unconscious into consciousness. The remembrance expands into a philosophy of consciousness in its tensions of conscious and unconscious, of latency and presence of knowledge, of knowing and forgetting, of order and disorder in personal, social and historical existence, as well as to a philosophy of symbols in which these tensions find their linguistic expression.' Eric Voegelin, 'Consciousness and Order: Foreword to "Anamnesis" (1966)', in Fred Lawrence (ed.), The Beginning and the Beyond: Papers from the Gadamer and Voegelin Conferences (Supplementary Issue of Lonergan Workshop, 4; Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1984), pp. 35-41 (39). Well and good, but this is not the Timaeus and Critias. Compare Jacques Derrida, 'Khflra', in Jacques Derrida, On the Name (ed. Thomas Dutoit; trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr and Ian McLeod; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 89-127, especially pp. 113-17. 28. The extant holograph manuscript of the History of Political Ideas, held in the Eric Voegelin Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, at Stanford University, begins with a discussion of Alexander. This has recently been published in Eric Voegelin, History of Political Idea. I. Hellenism, Rome, and Early Christianity (ed. Athanasios Moulakis; Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 19; Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), pp. 87-94.

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3 of Order and History, Plato and Aristotle, with, for the most part, only minor changes, many of which are stylistic. However, while there had been some discrepancy evident between the textual analyses presented in 'Plato's Egyptian Myth' and the theoretical orientation of the article's concluding footnote on poetry and the appended 'Note' on Schelling, the changes in Plato and Aristotle to the text of Voegelin's earlier article entirely obscure these difficulties. The footnote and appended 'Note' are simply dropped. They are replaced, not with better or more extensive exegesis, but rather with an often rambling discussion of Plato's 'philosophy of the myth'—or alternately his 'theory' or 'myth of the myth'—which seems to have been prompted by Voegelin's assumption that Critias's sophistic storytelling both represented Plato's mature hermeneutical theory and paralleled his own understanding of anamnesis.29 For example: whereas 'Timaeus-Plato' was said to have sung 'the poem of the idea' alone at the conclusion of 'Plato's Egyptian Myth', Voegelin has 'Timaeus-Plato and Critias-Plato' sing it together in the same passage in Plato and Aristotle. And whereas Critias's account of 'the mythical forces of the collective soul' had been presented explicitly as Plato's later corrective supplement to 'the forces of the Socratic soul' in 'Plato's Egyptian Myth', Voegelin deletes the reference to 'the Socratic soul' in the same passage in Plato and Aristotle, thus deliberately creating the impression that 'Critias-Plato' somehow represents a permanent feature of Plato's political philosophy.30 And whereas evidence to the contrary in Plato's dialogue—namely, the anamnetic failings of Critias and Timaeus—is not raised as a topic in 'Plato's Egyptian Myth', in Plato and Aristotle Voegelin explicitly states that the 'omission from the summary of this cardinal piece of the Republic on the Agathon' is 29. For Voegelin's discussion of the philosophy, general theory or myth of the myth, see Eric Voegelin, Order and History. III. Plato and Aristotle (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957), pp. 183-99. His remarks seem to expand his earlier assertion that 'the techniques for the interpretations of myths have only quite recently been developed to a point where the analysis of the late Platonic myths can be approached with some hope of success' (Plato's Egyptian Myth', p. 307). Neither the interpretative techniques nor the publications of their practitioners are mentioned explicitly in 'Plato's Egyptian Myth'; and there is only one general footnote in Plato and Aristotle, referring to the conventional philological commentaries of Taylor and Cornford along with a single work dealing with myth, from what Voegelin calls 'the older literature' (Voegelin, Order and History, III, p. 183), namely, J.A. Stewart, The Myths of Plato (repr.; Fontwell, Sussex: Centaur Press, 1970 [1905]). 30. Voegelin, Order and History, III, pp. 178, 180.

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essentially irrelevant.31 Critias's sophistry is elevated to the level of Plato's philosophy; the equation of the two is read into Voegelin's previous textual exegesis with selective editing; and the result is then further mystified by the presentation of Voegelin's interpretation of the narrative and metanarrative difficulties of his own reading of the dialogues as Plato's subtle, ironic and world-historically significant 'myth of the myth'.32 All in all, Voegelin's discussion of the Timaeus and Critias in Plato and Aristotle is no advance on his previous work. The most surprising claims about Critias appear in the second volume of Order and History, The World of the Polls, as part of Voegelin's discussion of Critias's Sisyphus fragment (B 25). The fragment, which Voegelin quotes at length, presents an unmistakably sophistic description, often criticized in the dialogues, of the relation between physis and nomos. Originally, human life was 'unordered [and] bestial', with no reward for the excellent or punishment for the wicked; human beings then established laws, making justice the 'tyrant of all', and punishing transgressors; but this could not prevent 'crimes committed in secret'. Therefore, the fragment continues, 'a wise and knowing man invented fear of the gods for the mortals that there would be a terror to the wicked, even if they did, said, or thought anything in secret'. He introduced 'the Divine' (to theion), using 'the most alluring of legends veiling the truth with a false tale [pseudos logos]'. And in this manner, it concludes, 'someone persuaded the mortals to believe [nomizein] in the existence of a race of gods' (B 25). Despite Critias's patently obvious sophistic argument, its atheism disguised—if at all—by the thinnest of literary pretenses, Voegelin is adamant in his opinion that 'it would be an impermissible superficiality to summarize the story as a sophistic theory that the laws and gods were invented by man'. And why? A fairy-tale reason: because Critias 'expressed his idea in the very form of the old myth; for the story opens with the 31. Voegelin, Order and History, III, p. 181; cf. 'Plato's Egyptian Myth', p. 308. 32. Voegelin, Order and History, III, p. 183. A somewhat disingenuous dismissal of those who would point out contradictions in Plato's Statesman serves well to show the manner in which Voegelin was often simultaneously aware of similar problems in his own interpretations of the dialogues and militantly impatient in his reluctance to face them head on: There can be only one answer to such questions: The "real" intention of Plato must not be sought in any one of the conflicting symbols but in the recognition that the complicated structure of the unconscious in depth and time cannot be harmonized into a system' (Order and History, III, p. 191). A surprising petitior. the 'reality' of Plato's intentions, even the drama in his soul, evident to Voegelin, is used to criticize those who would search suspiciously for Plato's 'real' intentions.

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of Prometheus in Plato's Protagoras'.33 A remarkable claim! Critias is excused from the charge of sophistry by making Plato a sophist; and the only evidence is the passage in the Protagoras (320d) beginning the story told by Protagoras that Socrates caustically criticizes for its sophistry (328d-329b).34 One is tempted to call such reasoning itself 'an impermissible superficiality'. Voeglin qualifies his enthusiastic identification of Critias and Plato at times, but unpersuasively. He writes, for example, that Critias's fragment represents 'a form of symbolization halfway between the older myth, which could no longer be naively accepted, and the new myth of the soul, which required a Plato for its creation'. He also claims that, like Plato, the late sophists were 'in search of the truth, aletheia\ consequently, Plato did not criticize the sophists at all, according to Voeglin, but only 'the immanentist perversion of the search'—in other words, Plato only criticized those who misunderstood the sophists. Voegelin goes so far as to defend the truth of Critias's Sisyphus fragment in his own name: The life of man, before the inventions [of laws and gods], was really unordered and bestial; the establishment of laws really made justice the tyrant of all; and the invention of the gods put a fear into men which really improved their moral conduct. The achievements are considered real, and Critias is the last man who would want to undermine the order of justice and morality.

One need only consult Xenophon's Memorabilia (1.2) and Historia Graeca for independent confirmation that this portrait of the tyrant Critias as a just and moral man is misrepresentative, to say the least. Voegelin goes 33. Voegelin, Order and History. II. The World of the Polis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957), pp. 320-21. 34. Protagoras's manner is so inimical to philosophic discussion that Socrates threatens to leave if Protagoras will not give up his long-winded displays of eloquence (Protagoras 334c-335c). Critias, who is present in the company of Alcibiades, asks Socrates to stay, but only that he might enjoy the argument a while longer: he refuses to side either with Socrates or with Protagoras (336d-e). Critias's role in the drama of this dialogue is far from constituting evidence that Plato intended somehow to synthesize the Socratic and Critian elements of his education. Indeed, just the opposite: for Plato, there is no synthesis possible between philosophy and sophistry, nor even neutrality in the conflict; and the neutrality of people like Critias and Alcibiades is merely a thin disguise for the far more dangerous tyrannical political ambitions that sophistry allows to flourish. 35. Voeglin, Order and History, II, pp. 322, 324.

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even further, however, in insisting that the sophistry of the Sisyphus fragment is integral to Plato's philosophy: Critias's account of the actions of his 'wise and knowing man' was the 'insight on which Plato based his [conception] of the philosopher-king'. And the similarity is not only superficial, it is substantive: '[I]n the work of Critias' greater nephew, in the Republic... Plato introduces the pseudos mythos for the mass of the people, veiling the truth, because they are unable spontaneously to live in conformity with unveiled truth.'36 The intent of these remarks is not entirely clear, but it seems possible that they have less to do with interpreting the Republic, Timaeus and Critias correctly than with understanding modern problems of ideology, political fanaticism and totalitarianism. In the Preface to Political Religions (1938), Voegelin writes that the National Socialist movement has its 'root in religious experience'. The Nazis are not simply 'morally bad'; they are a 'religiously evil, Satanic' force. For Voegelin, evil is not to be understood in the traditional way, common to Platonists and Christians, as a 'deficient mode of Being'; rather, it is a 'genuine, effective substance and force in the world', opposed to the good. Consequently, Nazis are not only human beings who succumb to this Very attractive force', but also its manifestation in the world and history. Voegelin does not speak metaphorically in describing the Nazis as 'Luciferian' and 'Satanic'. And furthermore, it is without hesitation or ambiguity that Voegelin claims the Nazis cannot be combated with 'morality and humanism alone', but only through 'religious renewal', either within or without the traditional Christian churches. These extreme remarks, perhaps understandable in the circumstances, have nothing to do with Plato, of course. If anything, they might unintentionally confirm his opinion, stated independently later in the text, that Plato and his contemporaries had 'a less developed level of spirituality' than Christians who were able to realize 'the possibility of an unmediated religious existence in God'.37 However, Voegelin's remarks do have something to do with Plato's uncle Critias. They are remarkably similar, in form and content, to Voegelin's account of the relation between Critias's sophistry and Plato's political philosophy. In 'Plato's Egyptian Myth', Voegelin's interest in the Timaeus and Critias is prompted in part by an unstated concern to account for modern political phenomena. And in Order and History, Voegelin's motivations

36. Voeglin, Order and History, II, pp. 323, 324. 37. Voegelin, Political Religions, pp. 2-4, 33; Diepolitischen Religionen, pp. 5-7, 32.

34 POLITCS,ORDERANDHISTORY

po34 POLITICS, ORDER AND HISTORY34 POLITICS, ORDER AND HISTORY34 POLITICS, ORDER AND HISTORY34 POLITICS, ORDER AND HISTORY34 POLITICS, ORDER AND HISTORY34 POLITICS, ORDER AND HISTORY

be34 POLITCS,ORDERANDHISTORY34 POLITCS,ORDERANDHISTORY34 POLITCS,ORDERANDHISTORY34 POLITCS,ORDERANDHISTORY34 POLITCS,ORDERANDHISTORY34 POLITCS,ORDERANDHISTORY34 POLITCS,ORDERANDHISTORY34 POLITCS,ORDERANDHISTORY34 POLITCS,ORDERANDHISTORY34 POLITCS,ORDERANDHISTORY34 POLITCS,ORDERANDHISTORY34 POLITCS,ORDERANDHISTORY34 POLITCS,ORDERANDHISTORY34 POLITCS,ORDERANDHISTORY34 POLITCS,ORDERANDHISTORY34 POLITCS,ORDERANDHISTORY34 POLITCS,ORDERANDHISTORY34 POLITCS,ORDERANDHISTORY ments of Political Religions and uses an ambitious interpretation of the Timaeus, Critias and Critias's Sisyphus fragment to read them into Plato. Why he would bother to do so is not entirely obvious. Why should Voegelin restate the difference between the Platonic and Christian understanding of evil as the privation of good, on the one hand, and the more radical understanding of it as an independent, Satanic force, on the other, as the difference between Plato's inadequate account of 'the forces of the Socratic soul' and its necessary corrective supplement in Critias's account of'the mythical forces of the collective soul'?38 Is it in order to discover a pedigree for modernity's need for 'religious renewal' as a sophistic/Platonic 'pseudos mythos for the mass of the people, veiling the truth, because they are unable spontaneously to live in conformity with unveiled truth'?39 The answer to such questions is not clear from the sources alone. It suffices for the purposes of the present study to recognize that such extraneous concerns cloud Voegelin's interpretation of the texts at hand. In the discussion of the Republic presented in Plato and Aristotle, Voegelin reformulates the ostensible tension between Socrates and Critias within Plato in yet another way. The two antithetical forces become two antithetical types of eros. Socratic eros is 'the positive force which carries the soul beyond itself toward the Agathon'. But it has a 'satanic double', the eros tyrannos, which Voegelin describes as 'the desire [in the soul] which succumbs to the fascination of Evil'. Voegelin is quick to find evidence of 'the problem of cosmic dualism' in his somewhat dubious and anachronistic interpretation of Republic (573b-d). He is also explicit in relating it to Critias, with predictably confusing consequences: Plato was acutely aware of the spirituality of evil and of the fascination emanating from a tyrannical order. The Eros tyrannos is dangerous and evil, but it is not contemptible—just as the order of Atlantis, in the Critias, has its qualities of luciferic splendor. °

How can a satanic force not be contemptible? And is the luciferic splendour of Critias's city in speech a necessary aspect of political order or is it not? Concerning the spirituality of evil, Voegelin cannot sustain the argument that Plato understood it as a satanic force, dualistically opposed to the good. He must admit that the eros tyrannos is 'parasitical', in the sense 38. Voegelin, 'Plato's Egyptian Myth', p. 317 = Order and History, III, p. 178. 39. Voegelin, Order and History, II, p. 323. 40. Voegelin, Order and History, III, p. 127.

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that it 'insatiably drives [the soul] to waste the substance'; in other, more traditional words, for Plato, evil is thus a privation of the good.41 Concerning the splendour of Atlantis, Voegelin has nothing further to say in this context. He does, however, mention it in relation to his understanding of the limitations of Plato's 'Dionysiac soul'. While Voegelin admits, on the one hand, that Plato's 'dualism of the Erotes [is] closely related to the Christian dualism of amor Dei and amor sui ,42 he also claims, on the other, that 'Plato's philosophizing remains bound by the compactness of the Dionysiac soul', a compactness which allowed neither 'mystical union with God, nor any other neo-Platonic or Christian developments':43 The leap in being, toward the transcendent source of order, is real in Plato; and later ages have recognized rightly in [the Republic (592b)] a prefiguration of St. Augustine's conception of the civitas Dei. Nevertheless, a prefiguration is not the figuration itself. Plato is not a Christian; and the surprising development [of the Republics 'leap in being'] occurs at the end 44 of an inquiry that started from the luminous depth of the Dionysiac soul.

Voegelin does not give 'the Dionysiac' per se much explicit substantive content. In one sense, it describes the aspect of the soul expressed in the Dionysian festivals that developed into the Greek tragedy: 'Tragedy as a form is the study of the human soul in the process of making decisions, while the single tragedies construct conditions and experimental situations, in which a fully developed, self-conscious soul is forced into action'.45 Platonic philosophy is thus the fullest expression of tragedy; and the Dionysian element, permanently bonding it to the polis in which tragedy is performed and contemplated, is one of its greatest strengths: 'true philosophical existence is perhaps possible only in an environment resembling the culture and institutions of the polis'.46 In another sense, for Voegelin, 'the Dionysiac' describes the luciferic or satanic: totemistic practices, bull-gods, sacrifices, chthonic rites celebrating either 'divine lust' or 'communion with a divinity of the nether regions'—all the 'Atlantian rituals of order' described in the Critias^7 but tainted with a sense of 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

Voegelin, Voegelin, Voegelin, Voegelin, Voegelin, Voegelin, Voegelin,

Order and History, Order and History, Order and History, Order and History, Order and History, Order and History, Order and History,

III, p. 127. III, p. 127. III, p. 62. III, p. 92. II, pp. 243, 247. II, p. 170; III, p. 70. II, pp. 56-57; III, pp. 127, 212-13.

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fascination combined with disgust that typifies both anachronistic understandings of'the pagan' and conventional misreadings of the Platonic dialogues. The luciferic or satanic both is and is not present in Plato. Its presence both is and is not attributable to Critias. Plato both does and does not understand it properly. Plato is to be both praised and criticized for his understanding of it. Plato's account both is and is not different from the Christian understanding. Christianity both is and is not necessarily superior to any philosophical account. Voegelin is always of two minds, but is always unwilling to admit the problem. Consequently, at one point of his argument he might claim that, in the 'luciferic splendor' of Atlantis, 'we touch perhaps upon the most intimate danger of the Platonic soul, the danger of straying from the difficult path of the spirit and falling into the abyss of pride'.48 And at another point in the same argument, he might equally well claim, in complete contradiction: The Atlantis is the unique instance of a Utopia written 'in bad faith' by a master of political psychology. In his construction Plato uses the materials which a Utopian writer might have used 'in good faith'; and he does it so skillfully that the account of Atlantis does not degenerate into a satire on dreamers of ideals. For the dream of Utopia... is a serious affair; it is something like the black magic of politics. Most appropriately, therefore, the 49 dream of Atlantis rises in luciferic splendor.

Both statements are equally anachronistic. Both wrestle with problems that are intrinsically important, but problems that are not intrinsic to the texts: in these formulations, they are, instead, the result of unsound readings of the dialogues. In the projected History of Political Ideas and 'Plato's Egyptian Myth', Voegelin presented Schelling as a Plato for our times, capable of addressing modernity's civilizational decline just as Plato addressed the decline of Hellas, but freed from Plato's reliance on pagan myth by Christian revelation and modern dialectics. By the time volumes 2 and 3 of Order and History are published, Voegelin seems to have reconsidered matters. A Plato for our times is still necessary, but it is not Schelling. First, Schelling's dialectic of the Potenzenlehre is too similar to the Hegelian dialectic that Voegelin came to recognize as one of the most important forms of modern gnosticism. And secondly, a Plato for our times must be a master

48. Voegelin, Order and History, III, p. 127. 49. Voegelin, Order and History, III, p. 209.

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of political psychology, deliberately using myth in order to counteract the evil, satanic forces present in the modern world. The 'Note' appended to 'Plato's Egyptian Myth' is thus replaced in Plato and Aristotle by a statement of Voegelin's new opinions. Schelling is now presented as second only to Plato as a 'philosopher of the myth'; however, 'his achievement is marred by the gnostic inclination to intellectualize the unconscious and to reduce its movements to the formula of a dialectical process'. Plato is free of this inclination, described by Irenaeus in his criticism of second-century gnostics as the desire to '"place salvation in the gnosis of that which is ineffable majesty "...perhaps because he shared unreservedly the common Greek conviction that things divine are not for mortals to know'. And Voegelin no longer considers it a valid criticism of Plato that the modern speculative dialectic was not available for his philosophy: 'The criticism characterizes as a shortcoming in Plato, though as one that was conditioned by his historical position, precisely what we consider his greatest merit, that is, the clear separation of the myth from all [intentional] knowledge.'50 For Plato, the distinction between myth and knowledge 'corresponds to the Christian distinction between the spheres of faith and reason'; and the 'acceptance of the myth (or, on the Christian level, the cognitio fidei} is the condition for a realistic understanding of the soul'.51 But in his momentary enthusiasm to emphasize the equivalences of the Platonic and Christian accounts, primarily by way of their dissimilarity to early Christian and modern gnosticism, Voegelin leaves a host of questions unanswered. 3. Equivalences and Differentiations The project of Order and History came to a standstill with the publications of volumes 2 and 3. In some part, this was due to the manner in which Voegelin used materials from his History of Political Ideas. On the basis of the evidence concerning the Timaeus and Critias, his earlier studies of the Greeks were not changed substantially in light of the discussion of the 'community of being' presented as the organizing vision for Order and History?2 his readings of the Platonic dialogues retained the form and content given them by the assumptions concerning the historical development of philosophy and religion that were common in contemporary 50. Voegelin, Order and History, III, p. 193. 51. Voegelin, Order and History, III, pp. 188, 194. 52. See Voegelin, Order and History, I, pp. 1-11.

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scholarship. Volume 4 was projected to be a study of early Christianity and the New Testament. Could he use materials from the History again in this way? And given the claims made by the Christians themselves to have superseded both Israel's revelation and the pagans' philosophy, how could Voegelin confront the topic squarely in the context of a project that was, to some extent, divided against itself? The philosophic consequences of his understanding of the 'community of being' remained to be elaborated; his understanding of Plato's philosophy and theology certainly required reinterpretation; and the accounts of the Gospels and the early Christian theologians had to be analyzed in a manner that did justice to their truth, but did not necessarily accept their self-understanding. Voegelin's response to these difficulties showed, as always, remarkable integrity. But one always wants the wise to be wiser still, to better embody wisdom itself. Voegelin's integrity is evident in the care he took to work through the problems with patience and insight. However, the results of his efforts—from this point in his career through to the posthumous publications of 'Quod Deus Dicitur' and In Search of Order—for all their brilliance and innovation, seem never to escape the interpretative dilemmas in which he found himself after publishing the first three volumes of Order and History. Although Voegelin mentions Plato constantly in subsequent studies, he never again undertook the task of publishing a sustained, thorough analysis of a single Platonic dialogue. Instead, there are many short, set-piece interpretations of various sections of the dialogues, the longest of which is the treatment of the Timaeus that ends In Search of Order, there are even more apergus about Plato's philosophy alluding to text; and there is a flourishing of technical terms, ostensibly representing Plato's terminology, in Voegelin's own writing. Unfortunately, the proliferation of Platonic technical terms does not necessarily indicate better insight into the texts from which they are taken; if anything, the opposite.53 For example, in 'Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History' (1970), Voegelin writes: 'When Plato tried to characterize the type of truth peculiar to the symbolism of [the anima mundi in] the Timaeus he wavered between the more assertive alethinos logos and the more doubtful eikos mythos!^ The words eikos mythos are spoken by Timaeus, and they do 53. For further discussion of this topic, and particularly Voegelin's use of the terms metaxy and epekeina, see my article 'The Uses of Plato in Voegelin's Philosophy of Consciousness'. 54. Eric Voegelin, 'Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History', in

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concern the account of the cosmos he is about to give (Timaeus 29d); the words alethinos logos arc spoken by Critias, but they concern his story about Atlantis, and not the cosmos (20d); what is more, Plato—who is neither a Pythagorean philosopher like Timaeus nor a sophist like his uncle Critias—has Socrates reply rather critically, with his usual irony, to Critias's claim that he will tell a 'true story' and not a fable of the sort Socrates told in recounting the discussion of the Republic (26e). Voegelin's use of these terms has almost nothing to do with Plato's text.55 In this important article, 'Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History', Voegelin makes his most philosophically courageous attempt to elaborate the understanding of the 'community of being' discussed in Israel and Revelation. Given that the 'quaternarian structure' of the primordial community—'God and man, world and society'—is a constant one, and that all human history and indeed every human experience occurs within this structure, it is possible to recognize and speak of 'equivalences', both of experiences and of their expression. Perhaps because he makes his argument outside the context provided by the project of presenting the materials of the History of Political Ideas as part of Order and History, Voegelin's account of equivalences shows no trace of any underlying developmental theory of history. Indeed, the enthusiasm for identifying equivalences is so strongly present in the article that one might wish for slightly more precision in specifying differences. His use of the term 'equivalence' too often suggests identity—and not only identity in reflecting some constant feature of, or within, the quaternarian structure, but even identity in detail. For example: after first hypostatizing metaxy as a Platonic technical term and claiming it can be used interchangeably with the Stoic notion of'tension' (tasis), Voegelin goes on to claim that a large range of tensional experiences are strictly equivalent or identical: the metaxy is ostensibly evident in the tension between life and death, perfection and imperfection, time and timelessness, truth and untruth, amor

Published Essays, 1966-1985, pp. 115-33 (127). 55. Voegelin's terminology does, however, capture something of the dialogue's meaning indirectly: he first incorrectly associates Timaeus's cosmology with Plato; he then clouds the association by incorrectly interpreting Plato's use of alethinos logos and eikos mythos-, and the result is the understanding that Plato's cosmology is not quite Pythagorean. But this, and more, could be known from trie text without such unsound inferences. And Voegelin's usage leaves open the question of what Plato's criticism of Pythagorean cosmology is. The dialogue itself is clear: for all its insight, Pythagorean cosmology gives no account of the good beyond being.

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Dei and amor sui, the moods of joy and despair, and a large number of similarly constructed pairs of antithetical terms.56 Quite simply, these pairs of terms describe widely different experiences, perhaps comparable in the context of a rather extensive philosophic anthropology; and to claim that they are equivalent because they have an antithetical structure that produces an 'in-between-the-poles' in every case is to commit a rather obvious fallacy. But it is an entirely forgivable error: in order to assert the primacy of the community of being, a difficult and indeed radical break with well-established traditions of interpretation is necessary. Although the term 'equivalence' became a mainstay of his philosophical vocabulary—it is used frequently in his meditative writings to move easily from topic to topic, author to author, text to text—after this article, Voegelin never returned to discuss in depth the question of what equivalences are. Perhaps the initial breakthroughs were difficult to sustain in themselves, or in the face of critical reaction; perhaps they too quickly became associated with the imprecise arguments in which they were first expressed; perhaps the task of working through their consequences proved to be too radical, or simply too much to do, given the materials at hand. For some reason, Voegelin qualified the insights. And what is more surprising, Voegelin became uneasy with others working toward that end. Mircea Eliade, for example: among many works, his 1946 and 1948 Sorbonne lectures, published in English as Patterns of Comparative Religion (1958), and his 1957-60 Eranos lectures, first published in the EranosJahrbuch (volumes 26-29, 1958—61) and then in English as The Two and the One (1965), are excellent studies of 'equivalences'. The chapter on 'Ropes and Puppets' in The Two and the One contains a succinct but illuminating comparative study of related passages in Homer, Plato and Pseudo-Dionysius that Voegelin was to use, without attribution, in later essays. And several theoretical chapters in Patterns of Comparative Religion discuss topics of immediate relevance to Voegelin's concerns: the structure and morphology of the sacred; hierophanies as modalities of the sacred in history; and the structure and degradation of symbols, to name the most obvious.57 But Voegelin makes almost no reference to Eliade's

56. Voegelin, 'Equivalences of Experience', pp. 119-20. 57. Mircea Eliade, Traite d'histoire des religions (Paris: Editions Payot, 1949); in English, Patterns of Comparative Religion (trans. Rosemary Sheed; London: Sheed and Ward, 1958); and Mephistopheles et I 'Androgyne (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1962); in English, The Two and the One (trans. J.M. Cohen; New York: Harper & Row, 1965).

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work,58 and where he does, he is dismissive: Eliade has Vast empirical knowledge', Voegelin claims, but he is an inadequate philosopher.59 It would seem that Voegelin's reluctance to acknowledge Eliade's real philosophical insights—like his reluctance to discuss the importance of Schelling in print—is evidence of his own reluctance to explore fully the consequences of recognizing equivalences in experience and symbolization. Voegelin qualified the theory of 'equivalences' in two ways: 'leaps in being'; and 'compactness and differentiation'. One step forward, two steps back. Although it is obvious that any account of the unchanging order within which all human history occurs must also be able to account for difference, uniqueness and individuality, and that Voegelin's understanding of 'leaps in being' and 'differentiations' was initially intended to serve this purpose, these rather unfortunate technical terms permitted the return of a developmental understanding of history to his work. And because the technical terms were said to represent theoretical advances when they did not, they so clouded matters that Voegelin's insights were not merely qualified, they were constantly threatened with being completely undermined. To speak in the commonsense language Voegelin often praised: 'equivalence and differentiation' are just 'same and different' dressed up to go to town. And we know from Plato that even the Eleatics recognized that sameness and difference are present in all things (Sophist 254e-260b). So the terms equivalence and differentiation—the latter term in its benign sense—are best seen as addressing the question of the presence of the sameness and difference in the community of being. Consider, for example, the relation of human being to the ground of being or God: it is present in all human beings at all times; its presence will be manifest as part of different dispensations of human being, of course; and some of these dispensations will emphasize the relation more or better than others; but no particular dispensation, no matter the degree of its emphasis or subtlety, will possess the relation itself to the exclusion

58. Voegelin, Order and History, II, p. 50 n. 6; IV, pp. 73, 254; Anamnesis, p. 113; Eric Voegelin, 'On Henry James's Turn of the Screw, in Published Essays, 1966-1985, pp. 134-71 (168); and Eric Voegelin, 'Anxiety and Reason', in Eric Voegelin, What Is History? And Other Late Unpublished Writings (ed. Thomas A. Hollweck and Paul Caringella; Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 28; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), pp. 52-110 (63). 59. Eric Voegelin, The Eclipse of Reality', in What Is History?, pp. 111-62 (158); Eric Voegelin, 'Response to Professor Altizer's "A New History and a New but Ancient God?"', in Published Essays, 1966-1985, pp. 292-303 (298).

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of other human beings; there is thus no difference of degree that is a difference of kind, though some might mistake the former for the latter through enthusiasm or ignorance or pride, or a host of other political or historical reasons. The presence of the relation itself in human experiences makes them roughly equivalent; the particular dispensations are differentiations of the equivalences; and the dispensations that emphasize the relation might be said to be the most differentiated, but no more. It is a fundamental feature of Christianity's self-understanding, for example, to represent its difference of degree as a difference in kind: the relation between human being and God is revelation; pagans are human beings without revelation at all, related only to the cosmos; the Jews are human beings with imperfect revelation; perfect revelation, the relation itself between a human being and God, is possible only through recognizing Jesus as God; in other words, the revelation itself is an event in time which divides time and existence into a before and after, nature and history; and those human beings with this relation are somehow fundamentally different from those without it—the theological and historical consequences of such awkward formulations having worked themselves out, for better and for worse, over two millennia. When Voegelin decided to use the term 'leap in being' to describe the differentiation of particular dispensations within the community of being, all the Christian connotations of his source, Kierkegaard's 'leap of faith', came with it.60 And when Voegelin began to distinguish between particular dispensations by referring to degrees of compactness and differentiation, the problem was compounded. Voegelin's scale of compactness and differentiation simply restates the claim for the superiority of revelation in a different set of technical terms. In other words, the relation of compactness to differentiation is the relation of natural philosophy to supernatural revelation, or the relation of Plato's philosophy, limited by the barriers of cosmos and polls, to the theology of the Gospels, open toward the divinity beyond the cosmos and cosmopolis. And if the scale of compactness and differentiation does not carry this meaning, it is, at best, a questionable bit of literary criticism that has not been—and, I would argue, cannot be— demonstrated exegetically.

60. Eric Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections (ed. Ellis Sandoz; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), p. 79.

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4. The Monogenes Argument In remarks addressed to the Thomas More Institute in 1970, Voegelin gave a succinct description of the insufficiently differentiated Plato that was to haunt his subsequent works. It is worth citing at length because all the recurring limitations in his understanding of Plato make appearances in their new guises, including the most important: the argument concerning the term monogenes. Having the knowledge of the unknown God just as much as Jesus, does not lead Plato to a differentiation of God in man. He says: if there is that presence of such an unknown God, he is a God about whom we can say nothing; we know only that there is one. The known gods, the son of God, the monogenas theos, the First-born, remains the cosmos, in Plato. The same words appear in the Gospel of St. John to designate Christ; but the great difference is that a man is the monogenes theos and not the cosmos... The experiences of being drawn by God are described in the Platonic myth (in the Laws) of the god who plays with men as with puppets and pulls them by the string. That's helkein (to draw). The term recurs in the Gospel of John. So the experience of being drawn by God remains identical... But Plato does not draw the consequences—the God who pulls man by the 61 string is not the God who becomes man to die.

Voegelin's pairing of Plato and Jesus is not a slip. It is an often-discussed comparison, as interesting for what it says as for what it does not say. It would seem that, as human beings, Plato and Jesus stand in exactly the same relation to God. And it would seem that the experience of being drawn by God is best described in Plato's Laws, not the Gospels. Usually, Voegelin pairs people with people, authors with authors, and texts with texts, but this passage is silent about the central figure of the dialogues: Socrates. Plato's account of God's pull on the puppet-string, first of all, is developed in far greater detail in the Laws than Voegelin admits.62 More importantly, however, the question of possible human responses to the pulls is discussed in a wide variety of literary forms throughout the dialogues, the main purpose of which is to describe the proper responses by way of portraying the character of Socrates' soul: the pull on the string is 61. Eric Voegelin, Conversations with Eric Voegelin (ed. R. Eric O'Connor; Thomas More Institute Papers, 76; Montreal: Perry Printing Limited, 1980), pp. 82-83. 62. For further discussion of Plato's development of the puppet image in the Laws, see my book, Plato's Political Philosophy: Prudence in the Republic and the Laws (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), pp. 165-69.

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answered by Socrates' erotic ascent, as it is presented in the Republic, Symposium and Phaedrus. And the manner in which Socrates 'immortalized' throughout his life is, in this sense, strictly comparable to the manner in which Jesus responded to the pull during his life. Socrates moved Plato to write, and Jesus moved the authors of the Gospels; and both Socrates and Jesus were presented in the respective texts as having become, during life, as much like God as is possible for a human being. Given this more precise comparison, emphasizing 'equivalences', what does it mean for Voegelin to claim that 'Plato does not draw the consequences'? It is not the case that Plato did not 'differentiate' the 'God in man'. Voegelin's suggestion, obliquely stated, is perhaps that he did not 'differentiate' it adequately; but in what way was his account inadequate? When pressed on this point, Voegelin sometimes answered by describing Plato in commonplaces: [W]hen you have an existential experience like Plato's...you will...break with the cosmological myth of the intra-cosmic gods and find a new symbolism for explaining the structure of the world: It's not the polytheistic gods...it is the idea.®*

Plato is thus presented as a rather uninteresting pagan who squanders a historically anomalous 'leap in being' by becoming a monotheistic metaphysician; and the best evidence against such a portrayal—Socratic erotics—is simply never mentioned. The same may be said for Voegelin's claim that Plato 'does not draw the consequences'. How is it not the case in the dialogues that 'the God who pulls man by the string is not the God who becomes man to die'? All human beings are God's puppets, both as his creations and as his play-things. God is manifest and evident in every human being, and thus it follows that he dies with the death of every human being. Not in an absolute sense, of course; but even the New Testament does not claim that God the Father died finally with Jesus. Perhaps Plato's account is inadequate because he does not describe the death of an 'immortal' human being? He does, of course: the death of Socrates, who is not just one of God's creatures for Plato, but also a 'divine' man, as much like God as possible. In accounting for his death, Plato wrestles with the 'consequences' just as much as do the authors of the Gospels. In Voegelin's remarks at the Thomas More Institute, the alleged lack of a differentiation in Plato is made to seem plausible by silence about

63. Voegelin, Conversations with Eric Voegelin, pp. 98-99.

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Socrates. His case, however, depends on the positive evidence of a comparison between Plato's Timaeus and John's Gospel. But this is to state the matter too broadly. In all his subsequent discussions of Plato and the Gospels, even in the contexts in which he mentions Socrates, Voegelin's argument in support of an understanding of the Gospels as more 'differentiated' than the dialogues ultimately depends on a single textual claim, and a textual claim that itself depends on the interpretation of a single word common to both texts: monogenes. Why should this one word be so significant? For the reason that it can be made to stand as a symbol for the comparison between the Timaeus and John's Gospel, between all of the dialogues and the New Testament, between Socratic philosophy and Christianity, indeed between Socrates and Christ. Voegelin claims—once again, but in different words—that Plato had 'a less developed level of spirituality compared to that of the Christian era, because it was as yet impossible for [him] to breach the bounds of the sacro-political, worldimmanent community and to recognize the possibility of an unmediated religious existence in God'.64 By taking the Pythagorean cosmology of the Timaeus as the highest Platonic doctrine and putting aside the full challenge of Socratic erotics, Voegelin once again describes Plato as merely a natural philosopher and an idealistic metaphysician, refashioning the patristic account of him—common since Augustine's Confessions—as a man knowledgeable about the mind and matter, but ignorant of the affairs of the heart and soul because he did not know God. And associated with this traditional misrepresentation is Voegelin's related assumption that the theology of the Trinity, based on the Gospels, is more 'differentiated' than the philosophy of Plato's dialogues, the reasons for which assumption remains unclear: perhaps because Christian theology develops great subtlety in its technical or metaphysical vocabulary; perhaps because its subtleties allow mysteries to be presented readily to non-philosophers; or perhaps because the Gospels could serve, as the dialogues could not, as an effective foundation for a public cult in the Roman Empire. Although Voegelin's claim about the significance of the term monogenes is bound up with other matters, it is important enough in his later writings to warrant being addressed separately. The 'consequences' of Voegelin's monogenes argument do not stand up on many fronts: Timaeus the Pythagorean cannot be assumed to speak for Plato in the Timaeus', the Pythagorean cosmology of the Timaeus cannot be assumed to be superior

64. Voegelin, Political Religions, p. 33; Diepolitischen Religionen, p. 32.

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to the 'Socratic' cosmology of the Phaedms and Laws X; and Christian theology cannot be assumed to be maximally 'differentiated' in comparison with the Platonic account. Plato's 'Socratic' theology certainly has a claim to being the most differentiated account possible of the relation between a human being and God, especially given the historically demonstrated openness of the Christian account to abuse. Be that as it may, Voegelin's monogenes argument does not stand up on its own terms. It is not simply a poor comparison from the Platonic side. It is also an unsound piece of biblical interpretation. The term monogenes is neither a Johannine neologism nor a Johannine term of art in the sense Voegelin claims it is.65 It is a common word, appearing in both the New Testament (Lk. 7.12, 8.42, 9.38) and the Septuagint Qudg. 11.34., Tob. 3.15; cf. Pss. 22.20, 25.16, 35.17) with the meaning of 'only child'. It is used once in the Wisdom literature to describe Sophia: 'an understanding spirit, holy, one only, manifold...loving the thing that is good' (Wis. 7.22). And the most significant context of its use in the Septuagint is God's command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac: 'Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love...' (Gen. 22.2, KJV; cited in Heb. 11.17). The Johannine use of the word monogenes might be seen as unique in one sense: it serves as part of the Christian liturgy presentation of Jesus as the only 'son' of God. In the Hebrew Bible, all human beings are descended from Adam through Noah and are related to God through the Noachite covenant; all may be said to be children of God in some sense. The Israelites are, of course, the children of Israel, also by descent and by covenant with God: favoured children. Subsequently, as Voegelin points out,66 the prophet came to speak alone as the 'son of God' (Jer. 1.5). In the Sermon on the Mount, the usage again changes slightly. Jesus himself says: 'Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called children of God' (Mt. 5.9, KJV). All are children, or sons, of God, if they observe the covenant or recognize God's will. The New Testament, however, presents Jesus as more than the most favoured or most deserving or truest or best of God's children: he is the only 'son'; and the range of the phrase 'children of God' is narrowed from 65. For the purposes of this analysis, I will concentrate on the term monogenes alone. In the initial formulations of his argument, Voegelin cites monogenes theos from Jn 1.18 in particular. This passage, however, is subject to interpretative dispute because it might be read as meaning Jesus, the son, is the only God. In later texts, therefore, Voegelin preferred to cite the term monogenes in its several Johannine usages. 66. Voegelin, Order and History, I, p. 467.

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those who stand in proper relation to the Father to those who come to the Father through Jesus (Jn 1.12; Phil. 2.15; Heb. 12.7; Gal. 3.26; Rom. 8.14-21; 1 Jn 3.1, 5.2). The Synoptic Gospels struggle with the problem of how to distinguish Jesus as the 'son': the pre-Easter Jesus is presented as both accepting (Mk 14.61-62) and not accepting (Mt. 27.64; Lk. 22.67) the title 'son of God'; and the title also appears in a variety of contexts to serve the literary function of prefiguring the resurrected son (Rom. 1.4) during his transfiguration (Mk 9.7) and his earlier baptism (Mk 1.11) and, of course, in the birth narratives (Mt. 2.15; Lk. 1.35).67 The Johannine writings are consistent in the manner in which they distinguish between the 'son' of God (Jn 1.14, 1.18, 3.16, 3.18; 1 Jn 4.9) and the 'children' (Jn 1.12; 1 Jn 3.1-2, 5.2) who accept him. In the Johannine texts, Jesus is quite literally the only 'son'.68 However, the uniqueness of Jesus in John is in no way indicated by the use of the word monogenes, in a technical sense, to describe him as the 'only-begotten' son. The Christology is not in the word itself. If anything, precisely the opposite: John uses terms for 'begetting' exclusively with reference to the relation of God to all of his 'children'; it would thus be against the consistency of John's narrative to speak of Jesus as the 'onlybegotten', in the sense of monogennetos.69 The Christology became associated with certain Johannine passages in which the common word monogenes is used only during Jerome's translation of the Bible into Latin. In the fourth century, Jerome's teacher, Gregory of Nazianzus, developed an account of the Trinity (Oration 29) that influenced Jerome to translate monogenes as unicus in most contexts, but as unigenitus in key passages of John. And the deliberate mistranslations of Jerome's Vulgate were carried into the King James Bible, where unicus is 'only child' and unigenitus is famously rendered 'only-begotten'. Voegelin's discovery of a significant Christology in John's ostensible use of monogenes as a technical term is therefore merely a discovery of Gregory's Trinitarian doctrine, as it had

67. See Reginald Fuller and Pheme Perkins, Who Is this Christ? Gospel Christology and Contemporary Faith (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983). 68. Compare Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Sections 40 and 47, in which he criticizes the philological 'swindle' in the New Testament's resentful transformation of'everybody's equal right to be a child of God, as Jesus had taught' into a doctrine of the 'one Son of God'. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols', and The Anti-Christ (trans. R.J. Hollingdale; Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1990), pp. 164-65, 174-75. 69. Dale Moody, 'God's Only Son: The Translation of John 3:16 in the Revised Standard Version, Journal of Biblical Literature 72 (1953), pp. 213-19.

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been forced into the text in Jerome's Vulgate. It is thus a rather unfortunate compound error that only serves to obfuscate the matters Voegelin claims to be clarifying.70 5. 'The Gospel and Culture' (1971) Voegelin's summary remarks to the Thomas More Institute are based on research that he published as 'The Gospel and Culture' in 1971. The argument of his paper is essentially the same in the end, but the range of evidence cited is extensive, and the presentation more finely crafted. What is most striking about the paper, however, is the manner in which Voegelin first strongly states the case for the equivalence of Plato and the Gospels, even for the equivalence of Socrates and Jesus, and then introduces qualification upon tenuous qualification concerning differentiations—including the monogenes argument—until nothing of the initial case for equivalence seems to remain. It is a remarkable exercise, powerful in its rhetorical effect, but ultimately anticlimactic and profoundly inconsistent. And it is, unfortunately, Voegelin's clearest statement on the subject. The first sustained argument Voegelin made to demonstrate the equivalence of the Platonic and Christian accounts—'Immortality: Experience and Symbol' (1967)—was based on an interpretation of their respective uses of the language symbols, 'mortality' and 'immortality'. Given the rather general, and inescapably 'compact', character of these terms, any context in which they appear is likely to seem equivalent, in Voegelin's sense. It is an important point to make, nonetheless; and Voegelin begins his discussion in 'The Gospel and Culture' with a summary of the comparison. Among the Greeks, Euripides' ambiguous line—'Who knows if 70. Pheme Perkins has criticized Voegelin's manner of biblical interpretation. She writes generally that Voegelin's analysis of Christian sources is 'both exciting and dismaying'. Although Voegelin has an 'intuitive sensitivity to the life of the spirit' in the texts, his work is 'dismaying' because 'it lacks...historical and exegetical finesse'. And concerning Voegelin's analysis of John in specific, Perkins writes: 'Voegelin's interpretation of Johannine symbols as applying to the consciousness of every individual christian (e.g. OH, IV, 16) [Order and History, IV, p. 16] errs... John consciously limits symbols that other thinkers had applied generally, to Jesus.' Pheme Perkins, 'Gnosis and the Life of the Spirit: The Price of Pneumatic Order', in John Kirby and William M. Thompson (eds.), Voegelin and the Theologian: Ten Studies in Interpretation (Toronto Studies in Theology, 10; New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1983), pp. 222-52 (222-23, 247-48 n. 4).

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to live is to be dead, / and to be dead to live'—is taken up in Plato's Gorgiasand most fully developed in Socrates' description of the judgment of the dead at the end of the Republic. In the revelatory tradition, Voegelin claims, 'Jesus resumes the symbolism'—taking Mt. 16.25-26 as Jesus' words—and Paul gives it further expression in Rom. 8.13 (cf. Jas 1.27; 2 Pet. 3.14). But the range of equivalents extends more broadly: the earliest example of which Voegelin knows is the Egyptian poem of the third millennium BCE, though it is 'still couched in the language of the cosmological myth'.71 It could be argued that mortality and immortality will always necessarily be described in the language of cosmological myth. And underlying such mythical imagery of life and death, in the best cases, there will be an attempt both to account for the relation between God and human being within the 'quaternarian structure' and to describe its consequence for how one ought to live one's life. The 'saving tale' of Plato's dialogues portrays Socrates living the most virtuous life possible as a consequence of his 'immortalizing', and dying in defense of it; the 'saving tale' of the Gospels similarly portrays Jesus. Voegelin states: 'the dramatic episode of John 12 is the Christian equivalent to the philosopher's Apology'. But he does not extend the comparison as far as John 19 and the Phaedo, except to suggest that in both cases 'the universal truth of existence had to be linked with a representative death', perhaps in order that the truth might better become 'socially effective'.72 In asserting equivalences, Voegelin claims 'it would be difficult to find a major difference of function between Plato's Pamphylian tale of the last judgment and John's Last Day'.73 These are simply the more socially effective, cosmologically symbolized versions of the lives and deaths of Socrates and Jesus. And Voegelin further asserts that Plato's story is as much a revelation as the story in the Gospels: 'Plato was just as conscious of the revelatory component in the truth of his logos as the prophets of Israel or the authors of the New Testament writings'. This is a perfectly consistent claim, since the 'revelation' all these authors are quite consciously describing in their different narratives is the experience of taking the relation between God and human being within the quaternarian structure as the formative relation of the whole order of being—an experience universally available to human beings, if difficult to sustain and perfect throughout one's life. But...Voegelin hesitates at this point in his 71. Voegelin, 'The Gospel and Culture', p. 179. 72. Voegelin, 'The Gospel and Culture', p. 180. 73. Voegelin, The Gospel and Culture', p. 182.

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analysis and introduces the first of the doubtful qualifications that ultimately undermine his insights: 'The differences between prophecy, classic philosophy, and the gospel must be sought in the degrees of differentiation of existential truth.'74 In attempting to establish the features that make the saving tale of the Gospels more 'differentiated', Voegelin does not use the term in a single meaning. It is used to mean several things simultaneously: simple difference; a greater degree of literary complexity; greater literary complexity in both the pejorative and approbative senses; greater emphasis of a given experience; emphasis of a unique experience, but the uniqueness of the experience understood only in the approbative sense; and a greater social effectiveness. The ambiguity of the term not only causes confusion in his argument; it also leads to an awkward inference. In Voegelin's initial comparative list of the features of the Gospel story that reveal it to be 'considerably more complex than classic philosophy', he admits several of the ways in which the Gospels are far less differentiated. According to his list, the Gospel story is:75 1. a) richer by the missionary fervor of its spiritual universalism; 2. b) broader'by its appeal to the inarticulate humanity of the common man; 3. more imposing through its imperial tone of divine authority; 4. more imbalanced through its apocalyptic ferocity, which leads to conflicts with the conditions of man's existence in society; 5. more compact through its generous absorption of earlier strata of mythical imagination, e.g., Israelite historiogenesis and miracleworking; 6. more differentiated through the intensely articulate experience of loving-divine action in the illumination of existence with truth.

a) poorer by its neglect of noetic control; b) more restricted\yy its bias against the articulate wisdom of the wise;

74. Voegelin, 'The Gospel and Culture', p. 188. 75. Voegelin, 'The Gospel and Culture', p. 189, emphasis added.

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For those features for which Voegelin offers an explicit comparison (1, 2), there seems to be no compelling reason to prefer the saving tale of the Gospels to the saving tale of the dialogues. The features for which Voegelin only implies a comparison (3, 4, 5) are not necessarily positive; indeed, some are so negative as to call the positive features of richness and breadth into question. And the only greater differentiation Voegelin mentions explicitly (6) is little more than a petitio, evocatively stated as if it were a conclusion. On the whole, if it were possible to draw up a balancesheet in which all the different senses of differentiation could be evaluated according to a single measure, a strong case could be made for the claim that the Gospels are less differentiated than the dialogues. The assessment would ultimately depend on an argument for or against the necessary relation of the social effectiveness of a text and the 'compactness' of its imagery, 'compactness' being understood as including the possibility of confusion and over-complexity. However, no such final balance-sheet is possible. Social effectiveness is demonstrated historically, and has no necessary relation to textual subtlety or truth. And textual subtlety, no matter how that might be understood, also has no necessary relation to truth. Although it often makes reference to historical evidence, Voegelin's argument in favour of the Gospels presents itself primarily as an exegetical exercise, appealing to a reader's unreflective opinion that textual detail corresponds to degree of truth. From his comparative list, Voegelin proceeds to discuss the questions of equivalence and differentiation at greater length, referring to selected passages of the dialogues and Gospels as evidence, and speaking in a manner that hints suggestively at the unfolding of great mysteries in a historical drama. He first discusses 'the noetic core' shared by classic philosophy and the gospel movement, and then ends his paper by elaborating their differences as degrees of compactness and differentiation once again. The decisive evidence of Plato's lack of differentiation is familiar: the monogenes argument. The argument for an equivalent 'noetic core', however, is interesting for the manner in which its novel textual claims offset Voegelin's earlier judgment that the Gospels are 'poorer' than the dialogues by their 'neglect of noetic control'. The common noetic core is a similarity in the description of existence 'as a field of pulls and counterpulls', a similarity that is definitively established for Voegelin by a single word that the texts have in common. In Plato's Laws, the relation of God to human beings is symbolized in the image of the human being as God's play-thing, a puppet suspended from a

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golden cord or string that rests in God's hand. God draws (helkein) the cord, how and when he will. Voegelin points out that the same word, helkein, appears in John, and nowhere else in the New Testament. In Jn 6.44, Jesus says: 'No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws (helkein) him'. This statement adds nothing to Plato's tale of Socrates as saviour, if the Athenian of the Laws who tells the story of the puppet is understood to be Socrates. The Gospel continues: in Jn 12.32, 'the author lets Christ say that he will, when he is lifted up from the earth, draw (helkein) all men to himself'.76 Voegelin treats the similarity in imagery as something of a mystery, taking it as proof of greater differentiation and allowing himself the rhetorical liberty of retrojecting the proof into history. He writes: 'With an admirable economy of means, John symbolizes the pull of the golden cord, its occurrence as an historical event in the representative man'. The passage goes on to mention a range of other phenomena, extending to the social effectiveness of the gospel movement. Voegelin then imagines 'a young student of philosophy' during this time, bored with the disputes of the school philosophers, who becomes 'fascinated by the brilliance of these succinct statements' because they appear to him 'as the perfection of the Socratic-Platonic movement'.77 And well they might, with no mystery at all about it. The imagery of God drawing up lesser beings to himself is originally Homeric, and was used quite deliberately by Plato in his portrayal of the life and death of Socrates.78 The appearance of the imagery in John is not evidence of mysterious historical movements, but rather evidence that John used Greek source-texts as deliberately as Plato did.79 Perhaps his intent was precisely to appeal to bored philosophy students. But the fact that the schools did not fully understand the experiential basis and literary

76. Voegelin, 'The Gospel and Culture', p. 189. 77. Voegelin, The Gospel and Culture', pp. 190-91. 78. Plato's development of Homeric sources for the puppet image in the Laws is discussed in my Plato's Political Philosophy, pp. 165-69. See also Eliade, The Two and the One, pp. 179-82. And there is also, of course, 'I've Got the World on a String', by Alter and Mitchell, and made famous by Frank Sinatra: Tve got the world on a string / Sittin' on a rainbow / Got the string wrapped 'round my finger / What a world, what a life / [I'm lucky] / I'm in love.' 79. The deliberate use of the Odyssey as a source-text for the Gospel of John is discussed by Oona Ajzenstat, 'Jesus as the New Odysseus: An Analysis of a Literary Source of John 9 and 10'. Paper presented to the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, 1995.

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form of Plato's dialogues does not prove that the Johannine account is more differentiated than the Platonic. In Homer's Iliad (8.5-27), Zeus, if he wills it, might draw up to himself the earth, the sea, and all the immortals, suspended at the end of a chain of gold. In Plato's Theaetetus (153c-d), the golden chain remains in God's hands alone; and in the Laws (644-5), the significance of the image as a saving tale for all human beings is elaborated. Restated in the Gospel's terms: no one comes to Socrates unless God draws him. But Socrates is not the God who draws up. In the Gospel of John, Jesus is the God. And what is more, Jn 12.32 uses the imagery of the Iliad ($.5-27) to identify Jesus, a man, with Zeus, the God who is able to draw (helkeiri) anyone and anything to himself when he wills. By identifying a human being with the God, John's imagery is more 'compact' than Homer's and Plato's. If there is a 'noetic core' shared by the dialogues and the New Testament, the best evidence for it is not the common word helkein, but rather the theotes of Col. 2.9, a peripheral Pauline letter: 'For in [Jesus] the whole fullness of divine reality (theotes) dwells bodily.' Again, a statement that Plato could have made about Socrates, and did make in as many words. Voegelin recognizes its importance: 'The passage is precious, because the author has succeeded in conveying his impression without recourse to older, more compact symbols, such as the Son of God, which would not have done justice to the newly differentiated experience.'80 But the recognition is lost immediately. The reason why he allows it to be lost is not obvious in his text: perhaps his penchant for reading historical significance into the neologisms he spots; perhaps his impressionistic manner of comparing textual similarities—although brilliant at times, in this case Voegelin's exegesis is less precise than Eliade's; or perhaps an inexplicably persistent reluctance to accept all of the philosophical consequences of the equivalences he had come to understand. For some reason, Voegelin first argues convincingly that the superiority of the theotes passage to the more compact 'Son of God' symbol commonly used in the Gospels demonstrates the equivalence of the gospel movement and Plato's philosophy, but then allows this insight to collapse into the conventional dismissal of Plato as historically unable to attain this level of differentiated experience. Even though he is compelled to admit that the experience symbolized in the theotes passage is also expressed in the Theaetetus passage (176b) in which Socrates describes the flight fom the evils of the world, becoming

80. Voegelin, 'The Gospel and Culture', p. 193.

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like God (homoiosis theo) as far as that is possible, he immediately undermines the evidence for equivalence with recourse to the monogenes argument: [T]hough Plato's homoiosis theo is the exact equivalent to the filling with theotesby the author of Colossians, Plato's spiritual man, the daimonios aner [of the Symposium}, is not the Christ of Colossians, the eikon ton theou. Plato reserves iconic existence to the Cosmos itself... [I]t is the one and only begotten (monogenes) heaven whose divine father is so recondite that it would be impossible to declare him to all men (Timaeus 28-29, 92c). In the contraposition of the monogenes theos in Plato's Timaeus and John 1:18 the barrier becomes visible which the movement of classic philosophy cannot break through to reach the insights peculiar to the gospel.81

After this point, the argument quickly recedes from its initial clarity; and it never mentions Plato's daimonios aner, Socrates, again. Any interpretation of the dialogues that does not recognize the central importance of Plato's understanding of the erotic mania of Socratic philosophy and is not sensitive to the literary form of Plato's presentation of the 'saving tale' of Socrates' life and death will only result in another theory of 'Platonism' to add to the collection of such theories that have accumulated in libraries through the centuries. Without Socrates, Plato is Platonism; and Platonism is some arbitrary recipe in which Eleatic theorizing, Pythagorean philosophy and sophistry are mixed to taste, with or without a dash of the Socratic elenchos. When Voegelin diminishes the importance of Socrates and then excludes him from consideration altogether, all that remains of Plato is the Platonic natural philosopher and metaphysical monotheist. In the articles written after 'The Gospel and Culture' in which Voegelin compares the dialogues and the New Testament, Socrates is never compared with Jesus, and Plato is always nothing more than a Platonist, Voegelin's preferred type being strongly influenced by the interpretations of Plotinus and Augustine. Plato is Timaeus, the Pythagorean cosmologist; Plato is the author of the Phaedrus myth—the dialogic role of Socrates is never mentioned—whose cosmology is, unsurprisingly, entirely unerotic in the Plotinean fashion; Plato is the metaphysician of the ideas; and Plato is the sophistic designer of public cults for the inarticulate in the manner of his uncle Critias. When Voegelin makes these claims, however, he does so with a bad conscience. He knows quite well that Plato is not

81. Voegelin, The Gospel and Culture', p. 194; cf. pp. 208-209.

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bound by cosmos and polis, unable to attain the insights of the Gospels, but he does not explain his understanding by way of interpreting the role of Socrates in the dialogues. Instead, the 'unbound' Plato appears as the central figure in Voegelin's own philosophy of consciousness. And the 'bound' Plato is frequently presented as struggling mightily through the tortuous formulations of the Timaeus to transcend his historical limitations and attain a noetic vision, comparable—if only as a prefiguration or intimation or intellectual equivalent—to the Christian vision. The opening words of Voegelin's essay, 'The Beginning and the Beyond: A Meditation on Truth' (1977), are as magisterial as the opening words of Order and History. 'Divine reality is being revealed to man in two fundamental modes of experience: in the experience of divine creativity in the cosmos; and in the experience of divine ordering presence in the soul.'82 Within the quaternarian structure of the primordial community of being, God is always the ground of being for the cosmos and human being; every human being is always related to God, both indirectly, through the cosmos, and directly; and both modes of relation act as ordering forces, primarily within the soul, but also within society, the human soul write large. Voegelin often assumes, however, that the second of these 'two fundamental modes' must be symbolized in the manner of Trinitarian theology in order for the experience to be described properly. This is not so. The experience of the divine ordering presence in the soul can be described immediately as such. It need not be described as the presence in the human soul of the divinity in the form of a man who himself experiences the divine ordering presence in his soul. Although this might seem a deeper mystery to some, it is unnecessarily complex or confused, and not a greater 'differentiation'. In the Laws, Plato accounts for both of these 'fundamental modes' of experiencing divine reality, and their proper relation, and the manner in which these modes should be manifest in society as well.83 Voegelin's reading of the Laws does not recognize them

82. Eric Voegelin, 'The Beginning and the Beyond: A Meditation on Truth', in What Is History?, pp. 173-232 (173). 83. They are evident in several literary images, carefully woven together by Plato: (1) the eikon of the motion of nous; (2) the eikon of human beings as puppets of the divine, supplemented by the eikon of the order of the Nocturnal Council, understood as the puppet's 'head'; (3) the motion of nous, proper, manifest in both the motion of the cosmos and the upward pulls on the golden cord; and (4) the symbolic significance of the genesis and order of Magnesia. See my Plato's Political Philosophy, Part II, passim.

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as such. The study in Plato and Aristotle'(1957) is based on his research for the History of Political Ideas project; and Voegelin never returned to the Laws to reinterpret the dialogue in light of his understanding of equivalences of experience and symbolization. Instead, he was satisfied to take the Timaeus—and occasionally the Phaedrus understood in terms of the Timaeus—as Plato's final word. Plato only knew the experience of divine reality in one of its two modes, as it was manifest in the cosmos. In 'The Gospel and Culture' (1971), Voegelin is most generous to Plato. He implies that Plato knew the experience of divine reality in both its modes, but did not recognize the immediate experience in the soul as primary: [T]he noetic analysis of the metaxy has gone as far as in the gospel movement, and in some points is superior to anything we find in the gospel, but the decisive step of making the experience of man's tension toward the Unknown God the truth to which all truth of reality must conform was never taken. To Plato, the monogenes of the Unknown God is, not a man, 4 but the cosmos.8

This is simply wrong. The 'man' is Socrates; and the 'decisive step' is taken in the first sentence of the Laws, if not in the first sentence of the first dialogue. Voegelin does not address the question of Socrates, turning instead to a Neoplatonic summary of the Phaedrus as proof.85 In 'The Beginning and the Beyond' (1977), the description is less generous. At best, Plato experiences 'a conflict between the compact fides of the cosmological myth and the new, more differentiated fides of a divine reality beyond the cosmos'.86 The Phaedrus is now evidence that Plato was something of a deistic monotheist: 'The cosmos that is full of gods is at the same time, though still not "full of God" in the Christian sense, at least full of the eminent... Being of the Beyond.'87 And in 'Quod Deus Dicitur' (1985), composed on Voegelin's death-bed, Plato is still less: merely a

84. Voegelin, 'The Gospel and Culture', p. 208. 85. Voegelin, The Gospel and Culture, pp. 208-209. 86. Voegelin, 'The Beginning and the Beyond', pp. 212-13. 87. Voegelin, The Beginning and the Beyond', p. 222. In 'Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme' (1983), there is yet another formulation, slightly different in its implications: The Platonic cosmos, thus, remains full of gods, even if the gods are now to be understood as manifestations of the truly One divine reality beyond the cosmos' (p. 346).

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Platonist struggling to attain 'the differentiating transition from the polytheistic language of the gods to the language of the one divinity beyond the gods'.88 In the Timaeus, the monogenes is the cosmos, but even that mode of experiencing divine reality is not immediate, in that the cosmos is only 'the unique or one-born (monogenes) divine copy of the paradigm', made by a demiurge. Plato's final and lasting achievement, it would seem, is one word alone: 'the epekeind'.89 6. Order and History, Volumes 4 (1974) and 5 (1985) In the essays written after the publication of the first three volumes of Order and History, Voegelin developed a technical vocabulary and a repertoire of textual interpretations that seemed to advance the project of studying the vast historical range of experiential and textual equivalences in light of his understanding of the quaternarian structure of the community of being. The end result of the work in these articles, however, was something different: the developmental or progressivist assumptions that he had accepted in earlier works such as the History of Political Ideas reappeared in a new, and theoretically more complex, guise, and eventually eclipsed his best insights. Perhaps this was a consequence of the manner in which Voegelin conceived the project of Order and History. The attempt to publish materials from the earlier History in the context of a radically different framework appears to have led to the theoretical difficulties that stalled the project between volumes 3 and 4. But after writing essays such as 'The Gospel and Culture', it became possible for Voegelin to return to Order and History and work with the materials at hand. The Introduction to volume 4, The Ecumenic Age, in which he explains the lengthy hiatus in publication, is less than perfectly honest. Voegelin says that the first three volumes were written while he was still laboring under the conventional belief that the conception of history as a meaningful course of events on a straight line of time was the great achievement of Israelites and Christians who were favored in its creation by the revelatory events, while the pagans, deprived as they were of revelation, could never rise above the conception of a cyclical time.

While working on the materials for volume 4, he claims, Voegelin discovered the phenomenon of 'historiogenesis' in documents such as the 88. Voegelin, 'Quod Deus Dicitur', p. 390. 89. Voegelin, 'Quod Deus Dicitur', p. 392.

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Sumerian King List and realized his error.90 The question of historical evidence or historiogenesis aside, Voegelin actually discovered that he had been labouring under the conventional beliefs of modern 'philosophies of history' while writing the Schelling chapter of the History of Political Ideas, if not sooner. His breakthrough at that time was not only that 'symbols' should be studied rather than 'ideas', but more importantly, that all developmental schemes—Christian and Enlightenment ones alike—were fundamentally wrong. And on the basis of his new understanding he wrote 'The Symbolization of Order', the Introduction to Israel and Revelation (1956). Perhaps he should not have allowed materials from the History— the fragment, 'Plato's Egyptian Myth', for example—to be published essentially unaltered as part of Order and History after formulating a new theoretical framework; and according to the Introduction to The Ecumenic Age, he should not have allowed volumes 2 and 3 to stand. But Voegelin's breakthrough was incomplete. In the essays written after volume 3, he struggled with the conflict between 'conventional beliefs', in themselves and as they were manifest in the scholarship he accepted, and the radical implications of studying the quaternarian structure philosophically, only to end up with a unique theoretical apparatus and vocabulary that allowed him both to acknowledge 'equivalences' and to discount them into conventionally accepted terms. The results of these essays are applied in The Ecumenic Age. Consequently, the Introduction to the volume is confusing and somewhat disingenuous: Voegelin criticizes himself for an error he had not made, and then presents as his recent theoretical advance the same error in a new form: The program as originally conceived, it is true, was not all wrong. There were indeed the epochal, differentiating events, the 'leaps in being', which engendered the consciousness of a Before and After and, in their respective societies, motivated the symbolism of a historical 'course'... There was really an advance in time from compact to differentiated experiences of reality and, correspondingly, an advance from compact to differentiated symbolizations of the order of being.91

From criticizing developmental 'philosophies of history' tout court, Voegelin had now discovered a way of saying, in a corruption of Karl Lowith's phrase: 'There is no truth of history other than the truth growing in history.'92 90. Voegelin, Order and History, IV, p. 7. 91. Voegelin, Order and History, IV, p. 2. 92. Voegelin, 'Wisdom', p. 343.

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In The Ecumenic Age, Plato is once again a pagan, 'deprived... of revelation', which is now described as the 'differentiation' of the gospel movement; and a pagan unable to 'rise above the conception of a cyclical time', now described as the 'compactness' of his experience of the cosmos. Indeed, Voegelin now uses the term 'revelation' quite freely to mean any insight that is superior to a previous insight, or any historically significant differentiation. Plato thus has his revelations; but the revelation of revelations, the maximal differentiation, Revelation itself in conventional speech, remains inaccessible to him. As Voegelin wrote to one of his correspondents: 'Plato is clear and outspoken about the revelatory component in his noetic enterprise, about the "vision" (ofsis) as he calls it... [But] I have carefully elaborated the superiority of the Johannine and Pauline vision in my Ecumenic Age.'93 And once again, the evidence of the inferiority of Plato's vision is taken from the Timaeus. There are occasional traces of an understanding of Plato as a man open to the revelation of divine reality in both of its 'fundamental modes'—in the cosmos and as an ordering presence in the soul—but they appear only in contexts that deny such openness to other human beings. In comparison with the epic poets, Homer and Hesiod, for example: Voegelin writes that Plato 'experiences divine reality as the ordering force in the cosmos and in personal existence'. The poets do not. Their poetry consequently falls short of expressing 'noetically illuminated existence'; and Plato is right when he 'roundly disposes of it as pseudos, as falsehood.' Voegelin concludes this discussion with a rather Straussian digression that recalls his earlier misplaced praise of the sophistic storytelling skills of'Critias-Plato': in place of the bankrupt pseudos of the poets, Voegelin contends, Plato formulates 'the alethinos logos, the true story of his own mythopoesis', although he is always cautious in such stories not to '[molest] the faith of the true believer with philosophy'.94 Perhaps; and perhaps not! The most important feature of Voegelin's comparison of the poets and philosophers, however, is that it parallels the more frequent comparison of Plato and the Gospels in which Plato is found wanting. The names may change, the texts may change, the unique, 'differentiating' factor may change, but whatever the details, the form of the argument remains the same. It was an

93. Letter to Professor John A. Gueguen, 11 May 1978, Eric Voegelin Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Box 82, Folder 10. 94. Voegelin, Order and History, IV, pp. 36, 37.

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argument Voegelin often made at Plato's expense; and it appears in so many versions in The Ecumenic Age, it would be fair to say that there is no consistent presentation of Plato in the book. At one point, Voegelin explicitly relates Plato to his understanding of the quaternarian structure: the Platonic myth, Voegelin writes, is 'an alethinos logos, a "true story", of the Demiurgic presence of God in man, society, history, and the cosmos'; but the myth 'is not yet fully differentiated' because Plato had not fully explored 'the truth of existence'. The alethinos logos that had been true without qualification when Plato had been compared with the poets is now little better than poetry itself. Plato's openness to the revelation of divine reality in both of the fundamental modes within the quaternarian structure is now qualified because, for Plato, on the ostensible evidence of the Timaeus, God is only a demiurge: there is no 'personal' relation. In the wings, setting the terms of the debate, is the 'superior degree of differentiation' of the Pauline myth, which articulates 'the pneumatic depth in divine reality beyond the Nous' that was inaccessible to Plato. Plato was aware only of 'the divine abyss beyond the revelation of God as the Nous'; the truth of existence, for him, 'was restricted to the noetic structure of consciousness'. In other, simpler words: Plato knew God only as the Creator, and then only through the intellect, not with the heart. God had not yet appeared as a man in history. At best, Plato sensed his absence and longed for his appearance. But what could he do? In the awareness of 'the divine abyss...he surrounded [the] further movement of the psyche toward the depth of divine reality with...deliberate uncertainties'.95 Previously, Plato's deliberate uncertainties had been 'noble lies' told by Critias-Plato to protect 'the true believer' from thinking too much; now they are evidence that Plato could not think his way to becoming a true believer. At another point Voegelin claims that Plato's 'differentiation of the Nous is apparently not sufficient to compel a radical break' because the 'primary experience of the cosmos prevails so strongly that the experience of the Beginning itself still remains immersed in its compactness'.96 Again, in simpler words: Plato's participation in the created order was so strong that he could not conceive of either a radically 'dedivinized' cosmos or a Creation ex nihilo. Now, the experience of a radically dedivinized cosmos

95. Voegelin, Order and History, IV, pp. 249, 250. 96. Voegelin, Order and History, IV, p. 12.

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is not necessarily a desideratum, given the unchanging nature of human existence within the quaternarian structure and the consequences of attempting to live as if the cosmos were dedivinized, empirically evident in both ancient and modern times. And concerning creation ex nihilo: The Christian interpretation of the Genesis story is not self-evident in the text; it is perhaps instead the retrojection of the doctrine that God creates each immortal soul ex nihilo and implants it in each human being at some point during gestation. In both cases, there is evidence of the co-existence of something during creation. And ever since Kant presented his account of the antinomies, if not long before, this has not been a problem for philosophy: the choice between the co-eternity of the cosmos or creation ex nihilo is entirely a matter of faith. The alternative is present in Plato's dialogues as well: the Pythagorean account of the Timaeus suggests the former; the 'Socratic' account of LawsX suggests something like the latter. For Plato, they were both 'likely stories'; and, if either, he would have favoured the latter because the Pythagorean accounts were demonstrably inadequate in their lack of an account of the good beyond being (cf. Timaeus 19a-b). For Voegelin, however, Plato is 'Timaeus-Plato'. His experience is inherently limited. Consequently, 'the Platonic Demiurge cannot become absolutely creative. The Demiurge of the Timaeus is bound by the Ananke of the cosmos.'97 At yet another point, Voegelin admits that the Timaeus is not Plato's 'last word...in the matter'. There is the Laws. But Voegelin does not attempt to unravel the theology of Laws X. He prefers instead to discuss 'the famous passage concerning the two world-souls (Laws, 896e) which is assumed to reflect a Zoroastrian influence'.98 In Plato and Aristotle, Voegelin had simply cited the authority of Werner Jaeger's historical reconstruction of the 'inner affinity between the Platonic dualistic metaphysics and Iranian eschatology' ostensibly evident in this passage. Even so, Voegelin had his reservations: Whether {Laws 896e] means that Plato really wished to adopt the symbol of the two world souls as the adequate expression of his own religiousness must remain doubtful; the formulation is inconclusive; but it certainly shows that he toyed with the idea.99

97. Voegelin, Order and History, IV, p. 12. 98. Voegelin, Order and History, IV, p. 231. 99. Voegelin, Order and History, III, pp. 285, 286.

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In The Ecumenic Age, it is taken as fact, without reference. The good world-soul is the Demiurge; the other is therefore the evil one, 'corresponding to Zoroaster's Angra Mainyu'. Voegelin then further interprets the text as evidence that Plato had made progress: the metaxy is now 'determined by two angelic figures, a savior and a satan, and their actions [are] allowed by the one God'. And this suggests, furthermore, 'that [Plato's] revelatory experience had indeed moved toward the divine abyss beyond the Demiurge and his Nous'.100 No matter whether Voegelin interprets the Timaeus and Laws correctly: it is clear that Voegelin understands evil in a certain way, and measures the relative worth of various accounts of evil accordingly. In Political Religions, Plato was faulted for understanding evil as a privation of the good when it is so obviously a 'Luciferian' and 'Satanic' force.101 In The Ecumenic Age, intimations of the proper understanding are allowed to him. Different accounts of the Beginning suggest different understandings of the End. In this too, Plato is found wanting: 'While the Platonic Demiurge could remain limited by Ananke, the Pauline creator-god had to emerge victorious from his struggle with the forces of resistance in the cosmos.'102 Creation ex nihilo and the End of Days are the work of the same God; the narrative is consistent. Furthermore, in the Christian account, the End of Days and the salvation of the soul are ultimately undifferentiable, though this need not be the case. Voegelin incorrectly assumes that since Plato gives no description of an End of Days, his understanding of salvation must therefore be inadequate, even in its account of the soul's relation to God in the present. Plato conducted his analysis within the limits set by the fundamentally intracosmic character of the theophany to which [he] responded; the Platonic Third God never became the Pauline one and only God who creates the world and reveals himself in history... [Plato's analysis] differentiated the structure of existence in the Metaxy, but it did not extend to the structure of divine reality in its pneumatic depth of creation and salvation.103

Unlike Paul's vision, Plato's 'immortalizing...did not unfold into a full response to the "father-god" whom Plato sensed as the God behind the gods'.104 The best he could do, on the evidence of the Timaeus, was to 100. 101. 102. 103. 104.

Voeglin, Order and History, IV, p. 231. Voegelin, Political Religions, pp. 2-4; Diepolitischen Religionen, pp. 5-7. Voegelin, Order and History, IV, p. 250. Voegelin, Order and History, IV, p. 303. Voegelin, Order and History, IV, p. 303.

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symbolize 'the cosmos as the monogenesof the Father'.105 The cosmos is twice described as monogenes'm the Timaeus (31b, 92c). The word is used by Timaeus as part of his account of the rather straightforward Pythagorean teaching that the cosmos is one, not many. The word describing God as the 'father', pater, is used only once (28c). There is no point in the dialogue at which the cosmos is called 'the monogenes of the Father', as Voegelin would have it. Indeed, it is not at all obvious that the God called pater is the same as the demiurge. This is likely an inconsistency in the Pythagorean doctrines that Plato intended to present critically in the dialogue. Be that as it may. It is an illegitimate hermeneutical exercise first to identify the demiurge and the father, then to associate the argument that the universe is one with the description of God as father, and then to attribute the resulting doctrine to Plato himself. There is, of course, a distinguished pedigree for such an interpretation, dating to the Hellenistic schools and the patristic writings. It is not textual analysis, but rather searching for prefigurations. The 'monogenes of the Father' in the Timaeus is nothing but an artificially constructed prefiguration of the 'monogenes of the Father' in the Gospels, intended to serve as proof that Platonic philosophy prefigures, but only prefigures, Christianity. Voegelin knows it is illegitimate; but he continues to make the argument. The last section of the final volume of Order and History that Voegelin lived to complete was a discussion of Plato's Timaeus. For all that Voegelin's reading of Plato was profoundly influenced by the Christian interpretative tradition, Voegelin's own philosophy was closer to the philosophy of his Plato than it was to his understanding of Christian theology. The struggles that Voegelin discovers in Plato are his own struggles, and nowhere more so than in the final chapter of In Search of Order. Here he presents Plato as 'struggling for a language that will optimally express the analytical movements of existential consciousness within the limits of a fides of the Cosmos'. His Plato struggles with the 'new difficulties surrounding the symbol "being" ', which arise from 'the advance in the articulation of meditative consciousness'.106 No matter that these difficulties are not Plato's difficulties at all, but rather part of Plato's ironic presentation of the limitations of Pythagorean speculation about 'being' in the absence of an account of the good beyond being. Voegelin recognizes them as deliberately ambiguous constructions on Plato's part, but takes

105. Voegelin, Order and History, IV, p. 82. 106. Voegelin, Order and History, V, pp. 89, 91.

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them as signs that he and Plato struggled with the same problems: '[L]inguistic ambiguities of this type are not caused by some negligence in Plato's thought or writing. Plato was well aware of them and traced them to the paradox that governs the complex of consciousness-reality-language.'107 The philosophy of Voegelin's Plato had difficulties, perhaps the difficulties of Voegelin's own philosophy: it comes 'close to the differentiation of consciousness [evident in] the symbolism of the Biblical book of Genesis', but does not quite attain it.108 The difference, again, is the cosmos as monogenes. In full flight, deliberately ignoring the classical and biblical scholarship to the contrary, Voegelin claims: The symbol monogenes will be rendered only inadequately by such phrases as unique, or one-of-its-kind, or only-born, as they still imply a numerical oneness; the oneness intended is not numerical, but the experienced oneness of existential tension... The Cosmos as the monogenes is not a 'thing' but the visible (aisthetos) god generated in the image (eikon) of the intelligible (noetos) god, the intelligible god not being the Demiourgos but the noetic paradigm (92c).109

Plato first articulated the symbol in noetic form: 'the Gospel of John made it the attribute of the Son of God (1:14,18; 3:16,18)'. And the manner of its progress from Plato to John is, for Voegelin, an impenetrable mystery: The wandering of the symbol monogenes from the Cosmos to the Christ reveals the movement of experiential emphasis from the God who creates the order of the Cosmos to the God who saves from its disorder. While Plato could not foresee the forms the movement would concretely assume in the events after his death, he was conscious of its presence in his own quest for truth... We must trace his ironically tentative treatment of these problems, because on some points his formulations are analytically more successful than the later attempts of the Christian theologians to find the intellectus of their fides.

The Plato of Voegelin's last published remarks is the Plato of his earliest published remarks, a philosopher with 'a less developed level of spirituality compared to that of the Christian era', because it was 'as yet impossible' for him to 'breach the bounds' of cosmos and polls.111 With this differ107. 108. 109. 110. 111.

Voegelin, Order and History, \, p. 92. Voegelin, Order and History, V\ p. 89. Voegelin, Order and History, V, p. 95. Voegelin, Order and History', V\ p. 96. Voegelin, Political Religions, p. 33; Die politischen Religionen, p. 32.

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ence: the Plato of Voegelin's last days is one that he prefers, even if he can only explain his preference in an Ironically tentative' way. But this is not enough. Something profoundly important is lost in the fact that the Plato of Political Religions differs so little from the Plato of In Search of Order. Should a life's work result only in a bit of metaphysical speculation about the ambiguities of the word 'being' and an 'ironically tentative' style? What is lost is the recognition of Plato's openness to the exploration of the quaternarian structure of the community of being, to use Voegelin's own terms. The philosophical framework of Voegelin's greatest project is the project of Plato's dialogues as well, but Voegelin only recognized this in part. His understanding of Plato was always hindered by his acceptance of the conventional identification of Platonic philosophy with the doctrines of Timaeus the Pythagorean and Critias the tyrant. But Plato's understanding of cosmos and polis is not given in the Timaeus and Critias. Plato's philosophy is the divine mania of Socrates, and his understanding of cosmos and polis by way of Socratic erotics is given in the Symposium and the Phaedrus, the Republic and the Laws.

'VOEGELIN NOT MYSTERIOUS': A RESPONSE TO ZDRAVKO PLANINC'S CTHE SIGNIFICANCE OF PLATO'S TlMAEUS AND ERIC VOEGELIN'S PHILOSOPHY5 Terry Barker and Lawrence Schmidt

1. Introduction It is no doubt a commonplace to note that many of Eric Voegelin's Christian readers, particularly since the publication of volume 4 of Order and History (The Ecumenic Age) in 1974, have found his philosophy of consciousness and history to be insufficiently Christian. In the paper under review, by contrast, Professor Zdravko Planinc finds Voegelin's work to be insufficiently Platonic. This problem, he argues, is caused by its Christian or Christian-derived (Enlightenment) bias. Specifically, Planinc sets out to show that from Voegelin's earliest-published treatment of Plato (in Political Religions^ 1938) right up to his death-bed meditation ('Quod Deus Dicitur', 1985), he views Plato's thought through a 'conventional...progressivist' or 'developmentalist' lens. Voegelin does this despite his deepening understanding of the permanent structure of reality compatible with Plato's philosophical discoveries by means of'Socratic erotics'. In his paper, Planinc's stated limited aim, one that he considers to be key to his overall argument, is to demonstrate that Voegelin takes as his mature Plato the supposed cosmological mythographer of the Timaeus and Critias rather than the one expressing 'the divine mania of Socrates' in the Symposium, Phaedrus, Republic and Laws. Planinc views this as a misconstruction which has its origins in Neoplatonism and the Church Fathers. In this paper, we shall argue that the evidence that Planinc has marshalled points, indeed, to a movement, on Voegelin's part, away from 'progressivist' and 'developmentalist' understandings of history and reality of'Christian Historicist'1 and Enlightenment provenance. However, the 1. C.S. Lewis describes the historical schemes of Saint Augustine, Orosius and Dante as varieties of 'Christian Historicism'. See C.S. Lewis, Christian Reflections (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1967), p. 135; and Lewis, The Discarded Image: An

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same evidence supports the view that this process did not take him 'closer to the philosophy of his Plato' or 'to his understanding of Christian theology', as Planinc seems to imply, but rather closer to his goal, namely, the full development of a critical 'Classic and Christian' political philosophy. At the heart of Planinc's critique is his observation that Voegelin seems 'always of two minds' concerning the relative superiority of Plato's or the Evangelists' account of the life of the spirit, but he is 'always unwilling to admit the problem'.2 This is tantamount to saying that Voegelin retains the Christian view of reason and revelation as a cooperating dichotomy, in which the latter is understood as completing the work of the former, or in its Romantic version, that reason and revelation are reconciled as 'dialectical' partners in a panentheistic process of progressive development. Planinc is thus implying that Voegelin's thought remained in thrall to that of F.W.J. von Schelling, an acknowledged major influence, while ignoring the fact that Voegelin had already by 1951 publicly classified him as a 'contemplative gnostic'.3 According to Voegelin's Autobiographical Reflections, he had realized even in the early 1930s that a critical analysis of modern ideological movements, which was to provide the immediate spur to all his work, required a basis in 'Classic and Christian' philosophy. However, his definitive identification of these movements as 'gnostic', a theoretical category later to be qualified, but never abandoned, did not occur until around 1950.4 As Planinc notes, Voegelin had already recognized the inadequacy of the nineteenth-century 'philosophies of history' during the course of the writing of his History of Political Ideas in the 1940s. His awareness that they were ideological constructions that had arisen in the wake of the decay of Christian Humanist culture evidently only gradually dawned upon him. In order to ground his new 'Classic and Christian' theory of human nature and politics, he began to develop his own theory of history which, in 1952, he programmatically set out in The New Science of Politics.

Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), p. 175. 2. Zdravko Planinc, 'The Significance of Plato's Timaeus and Critias in Eric Voegelin's Philosophy', Section 2. 3. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), p. 124. 4. Eric Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections (ed. Ellis Sandoz; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), pp. 38, 64-66.

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In the 1960s, Voegelin elaborated the philosophy of consciousness undergirding his theory of politics and history, and in his subsequent work he retheoretized his understanding of the 'Christian centuries', later to be expanded to a study of the 'ecumenic age'. All this deepening led to a full break with the methods of the 'philosophies of history' and a recognition that 'the modern disorder' had arisen through the failure of both Classic and Christian thinkers to develop an adequate 'histories', or theory of history, rooted in an adequate theory of consciousness and reality. In his final, unfinished, fifth volume of Order and History^ In Search of Order? Voegelin claimed to be working out the basis for such a theory, inspired by the 'Classic and Christian' mystical philosophy/theology of Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing.6 While Professor Planinc's paper presents Christianity and Plato's philosophy as (to borrow a phrase from the English Deist John Toland) 'not mysterious', Eric Voegelin's philosophical motivations, as set forth therein, are quite mysterious indeed.7 2 The mechanics of Professor Planinc's analysis are, on the surface, those of a straightforward comparative literary/textual criticism. His purpose seems to be to show that Voegelin is consciously selective in what one might call his 'choice of Platos', favouring throughout the one transmitted to the mediaeval period by early Christians writing philosophically. If this be Planinc's main contention, then it seems not merely plausible but self-evident; Voegelin prefers the Plato this tradition finds in the Timaeus rather than the one whose political theory and erotic mysticism are expressed in the Republic and Phaedrus. However, when Planinc comes to analyze Voegelin's own theoretical formulations (rather than simply his treatment of Plato), he himself indulges in a selectivity for which no plausible rationale is provided. He uses a method of criticism that makes Voegelin 5. Eric Voegelin, Order and History. V. In Search of Order (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987). 6. Eric Voegelin, Letter to David Walsh, 13 December 1983, Eric Voegelin Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Box 40, Folder 2. See Herschel Baker, The Wars of Truth: Studies in the Decay of Christian Humanism in the Earlier Seventeenth Century (London and New York: Staples Press, 1952). 7. John Toland, Christianity not Mysterious (London, 1696).

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appear to have been engaging in deliberate obfuscations for mysterious motives. Planinc's selectiveness is related to his primary technique in dealing with Voegelin's theory of history: the juxtaposition of its key theoretical categories in ways that show the unhelpfulness or irrelevance of some for recognizing the 'Socratic erotics' and cosmology of Planinc's essential Plato, and the appropriateness, indeed, perhaps even superiority, of others. Voegelin, in short, is not simply to be accused of being a Christian, a Plotinian, or a gnostic (although there are strong suggestions made that any of these 'charges' might be made against him),8 but he is to be criticized primarily for the inadequacy of the Platonic part of his own 'Classic and Christian' philosophy. In the Introduction and Sections 1-3 of his essay, in addition to outlining evidence from Voegelin's earlier work to substantiate 'the most important point' in his argument (i.e., that Voegelin read Plato's Timaeus and Critias in a consistently conventional, and ultimately Christian, way), Professor Planinc examines key notions in Voegelin's mature philosophy itself that he thinks indicate a persistent and, indeed, growing conflict between the now-properly Platonic and progressivist/developmentalist elements in his thought. Planinc's analysis focuses upon Voegelin's use of three terms: the 'primordial community of being...with its quaternarian structure', 'equivalences of experience and symbolization', and 'compactness and differentiation'. These terms are to be found in (among other places) the 'Introduction' to the first volume of Order and History', Israel and Revelation (1956), and the essay 'Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History' (1970).9 They are treated by Planinc not as descriptions of, or symbols for, reciprocal relationships in a coherent process-philosophy, but 8. Planinc suggests throughout his paper, of course, that Voegelin favours the Christian account of the life of the spirit over that of Plato, and is in debt to Christian understandings of the thought of the latter. He also seems to argue that there are, additionally, Plotininan influences upon Voegelin's thought (Sections 2, 5, 6), that Voegelin's understanding of evil is, in contrast to the Platonic and Christian views, dualistic (Sections 2, 6), and that Voegelin's philosophy is of Schellingian provenance (Section 1). 9. Eric Voegelin, Order and History. I. Israel and Revelation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956); 'Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History', in Eric Voegelin, Published Essays, 1966-1985 (ed. Ellis Sandoz; Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 12; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), pp. 115-33.

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as belated 'discoveries' by Voegelin of the 'permanent' structure of reality (in the case of the first two), and evidence of lingering progressivism or developmentalism in his thinking (in the case of the third). The three terms are, in fact, severed from their context and from one another by Planinc, and reassembled by him to articulate what Voegelin supposedly should have said about Plato's philosophy, or to explain why he didn't say it. Planinc evidently considers the 'important article' 'Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History' to be a revision of the theoretical Introduction to Israel and Revelation, entitled 'The Symbolization of Order'.10 He refers to the former as Voegelin's 'most philosophically courageous attempt to elaborate the understanding of the "community of being" discussed' there. As such, Professor Planinc argues, the essay expresses the actual 'break in programme' in Order and History, which Voegelin (somewhat disingenuously, in Planinc's opinion) associates with his disentanglement from 'historiogenesis' (the linear construction of history) in the Introduction to volume 4 of Order and History, The Ecumenic Age, in 1974.11 In the Autobiographical Reflections, transcribed by Professor Ellis Sandoz from interviews with Voegelin in 1973, Voegelin clearly acknowledged that the 'various occasions' for his 'becoming aware' of the 'theoretical inadequacy' of his 'conventional preconceptions about a history of ideas did not arise all at once and did not find immediate solutions'. He characterized 'the five years between 1945 and 1950 as a period of indecision, if not paralysis, in handling the problems' that he 'saw but could not intellectually penetrate' to his satisfaction. However, Voegelin also noted that this 'period of theoretical paralysis with mounting problems for which I saw no immediate solutions' was concluded by a 'breakthrough' which 'occurred on occasion of the Walgreen Lectures that I delivered in Chicago in 1951'. There, he said, 'I was forced, in comparatively brief form, to formulate some of the ideas that had begun to crystallize'.12 Furthermore, in an interview given in 1973, while admitting that there were 'a lot of things that [needed] to be said' that he didn't know at the time he gave the lectures, which were published in 1952 as The New Science of Politics, Voegelin averred that 'as a literary production in six 10. Voegelin, Order and History, I, pp. 1-11. 11. Planinc, 'Significance', Introduction, Section 3; Eric Voegelin, Order ana History. IV. 77?^ Ecumenic Age (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974). 12. Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections, p. 64.

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lectures, there is no more one can put in it, and I wouldn't change it'.13 The New Science of Politics was thus evidently an important and substantial initial stage (at least) in Voegelin's theoretical reorientation. It is somewhat strange, then, that Planinc makes only a brief and passing reference to it in a footnote; he establishes his thesis that Voegelin made an incomplete Platonic breakthrough on the basis of an interpretation of subsequent shorter theoretical essays. It would seem more reasonable, in the first place anyway, to treat the latter writings as further articulations of the expression of the breakthrough that Voegelin recognized himself as having made in The New Science of Politics. Voegelin explicitly characterized his own theorizing there as 'within the historical horizon of classic and Christian experiences' and this would have seemed unhelpful to Planinc's thesis.14 The reference to The New Science of Politics is made early in Professor Planinc's essay. It is intended to show that Voegelin repeats there a claim that he had already made in his unpublished History of Political Ideas, namely, that the psyche had not yet been 'discovered' as the locus of transcendence by Homer, as it was later by Plato. For Professor Planinc this is proof that Voegelin defended a 'cliched [i.e. progressivist/developmentalist] understanding' of Greek thought. The passage from The New Science of Politics chosen to illustrate this point reads as follows: [T]he psyche itself is found as a new center in man at which he experiences himself as open toward transcendental reality... With due regard for the problem of compactness and differentiation, one might almost say that before the discovery of the psyche man had no soul.15

As with Voegelin's treatment of Plato and Christianity, so also his understanding of the relationship between Homer and Plato demonstrates, for Professor Planinc, a progressivism/developmentalism 'that stands in opposition to... Voegelin's own account of the permanence of the community of being...'16 Planinc is critical of Voegelin's understanding of'the problem of compactness and differentiation' here. In the concluding comments of the footnote in which the above passage is quoted, he remarks that 'in a

13. Eric Voegelin, 'Philosophies of History: An Interview with Eric Voegelin', New Orleans Review'2 (1973), pp. 135-39 (136). 14. Voegelin, New Science of Politics, p. 79 (emphasis added); see pp. 11-12, 79-80, 80 n. 7. 15. Voegelin, New Science of Politics, p. 67. 16. Planinc, 'Significance', Introduction.

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late essay, "Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme: A Meditation", Voegelin claims that similar literary features in the ///Wand Plato's Laws, the latter being based deliberately on the former, do not indicate an equivalence of experience or symbolization' as 'Plato's work is not "naively Homeric" '. With some heat, Planinc objects that 'the Iliad cannot be said to be naive in any sense, or compact in its literary form, or evidence that its poet was incapable of reflective, differentiated, analytic or historically sensitive insight'.17 In the paragraphs following this footnote's seemingly slightly digression, Planinc fully enunciates, for the first time, his complete thesis, and juxtaposes all three of Voegelin's theoretical terms ('the quaternarian structure of the community of being', 'compactness and differentiation' and 'equivalences of experience and symbolization') that are to form the focus of his analysis. We shall attempt to show that Planinc's analysis offers a substantial revision of the way in which Voegelin uses them. With respect to these terms, Planinc's thesis is: (1) there is a fundamental contradiction, and not a tension, between Voegelin's recognition of 'equivalences of experience and symbolization' within the order of the community of being, on the one hand, and Voegelin's uses of various linear and developmental schemes to order the data of human history, on the other; and (2) the fundamental contradiction between these two aspects of Voegelin's work is only confused, and not resolved, by his frequent recourse to the distinction between compactness and differentiation.18 Planinc's discussion of Voegelin's modern terminology exhibits a distinct air of anachronism. Elaborating upon the second point of his thesis, for example, he writes: In its narrowest or most precise sense, the distinction between compactness and differentiation is apparent only at the level of symbolization or expression of equivalent experiences. But once the distinction is allowed, even in this manner, it reintroduces a developmental scheme at the level of experience. Indeed, that may be its main function. It serves no good critical purpose in the analysis of symbolization; in other words, it is inadequate for the purposes of textual exegesis, often to the point of being misrepresentative when it is not merely trivial or irrelevant. Be that as it may, Voegelin uses it most frequently to speak of the difference between compact and differentiated experiences, not symbols.19

17. Planinc, 'Significance', Introduction, n. 7. 18. Planinc, 'Significance', Introduction. 19. Planinc, 'Significance', Introduction.

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No textual references are given for these assertions, and they create the impression that Voegelin must have introduced the notion of 'compact and differentiated' experiences and symbolizations in order to counteract the effect of his 'discovery' of the Platonic insight into the 'permanence of the quaternarian community of being' with its corresponding 'equivalences of experience and symbolization'. Indeed, after a brief statement of Voegelin's failure to ever fundamentally alter his flawed early Christianderived understanding of Plato, Planinc makes this point specifically: 'Voegelin's breakthrough in recognizing the significance of equivalences of experience and symbolization was jeopardized when it became associated with the unhelpful distinction between compactness and differentiation'.20 3 An examination of Voegelin's theoretical texts referred to, or alluded to, by Planinc to this point in his analysis of Voegelin's terminology reveals an intellectual chronology, and suggests a motivation on Voegelin's part quite other than the ones implied by Planinc. 'Compactness and differentiation' first appears in The New Science of ^Politics-(1952); 'the quaternarian structure of the primordial community of being' is introduced in 'The Symbolization of Order', the Introduction to Israel and Revelation (1956); and 'equivalences of experience and symbolization' is fully developed in concert with the other two in 'Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History' (1970). If we consider these texts together in the order in which they were produced, the importance of Voegelin's articulation of 'compactness and differentiation' to replace the linear, developmentalist, and progressivist-derived symbols by new, meditative, symbols is clear. This articulation plays a crucial role in his developing 'histories', based upon his developing theory of consciousness and reality. In The New Science of Politics, Voegelin describes the increasing scale of 'representation' expressed in societies by the levels of 'elemental', 'existential' and 'transcendental' symbolization of truth, as 'cosmological', 'anthropological' and 'soteriological' representations of truth succeed each other.21 This process, followed by a grand civilizational recession from the spiritual heights achieved, seems to express an 'extreme Augustinianism'

20. Planinc, 'Significance', Introduction. 21. Voegelin, New Science of Politics, pp. 49-79.

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(as one commentator has called the effect) or to echo the 'progressivism in reverse' of the literature of the 'decline of the West'.22 However, the 'advances' noted in the book are described as being from 'compact' to 'differentiated' experiences and their symbolizations, and the 'recession' is characterized as one from the 'maximum of differentiation' in the 'classical and Christian' experiences and symbolizations to an attempted return to 'compactness', which is in fact a 'gnostic' occlusion of these experiences.23 'Compactness and differentiation' functions in The New Science of Politics, in effect, to counter the possible progressivist and developmentalist (or regressivist and cyclic) implications of the conventional triadic schemes of 'elemental', 'existential' and 'transcendental' levels of representation and 'cosmological', 'anthropological' and 'soteriological' phases of truth's articulation. In later writings Voegelin drops this triadic terminology. 'Differentiation' is used initially in The New Science of Politics to describe the process of the emergence of symbols. Later it is explained as being part of a movement from 'compact' to 'differentiated' experiences and their symbolizations that can be noted among the early Greeks in their gradual 'discovery and exploration' of the 'depth of the soul', a process only brought to full articulation by Plato.24 The 'maximum of differentiation' occurs with 'the revelation of the Logos in history', but unfortunately the Christian 'Patres' (like Saint Augustine) did not understand (as Plato had, in principle) that now 'compact' and 'differentiated' truth and their symbolizations must be retheoretized to coexist in complex duality. As the highly 'compact' civil theology of Roman civilization decayed, the resulting theoretical vacuum paved the way for the slow millennial growth of a 'gnostic' civil theology composed of elements that were 'suppressed as heretical by the universal church' (millenarian speculation, apocalypticism, gnostic speculation, etc.).25 The book ends with a clarioncall to the custodians of the 'glimmer' of classic and Christian thought to 'kindle' it 'into a flame by repressing Gnostic corruption and restoring the forces of civilization'. Their task—and Voegelin's—was to further

22. Fred Dallmayr, 'Postmetaphysics and Democracy', Political Theory 21 (1993), pp. 101-27 (103). Voegelin's apparent sympathy for the theorists of Western decline is expressed in The New Science of Politics, pp. 128-32. 23. Voegelin, New Science of Politics, pp. 79-80, 123-24. 24. Voegelin, New Science of Politics, pp. 66-67. 25. Voegelin, New Science of Politics, pp. 82-88, 107-32, 156, 164.

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differentiate 'classic and Christian' thought to undercut the continuing growth of gnostic ideologies.26 The paradigmatic 'classic and Christian' response to political 'gnosticism' in Western civilization, at the early stage of the conflict in which the Gnostics still understood themselves as within the Christian orbit of thought, was Richard Hooker's challenge to the sixteenth century (and, by extension, seventeenth century) English Puritan movement.27 In The New Science of Politics, Voegelin focuses upon Hooker's analysis of the Puritan mind in the 'Preface' of Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. Understandably he takes his epigraph for The New Science of Politics from its first sentence. In the History of Political Ideas material from which the New Science study is drawn, Voegelin had shown his familiarity with the full argument of the Laws, and commended Hooker for having 'understood that the answer to the problems of the age must be sought in a philosophy of historical existence'. Concretely, this meant that Hooker was compelled to 'restore the scholastic tradition of philosophizing about law and politics'.28 In his larger philosophical response to Puritanism, Voegelin noted, Hooker's task was to develop a theory of historical change that is also a theory of human nature, in response to a movement that, at base, acknowledged neither history nor nature. Dante Germino has recently shown that the 'portrait of Hooker' presented to the public by Voegelin in The New Science of Politics was considerably more approving than that sketched in his unpublished History of Political Ideas material.29 Voegelin's choice of the Hooker-Puritan controversy as the paradigm for 'Classic and Christian' resistance to political 'gnosticism', and his favourable re-evaluation of Hooker himself, can hardly have been unconnected with the 'breakthrough' of 1950-51. Germino suggests that the nature of that breathrough was methodological, but, unfortunately, he does not specify what Voegelin's methodological change was.30 We would argue that Voegelin's reconsideration of Hooker's 26. Voegelin, New Science of Politics, p. 189. 27. Voegelin, New Science of Politics, pp. 134-44. 28. Eric Voegelin, History of Political Ideas. V. Religion and the Rise of Modernity (ed. James L. Wiser; Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 23; Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), pp. 104, 105. 29. Dante Germino, 'Eric Voegelin's Two Portraits of Hooker and their Relation to the Modern Crisis', in Arthur Steven McGrade (ed.), Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community (Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997), pp. 351-68. 30. Germino, 'Eric Voegelin's Two Portraits of Hooker', p. 366.

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Neoplatonic understanding of 'participation', taken together with his work on 'classic philosophy', provided him with a theoretical basis for a 'histories' that would properly address the existential situation of the Anglo-American polities at mid-twentieth century (the immediate purpose of the Walgreen Lectures). It also provided him with the impetus for the development of the terminology of'compactness and differentiation'.31 This is not idle speculation. It is suggested in the following extract from a letter of Voegelin to his colleague and friend Robert B. Heilman, written in 1956, responding to Heilman's remarks about 'historicism' (historical relativism) in literary criticism: The occupation with works of art, poetry, philosophy, mythical imagination, and so forth, makes sense only if it is conducted as an inquiry into the nature of man. That sentence, while it excludes historicism, does not exclude history, for it is peculiar to the nature of man that it unfolds its potentialities historically. Not that historically anything 'new' comes up— human nature is always wholly present—but there are modes of clarity and degrees of comprehensiveness in man's understanding of himself and his position in the world... History is the unfolding of the human Psyche; historiography is the reconstruction of the unfolding through the psyche of the historian. The basis of historical interpretation is the identity of substance (the psyche) in the object and the subject of interpretation; and its purpose is participation in the great dialogue that goes through the centuries among

31. The tendency in Hooker scholarship has been to treat the author of Of the Lawes of 'Ecclesiastical! Politic as a 'late mediaeval' or an 'early modern' thinker, rather than as a controversialist within the thought-world of the Christian Neoplatonism of his own age of the Renaissance. Notable exceptions include Herschel Baker, The Wars of Truth, and C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954); see pp. 451-63. D.R.G. Owen has written that 'it is certain that, after Hooker, Anglican theology was Platonic rather than Aristotelian', but, of course, in Hooker's case the Platonism is the Christian Neoplatonism of the Renaissance, as even a cursory reading of Book I of the Lawes will confirm. D.R.G. Owen, 'Is there an Anglican Theology?', in M. Darrol Bryant (ed.), The Future of Anglican Theology (Toronto Studies in Theology, 17; New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1984), pp. 3-13 (6). Hooker's notion of law is associated with the central concept of his incarnational theology, 'participation'. See L.S. Thornton, Richard Hooker: A Study of his Theology (London: SPCK, 1924); and John E. Booty, 'Book V, in Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiatical Polity. VI: Part One. Introductions; Commentary, Preface and Books /-7V(ed. W. Speed Hill, with the assistance of Egil Grislis, John E. Booty et al\ Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, 1993), pp. 183-231; see pp. 197-99,217.

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men about their nature and destiny. And participation is impossible without growth in stature (within the personal limitations) toward the rank of the best; and that growth is impossible unless one recognizes authority and surrenders to it.

Voegelin addressed 'the problem of an eidos of history' (the matter of 'historicism' in the broader sense, of which a radical relativism is a consequence) in The New Science of Politics.^ He had there concluded that 'the problem of an eidos in history. ..arises only when Christian transcendental fulfilment becomes immanentized', as it does, most notably, after the 'resurgence of the eschatology of the realm' at the end of the twelfth century.34 But it was not until he wrote 'The Symbolization of Order' as the theoretical preamble to volume 1 of Order and History that he began to apply his new anti-historicist 'histories' fully to the task of historiography itself. The opening sentence of that preamble might indeed be seen as, to use Planinc's word, 'magisterial': 'God and man, world and society form a primordial community of being'. However, any impression of peremptoriness, either stylistic or substantive, is immediately dispelled by the sentences that follow: The community with its quaternarian structure is, and is not, a datum of human experience. It is a datum of experience in so far as it is known to man by virtue of his participation in the mystery of its being. It is not a datum of experience in so far as it is not given in the manner of an object of the external world but is knowable only from the perspective of participation in it.

Voegelin goes on to say that '[t]he perspective of participation must be understood in the fullness of its disturbing quality', for man is an 'actor, playing a part in the drama of being' who, 'through the brute fact of his existence' is 'committed to play it without knowing what it is'. This '[p]articipation in being' is 'not a partial involvement of man', for 'he is engaged with the whole of his existence, for participation is existence itself, and there is 'no vantage point outside existence from which its meaning can be viewed.. ,'36 This fact does not lead Voegelin to accept a radical historicism 32. Eric Voegelin, Letter to Robert B. Heilman, 22 August 1956, Eric Voegelin Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Box 17, Folder 9. 33. Voegelin, New Science of Politics, pp. 117-21. 34. Voegelin, New Science of Politics, pp. 110, 120. 35. Voegelin, Order and History, I, p. 1. 36. Voegelin, Order and History, I, pp. 1-2.

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or scepticism. Although the 'play and the role are unknown', and 'the actor does not know with certainty who he is himself, nevertheless 'man's participation in being is not blind but is illuminated by consciousness'.37 This illumination is enhanced by the movement from compact to differentiated symbolism. Voegelin formulates the results of his meditation on the 'primordial community of being' as follows: There is an experience of participation, a reflective tension in existence, radiating sense over the proposition: Man, in his existence, participates in being. This sense, however, will turn into nonsense if one forgets that subject and predicate in the proposition are terms which explicate a tension of existence, and are not concepts denoting objects... At the center of his existence man is unknown to himself and must remain so, for the part of being that calls itself man could be known fully only if the community of being and its drama in time were known as a whole. Man's partnership in being is the essence of his existence, and this essence depends on the whole, of which existence is a part. Knowledge of the whole, however, is precluded by the identity of the knower with the partner, and ignorance of the whole precludes essential knowledge of the part.38

The 'quaternarian structure' of the 'primordial community of being' is thus not a 'permanent' structure immediately present to human consciousness, as implied by Planinc, but is revealed in history through the 'experience of participation' which is a 'reflective tension in existence'. Against this background of the 'ultimate, essential ignorance' of man concerning 'the decisive core of existence', the subject of Voegelin's study must be 'the long-drawn-out process of experience and symbolization' through which some limited 'knowledge about the order of being' becomes evident. This process consists in 'the creation of symbols purporting to render intelligible the relations and tensions between the distinguishable terms of the field' of being.39 In the early stages of the process, 'the acts of symbolization are still badly handicapped by the bewildering multitude of unexplored facts, and unsolved problems', so that '[n]ot much is really clear beyond the experience of participation and the quaternarian structure of the field of being'. However, even in the confused situation of the early stages, 'there is

37. Voegelin, Order and History, I, p. 2. 38. Voegelin, Order and History, I, p. 2. 39. Voegelin, Order and History, I, pp. 2-3.

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enough method to allow the distinction of typical features in the process of symbolization'.40 These typical features, which, as we have said, are present even in the early stages of'the process of symbolization', are listed by Voegelin. They are: (1) 'the predominance of the experience of participation', (2) 'the preoccupation with the lasting and passing (i.e., the durability and transiency) of the partners in the community of being', (3) 'the attempt at making the essentially unknowable order of being intelligible as far as possible through the creation of symbols which interpret the unknown by analogy with the really, or supposedly, known', and (4) the 'awareness of the analogical character of [the] symbols'.41 The 'predominance of the experience of participation' typifying the process of symbolization is manifest, in the early stages of the process, in such a way that the 'community of being is experienced with such intimacy that the consubstantiality of the partners will override the separateness of substances'. With regard to the second feature, awareness of the differences in the 'lasting and passing... of the partners in the community of being' engenders, also in the early stages of the process of symbolization, the 'experience of hierarchy' which 'furnishes an important piece of knowledge about order in being' and becomes 'a force in ordering the existence of man'. Humanity's 'attunement to the more lasting and comprehensive orders of society, the world, and God' is more than an external adjustment, however. It 'suggests the penetration of the adjustment to the level of participation in being', and here 'the limits that are set by the perspective of participation' are reached, for when we 'experience our own lasting in existence, passing as it is, as well as the hierarchy of lasting... existence becomes transparent, revealing something of the mystery of being, of the mystery in which it participates though it does not know what it is'.42 The third feature of the 'process of symbolization', already present in its early stages, is the effort to make the awareness of the mystery of being, articulated through the experiences of 'participation' and 'lasting and passing', understandable on the analogy of things already known, or believed to be known. An historical dimension of existence thus becomes manifest, accompanying the awareness of an order wrapped in mystery: These attempts have a history in so far as reflective analysis, responding to the pressure of experience, will render symbols increasingly more adequate 40. Voegelin, Order and History, I, p. 3. 41. Voegelin, Order and History, I, pp. 3, 5, 6. 42. Voegelin, Order and History, I, pp. 3-4.

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popopopopopopo to their task. Compact blocks of the knowable will be differentiated into their component parts and the knowable itself will gradually come to be distinguished from the essentially unknowable. Thus, the history of symbolization is a progression from compact to differentiated experiences and symbols.43

With the addition of the feature of the experience of 'compactness and differentiation', the account of the early stages of the 'process of symbolization'—integrally involving, as we have seen, the experiences of 'participation' and 'lasting and passing'—can be seen to be recognizably the 'process of experience and symbolization that forms the subject matter of the present study'. Voegelin makes this point explicitly at this juncture: 'Thus the history of symbolization is a progression from compact to differentiated experiences and symbols... [T]his process is the subject matter of the whole subsequent study.. ,'44 The 'long-drawn-out process of experience and symbolization' (involving 'participation' and the experience of 'lasting and passing' in the community of being) can thus only be understood through the study of 'the history of symbolization' (the 'progression from compact to differentiated experiences and symbols'). Far from being, in Voegelin's theoretization, contradictory of, or extraneous to, the experience of 'participation' in the 'primordial community of being', as Professor Planinc's critique suggests, the awareness of the 'compactness and differentiation' of experience and symbolization appears to be of its very warp and woof. 4

The same objection may be made against Professor Planinc's judgment that there is a contradiction or inconsistency in Voegelin's use of the theoretical terms 'compactness and differentiation' and 'equivalence of experience and symbolization'. The latter notion, while developed in detail in the 1970 essay 'Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History' (the last word of which title perhaps indicates something of the term's provenance), is present in principle in 'The Symbolization of Order', the 1956 theoretical introduction to Voegelin's historiography that we have been discussing. It emerges there embryonically as the fourth 'typical feature in the early stages of the process of symbolization', and is developed as an important component of the concluding analysis of the complex of 43. Voegelin, Order and History, I, p. 5. 44. Voegelin, Order and History, I, pp. 2, 5.

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'compact' and 'differentiated' experiences and symbolizations that comprises the field of historical reality in the last half of the essay (pp. 6-11).45 That feature is 'man's awareness of the analogical character of his symbols' (p. 6) which, in turn, produces an 'awareness that the order of being can be represented analogically in more than one way' (p. 7), which is reflected in the 'early tolerance' of 'rival symbolizations of the same truth' (p. 7). After consciousness is 'attracted by the problem of the greater or lesser adequacy of symbols to their purpose of making the true order of being transparent' (p. 8), that tolerance gives way to an intolerance of 'false' symbolizations, which is finally 'balanced by a new tolerance' based on the awareness that 'new truth about being is not a substitute for, but an addition to the old truth' (p. 11). This historical pattern, as Voegelin makes clear in detail in the concluding pages of the essay, comes to full articulation in the 'leaps in being' (or changes in participation in the community of being) of Plato's philosophy and Christianity (p. 10), which nevertheless do not abolish the 'perspectivism of participation in the community of being' (p. 9) or 'partnership in the community of being at large' (p. 11). The 'break in program' announced by Voegelin in the Introduction to The Ecumenic Age, volume 4 of Order and History, when it finally appeared in 1974, was from that outlined in the 'Preface' to volume 1. The original programme and its theoretical justification had been seen as adequate by Voegelin, evidently, not only for purposes of producing a study of the emergence of Hebrew society and prophetic religion, but also for the publication of his studies of the genesis and development of Greek civilization and philosophy (The World of the Polis and Plato and Aristotle, volumes 2 and 3 of Order and History, 1957).46 Substantially these were the relevant materials from his unpublished History of Political Ideas, as Planinc correctly notes. The 'break in program' (and its preceding lengthy break in publication of Order and History) reflected the difficulty Voegelin had had in dealing with the historical materials related to his study of Christianity and its deformations; the titles of the final three projected volumes in the series had been Empire and Christianity, The Protestant Centuries and The Crisis of Western Civilization.^1 As the focus of 45. Voegelin, Order and History, I, p. 6. 46. Eric Voegelin, Order and History. II. The World of the Polis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957); III. Plato and Aristotle (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957). 47. Voegelin, Order and History, IV, p. 1.

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Voegelin's original programmatic statement (The New Science of Politics) had been precisely Christian civilization and its deformations, Voegelin's 'break in program' at this point suggests a further theoretical breathrough, extending that of 1950-51. In volumes 1-3 of Order and History, Christianity and its accompanying problem of 'modernity' (the chief subjects of The New Science of Politics) are treated as footnotes to the Israelite and Greek developments, albeit with implications of advance and decline in participation in 'the community of being' respectively. Voegelin's return to work on the problem of Christianity and modernity directly, after the comprehensive reconsideration of the background of the emergence of what he had originally called the 'cosmological' and 'anthropological' representations of truth, and of the Hebrew prophetic experiences and their symbolizations, necessary for the preparation of the first three volumes of his magnum opus, forced a retheoretization of the time dimension of the problem as presented in The New Science of Politics. For it was no longer possible for Voegelin to characterize Christianity, in the conventional Enlightenment manner (derived partly from Christian historiography), as a linearly-conceived sequel to the classic and Israelite experiences and symbolizations, or to characterize modernity's typical notion of an 'eidos of history' as essentially the 'Christian transcendental fulfilment...immanentized'.48 This was because he had come to realize that the question of the proper symbolization of the time dimension of human experience had exercised the thinkers of the 'cosmological' civilizations, as well as the classic, Israelite and Hellenistic thinkers, and had carried right on (without resolution) into the Christian and modern periods. This second phase of Voegelin's 'breakthrough', which concerned the evident persistence of the problem of the symbolization of the time dimension of experience across civilizations, apparently extended from the late 1950s to the late 1960s, as Voegelin worked through the historical materials and his theoretical problems. The fruit of his efforts during this hiatus in the publication of Order and History appeared in various essays, and, most notably, in his book Anamnesis (published in Germany in 1966) which details the theory of consciousness underpinning his mature theories of history and politics.49 The invitation to give the Walter Turner 48. Voegelin, New Science of Politics, p. 120. 49. Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis: Zur Theorie der Geschichte und Politik (Munich: R. Piper, 1966). The English language version, omitting some of the essays in the original and adding two new chapters, appeared as Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis (ed. and

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Candler Lectures at Emory College in Atlanta, Georgia, the following year, provided Voegelin with an opportunity to present, in relatively nontechnical language and in preliminary form, some major features of his revised 'classic and Christian' analysis of the crisis of modernity.50 These lectures, entitled The Drama of Humanity', signalled Voegelin's return to the task of unfolding his understanding of the primary experience of consciousness as analogous to the experience of an actor in a drama who does not know the whole course of the drama, what his part is, or even who he is. A review of some of the chief themes of these lectures offers clues to the true import of Voegelin's articulation of his theory of history in the essay 'Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History', published prior to volume 4 of Order and History,. In 'The Drama of Humanity', Voegelin again analyzed what he called 'the revolt of man' (i.e., the rise to intellectual hegemony of the ideological 'dogmatomachy' after 1750), only this time against the background of a much wider theoretical and historical canvas than he had been able to sketch in The New Science of Politics.51 Voegelin included now a discussion of many factors which ultimately contributed to the 'revolt' of modernity. He spelled out the problems which emerged when the 'conception of the nature of man...formed in antiquity, in classical philosophy' led to the eighteenth-century understanding of humanity as 'artefact or organism'. He elaborated the difficulties which ensued when the classical 'insight into the personal structure of man as a stable structure in a given situation of the late Polis', expanded 'into a perfect stable structure of society as it ought to be', and produced an ethics and politics, but no 'histories', that is, no account of the 'process-element in the nature of man'. And he examined the problematic which inevitably accompanied 'historiogenesis': a linear construction of history always culminated in the present of the historiographer. This was true whether the method was employed by the scribes at the time of the ancient Sumerian and Egyptian empires, by the Old Testament writers who fashioned a history 'from the creation of the world down then into Israel',52 or by Hegel for whom the end of history took place in nineteenth-century Germany. trans. Gerhart Niemeyer; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978). 50. Eric Voegelin, 'The Drama of Humanity', The Walter Turner Candler Lectures, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, 17-20 April 1967 (Eric Voegelin Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Box 74, Folders 1 and 2). 51. Voegelin, 'Drama of Humanity', pp. 42-61. 52. Voegelin, 'Drama of Humanity', pp. 10-12, 50-55.

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Voegelin's own present project, as he made clear in the second 'Drama of Humanity' lecture, was related to the problem inchoately formulated first by Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages. The recognition of 'the one world-transcendent divinity' corresponding to the idea of 'universal humanity' which emerged as the process of consciousness became selfconsciousness, came 'to approximately good expression in Christianity'. Voegelin argued for its relevancy as a theoretical focus. What was required was the development of 'a real philosophy of history based on this problem of this universal divinity'.53 In the introductory remarks to the lecture series, Voegelin had stated that he would be developing a 'concept of history...as an open field of existence' as an alternative to modern 'immanentist constructions of history'; he would deal with the question of 'open time' along the lines set out by T.S. Eliot. This would involve seeing that 'every point of presence is... a point of intersection of time with the timeless'. The human present (and human history) has no reality except in relation to the divine presence so that 'a proper diagramatical formulation would then not be the line', but would be 'something like a flow of presence, with a direction in which there is permanently a tension between immanent and transcendent poles'. Operating with this conception of 'a flow of presence', Voegelin announced, he would be signifying by humanity, 'man in a mode of understanding himself in his relation to God, World and Society', recognizing that 'those modes change'. Thus, by history is meant 'the drama (if a meaning in it can be found) of humanity, of this self-understanding of man'.54 Having laid the theoretical groundwork for his 'histories' in the 1960s, and having become aware of the complexity of the elements contributing to 'modernity' through his studies of the Hellenistic period for volume 4 of Order and History, Voegelin was able to restate in detail his understanding of the pattern of human representation and misrepresentation of truth across cultures and time periods. He was also able to eliminate the vestiges of both cyclic and 'historiogenetic' habits of thought about history that had been evident in his earlier work.55 When history is understood as an

53. Voegelin, 'Drama of Humanity', pp. 29, 30. 54. Voegelin, 'Drama of Humanity', pp. 8, 12. 55. Writing in the Introduction to The Ecumenic Age of the original conception of Order and History, Voegelin states: 'What ultimately broke the project...was the impossibility of aligning the empirical types in any time sequence at all that would

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'open field of existence', the recognition that experiences and their symbolizations exhibit 'compactness and differentiation' points to something beyond the 'process of symbolization', namely the experiences of consciousness (the psyche) that stimulate the search for more adequate symbolization in the first place. This was a point already adumbrated by Voegelin in the theoretical introduction to volume 1 of Order and History ('The Symbolization of Order'), but it is fully worked out by him only in 1970 in 'Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History'. The 'compactness and differentiation' of experiences and their symbolizations is not discussed, as such, in the 1967 'Drama of Humanity' lectures, although the 'differentiation of consciousness' itself in the Hellenic experience, with the consequent emergence of the symbol 'man', is a focus of attention in the meditation. In The New Science of Politics, the discovery of the psyche (the 'differentiation of consciousness') had already been associated by Voegelin with the 'differentiation' of 'compact' experiences and symbolizations attendant upon the search in 'the depth', which, of course, proves to be the depth of the psyche itself.56 Whereas in 'The Drama of Humanity' Voegelin is dealing with problems of modernity deriving from classic, Hebraic and 'cosmological' sources, in 'Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History' he returns to the general theme of the formation and deformation of truth over the time dimension of existence, and particularly in modernity, first assayed in The New Science of Politics. The matter of the 'compactness and differentiation' of experiences and symbolizations reappears, this time in the context of a meditation on the permanent in human experience, which, when followed to its end, reveals only the 'process in the mode of presence'.57 We have noted that Professor Planinc believes that 'Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History' expresses, perhaps most clearly, Voegelin's turn away from progressivist/developmentalist schemes toward Plato's thought. With this we concur, in a sense, but the evidence offered by this article is that the lengthy extension of Voegelin's breakthrough of 1950-51 represented a gradual move from a German Romantic (Schellingian) basis for his theorizing about history to a Christian Platonist (and thus truly 'classic and Christian') one. Voegelin's problematic in this essay, permit the structures actually found to emerge from a history conceived as a "course" ' (p. 2). 56. Voegelin, New Science of Politics, pp. 62, 66-67. 57. Voegelin, 'Equivalences', p. 132.

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initially expressed in the language of contemporary positivistic scholarship, is the possibility of'permanent values in the process of history', a concern analogous to Hooker's scholastically conceived attempt to reconcile Natural Law with historical change. Voegelin begins by noting that a helpful substitute for the now vacuous language of Values' is available in contemporary scholarship itself. In the realm of the comparative study of cults, rituals, myths, etc., 'equivalents' are noted (rather than Values'), and furthermore scholars are aware that, although there may be differences in the symbols being compared, the 'language of "equivalences" ' is justified by the 'sameness...in the experiences which have engendered them'. The existing scholarly language of'equivalences', thus, 'implies the theoretical insight that not the symbols themselves but the constants of engendering experience are the true subject matter of our studies'.58 An initial assessment of what is permanent in human history can therefore be made easily, and can be simply stated: it is not the symbols, 'but man himself in search of his humanity and its order'. But such a conclusion, based upon the findings of modern scholarly research, has important implications. Comparative cultural study, to the degree that it moves beyond recording symbols to 'the constants of engendering experience', must use symbols 'which in their turn are engendered by the constants of which the comparative study is in search'. In short, the 'study of symbols is a reflective inquiry concerning the search for the truth of existential order'. If pursued, it leads to the development of what is customarily classed as a 'philosophy of history'.59 Voegelin further suggests that the desire to develop a theory of 'equivalences', as is manifest in contemporary comparative cultural scholarship, 'presupposes the existence of a philosopher who has become conscious of the time dimension in his own search of truth and wants to relate it to that of his predecessor[s] in history'. Additionally, the wish to substitute for a theory of Values' such a theory of 'equivalences' is evidence that 'the comparative study of symbols' has reached a point where it understands itself as 'a search of the search', or a reflection upon its own processes.60 Voegelin situates his own current essay within the context just described, and states that it is intended to 'clarify...the principal problems' arising from this 'new historical consciousness'.61 The 'equivalences of 58. 59. 60. 61.

Voegelin, Voegelin, Voegelin, Voegelin,

'Equivalences', p. 115. 'Equivalences', pp. 115, 116. 'Equivalences', p. 116. 'Equivalences', p. 116.

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experience and symbolization' which are to be the subject of Voegelin's subsequent reflections are clearly understood by him, then, as having both a 'depth' and time dimension intrinsic to the comparative process that engenders them. Simply put, they are 'equivalences of experience and symbolization in history (i.e., as articulated over time). Indeed, the time dimension of existence is '[t]his field of experiences and symbols', which is only 'accessible...through participation in its reality', a possibility that may be blocked by the thinker's lack of intellectual training 'in openness toward reality', or by the holding of views 'which obscure the reality of immediate experience'. The historical field itself is not, of course, made up of'experiences and symbols' of'openness toward reality' and 'immediate experience' only, 'but it is interrupted by periods, or shot through with levels, of deformed existence'. Such deformed periods or strata can so influence thinkers that they will not only deform themselves, 'making deformed existence the model of true existence', but also 'deform the historical field of experiences and symbols' by imposing their model of true existence upon it, as has occurred in the 'modern dogmatomachy' ,62 Voegelin's project in 'Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History' is not simply the one suggested by the advance of the sciences of comparative religion, cultural anthropology, archaeology, history of religion, etc. It resembles that of Richard Hooker described in The New Science of Politics, and the History of Political Ideas, where the attempt to retheoretize human nature together with its historical dimension is occasioned by a challenge to the order of society from 'a stratum of deformed existence', that is, the Puritan movement. This 'stratum' became an 'age', a 'social and historical field of deformed existence' 'roughly extending from 1750 to 1950', and gave rise to the 'modern dogmatomachy' itself. 63 Our response to it must, in Voegelin's view, recognize that the flux of existence does not have the structure of order or, for that matter, of disorder, but the structure of a tension between truth and deformation of reality'. This 'In-Between' structure is the 'Platonic metaxy, which has been articulated in history in the 'language of tension between life and death, immortality and mortality, perfection and imperfection, time and timelessness' as well as 'between order and disorder, truth and untruth, sense and senselessness of existence', and between amor Dei and amor sui, I'ame ouverte and lame close". This metaxic structure of existence is also reflected in the 62. Voegelin, 'Equivalences', pp. 116, 118. 63. Voegelin, 'Equivalences', pp. 118-19.

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expression of the tension 'between the virtues of openness toward the ground of being such as faith, love, and hope, and the vices of infolding closure such as hubris and revolt', and between 'the moods of joy and despair' and 'alienation from the world and.. .from God'.64 Voegelin goes on to make clear that 'deformed existence' originates when the 'poles of the tension' of this metaxic constant of mankind's existence (which is not to be confused—pace Professor Planinc—with the 'quaternarian structure of the primordial community of being') are hypostasized as 'independent entities'. Then the tensional reality of existence is eclipsed and 'consciousness and intellect' is lost, to be replaced by 'dream life'.65 Although 'participation' and the awareness of the analogical nature of symbolization (leading to a mature 'tolerance' of earlier symbolizations) are discussed as parts of the 'long-drawn-out process of experience and symbolization' in the theoretical introduction to Israel and Revelation, as we have seen, the emphasis there is upon the process of the unfolding of consciousness through the 'differentiation' of 'compact experiences and their symbolization', detailed empirically in the studies of the Israelite and Hellenic fields of history which that essay precedes (volumes 1—3). In 'Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History', the stress moves to the fundamental 'experience of participation', and to the meditative elaboration of the awareness of the analogical nature of the symbolization (the first and the fourth of the 'typical features' of the 'early stages of the process of symbolization'). When it is recognized that the metaxic 'structure of existence itself is the 'constant in the history of mankind, i.e., in the time dimension of existence', and that '[u]ltimate doctrines, systems and values are phantasmata engendered by deformed existence' (i.e., are the hypostasis of the poles of the metaxic tension), then 'certain propositions can...be advanced' with regard to 'this constant structure' although, as Voegelin notes, misgivings immediately arise concerning their validity. These propositions all flow from 'the fundamental proposition' that 1. Man participates in the process of reality. The further implications of this are as follows: 2. Man is conscious of reality as a process, of himself as being part of reality, and of his consciousness as a mode of participation in its process. 64. Voegelin, 'Equivalences', pp. 119-20. 65. Voegelin, 'Equivalences', p. 120.

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3. While consciously participating, man is able to engender symbols which express his experience of reality, of himself as the experiencing agent, and of his conscious experiencing as the action and passion of participating. 4. Man knows the symbols engendered to be part of the reality they symbolize—the symbols 'consciousness', 'experience', and 'symbolization' 66 denote the area where the process of reality becomes luminous to itself.

These articulations of the basic propositions concerning the metaxic structure of existence (that is, man's participation in the process of reality), are supplemented, in Voegelin's inventory, by some further 'corollaries of a cautionary nature': 5. Reality is not a given that could be observed from a vantage point outside itself but embraces the consciousness in which it becomes luminous. 6. The experience of reality cannot be total but has the character of a perspective. 7. The knowledge of reality conveyed by the symbols can never become a final possession of truth, for the luminous perspectives that we call experiences, as well as the symbols engendered by them, are part of reality in process.67

This register of propositions flowing from the fundamental one that 'man participates in the process of reality' engenders doubt, as Voegelin notes, about even its validity. For they describe an 'experience of participation in a process of reality of which man, the knower, is a part', so that knowledge of participation and the 'luminosity' that the development of symbolizations of this generate are indications of a 'cognitive consciousness whose cognition is closed within itself. The self-reflective nature of a 'consciousness reflecting on its own structure of participation' that is evident in the very content of these propositions must be acknowledged, Voegelin admits, but, he adds, the 'process of self-reflection by which consciousness becomes luminous to itself that they describe is not 'a flight of imagination', nor are the symbols this process produces 'one more ideology, or one more project of Second Reality', such as those that obtain when the poles of the metaxic tension are hypostasized. The 'process of selfreflection' is not simply a fall into 'subjectivity' either, for 'the effort of self-reflection is real', Voegelin notes, and it exhibits a specific pattern of articulation: it is recognizably related to a less reflected experience of participation and its less differentiated symbolization; and the propositions engendered by the 66. Voegelin, 'Equivalences', p. 120. 67. Voegelin, 'Equivalences', pp. 120-21.

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effort are recognizably equivalents of the symbols which had been found unsatisfactory and whose want of differentiation had motivated the effort of reflection.68

The core element here is an 'experience of participation', which in its 'less reflected' state, with its 'less differentiated' symbolization, had been the stimulus for 'the effort of reflection' in the first place. The articulation of the 'experience of participation' does not rest with the 'differentiation' of the 'compact' experience and its symbolization in this analysis, however, but stresses the more adequate symbolizations 'engendered by the effort' of reflection and their identity as 'recognizably equivalents of the symbols which had been found unsatisfactory'. The 'propositions' that emerge from such a process can be 'tested objectively', Voegelin claims, by placing them 'in the historical field of experiences and their symbolizations, i.e., in the time dimension of existence itself. The test of the validity for the 'propositions' will be whether, in this setting, they are shown to be 'recognizably equivalent with the symbols created by our predecessors in the search of truth about human existence'.69 To test his own catalogue of 'propositions' concerning the 'central issue, i.e., the experience of participation and the consequent identity and nonidentity of the knower with the known', Voegelin thinks it enough, therefore, to refer to a few 'equivalent symbolizations' of this issue found in 'the historical field'. This he proceeds to do. A comparison of these with his propositions concerning the 'constant structure' of existence will yield, Voegelin thinks, a positive result in the only valid 'test of truth' in this regard, namely 'the lack of originality of the propositions'.70 However, to reiterate, the unoriginal propositions, the symbols that proved to be 'equivalent' to those found in the 'historical field', are generated as a result of dissatisfaction with the 'less reflected' experiences of 'participation', and their 'less differentiated' symbolizations—with, indeed, the very symbolizations (and their generating experiences) with which they are 'equivalent'. Thus, the 'equivalences of experience and symbolization' of the title of the essay under consideration cannot be, as Professor Planinc seems to imply, the identity of experiences. Furthermore, as we suggested above, Voegelin's notion of 'compactness and differentiation' is evidently as interwoven with his theoretical term 'equivalences of experience and

68. Voegelin, 'Equivalences', p. 121. 69. Voegelin, 'Equivalences', pp. 121-22. 70. Voegelin, 'Equivalences', p. 122.

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symbolization' as it is with his terminology of 'participation' in the 'primordial community of being'. 5 In the final, highly concentrated, 11 pages of the essay 'Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History' (pp. 123-33), Voegelin presents his full theory of 'equivalences' as a response to the problem of the search for 'permanent values' in history, and it becomes crystal-clear that his theoretical terms describing the 'quaternarian structure of the primordial community of being', 'compactness and differentiation' of experiences and symbolizations, and the 'equivalences of experiences and symbolizations in history' are mutually dependent relationships in a process-philosophy. For the 'equivalent symbolizations' are of the participants in the 'primordial field' engendered by the process of reflection upon 'less differentiated experiences and symbolizations', an activity of participation extending into the 'depth' of consciousness as its source, a theme briefly alluded to in The New Science of Politics.71 Voegelin's theory of 'equivalences' emerges in these pages as a result of what he claims is itself an analysis of this type, one which has been careful to avoid various hypostases of consciousness, such as those of Hegel, Schelling, and the modern 'depth psychologies'. The latter treat 'experience' as an absolute, creating a 'system' to symbolize it that claims exemption from being a historical 'equivalent' (Hegel), treat the 'depth' as an absolute (Schelling), populate the 'depth' with 'archetypes' (Jung) or give it 'libidinous dynamics' (Freud), all of which also claim an absolute status which cannot be justified by 'a critical analysis of experience'.72 Although the 'experience of depth' thus can offer no further content to the 'experiences and symbols' about the 'equivalence' of which Voegelin is conducting his inquiry, it can shed light, in Voegelin's opinion, on the 'process of reality from which the equivalents emerge'. This requires careful attention to 'the process' by which 'more differentiated experiences engendering more differentiated symbols' than those currently in use are arrived at. It enjoins a method employed by the Hellenic thinkers from Heraclitus onwards, who developed the symbol of the 'depth' of the soul' for the experience of consciousness below 'articulate experience'.73 71. Voegelin, New Science of Politics, pp. 66-67. 72. Voegelin, 'Equivalences', pp. 123, 124, 130. 73. Voegelin, 'Equivalences', p. 124.

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It is such an 'exploration5 in 'the depth' of the psyche, in search of the 'augmentation of meaning in conscious experience', Voegelin says, that ultimately produces a 'theory of equivalent symbols and experiences' as in the case of Aristotle: A descent into the depth will be indicated when the light of truth has dimmed and its symbols are losing their credibility; when the night is sinking on the symbols that have had their day, one must return to the night of the depth that is luminous with truth to the man who is willing to seek for it... [W]hen the new truth effectively constitutes a new social field, the event of its emergence will be considered to mark an epoch and to articulate the process of history by a Before and After; and the enthusiasm of renewal and discovery can be so intense that it will transfigure the new truth into absolute Truth—an ultimate Truth that relegates all previous truth to the status of pseudos, of lie. Nevertheless, the enthusiasm can also be tempered by awareness that the truth emerging from the process is not entirely new, not a truth about a reality hitherto unknown, but a differentiated and therefore superior insight into the same reality that had been compactly symbolized by the old truth. When such critical awareness becomes acute enough, as it does in Aristotle, the first steps toward a theory of equivalent symbols and experiences will be taken: Aristotle recognizes both Myth and Philosophy as languages man can equally use to express the truth of reality, even though he accords to Philosophy the rank of the instrument that is better suited to the task.

For Voegelin, thus, the 'equivalent symbols and experiences' emerge from the process of articulating more clearly truths that have already been recognized, from 'differentiating' 'compact' experiences and their symbolizations that have emerged previously from the exploration of the 'depth' of consciousness. Clearly, the expression 'equivalences of experience and symbolization' has not simply 'become associated' with 'compactness and differentiation' in this essay in the formal and arbitrary way suggested by Planinc. Neither has the discussion of'Plato's answer...in the Timaeus to the question of the 'kind of reality in terms of the primordial field' that is sensed by the philosopher in the descent into the 'depth', with which Voegelin concludes the essay. For, as Planinc has himself noted, Voegelin's reading of Plato is deeply in debt to the Patristic emphasis upon the Timaeus s cosmology. Thus Voegelin cautions that the philosopher 'in search of the truth about reality...will not identify the reality of the depth with any of the partners in the community [God, man, world and society] but with the 74. Voegelin, 'Equivalences', p. 125.

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underlying reality that makes them partners in a common order, i.e., with the substance of the Cosmos'. Rather he will see, with Plato in the Timaeus, that the 'depth of the psyche below consciousness is the depth of the Cosmos below the primordial field', so that 'the reality of the Cosmos in depth' is symbolized by the anima mundi, the philosopher's myth that combines the insights gained from 'the experience of the primordial field' and 'the experience of the psyche'.75 The core of Planinc's criticism of Voegelin's theoretical terminology is presented in his paper under the sub-heading 'Equivalences and Differentiations' (Section 3). This manner of grouping the symbols 'equivalences of experience and symbolization' and 'compactness and differentiation' reduces them from descriptions of interrelated processes in consciousness to a simple prepositional antinomy. As Planinc simplistically puts it: 'To speak in the commonsense language Voegelin often praised: "equivalence and differentiation" are just "same and different" dressed up to go to town'. Pointing out that Plato shows 'that even the Eleatics recognized that sameness and difference are present in all things', Planinc neatly moves on to a thorough revision of Voegelin's meaning: 'So the terms equivalence and differentiation—the latter term in its benign sense—are best seen as addressing the question of the presence of sameness and difference in the community of being.'76 This may be the only sense Planinc can make of Voegelin's theoretical terminology from his own perspective, but it cannot be all that Voegelin means by it. That much is clear from the latter's conclusion to the 'Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History' essay, which extrapolates from Timeaus's conclusion concerning the truth of his myth of the Cosmos, understood as being Plato's own conclusion, namely that 'the Cosmos is a zoon empsychon ennoun in very truth (te aletheia)\ According to Voegelin, this 'assertion' of the myth's 'truth in the full sense', still retaining 'in its depth' the irony expressed by Plato in his earlier wavering presentations of it as either a 'true story' or 'likely myth', expresses Plato's understanding of'the most intimate truth of reality': 'the truth about the meaning of the cosmic play in which man must act his role with his life as the stake' is that it is 'a mythopoetic play linking the psyche of man in trust with the depth of the Cosmos'.77 Voegelin's own 'meditative exegesis' of this experience has, he claims, 75. Voegelin, 'Equivalences', pp. 126-27. 76. Planinc, 'Significance', Section 3. 77. Voegelin, 'Equivalences', p. 128.

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been 'critically attentive to itself, for if it had not, it would not have 'enacted a descent to the depth' of the psyche, but would have become entangled by 'reifications of symbols', or 'the construction of an absolute content'. Thus the 'search for the constant in history' has been directed back from 'the symbols to the experiences, and from the experiences further back to the depth of the psyche'. However, at this crucial stage of the exegesis, specific 'reifications and fallacies' of the depth must be avoided, Voegelin declares, if the 'descent' is to be helpful in illuminating 'the truth of reality and the problem of equivalences'.78 The descent to the 'depth' itself shows that 'the search for a substantive constant of history that would be exempt from the status of an equivalent' is fallacious, Voegelin argues, for the 'depth' is simply the 'depth below consciousness', and it 'renders no truth but the equivalent experiences of the primordial field of reality'. There is no 'depth below depth in infinite regress', nor is there a 'phenomenon in the past or the future of the historical field' which, as 'an ultimate truth of reality.. .would transform the search' for a substantive content of history 'into a possession of truth'. Thus, Voegelin concludes, the 'symbolism of an ultimate truth is engendered by the apocalyptic dream of abolishing the tension of existence', and since 'no such apocalyptic truth of reality behind reality can be experienced', the 'equivalence of symbols' which has already been traced back 'to the experiences engendering them' must be further traced back 'to the depth by which experience lives'.79 Having recognized that the 'structure of equivalence' can be extended 'from the historical field of symbols through the experiences to the depth', it can be clearly seen, according to Voegelin, that 'the psyche of man' is 'an area of reality whose structure extends continuously from the depth to the manifestations of consciousness'. Therefore, the 'problems of the historical field, of equivalences, and of the constant in history' need to be approached with full appreciation of the fact that there 'is neither an autonomous consciousness nor an autonomous depth but only a consciousness in continuity with its own depth'.80 In the last four pages of the essay, Voegelin directly applies the results of his 'meditative exegesis' to the 'problems of the historical field, of equivalences, and of the constant in history'. Again he takes care to avoid 'suggestive fallacies'. Voegelin does not, as Planinc's analysis suggests that 78. Voegelin, 'Equivalences', pp. 128, 131. 79. Voegelin, 'Equivalences', p. 129. 80. Voegelin, 'Equivalences', p. 129.

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he should, reduce the significance of his theoretical terminology to 'equivalence and differentiation' used in 'addressing the question of the presence of sameness and difference in the community of being'. Rather, as Planinc's actual critique of Voegelin would lead us to anticipate that it might, Voegelin outlines a 'classic and Christian' theory of history based upon the full 'experience of participation in the primordial field, of emergent truth, and of its meditative articulation through symbols'. The 'relation of equivalence' that has been the focus of Voegelin's inquiry 'does not run between the phenomena of the field directly', but is 'mediated through the equivalence in the depth of the psyche from which the experiences and their symbolizations have emerged'.81 Thus, it is only participation in 'the process of search from which the previous symbols of truth have emerged' that reveals the 'relation of equivalence' between individual phenomena, and only 'by virtue of this relation' are they understood 'as an historical field'. In short, the process has a past only to the consciousness of its presence, i.e., at the point where a new truth is released from the depth of the psyche and sets itself off against older truth that has emerged from the same depth.82

This 'point' is, of course, that which Voegelin has described previously in terms of the 'differentiation' of more 'compact' experiences and symbolizations, a fact which is made evident by the following remark: The presence of the process, thus, is the point at which, along with a new truth, emerges our consciousness of the historical field and the equivalence of its phenomena—as we have seen in the cases of Heraclitus, Plato, and Aristotle where the new truth of philosophy emerged together with the 83 knowledge of its equivalence to the Myth.

'Equivalence of experience and symbolization' is therefore, in Voegelin's thought, a development of his understanding of the roots of the 'differentiation' of 'compact' experiences and their symbolizations. It is this more clearly articulated 'process in the mode of presence' that itself is 'the source of our knowledge concerning the depth of the psyche' and of the existence of a 'process in the depth'.84 Voegelin recognizes that the return of the emphasis in the analysis to 'the [core] experience of emergent consciousness' suggests other fallacies 81. 82. 83. 84.

Voegelin, Voegelin, Voegelin, Voegelin,

'Equivalences', pp. 129-31. 'Equivalences', p. 129. 'Equivalences', pp. 129-30. 'Equivalences', p. 130.

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which must be guarded against. The realization that 'the relation of equivalence' is rooted in 'a process in the depth' of the psyche that only becomes evident 'in the phenomena of the historical field' through 'the emergence of a newly differentiated truth, recognizably equivalent to the more compact truth it is meant to replace', can induce various reductive fallacies. The 'historical sequence of equivalent verities' can be understood as 'the epiphenomenon of an evolving truth of reality in the depth of the psyche', and this 'depth' can 'acquire the character of an absolute', as in the case of Schelling's 'theogonic speculation'. On the other hand, if the 'depth' and surface of consciousness are simply held in balance, the 'field of history' tends to be interpreted 'in terms of an evolving truth in the depth', and the 'process in the depth' is understood 'in terms of the historical field of equivalents and such sense as they make'.85 Such circular interpretations of the 'experience of emergent consciousness' can be avoided by means of the 'conventional construction of consciousness as a series of reflective acts', but this destroys 'the reality of the experience as experienced' as it sunders the complex 'experience of participation in the primordial field, of emergent truth, and of its meditative articulation through symbols' into separate mental perspectives, thereby losing the 'character of wholeness in the experience'. It also, as Voegelin notes, is at odds with 'the pre-Socratic and classic analyses of the psyche', and with the modern analysis of'pure experience' of William James. The 'character of wholeness in the experience', Voegelin further explains, is that 'the experience is experienced as wholly present to itself. This quality of 'wholeness of presence' of the experience in the experience itself is denominated by Voegelin as its 'luminosity'.86 Voegelin explains the 'wholeness of presence' as 'luminous to itself as man's consciousness of participation in the primordial field of reality, in the depth of the psyche, and in a process by which the truth of reality assumes consciousness in the historical field of equivalent verities'. He cautions, furthermore, that this 'wholeness of presence' must not be understood as an objective 'structure of consciousness', and his meditation must not be viewed as a reflection upon it. Rather, he claims, his analysis is a 'meditative exegesis of the experience' which has been 'engendered by the experience itself as part of its self-articulation through symbols', and is in fact 'the very process by which the experience expresses its own

85. Voegelin, 'Equivalences', p. 130. 86. Voegelin, 'Equivalences', pp. 130-31.

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luminosity on the level of symbols'. As such, and to the degree that it 'has been successful in differentiating the truth of reality beyond the state achieved by previous equivalents', Voegelin states, his analysis has been, and is, 'moving...in the process at the point of its presence where truth emerges from the depth'.87 Having completed his analysis, Voegelin returns in the conclusion of the essay to its original focus upon the problems 'of a constant in history and of equivalence'. He states bluntly that there 'is no constant to be found in history', for the reason that 'the historical field of equivalents is not given as a collective of phenomena which could be submitted to the procedures of abstraction and generalization'. Indeed, history itself'originates in the presence of the process when a truth of reality emerging from the depth recognizes itself as equivalent but superior to a truth previously experienced', so that the only thing that 'deserves the name of a constant' that has become evident in the analysis is 'the process in the mode of presence'. This constant process 'leaves a trail of equivalent symbols in time and space' to which we can 'attach the conventional name of "history" '. History, then, is 'a symbol by which we express our experience of the collective as a trail left by the moving presence of the process'. 'Equivalence', too, should be understood in terms of this presence, rather than simply 'on the level of symbols', for, 'as an immediate experience', equivalence 'is to be found only at the point where two symbolisms confront each other in the presence of the process'.88 Voegelin points out in his final remarks that the clarification of the problems of the constant in history, and of equivalence, reveals the underlying problem of 'the process itself. The 'immediate knowledge of the process' can only be had in 'its mode of presence' and this only occurs concretely in identifiable individuals, but the 'historical field' that the process leaves is not the result of 'the confrontation of truth in the psyche of one concrete man', but of'the presence of the process as it moves through the multitude of concrete beings who are members of mankind'. Therefore, 'the process as a whole.. .is not experienced by anybody concretely'.89 How is the truth of general premises concerning human nature and experience to be established, then? Faith in these, Voegelin asserts, is not the result of some 'additional experience of man's nature', but of the same

87. Voegelin, 'Equivalences', p. 131. 88. Voegelin, 'Equivalences', pp. 131-32. 89. Voegelin, 'Equivalences', p. 132.

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ensemble of experiences already reviewed in the course of the analysis of 'equivalences of experience and symbolization in history'. These are the 'primordial experience of reality as endowed with the constancy and lastingness of structure that we symbolize as the Cosmos', the 'trust in the Cosmos and its depth' as 'the source of the premises' (such as 'the generality of human nature' and 'the reality of the process as a moving presence'), and the 'assumption that the truth brought up from the depth of his psyche by man...is representative of the truth in the divine depth of the Cosmos'.90 The conclusion drawn by Voegelin at the end of this key theoretical essay is that each of the 'equivalent symbols' in the historical field has been engendered by someone, engaged in the search, 'as representative of a truth that is more than equivalent'. It is thus this search, which 'rests ultimately on the faith that, by engaging in it, man participates representatively in the divine drama of truth becoming luminous', that produces the phenomenon of 'equivalences of experience and symbolization in history'.91 6. Conclusion At the outset of this paper, we suggested that for Planinc, while Plato's philosophy and Christianity are 'not mysterious' (possibly in John Toland's sense), Voegelin's motivations, as reflected in the theoretical terminology of his 'histories', are quite mysterious, in the sense of inexplicable. Indeed that terminology is presented by Professor Planinc as being in clear and persistent contradiction with itself. An examination of Planinc's treatment of Plato's philosophy and Christianity has been beyond the scope of this paper, but our analysis of Voegelin's relevant theoretical writings has demonstrated, we believe, that Planinc's understanding of Voegelin's use of the terms, 'quaternarian structure of the primordial community of being', 'compactness and differentiation', and 'equivalences of experience and symbolization', is quite different from Voegelin's actual use of them. It is evident that for Voegelin they are symbolisms expressing reciprocal relationships in a mystic process philosophy of 'classic and Christian' provenance, whereas for Planinc they are signs of a partial recognition of the 'Socratic theology' that 'has a claim to being the most differentiated account possible of the relation between a 90. Voegelin, 'Equivalences', p. 133. 91. Voegelin,'Equivalences', p. 133.

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human being and God',92 and of an elaborate decades-long theoretical effort to obscure this insight. Our detailed examination of Voegelin's relevant theoretical texts revealed no lack of coherence in his terminology, no lack of candour in his acknowledgment of debt on a selective basis to classic, Christian and modern thinkers, and no evidence of deliberate obfuscation of his meaning. That is to say, for us, Voegelin is not mysterious at all. What does remain mysterious, however, is Professor Planinc's rationale for treating Voegelin as a failed Socratic theologian, rather than the 'mystic philosopher'93 he acknowledged himself to be.

92. Planinc, 'Significance', Section 4. 93. Gregor Sebba, 'Prelude and Variations on the Theme of Eric Voegelin', Southern Review, NS, 13 (1977), pp. 646-76 (665): To me Eric Voegelin has always been an exemplary representative of rationality in the Greek sense, but when I argued that against a statement calling him a mystic philosopher he wrote back: "This will shock you, but I am a mystic philosopher." ' Cited in Eugene Webb, Eric Voegelin: Philosopher of History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981), p. 44 n. 43.

ERIC VOEGELIN AND THE ESSENCE OF THE PROBLEM: THE QUESTION OF DIVINE-HUMAN ATTUNEMENT IN PLATO'S SYMPOSIUM M.W. Sinnett

If...in our prescientific participation in the order of a society, in our prescientific experiences of right and wrong, of justice and injustice, we should feel the desire to penetrate to a theoretical understanding of the source of order and its validity, we may arrive in the course of our endeavors at the theory that the justice of human order depends on its participation in the Platonic Agathon, or the Aristotelian Nous, or the Stoic Logos, or the Thomistic ratio aeterna. For one reason or another, none of these theories may satisfy us completely; but we know that we are in search for an answer of this type. If, however, the way should lead us to the notion that social order is motivated by will to power and fear, we know that we have lost the essence of the problem somewhere in the course of our inquiry. 1 —Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics

1. The Task of Assessment It is the burden and challenge of every great mind that his works can be critically assessed and applied only with the greatest difficulty. No one more clearly illustrates this problem than Eric Voegelin. There are several reasons for this. Voegelin's 'fiendish erudition' and ingenious mind, in the first place, combine to produce inferences of such startling originality as to be positively bewildering, as well as to be at odds in some cases with virtually all relevant contemporary scholarship. On many points, secondly, there is precious little consistency, 'foolish' or otherwise, over the course of Voegelin's career. In his latest writings, thirdly, in place of the brilliant and detailed exegeses contained in the first three volumes of Order and History, Voegelin's references to both primary

1. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), p. 6.

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and secondary materials are relatively sparse, and his interpretations of the texts to which he does refer often very difficult to follow. This contributes significantly to the fourth and greatest difficulty with Voegelin's writing: namely, that there is, especially again in his latest writings, no fixed position, no collection of final results, no body of doctrine, that can directly be expounded or assessed. Voegelin's reader, instead, is confronted by a running commentary on an astonishing array of literary sources, moving 'backward and forward and sideways'2 over some five thousand years of intellectual history, and conducted from the perspective of an encompassing vision of reality that is nowhere explicitly presented. Such is the comprehensiveness of Voegelin's vision and the power of his intellect that the effects of his writing range from delight to outrage, from excitement to bewilderment, from devotion to blank incomprehension, and back again. Such is the torrential force of his analysis and the alluring intimation of his insight that any persistent student of Voegelin is continually threatened with the loss of all critical reserve. These characteristics of Voegelin's writing help to explain why there has been so little responsible criticism of his work. Those willing to undertake the task of criticism have frequently been specialist scholars insufficiently well versed in Voegelin's work as a whole to really understand his intentions; while many of those who share deeply enough in his vision to understand his intentions have seemingly lost all capacity of substantive criticism. The problem is particularly well illustrated by the approaches most frequently taken to the vast collection of historical materials that inform and support Voegelin's analyses. Specialist scholars, approaching Voegelin's treatment of a particular text with little or no knowledge of the breadth of vision that guides his explorations, often fall short of any genuine engagement with Voegelin, thus depriving us of all benefit from the mutual insights that might otherwise have been possible. Voegelinian enthusiasts, on the other hand, being unwilling or unable to question their master's reading of basic texts, quickly find themselves helpless in the relentless sweep of Voegelin's exegeses, thus abandoning any hope of a critical approach to his work. The one runs the risk of an uninformed dismissal of Voegelin's work, while the other, at best, contributes another item to the growing catalogue of Voegelinian hagiography. What will be necessary in order for there ever to be responsible assessment and critical

2. Eric Voegelin, Order and History. IV. The Ecumenic Age (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), p. 57.

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application of Voegelin's work is the endeavour on the part of many scholars over a period of many years to explore in detail, and in a relevant manner, the empirical bases of Voegelin's writings. The present essay is intended as a small contribution to this vast undertaking. There can be no doubt as to the importance of the symbolism of 'the In-Between' in all of Voegelin's later thought. Notwithstanding that Voegelin's principal reference for this symbol is Plato's Symposium, there is no connected account of this dialogue either by Voegelin himself, or anywhere to my knowledge in the secondary literature on Voegelin. To provide such an account with an eye to themes in Voegelin's late writings is the primary goal of this essay. It is intended to highlight relatively neglected aspects of the dialogue; to provide a concrete illustration of several important themes in Voegelin's later writings; and, finally, to suggest opportunities for further application and assessment of Voegelin's work. While there have been many alternatives suggested for Plato's purpose in writing Symposium? it is Voegelin's emphasis upon Plato's concern for political order that is particularly illuminating.4 As we will find in Section 2, the 'spiritual realm' that lies 'in-between' only gains its full meaning within the context of the early 'speeches' in the dialogue which establish the problem of political order—the problem of divine-human attunement—as the central focus of Plato's analysis throughout. In effect, at Voegelin's prompting, we replace Plato's 'answer' in the context of the original 'question'. We attempt, in other words, to regain 'the essence of the problem'5 as a means of more accurately understanding Plato's exploration of'the problem'. In so doing, however, we discover that the truth of the 'answer' lies in the fact that it is not an answer at all, but rather a reformulation of the question from the philosopher's distinctive perspective of participation in divine-human reality. That the philosopher's inquiry, as we shall discover, only makes the original question more

3. Recent studies have tended to regard Symposium as a treatise on human sexuality. For such approaches, see R.E. Allen, The Dialogues of Plato. II. The Symposium (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); and Allen Bloom, Love and Friendship (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), pp. 429-546. 4. Voegelin was not, of course, the first to emphasize the 'political Plato', but followed in the footsteps of Wilamowitz, Friedlander, and Hildebrandt. On this see, for example, Hans-Georg Gadamer, 'Dialectic and Sophism in Plato's Seventh Letter, in Gadamer, Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato (trans. P. Christopher Smith; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 93-123 (94-95). 5. Eric Voegelin, New Science of Politics, p. 6.

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problematic illustrates what Voegelin calls 'differentiation' (to be discussed in Section 3). That the philosopher's inquiry, furthermore, is his own distinctive mode of participation in reality—in this case, in the cosmic tension of Eros—and simultaneously the event in which the tension comes to conscious awareness of itself, illustrates what Voegelin calls 'the paradox of consciousness' (to be discussed in Section 4). That these advances of insight only render more mysterious the social resistance to the philosopher's inquiry is what Voegelin calls 'the process of the Question' (to be discussed in Section 5). It is in connection with this final mystery that it will be possible to venture some suggestions as to further application, as well as to certain limitations, of Voegelin's work. The critical suggestions promised for the concluding section notwithstanding, the following analysis of Symposium, far from fulfilling the requirements for 'responsible criticism' discussed above, is only the first step in that direction. The limited results of this essay, however, are by necessity, not by intention: its rather broad generalities indicate a man swimming far from the safe shores of his own competence toward high seas beyond his depth. The only justification for my venturing the plunge at all is that no one more competent has come forward to undertake the task in my stead. If, however, the spectacle of a drowning man be sufficiently pathetic, or sufficiently irritating, to cause some abler scholar to bestir himself in this regard, no one will be better pleased than myself. 2. The In-Between In beginning our examination of Symposium6—certainly among Plato's finest artistic achievements—it must be emphasized that Plato's use of the dramatic and dialogical form, far from being simply an artistic embellish6. I have employed the Greek text of the Loeb Classical Library edition: Plato, Lysis, Symposium, Gorgias (trans. W.R.M. Lamb; Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). Except where otherwise noted, I have used the English translation of Michael Joyce in Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (eds.), The Collected Dialogues of Plato (Bollingen Series, 71; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), pp. 526-74. I have also consulted the translations of R.E. Allen, The Dialogues of Plato-, and of Lamb in the Loeb Classical Library edition; as well as the text and commentary of Sir Kenneth Dover (ed.), Symposium (Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). For a complementary version of the following discussion, see M.W. Sinnett, 'Eric Voegelin and the Problem of Theological Paradox: A Critical Assessment' (PhD dissertation, Cambridge University, Cambridge, 1993), pp. 93-104.

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ment, is central to the effect Plato intends his writings to have. The dialogues are tendered by Plato as a continuation of the Socratic 'inquiry' which, in turn, is the characteristic expression of'the love of wisdom'. They are intended, not as a means of advancing opinions about some object or other, but as a means of drawing the reader himself into the quest for wisdom.7 It so happens that Symposium is one of Plato's works where this may most easily be seen. At the centre of Symposium is the dialogue between Socrates and the Mantinean prophetess Diotima, which is recounted by Socrates as his 'speech in praise of Eros' during the banquet in Agathon's home; which, years later, is recounted by Aristedemus, who had been present at the banquet, to Apollodorus; who, years later, recounts it all to his anonymous companions, a few days after having similarly recounted the 'speeches' to Glaucon, the brother of Plato. It is surely no accident that the report that we are given of the 'speeches' is that given to anonymous, and hence arbitrary, listeners. Nor can it be altogether insignificant that

7. Cf. Eric Voegelin. Order and History. III. Plato and Aristotle (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957), pp. 10-14; Paul Friedlander, Plato. I. An Introduction (trans. Hans Meyerhoff; Bollingen Series, 59; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2nd edn, 1969 [1926]), pp. 168-70; Hans-Georg Gadamer, Plato's Dialectical Ethics: Phenomena logical Interpretations Relating to the Phaedrus (trans. Robert M. Wallace; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 1-100; W.K.C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy. IV. Plato: The Man and his Dialogues: Earlier Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 1-4; Stanley Rosen, Plato's Symposium (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2nd edn, 1987 [1969]), pp. xxxiv-liv. As a number of recent studies show, the consensus steadily grows that the dramatic structure of the dialogues is essential to Plato's intended meaning: see Charles L. Griswold, Jr, SelfKnowledge in Plato's Phaedrus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Zdravko Planinc, Plato's Political Philosophy: Prudence in the Republic and the Laws (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991); Gerald A. Press (ed.), Plato's Dialogues: New Studies and Interpretations (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993); and Drew A. Hyland, Finitude and Transcendence in the Platonic Dialogues (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995). This emphasis has been greatly heightened through realization that 'Socratic dialogue' was in fact a well established and broadly practised literary form. With the publication of Gabriele Giannantoni (ed.), Socratis and Socraticorum Reliquiae (Elenchos, 18; 4 vols.; Naples: Bibliopolis, 2nd edn, 1991), this 'Socratic movement', of which Plato was only one of many members, has become the object of intense scholarly attention: see Vander Waerdt (ed.), The Socratic Movement (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1994); and Charles H. Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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Apollodorus accompanies his rehearsal of the 'speeches' with exhortations to his listeners to concern themselves with the truly important matters of philosophy (173c-d). These urgings correspond to those on the part of Socrates himself which are reported in Alcibiades' speech: 'He makes me admit that while I'm spending my time on politics I am neglecting all the things that are crying for attention in myself (2l6a). He also complains to Socrates, that 'when we listen to you, or to someone else repeating what you 've said, even if he puts it ever so badly, and never mind whether the person listening is man, woman, or child, we're absolutely staggered and bewitched' (215d; emphasis added). As Voegelin suggests, the dialogue that unfolds in the soul of Socrates (indicated by Diotima's myth) 'is not locked up as an event in one person who.. .informs the rest of mankind of its results as a new doctrine'. Instead, 'the Socratic soul draws into its dialogue the companions and, beyond the immediate companions, all those who are eager to have these dialogues reported to them'.8 The centre, again, is Socrates' dialogue with Diotima, which unfolds within a dramatic context Plato has painstakingly prepared for it. The scene is a banquet in the home of the Sophist Agathon which the host has given to celebrate his victory in the Lenaea festival. Following the meal, the evening is spent in giving speeches in praise of Eros, the 'god of Love'. Socrates is originally intended to take his turn last, following the expected drollery of Aristophanes and the eloquence of Agathon. Following Socrates' 'speech', however, which in fact is not a speech at all, the party is interrupted by Alcibiades, who enters in an advanced state of intoxication, and who provides the actual conclusion to the speech-making by praising, not Eros, but Socrates. Symposium then concludes with Socrates in conversation with Aristophanes and Agathon, until the latter fall off to sleep, and Socrates leads Aristedemus away into the growing light of the dawning sun. By focusing upon the development of the word eros from the early speeches, through the transformation worked in its meaning by Socrates and Diotima, to Alcibiades' desperate eulogy, it will become clear that Socrates' 'speech' marks the turning point in the dialogue, just as his life did, for Plato, in the history of Athens. In the first speeches of the dialogue, those of Phaedrus (178a-180b), Pausanias (180c-185e), and Eryximachus (185e-188a), we encounter the traditional order of the Greek polls. Through the traditional language of the poets, Phaedrus praises Eros both for his venerable standing among the

8.

Voegelin, Order and History, IV, p. 186.

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gods and as the source of order in society. Eros, he says, was first-born among the gods (178b)9 and is the guiding 'beacon' in life (178c), producing 'that contempt for the vile, and emulation of the good, without which neither a city nor an individual person are capable of great or noble deeds \putepolin oute idioten megala kai kala erga exergazesthai]' (178d). Here, Eros is a power that pervades the cosmos and that effects, essentially without contingency, and certainly without human agency, an ordering of human life and society. We then encounter the problem of order in the speech of Pausanias. After the manner of Empedocles,10 he divides the single power of Eros into 'two loves' corresponding to two Aphrodites (180d), one of them 'Popular' (Pandemon) and the other 'Heavenly' (Ouranion) (180e). Although the love of the popular Aphrodite is not bad in itself, it is 'random' and 'disorderly' (181b); it must therefore be ordered according to 'the love of the heavenly goddess' which alone produces a zealous concern for virtue, and is accordingly 'precious alike to cities and to men' (185b-c). And Pausanias presents us examples of the laws and customs that can reliably achieve this attunement of human passion to divine love (181e185b). The human 'craft' (techne) by which this attunement is attained is then further clarified by Eryximachus. He accepts Pausanias's distinction between the 'two loves' governing human life in society, but, being a physician, he has learned from 'our craft' (tes hemeteras technes) 'how great and wonderful [Eros] is, and how he pervades all affairs both human and divine' (has megas kai thaumastos kai epi pan ho theos teinei kai kat' anthropina kai kata theia pragmata) (186a-b). And, 'out of deference to his craft [ten techen]' (186b), he pursues this medical perspective in order to illustrate the 'skill' (sophos) which is necessary to govern the 'two loves' that he believes (like Pausanias,!8Od-e) are always present in human affairs. 'It is necessary,' he says, 'to accept the desires of well-ordered men...and to hold fast to this Eros of theirs, for he is the noble and heavenly Eros, the Eros of the heavenly muse' (187d-e); and, at the same time, to carefully control 'the popular love' who springs from 'the muse of many songs' 9. See Hesiod's Theogony, 11. 120-22, in Richard Lattimore (trans.), Hesiod (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959), p. 130; also Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers: A Complete Translation of the Fragments in Hermann Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), Parmenides, frs. 12-13 (p. 45). 10. See Freeman, Ancilla, Empedocles, fr. 17 (pp. 53-54).

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(187e). What is required, thus, is the 'expert practitioner' (technikos), the 'good craftsman' (agathos demiourgos), who can achieve in every area of human life—medicine, music, athletics, and agriculture—the 'harmony' that, as Heraclitus says,11 holds together the cosmos. The same two forces govern the regularity of the seasons (188a) and the movements of the stars (188b), so that this same techne, in its ability to distinguish between the two, is the basis of the rites of sacrifice and divination that are 'the means of all communion between gods and men' (188c), and the basis of that 'decency and reverence' that is 'the creator of friendship between gods and men [philias theon kai anthropon demiourgos}' (188d). The many points of contact between Socrates' inquiry and the first three speeches indicate that Plato is far from regarding them as entirely without value. What unites all three, however, is that for none of them is the order of society genuinely problematic. For even the most 'scientifically' sophisticated of the three, Eryximachus, who realizes the necessity not simply that the public cult shall be properly administered but that individual men shall live 'well-ordered' lives, there is a techne—a technique—which is understood as a quite reliable means to the predictable maintenance of all aspects of public order. The instability of this arrangement, however, a matter of Plato's historical experience, is indicated in Symposium through the ensuing sequence of speeches: the burlesque of Aristophanes (189e-193d), in which the drama of divine—human relationship is reduced to farce; and the empty sophistry of Agathon (194e-197e), in which, despite his claim to know the true nature of the god (194e-195a), the problem of attunement is altogether lost from view. This descending path, paralleling for Plato the spiritualpolitical decline of Athens, demonstrates the helplessness of the traditional order to defend itself from the forces of dissolution,12 and thus sets the stage for the advent of the true demiourgos, whose knowledge of 'lovematters' and whose 'skill' are his society's only hope, and perhaps no more than a hope, for the restoration of'friendship between gods and men'. Given his turn to speak, Socrates apologizes for his folly in having professed 'to understand nothing but love-matters [ta erotika]' (177e). He now admits that he has no ability whatsoever to follow the example of the 'excellent speeches' that have preceded his: 'For I was such a silly wretch as 11. See Freeman, Ancilla, Heraclitus, fr. 45 (p. 27). 12. This is reminiscent of the early stages of Republic, where Cephalus, the pious old man who represents the traditional order of the city, retires from the conversation in order to attend to his sacrifices (33Id).

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to think that one ought to speak the truth about the person eulogized' (199d; Lamb). He then obtains permission to speak 'the mere truth' (199b) in his own manner and launches into an examination of Agathon's speech. He establishes, contrary to Agathon's grand declaration, that Eros neither embodies nor possesses 'beauty' (20 Ib). Now, however, his 'speech' proper begins and he recounts his conversation with Diotima, in which he had played the role of Agathon—asserting the beauty of Eros— and had gone down to defeat by means of the same dialectical examination that has just been re-enacted. It does not follow, however, that Eros is 'bad and ugly' (20 le), for, as Diotima asks (202a), 'have you not observed that there is something in-between wisdom and ignorance [metaxu sophias kai amathias}Y It is 'correct opinion', which is 'neither full knowledge' (since no reason can be given for it), 'nor yet ignorance' (since it inadvertently hits on the truth). Just so is Eros 'in-between' the ugly and the beautiful. At this point, Diotima returns the conversation, and the dialogue as a whole, to the theme of divine-human attunement that had preoccupied the three earliest speakers. Eros, the priestess explains, is neither a god, nor a mortal, but 'a great spirit [daimon megas].. .for the whole realm of the spiritual is in-between the divine and the mortal [kai gar pan to daimonion metaxu esti theou te kai thnetou}' (202e). Inhabiting 'the realm of the spiritual', the power of Eros is that of effecting attunement to divine reality: interpreting and transporting 'human things to the gods and divine things to men...being in the middle [en meso\, [the spiritual] makes each to supplement the other, so the whole [to pan] is united in one'. 'All prophetic art [he mantike pas$ resides in this realm, along with 'the art of priests [he ton hiereon techne\' which concerns sacrifice, initiation, incantation, divination and sorcery (202e-203a). 'God does not mingle with man, but [the spiritual] is the means of all relation [homilia\ and converse [dialektos] of men with the gods and of the gods with men' (203a). So far Diotima's account is virtually interchangeable with that of Eryximachus, but there now arises a dramatic difference: 'He who has art [sophos} pertaining to such things is a spiritual man [daimonios aner\, but whoever has skill in the common crafts is a mere mechanic [ho de allo ti sophos on e peri technas e cheirourgias tinas banausos}' (203a).13 At this 13. This is by way of contrast with the speech of Agathon in which he exalts the many skills 'of technical manufacture' (ten ton technon demiourgian, 197a) which are the special gift of Eros. See also Republic495d-e, where Socrates describes the result of philosophy being abandoned by the ablest men: '...others in the form of men [anthropiskoj\, those who are most cunning in their little craft [technion], observing that the

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point, where one naturally expects some further explanation who this 'spiritual man' is, and how his 'art' is distinguishable from the common, mechanical technai, we are given an account of the birth of Eros: His father, Diotima explains (203b), is 'Resource' (Poros) and his mother 'Poverty' (Penia), so that Eros himself is at no time either 'resourceless' (aporei) or 'wealthy' (ploutei), but 'is in the middle between wisdom and ignorance [sophias te au kai amathias en meso estin}' (203e). In order to explain this, Diotima notes that neither the 'gods' nor the 'ignorant' (amaheis) are 'lovers of wisdom' (philosophousin) (203e-204a). The former already possess wisdom and the latter, though they utterly lack it, are satisfied with themselves and have no desire for that of which they feel no defect (204a). 'Who then', asks Socrates, 'are the lovers of wisdom, if they are neither the wise nor the ignorant?' Diotima responds: 'They are the ones in-between the two, and one of them is Eros' (204b). The 'lovers of wisdom' are further characterized, subsequently, in terms of their loving quest of wisdom and beauty: Each of them climbs aloft, 'as on the rungs of a ladder, from one to two, and from two to all beautiful bodies...to beautiful institutions...to beautiful learning, and from learning at last to the special lore which is study of none other than the beautiful itself [ho estin ouk allou e autou ekeinou tou kalou mathem$ (2 lie). 'Whoever has been initiated so far in love-matters [ta erotika], viewing beautiful things in the right and regular order [theomenos ephexes te kai orthos ta kala], suddenly, as he draws near to the end of his dealings in love, a wondrous vision, beautiful in its nature, may be revealed to him [pros telos ede ion ton erotikon exaiphnes katopsetai ti thaumaston ten phusin kalon\\ and this, Socrates, is the final object of all those previous toils' (210e). We have no choice but to regard this seemingly anomalous discussion as the answer to the question as to the 'art' of the 'spiritual man' in 'lovematters'. Especially as indicated by the language of initiation, the philosopher's noetic ascent toward the 'wondrous vision' of the beautiful unfolds

place is unoccupied and full of fine terms and pretensions, rush from the mechanical crafts to philosophy [ek ton technon ekpedosin eis ten philosophian], just as men escaping from prison take refuge in temples. For in comparison with the other crafts [technas] the prestige of philosophy, even in her present low estate, retains a superior dignity; to which many aspire who are of unsuitable nature, whose souls are bowed and mutilated through their vulgar occupations [dia tas banausias tugchanousin], just as their bodies are marred by their crafts and manufactures [ton technon te kai demiourgion}'

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within the 'spiritual realm' which lies 'in-between the divine and the mortal'. The 'art' in question, furthermore, that by which the philosopher climbs aloft, is precisely the relentless inquiry which, in the dramatic structure of the dialogue, supersedes the complacent (and vacuous) speechmaking of the amatheis. The philosopher's inquiry, by virtue of its capacity to puncture uncritical opinions about Eros, is the means of divine—human attunement appropriate to the confusion of the society in which it is undertaken. Otherwise said, it is the means of divine—human 'relation' and 'converse' that is uniquely consistent with the contingency of human existence, that, in particular, is consistent with the radical contingency of the philosopher's perilous resistance to the disorder of society. After Socrates, accordingly, Alcibiades is presented in order to show the effects (and to demonstrate the uncertainty) of the 'art' by which the philosopher seeks to become the new source of order in society. Alcibiades relates that he had taken Socrates' interest in him as that of any 'lover' (217a), but the roles are unexpectedly reversed and the paradox arises in which the comely Alcibiades begins to pursue the notoriously ugly Socrates (219b-e). In Alcibiades' words, 'the moment I hear him speak I am smitten with a kind of sacred rage, worse than any Corybant, and my heart jumps into my mouth and the tears start into my eyes—oh, and not only me, but lots of other men' (215d-e). 'This latter-day Marsyas', he says, 'has often left me in such a state of mind that I've felt I simply couldn't go on living the way the I did' (215e-2l6a). The spiritual impact of Socrates' inquiry on Alcibiades both summarizes and completes the transformation Plato has worked in the meaning of eros: The sexual passion by which both the 'mortals' and the 'gods' participate in the tension of Eros pervading the cosmos passes over into the philosophic eros which characterizes existence in 'the spiritual realm'.14 It is entirely appropriate, thus, that Alcibiades' authoritative15 praise of Eros should take the form of an encomium on Socrates (2l4d-e). Socrates—the 'spiritual man' par excellence—is not only personally aware of the erotic tension aroused by the divine kalon, but is the place where it breaks forth into society. The speaker of this encomium, however, poses us something of a problem. Precisely because he is the philosopher's most favoured pupil, 14. See Rosen, Plato's Symposium, p. 230. 15. Cf. 217e: 'So far I've said nothing I need blush to repeat in any company, but you'd never have heard what I'm going to tell you now if there wasn't something in the proverb, "Drunkards and children tell the truth"—drunkards anyway.'

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Alcibiades demonstrates most dramatically the contingency of the philosopher's 'art'. Not only is he the man who would fail, and subsequently betray, his city,16 he also serves in the dialogue as the focal point of that hostility to the philosopher's endeavour that we invariably find in Plato's dialogues. He recalls that many of Socrates' fellow soldiers (during their military service together) were insulted by his imperviousness to hardship (220b). And he (only half playfully) refers to those gathered at the banquet as a 'jury' called together 'to try the man Socrates on the charge of arrogance' (219c). So tormenting is the 'sacred rage' Socrates has aroused in him that, says Alcibiades, 'there are times when I'd honestly be glad to hear that he was dead' (216c). We find once again the aura of violence and murder with which the Platonic Socrates is always surrounded.17 The rather curious result of our brief survey of the In-Between, thus, is that we don't really have a result at all. We have sought to regain 'the essence of the problem'—the original question of divine—human attunement—only to find 'the problem' regained more intractable than in its original provenance. We have sought, in particular, the means of healing the discord of society, only to find the philosopher's beloved pupil thirsting for the teacher's blood! In order to better understand this impasse, we turn to a discussion of (what Voegelin calls) 'the process of differentiation'. 3. The Process of Differentiation 'God and man, world and society form a primordial community of being',18 and, according to Voegelin, every symbolization of human existence must take account, consciously or by default, of all four sectors of reality. Within the cosmological symbolization of archaic societies the whole of reality is represented as a single 'compact' block, with the divine cosmos the dominant partner, and yet with a mutuality of substance allowing each sector to interpenetrate each other. 'Differentiation' may then briefly be described as the process in which the block begins to split apart and the different components come to be more or less clearly dis16. Cf. John A. Fine, The Ancient Greeks: A Critical History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 488-94. 17. The locus classicus is Gorgias (for example, 486a-b), where Socrates is, in effect, threatened with arrest and death if he continues 'pushing further into philosophy'. 18. Eric Voegelin, Order and History. I. Israel and Revelation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956), p. 1.

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tinguished.19 This amounts to a superior articulation of the structures of reality from a perspective of specifically cognitive participation in the whole of reality. Indeed, Voegelin maintains, the central event in this process is the 'differentiation of consciousness', which denotes the series of developments by which human beings become aware of consciousness as the means of their specifically human participation in reality. The differentiation of consciousness, moreover, is inseparable from a new truth about god and about humanity's relationship with God; namely, the discovery of 'divinity in its radically nonhuman transcendence'. In the process of differentiation, Voegelin continues, consciousness is discovered 'as a new center in man at which he experiences himself as open to transcendent reality'.20 This process is easily discernible in Symposium. Even in the early speeches we noted a sharpening of insight into the nature of the basic problem of divine-human attunement. The decisive step, however, is taken in Socrates' 'speech', when the archaic myths about the venerable god are taken over and transformed into Diotima's mythical account of the birth of Eros from Resource and Poverty. In the process, the character of divine-human attunement as given in the relatively compact terms of the early speeches—the koinonia and philia of men and gods in civic cults and festivals—receives more highly differentiated expression in terms of 'the spiritual realm' characterized by the philosopher's 'love of wisdom'. The Homeric anthropology of the early speeches (thnetoi—theon) is split into a triadic structure (amatheis—philosophosl}LtQs—kalon)\ and the 'logos of the tension'21 is very fully articulated in terms of the 'ladder' that leads to the 'wondrous vision' of'the beautiful itself. The 'wondrous vision', in turn, and the context within which it is presented to us, is indicative of the philosopher's experience of himself 'as open to transcendent reality'. The Vision', in the first place, is attended by a distinctive context of ecstatic experience.22 This is consistent, not only

19. For an account of'differentiation', see Eugene Webb, Eric Voegelin: Philosopher of History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981), pp. 120-22; and Sinnett, 'Voegelin and the Problem of Theological Paradox', pp. 50-55. 20. Voegelin, New Science of Politics, p. 67. 21. See Eric Voegelin, 'Anxiety and Reason', in Eric Voegelin, What Is History? And Other Late Unpublished Writings (ed. Thomas A. Hollweck and Paul Caringella; Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 28; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), pp. 52-110(69-70). 22. See Walter Burkert, Greek Religion (trans. John Raffan; Cambridge, MA:

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with Diotima's exalted description of'the beautiful itself (211a-b), but also with crucial elements of the plot of Symposium. A good illustration of this is the trance into which Socrates falls as he is accompanying Aristedemus to the banquet (175a-c), as well as the reminiscence of similar occurrences by Alcibiades (220c-d): He [Socrates] started wrestling with some problem or other about sunrise one morning, and stood there lost in thought, and when the answer wouldn't come he still stood there thinking and refused to give it up... And at last, toward nightfall, some of the lonians brought out their bedding after supper...partly because it was cooler in the open air, and partly to see whether he was going to stay there all night. Well, there he stood till morning, and then at sunrise he said his prayers to the sun and went away.

A similar interplay between light and darkness characterizes the dramatic structure of Symposium as a whole. At its beginning, in the growing darkness of evening, Socrates descends from his vision into the spiritual darkness of the Sophist's home; and then, at the dialogue's conclusion, accompanied by the man who will pass on an account of the 'speeches', he walks up again into the growing light of the dawn. None of this symbolism, of course, necessarily indicates, in and of itself, specifically transcendent experience. The philosopher's ekstatis, for instance, though it does lend a 'religious' coloration to the discussion,23 had long been a commonplace in Greek religion, as witness the inspiration of the poets and oracles, as well as the public frenzy that routinely—indeed, predictably—attended the celebration of various civic cults.24 What, however, does suggest the transcendent character of the philosopher's vision are the layers of irony and paradox that permeate the dialogue, and ultimately the incommunicability of Diotima's and Socrates'

Harvard University Press, 1985): 'The ascent of the soul to cognition is not a cool acknowledgement of fact. Plato portrays this path as a passionate undertaking which seizes the whole man, an act of love, eros rising up to madness, mania. It is the beautiful which points the way. It touches the soul and excites it to a loving approach... until finally a man "moving towards the goal of the erotic suddenly glimpses a 'beautiful' which is of wondrous essence...", the pure being, imperishable and divine, the "idea of the beautiful" ' (p. 323). As in Phaedrus, so here in Symposium, 'ascent and view are described in the language of the mysteries: this is an initiation which secures a blessed state, myesis, epopteia, orgiazeiri (p. 324). 23. Cf. Michael L. Morgan, Platonic Piety: Philosophy and Ritual in Fourth Century Athens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 80-81. 24. Cf. Burkert, Greek Religion, pp. 109-10.

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vision.25 A good example is found in Socrates' dramatic entry into the banquet hall. Having been informed of the trance into which his guest had fallen, Agathon commands Socrates to sit next to him in order that he might 'have some benefit from the piece of wisdom which occurred to [him] there in the porch' (175c; Lamb translation). Socrates' response is twofold: (1) T only wish that wisdom were the kind of thing one could share by sitting close to someone—if it flowed, for instance, from the one that was full to the one that was empty, like the water in two cups finding its level through a piece of wool' (175d). And, (2) cIf that were how it worked, I'm sure I'd congratulate myself on sitting next to you, for you'd soon have me brimming over with the most exquisite kind of wisdom. My own understanding is shadowy, as equivocal as a dream' (175d-e). The first statement, foreshadowing Diotima's myth of the birth of Eros from 'Resource' and 'Poverty', points forward to the inquiry by which Diotima will lead Socrates to his 'wondrous vision'. Wisdom, meanwhile, is not a piece of information to be possessed by a mere mortal and casually transmitted through close proximity. The most that is possible—given the philosopher's differentiated awareness of the transcendence of divine reality—is the mutual quest for wisdom that moves In-Between the empty and the full. By his second statement, however, Socrates ironically submits himself to the Sophist, the man who claims wisdom as his own possession. This ironic stance is not simply false modesty; it is not simply 'hide and seek', as the Sophist Thrasymachus calls it in Republic (337a). By the standard of wisdom defended by Agathon—wisdom that is a piece of directly communicable information—Socrates really is ignorant. In accordance with his denial of that standard in his first statement, the understanding of Socrates really is 'shadowy' and 'as equivocal as a dream'.26 In seeming to endorse the Sophist's standard, however, Socrates seeks to promote the inquiry through which he will transmit his real challenge. This deceit serves not only to draw the interlocutor into conversation, but also to heighten the impact of the challenge when it comes: Being, as we shall see, the very personification of eros, Socrates does in fact 'understand nothing but love matters' (177e), but in his own 'speech', following the glowing declamation of Agathon, he finds what a fool he was to have agreed to take his turn in praising Eros. He is now forced to say that, not only is he far 25. Cf. Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy, IV, p. 392; Rosen, Plato's Symposium, pp. 268-72; and Burkert, Greek Religion, p. 325. 26. On this point, see Gadamer, Plato's Dialectical Ethics, p. 4.

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from being an expert in 'love-matters', he is wholly ignorant of the way in which eulogies ought to be conducted (198c-d). The irony trembles at the breaking point with Socrates' explanation that he was innocent enough to think 'one ought to speak the truth' (198d); and he goes on to speak 'the mere truth' in his own way, as we have seen, by engaging Agathon in inquiry. The implications of Socrates' two statements, taken together, are aptly described in the words of Paul Friedlander: 'The single power by which Socrates opposes the flowery speeches and half-truths of the others... undergoes an ironic division, as it were, into Socrates, representing the principle of truth but otherwise ignorant, and the priestess leading to the highest secrets.'27 This 'ironic division' is precisely the manifestation of Socrates' position 'in-between' the amatheis and 'the beautiful itself; like the contradictory imagery in Alcibiades' description of Socrates, it reveals the paradoxical character of his existence as both the ignorant lover of wisdom (through his conversation with Diotima) and the beloved source of wisdom (through his conversation with Agathon and, as reported by Alcibiades, with the amatheis in general).28 As Friedlander continues, the 'ironic tensions between him and the others are superseded, at the crucial point, by an ironic tension between the seeker for truth and a power that, though shining through him, is also above him'. In this way, 'the ladder of ironic tensions raises the reader to the divination of a higher being...'29 The 'ladder of ironic tensions', of course, also refers to the 'ladder' of Diotima's inquiry, along the rungs of which the lover of wisdom is drawn to his transcendent vision. The 'in-between' structure of divine—human relationship is also clear in the paradoxical imagery of Alcibiades' description of Socrates: He is like 'one of those little sileni that you see on the statuaries' stalls...and when you open them down the middle there are little figures of the gods inside' (215b). 'I don't know whether anybody else has opened him up when he was in a serious mood, and seen the little images inside, but I saw them once, and they looked so god-like, so golden, so beautiful and so utterly amazing that there was nothing for it but to do exactly what he told me' 27. Friedlander, Plato, I, p. 150. 28. Cf. Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis (ed. and trans. Gerhart Niemeyer; Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1978), p. 129: 'The philosopher, too, is amathes, but his amathia is the one pole of the tension in which he experiences the other pole, sophia (wisdom)'. 29. Friedlander, Plato, I, p. 150.

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(2l6e-217a). This is reminiscent of Plato's discussion of 'dialectic' in Republic. Socrates is like those 'provocative things which impinge on the senses together with their opposites' (Republic 524d), those sensations in which 'some contradiction is always seen coincidentally with it, so that it no more appears to be one than the opposite' (524e); and his effect, thus, is to 'compel the soul to question [aporein] and to inquire [zeteiri\, by arousing thought in itself.. .(524e)'. And the connection between existence and inquiry is explicitly made in Alcibiades' description of Socrates' 'arguments': They seem like the same old thing and even 'laughable'; like Socrates' ridiculous appearance, they are clothed on the outside with absurd words and phrases—all, of course, what one expects of 'an insufferable satyr' (22le).30 'But if you open up his arguments, and get a fresh view by getting inside them...you'll find that they're the only arguments in the world that have any sense at all...[and that] nobody else's are so god-like, so rich in images of virtue' (222a).31 30. Cf. Paul Zanker, The Mask of Socrates: The Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity (trans. Alan Shapiro; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 34: 'The historical Socrates, from all that the ancient sources report, must have been strikingly ugly. But in this he was surely not alone among the Athenians. That his unfortunate appearance became such a focus of attention must derive from the offensive nature of his intellectual activities... The decision to adapt the comparison with Silenus [normally indicative of a base nature] for a portrait statue intended to celebrate the subject ...presupposes a positive interpretation of the comparison, such as we do in fact find, in particular, in the speech of Alcibiades in Plato's Symposium. Perhaps Socrates himself had already laid the groundwork for this new interpretation by accepting the comparison with his characteristic irony.' 31. Cf. S0ren Kierkegaard, 'The Work of Love in Praising Love', in Howard V. Fong and Edna H. Hong (ed. and trans.), Works of Love (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 359-74 (371-72): 'See, that simple wise man of ancient times, who of all people knew how to speak most beautifully of the love that loves beauty and the beautiful, he was, yes, he was the ugliest man in the whole nation, the ugliest man among the most beautiful nation. One would think that this would have deterred him from speaking about the love that loves the beautiful... But no, he was eccentric and strange enough to find just this appealing and inspiring, that is, eccentric and strange enough to place himself in the most disadvantageous position possible. When he spoke about the beautiful, when in the longing of his thought and discourse for the beautiful he transported the listener, who now inadvertently happened to look at him, he became even twice as ugly as he already was, he who already was the ugliest man in the nation. The more he spoke, the more beautifully he spoke about the beautiful, the more ugly he himself became by contrast. He surely must have been eccentric, this wise man; he must have been not only the ugliest man but also the most eccentric in the whole nation—or what could have motivated him?'

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The outward repulsion remains, however, and is lifted to a new level of intensity, as we have seen, in the hostility that Alcibiades displays representatively for his society. We thus return to the impasse we discovered above, but now with the realization that it is inseparable from differentiated awareness of that 'power' which, though shining through the philosopher, 'is also above him'. The transcendence of the divine source of order is demonstrated by, and in turn helps to explain, the ineluctable uncertainty of the philosopher's 'skill'. This is particularly well indicated by the transformation Plato has worked in the meaning of techne. We have sought the 'expert practitioner', the technikos, who can restore the order of society through attunement to divine reality, but, with the differentiation of consciousness, it becomes clear that this restoration cannot be pursued through traditional means. With the paradigm of eros in the cosmos now supplied by the 'love of wisdom' in the philosopher's soul, the traditional technai through which one could seek attunement to the predictable rhythms of the cosmic Eros are seen to be inadequate to 'the problem'. The ephemeral 'threshold' between the realms of the sacred and the profane that had seemed to permit the possibility of 'eternal return'—what may be described as the 'temporal compactness' of the ancient cult—has now expanded to admit the relatively open horizon of the philosopher's inquiry.32 The 'art' (sophos) of the 'spiritual man', accordingly, although it is of one substance with 'the techne of priests', is also clearly distinguished from those 'common techniques' that are merely 'mechanical'.33 Unrest can reliably be brought to birth in the soul of the interlocutor, as we discovered at the beginning of the dialogue—even if it is someone else repeating the philosopher's dialectic, 'even if he puts it ever so badly', we are still 'absolutely staggered and bewitched'—but there is no guarantee, no 'technique' with which to ensure, that the response will be forthcoming by which the unrest may be followed to its transcendent source.34 And what clearer demonstration can 32. For the symbolism of the 'threshold', see Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (trans. Willard R. Trask; New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1959), pp. 25-27, 181-82. For a discussion of'temporal compactness', see M.W. Sinnett, The Primacy of Relation: Prelude and Variations on a Theme by D.M. Baillie' (Honours dissertation, St Andrews University, Scotland, 1988), pp. 51-62. 33. Cf. David Roochnik, Of Art and Wisdom: Plato's Understanding of Techne (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), pp. 239-40. 34. Cf. Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture. II. In Search of the Divine Centre (trans. Gilbert Highet; New York: Oxford University Press, 1943), p. 197.

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there be of this contingency to the philosopher's 'art'—what clearer demonstration that the philosopher's 'art' is not a 'technique'—than the figure of Alcibiades with whom it clearly fails? Our darkest suspicions, thus, are confirmed: the transcendence of 'the beautiful itself, along with the recalcitrance of the amatheis, imply the permanence of the In-Between structure of existence. The philosopher's differentiated understanding of the original question demonstrates, as we feared, that it admits of no conclusive answer. Inquiry must now be acknowledged a permanent (and rather dangerous) way of life. While this might suggest for some the senselessness of existence, it is precisely what Plato means by the life of reason; for inquiry, even though it achieves no final result, does reveal a structure in reality—as indicated by Diotima's 'ladder', for instance—that may be rationally explored and explicated, and which permits the inquiry to proceed with a firm sense of direction and momentum.35 This insight of Plato in the fourth century BCE has important implications for Voegelin's understanding of reason in the twentieth century CE. Before turning to this matter, however, we have one more lesson to learn from Symposium, for the rational character of the philosopher's inquiry depends upon the fact that it is an event in the same reality of which he is inquiring. The philosopher's perpetual movement in the In-Between, far from implying his alienation from reality, is the paradigmatic event of reality, that which represents his own distinctive mode of participation in reality, as well as that in which the comprehending reality comes to conscious awareness of itself. The In-Between structure of existence, thus, implies, and is implied by, (what Voegelin calls) 'the paradox of consciousness'. 4. The Paradox of Consciousness By the very nature of his existence, Voegelin claims, man is a participant in reality. This 'participation', moreover, 'is not a partial involvement of man; he is engaged with the whole of his existence, for participation is existence itself. The human situation, therefore, displays a 'paradoxical

35. On the directionality of rational inquiry into an object's 'opened-up being', see Gadamer, Plato's Dialectical Ethics, p. 59; and especially, by the same author, Truth and Method (trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall; London: Sheed and Ward, 2nd rev. edn, 1989 [I960]), pp. 362-65.

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character', for the would-be 'knower' of reality 'is not a self-contained spectator. He is an actor, playing a part in the drama of being without knowing what it is.' The partiality of his knowledge, even about himself, is inescapable, 'for the part of being that calls itself man could be known fully only if the community of being [formed by God and man, world and society] and its drama in time were known as a whole'.36 Through the process of differentiation, of course, man becomes reflectively aware of his consciousness as his distinctively human means of participation in the community of being. This, however, in no way eliminates the partiality of his perspective. To the contrary, that the 'knower' of reality is a part of the reality to be known is a contributing factor to the permanence of the In-Between. The 'paradoxical character' of existence, thus, far from being abated by the process of differentiation, implies 'the paradox of consciousness'. It implies, in other words, that consciousness is both 'the site and the sensorium of participation';37 that is, that it is both the location in reality where the event of awareness occurs, as well as the means by which a particular human being has the awareness. Symposium provides an excellent illustration of this concept. The crucial point is to realize that the philosopher, even with his differentiated awareness of transcendent reality, is still a participant in the cosmos. This is clear in the studied ambiguity in Plato's symbolization of eros, an ambiguity that we must take care to preserve intact. If the symbol is not allowed its full range of meaning—if its various meanings are not allowed to condition one another—if, instead, distinct references to eros are regarded as identifying distinct entities—then we will lose all hope of sharing in Plato's sense of the wholeness of cosmic reality, and of the 'love of wisdom' as the philosopher's mode of participation in the erotic tension that pervades the Whole. The symbolism moves from the archaic myth of the Venerable god' in the speech of Phaedrus, to the partial differentiation of the 'two loves' of Pausanias and Eryximachus, to Diotima's myth of the birth of Eros from Resource and Poverty, to the erotic tension of the InBetween aroused in the consciousness of Socrates through Diotima's dialectic, to the 'sacred rage' aroused in the amatheis through Socrates' dialectic, to the intellectual excitement transmitted down the years to all

36. Voegelin, Order and History, I, pp. 1-2. 37. Eric Voegelin, 'Immortality: Experience and Symbol', in Eric Voegelin, Published Essays, 1966-1985 (ed. Ellis Sandoz; Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 12; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), pp. 52-94 (90).

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those who have the 'speeches' recounted to them, and finally to the effect intended by Plato through the written text of the dialogue itself. All of this is eros. All of this is an unfolding of the one tension of eros that makes of reality, for Plato, a cosmos. This 'unfolding' of eros is of course observable only from the relatively differentiated perspective of the philosopher's consciousness. Thus, in Diotima's account, the paradigmatic event of eros—the event which serves as a model for the birth of the cosmic Eros—is 'the love of wisdom' that moves, in the philosopher's consciousness, 'in-between' the 'poverty' of ignorance and the 'resource' of wisdom. In the narrator's time, the philosopher's eros comes first and is extrapolated onto a cosmic scale as a means of interpreting—that is, reinterpreting—the tension in reality.38 The new myth about Eros, thus, is the 'philosopher's myth', an account of cosmic order told from the perspective of the philosopher's participation in it?** Here, the consciousness of the 'spiritual man' is the 'sensorium of the

38. The same procedure is employed by several modern philosophers whose work fully exemplifies the paradox of consciousness: Whitehead's model for 'prehension' (the generalized process that drives his 'philosophy of organism') is to be found in the human experience of'the causal efficacy of symbolism' and of'symbolic transference'. Cf. Alfred North Whitehead, Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (New York: Fordham University Press, 1985), esp. pp. 29, 36, 62-63. Similarly, for Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton; Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1977), pp. 211-12, mysticism is the distinctive means of human participation in the cosmic tension of the Vital impulse'. But the Vital impulse' is distinguished from its opposite, 'the mechanistic philosophy', by their corresponding forms of time. The original model for the Vital impulse' thus arises in Bergson's analysis of the freedom of consciousness in duree. Cf. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (trans. Arthur Mitchell; New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1926), pp. ix-xv, 267-71, 329-45. Finally, in the thought of Michael Polanyi, we find the experience of 'tacit knowing', or 'tacit integration', serving as the model for 'a generalized field' which is both a hierarchy of meaning and of being: To speak mathematically, the Vectorial quality of understanding', the 'gradient arising [in the mind] from the proximity of a possible achievement', is the model for the 'gradient of meaning' by which reality is constituted a hierarchy defined by increasing 'potential for novel disclosure'. Michael Polanyi, 'The Logic of Tacit Inference', in Polanyi, Knowing and Being: Essays by Michael Polanyi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 138-58 (145); and Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), pp. 177-79. For a succinct account of the tension in the mind as the paradigm for the tension in reality, see Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1983), pp. 32-33. 39. Cf. Voegelin, Order and History, III, pp. 170-71; IV, pp. 9-11, 183-87, and

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tension', the bodily located awareness of a human being within which the cosmic tension of Eros is visible and intelligible.40 At the same time, however, it must be emphasized that the philosopher's myth is an account of the cosmic order of which the philosopher's consciousness is only a part. Though paradigmatic for the order of the Whole, the 'love of wisdom' is experienced and symbolized as a special case—a concrete instance among many others—of the cosmic tension. In the 'time of the tale', therefore, the cosmic Eros comes first and then engenders the philosopher's eros as part of its unfolding process. The generative power of the tension in reality is particularly clear in the fact that the impetus of the philosopher's inquiry does not arise from within himself, but from his being drawn by the divine reality of which he is in search. In Republic, the philosopher is able to attempt the cure of the prisoners in the Cave only because he has himself been 'dragged' (helkein) 'by force up the ascent which is rough and steep and...out into the light of the sun' (Republic 515e). 'The accent', as Voegelin indicates, 'lies on the violence suffered by the man in the Cave, on his passivity and even resistance to being turned around...so that the ascent to light is less an action of seeking than a fate inflicted'.41 In Symposium, similarly, the initiative for Socrates' inquiry arises through the examination to which he is subjected by the priestess 'honored by the god' (diotima).^2 In 'the tension of the Inespecially 249; Freidlander, Plato, I, pp. 178-80; and Michel Depland, The Education of Desire: Plato and the Philosophy of Religion (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), p. 231. 40. Cf. Voegelin, Anamnesis, p. 124: 'The event philosophy is one among many that constitute history, but it constitutes history in a special way insofar as in the philosophical experience eternal being not only realizes itself in time, but in the same movement also makes the logos of realization transparent. It causes the field of history to become visible as a field of tensions in being.' 41. Eric Voegelin, 'The Gospel and Culture', in Voegelin, Published Essays, 1966— 1985, pp. 172-212 (184). Similarly, cf. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 366: '...logically considered, the negativity of experience implies a question. In fact we have experiences when we are shocked by things that do not accord with our expectations. Thus questioning too is more a passion than an action. A question presses itself on us; we can no longer avoid it and persist in our accustomed opinion.' 42. Cf. Rosen, Plato's Symposium, p. 207: 'The madness of psyche, already a gift from the gods, is the link between religion and philosophy. The apparent contradiction between Socratic knowledge and ignorance can be restated in these terms. Philosophy, as the pursuit or love of knowledge, is ignorance. But one cannot pursue that of which he is altogether ignorant. Prophecy is that aspect of the divine madness which allows us to surmise what we seek to know.'

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Between', Voegelin asserts, the philosopher 'feels himself moved (kinein) by some unknown force to ask the questions; he feels himself drawn (helkein) into the search'. In the philosopher's experience, in fact, the 'unrest is distinctly joyful', for the disturbance in the soul, in coming to explicit expression, is experienced 'as a movement in the psyche toward the [divine reality] that is present in the psyche as its mover'. 43 The important point, however, is that the new insights, though an advance beyond the level of the archaic myth, are nevertheless experienced as occurring within the same reality covered by the older symbolism. The new truth, thus, is not simply about Eros, but is an event in the process of Eros,44 indeed 'a late event'45 in the same process of Eros more compactly experienced by those in the philosopher's background. In this respect, the philosopher's consciousness is not simply the 'sensorium of the tension', the means of his personal awareness; it is also, simultaneously, the 'site of the tension', the location in reality where the cosmic tension of Eros comes to conscious awareness of itself, the new location, in particular, where the power of Eros erupts into society in the guise of the philosopher's 'art'. The paradox of consciousness—the nature of consciousness as simultaneously 'site and sensorium'—is of fundamental importance for Voegelin in ensuring the rational character of the philosopher's inquiry. In main43. Eric Voegelin, 'Reason: The Classic Experience', in Voegelin, Published Essays, 1966-1985, pp. 265-91 (269, 272, 277). Voegelin takes the term kinein from Aristotle. Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 12.7, 1072a30-32: 'And thought [nous] is moved [kinetai\ by the object of thought [hupo tou noetou] and one side of the list of opposites is in itself the object of thought [noete]\ In 1072a26-7, the 'unmoved mover' (the subject of the entire section) is described as 'the object of desire and the object of thought' (to orekton kai to noeton) which are one and the same. This is then further characterized as the 'substance which is eternal and unmovable and separate from sensible things' (1073a4-5), and also as 'God' (ho theos) (1072b25). 44. See the previous note. Cf. also Stephen R.L. Clark, Aristotle's Man: Speculations upon Aristotelian Anthropology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 65: '[The view that] the world's being is quite other than living...is not obviously a triumph for reason, but rather a superstition. Consider: suppose a lump of clay sprouted locamotive [sic} organs and began to walk and talk. Suppose that this lump was unduly impressed by a modern philosopher and announced in ringing tones that the world was an unthinking mechanism, and clay a sort of sludge... If we were not completely mesmerized by the lump's mentor, it might occur to us that the lump was talking nonsense, merely because it was talking. If the universe can speak it is obviously not dumb. Yet when a lump of carbon proceeds to bite its mental throat by denying intelligence to things it is acclaimed for the profundity of its pessimism and elected to the Royal Society.' 45. Voegelin, Anamnesis, p. 33.

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taining the priority of cosmos over consciousness, in the first place, the paradox promotes (what Voegelin calls) 'the balance of consciousness'; that is, it helps prevent the eclipse of the Beginning by the Beyond.46 The philosopher, no matter how dramatic the advance of his insight, is not allowed to forget that his inquiry proceeds in the same cosmos as that inhabited by his predecessors. This, in turn, ensures that the inquiry is not a mere idiosyncratic fantasy, but unfolds in contact with the reality of which it is part, and in continuity with the archaic myth which it nevertheless supersedes. The philosopher's myth, in acknowledging the 'equivalence' of the more compact symbolisms,47 restores and preserves the original question (of divine-human attunement), and thus ensures that the philosopher's differentiated experience and symbolization may be understood as an advance. Even this, however, is no more than a relative advance, for the paradox of consciousness, in preserving the paradoxical identity of knower and known, demonstrates the permanence of the InBetween structure of existence. The inconclusiveness of the philosopher's inquiry, thus, far from demonstrating its irrationality, establishes it as the epitome of reason. This is all the more so in that, as with other differentiating advances, conscious awareness of the paradox of consciousness renders the original question even more intractable. In helping preserve 'the essence of the problem', the paradox of consciousness also very forcibly poses the new question as to why 'the problem' should ever be 'lost'. If the philosopher's inquiry is an event—indeed, the paradigmatic event—in 'the process of the Whole', why is there such widespread resistance to it? In turning now to consider this mystery—(what Voegelin calls) 'the process of the Question'—it will be possible to offer some suggestions as to the applicability and limitations of Voegelin's work. 5. The Process of the Question The relentless Socratic inquiry is an example—perhaps, indeed, the canonical example—of what Voegelin calls 'the Question capitalized'. This, he explains, 'is not a question concerning the nature of this or that object in 46. Cf. Voegelin, Order and History, IV, pp. 7-30, 227-38; and Eric Voegelin, 'Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme: A Meditation', in Voegelin, Published Essays, 1966-1985, pp. 315-75. 47. Cf. Eric Voegelin, 'Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History', in Voegelin, Published Essays, 1966-1985, pp. 115-33.

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the external world, but a structure inherent to the experience of reality'. 'The Question', indeed, cis not just any question but the quest concerning the mysterious ground of all Being'; it symbolizes the human quest for attunement to the divine ground of existence now experienced in its 'radically nonhuman transcendence'. The whole point of'the Question' is that there is no answer to it 'other than the Mystery [of reality] as it becomes luminous in the acts of questioning'.48 Thus, as we have seen in Symposium, the philosopher's open-ended inquiry, far from abrogating the mystery of divine-human attunement, is the means of bringing 'the problem' to ever more explicit attention. In articulating his differentiating experience of 'the realm of the spiritual' as the In-Between of inquiry, the philosopher poses the Question—seeks to gain a hearing for the Question—which he acknowledges he can never answer. The necessity to gain a hearing for the Question, however, implies, as we have seen throughout, that the philosopher's inquiry is also an act of resistance to the disorder of surrounding society. Against all those who ignore the Question, or who presume to have answered it, the philosopher insists upon both its reality and unanswerability. But why should such resistance be necessary? This question, itself part of the Question, expresses what Voegelin regards as the deepest strata of mystery in the human experience of reality, what he calls 'the process of the Question'.49 This mystery he explicates through a series of related questions: (1) Why should there be epochs of advancing insight at all? why is the structure of reality not known in differentiated form at all times? (2) Why must the insights be discovered by such rare individuals as prophets, philosophers, and saints? why is not every man the recipient of the insights? (3) Why when the insights are gained, are they not generally accepted? why must the epochal truth go through the historical torment of imperfect articulation, evasion, skepticism, disbelief, rejection, deformation, and of renaissances, renovations, rediscoveries, rearticulations, and further differ50 entiations?

The Question, clearly, admits of no final answer, for the brighter the light that shines in the philosopher's soul, the deeper the mystery that others do not see it. And the mystery is all the greater for our differentiated aware48. Voegelin, Order and History, IV, pp. 317, 320, 330; New Science of Politics, p. 67. 49. Voegelin, Order and History, IV, p. 326. 50. Voegelin, Order and History, IV, p. 316.

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ness of the paradox of consciousness: Only because the philosopher's inquiry is an event, indeed the paradigmatic event, in the tension that pervades the cosmos—only because the philosophic eros is paradigmatic for the cosmic Eros—is it particularly mysterious that other members of the same cosmos do not respond to it. Voegelin's insistence upon such ultimate questions, and the methods and illustrations he provides for their restoration and exploration, constitute an important aspect, and a quite general aspect, of his potential applicability to a wide range of problems. Along with such thinkers as Heidegger, Gadamer and Polanyi, Voegelin has helped re-establish the endeavour of inquiry as, in and of itself, the essence of rational life.51 This is particularly important in respect of those questions which, since there are no adequate answers to them, disclose dimensions of reality to which we have no other means of access; and also in respect of those processes of questioning that even the most disparate intellectual disciplines share in common.52 Of unique significance is the potential of Voegelin's work for the analysis of resistance to questions and of the 'second realities' (von Doderer) which serve to bring the disturbance of fundamental questions under control. With regard to political problems, for example, Voegelin is immediately applicable to the phenomena discussed in Thomas Sowell's recent book, The Vision of the Anointed^ I have also found Voegelin very helpful in exploring the 'Socratic dialogue' that unfolds between the 'upbuilding discourses' of S0ren Kierkegaard and the 'pseudonymous' works (of his socalled 'first authorship') with which they are chronologically associated.54 51. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy: Selected 'Problems' of'Logic' (trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 362-79; and Michael Polanyi, The Unaccountable Element in Science', in Knowing and Being, pp. 105-20 (and see above, n. 38). 52. Cf. M.W. Sinnett, 'Another Mathematician's Apology: Theological Reflections on the Role of Proof in Mathematics', Scottish journal of^Theology 46 (1993), pp. 34570. 53. Cf. Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy (New York: Basic Books, 1995). 54. Cf. M.W. Sinnett, Restoring the Conversation: Socratic Dialectic in the Authorship ofS0ren Kierkegaard (in preparation). In his discourses, Kierkegaard formulates the Question that is intended to explain, and to puncture, the Second Realities that constitute the pseudonymous personalities' various states of alienation. In this way, through his critique of his own pseudonyms, Kierkegaard hopes to gain, 'indirectly', a

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This, in turn, is merely illustrative of Voegelin's important applicability throughout 'dialectical theology'.55 The process of the Question, moreover, in conjunction with the paradox of consciousness, helps to predict the extent of Voegelin's applicability in a particular contextual setting. An important area where Voegelin is powerfully applicable is in the study of Neoplatonism. No doubt because of the influence of Symposium upon Plotinus and his disciples, nearly everything we discovered about Plato's dialogue is clearly observable among the Neoplatonists as well.56 Particularly important is the paradox of consciousness in helping us understand the philosopher's noetic ascent toward 'the One' as both his distinctively human mode of participation in the 'return' of cosmic reality to its divine source, as well as the paradigmatic event through which the cosmic tension of 'Procession and Return' comes to conscious awareness of itself. Given the tendency of modern scholarship to decompose this all-encompassing process into 'subjective' and 'objective' components57—as if the Areopagite, for instance, had been reading up his Descartes!—Voegelin's concept has an important corrective role to play in an increasingly significant area of study. Given the largely Neoplatonic provenance of much of Voegelin's standard terminology,58 fresh hearing for the Question of the Gospel that he finds so badly deformed in Danish Christendom. 55. Cf. Sinnett, 'Eric Voegelin and the Problem of Theological Paradox', pp. 13738. 56. Cf. Sinnett, 'Eric Voegelin and the Problem of Theological Paradox', pp. 10718. 57. In the context of the Corpus Areopagiticum, see I.P. Sheldon-Williams, 'The pseudo-Dionysios', in A.H. Armstrong (ed.), The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), pp. 457-72 (463). See also the sections labelled 'Subjective Theory' and 'Objective Theory' in Stephen Gersh, From lamblichus to Eriugena: An Investigation of the Prehistory and Evolution ofthePseudo-Dionysian Tradition (Leiden: EJ. Brill, 1978). See also Paul Rorem, The Uplifting Spirituality of Pseudo-Dionysius', in Bernard McGinn, John Meyendorff and Jean Leclercq (eds.), Christian Spirituality: Origins to the Twelfth Century (World Spirituality, 16; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), pp. 132-51 (134, 144), where the Areopagite's 'epistemology' is abstracted from the cosmic tension of Procession and Return. 58. The Greek terms metaxu, epekeina and paroust a (as opposed to pareinai), though well attested in the technical vocabulary of Neoplatonism, are of merely incidental significance in Plato's writings. See above, Section 2, where the 'spiritual realm' is variously described as 'in-between' (metaxu) and 'in the middle' (en meso). This is especially true with regard to the nominal form of these words—the In-Between, the

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moreover, such an application is likely to be mutually illuminating. Such close relationship reflects a common level of differentiation, a common horizon of mystery. The paradox of consciousness ensures that every aspect of the mystery surrounding the Question is intelligible and communicable in Neoplatonic terms. This horizon of mystery, however, is inadequate to the problematic of Christian experience. No Christian, after all, has reason for surprise at the fact of popular resistance to the Gospel. Assuming his willingness to acknowledge his own conscious, repeated, ongoing rejection of the truth, the 'historical torment' of the truth is what he expects to find all around him. Nor is he particularly anxious to present himself as 'the source of order in society', recognizing, as he should do, his own sinful complicity in the disorder of society. The philosopher, starting out from the relationship mediated by the cosmic Eros, is surprised that others do not follow him in his joyful explorations of 'the spiritual realm' which lies always InBetween. The Christian, on the other hand, inhabiting a world that is distinctly acosmia (if for no other reason than its containing him), is astonished to find that any relationship with God still exists to be explored.59 The one is surprised that others do not share his joy; the other is 'surprised by joy'. Significantly, the process of the Question, far from being suppressed through imposition of some theological dogma, is subjected to a further question. 'The essence of the problem' in its ultimate and most intractable formulation refers, not to the mystery of popular apathy and resistance to the light that shines in the philosopher's soul, but to the far deeper mystery of one's personal rejection of the light that shines in one's own soul. This is the reason, as I have argued elsewhere,60 for the failure of the accommodation between classical philosophy and Apostolic Christianity that Voegelin

Beyond, the presence—in which Voegelin routinely employs them. (For further similarities between Voegelin and Neoplatonism, see Sinnett, 'Eric Voegelin and the Problem of Theological Paradox', p. 136.) 59. In this respect, Voegelin's work presents the same problem as that of the 'process' philosophers. Cf. M.W. Sinnett, The Primacy of Relation in the Paul Tillich's Theology of Correlation: A Reply to the Critique of Charles Hartshorne', Religious Studies 27 (1991), pp. 541-57 (551-52). For Voegelin's view of process philosophy as 'the only meaningful systematic philosophy', see Voegelin, Anamnesis, pp. 2627. 60. Cf. Sinnett, 'Eric Voegelin and the Problem of Theological Paradox', pp. 12335.

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sought in his final years.61 This is well represented by the relation he seeks between (what he calls) the 'cosmologica300l fides, based upon Plato's Phaedrus and Timaeus, and the Christian symbol of fides quaerens intellectum, based upon Anselm's 'meditation' in Proslogion.62 If, however, as Voegelin otherwise instructs us to do, we restore this symbolism to its original provenance—Anselm, in the preface of Monologion, refers us to Augustine's De Trinitate—we find Voegelin's sought-after accommodation already fully explored, and quite resolutely rejected. In the course of his 'second conversion', clearly displayed in the sequence of texts, De Vera Religione, Confessiones and De Trinitate, Augustine becomes a problem to himself in a manner entirely unknown to Plato and to 'the Platonists' (by which Augustine means the Neoplatonists). So radical is this crisis that, though created to be 'the glory of nature', Augustine recognizes himself to have fallen, through his own conscious revolt against God, lower than all of nature. ^^ fides that is the 'new creation' of God's grace, therefore, is not an occurrence in the order of the original creation; it arises only in turning the mind completely away from the world. Accordingly, the love that powers the quest of Augustine's fides for understanding in De Trinitate—the love through which the imago Trinitatis is progressively renewed in Augustine's mind—is paradigmatic, not for a tension pervading a cosmos, but for the peregrinatio that constitutes God's history of redemption. The paradox of (noetic) consciousness has been superseded by what we may call 'the paradox of historical consciousness'.63 The difficulty, again, is not some prepositional doctrine that shuts off Voegelin's questioning, but a question that transcends the horizon of his (essentially Neoplatonic) inquiry. It is a question that he not only cannot answer, but that he cannot even ask. Is it also a question he was determined not to ask? Certainly, Voegelin had long been aware of Augustine's understanding of grace as the agency of God's 'new creation';64 as well as 61. For a very clear account of this attempted accommodation, see Michael P. Morrissey, Consciousness and Transcendence: The Theology of Eric Voegelin (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1994), pp. 136-70. 62. Cf. Eric Voegelin, 'The Beginning and the Beyond: A Meditation on Truth', in Voegelin, What Is History?, pp. 173-232(188-232). 63. Cf. M.W. Sinnett, 'Resume to Theology from In-Between: Eric Voegelin and the Promise of Dialectical Theology (unpublished manuscript), pp. 8-9. 64. In a relatively early essay, 'What Is Nature?' (1965), included in Anamnesis (pp. 71-88), Voegelin notes the joyful tone of Augustine's discussion of reformatio in De Trinitate 15.14, and relates it to what he regards as the clearer discussion by Thomas Aquinas in Summa Theologiae la-IIae, q. 110, a. 2: 'The habitus of grace is

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of the inadequacy of the paradox of (noetic) consciousness to 'the problem of grace'.65 Is this why Anselm's reference to the source of his meditative procedure is so studiously—and so uncharacteristically—ignored? Such questions confirm, by way of supplement to the opening sentence of this paper, that it is the burden and challenge of every great mind that he can only be criticized in his own terms. Even if our questions come to be directed toward an incipient Voegelinian 'System', it will still be Eric Voegelin helping us to restore 'the essence of the problem'.

not a mutation of the soul but a new creation; men are newly created out of nothingness—in novo esse constituuntur ex nihilo ('What Is Nature?', in Anamnesis, p. 73). While he understates the degree to which Augustine also regards the renewal of the imago Trinitatis as a 'new creation', this remark shows Voegelin's awareness of the sharp contrast between the experience and symbolization of 'grace' and the understanding of'the Platonists'. The split which this implies in Voegelin's paradox of consciousness may then be observed in the distinction in De Trinitatis 12.3 between (what Gilson calls) the 'superior reason', which is 'that rational substance of our minds by which we depend upon and cleave to the intelligible and unchangeable truth', and the 'inferior reason', which is 'derived' from the former as the necessary means of handling and directing 'the inferior things', the 'corporeal and temporal things'. Cf. Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine (trans. L.E.M. Lynch; London: Victor Gollanz, 1961), p. 117. And the same split in the paradox of consciousness may be seen in Thomas's equally sharp distinction, in the previous question of the Summa (la-IIae, q. 109, a. 1), between the natural 'intelligible light' (intelligibile lumen) and 'the light of grace' (lumen gratiae). 65. In correspondence with Alfred Schiitz, discussing the experience 'of the divine transforming intervention reaching into "nature", the superimposition of a forma supernaturalis in human nature upon the Aristotelian forma naturalis', Voegelin complains that this 'is the point where Bergson's speculative construction in his Deux Sources shows cracks: he must confront the problem of experience yet does not dare enter into the problem of grace (Eric Voegelin, ' "On Christianity", Letter to Alfred Schiitz, 1 January 1953', in Peter J. Opitz and Gregor Sebba (eds.), The Philosophy of Order: Essays on History, Consciousness and Politics (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981), pp. 449-57 (454-55; emphasis added). Voegelin's remark is particularly significant because of his subsequent enthusiasm for Bergson's thesis, and especially in light of the value of Bergson's modern 'philosopher's myth' as an illustration of Voegelin's paradox of consciousness (see above, n. 38). This not only illustrates the dramatic transformation in Voegelin's thought, but, in effect, predicts its limitations.

THE GOSPEL MOVEMENT': PULLS AND COUNTERPULLS IN VOEGELIN'S INTERPRETATION OF CHRIST AND CHRISTIANITY William M. Thompson

1. Working Out of Doctrinal Impasses In an appropriate way, the centre of Eric Voegelin's essay The Gospel and Culture' contains what seems like an autobiographical observation. He is writing of the noetic core shared in common by the gospel movement and classic philosophy. Some passages in the Gospel of John articulate that noetic core 'with an admirable economy of means', he maintains, where John symbolizes the pull of the golden cord, its occurrence as an historical event in the representative man, the illumination of existence through the movement from the question of life and death initiated by the pull to the saving answer, the creation of a social field through the transmission of the insight to the followers, and ultimately the duties incumbent on John to promulgate the event to mankind at large through writing the Gospel as a literary document.

The autobiographical comment comes soon after, when Voegelin observes: One can imagine how a young student of philosophy, who wanted to work himself out of the various doctrinal impasses into which the school philosophers of the time had maneuvered themselves, could be fascinated by the brilliance of these succinct statements that must have appeared to him as the perfection of the Socratic-Platonic movement in the In-Between of existence.1

1. Eric Voegelin, The Gospel and Culture', in Eric Voegelin, Published Essays, 1966-1985 (ed. Ellis Sandoz; Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 12; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), pp. 172-212 (190-91). The passages from the Gospel of John cited are: Jn 12.32; 6.44; 173, 18, 25-26; 20.30-31. Compare this passage with Voegelin's explicitly autobiographical comments in Eric Voegelin, 'Remembrance of Things Past', in Anamnesis (ed. and trans. Gerhart Niemeyer; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978), pp. 3-13 (3-6). 'Remembrance of

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Voegelin's entire essay, in its four sections, is governed by this noetic core. The first section illustrates an instance of its healthy existence in early Christianity in the Church father Justin and some instances of its deformation in modern thought. The second section seeks to restore the core by a brief exemplification of its presence in Plato and the Gospel of John. The third begins a discussion of the Christian differentiation of the noetic core, and the fourth completes that discussion with a study of the Gospel of Matthew and some of the difficulties attendant upon the Christian differentiation. One senses that one is rather close to Voegelin's central concerns with respect to Christianity in this essay. Like the young student noted above, he wants to work himself out of doctrinal impasses. At the same time, the essay's compact nature gives it something of a summary character of his thought on this key matter. The observations that follow, consequently, will constitute a meditative close reading of this central essay, on the wager that this will offer us a special key into Voegelin's views on Christ, Christianity, and a philosophy of politics. 2. 'The Gospel Movement': Voegelin's Symbolism for Christ and Christianity First, some lexicological indications. Voegelin's essay of 40 pages exhibits a Heraclitean thrust. It is on the move. The word 'movement' occurs at least 50 times, which is enough to average about one-and-a-quarter times per page. Several times one will come upon four to six occurrences on the same page; at one point there are three occurrences in the same sentence!2 It seems clear to me that Voegelin considers the term a key symbolism, even capitalizing it seven times toward the essay's conclusion, to indicate the one, common dynamism shared by the classical and Jewish-Christian traditions. The words 'gospel movement' occur in the third and fourth sections of the essay, where Voegelin is focusing on the Christian differentiation of the common noetic core, appearing eight times. So far as I can tell, the simple word 'movement', which occurs 11 times in these sections, also functions as a shorthand expression for the more complete 'gospel movement'. If we add to these the six occurrences where the term 'movement' can refer to both the classical and the Christian differentiations, that would give us some 24 occurrences in all. It seems rather transparent that Things Past' has been reprinted in Voegelin, Published Essays, 1966—1985, pp. 304314(304-307). 2. Voegelin, 'The Gospel and Culture', p. 177.

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Voegelin wants to highlight this dimension of movement, and that he quite deliberately invents the phrase 'the gospel movement' as his symbolism of choice for his consideration of Christ and Christianity. This observation will not be particularly new to students of Voegelin's work: terms like 'flow', 'process', 'movement', 'countermovement', and so on, populate his pages. Voegelin is a radically historical thinker, in other words. Nevertheless, not too much has been made of the following statement by Voegelin, and we do not know precisely how he would have developed its implications, but it is pointedly expressive of this trajectory in his thought: T incline to believe that the process-theological attempt and its expansion, a metaphysics that interprets the transcendence system of the world as the immanent process of a divine substance, is the only meaningful systematic philosophy.'3 The Heraclitean thrust of Voegelin's 'Gospel and Culture' essay has already been pointed out. This observation prompts us to review central themes in the Heraclitus chapter in The World of the Polis as a helpful guide to the theme of movement in Voegelin.4 There he points out that if the soul's 'height that is domed by transcendental Being' has struck Parmenides with 'blinding force', Heraclitus has discovered that the 'light of Parmenides cannot be seen without a light in the soul that illuminates the way toward its border'.5 The discovery of Being presupposes a soul capable of such an act of discovery, and Heraclitus seems to have articulated the soul as a capacity of transcendental discovery. And the act of discovery means that the inquiring discoverer is not static but in movement. Heraclitus is particularly attuned to discovery as an action in movement, as is well known: 'You cannot step twice into the same river' (B 91).6 He explores the soul by focusing on the dynamics of the soul. 'You could not find the limits of the soul, even if you travelled every path; so deep is its logos' (B 45). This soul travel is difficult, and Voegelin speaks of Heraclitus's articulation of various anticipating urges that are needed to sustain the travel, such as faith and hope. 'If you do not hope, you will not find the unhoped-for, since it is hard to be found and the way is all but 3. Voegelin, Anamnesis, pp. 26-27'. 4. Eric Voegelin, Order and History. II. The World of the Polis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957), Chapter 9: 'Heraclitus', pp. 220-40. 5. Voegelin, Order and History, II, pp. 220-21. 6. Voegelin, Order and History, II, p. 236. Translations from Heraclitus by Voegelin. For primary texts, see Hermann Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (ed. Walther Kranz; Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 7th edn, 1954).

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impassable' (B 18) and Through lack of faith [apistie] the divine [?] escapes being known' (B 86)7 Voegelin's very affirmative interpretation of Heraclitus is quite striking, and so unsurprisingly and somewhat singularly, we find a striking Heraclitean accent in Voegelin's interpretation of Plato as well. 'Both Heraclitus and Plato...agree that no composition can lay claim to "truth" unless it is authenticated by the movement of the psyche toward the sophon! This movement includes struggle—think of the pulls and counterpulls of the noetic core, echoing especially Plato in Laws 645a—and at one point Voegelin even suggests the fruitfulness of a comparison with Zen mysticism in order to elucidate further 'the connection between love of the All-wise and [the] askesisof the warrior' in Heraclitus.8 The way Voegelin connects the emergence of a certain 'aristocracy' with Heraclitus is significant as well. For the emergence of the more differentiated soul constitutes a new authority within society and history, who will likely need to contend with the less differentiated and attuned souls. Heraclitus declared: 'One man is to me ten-thousand if he be the best' (B 49). 'It may be law [nomos] to obey the will [or: counsel] of one' (B 33). These fragments suggest the need for order in society based on the new level of authority, but an order that will not be easily won. A certain hierarchy seeking to become socially effective is in process, and Plato sets himself to grappling more fully with the set of problems connected with this. The pulls and counterpulls play themselves out, then, not only within the souls of isolated individuals, but on a social and historical field as well.9 7. Voegelin, Order and History, II, pp. 227, 228. 8. Voegelin, Order and History, II, pp. 227, 238 n. 24. One is tempted to note a similarity between Voegelin and Nietzsche as well, another radically historical thinker, who traced his view of the eternal recurrence back to Heraclitus. Although Nietzsche's teaching on eternal recurrence is finally inconsistent with his 'superman' ideal, in one of its interpretations it might be seen as a call back to the original springs of life and novelty. See Keith Ansell-Pearson, An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 108-20. 9. Voegelin, The World of the Polls, pp. 239-40. For an early appreciation of some aspects of Nietzsche's Plato-like view of the role of an aristocracy, see Eric Voegelin, 'Nietzsche, the Crisis and the "Wat Journal of Politics 6 (1944), pp. 177-212. Clearly, however, this point needs to be balanced by a recognition of the profound disagreement between the two thinkers. Particularly important in this regard is Voegelin's chapter 'Nietzsche and Pascal' in Eric Voegelin, History of Political Ideas. VII. The New Order and Last Orientation (ed. Jiirgen Gebhardt and Thomas A. Hollweck; Collected

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'Movement' is something of a Voegelinian Ursymbol. It evokes the generativity of the metaxy, the engendering process of the question and sought-after answer held together in the search. Its deliberate and repeated use in the phrase c the gospel movement' indicates Voegelin's desire to evoke how Christ and Christianity are rooted in the metaxy of society and history, thus uncovering their point of connection with human existence. Simultaneously, this perhaps arouses in us our own engendering springs of the search and the relevance of Christ and gospel to ourselves. Like Nietzsche to some extent, Voegelin seeks a return to the springs of generativity. Like Heraclitus, he wants us to travel through the unlimited depths of the soul's logos. The heavy accent Voegelin places on 'movement' suggests an emphatic urgency to return to the gospel's engendering sources within the metaxy in the light of later Christian doctrinization and general western deculturation. Where the search is alive and well, Voegelin suggests, the quester will be in a position to ascertain the relevance of Christ and gospel. A political science that is shocked by Voegelin's attention to Christ is simply a political science, he seems to be suggesting, that has curtailed the search. We might also say that a Christian believer who is shocked by the kind of treatment Voegelin accords Christ and gospel is also, Voegelin suggests, suffering from an eclipse of the search.10 'Gospel movement' is a unitive symbolism with multiple levels of evocation. The personal level of the soul as a generative site of pulls and counterpulls has just been noted. This is the 'aristocratic' element, so to speak, inasmuch as its differentiation generates the soul attuned to the logos of the metaxy. The generative soul creates a social field, inasmuch as it is representative for others who recognize its authoritative nature by the way it arouses a sympathetic and compelling response on their part. 'Heart speaks to heart', wrote Francis de Sales.11 It causes social turbulence as well, by the resistance it arouses to its attempt to become socially and even institutionally formative. The personal and social dynamic are part of an

Works of Eric Voegelin, 25; Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), Part Eight, Section 4, pp. 251-303; printed previously as Voegelin, 'Nietzsche and Pascal', Nietzsche-Studien 25 (1996), pp. 128-71. 10. For the language of 'engendering', see Voegelin, The Gospel and Culture', pp. 184, 187. 11. 'Eye speaks to eye and heart to heart, and no one understands what passes save the sacred lovers who speak.' Francis de Sales, Treatise on the Love of God (trans. John K. Ryan; 2 vols.; Rockford, IL: TAN, 1975), I, p. 297.

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historical flow (Voegelin's 'millennial Movement'12), for they do not arise out of nowhere but are a part of a questing humanity which itself positively responds. In this way they themselves become a historical, formative force. We recognize here all of the elements of the noetic core, adumbrated earlier in our opening quotation from Voegelin, which are present within the gospel movement in a climactic way in a certain, specified sense. 'Movement' qua symbolism simultaneously, economically, and somewhat cleverly evokes these levels of meaning. It is a 'protective device', to use one of Voegelin's own phrases, by which Voegelin hopes to keep the Christian symbols rooted in the metaxy. 'The Gospel and Culture' essay, with the aid of the 'gospel movement' symbolism, seems particularly concerned to stress the commonality between Christ and others, on the one hand, as well as the dangers of deformation brought into the historical and social fields by the Christ differentiation, on the other. To begin with the former, speaking of a gospel movement cleverly places an accent on what is common among those participating in the movement. In a certain sense, this relativizes Christ, by indicating that his singularity is not an oddity, but in a meaningful way sharable. Intriguingly one thinks of Heraclitus's 'follow the common [xynon]' (B 2). The thinker so attuned to movement was also, unsurprisingly, attuned to the xynon. This fragment continues with, 'But though the Logos is common, the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own [idian phronesin]\ Voegelin's commentary on this passage is instructive: 'The Logos is what men have in common, and when they are in agreement with regard to the Logos (homologia) then they are truly in community.' Somehow the word being spoken in Christ is not simply private (Heraclitus's idios), but public and sharable (xynon).13 If the Father and the Son in the critical logion [that is, Mt. 11.25-27] be conceptualized as two persons who know one another to the exclusion of everybody else, then the statement would indeed be no more than a bit of information that one can believe or not.14

Typically, then, Voegelin will generalize his formulations of the differentiation occurring in Christ, implying the (Heraclitean) 'public' word.

12. Voegelin, The Gospel and Culture', pp. 204, 210. 13. Voegelin, Order and History, II, p. 232; Eric Voegelin, Order and History. V. In Search of Order (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), p. 26. 14. Voegelin, The Gospel and Culture', pp. 200-201.

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For example, that differentiation is 'the experience of eminent divine presence in the movement of the soul in the metaxy, or that of 'the eminent truth of existential consciousness'.15 This should not surprise us in a philosophy of order and politics, focused on the sociopolitical implications of the 'spectacular breakthroughs in history', as Voegelin calls them in this essay.16 This enables the political philosopher to grasp the relevance of a consideration of Christ to political theory. It also, from the theological side, helps the theologian grasp the inner connection between Jesus and his followers, or between Christology and soteriology, to use the technical terms. Jesus was believed to be the Christ because the soulforming force of the logos radiated out from him and illuminated others in society and history. The one, 'public word' (logos) is a community-forming force, Voegelin would say. Its irruption in Christ has formed its corresponding community. Keeping the accent on the 'common' and the 'sharable' in the gospel movement is accompanied by a second focus in this essay, namely, that of the possibility of a radically gnostic derailment brought on, Voegelin maintains, by the radicality of the Christ differentiation. Again, the symbolism of the 'movement' cleverly evokes the sense of flux and turbulence, and even disruption (Voegelin uses this term17). Already in his early essay on Heraclitus Voegelin had written of the precariousness of maintaining a balance between the sense of the flow and 'the experience of a direction in the soul toward the divine "All-Wise" '. He suggested that the 'great thinkers' (like Plato and Aristotle) 'maintained the balance', avoiding 'an eschatological desire to escape the world' as well as 'a romantic surrender to the flux of history or to eternal recurrence' (a reference to Nietzsche?).18 Voegelin is not inclined to attribute a similar balance to the gospel movement. Its 'neglect of noetic control', 'bias against the articulate wisdom of the wise', and its 'apocalyptic ferocity' hardly incline the gospel movement toward balance. Voegelin even implies the existence of this imbalance, or at least its precariousness, in Jesus himself when he refers to the fulfilment brought on by the gospel as one 'difficult to distinguish from apocalyptic destruction'. Voegelin is referring to the Jesus of Mt. 16.28: 'Truly, I say

15. Voegelin, 'The Gospel and Culture', p. 207. 16. Voegelin, The Gospel and Culture', p. 195. 17. Voegelin, The Gospel and Culture', p. 211. 18. Voegelin, Order and History^ II, p. 236. Is a Nietzschean flight into eternal recurrence a secularized substitute for eschatological hopefulness?

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to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.'19 I have used the word 'clever' with regard to Voegelin's use of the symbolism 'gospel movement'. He is evoking, and one actually senses, the flow, the flux, the pulls and counterpulls, particularly in the accent he places on the sharable logos (Heraclitus's xynon) in Jesus and his followers, which forms community, and in the accent he places on the communitydestroying apocalyptic ferocity, the 'blood-dripping Word of God' (Voegelin's terms) of Rev. 19.11-16, which would have to correspond to the Heraclitean idios, the 'private', or even 'weird', for it closes off access to the sharable logos and replaces persuasion with violence.20 Voegelin is 'inbetween' these two, like the young student of philosophy seeking to work himself out of various doctrinal impasses others have manoeuvred themselves into. Let me suggest another tension playing itself out in these pages, one in Voegelin himself, again like the young philosophy student seeking to work himself out of doctrinal impasses. I hesitate to characterize it as a tension between Voegelin's Christ, if I might reluctantly use that phrase for a moment, and the Christ of Christian doctrine, because Voegelin, rather deliberately, uses the terms 'doctrine' and 'doctrinization' mischievously, sometimes suggesting a positive, sometimes a pejorative, meaning. If you will, there is a sort of deliberate Heraclitean flux in his use of the term 'doctrine'. The flux corresponds to reality, I think. In 'The Gospel and Culture', the meaning is negative, I think always, unless one reads into the sole use of the phrase 'radical doctrinization' the view that there is an unradical and so positive form of doctrinization.21 So let us say that there

19. Voegelin, 'The Gospel and Culture', pp. 189, 210. For his 'final' views on gnosticism, see Eric Voegelin, Order and History. IV. The Ecumenic Age (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), pp. 20-27. 20. Voegelin, 'The Gospel and Culture', p. 206. 21. Voegelin, 'The Gospel and Culture', p. 179. Two positive instances may be cited: Eric Voegelin, Order and History. III. Plato and Aristotle (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957), pp. 263-68; and Voegelin, Order and History, IV, p. 56. In the first case, concerning Plato's Laws, Voegelin notes that minimum dogma is one of the ways in which Plato avoids a derailment into utopianism in his political views. Voegelin seems to share Plato's appreciation of the need for such, as long as precautions are taken to avoid soul-destruction, and Plato does take such precautions (the proemia, the role of play, and so on). In the latter case, Voegelin cautiously indicates that doctrine can derail into hypostatization '[u]nless precautions of

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is a tension, perhaps even deliberate, between two views of Christ, in Voegelin's exegesis.22 There is no question that Voegelin regards the epiphany of Christ as the culmination of the millennial Movement, and this precisely because it articulates 'the eminent truth of existential consciousness'. This 'eminent truth' is somewhat obscurely expressed by Voegelin, however. On the one hand, he seems to mean that in Christ and the gospel movement c[c]onsciousness becomes luminous to itself as the site of the revelatory process'. Here the accent is on consciousness, that is, on the human side of the divine—human interrelationship within the metaxy, but on consciousness as revelation's site. This seems to be the rather common emphasis within this essay, and it would bring Voegelin's interpretation of Christ and Christianity close to those that stress Christianity's heightened differentiation of the human subject as a personal and free being. It is this heightened view of the human self that finds expression in Augustine's Confessions and in occasional struggles through the period of the patres and mediaevals on behalf of human dignity and freedom, on through to the liberal thinkers of modernity, such as Locke, Kant, Hegel and the American founding leaders and thinkers.23 But in Voegelin, the accent of the incarnation on the human subject is always linked with a stress upon its nature as the site of revelation. This seems to be what differentiates it from the noetic differentiation of the Greeks.24 There is not that same stress upon the soul as the site of a revelation with the Greeks. Perhaps this is why, albeit only once in this essay, Voegelin refers to the revelation in Christ as 'climactic' because it differentiates the theotes of the millennial Movement in a climactic manner. This would place the accent on the divine pole of the divine—human interrelationship and on the divine initiative of loving grace. This latter accent would likely correspond to his intriguing statement, never returned to meditative practice are taken'; 'the device [of doctrine] can [also] protect the insight gained against disintegration in society'. 22. Voegelin appears to use 'Christ' and 'Jesus' interchangeably. See, for example, Voegelin, 'The Gospel and Culture', p. 192. 23. Voegelin, The Gospel and Culture', pp. 207, 210. Cf. David Walsh, The Growth of the Liberal Soul (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), pp. 204207. For Augustine, see, for example, Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), Chapter 16: 'The Confessions'. 24. See Voegelin, 'The Gospel and Culture', p. 208: 'In the movement of classic philosophy...the noetic analysis of the metaxy has gone as far as in the gospel movement, and in some points is superior to anything we find in the gospel...'

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either, in which Voegelin writes that the 'saving tale of divine incarnation... [is] more differentiated through the intensely articulate experience of divine-loving action in the illumination of existence with truth'.25 The tension in the two views of Christ that emerged earlier in this essay are distinct from this interplay between the human and divine poles of the metaxy under consideration just now. Both dimensions of this interplay, Voegelin argues, achieve, in the senses indicated, a climactic articulation in the gospel movement. The tension noted earlier, on the other hand, is that between Christ (or Jesus) and his followers, which Voegelin only once seems clearly to refer to, but this section of the essay seems particularly significant, because Voegelin writes that 'the passage is precious' since in it Paul invents a new word to suggest the novelty of the differentiation by Christ, a differentiation allowing for 'degrees of participation'. He is commenting on Col. 2.9-10; the word Paul invents (or at least uses as a neologism) is theotes. 'In its whole fullness...divine reality [theotes\ is present only in Christ...' This is in contrast to '[a] 11 other men [who] have no more than their ordinary share of this fullness (pepleromenoi) through accepting the truth of its full presence in the Christ'.26 Does Voegelin suggest that this is only Paul's view of the matter, or does he share it as well? The overriding emphasis of 'The Gospel and Culture' seems to be upon the pepleromenoi, upon Christ as the 'representative man', not upon Christ as the unique fullness.27 Yet one hesitates, for one of the reasons Voegelin considers this passage precious is precisely because it allows for this range of participation: from that of Christ's fullness of participation to that of the less extraordinary participants. In a later section of the essay, when he is considering aspects of Matthew, he once again seems to reinforce such an interpretation. We will come to that in a moment. For now this tension between the pleroma and the pepleromenoi, and the essay's decided tendency to stress the latter over the former, shall be our focus. This inevitably invites the question, 'Why?' At the same time, there is the confessio voegeliniana implied and perhaps expressed in his interpretation of Colossians 2. Another possible instance comes up in his study of Matthew, and it will be noted later. This invites further questions.

25. Voegelin, The Gospel and Culture', pp. 189, 196. 26. Voegelin, The Gospel and Culture', pp. 192-93. 27. Voegelin, 'The Gospel and Culture', p. 190.

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3. Symbolic Form: Gospel Movement as Dramatic Narrative Now we might fruitfully address the theme of the drama, for it would seem that one of the central symbolic forms of the personal and social field of pulls and counterpulls of souls and between souls is the drama. In his study of Greek tragedy, Voegelin presents the tragic drama as both an 'experimental study' and a 'search for the truth of decision': Tragedy as a form is the study of the human soul in the process of making decisions, while the single tragedies construct conditions and experimental situations, in which a fully developed, self-conscious soul is forced into action.'28 The tragedies X-ray the process, the movement, the flow. Attuned to the Heraclitean flow as he is, Voegelin unsurprisingly, for example, suggests that some lines of the King (Pelasgus) in Aeschylus' Suppliants ('There is need of deep and saving counsel, like a diver's, descending to the depth, with keen eye and not too much perturbed'29) recall the Heraclitean 'deep-knowing' of the soul whose border cannot be measured because its Logos is too deep. The Heraclitean dimension of the soul in depth is dramatized by Aeschylus into the actual descent of a soul in a concrete situation that requires a decision.

Movement and drama are like content and form. One cannot have one without the other. Attuned as he is to movement, Voegelin is necessarily also attuned to drama. We remember how the language of drama presides, so to speak, over the presiding introduction to the whole of Order and History. We are not spectators but participants in the community of being. We are actors 'playing a part in the drama of being'. We play a role, for there is a certain element of illumination enabling us to participate. But at the same time there is an element of uncertainty, for we are in the midst of 'an adventure of decision on the edge of freedom and necessity'. Drama presupposes this tension between freedom and necessity, our human response to the mystery of existence, freedom and grace (in a Jewish and Christian perspective).3* The final, fourth section of 'The Gospel and Culture' is pregnant with 28. Voegelin, Order and History, II, p. 247. 29. Aeschylus, The Suppliants, 11. 407-408; translation by Voegelin, Order and History, II, p. 249. 30. Voegelin, Order and History, II, p. 249. 31. Eric Voegelin, Order and History. I. Israel and Revelation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956), pp. 1-2.

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the language of drama. Voegelin repeatedly emphasizes that the gospel movement is to be thought of as a drama. He speaks of the 'historical drama of revelation', and states that it is 'far from alive in the Christianity of the churches today' because of'the separation of school theology from mystical or experiential theology' and the drama's eclipse by Christian doctrine. He writes of the 'gospel drama' with its 'dramatis personae' of God and men. He seems to make a distinction between the gospel drama and 'a poet's work of dramatic art' as well as 'an historian's biography of Jesus', but as he draws the distinction, he goes on to write about the 'personal drama' of Jesus in the gospel, the 'social drama' of his followers, its 'historical' dimensions, inasmuch as it forms a part of an ongoing tradition of experience and symbolization, and how all of these constitute 'the revelatory movement' of the 'drama of the Gospel' (in this particular case, of Matthew), which 'runs its course on more than one plane'.32 This ought to be enough to indicate that Voegelin wants to draw our attention to the gospel movement's connections with the symbolic form of the drama. This invites a bit more of a reflection upon the symbolic form, in this case, that of drama. Voegelin never separated, although he distinguished, experience from symbolic form. Meaning/truth are mediated through the form, and if we wish to participate in the luminosity of the truth, we must participate in the form. Voegelin was quite sensitive to this, sharing something of Paul Ricoeur's view that language genres (in Voegelin's language, the symbolic forms) are not simply devices of classification, but productive and generative. They 'work' by getting us to 'work', or participate. They enable and arouse our participation, and as we know, Voegelin is very much of the view that participation is the royal road to truth. Far from being merely artificial devices of classification, they 'are engendered in the event of participation itself'.33 This attentiveness to symbolic form is connected with Voegelin's disagreement with German 'identity philosophy' as well. Knower and known do not constitute an immediate identity, such that one 'directly' possesses truth, so to speak. One must take a 'longer way' (Republic 504b), through history and the trail of symbols it leaves. There is a distance we must travel through reflectively. This is Voegelin's reworking of Plato's symbol of anamnesis. But the anamnesis occurs with and through symbols.34 32. Voegelin, The Gospel and Culture', pp. 199, 201, 203-204. 33. Voegelin, 'The Gospel and Culture', p. 187. 34. Paul Ricoeur, 'Biblical Hermeneutics', Semeia 4 (1975), pp. 29-148 (68); Voegelin, Order and History, V, pp. 48-50.

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It may well be that Voegelin was beginning to attend more fully to some of these questions in In Search of Order. This would have been quite appropriate, since it was here that he was differentiating the 'third dimension of consciousness', that is, that of the philosopher reflecting in a second order manner on what is implicit in consciousness, experience, symbolization and differentiation. It is here that we find him writing of the necessarily storied and narrative character of human existence. 'The story is the symbolic form the questioner has to adopt necessarily when he gives an account of his quest as the event of wresting, by the response of his human search to a divine movement, the truth of reality from a reality pregnant with truth yet unrevealed.' The 'story', Voegelin writes, is both 'narrative' and 'event'. Narrative points to how the story conveys insights into reality 'in the mode of intentionality' or 'thing-ness'. 'Event' is Voegelin's special way of pointing to how the story, in a more comprehensive sense, is an event of luminosity within the in-between of existence. Narrative is 'narratively referential', while event is 'luminously symbolic'.35 It seems appropriate to wager that Voegelin is not drawing too sharp a distinction, if any, between 'drama', 'story', or even 'saving tale' in 'The Gospel and Culture'.36 Perhaps we could argue that the drama focuses upon the story's unfolding of a plot, the wresting and struggle involved, the counterpulls as well as the pulls. In other words, the realm of action and decision is highlighted in the dramatic story/narrative. 'Story' is then perhaps the more inclusive term, and drama is one of its forms. In many ways, Voegelin's magnum opus, Order and History^ displays a dramatic, narrative (perhaps even epic) form. Commentators who concentrate on the 'order' dimension often miss this narrative quality. The attention to history, to how order only emerges from the struggle for it in history, is the more narrative and dramatic feature of Voegelin's project. The stress upon drama in 'The Gospel and Culture' is of a piece with this.

35. Voegelin, Order and History, V, pp. 24, 26, 41. 36. See Voegelin, 'The Gospel and Culture', pp. 186-88. Fruitful insights might emerge from a comparison between Voegelin's use of drama and that of Karl Earth in his Christology—see Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics. IV. The Doctrine of Reconciliation (ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance; various translators; 5 vols.; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956-62), III. Part Three: First Half (mm. G.W. Bromiley), pp. 153-54, 165-68, 386-88, 398-408—and that of Hans Urs von Balthasar. For a summary of this latter, see Bede McGregor and Thomas Norris (eds.), The Beauty of Christ: An Introduction to the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1994), Chapters 5 and 11.

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Voegelin underscores the gospel movement's dramatic elements through a study of Matthew. Understanding just why he chooses to focus upon particular Gospels at various points in his essay remains something of a matter of guesswork. Earlier, when he was setting forth the common noetic core shared by the Greeks and by Christians, he used the Gospel of John, as we have seen. This seems to have been because of its Greek features. His choice of Matthew seems governed by the gnostic misuse of Mt. 11.25-27, as reported by Irenaeus. Voegelin wants to correct such a gnostic misuse of the gospel movement. Curiously, in an essay so dominated by the theme of movement and struggle, the one Gospel that is never mentioned is that of Mark, whose use of euthus ('immediately', 'at once') some 40 times in 16 chapters, and whose stress upon Jesus moving ad crucem in such a hurried way, would have helpfully underscored many of Voegelin's sensitivities.37 Voegelin's interpretation of Matthew is particularly helpful in displaying how the drama surfaces the theme of participation. Knowing comes by way of participating. The Gospel's 'Messianic secret'—the charge not to tell anyone that Jesus is the Messiah, a theme running throughout the Gospel—is viewed as a way of drawing 'the distinction between revelation and information' and of avoiding 'the derailment from one to the other'. Revelation is this knowing through participation, that is, an existential event that admits of varying levels of comprehension and enactment, depending upon the depths of one's own entry into the passion and resurrection of the pulls and counterpulls. This is why the secret is also something known, on Voegelin's interpretation, at varying points by varying people along the way in the Gospel.38 37. Voegelin, 'The Gospel and Culture', pp. 181, 200. For Mark, see my The Struggle for Theology's Soul: Contesting Scripture in Christology (New York: Crossroad, 1996), pp. 79-85. Voegelin pays closer attention to Mark, and indeed to much of the New Testament and early Church teaching, in his early studies on Christ and Christianity in his History of Political Ideas. See Eric Voegelin, History of Political Ideas. I. Hellenism, Rome, and Early Christianity (ed. Athanasios Moulakis; Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 19; Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), pp. 149-85. Voegelin's dissatisfaction with the separation between exegesis and mysticism among exegetes plays an important part in his attention to Gospels other than Mark, I believe. Mark, because it is thought to be the earliest of the Gospels, tends to be the favoured child of many exegetes, who then play it off against the other, more 'revelatory' and so untrustworthy (?) New Testament writings. Voegelin vigorously resists such tendencies. 38. Voegelin, The Gospel and Culture', pp. 202-205.

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There is something 'postmodern' in the way Voegelin stresses the inbetween, participatory, and even agonistic features of truly formative knowing. It is an 'event' rather than a simple possession, a presence that can derail into an absence, so to speak. Voegelin is 'logocentric' in a certain sense, to be sure. We remember that he begins The Gospel and Culture' by saying that he is a philosopher who will speak 'about the Word's difficulty to make itself heard in our time and, if heard at all, to make itself intelligible to those who are willing to listen'. If he is postmodern in some respects, he is not a postmodernist, certainly not in the sense of nihilism or relativism. The category is too ambiguous and limiting to fit his project. There is an intelligible Word. This is why the question of life's meaning arises, and why we sense a direction and experience pulls within the movement of existence. Yet, Voegelin can sound themes that resonate greatly with a postmodern sensitivity. A Word there may be, but it is found only in the In-Between through participation in the movement of existence. 'Well, existence is not a fact. If anything, existence is the nonfact of a disturbing movement in the In-Between of ignorance and knowledge.. ,'39 These connections with postmodernity might be misleading, if one draws the conclusion that Voegelin simply endlessly floats in a historical flux. The drama is a play, but it is a serious play (in Plato's sense). Ludic, but not ludicrous. One notes this early on in 'The Gospel and Culture'. When he is setting forth his description of the noetic core, with its pulls and counterpulls, he refers to the dialogue form of Plato as an example of a kind of balanced form of the pulls and counterpulls. He goes on to suggest that behind this is a Plato whose own experience is perhaps more realistically expressed in the Parable of the Cave of Republic 515e. This reference to the fettered cave dweller, with face to the wall, who is dragged up by force to the light, becomes in turn the occasion for a further reference to 'the passion of conversion inflicted on the resisting Paul by Christ through the vision on the road to Damascus'. We are not simply endlessly searching. There is an answer before the question. And it is seeking us. Is this what Voegelin has in mind as he writes of the gospel movement's greater differentiation of 'loving-divine action in the illumination of existence with truth'? The exousia of Jesus, displayed by Matthew, which gives rise to the social drama of Jesus' fellowmen who recognize his divine

39. Voegelin, The Gospel and Culture', pp. 172, 176. Walsh's The Growth of the Liberal Soul \$ suggestive on the postmodern, non-foundationalist aspects of Voegelin's project.

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authority, would seem to be expressive of this loving-divine action.40 Voegelin's drawing attention to the recognition of exousia in Jesus again returns us to the tension in Voegelin's essay, noted earlier, between the two views of Jesus: the representative of humanity, where the accent falls upon what he shares in common with others, and the unique one, where the accent falls upon the difference. In the essay's section on Matthew, the fourth and final section, one has the impression that Voegelin is offering a commentary on his hints about Jesus' uniqueness expressed in the third section, where the discussion of Col. 2.9-10 occurred. For the third section was chiefly occupied with showing how the Christian differentiation through incarnation forms a piece of the larger millennial movement of differentiations within the metaxy. Finally when he comes to his interpretation of Matthew, in this last part, he spends several pages attempting to articulate the difference between 'full' and 'minor' degrees of comprehension of the divine presence in existence. Again, the tension is never quite fully relieved. Following Matthew, Voegelin distinguishes between the drama of Jesus and that of his followers. They do not seem to be identical. Voegelin writes of 'the event of [the] full comprehension and enactment through the life and death of Jesus... [of] the mystery of divine presence in existence', and seems to distinguish this from 'the social drama of his fellowmen who recognize the divine authority, the exousia, in him by his words and miracles'.41 He uses Matthew 11 and 16 to develop the difference between minor and full degrees of comprehension. In the first, the Baptist becomes the forerunner not simply of Yahweh, but now of the Unknown God present in his Son Jesus. The age of the law and the prophets is now yielding to the new. In Matthew 16, the older Jewish title of the 'Messiah' must now be linked with the newer one of the Son of God that is Jesus. In these ways, Voegelin is pointing to Matthew's view of the something new and even 'full' breaking into clarity with Jesus. But in each case, Voegelin also seems to generalize the event, in such a way that the line between Jesus and his followers blurs. For example, with respect to Matthew 11: '[W]hat is in the process of coming, and is even present in Jesus and the plain people who follow him, is the kingdom of the Unknown Father...' The confession of Jesus as the Christ and Son of God in Matthew 16 immediately moves into a discussion of discipleship

40. Voegelin, The Gospel and Culture', pp. 184-85, 189, 204. 41. Voegelin, The Gospel and Culture', p. 204.

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applicable to all Jesus' followers, without delaying on the possible significance of the confession for Jesus himself.42 Still, some blurring seems quite appropriate. If Christ is indeed the Saviour, through whom the saving Word actually reaches out and transforms others, then there should not be an absolutely clear line of demarcation between Jesus and his followers. Karl Earth, for example, wrote: 'It is quite right that the voice and form of Jesus cannot in practice be distinguished with any finality in the Gospels from the community founded by Him and sharing His life.' Historians, Earth went on, will find this either 'suspicious' or 'provocatively interesting', but in any case it is 'further evidence of that submission to the divine verdict without which the Gospels could never have taken shape as Gospels'.43 Voegelin's essay itself is something of a drama, with its own pulls and counterpulls as well. For it is not simply a theologian's personal commitments to the christological doctrines of the Church that force our attention on these 'details' about Jesus. Voegelin's text does so as well. There seems to be a pathe in this essay which pulls the reader to ask these questions, much like the way Plato was gripped by the light, and Paul as well. 4. Follow the Pulls Much of 'The Gospel and Culture' illustrates Heraclitus's counsel to follow the common logos that forms genuine community. The sheerly private becomes the odd and even bizarre, like the esoteric teachings of the gnostics, ridiculed by Irenaeus, who thought they were all privileged Godmen enjoying the secrets of a totally unknown Father.44 True community generates the dynamic movement of souls exploring the depths of truth on personal, social and historical fields. 'Following the common' occurs through participation in the logos, and in fact participation presupposes a sameness and difference, a unity in diversity. Radical sameness would be

42. Voegelin, The Gospel and Culture', p. 205. For this whole discussion, see pp. 203-207. 43. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics. IV. The Doctrine of Reconciliation. I. Part One (trans. G.W. Bromiley), p. 320. A similar insight will be found in Karl Rahner; see Karl Rahner and Wilhelm Thusing, Christologie, systematisch und exegetisch: Arbeitsgrundlagen fur eine interdisziplindre Vorlesung (Quaestiones Disputatae, 55; Freiburg: Herder, 1972), p. 38. 44. See Voegelin, 'The Gospel and Culture', pp. 200-201, 211, for his references to Irenaeus.

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identity, and there would be no need for participation. Radical difference would close off the possibility of sharing. Participation occupies the InBetween. In other words, implicit in Heraclitus's 'common' is also a rich diversity of various forms of participation. Voegelin's interpretation of the gospel movement is directed toward explaining how Christ and Christianity make a contribution to this. But for the most part, and in a way somewhat appropriate for a political philosophy, Voegelin's explorations remain on a rather more generalized level, and some of the questions that seem rather more central for the theologian recede into the background. For example, describing the incarnation as an event in which the human existential consciousness becomes maximally aware of itself as the site of the logos s revelation seems the dominant focus of 'The Gospel and Culture'. That it is also an event in which the 'loving-divine action' is intensely differentiated, and that this forms a part of its climactic nature, is also noted, but seemingly unemphasized.45 Many theologians would be inclined to want to pursue more forcefully, however, this latter aspect of the incarnation. Voegelin, as a philosopher, is following the pulls, so to speak, of his quest. Knowledge only comes by way of participation. Just as he noted the fatal separation of school theology from mystical or experiential theology, so he refused to separate the 'science' of the philosopher from spirituality. This is particularly noted and developed in Michael P. Morrissey's study of Voegelin and the New Testament in the present volume. True science is a form of spirituality or mysticism, reflecting the formation through virtues of the knower. Voegelin's own experience of participation led him so far and no further. His work is an invitation and even a challenge to philosophers and theologians to likewise participate. One could argue, with Voegelin, that Scripture represents the symbolic trail of the early Church's participation in Christ. One might also argue that, despite its limitations, this participation continued in the early Church writers and councils, and that the articulation of the trinitarian faith, first and primarily as a symbol and only derivatively as a protective doctrine, was the result. If this be so, an appropriate next step for Voegelin students interested in the gospel movement would be to explore the 45. Earlier, in The New Science of Politics (1952), Voegelin had referred to this as the 'soteriological truth' of Christianity, the 'experience of mutuality in the relation with God, of the amicitia in the Thomistic sense', but there also it was only touched on. See Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), p. 78.

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trinitarian dimensions of the same, along with their implications for political order. There are some promising sources for this in Voegelin's works themselves, and this would be a way of challenging and expanding Voegelin's project from within. Allow me to end with a brief 'beginning' in this effort. There are at least two trajectories in Voegelin's writings on the Christ. One is what we may characterize as the pre-Nicene strategy. This is in line with Voegelin's accent on returning to the engendering experiences and symbols of the great events of differentiation, prior to their doctrinal formulation and possible derailment into hypostatized doctrines. This remains very compact, from later Christianity's viewpoint, but it need not be incompatible with church doctrine. If you will, this seeks to reroot detached doctrines in their narrative, experiential context. The passage in The Ecumenic Age where Voegelin somewhat wistfully celebrates the 'generous openness' in doctrinal matters of the early Church, its tolerance of a kind of subordinationism, and the 'openness of the theophanic field', is a classic example. Here he stresses the openness to the mystery of God as the key element, and argues that in order to protect itself from various forms of the denial of the one, true God the protective device of the Nicene and Chalcedonian doctrines had to be developed.46 The other trajectory manifests a willingness not to eclipse the route travelled by the early and mediaeval Church, namely, the trinitarian one. In Voegelin, this remains very compact as well, but its presence in Voegelin, at both an early and a late date, illustrates that he had a sensitivity to it and that he was, so to speak, following its pull. An early 46. Voegelin, Order and History, IV, pp. 259-61. 'The Gospel and Culture' largely fits into this trajectory, but with the inner tensions noted. Interestingly, the passage cited here from The Ecumenic Age makes an observation that can be given a trinitarian twist. Voegelin writes that the christological and trinitarian doctrines are 'a protective device' shielding the Unknown God 'against confusion with the experiences of divine presence in the myths of the intracosmic gods, in mytho-speculation, and in the noetic and pneumatic luminosity of consciousness' (p. 260). The first confusion is guarded against by the doctrine of God the transcendent Father; the second confusion, which reminds one of the subordinate logoi of Gnosticism or the subordinate Logos of Arius, is guarded against by the doctrine of God the Son; the third confusion is guarded against by the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit who is within our consciousness and existence but not reducible to them. Voegelin is more concerned to stress the need to protect God's transcendence, but the trinitarian dimensions would stress the need to bring into view God's legitimate immanence as well through the incarnation and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

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instance is his letter on Christianity of 1 January 1953 to his friend Alfred Schiitz, which contains a detailed exegesis of the christological and trinitarian doctrines. Here Voegelin makes a clear distinction between God's universally mediating intervention into human history through Christ, an event universally valid for all times, and the participation of the creature in the same through the Spirit. A late instance is his observations on the trinitarian structure of Anselm's Proslogion in his essay The Beginning and the Beyond'. He refers to Anselm's approach to the 'trinitarian Creed [as] more than the letter of a doctrine to be believed'; rather, 'it has to be lived through as the true symbolization of a reality...' The drama of Anselm's own prayer enacts the drama of the Trinity, writes Voegelin. Anselm's movement in prayer from Creator to Christ to paracletic Spirit reflects his own movement from mortal imperfection to immortal perfection, the quest of his reason as aroused by the intelligible movement of his faith regarding, if you will, God as Unknown (Father), as Logos (Jesus the Christ), and as Attraction (the Spirit Who Draws). 'Being, Speech and Action', Karl Barth might say. The Speech is fully uttered for us in Jesus' person as a reality of love, and in the Spirit all creatures are appropriately enabled to share in it. Could this be a further development of what Voegelin hints at in his view of the incarnation as the intense articulation of loving-divine action?47 These two trajectories form something of a fruitful dialectic in various ways. For example, the movement back to the engendering Christian experiences and symbols, prior to their later doctrinization and even conceptualization, remains a constant necessity for any true reappropriation of the gospel movement. This looks to the aims of the first trajectory. At the same time, one cannot simply bypass later reflection on the engendering experiences, and at times the reflective distance enables a greater penetration of dimensions of the engendering experiences and symbols through ongoing participation. This looks to the second trajectory. 47. Eric Voegelin, ' "On Christianity", Letter to Alfred Schiitz, 1 January 1953', in Peter J. Opitz and Gregor Sebba (eds.), The Philosophy of Order: Essays on History, Consciousness and Politics (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981), pp. 449-57; Eric Voegelin, The Beginning and the Beyond: A Meditation on Truth', in Eric Voegelin, What Is History? And Other Late Unpublished Writings (ed. Thomas A. Hollweck and Paul Caringella; Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 28; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), pp. 173-233 (195-96); Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics. I. The Doctrine of the Word of God (ed. G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance; various translators; 2 vols.; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1936-75), I. Part One (trans. G.W. Bromiley), p. 381.

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Looked at in another way, these two trajectories greatly reflect the 'master' tension running throughout Voegelin's entire project, namely, that between order and history. Just as the order of history with its truth emerges from the history of order, so the order and truth of Christian existence can only emerge from the history of Christian order, so to speak. An unwillingness to attend to the ongoing history of Christian doctrine and theology would be equivalent to a gnostic eclipse of the historical field. This history is not necessarily a sad trail of doctrinal hypostatization; it may also be the fruit of an ongoing participation in the engendering experiences of Christianity which yields deepened insight. Voegelin's willingness to be 'troubled', so to speak, by the trinitarian articulations of the tradition can fairly be read as an instance of his own refusal to turn 'gnostic'. Voegelin's impressive articulation of the 'noetic core' .shared in common by the classical and Judaeo-Christian traditions exemplifies this master tension between order and history. On the one hand it is a retrieval of the soul as the moving site of pulls and counterpulls on personal, social and historical fields, as articulated in varying degrees of differentiation by the classical and Judaeo-Christian founding sources. On the other hand, it is doubtful that Voegelin could have appropriated this noetic core without the later developments in history and philosophy that nourished his own philosopher's skills. Similarly, then, Voegelin's and our own ongoing articulation of the Christian 'differentiation' takes place in this space between originating experiences and the ongoing flow of historical participation (or its lack) in the same. It may well be that the Christian Church moved in the direction of Nicea and its chain of theological and conciliar reactions partly because of a loss both of the openness of the theophanic field and of doctrinal tolerance. The first trajectory noted above illustrates Voegelin's tendency to think in these terms. The key sensitivity here, it seems, is to preserve as much of the fullness of the originating experiences as possible. At the same time the second trajectory indicates something of a willingness not to eclipse the later historical field, and I am suggesting that we might fruitfully build on this. After all, the originating experiences have depths to them that typically come to clarity only under the pressure of later, ongoing struggle and reflection. For example, Greek thought, as it continued in early Christianity, tended toward subordinationism. Being, or the One, was thought of more impersonally and in an extremely transcendent way. A logos that had become flesh had to be subordinate to the truly transcen-

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dent One in its fullness. The movement beyond subordinationism was largely counterintuitive to this 'development' of the classic tradition.48 An incarnate Word/'Logos that is truly God's own Word necessitates a more personal, sharing view of the Divine. And with this, we are on the way to the trinitarian articulation. At the same time, the more one opens oneself to later developments, the more one should attend to the engendering experiences and symbols that are claimed to be at the source of such developments. Voegelin's analysis of the noetic core undertaken in his essay under consideration here is an important illustration of this. Another would be his suggestion that, at the limits of noetic analysis, Christianity would do well to follow Plato and employ the 'likely myth' in its efforts to throw further light upon the Christian mysteries.49 Learning how to maximize the fruitful tension between these two strategies of returning to the originating experiences and symbols as well as attunement to later historical developments may be one of the most significant contributions Voegelin can make to our continuing efforts on behalf of a philosophy of order and human affairs.

48. Voegelin is by no means a subordinationist, but there are touches of the 'impersonal' in his interpretation of Paul's theotes. See Voegelin, The Gospel and Culture', p. 193; and for Voegelin's view of John's Christology, see Voegelin, Order and History, IV, pp. 13-20. Why is any commentary on John's prologue missing in 'The Gospel and Culture'? 49. Voegelin, Order and History, IV, p. 267.

ERIC VOEGELIN AND THE NEW TESTAMENT: DEVELOPMENTS, PROBLEMS AND CHALLENGES Michael P. Morrissey

Eric Voegelin's writings that treat New Testament sources have not been fully appreciated.l This is unfortunate since these particular essays are some of the most trenchant analyses of the Gospels and Paul's letters written in the twentieth century. My task in this essay is to review the recent developments in New Testament studies in light of Voegelin's work. Of course this field of scholarship is wide and vast, and no book, let alone a single essay, could do it justice.2 Any layperson surveying the scope of New Testament studies today, with all its specialties and sub-specialties, would likely conclude that it is a massive, unwieldy expanse of learning, most all of it irrelevant to the everyday Christian believer. In addition to the conventional fields of Synoptic studies, Johannine studies, and Pauline studies, there are now Q studies, Dead Sea Scroll studies, intertestamental studies, parable studies, apocryphal Gospel studies and Graeco-Roman religion and philosophy, not to speak of the important contributions that philology, archaeology, sociology, cross-cultural anthropology and so on, have made on the historical and theological understanding of the source documents. Among the current generation of scholars there has also proliferated a number of new methodologies. In addition to the conventional methods of source, form and redaction criticism, the tasks of exegesis and interpretation are now executed by literary criticism and hermeneutics, structural criticism, feminist criticism, liberationist criticism, psychoanalytic criticism and aesthetic1. See especially Chapter 5: 'The Pauline Vision of the Resurrected', in Eric Voegelin, Order and History. IV. The Ecumenic Age (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), pp. 239-71; and Eric Voegelin, 'The Gospel and Culture' in Eric Voegelin, Published Essays, 1966-1985 (ed. Ellis Sandoz; Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 12; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), pp. 172-212. 2. The best overview of contemporary New Testament scholarship available, though already somewhat out of date, is Eldon Jay Epp and George W. MacRae (eds.), The New Testament and its Modern Interpreters (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989).

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rhetorical criticism, as well as the various schemes of the postmodern deconstructionists. For the student today choosing to pursue graduate studies in the New Testament, the discipline must appear to be an inch wide and a mile deep. Such a sentiment would likely be felt also by the more learned inquirers of meaning and truth in history whose reading of the sacred books of their religious tradition is informed by the philosophical analysis of Voegelin. I am forced to be compact and selective in my overview of recent developments in New Testament studies. Furthermore, since I am not a specialist in the New Testament, but rather work in the area of systematic theology, and have a particular interest in Christology, the focus of this paper will be on that area of New Testament studies that directly deals with its central figure, Jesus of Nazareth. More specifically, I will take as my point of departure the whole problematic in Christian theology that deals with the relation between the so-called 'historical Jesus' and the 'Christ of faith', a distinction that came to light in the nineteenth century with the rise of critical-historical consciousness. Voegelin addressed a wide range of issues related to Christianity, but it is this particular problematic that I think his writings speak to with unique acumen. This essay, then, will have three parts. First, I will assess the state of New Testament studies and its impact on Christian faith and theology in the modern world, given the challenge of historical science. Secondly, I will review the works of six of the most important scholars in the discipline, most of whom can be called 'Third Questers' for the historical Jesus, which have appeared in just the past ten to fifteen years. Thirdly, I will discuss Voegelin's contribution to New Testament studies and Christology, which I believe is a very challenging and insightful achievement that remains largely unrecognized by scholars working in these disciplines. I think the particular authors under review could learn something from Voegelin's philosophy of history and consciousness as it pertains to the study of biblical texts.

1 Orthodox Christian faith is in a state of crisis. Arguably it has been in such a state for about 200 years now, ever since historically minded scholars, riding the wave of the Enlightenment, began asking critical questions about the Bible and the origins of Christianity. The challenge of these historians, most all of whom take their bearings not from faith but from the

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principles of Enlightenment rationality, has reached a crescendo in just the last 20 years. Quite simply, given the breakthroughs of historical investigation into the person of Jesus, the New Testament literature about him and the origins of the Christian movement in first century Palestine, the old answers concerning the basis of Christian faith no longer suffice, nor are they any longer deemed credible. New data are being discovered, new theories are being advanced, and new historical judgments are being proclaimed by archaeologists, biblical scholars, historians, and systematic theologians, all working within the canons of scientific investigation widely accepted throughout the modern academy. The results of these investigations raise far-reaching questions about the truth of long-held Christian claims that potentially undermine many orthodox beliefs and practices of the Church. We are living in a painful period when the advances of biblical study and critical history are outstripping the comfortable, time-honoured truths of the past. It has generated not just a theological turbulence among intellectuals, but a certain crisis of faith among ordinary literate Christians. Of course the seeds of the revolutionary change apparent in the present generation were planted long ago during the middle of the eighteenth century, when the historical-critical method was introduced into theology and biblical studies. The age of Reimarus, Strauss and Renan marked the first great wave of upheaval in Christian theology, when the inviolable truths of orthodox belief were radically challenged by the critical-historical perspective of Enlightened rationalism. For those bold enough (unlike Reimarus) to publish books challenging the time-honoured claims of orthodox belief, the result was either losing their academic position in the university (Strauss at Tubingen), or their own life (Aikenhead, in Edinburgh over a century earlier). Only moderns who have inherited this enlightened historical perspective have been interested in the factual life and career of the Jew from Nazareth. Since 1835 the historicity of Jesus has been of great concern to Christians, for in that year, due to D.F. Strauss's Life of Jesus, there first arose the figure of a 'historical Jesus' detached from the canonical and doctrinal 'Christ of faith'.3 Strauss argued that the most important of the

3. The distinction became topical as a result of Martin Kahler's The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic Biblical Christ, published in Germany in 1892. Kahler argued that it was impossible to separate the Jesus of history from the Christ of faith, not least because the source documents reveal the former only through the latter, the

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supposed 'facts' of Jesus, his birth, his teachings, his miracles, his resurrection, turn out to be 'myths' instead. For good or for ill the critical perspective wrought by the eighteenthcentury Enlightenment thinkers and their nineteenth-century disciples, once established in the academy, was irrevocable, however long and adamant was the resistance of the Church and pious Christian believers steeped in the traditional doctrines of faith. Indeed, this revolutionary challenge reached a peak at the turn of the last century. Writing before the outbreak of World War I and the subsequent rise of neo-orthodox theology, Ernst Troeltsch illustrated this crisis best when he began his seminal essay on the historical Jesus by proclaiming from the summit of nineteenth-century historical science that 'Christian dogma, as constructed by the early church, has finally disintegrated'.4 Of course such a view has long been censured by ecclesial authorities, but resistance to historical truth cannot endure forever.5 Nonetheless, the crisis of change drags on as the Christ of faith being the only Jesus that should matter to scholars. This work, along with Schweitzer's famous The Quest of the Historical Jesus, published in 1906, brought an end to the period of the 'first quest' of the historical Jesus, when historians focused on writing various 'lives' of Jesus, reconstructed biographies that, according to Schweitzer, revealed more about their authors than about Jesus. What followed was the period of the 'no quest', represented best by Rudolf Bultmann who, among a host of neo-orthodox theologians between the wars, believed that we can know virtually nothing about the historical Jesus, nor should it matter since Christ is the object of Christian faith, not a Jesus reconstructed by historians. The 'second quest' began in 1953 with the publication of Ernst Kasemann's famous lecture, 'The Problem of the Historical Jesus'. A student of Bultmann, Kasemann argued that the Gospels indeed preserve historical memories of Jesus and that history is relevant to faith. This postBultmannian view yielded the first great 'life' of Jesus, by another student of Bultmann, Giinther Bornkamm's Jesus of Nazareth, published in 1956. The second, or 'new', quest was underway, chronicled in 1959 by James M. Robinson's A New Quest for the Historical Jesus. The 'third quest' began in the early 1980s, catalyzed by new archaeological discoveries, new manuscripts and some methodological breakthroughs, as well as by a new enthusiasm about the productivity of historical Jesus research. 4. Ernst Troeltsch, 'The Significance of the Historical Existence of Jesus for Faith', in Robert Morgan and Michael Pye (eds.), Ernst Troeltsch: Writings on Theology and Religion (trans. Robert Morgan; Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1977), pp. 182-207 (182). 5. Indeed, much of what the Catholic Church once condemned as modernism at that time, now nearly a century ago, it now accepts as legitimate fare as reflected in numerous ecclesial documents from and since Vatican II. See, for example, 'An Instruction about the Historical Truth of the Gospels' issued by the Pontifical Biblical Commission in 1964, and 'Dei Verbum §19', in Joseph A. Fitzmyer, SJ, A Christo-

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current period of biblical and historical research is offering new and perhaps more radical challenges. The current crisis is reflected in one particular characteristic of the contemporary period: the virtually complete separation between the experience and expression of Christian faith in liturgy, worship and spirituality from its understanding by way of critical thinking among academics.6 The majority of ordinary Christians simply do not know, nor want to bother thinking about, the issues raised by contemporary scholars. Most lay Christians, particularly those of an evangelical and fundamentalist persuasion, have not even begun to see the problems posed by contemporary theology and Christology in a rational, historically minded, scientific, multi-faith society. The gap between what scholars know about Jesus of Nazareth in his historical Jewish context and what the ordinary Christian believes is most wide and ever-widening. This crisis is also reflected in the seminaries and church-related colleges and universities by their conservative-minded professors who tie themselves in knots trying to rescue the outdated perspectives of ancient claims in order to preserve orthodoxy. This is usually accomplished by upholding the supremacy and finality of Christianity vis-a-vis other religions, by disarming the real challenges of new questions and perspectives in the face of scientific breakthroughs by accommodating them to past orthodoxies, or by simply translating the past orthodoxies into contemporary language. In the face of the convincing results in biblical and theological science today, these pre-critical, doctrinaire tactics prove themselves empty. Their practitioners simply are losing their credibility to those Christians no longer hampered by the strait]acket of authoritarian teachings and who seriously think about the significant questions raised by the historians. On the other hand, however, the crisis can be equally discerned in the secular academy by the lot of critical historians and liberal-minded thinkers who reduce the symbols and source texts of early Christian faith

logical Catechism: New Testament Answers (New York: Paulist Press, 1991), Appendix: pp. 119-64. 6. The recent works of two Catholic theologians attempt to bridge this gap by recovering a spiritual reading of the scriptural texts. See William M. Thompson, Christology and Spirituality (New York: Crossroad, 1991), and The Struggle for Theology's Soul: Contesting Scripture in Christology (New York: Crossroad, 1996); also Sandra M. Schneiders, The Revelatory Text: Interpreting the New Testament as Sacred Scripture (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991). Thompson is the only theologian with some renown whose writings reflect a considerable Voegelinian influence.

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to mere objects of historical investigation, failing to apperceive their revelatory content. Prompted by an anti-dogmatic search for origins, such reification prescinds from the orientation of faith shared by the earliest proclaimers, hearers and readers of the Gospel. These first Christians faithfully accepted the gospel narratives as communicating the truth about the revelation of the divine in Jesus, which in time yielded the intellectual development and articulation of their storied faith in the later christological creeds and doctrines. Thus to read these texts apart from the religious experiences that ground their meaning and truth transforms a living genre of'good news' into a stultified object of scientific inquiry. Considering this doctrinal development of faith, the search for the historical Jesus raises one of the most crucial questions facing Christianity today. Orthodox Christology affirmed a paradox: Christ was both fully human and fully divine. But even in the time this proposition was first formulated at Chalcedon in the mid-fifth century, it violated the intellectual principles of the only philosophical language, that is, Greek metaphysics, that could be appropriated to solve the problem of the true identity of Jesus that the scriptural texts left unanswered. In the midst of constant heretical uprisings the early Church Fathers rose to the challenge during the conciliar debates and honed out the orthodox position. Whatever positive results (political as well as theological) the doctrinal formulas gained at the time, their legacy generated a particular view of Jesus that is no longer acceptable. For at least the last two centuries (and especially the last two decades) it has become increasingly clear that the original doctrinal language called upon to mediate the truth of the paradox of Jesus' identity is inadequate. The abstract deductive metaphysics of the ancients has today been superseded by a view of the person shaped by current schools of thought: psychology, anthropology, phenomenology, existentialism, evolutionary science, critical history, etc. Thus Christian theology has sought new ways to articulate the truth about Jesus' person and nature, in order to make intelligible the verity of the ancient creeds and doctrines. As a consequence, the 'high Christology' of the theological tradition since Nicea has succumbed to the 'low Christology' of our own time. Contemporary theologians and biblical scholars focus on the humanity of Jesus to explain the ancient doctrine of Incarnation. But, as a result, the historical Jesus has for many replaced the traditional Christ of faith. As valuable and necessary as the turn to Jesus' humanity has been, given the hypostatized encrustations on the gospel texts that 'high' christological doctrines imposed, something has gone awry in the process. The

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quest for the historical Jesus cannot seem to fully ground a theology of the Incarnation and Resurrection, or make intelligible the Christian symbols of Cross and Redemption, which as mysteries are grasped by faith and are not entirely susceptible to historical analysis. Although it is true that theology today is irrevocably historical, something essential is lost if theology is done by historians without an attunement to the way divine transcendence reveals itself in history. Indeed, there is no going back to any view of Jesus that militates against the truly human Jesus of contemporary 'low' Christology. Nonetheless, the offerings of many contemporary scholars who focus solely on historical Jesus research seem to dilute the ancient truth that in the life and death of Jesus the vertical and horizontal met, and the meeting marked a definitive revelation of God in history. The Gospels are the literary expression in symbol and story of the profound religious experiences of the disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, initiated by his ignominious defeat on the cross at the hands of Rome, followed by the disciples' subsequent vision of his resurrection. What specifically, then, has so challenged orthodox Christianity as to evoke a turbulence of faith among educated Christians? Essentially it is the number of long-embraced proclamations about Jesus and the origins of Christianity that have been disclaimed by historians.7 Based on the critical-historical study of the New Testament, a consensus is forming today around the following propositions: 1) Jesus was not the first Christian but a devout Galilean Jew who did not intend to establish a new religion. Instead he was deeply faithful to his own Jewish tradition which he tried to reform through the power of his words and deeds. 2) Jesus' mission most certainly did not include the Gentiles, nor did he issue a commission to convert the whole world, but rather only the house of Israel. Nor did Jesus see his mission or purpose as dying for the sins of the world. 3) Jesus did not institute the Church or bestow a particular authority upon Peter. Although the roots of the Church can be traced back to Jesus' 7. Among the many sources surveying the vast literature in the field, see especially John Reumann, 'Jesus and Christology', in Epp and MacRae, The New Testament and its Modern Interpreters, pp. 501-64. Reumann wrote this essay too early to discern and treat the 'third quest'. For the best book-length review from a critical perspective of this renewed effort to recover the historical Jesus, see Ben Witherington, The Jesus Quest: The Third Search for the Jew of Nazareth (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1995).

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ministry, the institutional Church was created by Jesus' followers in later generations primarily for political and pragmatic reasons as the Christian movement broke off from its Jewish roots and as the Parousia failed to occur. 4) Jesus did not institute the sacraments. The sacred rites of the Christian Church emerged and developed over a period of centuries, beginning with Jesus' followers who transformed the baptism ritual of purification for sin and the Sabbath meal into the Christian rites of Baptism and Eucharist. As a faithful Jew, Jesus engaged only in the Jewish rituals of his day. 5) Jesus did not issue new moral edicts. His essential teachings can be derived from earlier Jewish sources and in essence can be reduced to the double love command. Indeed his teachings were not essentially about morality at all, nor about himself; rather, they were to announce the coming of God's kingdom and what is needed to prepare for it. The tenor of Jesus' teachings is eschatological. The Sermon on the Mount is not a blueprint for creating an ethical society; it is an eschatological proclamation for humans preparing for the imminent Parousia, or the fullness of God's kingdom. 6) The Gospels were composed by anonymous authors at least two generations after Jesus' death, drawing upon oral and extinct written sources (such as the hypothetical Q document and the 'signs gospel') that developed only in the wake of his death. The anonymously composed Gospels were later ascribed to leading figures in the Christian movement, during the generation of first apostles, because of their authority. 7) During this pre-Gospel time these sources included stories that were circulated to inspire faith in certain christological mysteries. For example, the stories about Jesus' birth (particularly his virginal conception) in Matthew and Luke do not describe a historical event. Instead they express a theological claim that Jesus was the Son of God from the beginning of his human existence, not unlike the stories of 'divine men' known to the Graeco-Roman world. Likewise, the stories of the empty tomb, found in all four Gospels, do not relate an event of history. They too were formulated in mid-century to inspire Easter faith. 8) The miracle stories are not eyewitness accounts or attempts to record 'factual' history. These stories, which were quite common in the ancient world, were told not to explain 'what happened' on the occasions when Jesus performed 'deeds of power', but to proclaim faith in the power of God's kingdom. As post-Easter stories they took on a stylized, mythic Ian-

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guage to communicate this power and mystery. The ancients viewed reality as an awesome mystery controlled by spiritual forces. They had no conception of'nature' that runs by external, inviolable laws. They did not separate the 'natural' world (which is all moderns believe in) from the 'supernatural' world. They believed that spiritual forces could indeed influence the physical world in tangible ways. The cosmos was full of good and evil spirits that could enter the world of sense perception. 9) The traditional manoeuvre of reading back later events and developments into the life and mission of Jesus was done for theological and political reasons, most probably following the tradition of Jewish Midrash. 10) Jesus did not actually say or do all that others said he said or did. The later creative conglomeration of Jesus' teachings by the evangelists has persuaded one group of scholars to conclude that no more than 18 per cent of the words ascribed to Jesus in the Gospels is the actual voice of the historical Jesus.8 11) Jesus' christological titles are post-Easter attributions, none of which goes back to the historical Jesus. Indeed Jesus himself shunned any messianic claim for himself. He did not think of himself in the exalted terms in which he is spoken of in the Gospels or in Paul. Like every human being, Jesus grew psychologically, intellectually, morally and spiritually. There is evidence in the Gospels that Jesus, like every person, suffered temptations, doubts and an ambiguous self-knowledge. 12) Jesus' eschatology was most likely not the imminent end-of-theworld variety. His kingdom language was this-worldly and deeply rooted in the social world of the Jewish people. Though this issue is still debated, the 'coming Son of Man' sayings are not judged to be original to Jesus by an increasing number of scholars, now in the majority. The apocalyptic eschatology of Daniel and Revelation, which has dominated the consciousness of Christians since the first century, was not the typical form of Jewish eschatology during Jesus' time, except for marginalized splinter groups like the Essenes, as the Dead Sea Scrolls have revealed. 13) Finally, the Gospel texts tell us more about the last third of the first century than the first third. Their theology sprang more from the rise of Jewish-Christian conflict, and the period of missionary expansion beyond 8. This is the conclusion of the notorious Jesus Seminar, whose controversial scholarship I review below. See Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1993). See also Robert J. Miller (ed.), The Complete Gospels: Annotated Scholars Version (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1994).

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Israel after the destruction of the temple in 70 CE, than from the earthly Jesus. However enlivening it makes the story of Jesus, the reading of the Gospel narratives as a historical report is simply anachronistic and outdated. The refusal to accept these historical judgments, and all of their consequences, is due to the fear of destroying Christian faith and of undermining the authority of the official Church and its tradition. However, a capitulation to the Jesus of historical research can yield a reductionistic historicism. If faith is wholly dependent on certain historical claims (as some scholars would argue, and not a few Christians believe), then it is built on sand, at least to the degree that such claims can be refuted by historical investigation. But authentic Christian faith is not so dependent. Following the Anselmian formula, faith seeks understanding. History cannot be irrelevant to faith since the understanding of faith is a historical one. But neither can faith be dependent on the vagaries of historical research or on the latest pronouncements of professors.9 Christianity indeed rests on the historicity of the revelation it proclaims and this historicity keeps faith from becoming superstitious. But there is more to faith than what historical reconstruction can possibly authenticate. Faith is rooted in a divine mystery (Heb. 11.1), and thus is not open to refutation by historians. The particular substance of Christian faith is historical to the extent that the universal experience of this mystery is for Christians grounded in the life and death of the historical Jesus (however inaccessible and irretrievable the disciples' original experiences of Jesus are), and its 'mythic' expression in symbols and texts. Since the essence of Christian faith is to be discovered in its origins, and since the understanding and communication of that essence was originally developed in the scriptural and doctrinal formulations of early Christians, however inadequately, then one must ultimately turn to the New Testament sources, for in the truest understanding of these documents rests the foundations of authentic Christianity and the solution to the contemporary crisis in faith and theology. Such has been the case from the beginning. But given the current pluralistic context and historically 9. The classic statement on the relation between faith and history remains Van A. Harvey, The Historian and the Believer (NewYork: Macmillan, rev. edn, 1996 [1966]). With the rise of the new historical consciousness, historians no longer simply chronicled the past based on authoritative data, but became the judge of that data as to its truth-claim, that is, in regard to 'what really happened'. Harvey showed what effect this had on theology and Scripture.

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minded sensibility of scholars, what could possibly be meant by 'the essence of Christianity' or 'the truest understanding of the gospel', since we know that the four canonical Gospels themselves contain inherent contradictions, diverse perspectives of early dissonant Jewish-Christian communities, and multiple and probably irreconcilable Christologies. The task before us today looms ever larger. But if we are to avoid a postmodernist deconstruction of the symbols and texts into a set of relative meanings and values, or a reduction of the revelatory content of the symbols and texts into objects of secularized historical analysis, devoid of spiritual insight, or the no longer viable compression of the divergent symbols and texts into the vise of traditional orthodoxy, then another course must be found, for none of these options, in our search for the 'truest understanding' of the gospel literature, is intelligent or scientific or reasonable. Unless we realize the issues at stake in a straightforward manner, we will find it hard to understand why reason—by which I mean not Enlightenment rationality, but the classical noesis that Voegelin has recovered for us—when it does succeed in making its voice heard, so often does not prevail in the contemporary debates about Jesus and the truth of Christian claims. With this in mind I will attempt to elucidate the current problems in traditional biblical faith and Christology raised by recent historical investigations into the life and person of Jesus. After my summary review of six New Testament scholars, I will consider Voegelin's contribution to these matters and show how, in light of his philosophy of consciousness, these current scholars ultimately fail to realize the critical issues themselves. I will then propose as one fruitful solution to the crisis of faith, elicited by critical history, Voegelin's penetrating analysis of the Gospel texts and the figure of Jesus the Christ. As we shall see, Voegelin's hermeneutics of gospel literature ultimately depends on his philosophical analysis of religious experience and its unfolding symbolization in history. I believe his analysis has the power to forge the higher viewpoint that would dialectically integrate the truths and perspectives of both the early orthodox tradition and the historically minded scholar of today.

2 The past 20 years have witnessed a renaissance of Jesus studies. During this time there has appeared a flood of books on the historical Jesus. Every year now publishing houses bring forth new titles promising to shake the very foundations of Christendom. These are written by serious scholars as

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well as by many amateurs seeking to popularize the latest findings.10 Because of the sales generated by a number of them, historical Jesus research has become a growth industry. In no previous generation has there been so many scholars—stimulated by new archaeological discoveries, new analytic methodologies and new theories—preoccupied with the debate about who Jesus was and the proper categories by which we must understand him. The christological pluralism of the early church seems today to have yielded to an even greater pluralism of scholarly options and perspectives. After two centuries of analysis and debate, using all the modern tools of biblical exegesis and historical investigation, contemporary scholars do not even agree on who Jesus was. Was he a carpenter? an itinerant preacher? an apocalyptic judge? an eschatological prophet? a faith healer? a miracle worker? a Jewish rabbi? a fomenter of revolution? a cynic sage? a mystic? an ordinary holy man? a wandering peasant? a madman? or any combination of these? If he was a messiah, in what way are we to understand that title, given the Jewish messianic expectations of his day that Jesus obviously failed to fulfil? The recent works of some serious scholars who have taken up these questions, and have proposed some answers, will now be my focus. An appropriate review of their writings would require much more attention than what is required here. I seek only to identify the major conclusions of their historical research, as well as their most challenging proposals about Jesus for the task at hand. I have selected the works of E.P. Sanders, John Dominic Crossan, Marcus J. Borg, Burton L. Mack, Robert W. Funk and John P. Meier to review, not only because these historians have become widely read, and a few are rather controversial, but because they represent the state of critical scholarship on the historical Jesus at the end of the twentieth century. E.P. Sanders About Jesus we know very little for certain. This view is widely held among scholars who search for the Jesus behind the gospel texts. But

10. The latest book to popularize the work of scholars is Russell Shorto, Gospel Truth: The New Image of Jesus Emerging from Science and History, and Why it Matters (New York: Riverhead Books, 1997). Shorto writes as a journalist and a sleuth in quest of lost treasure. He chronicles the major researchers and their consensus portrait of Jesus in a very lucid and engaging fashion. Unlike other reporters, Shorto also impugns the modern prejudice that scientific truth undermines spiritual truth.

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unlike Bultmann and the neo-orthodox thinkers between the two world wars, who believed nothing can be known for certain about the historical Jesus, E.P. Sanders, the renowned biblical historian at Duke University, in his celebrated book, Jesus and Judaism, affirms that a viable portrait of Jesus can be reconstructed from the gospel evidence. He argues that any historical reconstruction must begin from the evidence that is most secure. While most scholars begin with the sayings traditions, Sanders begins his historical reconstruction with a list of the almost indisputable facts about Jesus' career and its aftermath: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist. Jesus was a Galilean who preached and healed. Jesus called disciples and spoke of there being twelve. Jesus confined his activity to Israel. Jesus engaged in a controversy about the temple. Jesus was crucified outside Jerusalem by the Roman authorities. After his death Jesus' followers continued as an identifiable movement. 8. At least some Jews persecuted at least parts of the new movement, and it appears that this persecution endured at least to a time near the end of Paul's career.11

More than this is conjecture or a judgment of historical probability. But based on these facts alone, Sanders sees Jesus as an eschatological prophet in the tradition of Jewish restoration theology. On this he is a descendent of Albert Schweitzer and thus is, at least on this issue, the most traditional of the historians under review. For Sanders, Jesus believed the fulfilment of God's promises to Israel was imminent, to be inaugurated by a catastrophic intervention of God involving the destruction of the temple that had become hopelessly corrupt. Jesus' violent action in the temple before his arrest was a symbolic anticipation of God's ultimate cleansing to be followed by the building of a new temple and a new Israel. This is the core of Sanders's reconstruction of Jesus' life and mission, a thoroughly eschatological Jesus whose self-understanding was that of an agent of God who would initiate the messianic age centred in Jerusalem, establishing a new social order ruled over by him and his twelve apostles.12 Though Sanders 11. E.P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), p. 11. For Sanders's more recent study of Jesus, see E.P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (New York: Penguin Press, 1993). 12. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism, pp. 146-48.

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agrees with most scholars that Jesus' claims to be the Messiah and Son of God are creations of the early church, he finds implicit in some early traditions a Jesus who saw himself in some way as the future king of God's imminent kingdom. Sanders's Jesus is thoroughly Jewish. Indeed no other historian has done more to recover the Jewish substance and context of Jesus and his mission.13 Traditionally Jesus has been viewed as standing against his Jewish tradition, but Sanders sees Jesus within Judaism. For too long the issue of Jesus' relation to the Jewish law has been viewed through the lens of the Pauline and Lutheran dichotomy between law and grace: the view that Jesus overcame the strictures of the Jewish law and replaced it with God's free love. For Sanders the evidence does not support this view. The conventional view of the law as a legalistic system promoting hypocrisy and scrupulosity, and devoid of grace, largely stems from the gospel caricature of the Pharisees. In the absence of Jewish sources of the period this distorted view of the law, and Jesus' relation to it, has prevailed. The depiction of Jesus' attack against the law (regarding, for instance, food laws and Sabbath) reflects more the antagonism in the early Christian movement between church and synagogue after they split, than that of the Jewish Jesus. Sanders sees Jesus as contiguous with his Jewish tradition, and asserts that his eschatological teaching and action must be seen as rooted in a prophetic strain of Judaism during the late Second Temple period. Sanders is very cautious about making historical claims that are not warranted by the evidence. For example, he leaves unresolved the question of what Jesus meant by the cSon of Man' sayings, if indeed he ever spoke in such terms. Nor does he offer a historical sketch of the period between Jesus' death and the rise of the early church that would explain the disciples's sudden transformation. Compared to other scholars who often venture into such hypotheses, Sanders appears rather conservative in his historical portrait of Jesus, for he often restrains himself out of regard for his discipline. But as a result, in Sanders's reconstruction of Jesus as an eschatological prophet within Judaism, Jesus seems divorced from his social world of Roman oppression and hegemony. His restoration theology is directed against the temple, not the barbarous social and political climate of Israel. In this sense Sanders's Jesus is largely apolitical, unlike the Jesus of Crossan and Borg whom I turn to next.

13. See E.P. Sanders, 'Jesus in Historical Context', Theology Today 50 (1993), pp. 429-48.

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John Dominic Crossan Crossan is perhaps the premier Jesus scholar today, if not also the most popular. Such a claim is warranted by the range of his learning, the eloquence of his writing, the freshness of his portrait of Jesus, the rigour of his method, and the sheer sales of his publications. No recent scholarly work on the historical Jesus has had more impact than Crossan's The Historical Jesus.14 It is arguably the most important work in Jesus studies since Schweitzer's The Quest of the Historical Jesus. He has clearly had an impact not only on the scholarly world but on the world beyond the academy as well. Though a number of the historical claims Crossan makes are controversial, what makes his portrait of Jesus so compelling is his close attention to method, which is objective, mathematical and most exacting. He employs an archaeological scrutiny of the source texts in quest of 'authentic' material, that is, traditions that go back to Jesus himself. With regard to the source texts themselves, no other Jesus researcher makes more out of non-canonical sources than does Crossan. This is to his credit as a historian, one who is not bounded by scriptural authority. However, Crossan often overreaches by claiming too much historical significance for these sources (gospel fragments, hypothetical texts), as judged by the majority of scholars. Crossan's method first depends on a chronological layering of four strata in which he dates the relevant source texts: First strata: 30-60 CE Second strata: 60-80 CE Third strata: 80-120 CE Fourth strata: 120-150 CE

14. See John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991). In the first year and a half after publication this book sold 55,000 copies, a remarkable feat for such a long, dense, scholarly text. A more popular version, which Crossan affectionately refers to as his 'baby Jesus' book, is Jems: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993). See also John Dominic Crossan, Who Killed Jesus? (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995); and, for a more general audience, John Dominic Crossan, Who Is Jesus? (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996). Crossan's most recent study, treating the period after Jesus and before Paul (30-50 CE), is John Dominic Crossan, The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately after the Execution of Jesus (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1998).

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In the earliest stratum Crossan dates Q; an early version of the Gospel of Thomas; the authentic letters of Paul; a miracles collection; and a few other questionable texts, such as the 'signs gospel' employed in John, the 'cross gospel' found in the Gospel of Peter, and some other gospel fragments.15 Of the canonical Gospels, Mark was composed during the second stratum, while Matthew, Luke, and the first version of John emerged during the third stratum. Among the various criteria for determining authentic Jesus material employed by New Testament scholars (see the Appendix at the end of this essay), Crossan depends most heavily on multiple independent attestation, a criterion derived from redaction criticism. Based on the above stratification, Crossan then counts the number of independent attestations of Jesus material in each layer. As a result, sayings attributed to Jesus with a larger number of independent attestations would be more authentic than sayings with fewer independent attestations, particularly if they come from earlier strata as opposed to later strata. From this first step Crossan proceeds to interpret the authentic Jesus material by relating it to what we know about first-century Palestine from a multi-disciplinary, cross-cultural analysis. He brings to bear the insights of anthropology and sociology to flesh out the historical and cultural context in which Jesus lived. The models and insights that emerge from these disciplines are truly provocative in spite of their sometimes questionable employment. The portrait of Jesus to emerge from Crossan's rigorous method is the following: 1) Jesus was a peasant. He lived among peasants in an honour-shame, patron-client society where peasants suffered the most ignoble deprivations, not least of which was the obvious lack of education. Thus the view of Jesus we have from the gospels as a literate Jew with scribal skills is false. He was a simple man who spoke simply to simple people, but with an obvious charismatic power, perhaps because of his very concrete sayings and stories that made sense to peasants. 2) Jesus was a Jewish Cynic sage. His modus operandi, characterized by his 'life style', his dress, his eating habits and his way of relating to people was very similar to the Hellenistic Cynics who wandered from place to place teaching their wisdom. Thus Jesus fits a particular model. Though

15. See Crossan, The Historical Jesus, Appendix I: 'An Inventory of the Jesus Tradition by Chronological Stratification and Independent Attestation', pp. 427-50.

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unlike the Hellenistic Cynics who taught in the cities, attracted the literate, were active in the marketplaces and adopted a very individualistic philosophy, Jesus was predominately rural, hung out with fellow peasants, spoke their simple language and inspired their hope in God's imminent liberation of the oppressed with a social vision of God's kingdom. 3) Jesus was a healer. He was a faith healer with a 'magical' touch, that is, someone operating outside acceptable religious boundaries to directly mediate God's power. This power was directed not so much to an individual with faith in order to heal his particular malady, but to an oppressed people to liberate them from social and political oppression. Thus, for example, in the story of the Geresene demoniac, we do not witness a Jesus who exorcises many demons from an unfortunate victim in order to save him from his dreadful possession, but rather a Jesus who symbolically eradicates the 'Legion' of Roman oppression from an occupied land whose people view them as swine, and who have been psychologically and spiritually diseased by this demonic political hegemony. 4) Jesus was a radical. He engaged in 'open commensality' which raised the hackles of the righteous whose whole religious code was dependent on keeping their distance from the defiled. In an honour-shame society it was incumbent on the righteous Jew never to share a meal or have any public contact with the outcast, who would include women, lepers, publicans, Samaritans, Gentiles and sinners. Jesus associated with all of these and in the most intimate way, by eating with them. Jesus also engaged in 'radical itinerancy', and demanded as much from his closest followers. It was a life style devoted to complete dependence on others for one's 'daily bread'. It was a healing and preaching mission that was always on the move, not waiting for 'clients' to come to the healer, whose patronage could then be brokered by profiteers. Rather, Jesus' ministry was one that sought out the needy where they lived because that is where God dwells, not in temples, synagogues, or on holy mountains. Jesus' Abba was a God whose worship could not be controlled by a priestly class of brokers. Since he dwelled in the midst of people, his worship could be directly conveyed in their hearts. 5) Jesus was a non-eschatological preacher. Crossan rejects an apocalyptic Jesus who awaits the imminent Parousia. The 'Son of Man' sayings emanate not from Jesus but from the later Church. For Jesus the eschatological Kingdom was not an apocalyptic event in the future but an immediate fulfilment in the present that relied on a new way of living.

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Marcus J. Borg Borg's most important contribution is helping Christians think about Jesus properly in light of recent historical scholarship. Though he argues that historical knowledge of Jesus is not essential for Christian faith, one's image of Jesus nevertheless determines how one lives by that faith. Since historical scholarship about Jesus affects our image of him, and thus our understanding of the Christian life, we must take reconstructions of the historical Jesus seriously. The popular image of Jesus has traditionally been that of divine saviour whose mission and identity are self-evident: the divinely begotten Son of God who came into the world to die for the sins of humanity, and whose message was about himself and the importance of believing in him. For Borg this is the pious image born of Christian kerygma, creed and doctrine. But a proper understanding of the historical Jesus must situate him in his Jewish context. This is what Borg sets out to do: to present a de-dogmatized Jesus that is both true to history and to the essential meaning of Christian faith. Borg's portrait of Jesus is contained in a series of books beginning with his Conflict, Holiness and Politics in the Teachings of Jesus (1984), and Jesus: A New Vision (1987). His later writings, geared for a more general audience, have added little to what he developed in these first two works.16 Borg's Jesus is to be seen through four central images. The first two, Jesus as a 'social prophet' and Jesus as a 'movement founder', emerged from his first book. There Borg focused on the conflict episodes of the synoptic gospels to place Jesus in his proper context: a Jewish social world dominated by the ethos of holiness. The strict religious purity system of the Jews enforced a sharp segregation between the pure and the impure, a system that gave shape and direction to Israel's history. With regard to all the legal controversies of the temple, table fellowship, the Sabbath, consorting with outcasts, the poor, Gentiles and sinners and so on, Jesus broke from the prevailing politics of holiness. Therefore, he must be seen as a social prophet in the political sense, for his conflict with his Jewish 16. See Marcus J. Borg, Conflict, Holiness and Politics in the Teachings of Jesus (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1984); Jesus: A New Vision (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1987); Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1994); Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press, 1994); The God We Never Knew (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1997); and Marcus J. Borg (ed.), Jesus at 2000 (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996).

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opponents over the purity system concerned how to interpret the Jewish tradition. Where ritual purity was the sign of holiness, Jesus upheld compassion. Where the purity system excluded many by law, Jesus included everyone out of mercy. Israel's future was to turn on this genuine holiness born not of legal obligation but of personal transformation. Thus Borg's Jesus is deeply political and deeply engaged in his social world, and therefore must be seen as the founder of a revitalization movement centred on the true meaning of holiness. In this book Borg also stepped into the circle of dissenters from the conventional portrait of Jesus when he argued for a non-eschatological understanding of Jesus. Against Sanders, Borg argues that claims for Jesus' imminent apocalyptic eschatology have little historical warrant once the texts are carefully scrutinized. This is so for three reasons: (1) the 'coming Son of Man' sayings are today seen as less and less emerging from the voice of the historical Jesus and more and more from the early church; (2) the evidence for Jesus being so involved in his social world is so strong that the other-worldly view of Jesus' teachings would not be coherent; and (3) the belief in the imminent end of the world among the disciples arose with the belief in Jesus' second coming, a post-Easter event, and thus is not authentic to Jesus. The 'apocalyptic' language of Jesus' warnings to Israel must be read as prophecies of 'this worldly' judgment, not hell-fire after death. The same evidence that Weiss and Schweitzer used to proclaim a thoroughly apocalyptic Jesus (the end of the world was imminent), Borg uses to proclaim a this-worldly Jesus (the imminent end was to come not to the world but to Jerusalem and the temple). Jesus' kingdom was not 'beyond' in heaven, but below, here and now. In his 1987 book Borg added two more images to his portrait of Jesus: Jesus as 'holy person' and Jesus as 'sage, or wisdom teacher'. Drawing upon such interdisciplinary fields as the history of religions, cultural anthropology and psychology of religion, Borg identified Jesus as fitting a certain type of religious personality, that of holy man. This type of figure has numerous cross-cultural variants: shamanic healer, mystic, charismatic saint, agent of the numinous, spirit warrior. All are mediators of the sacred. A long line of such figures belongs to the Jewish tradition: from Moses and Elijah to Hanina ben Dosa and Honi the Circle-Drawer. As a Jew, Jesus is to be understood as another such mediator of Yahweh's presence to his people, a Hasidwith special powers to heal. Finally there is the fourth image of Jesus: a teacher of wisdom. Jesus is portrayed as the incarnation of divine Wisdom (Sophia) in the Gospels.

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But far from teaching conventional wisdom, Jesus' wisdom was subversive. It challenged the accepted traditions of his people and their images of God in a most radical way. Borg is dependent on recent scholarship on Jesus' aphorisms and parables in portraying a Jesus who invites an internal transformation, a metanoia, that leads to living life centred in the Spirit, not in 'secondhand', institutionalized religion. It was of course a teaching that got Jesus in trouble and helped to seal his fate, but this wisdom is liberating and life-giving for one who seeks to respond to its truth. Jesus' wisdom also challenges many popular notions of Christianity, as Borg frequently points out. These four images must be held together, for no one image is sufficient to grasp the totality of the historical Jesus, a holy, 'Spirit-filled', social prophet, who founded a movement to restore Israel to the truth of God's wisdom. Burton L. Mack Mack presents the most sceptical image of Jesus and Christianity of the six scholars reviewed here.17 His portrait of Jesus has certain affinities with Crossan's and Borg's, but is the polar opposite of Sanders's. Mack does not regard himself as a Jesus scholar. He is a scholar of Christian origins focusing on the early Jesus movements and 'Christ cults' as they grew and spread in the decades after Jesus' death. Thus, nowhere does one find in Mack's books a reconstruction of the historical Jesus, but rather a reconstruction of the development of the synoptic tradition in Christian communities in the mid to late first century. His more recent work has placed particular emphasis on the development of Q in its various stages and contexts. Nonetheless, there is a minimalist portrait of Jesus that emerges from Mack's writings. His historical construal of Jesus is that of a Hellenistic Cynic sage who taught in a thoroughly Hellenized Galilee where Cynics and Cynic traditions circulated. (The Cynics were rugged individuals who wandered the Roman Empire preaching a severe version of Stoic philosophy and gathering disciples as they went.) Mack's Jesus is divorced from his social world; he had no mission to restore or reform Judaism. He did not invite people into community; he spoke to individuals. As a wandering Cynic, he was rather aimless. He taught a core of 17. See Burton L. Mack, A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988); The Lost Gospel: The Book ofQ and Christian Origins (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993); and Who Wrote the New Testament?: The Making of the Christian Myth (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995).

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wisdom teaching with a social critique, clever and provocative, but devoid of any eschatological elements. The language of judgment and apocalyptic in the Gospels originate with the Jesus groups who suffered persecution and setbacks and had to defend themselves against their detractors. Indeed, according to Mack, it was not Jesus but the author of Mark who introduced this language into the tradition. Texts that set one group against another, or Jesus against certain Jewish groups, reflect the various ideologies that emerged after Jesus' death among groups of his followers as they sought to understand and defend themselves in times of trouble. Mack argues that the earliest layer of Jesus material, which is the most trustworthy in reconstructing Jesus, is sapiential, found in aphorisms, parables, and pronouncement stories. These early Jesus traditions emerged from different Jesus groups with their own particular memory of Jesus. This accounts for the myriad of literary forms found in the later gospels. These earliest traditions were not essentially Jewish. Mack argues that Jewish ideas were a later intrusion that culminated in the Gospel of Mark. The Jesus movement was originally an unorganized campaign of social protest, which Mark turned into a Jewish, anti-worldly Christ cult with disastrous results. Mark was the first great mythmaker of the heroic Jesus, the author who constructed the Jewish re-reading of the Jesus story and thus helped cover up the true Jesus who was more in line with the pagan world of his time than the Jewish one. Mack's Jesus turns out to be a cross between a Gnostic and a Cynic, a figure far removed from the eschatological Jewish prophet found in the books of Sanders and other mainline scholars, and even further removed from the divine Saviour of Christian faith and theology. Mack's reconstruction is of course highly speculative and contentious. He leaves open the question that was also left open by Borg and Crossan. If Jesus was not the impressive charismatic prophet of God the Gospels portray him as, then how do we account for the extraordinary proliferation of movements and literature in his name? Indeed, these scholars avoid the even more crucial issue of the power of Jesus' personality, which had an extraordinary and surprising effect on his disciples, particularly after his death when they were scattered in utter darkness. Robert W. Funk and the Jesus Seminar A former seminary and university professor of New Testament and former director of the Society of Biblical Literature, Robert W. Funk is the author

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of numerous articles and books on Jesus.18 He is well known as the founder and director of the controversial Jesus Seminar that counts among its members 79 New Testament scholars, including Crossan and Borg. The Jesus Seminar is a largely self-selected group of North American scholars, who call themselves 'Fellows', and who strictly adhere to the critical-historical approach to ancient texts. Their work has, since its beginning in 1985, received an enormous amount of press coverage, due largely to two factors: the newsworthy results of their scholarly judgments about Jesus and early Christianity, which has had not a little impact on contemporary Christians, and their obvious self-promoting attempt to share with the larger public the conclusions of modern biblical scholarship, hitherto confined to the academy.19 In its first phase, lasting about six years, the Seminar focused on the 'sayings tradition' in the gospels. These scholars sought to answer one primary question, 'What did Jesus really say?' Setting the iconoclastic tone of their whole project, Funk addressed the Fellows at their first meeting in Berkeley, California with these words: We are about to embark on a momentous enterprise. We are going to inquire simply, rigorously, after the voice of Jesus, after what he really said. In this process, we will be asking a question that borders the sacred, that even abuts blasphemy, for many in our society. As a consequence, the course we shall follow may prove hazardous. We may well provoke hostility. But we will set out, in spite of the dangers, because we are professionals and because the issue of Jesus is there to be faced.

18. His latest book is the culminating statement of his life work. See Robert W. Funk, Honest to Jesus (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996). 19. The primary work of the Jesus Seminar can be found in three publications: Funk et al, The Five Gospels', Robert W. Funk et al, The Acts of Jesus: The Search for the Authentic Deeds of Jesus (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1998); and Robert J. Miller (ed.), The Complete Gospels (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1992). The first volume is a fresh translation of the four canonical Gospels and the Gospel of Thomas with commentary, in which words of Jesus that are deemed authentic are colour-coded. The second volume is the most recent report of the seminar, which does the same for Jesus' deeds. The later volume is a collection of all the surviving Gospels and Gospel fragments. The Jesus Seminar also published two earlier reports: Robert W. Funk, Brandon B. Scott and James R. Butts, The Parables of Jesus: Red Letter Edition (Sonoma, CA: Polebridge Press, 1988); and Robert W. Funk and Mahlon H. Smith, The Gospel of Mark: Red Letter Edition (Sonoma, CA: Polebridge Press, 1991). 20. Funk and Smith, The Gospel of Mark, p. xvi.

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Meeting biannually, the Seminar deliberated on each of over 1500 sayings ascribed to Jesus in the Gospels, eventually voting on the historical authenticity of each one by casting one of four coloured beads into a ballot box: A red bead: These are the authentic words of Jesus. A pink bead: Jesus did not say this exactly but it approximates what he said. A gray bead: These are not Jesus' words but they reflect his ideas. A black bead: Inauthentic; Jesus did not say this. It is invented by the early church.

The historical-critical presuppositions and methodological criteria used by these scholars in casting their votes are themselves controversial and reflect the scientific scepticism of the academy. In spite of their shared presuppositions, the balloting results of their 'democratic' procedure unfortunately covered up the deep divisions among them on many of Jesus' sayings in question, not only with regard to each fellow's particular judgments regarding authenticity or lack of it, but also with regard to the different use of the methodological criteria each employed. This can be expected when scholarship is done by committee.21 In any case, when their 'red letter' translations of the gospels were published, media attention was predictably directed toward the sensational results: less than 20 per cent of Jesus' words were printed in red or pink. Some of the most familiar and beloved words of Jesus, including sayings where Jesus speaks of himself in the exalted terms of'son of God' or 'messiah', sayings that refer to Jesus' redemptive death for the sins of the world, and virtually all of John's gospel, including the famous T am' sayings, were printed in black. Of course, the conclusion to draw from this is that the Gospels are not generally reliable for reporting history, which is not news among Bible scholars who, given the nature of the sources, are mostly a sceptical group today. But such a message causes an uproar among the Christian public, many of whom judge these scholars to be anti-Christian. The second phase of the work of the Jesus Seminar has focused on answering the question, 'What did Jesus really do?' The results of their deliberations on the 'deeds tradition' has recently been published and will 21. The work of the Jesus Seminar testifies to the startling prospect of scholarship done by jury. Whether this collaborative procedure yields much fruit in the academy in the long run remains to be seen. The controversy it has generated does not bode well for such democratic enterprises, as many scholars revile the business of taking a vote on truth. But then perhaps the Seminar Fellows seek to model themselves on the great church councils of the fifth century, which took votes on truth.

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no doubt generate just as much controversy and critique, not least because even fewer of Jesus' deeds recorded in the Gospels (16 per cent) are judged authentic by the Seminar compared to his words (18 per cent).22 With the publication of their latest results the profile of Jesus based on these scholars' composite view has been more fully fleshed out. Though a reconstructed portrait of Jesus is not the direct aim of the Seminar, each Seminar member must imagine the life framework into which Jesus' sayings and deeds fit. That composite profile largely reflects the historical reconstruction of Jesus proposed by Funk in his recent book, Honest to Jesus. Like Crossan's book, this work is another landmark text in the Third Quest for the Historical Jesus. It summarizes and implements the tenets of the Third Quest in a fresh, provocative and exacting manner. In fact it reads as an impassioned plea by a Christian Jesus scholar to free Jesus from the hegemony of ecclesiastical control and doctrinal tradition. Indeed, Funk does not refrain from telling us of his own persecutions by ruling authorities in academic and church institutions where he has taught and from which he eventually freed himself by establishing his own institute and publishing house (the Weststar Institute and Polebridge Press, which sponsors and publishes the work of the Jesus Seminar). Funk's book begins and ends with a U-turn from Nicea to Nazareth and back again, tracing the process of how Jesus became the Christ, or 'how the iconoclast became the icon'. In the middle section Funk offers his profile of Jesus based on the authentic sayings and deeds. It is a view of Jesus congruent with that of many other Third Questers, though perhaps more radical in its distinctive design. In gist, Funk's Jesus did not arrive via a miraculous birth, did not think of himself as a messiah or son of God, was not a miracle worker, did not preach apocalyptic judgment, did not select special followers, appoint leaders among them, or establish a church and inaugurate a world mission. Jesus had no foreknowledge of his resurrection, nor did he submit to an atoning blood sacrifice in his passion and death. Jesus was not the external redeemer or the eternal Son of God of Christian myth and doctrine. Indeed, in order to free himself from the Christianizing biases of the Gospels, or what he calls 'the veil of Easter', 22. The best critique of the Jesus Seminar (along with the works of Crossan, Borg and Mack) can be found in Luke Timothy Johnson, The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996). See also Ben Witherington's critical review in Chapter 2 of his The Jesus Quest, pp. 42-57.

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Funk is less concerned about who Jesus was, or even how he thought of himself, than in what Jesus was about, that being the call to which he was responding. Jesus did not make claims but was being claimed. Thus, whatever we say of Jesus' identity, Funk argues, must emerge from Jesus' vision of God's domain and his attempt to share it with others in his teachings and deeds. The roots of Christianity lie here, behind the creedal Christ, in the unbrokered relationship to God that Jesus experienced and advocated. If Jesus is a saviour, it is only because he aspired to heaven as all mortals do but was wise enough to reject the temptations of worldly power and glory and accept the limits of human existence, thus becoming the model for all seekers of immortality. John P. Meier Of our six Jesus researchers, John Meier offers the most traditional portrait of Jesus, which in part may be due to the fact that he is a Catholic priest and professor of New Testament at Catholic University. His scholarship is characterized by both caution and careful argumentation. He has produced an imposing body of work that is still in process. Currently completing the third and final volume of his massive project on the historical Jesus, this trilogy will likely become the standard work in the field for some time to come.23 The first volume of Meier's The Marginal Jew deals mostly with the source texts, historical context and methodological issues, setting the stage before his actual discussion of Jesus that follows. There Meier explains why his reconstruction of Jesus rests almost entirely on the canonical sources, arguing that the extracanonical sources offer us virtually nothing of historical value. Against scholars like Crossan who posit an early dating for some extracanonical Gospels, such as the Gospel of Peter and the Gospel of Thomas, Meier argues, along with the majority of scholars, that these texts are derivative of the canonical Gospels and must be treated accordingly. Nevertheless, Meier does offer a very credible and insightful examination of the little we can learn about Jesus from early non-Christian sources, such as Josephus, Tacitus and Suetonius in their brief references to Jesus. In this volume Meier also enumerates most clearly for the lay reader the criteria scholars like himself use to judge the historicity of Jesus traditions in the Gospels (see the Appendix below). Unlike Crossan, who draws 23. See John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus (2 vols.; New York: Doubleday, 1991-94).

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almost exclusively on the criterion of multiple independent attestation, Meier is much more eclectic but also more circumspect in his use of the primary and secondary criteria. Meier's second volume treats Jesus' public ministry, focusing on Jesus' relationship to John the Baptist, his proclamation of the kingdom of God and his miracles (which comprises most of the book). Jesus adopted John's future eschatological teaching and maintained it throughout his ministry; however, he did not believe in an imminent Parousia, judging the relevant passages (such as Mk 13.30) to be a product of the early church. Against scholars like Crossan and various liberation theologians, the kingdom of God that Jesus preached was not a social programme or political movement, since it refers to God who alone acts to establish his kingdom of justice and love to be fulfilled in the end time. Humans can and must respond in kind, but essentially, since God is the initiator, humans can only wait for it. On the last theme of miracles, Meier ranges widely from theological to historical to philosophical issues. He rejects the modern a priori judgment of Sanders and other scholars that miracles cannot and therefore did not happen. Since people who witnessed Jesus' 'deeds of power' experienced them as miracles, this is enough for Meier to claim that the miracle traditions are authentic, though he does not argue for the historicity of any of the miracles per se. He does argue against the view proposed by Crossan and others that Jesus' miracles can be categorized as ancient magic, claiming that the stories of Jesus' miracles in the gospels are devoid of features that would characterize them as such. In this volume Meier also adds an excursus on the Q document. He takes on biblical scholars (like Mack and his circle) who reconstruct Q's original composition, its stages of redaction, its originating community, its theology, etc. Meier is sceptical about making too much out of this hypothetical document, believing that none of this is knowable based on the data currently available.24 Even if we had a valid reconstruction of Q and its development, he claims that it would still tell us virtually nothing about the historical Jesus, since any logion in Q could have just as well originated with the early church as with Jesus. The authenticity of a saying cannot depend on the time of its entrance into Qor any other Jesus tradition, oral or written. Meier's projected third volume will complete his study by focusing on the crucial questions of Jesus' identity, the various individuals and groups

24. Meier, A Marginal Jew, II, pp. 177-81.

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responding to Jesus' words and deeds, particularly his disciples, and Jesus' relation to the Mosaic Law. Based on the direction of his study so far we can safely say that Meier sees Jesus as some sort of messianic figure, though being a complex historical person he eludes precise definition. In gist, Meier's Jesus is a miracle working eschatological prophet, a charismatic who taught a radical interpretation of the Law, and who located his authority to teach not in the accepted channels but in his direct experience of God, thereby knowing intuitively God's will for Israel. Like the great New Testament exegete, Raymond E. Brown, Meier takes critical-historical scholarship about as far as it goes without infringing on the creedal and doctrinal traditions of the Church. In the works of these two Catholic scholars orthodox faith remains largely intact. Consequently, other critical scholars, like Funk and Crossan, judge their work to be based more on apologetics than real history. Though their scholarship is indeed rooted in their Catholic tradition, this characterization of Meier and Brown would seem unfair to anyone who has carefully read their very judicious works. Both are fully committed to the historical-critical method but shy away from drawing speculative conclusions about the same data of material studied by other scholars. For this reason their portrait of Jesus appears the more traditional compared to their more dissident colleagues in the field.

3 What exactly would Voegelin make of the last 20 years of Jesus research? It is difficult to say, since the third quest for the historical Jesus began around 1980 and Voegelin's important writings on the subject of Jesus and Christianity predate that year. However, anyone familiar with Voegelin's work would know that he was a great champion of the work of contemporary historians who, freed of dogmatic prejudice and ruling orthodoxies, follow the established canons of historical science, as he did. For this reason I believe Voegelin would defend historical Jesus research as a legitimate and necessary affair, in so far as historical reconstructions of Jesus mark the post-Hegelian attempt to return from dogma to the reality of experience. However controversial the conclusions of these scholars may be, their work cannot be dismissed, for what they seek to do is salutary: to clear away the doctrinal veneer and false interpretations that have been laid over Jesus and the gospels, providing a fresh understanding of who Jesus was and what he was about.

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However, the purpose of this essay is not simply to review and affirm the works of these Jesus scholars, but rather to penetrate to the critical issues that Voegelin's philosophy illuminates in the quest for the 'truest understanding' of the Christian sources. Though a thorough understanding of Voegelin's mature philosophy of history and consciousness is necessary in order to appreciate the full extent of his contribution to New Testament studies, in what follows I will draw only upon the few significant essays from his corpus that treat the New Testament.25 Eric Voegelin was not a Bible scholar; nor was he a theologian. He was a philosopher. As a philosopher Voegelin read the Bible philosophically, seeking to penetrate to the experiences of order that ground its symbols and stories. Likewise Voegelin was not a critical historian per se, but a philosopher of history seeking to grasp the movement and structure of history as the unfolding of the human-divine drama revealed in the world historic events that yield a differentiation of consciousness. For Voegelin, the New Testament expressed the most pneumatically differentiated understanding of reality available. Thus, he did not study it to learn about the historical Jesus according to the modern methods of critical history. He studied the New Testament to understand the originating experiences of the theophanic Christ, the climactic revelation of divine presence in history.26 This approach to reading the gospels was already evident in Voegelin's History of Political Ideas from the 1940s. There, in Volume I, Part 2, Chapter 1, entitled The Rise of Christianity', Voegelin focused on the emergence of Christianity as an epoch-making event due to its creation of a new community substance that grounds the civilization of the West.27 25. Two of these essays, his most theological, represent Voegelin at his exegetical best: 'The Gospel and Culture', and 'The Pauline Vision of the Resurrected', both from the early 1970s. For an introduction to Voegelin's thought from a theological perspective, see my book Consciousness and Transcendence: The Theology of Eric Voegelin (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994). 26. Voegelin once explained why he had stopped short of treating Christianity in the first three volumes of Order and History. 'The question of Jesus I always shunned because I saw one couldn't do it on the basis of theology. Theology is two thousand years' accretion on top of the Gospel, and deforms the symbolism of the Gospel in a certain direction through the introduction of Hellenistic philosophy. One has to go back of theology and work directly on the sources of the time.' Eric Voegelin, Conversations with Eric Voegelin (ed. R. Eric O'Connor; Thomas More Institute Papers, 76; Montreal: Perry Printing Limited, 1980), p. 82. 27. See Eric Voegelin, History of Political Ideas. I. Hellenism, Rome, and Early

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The interest this had for a political scientist was due to the host of problems caused by Christianity when its spiritual substance and universalistic claims were absorbed into a world empire ordered on a collection of diverse ethnic societies loosely held together by a hegemonic power organization but lacking any spiritual unity. This absorption yielded the classic conflict between the spiritual and temporal powers in political society whose tension exists to this day. To clarify the issues involved Voegelin had to penetrate to the core of the spiritual substance let loose on the Roman Empire, and therefore spends the bulk of this chapter speaking about Jesus. In the long Section 2, entitled simply 'Jesus', Voegelin stated that the constitution of the new community originated from the personality and life of Jesus. However, he lamented that it is difficult to give an account of this phase in history because of the insufficiency of the critical exegesis of the Gospels. At the time Voegelin had to depend on the latest authoritative study of the Gospels, that of Guignebert's Jesus (Paris, 1933). Guignebert's study focused on the historical Jesus, not the Christ of faith. The following quotation summarizes Guignebert's portrait of Jesus but ends with Voegelin's crucial divergence concerning the proper methods involved in studying the Gospels in order to penetrate to the core issue: The latest authoritative study of the life of Jesus, by Guignebert, arrives at the conclusion that Jesus was a Jewish rabbi, a prophet, diverging in his teaching not essentially from the profounder, less legalistic type of Pharisaism as represented by Rabbi Hillel; that the poor, the amharez, were near to his heart, that Jesus announced the coming of the kingdom of God and demanded a radical change of heart in preparation for it, the metanoia (just as the Baptist), that his teaching was not very successful in the Galilean country towns, and that in a last desperate effort he made an attempt to teach in Jerusalem, where the Roman police got hold of him as a disturber of the peace and where he met his death rather unexpectedly. According to Guignebert, Jesus did not have any consciousness of being the Messiah, did not designate himself as such, and was not believed to be the Messiah by his disciples. He did not expect his death, and the disciples were in no way prepared for the event: that the Last Supper had taken place under circumstances similar to those reported in the Gospel is extremely doubtful; the trial did not imply the charge that he pronounced himself the Messiah. The experience of Jesus as the Messiah did not exist before his death and originates from the visions that the apostles had of the Resurrected.

Christianity (ed. Athanasios Moulakis; Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 19; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), pp. 149-72.

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As a result, the apostles, and particularly Peter, appear as the great religious personalities whose intensity of faith evoked the figure of the Messiah in visions after the death of Jesus. The plain statement of the result arouses grave misgivings as to its correctness, for it remains obscure what in the personality of Jesus should have been the cause for the somewhat surprising effect on the disciples after his life had ended in a black failure. The analysis of Guignebert is impeccable in itself, and I do not see what could very well be opposed to its plausibility, even if other authorities can take exception to an infinity of details with equal plausibility. I have reported, therefore, dutifully, the result of the analysis as the latest stage of science, but I have to draw the conclusion that the methods of critical exegesis of the Gospels are not the methods by which we can approach the personality of Jesus.

Voegelin proceeded to provide the framework for a proper critical exegesis of the Gospels by keeping with their peculiar nature: hagiographic literature (though he adds that it is more cautious to rank the Gospels as sui generis).29 The typical approach to the Gospels (which Jesus scholars today continue to employ) is trained, for example, on the life data of Jesus, the authenticity of his sayings and deeds and his influences and context. But Voegelin claimed that this leaves in the dark the most important problem: 'the religious personality and its effects on the disciples'.30 Consequently, Voegelin, choosing Mark as the prototypical Gospel, assumes that it conveys the personality of Jesus, his life and work, however incorrect the details are historically. The Gospels are not stenographic reports. On this score Voegelin has always aligned himself with the bulk of Bible scholars who read the Gospels as myth more than as history, not least because of the problems caused by their obvious contradictions. They reflect more the movements of early Christian experiences, than that of the Jewish Jesus. Nevertheless, he argued that the personality of the historical Jesus does emerge in the miracle stories, in the parables and in the dialogue scenes. But because of the lack of sources, we have no direct access to the personality of Jesus and his religious experiences compared to that of, say, Second Isaiah.31 28. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas, I, pp. 151-52. 29. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas, I, p. 152. 30. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas, I, p. 153. 31. Voegelin, ///Vtory of Political Ideas, I, p. 153. For Voegelin the case of the 'historical Jesus' is not that distant from that of the 'historical Moses'. See Eric Voegelin, Order and History. I. Israel and Revelation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956), pp. 380-88. He writes: 'The oral and written forms of saga and legend, of the paradigmatic elaboration of traditions, and of the Torah have penetrated their

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The most illuminating feature of Voegelin's exegesis of the Gospels in this early account concerns the mana of Jesus. Drawing on the story of the haemorrhaging woman in Mark 5, he identifies the principal element that constitutes the spiritual substance of Jesus and the community founded in his name. When she touches Jesus he felt 'that power (mana) had gone out of him'. Jesus is possessed of this mana which has the power to heal those who respond to him in faith. But he cannot use it at will; it requires the metanoia, the turning, the state of faith that springs from the soul of the individual. There is suggested in this story and other stories of Jesus' faith healing the Pauline teaching of faith over works, of faith as love and devotion and not intellectual acceptance of a creed or proposition. Jesus did not, and presumably could not, effect through magical works the mana of God, nor exercise it as a 'sign' to prove who he was. This is suggested by the story in Mark 6 of Jesus' failure to do just this when he returned home to Nazareth. The story further suggests that the biographical knowledge of the prophet prevents one from responding in faith to the mana that he possesses but does not control. Since the disciples and evangelists were themselves responsive in faith to the mana in Jesus, effecting the metanoia in their souls, the Gospels cannot be read as historical narratives, but rather as symbolizations of faith inspired by personal experiences of the personality of the prophet they claimed was the Messiah. The community substance that Christianity carried into the world of empire was constituted by this mana rooted in the interaction between Jesus and his disciples who responded to it. Its source was divine, and thus the community of the church represents the body of Christ whose spirit dwells within effecting ongoing metanoia. The gospel thus hinges on the experience of metanoia. To read it as a historical record about historical events, or as fanciful myth that yields some vestiges of historical fact, is not to read it according to its nature. Voegelin read the gospel as gospel. This is what, at this early stage in his analysis of history, he understood the 'critical exegesis' of the gospel to be. In his later work, Voegelin had come a long way since the 1940s in his analysis of the Christian sources. This later work reflects a more refined view of theophanic vision, and turns to the experiences of the theophanic Christ centred originally and authoritatively on Paul's vision of the resurrected, the earliest recorded Easter vision. To explicate the theophany of

materials so thoroughly that the construction of a reliable biography of Moses, or of the pragmatic course of events, has become impossible' (p. 382).

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the Christ to Paul and the other disciples, Voegelin avoided using the categories 'Jesus °f history' and 'Christ of faith', as if the disciples's response to the divine presence in Jesus was not one of faith, or as if the revelation of the divine in Jesus to the same disciples was not a historical event. The problem is that the distinction between the Jesus of history and the canonical Christ, or the pre-Easter and the post-Easter Jesus,32 however valid for critical history, yields a dichotomy that destroys the metaxic structure of the gospel. The Gospels are indeed mythic accounts of a theophanic experience. They are the unique symbolic form that the revelation of the Christ took in response to the theophany of the divine in him. In other words, the Gospels are what I would call a narrative theology based on the pneumatic experiences of those first-century Jews who met and remembered the man they came to call the Son of God. To read the Gospels with critical-historical eyes alone misses the point. It misses the reason why they were composed and circulated in the first place. Their truth, which is ultimately transhistorical, is embedded in the original visionary experiences they seek to symbolize. To recover these experiences goes beyond the retrieval work of critical history; it requires a meditative reading of the texts to experientially re-enact in one's own consciousness (at least vicariously) the truth of the original vision. Intellectually this is the contemplative work of philosophy and theology centred on mystagogy, not 'critical history' per se.33 More importantly, for most people (who are not philosophers), it requires ritual, faith, prayer, liturgical celebration, sacramental rites, meditative preaching and teaching and so on, to first order one's existence in relation to the divine.34 32. These are Marcus J. Borg's preferred terms. See his Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship, p. 195. 33. Voegelin once used the phrase 'critical history' to mean the penetration to the spiritual disorder that precipitates the cultural disorder of our time, something that 'descriptive history' fails to do. Illuminating this insight, he writes: 'the objectivity of historical knowledge is a fraud when the historian limits his object to the causal chain of passions and interests; for to the reality of history there belongs also the spirit, and when the spirit as a critical factor is excluded from the perception of events, then the objectivity of description becomes a blameworthy sympathizing with the condition of spiritual desolation and a complicity in its results'. Eric Voegelin, 'The German University and the Order of German Society: A Reconsideration of the Nazi Era', in Voegelin, Published Essays, 1966-1985, pp. 1-35 (5). 34. See Voegelin's statement on this in his essay 'Anxiety and Reason', in Eric Voegelin, What Is History? And Other Late Unpublished Writings (ed. Thomas A. Hollweck and Paul Caringella; Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 28; Baton Rouge:

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This meditative exegesis is what Voegelin accomplished in such essays as The Pauline Vision of the Resurrected' and 'The Gospel and Culture'. It is the kind of in-depth reading of the texts that critical historians do not do or cannot do, especially those who are not spiritually equipped to read a Gospel as a Gospel, or to read a Pauline symbolization of a theophanic vision as revelatory. To reduce the substance of the Gospels to their 'historicity' destroys the symbolic form of the myth, which for their anonymous authors was the proper expression of the vision of the divine in the metaxy mediated by Jesus. To ferret out the 'objective', factual core of the 'subjective' myth is inane, since it breaks apart the poles of the tension in religious experience. Such historical reconstruction that recognizes as real only the 'objective' phenomenal dimension of reality is encumbered by a Cartesian dualism. As Voegelin taught us, the mystery of the divinehuman participation cannot be split asunder without massive distortion: To invent a 'critical history' that will allow us to decide whether Incarnation and Resurrection are 'historically real' turns the structure of reality upside down; it flies in the face of all our empirical knowledge about history and its constitution of meaning. The misunderstandings arise from the separation of a 'content' from the reality of the experience, and from the treatment of the content as an object of prepositional knowledge. In its metaleptic context, Incarnation is the reality of divine presence in Jesus as experienced by the men who were his disciples and expressed their experience by the symbol 'Son of God' and its equivalents; while Resurrection refers to the Pauline vision of the Resurrected, as well as to the other visions which Paul, who knew something about visions, classified as of the same type as his own (1 Cor. 15.3-8).35

The failures of the critical historians derive from the aforementioned dichotomy that forsakes the metaxy. From this primary failure to recognize the metaleptic dimension of the source texts and the religious experiences they symbolize spring the prevalent fallacies, all interrelated, that one can find among a number of Jesus researchers. First: the separation of history and theology. The Jesus of history and the Christ of faith cannot be so easily separated, because revelation in history yields a theological language to properly express its meaning. To denude historical events of their theological mediation in order to 'see it truly' is to risk not seeing it at all, or to see it with blinders on. A historian may legitimately seek to detect the historicity of certain Christian claims Louisiana State University Press, 1990), pp. 52-110 (91-92). 35. Voegelin, Order and History, IV, pp. 243-44.

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about Jesus but be unable to evaluate their theological or philosophical validity. Some events, as experienced by those who suffered them, may possess inherent theological content or intent, which can find no explanation outside the realm of God-language. The differentiating structure of history is revealed by theophanic events to which those who experience them respond in faith and express themselves in the analogical, participatory language of theology (faith seeking understanding). Second: antiquarianism and primitivism. A number of scholars suffer from the prejudice that what is merely historical is what is most real and interesting, and that what is earliest is truest (for example, Crossan and Borg). But the earliest accounts of Jesus are not always the most reliable or revelatory. Later accounts can present Jesus in a more reflective manner, more adequate to the spiritual essence of the originating experiences. Vivid witness to Christian truth can appear in secondary writings as understanding develops in a disciple's grasp of meaning. Third: positivism. Many critical scholars claim that what is historically meaningful is only the material, phenomenal underpinnings of the text, those 'objective' facts of history that were later distorted by theological embellishment in the oral and written traditions of the first century (for example, Burton L. Mack, who uses the words myth and mythmaking in this reductionistic sense). But the revelation continued to be experienced, digested and expanded as the Jesus movement spread, requiring a visionary, indeed imaginative, development beyond the 'objective' facts as received. Finally, there are the more glaring fallacies, more often ignored than castigated by the academic community. These come usually from antiChristian authors, some of whom even reject the very historicity of Jesus, claiming that the Christian myth was invented as a hoax.36 Likewise one can find in any bookstore today books by New Age authors who spin fanciful yarns that appeal to those possessed of an eclectic, cross-cultural spirituality. For example, one can find a portrait of a young Jesus who travelled to India where he discovered in Buddhism the source of his teachings, or, more credibly, a Jesus who came under the influence of Buddhist monks whose missionary journeys reached Palestine in the first century. One can even read the recent fabrication of a fantasizing historian whose creative historiogenesis traces the Crown of England back to King David through

36. See, for example, G.A. Wells, Who Was Jesus? (LaSalle IL: Open Court, 1989); and his most recent study, The Jesus Legend (Chicago: Open Court, 1996).

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Jesus Christ himself.37 Voegelin of course would dismiss the fantastic reconstructions of these 'scholars' as 'second realities', which emerge in an age of deculturation because of the refusal to accept reality as we know it to be. Nor would he countenance those scholars who seem to be motivated by a more subtle anti-Christian ideology.38 I believe Voegelin would find those scholars engaged in the quest for the historical Jesus today to be, for the most part, spiritually obtuse, philosophically uninformed and even historically limited. This is so not because the search for the actual Jesus of Nazareth in his original setting is a misguided affair—quite the contrary—but because such critical reconstruction, taken at face value, distorts the meaning of history itself. History is not a record of factual events to be recovered by scholars who piece them together in chronological order in order to give a true account of 'what 37. See Laurence Gardner, Bloodline of the Holy Grail: The Hidden Lineage of Jesus Revealed (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1997). According to this book Jesus married Mary Magdalene, whose son became the scion of an amazing genealogy that terminates in the House of Stuart. To no reader's surprise, the author is the Historiographer Royal of the House of Stuart. 38. Burton L. Mack's work appears tainted by such an ideology. In a recent article reviewing the work of the International Q Project and the Jesus Seminar, he is quoted as saying: 'It's over. We've had enough apocalypses. We've had enough martyrs. Christianity has had a two-thousand-year run, and it's over.' Charlotte Allen, 'The Search for a No-Frills Jesus', The Atlantic Monthly, December 1996, pp. 51-68 (67). This bold statement indeed summarizes the final section in the conclusion to Mack's first book A Myth of Innocence, entitled 'The Cost of the Markan Legacy' (pp. 368-76). There he lamented Mark's making Jesus the founder of Christianity, the first step that led to the ruinous calamities of Western Culture through the ages, such as the Christian antiSemitism that first emerged in the gospels and culminated in the Holocaust. With regard to our own national founding, he claimed that the 'Markan myth of innocence' and its messianic complex expanded into the American myth of innocence, giving us such horrors as the genocide of the Native Americans, Hiroshima, Vietnam and Star Wars, Though one cannot deny the wanton violence Christians have inflicted on others in the name of Jesus throughout the centuries, one has to wonder about the prejudicial motives of a historian of Christian origins who refutes the legitimacy of Christianity itself. Mack's final words in this book, characteristic of much of his writing, say it all: 'There are no messiahs. It may be time to give up the notion. Neither Mark's fiction of the first appearance of the man of power, nor his fantasy of the final appearance of the man of glory, fit the wisdom now required. The church canonized a remarkably pitiful moment of early Christian condemnation of the world. Thus the world now stands condemned. It is enough. A future for the world can hardly be imagined any longer, if its redemption rests in the hands of Mark's innocent son of God.' Mack, A Myth of Innocence, p. 376.

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really happened'. Rather, history, according to Voegelin, is 'the area of reality where the directional movement of the cosmos achieves luminosity of consciousness'.39 The historical enterprise to reconstruct 'what really happened' is not illegitimate; indeed Voegelin would himself sanction a 'no-holds-barred' approach. What is problematic is that historians who seek to do serious history do not seem to know what history is. In this light I believe Voegelin would find the historical experiences the Jesus researchers recover to be inordinately prosaic and ultimately beside the point. Their reconstruction of Jesus and his times follows the mode of doing history on the level of phenomena. This of course has its value, but it is a limited one at best, since by focusing only on the pragmatic events that ground its symbols and stories, the revelatory content of the New Testament will fail to emerge. For Voegelin history is structured by the revelatory events that reveal its truth, and thus he had to penetrate to the experiences of order behind the texts, for only on the level of participatory experiences could the truth of the Christian story appear—and not just the Christian story, but the whole story of history as a story told by God, and always in a limited way told by us. As a philosopher, Voegelin could not avow the singular truth of Christianity, and he often distanced himself from traditional Christian claims; but he did once proclaim, in a characteristically cryptic phrase, that 'History is Christ written large'.40 Many of the Third Questers and members of the Jesus Seminar demonstrate no sensibility for revelation in history as symbolized in the texts they scrutinize. They fail to apperceive the theophanic structure of history, that 'history is a mystery in process of revelation'.41 As Voegelin has often proclaimed, this failure is symptomatic of the state of deculturation in the academy and in modernity as a whole, which he perceived as 'gnostic'.42 Their books often seem motivated by a demythologizing agenda in order to score political points, in the name of critical scholarship, against those who represent a still too dogmatic and literalist tradition. 39. Voegelin, Order and History, IV, p. 242. 40. Eric Voegelin, 'Immortality: Experience and Symbol', in Voegelin, Published Essays, 1966-1985, pp. 52-94 (78). 41. Voegelin, Order and History, IV, p. 6. 42. Voegelin's critique of the 'gnostic' historiographers Hegel, Comte and Marx with respect to their failure to witness to this truth is well-known and found throughout his writings, but he also found such witness lacking in the great civilizational historian Toynbee.

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However, what is needed today in Christian faith and theology is a 'remythologizing' agenda in order to make alive once again the gospel story, deadened by centuries of hypostatized literalism, dogmatism and rationalism. Because of the social dominance of these forces, Voegelin remarked that For ever-increasing masses of people, the sensual myths of the Christian tradition are being dissolved, while the spiritualized expressions of the experience of transcendence in intellectual mysticism and philosophical speculation are accessible only to a small minority. The inevitable result is the phenomenon of 'being lost' in a world that has no more fixed points in the myth. People, of course, do not cease to have experiences of transcendence, but these experiences remain in the psychic strata of shudder and fear; they cannot productively contribute to the creation of an order of symbols through which the transfinite processes can be made comprehensible in the transparency of the myth.

Thus, if we are to follow Voegelin's guidance here, the Bultmannian project of demythologization—translating the mythic symbols of the New Testament (unseemly to us moderns) into their 'real' existentialist meaning—must today yield to the metaleptic project of participation in the myth as myth, which alone can make transparent the truth of the theophany it seeks to illuminate. In this manner can the gospel become the alethinos logos of the Unknown God who becomes known in the saving tale of the Christ, a tale of love that promises to save from death those who participate in its timeless truth and universal grace. In conclusion, I am reminded of a provocative passage in Voegelin's last work. In reflecting on the debate concerning the origins of language, Voegelin remarked that like other structures of reality, be they atoms, molecules, genes, species, races or human consciousness itself, the epiphany of language 'is a mystery inaccessible to explanation'.44 By analogy I believe one could make the same claim about the historical origins of Christian truth. The actual historical events at the source of the Christian tradition that yielded to consciousness the Christian mysteries of incarnation, cross and redemption, are inaccessible to explanation. The concrete historical experiences of Jesus' encounter with God and the disciples' experience of Jesus, which over the course of decades engendered their 43. Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis (ed. and trans. Gerhart Niemeyer; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), p. 26. 44. Eric Voegelin, Order and History. V. In Search of Order (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), p. 17.

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symbolization in Gospels of the Christ and other early Christian writings, are irretrievable. Not only for lack of primary historical data is this so, but also because of the nature of revelation itself. For the revelatory truth of the gospel is irreducible to its genesis in particular historical events. Its truth, rather, lies in the universal presence of the divine in the human soul, that came to an epiphanic peak in the personal consciousness of Jesus, and through him in his disciples, in Paul, and in the evangelists who composed and developed the narratives of the mystery of transfiguring love in history, in memory of the one they called Lord. Appendix The following criteria are used by New Testament scholars today to judge authentic Jesus traditions, that is, material deemed historical and not invented by disciples and evangelists.45 Primary Criteria 1. Multiple attestation. Tradition that is found in more than one independent source (such as Mark, Q, Paul, John) is likely to be historical. 2. Dissimilarity. Tradition that cannot easily be explained as having originated in the early church or having been taken over from Jewish traditions is said to be dissimilar and therefore has a reasonable claim to authenticity. 3. Embarrassment. Tradition that is potentially embarrassing to the early church or the evangelists is not likely to have been invented. 4. Coherence, consistency, or conformity. Sayings or deeds of Jesus that fit in well with other traditions established as authentic by the first three criteria are likely to be authentic. 5. Rejection and execution. Any tradition that contributes to Jesus being tried and executed by Rome as 'King of the Jews'. Whatever is there that might explain this historical fact, as supported by Josephus, Tacitus and Lucian of Samosata, has a higher degree of authenticity.

45. For the best explication of these criteria, see Meier, A Marginal Jew, I, Chapter 6: 'Criteria: How Do We Decide What Comes from Jesus?', pp. 167-95.

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Secondary Criteria 6. Traces of Aramaic. Any saying of Jesus that has an Aramaic substratum. 7. Palestinian environment. Any saying that reflects the times. 8. Vividness of narration. Any saying that reflects an eyewitness report. 9. Tendencies of the developing synoptic tradition. Presumes scholars can discern certain 'laws of development', for example, making details concrete, adding proper names, eliminating Aramaic words and so on. 10. Historical presumption. Credence is given to early historical reports until the opposite is proven; burden of proof lies with the naysayers of historicity.

Part IV

VOEGELIN'S IMPLICIT' THEORY OF LITERARY AND MODERN CULTURAL CRITICISM

ERIC VOEGELIN AND LITERARY THEORY Eugene Webb

Eric Voegelin was a philosopher and political theorist, but he was also widely read in literature, and his general framework of thought gave a central place to the mythic imagination—of which we might take literature in the modern sense to be at least a province. He also referred to specifically literary works occasionally in his writings, and in at least one case, that of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw—in a letter to the critic Robert B. Heilman (13 November 1947) and a later 'Postscript' to it (1970),1 he offered an extensive analysis of a classic example of literary modernism. I would like in this essay to explore some of the ways in which Voegelin's thought might be seen to relate to the main issues of contemporary literary theory. It would not take very long, of course, for his readers to guess what Voegelin might have thought about much of what today goes by the name of literary theory—and I can confirm anecdotally that the guess would be correct; he once sent me, with amusement, as well as a certain scorn, a parody of post-structuralist theory he had clipped from The Times Literary Supplemental April 1978, pp. 440-41). It consists of a commentary on and an excerpt from a purported piece of critical writing (entitled Glglgl) by a purported theorist named Hendrik de Stijl. The title is a one-upping (or as they might say more elegantly in French, a surencheremenf), of Derrida's Glas, which a real critic in Diacritics (who will here be left anonymous) quoted by de Stijl's supposed commentator, Msistislav Bogdanovich, said combined the death knell (its meaning in French) with 'the sound of the spit in the throat and the death rattle; in fact...all the sticky 1. Originally published as Eric Voegelin, 'Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, with a 'Prefatory Note' by Donald E. Stanford; a 'Foreword' by Robert B. Heilman; and a 'Postscript: On Paradise and Revolution' by Eric Voegelin, Southern Review, NS, 7 (1971), pp. 3-48. Neither Heilman's 'Foreword' nor Stanford's 'Prefatory Note' appeared with the essay when it was reprinted as 'On Henry James's Turn of the Screw, in Eric Voegelin, Published Essays, 1966—1985 (ed. Ellis Sandoz; Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, 12; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), pp. 134-71.

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agglutinative gurgling of the body as such'. As Bogdanovich says, 'in the face of de Stijl's Nullisme, how pale, how quaintly serious, is Derrida's nihilism after all!' Clearly this and its real-life analogues would not be Voegelin's idea of theory, but there has been more to literary theory than merely that, and many of its issues are ones he would have had to take seriously if he had gone into them. Moreover, although Voegelin never himself formulated an explicit theory of literature to compete with those he considered ridiculous, it is possible to see the outlines of one in some of his statements about literature in his references to Greek tragedy and to the analyses of particular works of literature that appear now and then among his writings. Modern literary theory has had basically two thrusts. One—deriving from the effort of romantic, organic unity theorists, such as Coleridge, the French Symbolists, and the New Critics, among others, to define literature as a unique form of discourse—emphasizes literature's radical autonomy, its contemplative objectivity. The other, deriving from positivists and ideological social activists such as Sainte-Beuve, Marx, Taine and Zola, emphasizes the relation of literature to social and historical determinants. In a recent survey, Murray Krieger has suggested that despite their surface differences and their mutual vituperations, both the New Critics and the deconstructionists can be considered expressions of the former trend, while the New Historicists of today can be seen as expressions of the latter.2 Standing back from the mutual antagonisms of these camps, Krieger advocates a balanced view that would see partial truth on each side of the debate—a position that sounds very sensible, of course, since if either were exclusively correct we would all be stuck in the literary equivalent of a sterile spirit versus matter dualism. But do these antitheses exhaust the alternatives of interpretation? And is a synthesis of them the only thing that would make sense of our human experience of simultaneous involvement in and transcendence of the flux of history? Voegelin's thought offers a third, quite different perspective. As he sees it, the literary imagination reflects the mode of existence of the historical individuals who give it expression, and their modes of existence in turn, depending on the individual's resistance or submission to the surrounding culture, may be representative of more widespread patterns in their

2. Murray Krieger, The Institution of Theory (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp. 42-45.

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society. These modes of existence fall basically into two types, which Voegelin referred to as 'open' and 'closed'. Open existence is the mode that consciously directs itself toward reality, in all its dimensions, the spiritual as well as the material. Since the experience of human existence, for Voegelin, involves a sense of tension, of imperfection and lack of satisfaction, that could be assuaged only by a fullness beyond the reach of humanity, open existence necessarily must be an openness to a certain measure of suffering, a willingness to endure both the love of what is beyond us and the fact that it remains forever beyond. Open existence, in other words, is openness to existence under the conditions of finitude. Closed existence is a tendency to close oneself to existence, to pull back from living with full consciousness in reality—with the reality in question being understood to include experiential, cognitive and moral dimensions. One can give oneself to life or withhold oneself from it on any of these levels. This means, therefore, that Voegelin's thought tends ultimately toward a concern not just with the aesthetic good but with existential truth and with the good of existential decision, and his deepest objection to much of modern literary theory would be its tendency to bypass such issues—although it should be said that there have also been modern critics who have been as open to them as he was and whom he admired. A few who come to mind are Robert B. Heilman himself, Cleanth Brooks and Northrop Frye. We can see something of what Voegelin thought literature in its ultimate development as an expression of open existence could be if we consider his conception of Greek tragedy. He discussed this in the The World of the Polls, the second volume of his Order and History? As Voegelin saw it, tragedy was an essential element in the remarkable cultural enterprise that took place through the confluence of philosophy and literary imagination during that brief but historically pregnant period in which '[p]ower and spirit were linked in history for one golden hour through the inseparable events of the Athenian victory in the Persian War and the Aeschylean creation of the tragedy' (p. 243). Tragedy, he says, 'continues the search for truth' by participating 'in the great search for truth from Hesiod to the mystic-philosophers' (that is, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and others, including Plato) (p. 247). The material of tragedy was myth, but myth removed from its storytelling mode in Homer or its speculative mode in Hesiod. In tragedy myth 3. Eric Voegelin, Order and History. II. The World of the Polls (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957), pp. 243-66.

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is no longer primarily the aesthetic imitation of an action or the use of such imitation as an instrument of philosophical problem-solving. Rather, as Voegelin put it, [t]he truth of the tragedy is action itself, that is, action on the new, differentiated level of a movement in the soul that culminates in the decision (proairesis) of a mature, responsible man. The newly discovered humanity of the soul expands into the realm of action. Tragedy as a form is the study of the human soul in the process of making decisions, while the single tragedies construct conditions and experimental situations, in which a fully developed, self-conscious soul is forced into action (p. 247).

This is what he meant when he said that '[flrom its very beginning the tragedy was established as a cult-institution of the people' (p. 244); its performance and witnessing was a spiritual exercise designed to elicit in the participants a sense of existential possibilities and to call them toward their actualization in responsible personhood. (Voegelin illustrates his point with an analysis of Aeschylus's Suppliants, the whole thrust of which is toward the decision of the polis to commit itself to justice in giving refuge to the Danaides, who are fleeing from forced marriage to the sons of Aegyptus.) Voegelin's comment on Aristotle's treatment of tragedy makes clear his distance from any merely aestheticizing theory of literature: The disintegration of tragedy is complete when we reach the standard treatise on the subject, the Poetics of Aristotle. Tragedy has become a literary genus, to be dissected with regard to its formal characteristics, its 'parts'. It is the most important genus because of its formal complexity; he who understands tragedy has understood all other literary forms. As far as the substance and historical function of tragedy is concerned, however, there is barely an elusive hint in the Poetics-, obviously the problem had moved for Aristotle entirely beyond his horizon of interests (p. 246).

It is not only literary theory, however, that can bypass the existential issues Voegelin focused on. Literature itself can also obscure them even as it tries, at least in part, to address them. Because the literary imagination reflects the mode of existence of the historical individuals who give it expression, works of literature cannot fail to disclose something about existential possibilities and situations, and when they are expressions of open existence, they do so clearly. When they are expressions of existential closure, on the other hand, the movement of closure is itself given voice and form and thereby made available for reflection; but this may be in a way that is not only unclear but positively obstructive.

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Voegelin's major treatment of this type of problem was his discussion of The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, originating as a personal letter written to his colleague and friend, Professor Robert Heilman. Heilman writes in his 'Foreword' to the published letter that Voegelin had asked him about James, who he heard was being much discussed at the time (both were teaching at Louisiana State University in a period when it had a very lively English faculty).4 Heilman suggested he read The Turn of the Screw and also gave him some essays of his own about it. About three days later, Voegelin sent him the letter with his own analysis. In it Voegelin described the work as 'a study, not of the mystery of good and evil only, but of this mystery in relation to the complex of consciousness-consciencevirtue' and especially of the Puritan variant of this complex.5 The story is told from the point of view of a governess who has been charged by her young and handsome employer with the care of two children of whom he is the guardian, his nephew (Miles) and niece (Flora). He has imposed on the governess the condition of never disturbing him >about them but handling all problems herself, a condition she zealously undertakes to fulfil, even when serious problems arise. The story is probably familiar to every reader of this essay, so I need hardly mention that the particular problems that come up have to do with possible ghostly influences of a sinister sort involving an earlier butler (Quint) and governess (Miss Jessel), since deceased, and that it ends with the death of the boy. What interested Voegelin especially was the governess's intentness on resisting any temptation to appeal for help from a higher power (the employer). Voegelin thought that this was an expression of a deeply rooted will to self-salvation, growing out of a secularized version of America's Puritan heritage. He interprets the employer as a symbol of God, the governess as a symbol of the soul, and the simple housekeeper, who sees no ghosts and finds it difficult to believe the governess's suspicions, as a symbol of common-sense existence. 'From the beginning,' Voegelin says in the letter, 'James has defined his study carefully as a study of the demonically closed soul; of a soul which is possessed by the pride of handling the problem of good and evil by its own means; and the means which is at the disposition of this soul is the self-mastery and control of the spiritual forces (the symbol of the governess)—ending in a horrible defeat' (p. 136).

4. Voegelin, 'Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, Southern Review, p. 6. 5. Voegelin, 'On Henry James's Turn of the Screw, Published Essays, 1966-1985, p. 135. All subsequent references to Voegelin's text will be to this printing.

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Voegelin also brings up another major point: that there are hints of incestuous fascination in the picture of the relation between Miles and Flora and that the other relationships—between Quint and Miss Jessel (who are said in the story to have been 'united by an unspeakable bond'), the employer and the governess, and Miles and the governess—all have erotic, incestuous overtones. With this pattern in mind, Voegelin suggests that 'the ultimate, metaphysical conception of James goes back to a vision of the cosmic drama of good and evil and an incestuous affair in the divinity' (p. 148) that is, a project of Utopian self-sufficiency on the part of spiritual forces turned in on themselves by closure against what would be genuinely beyond them. He concludes that James is dealing with 'the problem of "self-salvation" through the demonically closed human will that plagued everybody in the nineteenth century...' (p. 149), and he closes with an expression of admiration for James's artistic achievement in representing it. That was in 1947. In 1970 when he wrote the 'Postscript: On Paradise and Revolution,' he was no longer so admiring, nor would he have said as he did earlier that 'James defined his study carefully as a study of the demonically closed soul'. Now he saw James not so much as a careful, deliberate artist but rather as a somewhat confused one who was himself implicated in a syndrome that the work only partially analyzes. Voegelin said he did not choose to take advantage of the occasion of the letter's publication to carry forward his analysis of James's story because, he said, T no longer believe that James's symbolism permits a direct translation into the language of philosophy at all' (p. 150), by which he meant that its implications for an understanding of human existence could not be made clear. 'Even while writing the letter', he said, I was uneasily aware of an incongruence between the meaning I tried to establish in terms of God and man, the Puritan soul and common sense, the passion of self-salvation, grace and damnation, and the Jamesian symbols which carried these meanings distinctly but surrounded by a ghostly aura of indistinctness. Even worse, when later I tried to pursue the symbols through the labyrinth of the story, the distinct core tended to be shrouded by the fogginess of meaning that pervaded the work as a whole (p. 150).

Voegelin makes a passing reference to a need 'to reconsider the assumptions under which the interpretation of a symbolistic work of art was undertaken twenty years ago' (p. 151). He does not mention what these were, but the thought is not hard to fill in, and doing so will make more explicit how Voegelin relates to the principal theoretical stances in the

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field. Here he is clearly alluding to the pattern of thought associated with the 'symbolist' approach to interpretation, which has a long history running from romanticism through the Symbolist movement and continuing through Russian Formalism and the New Criticism, which was the principal school Voegelin would have encountered when reading the story. (His friend Robert Heilman was himself a leading figure in that school of thought, as was Cleanth Brooks, who also taught at Louisiana State University.)6 Broadly speaking, the symbolist approach emphasized three principal points. One was the irreducibility of literary meaning to any conceptual paraphrase. This is a point Voegelin would not have quarrelled with, since his conception of philosophical myth is closely related to it. Another was its independence from the intentions of the author. Again Voegelin would have agreed, since the extent to which the work reflects the author's mode of existence and his relation to existential issues is likely to exceed the author's explicit understanding. In the case of The Turn of the Screw he began the letter to Heilman by saying that the basis for the analysis of a literary work must be the work itself; if the author has expressed himself on the meaning of his work, such utterances are most valuable if they clear up obscure points; but if (as it seems to be in this case) the utterances of the author are in open conflict with the text of his work, then the meaning offered by the text has to prevail (pp. 134-35).

But another element of the symbolist approach to literature that Voegelin would have found more problematic is its tendency to think of ambiguity as such as a literary value—so that the mind is drawn into an endless process of mental play that has no purpose beyond itself. A classic symbolist gesture of this sort would be Molloy's game with the suckingstones in Beckett's novel of that name, as well as the same character's delight in the possibility of wondering endlessly about the possible use of a small implement (which seems in reality to be merely a knife rest, though Molloy—fortunately for his purpose—never guesses that). A classic statement of the principle is Mallarme's cLe sens trop precis rature / Ta vague litterature' (the last lines of his Toute 1'ame resumee...'). Voegelin would 6. I do not mean to imply, however, that all New Critics or all Symbolists exemplify the problematic characteristics outlined below. Heilman and Brooks were not ideological or symbolistic immanentists, as can be seen in Heilman's case from his positive interest in Voegelin's discussion of the problem of immanentism. And Baudelaire, whose favourable treatment by Voegelin will also be discussed below, might well count as a Symbolist poet, even if he came before the school took on its name

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have suspected that this conception of the goal of literature was an attempt to close it in on itself and thus make it an instrument of spiritual evasion rather than of exploration. It was precisely this last tendency that Voegelin thought he found in James's The Turn of the Screw, where, he wrote in 1970, the fuzziness of the symbols, as well as the general fogginess of meaning pervading the work, is caused rather by a certain deformation of personal and social reality that was experienced as such by artists at the turn of the century and expressed by means of symbolistic art. The indistinctness and ambiguity are inherent to the symbols which express deformed reality (p. 151).

He went on to say that the deformation in question was the fateful shift in Western society from existence in openness toward the cosmos to existence in the mode of closure against, and denial of, its reality. As the process gains momentum, the symbols of open existence—God, man, the divine origin of the cosmos, and the divine Logos permeating its order—lose the vitality of their truth and are eclipsed by the imagery of a self-creative, self-realizing, self-expressing, self-ordering, and self-saving ego that is thrown into, and confronted with, an immanently closed world (p. 151).

What makes the literature that grows out of this cultural pattern so ambiguous is not simply that it cultivates ambiguity for aesthetic reasons with an artistry that remains in control of it; rather, '[t]he artists... place themselves in the situation of deformed existence and develop symbols that will express their experience, as it were, from within the deformation' (p. 151)—thus preventing its clear thematization in the work. Classical tragedy, in Voegelin's conception, had as its function to elicit in its audience a clear awareness of the existential issues underlying their lives, but a 'Romantic or Symbolistic work of art is not an Aeschylean drama in which the full articulation of various tensions is the mode of consciousness that makes the drama a tragedy' (p. 152). Rather than clarifying issues for the sake of decision, this later type of literature merely gave articulate form to the confusions of its age and helped to keep its readers bound by them. Lest this should give the impression, however, that Voegelin dismissed all of modern literature as an expression of confusion and closure of existence, I would like to mention one other example that will help to round out this picture of Voegelin's way of analyzing literature in existential terms, his discussion of a poem by Baudelaire that I brought to his attention in the late 1970s. He discusses it in 'Wisdom and the Magic of the

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Extreme: A Meditation'.7 This was originally a lecture given at the Eranos conference of 1977 at Ascona, Switzerland. While he was preparing it, I happened to be teaching a seminar on the Symbolist Movement and had been struck in reading Baudelaire's 'Au lecteur', the prefatory poem to his Fleurs du mal, by the parallel (and of course the contrast) between its imagery and that of Plato's philosophical myth (in Book I of Laws), which is described as a 'true story' and a 'saving tale', of man as a puppet pulled by diverse cords; we are drawn by the golden cord of Nous (our capacity for reason and will) but also by the iron cords of the passions and desires, and we must resist the pull of the others in order to sense and yield ourselves to the gentle, upward pull of the golden one. Baudelaire's image is of Satan as Hermetic sage enchanting us and vaporizing, through a sort of reverse alchemy, the gold of our capacity for reasonable and responsible decision: Sur 1'oreiller du mal c'est Satan Trismegiste Qui berce longuement notre esprit enchante, Et le riche metal de notre volonte Est tout vaporise par ce savant chimiste. C'est le Diable qui tient les fils qui nous remuent. [At the pillow of evil, it is Satan Trismegistus who sings a long lullabye to our enchanted mind, and the rich metal of our will is completely vaporized by this sage chemist. It is the Devil who pulls the cords that move us.]

The reference to the Devil pulling our puppet strings so distinctly echoes Plato's image that there seems good reason to think Baudelaire was consciously alluding to it (and he does make explicit references to Plato in some of his other writings). When I told Voegelin about the poem, he found the similarity as striking as I did (and was generous beyond any scholarly obligation in giving me credit in a footnote for pointing it out to him). Voegelin's discussion of this passage addresses a case midway between that of classical tragedy and such a work as The Turn of the Screw. He thought Aeschylus himself clearly understood what open existence was and consciously set out to evoke a decision for it in his audience. In Henry James's case, on the other hand, he thought the author was unclear about 7. Eric Voegelin, 'Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme: A Meditation', in Voegelin, Published Essays, 1966-1985, pp. 315-75.

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it and used his art in a way that obscured the issues—though not exactly deliberately, since he lacked sufficient clarity himself to be capable of deliberateness regarding them. He considered Baudelaire a mixed case. His essay brought Baudelaire in to contrast him with Hegel, who Voegelin thought consciously rejected Plato's idea of human dependency on a divine Beyond—which is what Plato's myth represents by its imagery, since there it is Zeus who draws us upward by the golden cord of Nous. Hegel's philosophical oeuvre Voegelin considered to amount to a countermyth of human self-divinization, since it reduces the Absolute to something that depends on human consciousness to attain consciousness of itself. Baudelaire, in contrast, 'did not conceive of his symbolism as an improvement on [Plato's] "true story" ' (p. 341). His revision of the symbolism to put the Devil in the place of Plato's God expressed Hegel's experience of estrangement from any real beyond, with the Devil serving as an image of 'man himself when he indulges his imagination to the extreme of self divinization' (p. 342). 'By his variant', says Voegelin, Baudelaire did not symbolize the balance of consciousness but, on the contrary, the consequences of its loss. He had experienced the 'modern man' of his time as being a diseased mind engaged in the sorcery of self-divinization; he had lived through the satanistic situation without letting it impair his intellectual order; and he could, therefore, understand the imbalance of consciousness analytically by the criteria of balance (p. 341).

Baudelaire, in effect, used the Platonic language to create a new 'saving tale' for those modern hearers who would heed it, and as Voegelin puts it, in a comment of the first importance for understanding his implicit theory of literature, '[t]he saving tale is more than a tale of salvation; it is the tale that saves' (p. 370). To do this, however, it must communicate. The Turn of the Screw did not do so effectively because it merely expressed, and did not elucidate, the spiritual problems of its surrounding culture. Such literature shifts to the reader the burden of penetrating the problem and raising its issues into consciousness: 'The reader, in order to extract the full meaning, must supply the critical consciousness of reality, as well as the range of its possible deformation, which in the work itself does not become sufficiently thematic', and even a reader capable of doing that will still be left wondering frequently 'whether a symbolism remains obscure because his own consciousness is not comprehensive enough to grasp the point, or because

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the author's critical consciousness had not been good enough to make it'.8 With regard to the traditional distinction, classically formulated by Horace as that between the dulce and the utile, the entertainment and instructional functions of literature, Voegelin, like Horace, emphasized the power of literature to edify. But for him this edification went well beyond anything a Horace would have conceived, since what mattered to Voegelin was not the delivery of objective content but the way the work could assist the reader in a process of subjective transformation. What he was looking for above all was differentiation of consciousness and realization of open existence. To some this might still make Voegelin sound like a didactic moralist with an ideology that a critic following his practice would end up projecting into every work. This would be a misleading interpretation of his thought, however. Although his critique of the culture of closed existence often takes on what might be called a moralistic tone, Voegelin really should be considered less a moralist than a spiritual realist. He believed that openness is not an imperative imposed either by a sort of Kantian rationality or by the arbitrary command of a supreme being. Rather openness and closedness are existential possibilities constituted by ways of relating to the structure of reality as such. In terms of the opposition between egoistic self-salvation and receptivity to divine grace that he saw in The Turn of the Screw, Voegelin believed that the theological language of grace was a way of talking about the graciousness inherent in the structure of existence itself. The openness he advocated is receptivity to participation in a reality that is always ready to receive those who will receive it in turn. Openness conceived in this way is not so much a matter of obligation as of opportunity. It is not a matter of subordinating one's wishes to another will that stands in opposition to them; rather, it is one of discovering a genuine fulfilment that can satisfy the deep appetite for existence that underlies all our other desires, even if in our confusion we often mistakenly seek that satisfaction in Utopian dreams and an impossible selfsufficiency. To come to realize where our true satisfaction lies is what makes it possible for us to become truly ourselves and to realize genuine freedom in the decision for open existence. Voegelin would have opposed any form of structuralism or of ideology critique that would emphasize impersonal forces as determinants of human possibilities. History, for him, was a field of existential possibility,

8.

Voegelin, 'On Henry James's Turn of the Screw, p. 152.

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of invitation and opportunity, even if the choice of closed existence reduced the range of the personal in a given individual's life and could contribute to a culture of closure that those seeking open existence would need to resist. Therefore, although Voegelin is sometimes naively interpreted as a kind of conservative ideologist, if one were to think about how to situate him in the tug of war Krieger refers to between ideologists and counter-ideologists,9 Voegelin's philosophical principles would clearly place him in the latter camp. They do imply the value of political freedom, but this does not necessarily constitute a political ideology, since freedom, in the form that matters most—that is, the freedom of open existence—can be realized within the framework of any political system that does not try to impose uniformity of thinking. What the social and political world must offer above all if open existence is to be able to flourish is the opportunity to think freely and engage in open dialogue with others. This points to another feature of Voegelin's thought that must also be included in this sketch of his implicit theory of literature: its emphasis on dialogue as an element of open existence. Nothing he said about literature as such was explicitly linked to this topic, but it is a major theme of Voegelin's thought, just as it is also of recent literary theory. Surprising as it might seem to situate Voegelin in proximity to a critic like Paul de Man, for example, both nevertheless share the belief that to fulfil its proper function literature must be allowed to surprise us, to speak to us of and from a point of view other than our own. Or to mention another figure Voegelin read and appreciated, there is Mikhail Bakhtin.10 Bakhtin had many facets.11 What Voegelin could be expected to have found congenial in him would have been his ideas of the dialogic imagination (as compared with the monological) and of the unfinalizability of both literature and human life. One might compare, for example, 9. Krieger, Institution of Theory, Chapter 3. 10. At the 1997 conference in Manchester at which this paper was presented, I said that I did not know whether or not Voegelin was familiar with Bakhtin, since Bakhtin never came up in the conversations I had with him. Professor Thomas A. Hollweck said on that occasion, however, that Voegelin had discussed Bakhtin with him in favourable terms and that he is in possession of Voegelin's copy of Bakhtin's Dialogical Imagination containing marginal notations in Voegelin's handwriting. 11. For a while it was frequently said that Bakhtin was the author of some Marxist criticism, which would, of course, have put Voegelin off, but I think this has been successfully refuted by Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson. See their Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).

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Bakhtin's declaration that '[n]othing conclusive has yet taken place in the world, the ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been spoken, the world is open and free, everything is still in the future and will always be in the future'12 with Voegelin's statement in the Introduction to The Ecumenic Age that £[t]he process of history, and such order as can be discerned in it, is not a story to be told from the beginning to its happy, or unhappy, end; it is a mystery in process of revelation'.13 And Bakhtin himself, as an Orthodox Christian, would probably have felt some sympathy with Voegelin's idea that history 'is not a stream of human beings and their actions in time, but the process of man's participation in a flux of divine presence that has eschatological direction'.14 The major point of contact between the two, however, is the idea of the dialogic imagination. This was the heart of Bakhtin's thinking about literature, which he thought had as its principal challenge to carry not only the reader but the author as well beyond his or her own horizon in order to encounter a real otherness that can become a window on transcendence. Voegelin himself expressed this idea by way of his discussion of Plato's distinction between dialectic and eristic discourse.15 Dialectic discourse is open to all questions and ultimately to what Voegelin called the Question with a capital Q, that is, the reaching of consciousness toward the transcendent pole of the existential tension fundamental to all human experience. It is also open to what all partners in dialogue who are also exploring existence under the impulsion of this Question may be able to contribute toward its elucidation. Eristic (literally, 'contentious') discourse, on the other hand, tries to impose a present answer from within its own limited horizon and thus bring dialogue and exploration to a stop. Bakhtin expressed his conception of these issues by way of his opposition between dialogic and monologic discourse. Monologic meaning is that which can be expressed by a single speaker in a single voice. Bakhtin did not entirely reject the idea of monologic truth, but he thought that there was also truth, and more important truth, that could only take the form of an exploratory conversation rather than a series of propositions. 12. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 166. 13. Eric Voegelin, Order and History. IV. The Ecumenic Age (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), p. 6. 14. Voegelin, Order and History, IV, p. 6. 15. See Eric Voegelin, 'Reason: The Classic Experience', in Voegelin, Published Essays, 1966-1985, pp. 265-91.

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Monologic discourse, even when true, has an unfortunate tendency to try to eclipse the other, more important truth that could only develop in the form of dialogue. What Bakhtin valued in literature was imaginative expressions that maintained dialogic openness through the author's willingness to recognize multiple possibilities of meaning and to allow the work and its voices to probe them beyond his or her own immediate understanding. Like Voegelin, he was explicitly critical of what has commonly gone by the name of 'dialectics' in modern usage, whether in its Hegelian or its Marxist versions, since he considered this to be the worst form of monologism. Both, one might say, considered dialectics in this sense to be eristics masquerading as its opposite. Voegelin spoke of the opposition between the two modes of discourse in connection with philosophy rather than literature, but his conception of philosophy was close to what Bakhtin would have considered the essence of the literary. For Voegelin, philosophy was supremely expressed in the dialogues of Plato, which he believed were not merely decoratively literary presentations of arguments but what might be called scripts for the reader's own exploratory enactments in pursuit of existential wisdom. To read a Platonic dialogue, for Voegelin, was not to decode a series of propositions and analyses of arguments but to re-enact inwardly Plato's own balancing and stretching of points of view as he explored the 'between' of divine-human dialogue. To do this, the mythic imagination is at least as essential as the logic of argumentation, because the ultimate goal of each lies beyond all propositional expression in a realm of experience where the imagination alone is able to take the lead, even if it will always need the accompaniment of a highly developed critical faculty to help it avoid falling victim to the enchantment of its own self-generated monologic Utopias. This is what literature and literary criticism at their best also share as their aim. Literary theory, therefore, in reflecting on and thematizing this aim, must ultimately converge with what Voegelin meant by philosophy—that is, the reflective pursuit of existential wisdom—in order to help both literature and philosophy to fulfil their highest calling.

TRAGEDY AND THE POLIS IN ERIC VOEGELIN'S ORDER AND

HISTORY Jack E. Trotter

Eric Voegelin's analysis of tragedy in The World of the Polish the second volume of his magnum opus, Order and History, discloses the birth of the tragic as virtually synonymous with the emergence of the Greek polis as a community in history. Without the polis, tragedy would be unthinkable; without tragedy—or what Voegelin calls the 'tragic cult'—the polis would not in the most important sense exist, would recede into prehistorical myth. For tragedy flourishes only as the expression of a communal substance possessing sufficient spiritual resources to become aware of itself as a people 'in history', which is to say oriented toward a transcendent telos. Only after the great pre-Socratic philosophers had done their work, stripping away the veils of the old mythos, the theomorphic symbolizations of experience, to reveal the truth of the Logos in every soul—only then could the Heraclitean 'sleepers' awaken and form a community capable of living 'by the insights of the mystical philosophers' (II, p. 241). Thus Voegelin, breaking with the Aristotelian tradition, situates tragedy firmly within a social and, therefore, ethical horizon. For this purpose he singles out the dramas of Aeschylus, especially The Suppliants and Prometheus Bound, as paradigmatic. But the story Voegelin tells about tragedy is not simply the story of the victorious emergence of tragic truth out of the chrysalis of myth; it is also a story of decline and transformation. In Voegelin's view that decline is already evident in the great tragedies of Sophocles, and complete in the age of Euripides. This view is far from

1. All references to the five-volume Order and History will be cited parenthetically in the text by volume and page number: Eric Voegelin, Order and History. I. Israel and Revelation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956); II. The World of the Polis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957); III. Plato and Aristotle (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1957); IV. The Ecumenic Age (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974); V. In Search of Order (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987).

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novel, to be sure. However, in a generally overlooked passage in Plato and Aristotle, the third volume of Order and History, Voegelin appends to this view a more startling claim. Whereas in The World of the Polls he had seen the tragic cultus as a crucial moment in the Athenian adventure of the soul, culminating in the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, in Plato and Aristotle Voegelin asserts that Plato's Socratic dialogues are themselves a kind of tragic drama, 'the successor to Aeschylean tragedy under the new political conditions' of late fifth-century Athens (III, p. 11). In short, Voegelin appears to be claiming an essential identity between tragedy and Socratic dialectic, a view which, if we recall the fate of Attic tragedy in the Republic, will seem—to say the least—counterintuitive. By what manner of legerdemain, we may wonder, can Voegelin redeem Aeschylus and his fellow dramatists (not to mention the epic and lyric poets) from that netherworld of untruth to which Plato so notoriously banishes them? Moreover, is Voegelin's position defensible in light of more recent 'postmodernist' attempts, such as Rene Girard's, to discover in tragedy not the emergence of transcendent truth out of discord, but rather the sacralization of arbitrary violence? As I will show in what follows, Girard's provocative analysis of the cult of tragedy in his much debated Violence and the Sacred converges with Voegelin's own analysis in rejecting the aestheticizing tendencies of the Aristotelian view of the tragic, but diverges on the crucial question of tragic myth. For Girard, myth is nothing more nor less than the veil beneath which a horrifying but necessary sacrificial order is concealed; while for Voegelin, tragic myth, especially as refracted through and purified in the great tragic dramas, discloses a comprehending reality, a story which in its unfolding toward a horizon of transcendent meaning enacts not a concealment but rather a #vm.$figuration of sacrificial violence. Voegelin argues that the Solonic Reform of 594 BCE was the pivotal link between the purely philosophical insights of the pre-Socratics and the development of the tragic cult almost a century later. Permeating the Reform, which would in time '[draw] the people into the culture of the aristocracy' (II, p. 243), is a spirit of right order (eunomia) which calls upon the Athenians to renounce the aristocratic model of virtue: 'The goods at which man aims through his action are apparent only; they belong to the doxa of his wishes and pursuits. The true Arete consists in man's obedience to a universal order...in accordance with Dike' (II, p. 197). The source of disorder lies in doxa, the pursuit of private goods against the common good. But the common good is not to be understood

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in merely utilitarian terms; Dike is the 'unseen measure' of the gods. Thus, according to Voegelin, Solonic politics becomes a politics of arbitration, of 'balancing the conflicting desires of the social groups so that their co-existence within the polls, and thereby the existence of the polls itself, will be possible' (II, pp. 197-98). But how are the citizens to learn the 'unseen measure', to distinguish right order from private desire, or dox