Disturbing Revelation: Strauss, Voegelin, and the Bible

Disturbing Revelation: Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and the Bible. John J. Ranieri. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2009.

In Disturbing Revelation: Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and the Bible,¹  John J. Ranieri offers a critical appraisal of the treatment that the Bible receives in the works of Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin. Although Professor Ranieri notes that he has learned much from Strauss and Voegelin, his appraisal is generally negative. In his view, Strauss and Voegelin do not approach the Bible on its own terms, but focus overwhelmingly on what they take to be its negative consequences for social order, and they undermine the biblical view of human existence in favor of their preferred perspective, philosophy.

In a long conclusion, Ranieri further develops his critique of their interpretations of the Bible via the thought of René Girard. He argues that Strauss and Voegelin wrongfully attribute the ideological violence of modernity to the Bible, whereas Girard correctly recognizes that the Bible delegitimizes violence and blames the violent upheavals of modernity on pre-Christian patterns of social order. Given limited space and the intended audience, this review will focus on Ranieri’s critique of Voegelin.

The first problem with Ranieri’s analysis is that he does not offer a balanced view of Voegelin’s treatment of the Bible. He is on safer ground when he raises what many critics would suggest are legitimate questions about Voegelin’s treatment of Christianity: Why deal with the experience of Saint Paul and not the reality of the Cross? How can a philosophy of consciousness encompass the tangibility of the apostles’ encounters with Christ? How can Voegelin fail to give the ordering effects of Christian community, doctrine, and ritual their due? But Ranieri misrepresents Voegelin’s view of Christianity by repeatedly suggesting that Voegelin blames the Bible for the violent ideological movements of modernity.

For example, Ranieri writes that “Voegelin addresses the role of the Bible as the source from which ideological movements have drawn to sustain their socially disruptive fantasies.”² In another instance, he claims that “Voegelin is quite forceful in pointing to a direct link between biblical revelation and contemporary ideological movements.”³ In reference to the ideological violence of modernity, Ranieri adds that, in Voegelin’s “view, the intellectual lineage of the ideas motivating such atrocities has its unfortunate source in the biblical tradition” and that “what Voegelin has done is to accept such violence as somehow legitimately derived from biblical sources.”⁴

These claims misrepresent Voegelin’s position because, as Ranieri himself writes (although without really taking it into account), Voegelin holds that the mass ideological movements of modernity are based on the “deformation of biblical sources.”⁵ Voegelin does not blame Christianity or the Bible for the ideological violence of modernity. Voegelin does argue that Christianity increases the possibility of existential anxiety on account of the transcendent nature of its God: “The temptation to fall from uncertain truth into certain untruth is stronger in the clarity of Christian faith than in other spiritual structures”⁶ But Voegelin also holds that it is human beings who fail to trust in God and then perpetrate violence against others in search of immanent salvation. It is not his view that the Bible itself is responsible for second realities or intraworldly activist programs.

Moreover, as Ranieri also concedes (but again does not discuss), Voegelin holds that gnosticism and the problems of disorder that lead to it are not exclusive to the biblically-influenced world. He recognizes this later in his career for certain, but even in Ersatz Religion, a text that precedes Voegelin’s later reservations concerning the gnostic terminology, he acknowledges the possibility of gnostic patterns in other cultural contexts: “The gnostic mass movements of our time betray in their symbolism a certain derivation from Christianity and its experience of faith. The temptation to fall from a spiritual height that brings the element of uncertainty into final clarity down into the more solid certainty of world-immanent, sensible fulfillment, nevertheless, seems to be a general human problem.”⁷ The source of gnosticism is in the disordered souls of individuals who cannot bear to remain in the perennial tension of existence. Although gnosticism is often associated with biblical imagery in our civilization because the religions of the Bible dominate our cultural horizon, the Bible itself is not the source of gnosticism.

The second problem with Ranieri’s book is that his arguments for the superiority of Girard’s views over Voegelin’s are unconvincing. First, although Ranieri praises Girard for not finding the source of modern ideological violence in the Bible itself, he notes Girard’s view that the introduction of the biblical message into the world has had violent consequences. For Girard, “The Bible produces a double movement within a culture, both a heightened awareness of victims and a violent reaction on the part of the sacrificial system it exposes.”⁸ Thus, it is not clear how superior Girard’s view actually is to Voegelin’s, even granting Ranieri’s reading of the latter.

Second, Girard’s position sounds closer to Voegelin’s own assessment than Ranieri seems to think, since, as the quotes above indicate, Voegelin holds that Christian revelation heightens our understanding of order while also increasing the risk that we will fail to live within that order. Ranieri would protest that there is an essential difference because Girard does not blame the violent reaction to the introduction of Christianity into history on the Bible itself. This is Voegelin’s view too, however, although Ranieri does not admit it, since he plays down the fact that, for Voegelin, ideologies are based on deformations of the biblical symbols of order.

Third, at least by Ranieri’s account, Girard’s theoretical position appears to be subject to a Voegelinian critique on at least two counts. One, he appears to offer a reductionist account of human nature, since he holds that “human beings . . . are largely constituted by what he refers to as mimetic (or borrowed) desire.”⁹ Two, he seems to believe that the nature of human social existence can be altered in history. This is suggested in the following words of Ranieri’s: “Unfortunately, humanity’s habitual recourse to violence does not pass away without a struggle;” “they [Strauss and Voegelin] do not appear to have come to Girard’s insight that anti-ideological violence is just as likely to perpetuate the destructive cycles that it hopes to eliminate;” “he [Girard] would distinguish between the biblical unmasking of the sacrificial structures at the basis of culture and the fact that it takes even the recipients of this revelation many centuries to be weaned from a reliance on them.”¹⁰ Each of these passages subtly suggests that, although it has not yet come to pass, we could achieve a world without (or with a minimal amount of) violence, and this belief, it seems to this reviewer, is the true motivation for Ranieri’s critique of Voegelin.

Ranieri denies that what Voegelin calls the “laws of mundane existence” are in fact laws, and he fears that Voegelin’s call for the Christian community to adapt itself to these laws blunts the social gospel. Thus, Ranieri observes that Voegelin’s critiques of metastatic excess “operate with an unspoken assumption. For this position to be compelling, those who espouse it would have to be (or believe themselves to be) in possession of knowledge concerning the existential limits present in any given social reality. In other words, they would have to know what is and is not possible in the realm of society and politics.”¹¹

More to the point, Ranieri claims that “One may argue, as Voegelin does, that a metastatic thinker is someone who is in rebellion against the structure of reality, and that this rebellion is indicated by a vision of the world freed from the evils that afflict us. But this definition immediately raises questions with regard to human efforts to reduce suffering and to bring about a relatively better order of justice. Are all such efforts to be dismissed as metastatic dreams?”¹² The answer is no. It is not wrong to act charitably toward others and it is not wrong to seek justice in the world. In fact, we are called to pursue these things.

It is problematic, however, to claim, as Ranieri does, that the world could be fundamentally other than it is. Critiquing Strauss and Voegelin for justifying some acts of violence in the name of political order, Ranieri argues that “The practice of nonviolence becomes problematic only in a situation where violence is accepted as normal.”¹³ But how could we not accept violence as normal in our present circumstances? In Christian terminology, we live in a post-lapsarian world and, at least according to Catholic dogma, only two sinless human beings have ever walked the earth, Jesus and His mother. There is simply no evidence to suggest that we can transform the world into a perfectly just and peaceful place. That seems like a fairly solid standard for judgment concerning the “laws of mundane existence.”

For these reasons and for others that have not been elaborated here, Ranieri’s critique of Voegelin is unpersuasive. By way of conclusion, there are a few other criticisms of the book that should be mentioned. First, it is not clear that one can write about the influence of the Bible on the thought of Strauss and Voegelin without evaluating their respective stances on the nature of revelation and its relationship to philosophy. This is what Ranieri claims to do, but he cannot help but address the question of what Strauss and Voegelin actually take revelation to be. Second, since Girard plays such a prominent role in Ranieri’s critique of Strauss and Voegelin, the book should have included a reference to Girard in the title and given more space to his thought. A more thorough development of Girard’s position would have provided the reader with a stronger basis for comparing his position to Strauss’s and Voegelin’s. Finally, it would have been helpful if Ranieri had offered a summary of his argument or a statement of his thesis in the introduction. As it is, the reader does not completely find out where he is going until the conclusion.

Notes

1. John J. Ranieri, Disturbing Revelation: Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and the Bible (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009).

2. Ibid., 48.

3. Ibid., 211.

4. Ibid., 222; 225.

5. Ibid., 137.

6. Eric Voegelin, Collected Works, vol. 5: Modernity Without Restraint: The Political Religions; The New Science of Politics; and Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, ed. Manfred Henningsen (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 310.

7. Ibid., 313.

8.  Ranieri, 212.

9. Ibid., 188.

10. Ibid., 212; 221; 225.

11. Ibid., 61.

12. Ibid., 62.

13. Ibid., 227.

Print