Eric Voegelin: Political Theology in a New Key

I

My initial inspiration to read Eric Voegelin came after I finished my PhD candidacy exam in political theory in the fall of 2013.  It was born from a potent mixture of intellectual ennui, exhaustion, and excitement.  While reading the “canon” of political theory from Plato to John Rawls for a written and oral general exam, you tend to suppress the intellectual urge to chase fascinating and aporetic details.  That being said, a certain amount of synthesizing and personal reflection (“What do I think of all these writers and traditions?”) is both necessary and inevitable in such a process of studying – even as it is suppressed.  Everyone who has studied for such an exam has felt this tension between the need to summarize the main points of a major thinker’s work as well as the many schools of interpreting that work, even while holding back the urge to explore gripping problems and haphazardly sketching out what you think of each thinker in a way that fits with your other “official” interpretations and commitments.

In the end you defend these summaries and sketches against your examiners’ queries and hope it all makes sense.  If you are successful in the end it “makes sense” but chances are that you are left with a set of more or less coherent views that have become blunt and boring.  Insofar as you have rendered your views consistent your views become duller and safer; you learn interpretive reduction and caution rather than wisdom.  Perhaps this is just my experience.  However, the deep benefit of the process is not just an increase in self-discipline and familiarity with the subject area but the consciousness of exactly this distance between the drab tapestry of “your views” as presented to your examiners and all of the seams of exciting problems that you set aside to weave a coherent story: a distance that exists precisely because your real views lie in the search that follows each of those problems and likely tears apart the interpretations you officially defended.  The real benefit lies in a radical consciousness of your own incompleteness and the hopeful allure of all those roads not taken.

In the wake of my exams I felt utterly bored with much contemporary political philosophy, which often seeks to abolish metaphysical assumptions from its myriad justifications for the modern liberal state (such justification being its definitive project).  Even so, in the depths of intellectual exhaustion I felt a strong undertow of excitement at the very problem of the impossibility of abolishing metaphysics from political thought.  As hard as I tried to include this concern in my own “official” views the most I managed to achieve was a kind of gesture in the direction of my interpretations of the questions of the classical past.  I failed to make these questions “officially” relevant to contemporary concerns and really to understand their historical relationship for myself, but the distance between my “official” views and the tugging current of the metaphysical questions hovering over every justification of the state proved an invigorating new beginning.

One question I felt dragging me beneath the surface of my own views was that posed by the problem of “political theology” as I understood it.  The problem is that every justification or description of political order includes metaphysical assumptions and because the relationship of the transcendence to political order is a fundamental metaphysical question, all justifications of political order will involve metaphysical assumptions belonging to and determining their relationship to the transcendent.  This problem haunts even those contemporary political theories that devote themselves to its artificial suppression and denial, such as the “political not metaphysical” approach to theorizing justice advocated by John Rawls and his increasingly influential apostles.  I knew that Eric Voegelin was one thinker who had pondered this problem, and when I mentioned my interest in reading Voegelin to a former student of Ellis Sandoz, Glenn Moots, I was very quickly plugged into a scholarly community replete with suggestions and encouragement, to the point of being invited to share my experience of reading Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics in this phenomenological piece.

Of course, a book such as The New Science of Politics offers the likelihood of radically changing the questions you bring to it, but here I will simply elaborate on what I mean by the problem of political theology and how I experienced The New Science of Politics’ relation to the problem.  I think my experience of The New Science of Politics’s relationship to the problem can be demonstrated with the most clarity if it is compared with the infamous “political theology” of Carl Schmitt.  I will make this comparison with the aim of explicating Voegelin’s own “political theology”.  Voegelin’s work is difficult and I hope that I have not misunderstood it, but part of the point of this project is to present my first, undoubtedly flawed, impression of the central argument of The New Science of Politics.  I ask for your patience with me as I explain my interpretation and my excitement upon first reading Voegelin.

 II

“Political theology” is often associated with a much narrower problem than that which I outlined above, and admittedly nowhere in The New Science of Politics does Voegelin identify “political theology” as his own question (in fact, he reserves this term for the Roman divinization of the political).  Nevertheless, my view is that “political theology” is the implication of the transcendent in the metaphysical assumptions of any justification of a political order, and that this implication is exactly the subject of Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics.  On my reading, The New Science of Politics is a book that raises the question of “political theology” in order to make sense of “Gnostic” answers to it which pretend to be final and which thereby purport to resolve the tension between city, man, and transcendence.  The question of “political theology” need not be answered in “Gnostic” fashion, but the critique of such fashionable answers reveals the impossibility of superseding the question of “political theology”.  In this way Voegelin’s thought opens up the question of “political theology” and promises to breathe new life into political theory.

The phrase “political theology” raises the spectre of the German legal philosopher Carl Schmitt.  In a book called Political Theology Schmitt famously argued for two theses which for him constituted the heart of “political theology”: (1) that the sovereign is “he who decides” on the exceptions that determine and exclude political and legal norms, and (2) that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts” and thus that the concept of sovereignty in the theory of the modern state is a concept with an originally theological function (divine will) secularized in order to serve a political function.  Thus the modern “secular” state bears the same structural relation to a state that is legitimated by divine sanction: the sovereign intervenes in personal decisions that determine norms but is never subject to norms, just as God’s will transcends the order he commands.  This is not the place for an in-depth explication and critique of Schmitt’s political theology, but it is useful to note that Schmitt’s view of God’s relation to the world and the appropriation of theology’s conceptual structure by politics is precisely that form of thinking which Voegelin derides in The New Science of Politics as “Gnosticism,” the critique of which opens up the road for a “political theology” unbounded from such nihilistic and reductionist decisionism.

As I read Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics I had Schmitt’s work in mind from the first brilliant sentence, and Voegelin’s project, at least insofar as I understand it, became clearest for me when I thought of Voegelin’s critique of “Gnosticism” as it applied to Schmitt.   It is not just that Voegelin’s critique of “Gnosticism” tracks Schmitt’s work, but that in tracing the critique we can find what I take to be the root of Voegelin’s project in the NSP.  Given just how well Voegelin’s critique of “Gnosticism” tracks Schmitt’s work, and given the rising popularity of Schmitt (particularly on the left), reading Voegelin with Schmitt in mind also made Voegelin’s relevance to contemporary political theory even starker in my mind.  Voegelin writes that “[t]he attempt at immanentizing the meaning of existence is fundamentally an attempt at bringing our knowledge of transcendence into a firmer grip than the cognitio fidei, the cognition of faith, will afford; and Gnostic experiences offer this firmer grip in so far as they are an expansion of the soul to the point where God is drawn into the existence of man” (NSP, 124).

In Political Theology Schmitt argues that the sovereign inherits the political function of God, and that just who this sovereign is is revealed only in the existential “miracle” of the personal decision actually determining the meaning of political and legal norms.  The decisionist identification of the sovereign (1) and the secular functionalization theses (2) are combined with Schmitt’s argument in The Concept of the Political, where he qualifies the two theses of Political Theology by characterizing (3) “the political” as the realm in which the decision is effected in a deadly contest between “friend and enemy”.  This concept of the political (3) helps to make sense of Schmitt’s view of the necessity of the exception and its existential decision.  It is because the political requires the “political entity,” which is “something specifically different, and vis-à-vis other associations, something decisive,” that the very existence of the political depends on the exception, on the decision of “whom it considers to be an entity and how he should be treated”.  And if “any such entity exists at all, it is always the decisive entity, and it is sovereign in the sense that the decision about the critical situation, even if it is the exception, must always necessarily reside there.”

So the political (3) requires the exception and the decisive sovereign (1), and vice versa.  The political decision of a political entity then constitutes the exclusion of an external other.  The political entity and its formation in the struggle and decision constituting its identity precede the constitutional state, but such a state presupposes the political entity of the people (Volk).  The state therefore pursues external peace by maintaining “the right to demand from its own members the readiness to die and unhesitating kill enemies” and the goal of internal peace requires the capacity to identify “domestic enemies” or internal others.  Schmitt’s argument for theses (1), (2), and (3) allow for a kind of political existentialism and a lens of analysis where the interpretation of the secular functionalization of the sovereign as fulfilling the role of God very much constitutes what Voegelin calls a volitional “redivinization of society.”

Voegelin identifies three general forms of Gnosis in The New Science of Politics: intellectual (i.e. Hegelian speculative penetration of the mystery of creation), emotional (i.e. the “paracletic sectarian leaders” of the reformation), and volitional (i.e. the “activist redemption of man and society” in Comte, Marx, Hitler).  We can see how Schmitt’s work forms a kind of volitional “Gnosticism” as, if we take theses (1), (2), and (3) together, the sovereign’s will becomes indistinguishable from the idea of the God – an omniscient, omnipotent reality external to the political world it shapes and commands.  The divinized sovereign decision transcends and determines the political world, becoming what Voegelin called the “immanentized” ground of existence.

Leo Strauss, one of the most perceptive readers of Schmitt, noted that whereas Hobbes characterized the state of nature as requiring a sovereign to resolve all conflict between individuals, Schmitt characterizes the political struggle between “friend and enemy” as requiring the sovereign and the “miracle” of the decision in order to preserve its meaning as the conflict between group identities.  In his comments on The Concept of the Political, Strauss insightfully remarks that Schmitt did not understand the world to be necessarily ordered this way, but rather affirmed the political and its requisite sovereign decision as an “anthropological confession of faith” meant to combat morally the liberal threat to the “seriousness of human life.”  In short, Schmitt affirmed the political and the divinized sovereign decision as an escape from liberal Gnosticism (which “immanentizes the eschaton” in the dream of a “definitively pacified globe”), not into the uncertainty of the Christian cognition of faith, but into the certainty offered by an unpolemical faith in the political theology of a world of strife – a world no more questionable than that of the Mongol letter of Kyuk Khan to Pope Innocent IV, which Voegelin uses as an example of the “immanentized” representation of a transcendent truth in the order of political existence.

For Voegelin this gnostic “immanentization” thus does not take one exhaustive form or have just one motive.  However, one of the prime motives he outlines helps to explain the roots of Schmitt’s Gnosticism and holds the key to understanding Voegelin’s own “political theology” of truth, representation, and existence.  When Schmitt admits that the liberal vision of the end of the political and the resulting “definitively pacified globe” would feature “various, perhaps very interesting, oppositions and contrasts, competitions and intrigues of all kinds” he is admitting that this state of affairs is possible even as he betrays his decision to interpret the world in such a way that preserves its serious meaning in decisionist strife.  For those standing outside of it, the liberal dream is uncertain, possible and interesting; and Schmitt opts for the certainty of the seriousness and meaning offered by his decisive interpretation of the political and the decisionist sovereign.  In The New Science of Politics Voegelin argues that the desire for certainty forms a central motive for modern Gnosticism.  Gnosticism of every sort offers “a certainty about the meaning of history, and about [the Gnostics] own place in it” and it is the “drive for certainty” in the face of the uncertainty of Christianity rather than “stupidity and dishonesty” that fuels modern Gnosticisms.

In contrast with gnostic certainties Voegelin develops a “political theology” of uncertainty.  Voegelin is committed to a view of the indeterminacy of the various modes of representing political truth.  Human society can and has been represented by rite, myth, and theory, each of which “illuminates [human society] with meaning in so far as the symbols make the internal structure of such a cosmion [little world], the relations between its members and groups of members as well as its existence as a whole, transparent for the mystery of human existence.”  Like Schmitt, Voegelin thinks of the relationship of truth to social existence, but unlike Schmitt he carefully distinguishes the theoretical symbols and experiences of the philosopher from those of the self-interpretation of society.  If this distinction is not carefully observed it becomes easy to identify one political society’s experience and pre-theoretical representation of truth as theoretical truth, and to ignore the important history and variety of such experiences and representations.

For Schmitt political truth is represented by the “miracle” of the divinized sovereign’s decision, but theoretically the analysis is dependent upon the experience of the political as embodying the “friend-enemy” distinction and a functionalized conception of God as a divine commander standing outside of the becoming of this world.  Schmitt can only have faith in this experience because it is contingent, and this faith results in the “immanent” collapse of Schmitt’s theoretical discoveries into the self-interpretation and historical experience of the world he purports to describe – in writings that he claims to be “analytically” superior to those of his liberal interlocutors.  Schmitt’s conclusion must perform his theory.  Voegelin notes that this mode of representing political truth as the direct reflection of the cosmos is one self-interpretation of particular historical social orders, such as the Empire of Genghis Kahn, and thus Schmitt’s “political theology” of “all political concepts” is a prime example of what Voegelin calls the gnostic “theoretical fallacy” of “treating a symbol of faith as if it were a proposition concerning an object of immanent experience” (NSP, 120).

III

Voegelin develops a “political theology” in relation to the uncertain experience of theoretical truth as it differs and is implicated within a “definite class of experiences” (NSP, 64). After discussing the historical existence and self-interpretations of “political theology” where societies take themselves to be political representatives of cosmic truth, Voegelin asks:

“Are all political societies monadic entities, expressing the universality of truth by their universal claim to empire? . . . Is the clash of empires the only test of truth, with the result that the victorious power is right? Obviously, the mere raising of these questions is in part the answer.  In the very act of raising them the spell of monadic representation is broken; with our questioning we have set up ourselves as the representatives of the truth in whose name we are questioning – even though its nature and source should only be dimly discerned.” (NSP, 60)

Schmitt collapses the meaning of history into the victorious decision of the sovereign in the political strife extant between friends and enemies, but Voegelin sees in the very questioning of such representative political truth a distinctive experience of truth that transcends political representation.  The symbols of theoretical truth transcend political representation, even as they take such representations as their object and are represented in rivalry with the myths of the older politically represented truths.  Voegelin’s “political theology” is rooted in an experience of truth that renders truth a matter of the soul opened up and measured in relation to the transcendent, opening up a radically new source of authority regarding human types and types of social order.

What I had heard philosophers say regarding Voegelin before I read him usually involved polite sneers about the “Christian” character of his philosophy, but it is exactly the uncertainty of the transformative question of theoretical truth as a historical experience that renders Voegelin’s philosophy a “political theology” unwedded to any particular theology.  Theology involves rational reflection on the beliefs relating to a specific conception of God, such as Hobbes and Schmitt’s conception of God as an omnipotent commander standing outside of yet somehow ordering the world.

By considering the philosophical implications of the experience of transcendental truth as a historical experience bound up in a new and transformational relation to the divine, Voegelin avoids collapsing the distinction between the symbols of his own theoretical reflections and the concepts developed and experienced in other ages, and he also avoids committing himself to the task of theology.  He allows for the true experience of Schmitt’s “political theology” in cultures and ages where the outcome of the conflict between politically represented truths is not questioned as a criterion of truth.  Such a mode of representation is a “political theology” but necessarily pre-theoretical in a way that vitiates Schmitt’s characterization of his inquiry as a superior “analysis” of the legitimacy of political outcomes.

However, the experience of questioning such outcomes raises a new criterion of truth grounded beyond immanent representation, and alters the nature of all those who ask the question.  Asking this question opens the souls of human beings as they discover their soul (psyche) in experiencing a source of authority transcending political representation.  The human soul is discovered as an instrument by which the political truths represented in a society are evaluated and understood, and soul is itself measured in relation to an unseen measure existing beyond the boundaries of what is human.  The transcendent is the measure of the human soul and the soul ordered towards transcendence is the representation of this truth against the immanent political truths of society. Whether such a questioning is carried out by a lone philosopher or the public cult of a political society, the result is that the political enemy is no longer discovered as the representative of untruth, but rather the representative of an untruth regarding the order of the soul.

The experience of transcendence in the questioning of political truth is not an a priori necessary experience shaping all social orders, but rather an uncertain experience that constitutes what we call the soul and the possibility of theoretically evaluating the truths our political societies claim to represent.  There are many historical concepts and experiences of the divine, but Voegelin in no way theologically presupposes the truth of any one such experience.  Instead, Voegelin investigates such historical experiences as they bear on the very practice of theoretical inquiry concerning the truths of human existence in political society – an inquiry necessary to their investigation.  Schmitt presupposed in his “political theology” a particular concept of God and presented the meaning of political society as the functionalization of that absolutist and decisionist concept in secular politics.  The resulting thesis that “political theology” entailed a dangerous and polemical decisionism constitutes an even more radical Gnosticism than the liberal vision of a “definitively pacified globe” it sought to avoid, and it is in part the linkage of “political theology” to this decisionism that fuels the tendency of contemporary liberal political thought to ignore the relation of political society to the transcendent.  I suspect that this tendency to avoid the problem of political theology in turn also fuels much of the boredom I experienced while reading contemporary liberal thought and attempting to understand the canon of political theory in the light of its immanent concerns.

Voegelin accepts the historical variation regarding the experience of and reflection on the transcendent, thereby disentangling the investigation of the relation of political existence to the divine from the historically contingent experience of decisionism and its God.  Yet, even as he accepts such historical variation as his starting point he identifies the fundamental structure of one historical experience of transcendence with the very root of philosophical inquiry into the truths represented in political society.  When we question the truths represented by political authorities a space is created not only between facts and norms, but between norms immanent to our society or culture and true norms that transcend and measure our endeavors to understand and evaluate ourselves.  In this space our souls are transformed in tension with the transcendent.  Thus the kind of uncertainty I felt regarding the meaning of the canon of political theory, the uncertainty of Christian faith, the uncertainty that drove Schmitt to gnostic decisionism are all constituted by the tension at the heart of thinking.  While I am at once apprehensive and curious regarding some of Voegelin’s readings of canonical theories in The New Science of Politics, I think the deepest achievement of the work is its argument that the very nature of theoretical inquiry renders it impossible to supersede the problem of the relationship between transcendent and immanent truth.  It is by way of this argument that Voegelin avoids the “redivinization of society” and instead offers us a “political theology” in a new philosophical key.

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