Deformations in History from Conversations

eric voegelin: I have been doing other things also. In “Gospel and Culture” I worked on certain deformations of existence; for instance, the present revolutionary deformations—

eric o’connor: I’m not sure what you mean by “the present revo­lutionary deformations.”

voegelin: In classic philosophy and Christianity, the solution to the sorrows of man—death and life and so on—are answered through turning toward God, the periagoge in the Platonic sense, the turning around. Deformations occur if you refuse to turn around and persist in a state of alienation.

Explicit persistence in the state of alienation (characteristic of gnosis) is possible only after Christianity has differentiated the problem of existence— a relation of man to the unknown God who is not intra-cosmic (as the polytheistic type is) but extra-cosmic. Then only—when that has differentiated—can there arise the conception of an extra-cosmic existence of man in revolt.

o’connor: And by the revolutionary—you mean explanation of a force going on apart from God?

voegelin: Yes. That helps very much to show that certain advances in the differentiation of man’s understanding of his re­lation to God—as in the Gospel—constitute a new cultural field in which new types of deformation can occur. That is an accom­paniment of Christianity, not to be found the same in China or India.

o’connor: There would be deformations of existence?

voegelin: Yes, but they would be of a different type. You can always have revolts against God—for instance: in Greece in the name of Promethean man, but not of a gnostic man. You can have a Prometheus revolt, which is recognized as a revolt against the gods—but the revolt receives a positive interpretation in gnosis. In Aeschylus it is negative. With the Gnostics of the second and the third centuries, to be Promethean becomes a positive quality. That is possible only after Christianity.

The Unfolding Nature of Man

charlotte tansey: We were discussing in a course tonight Erich Neu­mann’s Mystic Man. It seems to me that he offers a new way of thinking about man developing.

voegelin: I don’t know him yet. One has to dissolve the ques­tion of the nature of man. The factor neglected, though it is always present in the texts, is that the nature of man is a historical dis­covery. That does not mean there is not a nature of man but that the nature of man itself arises into consciousness in a historical process at a certain point—just as, let us say, in Jesus the differen­tiation of the eminent presence of God in man rises to a certain degree of differentiation of consciousness, though it was present also before. So the historical indices of what later becomes simply a dogmatism—that is what has to be worked out.

o’connor: So that is where you look again for those specific moments—

voegelin: That’s where the problems of differentiation in his­tory come in. You can see it best, perhaps, if you consider the ques­tion of the eminent presence of God: Where is He immediately to be experienced?  

Having the knowledge of the unknown God just as much as Jesus does not lead Plato to a differentiation of God in man. He says: If there is that presence of such an unknown God, he is a God about whom we can say nothing; we know only that there is one. The known gods, the son of God, the monogenes theos, the First-born, remains the cosmos, in Plato. The same words appear in the Gospel of Saint John to designate Christ; but the great difference is that a man is the monogenes theos and not the cosmos.

o’connor: So the drama will be the differentiation as it oc­curs—

voegelin: The concentration into consciousness. It’s all some­how compactly present, even before, so in the preparatio evangel­ica and the history of revelation one has to go as far back as the sources go. But the full differentiation comes only through Jesus, not through Plato.

cathleen going: And so what you were working on in the early volumes of Order and History—the differentiation of consciousness— remains the theoretical interest.

voegelin: The first three volumes stopped short of Christianity because I didn’t know how to handle it yet. I had to work through the sources. That I’ve done now.

The Accretions of Theology

The question of Jesus I always shunned because I saw one couldn’t do it on the basis of theology. Theology is two thousand years’ accretion on top of the Gospel and deforms the symbolism of the Gospel in a certain direction through the introduction of Hellenistic philosophy. One has to go back of theology and work directly on the sources of the time.

The experiences of being drawn by God are described in the Platonic myth (in the Laws)of the god who plays with men as with puppets and pulls them by the string. That’s helkein (to draw). The term recurs in the Gospel of John. So the experience of being drawn by God remains identical.

o’connor: “No man can come to me unless the Father draw him.”

voegelin: Exactly. The same words occur in the Platonic ver­sion. But Plato does not draw the consequences—the God who pulls man by the string is not the God who becomes man to die. Working out these parallels and differences is what I’ve done now.

o’connor: When did you realize that the shift had to come? Not just when you gave up the six-volume plan?

voegelin: I have written out the whole thing; the manuscript is standing there. But it makes no sense because, though I have di­gested materials to amount to some six more volumes, the essence is missing: The problem “What is the decisive difference that appears with Christianity?” is needed for explaining also the rev­olutionary deformations that are our present concern. The type of revolution that appears after Christianity is not present in the cultural environment of Plato and Aristotle.

Revolution and Alienation

o’connor: The kind of revolution that just wants to destroy?

voegelin: Oh, revolutions would always destroy, but giving revolution the foundation of an existential theory—that man in his alienation is the ultimate entity—that is new.

o’connor: If one says “the” ultimate entity or “an” ultimate entity—does it make a significant difference?

voegelin: Oh yes—because “the” ultimate entity means that man in the deformation replaces God.

And one can now give precise definitions of a Hegelian sys­tem of deformation: If you speculate on the basis of your state of alienation and seek salvation—while remaining in the state of alienation—that is the Hegelian trick. That is what is called dialectics.

All metaphysics (that is, the philosophy that has become dog­matized into concepts, beginning with the Stoics and reaching, say, to Spinoza) always includes as a premise of thinking that one turns around toward God. That turning around is given up in the eighteenth century.

tansey: Jonah in the Old Testament certainly didn’t turn around.

o’connor: He didn’t make a theory of it.

voegelin: But you can make a theory of it. There’s an excellent study by Orwell, Inside the Whale: a description of the contem­porary intellectual.

o’connor: And he clarifies what one would mean by making a theory?

voegelin: He is the one English intellectual who breaks out and understands these things—just as Camus is the one French intellectual to do so (and at the same time).

This excerpt is from The Drama of Humanity and Other Miscellaneous Papers: 1939-1985 (Collected Works of Eric Voegelin 33) (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2004)

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