Christianity’s Decisive Difference

A Letter to Alfred Schütz

January 1, 1953

My dear friend,

How could I begin the New Year better than with a reply to your kind, so careful, and so critical letter–or, rather, by beginning to reply, for you have touched upon so many and such vital points that I shall probably not be able to deal with everything in one go.

Let me say at the very outset that in the light of this more detailed explanation of your projected theory of relevance, I too believe that no very profound differences separate us. What looks like a difference probably stems from the fact that you want to work out a general theory while I am concentrating on a theory of politics in particular. Probably there are no essential misunderstandings in your letter, either.

On the contrary, the issues you raise are well-justified questions which call for more discussion than I have provided. My only excuse is that the lecture format has forced me to leave a great deal dangling in the air.

Now, as to my procedure in answering, I am going to take up your questions beginning with the conclusion of your letter, i.e., with your very energetic objections concerning Christianity and philoso­phy, and then work my way back to your introduction.

I agree that my position concerning Christianity is too sketchily presented and that the formulations might give rise to misunderstandings such as, for example, that I am trying to defend Christianity and that I condemn all that is not Christian.

Essentially my concern with Christianity has no religious grounds at all. It is simply that the traditional treatment of the history of philosophy and particularly of political ideas recognizes antiq­uity and modernity, while the 1500 years of Christian thought and Christian politics are treated as a kind of hole in the evolution of mankind.

As I worked on my “History” this approach turned out to be impossible. Whatever one may think of Christianity, it cannot be treated as negligible. A general history of ideas must be capable of treating the phenomenon of Christianity with no less theoretical care than that devoted to Plato or Hegel.

And now to your decisive question: Is theory possible only within the framework of Christianity? Quite obviously not. Greek phi­losophy is pre-Christian, yet one can philosophize perfectly well as a Platonist or an Aristotelian. Philosophizing seems to me to be in essence the interpretation of experiences of transcendence; these experiences have, as a historical fact, existed independently of Christianity, and there is no question that today too it is equally possible to philosophize without Christianity.

But this basic and unequivocal answer must be qualified on one essential point. There are degrees in the differentiation of expe­riences.

The Principle of Maximum Differentiation of Experience

I would take it as a principle of philosophizing that the philosopher must include in his interpretation the maximally dif­ferentiated experiences and that, so long as he is operating ratio­nally, he therefore does not have a right to base his interpretation on the more compact types of experience while ignoring differenti­ation, no matter for what reason. (This is the problem of the history of ideas as I have already raised it.)

Now with Christianity a decisive differentiation has occurred, one which can perhaps be elucidated by the Platonic parable of the cave. Plato has his human beings chained in the cave, their faces turned to the wall, upon which they see nothing but the shadows cast by the objects carried past behind their backs. The situation becomes dynamic when one of these people is “forced” to turn around and is then dragged up to the cave entrance where he can see the sun.

Question: Who “forces” this man to undergo the conversion, the periagoge?

Here you have the problem of grace, on the Platonic level of transposition into para­bles or myths. It is this “forcing” that in essence is differentiated in Christian “revelation” or grace as the experienced intrusion of transcendence into human life which can break in from outside so overwhelmingly that it may call human freedom into question, as it did with Paul or Augustine.

This is new. And it has an important philosophical-technical consequence in that today no one would think of developing a theory of mystic experiences in the form of a Platonic myth. For a theory of this kind we now have the differenti­ated Judaeo-Christian vocabulary, as for example in Maimonides’s very detailed theory of prophecy, which strongly influenced Bodin.

The Church and Perfection Beyond Politics

Plato could not take the stage as a prophet; he had to conceal the authority of the man inspired by revelation behind the symbols of the philosopher king (Republic) or the royal ruler (Statesman). A further consequence of this was that the community of the inspired man’s followers could be imagined only in the form of a polis, a city state, not as a congregation or church beyond secular politics.

The differentiation of the problem of church, the understanding that the orientation toward transcendent perfection is not a political one, is still another achievement of Christianity.

The Platonic school, like the Pythagorean one before it, got into all kinds of difficulties because of its political activities, as you well know.

If a philosopher refuses to enter into such questions, if for example he limits himself to problems of logic or of the constitution in consciousness of the outside world, then of course these questions never need to become acute and one can very well do without them.

As a theoretician of politics I have no choice in this matter; these questions arise in the historical material, and I have to come to grips with them–in the direction I have outlined.

The Sacrificium Intellectus

Now let me turn to a sub-question you bring up.

On p. 25 of your letter you raise the question why an ethics has to be founded on prudentia of all things, why not on the lumen naturale or the amor Dei intellectualis?

Here I should perhaps have been clearer. Prudentia is the first of the Christian ethical virtues. Above these stand the Christian theological virtues or the Aristotelian dianoetic ones or the Platonic experiences of transcendence (philosophia, eros, etc.).

The classical ethics, like the Christian one, is primarily founded on the experiences of transcendence, secondarily on the ethical virtues. This creates a delicate problem for prudentia, for one of this virtue’s characteristics is that it has absorbed into its ethical knowledge the knowledge that stems from the experiences of transcendence.

Ethical action based, say, on utilitarian consid­erations would be just as sinful in the classical as in the Christian sense because it is not one’s own human nature nor that of others that determines action.

Typical case: Bentham, who comes quite close to a totalitarian ethics with social repression of all human values that are opened up by expe­riences of transcendence.

This problem is part of the larger one of the sacrificium intellectus, to which I must turn for a moment. In the 19th-century atmosphere of liberal editorializing, the sacrifice of the intellect was understood as an abdication of reason through the acceptance of dogma.

But this is not how it was understood from Athanasius to Kant. For Athanasius sacrificium intellectus signifies the obligation not to operate with the human intellect in regions inaccessible to it, i.e., in the regions of faith. This dis­cussion is aimed at the gnostics of Athanasius’s time, who, as Irenaeus put it, want to read from God as they read from a book. This understanding lives on in Kant when he limits philosophizing to a metaphysics within the boundaries of mere reason.

Faith Provides Essential Knowledge

Concretely speaking, if we assume, as Marx for one did, that man can somehow be transformed into a superman free of passions and therefore no longer in need of the means of institutional pressure that keep him on the right path, we have thrown out the classical as well as the Jewish and the Christian insight into the essence of human nature as opposed to divine nature.

And the dire consequence of that is that under the pretext of establishing the realm of perfection here and now the most ghastly crimes seem justified. Marx never made the sacrificium intellectus; instead he proposed speculative intellec­tual theses that can be proposed only when the abyss separating the divine from the human has not been experienced.

The lack of faith leads to depraved and criminal behavior within the concrete social situation. In this sense one would have to say that Marx did not have the virtue of prudentia because he lacked essential elements of knowledge from the sphere of faith.

As to the lumen naturale as a fundamental virtue, I would say that either this natural light as the Enlightenment understood it merely means, as in Locke, that whatever Locke happens to think is right, or else, in the Christian sense, it means ratio as in Thomism, where it is understood as human participation in the ratio divina. But this is taking us into the problems that Bergson has already dealt with extensively in his Deux sources [de la morale et de la religion].           

I can accept amor Dei intellectualis for philosophers, but what about the poor devils who have no philosophical background? The Christian fides caritate formata with its considerably richer emotional and voluntaristic content really seems to me preferable.

Throwing Out the Early Church Apocalyptic

As to “intellectual discipline,” it does not consist in a philoso­pher’s building with the utmost intellectual discipline a rigorous system based on false premises; it consists in his making the sacri­ficium intellectus and not making the false premises.

These corollaries will make it easier to understand something else I have to say concerning the main issue: namely, why I as a philosopher am not inclined to throw Christianity overboard.

This question is bound up with the role of gnosticism within Chris­tianity. There is no doubt that historically Christianity contains two main components which I have distinguished and identified as the gnosis of historical eschatology and as essential Christianity.

Not everybody will like this distinction. The sectarian movements and certain trends within Protestantism insist that eschatological Christianity is the essential one, while what I call essential Chris­tianity is for them the corruption of Christianity by the tradition of the Catholic church.

This can easily give rise to misunderstandings in debate such as appear in the letter of Jacob Taubes which you so kindly forwarded to me.³ Taubes (who would be supported here by Karl Löwith, for example) takes his lead, so far as Christianity is concerned, from Overbeck and Nietzsche.

Overbeck in particular, a good post-Hegelian theologian, has a rather low opinion of the cultural and philosophical value of Christianity because he iden­tifies it with the gnostic-eschatological components of the New Testament (John, certain texts in Paul, Revelation). This evaluation (Christentum und Kultur) is completely justified, for a historical society can indeed derive little hope of survival from a religious attitude based on the assumption that the world will end tomorrow and that social order is therefore entirely irrelevant.

If there were no more to Christianity than this radical eschatological expectation, it would never have become a power in history; the Christian com­munities would have remained obscure sects which could always be wiped out in the event that their foolishness seriously threat­ened the order of the state.

Throwing Out the Catholic Church

But precisely because this evaluation is correct, I consider it fantastic to see the essence of Christianity in this destructive component while dismissing as unessential the Church’s factual evolution into a historical power.

Post-Hegelian Protestant theology, especially in Germany, has profoundly shaped the philosophers’ attitude toward Christianity even where they are hardly aware of it, but in my view this is an untenable adulteration of history, inspired by anti-Catholic resentment.

Christianity be­came historically effective through the Pauline compromises, one of which concerned the order of the world–not only the order of the state but the very being of the world, a world which will not end next week; the other concerned the transformation of the faithful living in eschatological expectation into the historical cor­pus Christi mysticum.

These compromises were not an arbitrary addition; they were definitely implied as a possible evolution in the appearance and the teachings of Christ. So much to justify my distinction between an “essential” Chris­tianity and the gnostic and eschatological components. It seems to me that in its theology and philosophy Christianity has attained very significant achievements which should not be neglected.

The first of these achievements was attained through Christology. Today this body of dogma is regarded with deep distrust by philosophers of the secularist persuasion because it posits the di­vinity of Christ, while the Catholic philosophers accept it unquestioningly, without subjecting its meaning to closer analysis.

Both attitudes seem to me inadmissible; the secularist one because it treats the problem anachronistically, the Catholic one because it is uncritical.

The prime condition for dealing with this question is the need to formulate it in the terms of Jesus’ time, not in terms of our time, for which the historical consequences of Christology are “unquestioningly given.”

In the time of Jesus, it should be noted, god-men were no rarity; a whole set of Hellenistic kings were gods, not to mention the fact–a fact which directly influenced Christian symbolism (Norden)–that every pharaoh was born a divine child and was an incarnation of Horus.

What was new, what excited people, was not the divine humanity of Christ but (1) the social status of the incarnated God, and (2) the universality for all mankind of His mediating function.

What was new was that he was not a representative of society, a king who was a god, but a poor devil of proletarian estate who came to a very miserable, ungodlike end. Furthermore he was a mediator performing his function not for a historically existing society but for all men. (This was what caused the tension between the Jewish-Christians of Jerusalem and the Paulinians.)

And finally it was new to have a mediator who was not the incarnation of a god but was God in the monotheistic sense that excludes all other gods. This idea of God is radically universal; the mediating function is radically universal for all men; and its validity is universal for all times.

The experience of divine help, symbolized in all pre-Christian civilizations polytheistically and in national pluralism, was reduced to its essence and made humanly universal through Christology. Christ is the god who puts an end to the gods in history (Holderlin: “The last god”).

For the interpreta­tion of human existence in society this represents, it seems to me, a critical clean-up of the first order; its consequences are readily accepted (without regard for the cause) by those of our contemporaries who do not find Christology much to their taste.

And the horrifying things that can happen when, in the wake of anti-Christian mass movements, this clean-up is forgotten should have been abundantly demonstrated by the rise of the idea of the superman since the 18th century and the appearance of the totalitarian Führer type.

The Dogma of the Trinity

The second achievement, which is closely linked with Chris­tology, is the dogma of the Trinity.

Christianity is not monotheism as is sometimes loosely said; it is trinitarianism. Monotheism was condemned as a heresy–under the name of “unitarianism.” (This, by the way, was the heresy that led to the condemnation of Giordano Bruno, not his pantheism, an incidental lapse that can befall a Unitarian, and certainly not his advocacy of Copernicus.)

The achievement of the Trinity dogma is to have combined, in one theological symbol, experiences that must remain differenti­ated if speculative fallacies are to be avoided.

The first of these experiences is that of the radical transcendence of God (Thomistically heightened: the God of philosophical speculation, “being”; the God of theological speculation, the personal God who has a “name”; the personless, nameless, radically transcendent God of the “Tetragrammaton”–a masterly phenomenology, by the way, of the experience of transcendence.)

The second experience is that of the divine transforming intervention reaching into “nature,” the superimposition of a forma supernaturalis in human nature upon the Aristotelian forma naturalis. (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.)

The third experience is the presence of the Spirit in the community of the faithful, the Church. A radical monotheism (which would not recognize experiences 2 and 3) is always in danger (since the problem of these experiences cannot be abolished) of either degenerating into sterile deism (Voltaire’s problem–he was deeply shaken when Holbach and Lamettrie drew from his deism the conclusion that one might just as well go all the way and be an atheist), or else of slipping into a pantheistic construction so as to bring God back into the world.

The specula­tive situation can become even worse when experiences 2 and 3 are strongly developed while experience 1 is shut out, for in this case immanent forces become the carrier of grace and of the presence of the Spirit.

The third achievement is connected with the set of Mariological dogmas. To understand this complex, it must be considered as a whole: not just the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption, which have been formally raised to dogmas, but also the additional two proposed dogmas of Maria co-redemptrix and Maria mediatrix omnium gratiarum.^FN

I had a very interesting conversation with Karl Barth about this complex; if I remember rightly, I gave you at least some account of it.

Barth thinks that with this Mariological dogma­tism the Catholic Church is repairing a decisive defect in its doctri­nal structure–the hitherto neglected participation of the creature in the work of salvation.

I agree with him on that but would take the interpretation even farther, in a direction similar to that followed in my treatment of Christology.

Another fundamental human ex­perience demanding symbolization is the experience of progress (in the Augustinian sense of progressus) toward the sanctification of life and the perfection of the person, not only as a work of grace coming from without, but as a work to which men can contribute much on their own, and are obliged to contribute.

But–and this is again the crux of critical clean-up–this participation in the work of salvation has been elevated into the Mariological mystery.

The fact that the creature is capable of participating does not mean that created everyday man can spit on his palms and take a hand in salvation as Christ’s co-redemptor, with license to do all kinds of mischief in the process, as happened for example with the left wing of the Puritans.

For human beings, participation remains within the boundaries set for them by their nature. Just as Christ marks the end of the gods, Mary marks the end of superhuman vessels of the divine. In both instances the symbolism restores the balance between man’s splendor and possibilities and his limitations.

This excerpt is from Selected Correspondence 1950-1984 (Collected Works of Eric Voegelin 30) (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1999)

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