Eric Voegelin — A Recollection

by Robert B. Heilman

The late Robert B. Heilman wrote many books. He was a distinguished teacher and  literary critic who flourished at Louisiana State Univeristy. It was a remarkable time and place; his colleagues included Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks and Alan Tate. He became a close friend of Eric Voegelin and nurtured his understanding of American culture. This essay is taken from Professor Heilman's book, The Professor and the Profession, available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay will appear here in three parts. It  appears with permission of the publisher.

I     First Impressions

I first met Eric Voegelin in 1940 or 1941 when he came to Baton Rouge to lecture under the auspices of the department of government at Louisiana State University. He may have given a single lecture or a series, and the subject, I suppose, was something that would be part of Order and History, though that large work did not begin appearing for another decade and a half.

My first impression of Voegelin was of a speaker of great dignity and ease, of vast learning easily borne and not trimmed to please a general audience, of formality and yet graciousness. Here was a philosopher who had no marks of either the pedant or the popularizer; the gentleman as thinker. Despite a highly technical vocabulary and occasional, but not intrusive, problems of idiom and accent, Voegelin seemed comfortable and fluent in American English. During his stay in Baton Rouge, Eric — I use an informality that was slow to develop — attended a meeting of a faculty discussion group at which I was also present, whether as visitor or regular attendant (I am relying entirely on memory; I have no file of documents, formal or informal, to consult). I remember vividly the type, though not the specifics, of the argument that broke out there between him and several of my colleagues.

The latter were depending, as faculties often do, on the fundamental rightness of the current beliefs of social and political liberalism, and no doubt Eric challenged one or more of these; it was not that he was antiliberal in principle, but that he was a vigilant challenger of the going clichés of both left and right. Perhaps his point was that Hitler and Nazism represented less a violation of American democratic ideas than an enduring disorder of a distinguishable philosophical and theological type. I do not remember the details, but I do retain a strong impression that my colleagues, several of whom were my good friends, were badly though unknowingly overmatched.

Chesterton (and the rest)

T h e   B r i d g e

by   Max Arnott

A sensible man doesn't put too much stock in first impressions, of course, but there may be profit, now and then, from the shock of introduction.

The first man ever to see a horse might have things to say that would break through our matter-of-factness, a little, and Chesterton once imagined how a man might feel landing in Brighton under the assumption that it was New Guinea.

Now in today's case, like a man who knew about Angkor Wat only that it was large, old, famous and orienta, our reading led us to someone familiar to the wise, but about whom we knew no more than a name, and that he was famously pragmatic.

How then does one react to a first view of Charles Sanders Peirce?

(Peirce, by the way,  pronounced his name "Purse.")

How except with admiration and horror?

from The Collected Works

The Beginning of the Beginning  

§5.  The True Story

The authors of Genesis 1, as I said, were conscious of beginning an act of participation in the mysterious Beginning of the It, when they put down the first words of their text. As a literary document, the text is to be dated in post-Exilic times, somewhere between the middle of the sixth and the middle of the fifth centuries b.c. It opens a story of mankind from its beginning in Creation, through the history of the Patriarchs, of captivity and Exodus, of Palestinian settlement, of the Davidic-Solomonic empire, of the kingdoms and their catastrophe, of Exile and return, down to the Deutero-Isaianic dream of a world-Israel, under the guidance of God's covenants with man.

Through Israel, the history of man continues the creational process of order in reality; it is part of the comprehending story of the It; and the point at which the story arrives in the event of Genesis derives its significance from the revelation of the truth that the epiphany of structure in reality culminates in the attunement of human history to the command of the pneumatic Word.

The story and the truth it is meant to convey are clearly told, but what do the story and its truth mean in terms of experience and symbolization?

The Crisis of Americanism:

The Destructive Tradition of  Spiritual and Political Individualism — Part 2

by Juergen Gebhardt

Dr. Gebhardt is emeritus Professor at the Institute for Political Science at the University of Erlangen-Nürenberg. He is editor of the final volume of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Selected Correspondence, 1924-1949. We feature here Chapter 5 from his Americanism: Revolutionary Order and Societal Self-Interpretation in the American Republic, Louisiana State University Press, 1993. This is the first part of a muti-part article. It is reproduced here with permission.

The Decentralized Politics of  Laissez-faire

The continuity of the imperial self  became evident only retrospectively, after the social breakthrough of this dynamic-expansive ego to the domi­nant type that attempted to reconstruct the lost reality in its own image.¹⁷ But even during the incubation phase of the spiritual, political, and eco­nomic dynamization of the person, this concentration on the individual under American conditions unleashed powerful energies: Jackson's so-called revolution perfected political democracy.¹⁸ Taney's decision in Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge (1837) ¹⁹ ceded the order of the conditions of production to the liberal politics of laissez-faire.

This state­ment, however, should not be misunderstood in the sense of the doctrine of the "free enterprise" of a liberal "competitive capitalism" that hov­ers over the textbooks of liberal political economics (and its critics). It means, rather, that the psychosocial structural patterns of industrial eco­nomic society were accorded public status—that is, the original concep­tion of the political solution of economic problems was replaced by a laissez-faire attitude.

from The Collected Works

The Beginning of the Beginning  

§4b.  Digression on Conventional Misunderstandings

In the intellectual climate of our time, the experienced tensions of consciousness, their expression through symbols, and their differentiating exploration are exposed to certain misunderstandings. At this point it will be prudent to mention some of them; by warding them off it will be possible to clarify the structure of the present quest still further:

(1) One source of misunderstandings is the various psychologies of projection. The symbolism of Genesis 1 must not be misconstrued as an "anthropomorphism," or the projection of a human into a divine consciousness; nor would the opposite misconstruction as a "theomorphism," or a projection of divine into human consciousness, be admissible. On principle, the poles of an experienced tension must not be deformed into entities existing apart from the tension experienced; the tension itself is the structure tobe explored; it must not be fragmentized for the purpose of using one of the poles as the basis for clever psychologizing.

That is not to say that projections do not really occur; on the contrary, they occur quite frequently, but as secondary phenomena, be it the humanization of gods or the divinization of men.  One such phenomenon is the Feuerbach-Marx divinization of man for the purpose of explaining divine reality as a human projection that, if returned to man, will produce full humanity.