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Voegelin's Response to the Disorder of the Age

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

David Walsh
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Extract

The work of Eric Voegelin is primarily to be understood in relation to the problems created by the modern civilizational disorder. They are the problems that not only motivated his original search for order in man, society and history, but also determine the new directions in which his inquiry continues to move. This essay first traces the principal stages through which his thought acquired progressively more adequate instruments for a theoretical penetration of the nature of the modern disorder. Second, it examines the alternative vision of order that has correlatively emerged as the appropriate remedy in the course of this diagnostic analysis. Finally, it attempts a critical evaluation of the efficacy of Voegelin's critique as a response to the simultaneously spiritual, intellectual and political crisis of the age. In particular his reluctance to regard Christianity as the answer to the anxieties at the root of the modern disorder is explored at some length.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 46 , Issue 2 , April 1984 , pp. 266 - 287
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1984

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References

1 Camus, Albert, The Rebel, trans. Bower, Anthony (New York: Vintage, 1956; French original, 1951), p. vii.Google Scholar

2 Voegelin, Eric, “The Gospel and Culture” in Jesus and Man's Hope, eds. Miller, D. and Hadidian, D. G. (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh Theological Seminary Press, 1971), 2:66.Google Scholar

3 Voegelin, , Science, Politics and Gnosticism, trans. Fitzpatrick, William J. (Chicago: Regnery, 1968; German original, 1959), pp. 22–23.Google Scholar

4 Voegelin, , Die politischen Religionen (Stockholm: Bermann-Fischer, 1939; reprint of 1938 edition), p. 8.Google Scholar

5 Ibid., pp. 50–51.

6 Ibid., p. 62.

7 Voegelin, , From Enlightenment to Revolution, ed. Hallowell, John (Durham: Duke University Press, 1975).Google Scholar

8 Voegelin, , “Autobiographical Memoir” quoted in Sandoz, Ellis, The Voegelinian Revolution (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), p. 77.Google Scholar

9 Voegelin, , The New Science of Politics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1952), p. 124.Google Scholar

10 Ibid., p. 126.

11 Voegelin continues to stand by the substance of this analysis, although he would now add much more on the immanentization of spiritual experience that took place during the Renaissance. Such occult religious movements as Hermetism, kabbala and alchemy introduced a form of Gnosis that looked toward transfiguration within the world rather than escape from it. Voegelin, , “Response to Professor Altizer's ‘A New History and a New But Ancient God,’” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 43 (1975), 768–69.Google Scholar See also, Walsh, David, “Revising the Renaissance: New Light on the Origins of Modern Political Thought,” The Political Science Reviewer, (1981) pp. 27–52;Google Scholaridem, The Mysticism of Innerworldly Fulfillment: A Study of Jacob Boehme (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1983).Google Scholar

12 Not everyone of course is in agreement with Voegelin's enlargement of the historical horizon, to include the earlier religious origins of the later secular developments. This difference was clarified in his published disagreement with Hannah Arendt, which Voegelin summarized as follows: “If the spiritual disease is the decisive feature that distinguishes modern masses from those of earlier centuries, then one could expect the study of totalitarianism not to be delimited by the institutional breakdown of national societies and the growth of socially superfluous masses, but rather by the genesis of the spiritual disease, especially since the response to the institutional breakdown clearly bears the marks of the disease” (Voegelin, , “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Review of Politics, 15 [1953], 73–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

13 Voegelin, , Science, Politics and Gnosticism, pp. 99–100.Google Scholar

14 Ibid., pp. 23–49; 60–73, on the Marxian, Nietzschean and Hegelian prohibitions on questioning and the correlative attempts at the self-divinization of man. See also, Voegelin, , “On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery,” Studium Generale, 24 (1971), 335–68.Google ScholarPubMed

15 The pervasiveness of the ideological pattern of response is so little understood that frequently those who are most opposed to one another, such as democratic liberalism's resistance to communism or fascism, are quite unaware of the extent to which they are brothers under the skin. Commenting on Harold Laski's ambivalence toward communism, Voegelin observes that “one should not deny the immanent consistency and honesty of this transition from liberalism to communism; if liberalism is to be understood as the immanent salvation of man and society, communism certainly is its most radical expression; it is an evolution that was already anticipated by John Stuart Mill's faith in the ultimate advent of communism for mankind” (New Science of Politics, p. 178Google Scholar). Voegelin, , “Liberalism and Its History,” Review of Politics, 36 (1974), 504–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Voegelin, , New Science of Politics, pp. 170–73.Google Scholar

17 Science, Politics and Gnosticism, p. 107.Google Scholar

18 New Science of Politics, p. 122.Google Scholar

19 Voegelin, , Order and History, vol. 4, The Ecumenic Age (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), 19.Google Scholar

20 Ibid., p. 20.

21 Ibid., p. 18.

22 Ibid., p. 268.

23 Ibid., p. 270.

24 Ibid., p. 43.

25 Ibid., p. 58.

26 Voegelin, , Order and History, vol. 1, Israel and Revelation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956), ix.Google Scholar

27 Ecumenic Age, p. 8.Google Scholar

28 Ibid., pp. 253, 258.

29 Ibid., p. 233.

30 Ibid., p. 227.

31 Voegelin, , “Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme: A Meditation,” Southern Review, 17 (1981), 279.Google Scholar See also, Ecumenic Age, pp. 330–35.Google Scholar

32 Voegelin, , Anamnesis: Zur Theorie der Geschichte und Politik (Munich: Piper, 1966), p. 266.Google Scholar Translation in Anamnesis, trans. and ed. Niemeyer, Gerhart (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1978), p. 127.Google Scholar See also Voegelin, , “Configurations of History” in The Concept of Order, ed. Kuntz, Paul (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968), pp. 23–42.Google Scholar

33 Ecumenic Age, p. 267.Google Scholar

34 See for example Havard, William C., “Notes on Voegelin's Contribution to Political Theory” in Eric Voegelin's Thought: A Critical Appraisal, ed. Sandoz, Ellis (Durham: Duke University Press, 1982), especially pp. 112–14.Google Scholar

35 Die politischen Religionen, p. 8.Google Scholar Emphasis added.

36 From Enlightenment to Revolution, p. 180.Google Scholar Emphasis added.

37 Hallowell, John, “Existence in Tension: Man in Search of His Humanity” in Eric Voegelin's Search for Order in History, ed. McKnight, Stephen A. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), p. 123.Google Scholar One of the most sustained assaults on his treatment of Christianity is to be found in Bruce Douglass, “A Diminished Gospel: A Critique of Voegelin's Interpretation of Christianity” in Ibid., pp. 139–54. Douglass's criticisms, however, can frequently be answered by quoting from Voegelin himself. Thus the objection that for Voegelin the notion of God “actually present in the world, transforming it in anticipation of the consummation of his Kingdom” is “problematic” (p. 149), does not hold up when confronted with his elaboration of the “paradox of reality.” For example, “the transfiguring exodus within reality achieves the full consciousness of itself when it becomes historically conscious as the Incarnation of God in Man” (Ecumenic Age, p. 302Google Scholar). The problem with Voegelin's approach to Christianity is not one of interpretation, but of emphasis.

38 Voegelin, , “Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme,” p. 283.Google Scholar

39 Ecumenic Age, p. 249.Google Scholar Emphasis added.

40 Voegelin, , “Gospel and Culture,” p. 99.Google Scholar

41 Ibid., p. 78.

42 Ibid.

43 “Eric Voegelin to Alfred Schutz” [On Christianity, January 1, 1953] in The Philosophy of Order, eds. Opitz, Peter J. and Sebba, Gregor (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981), pp. 449–57.Google Scholar This letter and other aspects of Voegelin's analysis of Christianity are extensively discussed in a recent paper by Dante Germino, “Voegelin, Christianity, and Political Theory: The New Science of Politics Reconsidered” (Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, 1983).

44 “Eric Voegelin to Alfred Schutz,” p. 454.Google Scholar

45 Dostoevsky, , Letter to N. D.Fonvizina. Quoted in Konstantin Mochulsky, Dostoevsky, His Life and Work, trans. Minihan, M. A. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 152.Google Scholar

46 Voegelin, , “Immorality: Experience and Symbol,” Harvard Theological Review, 60 (1967), 262f.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

47 Ibid., 263.