The Spirit of Voegelin's Late Work —Part 1
by Ellis Sandoz
Professor Sandoz is the Editor of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. He has written many books and published many essays on the significance of Eric Voegelin's thought and on the political and spiritual foundations of the United States. This essay is taken from his most recent book, Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America, available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay will appear in four parts. It appears with permission of the publisher.
Did the "Scientific" Triumph over the "Spiritual"?
The principal work by Voegelin written in the final years of his life and published posthumously includes the final volume of Order and History, entitled In Search of Order, his deathbed meditation dictated to Paul Caringella, "Quod Deus Dicitur," and the unfinished Aquinas Lecture titled "The Beginning and the Beyond: A Meditation on Truth."1 While a great deal need not be made of the patently incomplete character of each of these documents, construing the silence of omissions has led to various interpretive debates in the secondary literature about the possibly "changed" views of the "late" Voegelin on crucial matters. The principal issues raised deserve brief mention and clarification from my perspective at the outset of this discussion.
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"One of My Permanent Occupations"
Eric Voegelin as Literary Critic -Part 3
by Charles Embry
Charles Embry is Professor Emeritus of Political Philosophy at Texas A&M-Commerce. He is editor of Robert B. Heilman and Eric Voegelin: A Friendship in Letters, 1944-1984. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004. The material that follows is taken from his The Philosopher and The Storyteller: Eric Voegelin and Twentieth-Century Literature. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008. This appears with permission and is presented in three parts.
Literature and the Time of the Tale (concluded)
For Voegelin it is clear that literature — in terms of both its experiential origins as well as its imaginative symbolization — is generically related to myth. That Voegelin understood a work of art as a cosmion reflecting the "unity of the cosmos as a whole" clearly connects it with a Cosmological style of truth and myth that are both rooted in compact experiences of reality — the primary cosmic experience. Voegelin understood Time of the Tale to be the primary literary form in two senses: primary as prior to other literary forms and primary as foundational to and underlying all later literary forms that result from human understanding of differentiated reality.
Literature, at least as we know it in the modern era, is created in a time after the differentiation of reality into immanence and transcendence.22 However, only when the tale being told combines human, cosmic, and divine elements does it approach the status of myth or the Tale with its Time that is out of time.
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from The Northern Lights
The Genealogy of Islamic Terrorism
Part 5
by Barry Cooper
Professor Cooper is the author of numerous books and essays in political science. He is the editor of several volumes of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. This essay appears as Chapter 3 in New Political Religions, or An Analysis of Modern Terrorism, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, 2004. This is published with permission of the publisher and appears in five parts.
The spiritual challenge of modernity, even when unencumbered by Western dress, leaves the modernists in Islam vulnerable to criticism both from traditional religious leaders and later from jihadist and salafist revolutionaries on the grounds that their modernism was both ineffective and "un-Islamic." Thus a modernist such as Al-Afghani (1837-1897) or Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905) whose views might be considered unexceptionable and even mainstream in the salons of Mayfair or the cafés of Paris look in retrospect as if they were in a kind of limbo or halfway house on the way to radical, fundamentalist, or jihadist Islamism.70
Political institutions created after the destruction of the Ottoman Empire opened a number of political possibilities. In Turkey, the abolition of the caliphate in 1924 by Mustafa Kemal, the hero of the defeat of the Allies at Gallipoli, laid the foundation for what is arguably the most successful state whose citizens are chiefly Muslim.71 In contrast, in Egypt the foundations were laid at about the same time for a renewal of salafist and jihadist Islam by Hasan al-Banna, who in 1928 founded the Muslim Brethren, the Jamiyyat al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin, in direct emulation of the Ikhwan of Arabia.
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"One of My Permanent Occupations"
Eric Voegelin as Literary Critic-Part 2
by Charles Embry
Charles Embry is Professor Emeritus of Political Philosophy at Texas A&M-Commerce. He is editor of Robert B. Heilman and Eric Voegelin: A Friendship in Letters, 1944-1984. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004. The material that follows is taken from his The Philosopher and The Storyteller: Eric Voegelin and Twentieth-Century Literature. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008. This appears with permission and is presented in three parts.
Voegelin's Criticism of Henry James's
The Turn of The Screw
A third significant statement regarding literary criticism originated in the Heilman-Voegelin correspondence and culminated with the publication in 1971 of a postscript to a letter first written by Voegelin in 1947. Voegelin's analysis focused on The Turn of the Screw by Henry James as a response to a critique that Heilman had published of a Freudian interpretation of the novella.8 In his postscript, Voegelin raised the twin issues of the "dustiness" of the symbols in James's story and the consequent necessity that a valid literary criticism must be firmly based upon a critical-existential assessment by the critic. These issues led to a conversation between Donald E. Stanford, editor of the Southern Review, and Voegelin.
After Stanford completed work on the issue in which both Voegelin's original letter on James's The Turn of the Screw and the newly written postscript appeared, Stanford and his wife visited the Voegelins at their home in Palo Alto.
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from The Northern Lights
The Genealogy of Islamic Terrorism
Part 4
by Barry Cooper
Professor Cooper is the author of numerous books and essays in political science. He is the editor of several volumes of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. This essay appears as Chapter 3 in New Political Religions, or An Analysis of Modern Terrorism, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, 2004. This is published with permission of the publisher and appears in five parts.
Indeed, generally speaking, the history of Islam prior to and during al-Wahhab's lifetime [1703-1787] was one of spiritual decline and political humiliation. The large topic of the decline, or at least the decentralization, of the Ottoman Empire has been debated at great length both inside and outside the empire, starting in the sixteenth century. Much of the discussion has centered on the changing balance of power between the empire and the new states of the West, rather than between Istanbul and other Muslim states.
From the battle of Lepanto in 1571 until the time of al-Wahhab, Ottoman power was, if not in retreat, then certainly undergoing reconfiguration in the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Crimea, southern Ukraine, and Hungary. At the same time, British, Dutch, and Portuguese ships were trading into the gulf. In the Ottoman homeland, these developments generated an extensive political literature dealing not just with themes of decline but also of religious reform.53 For al-Wahhab, as for many other less successful reformers, the answer to political decay was a salafist restoration of the virtue and piety of the pristine early days.54 As with all such movements, including those that have emerged from Judaism and Christianity, al-Wahhab's salafism was defined more by what he sought to destroy than by what he sought to build.
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"One of My Permanent Occupations"
Eric Voegelin as Literary Critic —Part 1
by Charles Embry
Charles Embry is Professor Emeritus of Political Philosoohy at Texas A&M-Commerce. He is editor of Robert B. Heilman and Eric Voegelin: A Friendship in Letters, 1944-1984. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004. The material that follows is taken from his The Philosopher and The Storyteller: Eric Voegelin and Twentieth-Century Literature. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008. This appears with permission and is presented in three parts.
* * * * *
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. ~ Eric Voegelin to Robert B. Heilman
* * * * *
There are many reasons for writing a book that relies upon the philosophical work of Eric Voegelin for the interpretation of modern literature. Not the least of these is Voegelin's own understanding of the nature of his work and vocation. In a letter dated December 19, 1955, he wrote to his friend Robert B. Heilman, the English literature scholar and literary critic:
Your letter of Dec.11th came just in time this morning, for I wanted to write you today anyway to thank you for the delightful review of Critics and Criticism. It had thrown me into a mood of indecision, because your refined politeness left me in doubt whether I should not read the volume, because literary criticism is after all one of my permanent occupations. (AFIL, letter 57, p. 142)1
Eric Voegelin considered literary criticism one of his permanent occupations because of the necessity that confronted him as he worked toward the preparation of what he intended as his first major work in English — The History of Political Ideas.
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from The Northern Lights
The Genealogy of Islamic Terrorism
Part 3
by Barry Cooper
Professor Cooper is the author of numerous books and essays in political science. He is the editor of several volumes of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. This essay appears as Chapter 3 in New Political Religions, or An Analysis of Modern Terrorism, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, 2004. This is published with permission of the publisher and appears in five parts.
Before returning to the question of Islamic history, there is one final issue about which it is important to be clear. There is a magical component to metastatic faith. More bluntly, demanding that God perform a miracle or alter the structure of reality does not work. The metastatic faith of the prophets cannot be fulfilled by any pragmatic organization, an insight made abundantly clear in Deutero-Isaiah. For metastatic prophets, the only thing to do is sit down and wait for the miracle to take place, from which experience arises the cry, "How long, O Lord? How long?" Prophets die waiting; generations of their disciples may die waiting as well.
One might anticipate that eventually, after several generations died awaiting a metastatic transformation, someone would undertake a close and critical examination of what had become an article of faith. On the other hand, once the agency for the miracle is transferred from God to human beings, there is no reason to expect any end to it at all: futuristic dreams practically by definition have an indefinite shelf-life.
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THE GROWTH OF THE LIBERAL SOUL
by David Walsh
Chapter One: The Crisis of Liberal Politics
Part 5
David Walsh is professor of politics at Catholic University of America. He is the author or editor of many books; he is editor of three volumes of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. His Guarded by Mystery has been serialized here at VoegelinView in its entirety. His most recent book is The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. The Growth of the Liberal Soul is available from the University of Missouri Press and appears here with permission. "Crisis of Liberal Politics" appears here in five parts.
Tumbling Liberal Defense (concluded)
We recall Socrates's argument that the tyrant is of all men the least powerful because he was unable to do anything to advance his own good, and all that he did made him worse (Gorgias 466). What of the many human beings today who cannot find a reason to be serious about their own good, who without being responsible toward themselves can hardly be responsible for others, and whose actions are driven by blind impulse from one self-destructive behavior to another? [Alan]Gewirth's principle presupposes the rational purposiveness it seeks to demonstrate. His principle says nothing to those who are not yet convinced that they ought to be purposive and should respect the liberal institutions of rights that are its expression.
Gewirth is peripherally aware of the problem and wonders aloud about the possibility that democratic majorities may "fail to endorse the redistributive justice of the supportive state" to implement the full recognition of rights (Reason and Morality, 321). In extreme cases, such as starvation, we can bypass the democratic process entirely; in the ordinary course of events, the process of "moral education" will render such emergency measures unnecessary. But what if the educational efforts are less than successful? No answer is forthcoming to this disturbing possibility.
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