Dominium v. Auctoritas: Nihilism and the Political Community

Anamnesis is a remembering or recollection of the orienting truths of existence that ought never to be forgotten. Mircea Eliade, in his Myth and Reality, wrote that anamnesis is the recovery of “truths, that is, structures of the real.”[1] The recovery, remembrance, or rediscovery of those structures are evocative experiences of being as it confronts, awakes and re-awakens consciousness to itself. Anamnesis is an anchoring of human existence—through its range from individual through society to history—in the “structures of the real” experienced as such in the consciousness of concrete persons; whereas “forgetfulness” is the loss of the real.

This article will consider order and authority under the personal and political impact of anamnetic recovery and forgetfulness, and the imaginative efforts that underlie both, as structures of consciousness. In the foreword to Anamnesis, Voegelin wrote that “The problems of human order in society and history originate in the order of consciousness. Hence the philosophy of consciousness is the centerpiece of a philosophy of politics.”[2] This article agrees with Voegelin that strictly political analysis is often an insufficient level of analysis, or at least, a theory of politics must be prepared to penetrate to a theory of consciousness. Thus, there are two parts to this article, each of which is composed of its own two parts.

Part One discusses order. It first presents Eric Voegelin’s late efforts to articulate a theory of consciousness that is played out personally, socio-politically, and historically. His philosophy of consciousness provides an insightful framework within which to discuss the perennial temptation to fall into the ideological lie when anamnetic recollection proves undesirable. Secondly, Part One consider order and authority from a political perspective. Here the article will briefly characterize the historical medieval struggle for political order as an achievement of the highest importance that itself ought not to be forgotten. Part Two of the article will discuss disorder. Like Part One, disorder in individual consciousness is discussed before political disorder. Accordingly, Part Two presents dominium or domination as a manifestation of Plato’s symbol anoia or “folly,” or what Voegelin refers to as resistance to the truth of reality, and as a substitute for genuine political authority (auctoritas). We conclude with a brief summation along the theme of nihilism.

I. Existential Authority and Political Order

a. Voegelin’s Theory of Consciousness: Anamnesis, Forgetfulness, and Imagination

The philosophic experiences of truth, of goodness, of beauty are recollections of those “structures of the real,” or to use Eric Voegelin’s synonym, the “order of being.” These recollections also serve as reminders of what is at stake in the forgetting of them. Eliade, in discussing myths about memory and forgetting in both India and ancient Greece, tells us that in the Dīgha Nikāya (I, 19-22) of Theravada Buddhism, “the Gods fall from Heaven when their ‘memory fails and they are of confused memory.’”[3] He continues, “‘Forgetting,’ on the one hand is equivalent to ‘sleep’ and, on the other, to loss of the self, that is, to disorientation and blindness (having the eyes blindfolded).”[4] The fallen gods were subsequently incarnated as men and it was only through yogic discipline that they succeeded in recollecting their former lives.[5] In Greece, it was Hesiod who wrote that Mnemosyne (Memory) is the mother of the Muses. She is also the sister of Kronos and Okeanos. She knows “all that has been, all that is, all that will be.” Eliade notes that:

“When the poet is possessed by the Muses, he draws directly from Mnemosyne’s store of knowledge, that is, especially from the knowledge of ‘origins,’ of ‘beginnings,’ of genealogies . . . By virtue of the primordial memory that he is able to recover, the poet inspired by the Muses has access to the original realities.”[6]

Recovering is remembering, and remembering is synonymous with existence attuned to the order of being. It is life itself, renewed by the inspiration of the poet, which is the inspiration by the divine ground of the order of being itself. Death, like drinking from the fountain of Lethe, is associated with forgetting. “The dead are those who have lost their memories.” Those who forget the “structures of the real” may be the dead, but they are also the figuratively dead. Hynos and Thanatos, Sleep and Death, are twin brothers in Greek mythology. The phenomenon of the Heraclitean sleepwalkers carries the symbolic resonance of the living dead: “To those who are awake, there is one ordered universe, common (to all), whereas in sleep each man turns away (from this world) to one of his own.”[7] The oblivion of forgetfulness of the order of being is an existential disorientation in which one renders oneself unmoored from “structures of the real” and vulnerable to both the various chaotic libidinous forces from the deep well of consciousness and to the tyrannical lie of sophistic soul of society. That is, forgetfulness is the word that symbolizes the fall into personal and social oblivion.

In moving from myth, Plato philosophically raises anamnesis to the level of a theme in his Meno in particular. Socrates is responding the question about how can he seek for something he does not know. His answer proceeds from observing the apparently ignorant slave boy who works through a problem of geometry. Under the questioning of Socrates, the boy moves from total ignorance and the absence of curiosity, to a middle ground of frustration and perplexity, to the eventual correct solution. “[T]rue opinions . . .  can be aroused by questioning and turned into knowledge,” Socrates concludes. He tells Meno, “And if the truth about reality is always in our soul, the soul must be immortal, and one must take courage and try to discover—that is, to recollect—what one doesn’t happen to know, or more correctly, remember, at the moment.”[8] The soul’s immortality, its participation in transcendent reality of the forms, is the evocative center out of which comes the formulation of recollection. In opposition to some modernist reductions of the soul to an empty vessel or a blank slate, or to the postmodernist attempt to negate nature—including human nature—Plato’s conviction was that the soul is already a fullness, constituted by the order of being with which it was, mythically speaking, in unmediated and open encounter before its incarnation, but even in its incarnation continues to participate in a transcendent order.

For Voegelin, the task of anamnesis is also the responsibility not to overlook some part of what can be remembered because the meditative complex in which the part belongs is ever-present. Since he first began expressly to develop a theory of consciousness in his 1966 work, Anamnesis, the terms “intentionality” and “luminosity” have signified structures of consciousness. A theory of consciousness was Voegelin’s attempt to penetrate to the religious radix of the human condition in an effort to clarify the dynamics of the soul, especially given the exponential increase in technological capacity for destruction. The attunement of the self (and, by extension, society) to a particular moral, political, or historical order is the problem. The “order of being,” experienced intimately in the soul as truth, goodness, beauty, justice, etc. is empirically only one of many forces that can attract the soul.

Voegelin paid much attention to the phenomenological method of Husserl. Phenomenology, as developed by Husserl, proceeds by suspending the “natural attitude toward the world” (epokhē). From this suspension, consciousness as intentionality can direct itself toward the contents of consciousness. Voegelin agrees with Husserl’s phenomenological understanding of consciousness to a point, but notes that the “basic subjectivity of the egological sphere, Husserl’s philosophical and undebatable ultimatum, is the symptom of a spiritual nihilism that still has merit as a reaction, but no more than that.”[9] What Husserl refused to apperceive is that intentionality is not the only structure of consciousness, and that the “epistemological critique may well be an eminently important topic of philosophy, but it does not exhaust the entire range of philosophical endeavor.”[10] In fact, intentionality is “balanced” by the structure of consciousness that he names as luminosity. Luminosity is the participation of consciousness within the encompassing reality that makes intentionality possible in the first place.

Luminosity can be characterized as noetic experience: “Noetic experience, interpreting itself, illuminates the logos of participation [in reality].”[11] Noetic experience, like revelatory experience, is the tension of consciousness, aware of itself as strung out between poles of immanence and transcendence, time and timelessness, ignorance and wisdom, etc. but unaware of why it should be so. Luminosity is the illuminating of consciousness as it becomes aware, or is made aware, of itself within the wider mystery of being. One the one hand, it is a sometimes anxious experience of the human condition as that which is limited, confronted in every moment by that which is unlimited, and knowing that this unlimited depth of being (Anaximander’s apeiron) symbolizes the ground out of which one has come and to which one must inevitably return in death. On the other hand, luminosity is that structure of consciousness that experiences itself in participation with a noetic or pneumatic divine height. One might say then that human existence is composed of impersonal general elements that are subject to the universal human condition and, as such, participate in the general temporality and perishing of all things; but existence is also composed of a personal dimension of nous or pneuma in which the consciousness of the human person experiences itself in tension with the divine height that does not perish.

The encompassing reality of being has mysteriously endowed consciousness with both self-awareness and awareness of that which is beyond the self in the range from immanence to transcendence. Husserl’s phenomenology is self-limiting because intentionality cannot give an account of intentionality. Luminosity is the compelling awareness of itself (that is, of one’s own conscious self) as an event in Being and as primordially participating, with all of its existence, in that reality of the Whole of Being in its range from the chaotic mystery of the boundless depth to the ordering mystery of the divine height. Luminosity is therefore the very possibility of intentionality. In confronting reality as a thing, the subject confronts it in the mode of transcendental subjectivity, Husserl’s “transcendental ego.” However, intentionality becomes a meaningful structure of consciousness only because it is nested within luminosity, whether one recognizes it or not. To recognize it and to be aware is anamnesis. To reject it or to ignore it is “forgetfulness.” The rejection of luminosity is not only the rejection of a structure of one’s own consciousness, but also the rejection of luminous meaning that emerges from the order of being.

In Volume Five of Order and History, Voegelin takes his meditative exegesis further. He points out that the possibility of anamnetic recollection always involves the possibility of forgetfulness, which he now refers to as “imaginative oblivion.” “There is no imaginative oblivion without remembrance.”[12] Intentionality and luminosity are structures of consciousness in relation with reality. However, where the reality intended by consciousness is referred to, there is “thing-reality.” Voegelin then uses the term “It-reality” to “denote the reality [within which consciousness exists and] that comprehends the partners in being, i.e., God and the world, man and society.”[13] Immediately we are confronted with a paradox: to use the term “It-reality” we are transposing the dimension of the encompassing and constituting reality that it symbolizes into thing-reality. To explore the significance of the experience of luminosity, we must turn our attention to it and intend it. That is, we necessarily treat luminosity in the mode of an object or thing-reality for the purposes of conceptualization. The paradox of consciousness must be attended to if the truth of reality, the logos, is to manifest itself in thought, word, and action; or better said, in participation with human consciousness.

“Moreover, when consciousness is experienced as an event of participatory illumination in the reality that comprehends the partners to the event, it has to be located, not in one of the partners, but in the comprehending reality.” The comprehending reality of the It, within which all things exist, becomes luminous to itself in participation with human consciousness. That is, “the luminosity of consciousness is located somewhere ‘between’ human consciousness in bodily existence and reality intended in its mode of thingness.” The danger of our paradoxical predicament is the forgetting of the “between,” the metaxic structure of consciousness in the luminosity of participation. The illumination of consciousness within the process of the It-reality “must be guarded against the conventional misunderstandings of a modernist mind that is accustomed to think of It-reality in terms of thing-reality.”[14] Indeed, it always remains an open question whether the thinker will remember or forget that what one is contemplating, when one contemplates being, is no existent thing but the non-existent, transcendent condition of thingness.

Quid est veritas? was Pontius Pilate’s question for Christ. It is a question that, if genuinely asked in the mode of an authentic quest for truth, rather than as a cynical rebuttal, implicates the clarification of consciousness. The question of truth raises two issues: What sort of authority does truth manifest that resonates so compellingly and formatively in the soul? And what is the prior stance or existential state that consciousness must be in, in order to recognize and welcome the authority of truth (or indeed, to resist such an authority)? “The event of the quest [for truth] is part of a story told by the It, and yet a story to be told by the human questioner, if he wants to articulate the consciousness of his quest as an act of participation in the comprehending story.”[15] It is the story of reality becoming luminous for its truth, experienced as the emergence of order from the boundless mystery of being, of kosmos from chaos by way of logos, which is always truth-telling in the anamnetic recovery of the order of being; truth-telling as both the existential drama of participation in the It, and the dramatic story of the It becoming luminous for its own logos within the consciousness of the questing thinker. The authority of the story is recognized only with “an authority commonly present in everybody’s consciousness, however inarticulate, deformed, or suppressed the consciousness in the concrete case may be.”[16]

In Volume One of Order and History, Voegelin reminded his readers that “participation is existence itself.”[17] The “authority commonly present” is the Heraclitean logos, the order of being of which every human being is luminously conscious simply because existence is participation in the It-reality that seeks the telling of its own story in part through consciousness. The Heraclitean logos is the authority already present in human existence, because human existence is already present to being itself; and we can refer to such authority, for the purposes of this article, as “existential authority.” Existential authority is the authority common to all because it is luminously present as the order of being to all. We can attend to it or not attend to it, but we can no more deny it than we can deny our own humanity. Sadly, of course, the denial of humanity—the choice to act inhumanly, to speak and think as though there is no human nature, and thus no inherent human dignity—is an all too frequent mode of being in the world.

Truth-telling is jeopardized as a result, and it is not only the telling of the truth of things, but of the truth of the self too. Much is at stake when the encompassing truth of reality is compromised in the regular eclipsing of luminosity by an imperious intentionality that attends only to certain parts of reality, and willfully forgets others. Existential authority is the authority by which we exist as human beings in our conscious capacities for luminosity and intentionality, and our capacity to attend to, or reflect upon, reality experienced in both modes. Truth-telling arises from existing in participatory tension with the encompassing It-reality, and in this tension truth emerges, bearing the authority of the order of being. Truth is experienced as authoritative because it tells the story of divine order—in its height above both bounded things and the boundless apeiron—that has illuminated one’s own consciousness. “The character of truth, thus, attaches to the story by virtue of its paradoxic structure of being both a narrative and an event.”[18] Truth is communicated by way of language in the mode of intentionality, and gains a quality of thingness, but whose luminosity must not be forgotten in the paradox. As an event of luminosity, truth-telling becomes an epiphanic event where the It-reality becomes luminous for its truth through the human attempt to enunciate it in words. “Under the aspect of this second structure the language of the story is not narratively referential but luminously symbolic.”[19]

As in Genesis and the Gospel of John, as well as in insights of Heraclitus, the word spoken is a logos if the word symbolizes the luminous event of truth as a paradoxical movement of the It in human consciousness. The logos is the paradox of the truth of the It-reality taking on “thingness” as words spoken or read, or becoming incarnate as the God-man. In Judeo-Christian symbolism, the human person is created in the image of God, and therefore exists as the image of the divine logos, the consummation of which is realized in truth-telling. By existing in anamnetic openness to the luminosity of truth—as one achieves it—the human person manifests an overflowing existential authority. Nonetheless, the narrative will always fall short of itself as an event. The event of truth-telling is the intentional attempt to articulate the luminous event in words. The pivot from luminosity to intentionality is an act of reflection that calls for humility simply because the person is a luminously constituted, but limited, part within the Whole.

Voegelin writes that reflection itself, along with luminosity and intentionality, is a structure of consciousness. That is, consciousness is also structured by its awareness of the paradox of luminosity and intentionality. He names this third structure “reflective distance” Reflective distance allows for anamnetic recollection and for “forgetting.” Reflective distance is the spiritual freedom or existential liberty of imagination to choose one’s way in life, in dialogue with the comprehending It-reality or not. As a function of such a choice, the human person communicates meaning in words, which themselves derive from imagination. So, imagination, closed to its own reality as a movement within the moving It-reality, becomes an alienated (though, perhaps, “transcendental”) ego in search of a ground of its own making that can save it from its self-imposed vacuousness.

However, imagination, open to its own reality as a movement within the encompassing reality of Being, is animated as a movement in luminous tension between the human person and the encompassing It-reality. “Imagination, as a structure in the process of a reality that moves toward its truth, belongs both to human consciousness in its bodily location and to the reality that comprehends bodily located man as a partner in the community of being.”[20] To the extent that imagination seeks truth, it becomes luminously authoritative as a questing and participating event of consciousness within the It as the It tells the truth of its own order through that very human imagination. The seeking for truth is already a form of truth-telling. Imagination is the freedom, that reflective distance affords, to seek symbols that adequately capture something of the truth luminously experienced in the metaxy, truth that is paradoxically more than can be told, truth as an event that overflows its narrative. Thus, the paradox of consciousness attaches to imagination too when it derives a word or symbol to communicate the existential authority of the truth of existence. Reflective distance requires humility because it is humility that underscores reflective distance. It is humility, after all, that recognizes that one’s own self is not the source of truth, but a truth-teller limited by imagination and the inadequacy of symbols for the telling of truth.

Voegelin notes that, given the paradox of consciousness, of reality, of language, existential resistance is unsurprising. He writes that the “truth of reality is not questioned; it is resisted” by imagination.[21] It is not simply that paradoxes are distasteful or untidy to systematizing minds, but that the in-between tension of truth, of the order of being, can be frustrating and perennially inconvenient if the movement of the It-reality forever overflows the intentional symbols of imagination. For example, Voegelin notes that “the ‘things,’ including man and society, come to an end in time without coming to their End out-of-time.”[22] The paradox of consciousness-reality-language may have a maddening quality for some, but the truth of consciousness-reality-language always moves beyond thing-reality and the imaginative projects of intentionality. Dissatisfaction and resentment, arrogance and pride resist the paradoxical truth of being, but it is imagination that provides a way to pretend that reality is not what it is.

Imaginative resistance has no need to question to the truth of reality if its symbols of resistance are distractingly effective. In the willful abolishing of luminosity, existential resistance can generate its own symbols of a truncated reality of thingness, under the auspices of homo mensura. Like the Platonic notion of evil as good-in-privation, existential deformation is the willful eclipse of the paradoxical truth of being, but without acknowledging the eclipse. In looking away from the inconvenient surplus of the event of the truth of reality in favor of a clipped narrative of truth; in dismissing the paradox that inheres in the complex luminosity-intentionality-imagination; in resisting the movement of the order of being in consciousness, consciousness chooses self-deformation and accordingly proceeds to communicate deformed symbols from the uneclipsed parts of reality that remain within its purview and subject to its manipulation. In “forgetfulness” of being, the measure of truth correlates only with the measure of reality that intentionality attends to and provides for.

Existential authority is the truth by which we exist, and the truthful order of existence that recognizes the appeal and authority of truth when it is encountered. The meditative context within which truth is recognized as valid is what Voegelin refers to as the “inescapably present structure of existence.” Truth-telling involves the attempt to articulate—by thought, word, and action—the context of its own emergence as logos. This meditative context is luminously “symbolized by the complex of consciousness-reality, of thing-reality and It-reality, of the things and their Beyond.”[23] The paradoxical nature of the truth of reality is that simultaneously it can be both symbolized and can overflow its own symbol. Existing and thinking occur within this ever-present meditative context whether through mythological, revelatory, or philosophical symbolization. This context is the paradox of truth that anamnesis recollects. Deformation is always the resistance to some part of the complex consciousness-reality-language and can become so emphatic and engrained as a habit that “oblivion” is a most appropriate term. Imaginative remembrance or imaginative oblivion are only possible because there is already the paradox of consciousness itself to which the acts of remembrance or oblivion pertain.[24]

 b. Authority in the Political Imagination

Tilo Schabert reminds us in his recent book, The Second Birth, that “Normally, politics as practiced is not what politics is in its essence. Part of the point of political theory is to remind us of this fact and to articulate the knowledge of politics in the predicament of politics.”[25] The mere exercise of political power (potestas) is not, by any necessity, either knowledge of the essence of politics or an adequate understanding of the predicament in which politics operates. The connection between political power and political understanding is found in some prior general grasp of human nature, as it is human nature that provides both the predicament in which politics operates and the understanding of what politics is for. Voegelin made the point that:

“there is no sense talking about good or bad institutions or making concrete suggestions about this or that social problem unless we first know what purpose or end these institutions are supposed to serve. This we cannot know unless we are familiar with the human nature which is going to develop within this social context.”[26]

Truth, as Voegelin has discussed, emerges from noetic or pneumatic consciousness, reflectively remembered by the truth-teller as that which is structured in the paradox of the It-reality manifesting itself in the mode of thingness. We now add that the “inescapably present structure of existence” is always operative in both the practice and knowledge of political existence as a dimension of human existence. If anamnesis and oblivion are possibilities of reflective distance, then reflective distance in the political imagination opens the possibility of both recollecting and forgetting the truth of reality, or at least, essential truths of human existence in political matters.

Power is one of the most salient characteristics of governance. It is a requisite of the practice of politics that, hopefully, is aimed at guaranteeing an order of truth (including goodness, justice, etc.). Power, employed in the service of the good of the political community, acquires authority in its exercise. Political authority, we suggest, is derivative of existential authority when the use of power is anchored in the truths of a community’s existence; but power that resists such truths, silences persons and communities, and eclipses the common good, lacks authority in the existential sense. Genuine political authority, in order to be adequately authoritative in and for a political community, seeks to realize and complete the political goods in which the political community knows itself.

The goods of liberty and justice, for example, manifest something of the truth of existence in particular Western societies, and political authority remains genuinely authoritative when it aims at these truths of the society’s existence.[27] Political authority is more than an institutional presentation of order, but more deeply is involves community consensus on political goods. But political goods emerge from attunement to the truth of existence, to the particular socio-historical realization of the order of being. What must be remembered by wielders of political power—and never forgotten—is that it is individuals and their communities in whom truth is experienced and symbolized. Political power per se is therefore existentially ambiguous. It can be employed in the consummation of those authentic human goods of political communities, or it can be used to forget the goods of attunement to the order of being, crushing human persons and their communities in its reckless oblivion.

Political theory considers the meaning and value of those various political goods such as liberty, justice, rights, law, property, education, etc. Most political theory textbooks feature a gap of a millennium in which, one supposes, that nothing of any significance happened. This millennium is the medieval period, yet it is the signal achievement of the medieval soul to work out the foundational political good, which is the good of order. The medievals articulated an authentic civilizational order in which power could be genuinely authoritative, and diagnosed why its misuse was not authoritative. It is upon the medieval foundation of order that subsidiary political goods stand and make sense. We will briefly present a marker of this medieval achievement in the contrast between auctoritas as rightly grounded power, and dominium as control or domination asserted in resistance to truth.

Dominium is a type of power, a dominance exercised over property. It was recognized from classical times as the proper authority exercised by a head of a household. Michael Oakeshott writes that “It referred to a specific potestas of the head of a household, namely his potestas as the owner of property and slaves. In respect of his property and slaves, but not in respect of his wife, children or clients, the paterfamilias was dominus (‘lord’) and exercised dominium.”[28] Dominion over the things of a household was the exercise of ownership over property. The things to be used and disposed of, according to the head of a household as property-owner, are the rightful objects to which the exercise of dominium is directed. With the unfortunate exception of slaves whose personhood was not recognized, the persons of a household—e.g., wives and children—were emphatically not subject to lordly ownership or dominium. In the medieval era, dominium was the authority rightly exercised by a lord over his demesne. Justice was therefore his to dispense, just as the lands and their harvest were his. It was to the lord that tenants would turn for the resolution to any disputes. The problem of justice residing in the hands of the lord, as the gift lying with his dominium, was obviously the adequate resolution of disputes that involved him. Nonetheless, the rise and codification of manorial law in the twelfth century onward reflected the mainly feudal arrangement of Western Europe and the prevalence of dominium.

However, from the twelfth century onward, there was also the rise of national realms that introduced new problems including the meaning of royal (rather than lordly) rule over subjects who found themselves already constituted as a nation or gens. The political community was a Christian and increasingly national community. Kingship was obviously not new, but kingship over the emerging national people throughout Christendom raised interesting questions about the kind of power to be exercised. The national peoples were not demesnes and their governance was not adequately formulated as dominium. The only self-evidently legitimate ruler of a Christian people was God, and therefore, only God could confer the right to exercise potestas over a people. Royal rule therefore rested upon a right conferred by God. It was more than mere lordship because it was not rule over property. The nation does not bear the status of property and the relation of ruler to the ruled is emphatically not the domination of a landowner. The nation did not belong to any monarch, rather he or she belonged to the nation, but the rightful exercise of power over the nation was a solemn obligation granted by God.[29] A king typically retained his dominium over his own demesne inasmuch as he was also a lord, but as king of a national realm, his power was not lordly.

Oakeshott writes, “A medieval king, then, came to be recognized to have two different kinds of ‘authority’ over two different kinds of subjects. The ‘authority’ of ‘lordship’ over his own demesne and his tenants, and the ‘authority’ of a ‘king’ over his kingdom and his subjects.”[30] Rightly grounded authority to govern is potestas used in the service of God’s people, a people attuned to the truth evoked by Christian symbols. Kingship was thus a Christian symbol and it symbolized the truth of existence of a people in attunement to the truth of reality. Accordingly, royal potestas was auctoritas, but the auctoritas by which a king ruled was not his own. Oakeshott, for example, describes the coronation of French kingship:

“It was understood that his royal potestas had not been given him by his electors, nor did it derive from his royal blood; it was something he had acquired in the anointing ceremony of his coronation. The oil of anointment had, according to repute, been brought by a dove from heaven for Clovis’s coronation, and it was preserved from generation to generation, over centuries. He was king Dei gratia.”[31]

Dominium, a power to be exercised within its own proper sphere, could not bear sufficient auctoritas to rule politically over any nation in Christendom because it was predicated upon the right to own property. Rather than an attunement to the truth of reality, dominium is the power to direct and manipulate some part of reality, at least that part of reality within its reach. The contrast could not be sharper.

In more contemporary tones, we might characterize the medieval insight as the recognition that the practice of politics 1) is authoritative only to the extent that it attunes itself to the order of being as already achieved in the political community, and thus acquires authority in its attempt to realize and perfect this order; and 2) becomes illicit when it resists its foundational and grounding authority.[32] Furthermore, since the truth of reality can only be experienced in the consciousness of individual persons (and, by extension, in the communion of community substance in which individuals exist), the governance of society that does not take into account the dignity of the individual person and his/her communities is a governance that begins to exercise dominium in the sense of domination and manipulation. Political authority—to the extent that it is genuinely authoritative—is always subsidiary to existential authority: it derives from existential authority when it is moved by the consenting participation of individuals and communities; and it finds its purpose in serving the common good by which individuals and communities already exist.[33]

The truth of reality is present in political governance, albeit indirectly or derivatively, when individuals and their communities matter, and when their good is the pre-eminent good to which potestas is directed. Political goods, such as liberty and justice, are rooted in the good of order which is the concrete order of concrete persons and concrete communities. In contrast, the political eclipse of persons and communities is the eclipse of existential authority, and the loss of genuinely political authority. Political potestas can lapse into dominium and claim the competence to act in a sphere to which it has no right and no foundation. Thus, just like the structure of reflective distance in the consciousness of the individual, the political imagination is capable of both political order and political disorder in its relation to the truth of reality.

II. Resistance to the Truth of Reality

a. Individual Existence and Anoia

Imaginative resistance begins in consciousness with the deformation of noetic consciousness or nous that Plato has diagnosed as anoia or “folly.”[34] It follows from Voegelin’s exegesis that anoetic consciousness (from anoia) is operative in two ways: 1) the resistance to luminosity as a structure of one’s own consciousness with the triumph of pure intentionality without paradox, and the attendant rendering of being to thing-reality; or 2) in the attempt to maintain luminosity, reflective distance collapses into reflective identity with the messianic merging of one’s own consciousness with the It-reality. That is, imaginative oblivion is the anoetic consciousness that resists the paradoxical truth of reality either by eclipsing luminosity with an intentional act of existential violence on one’s own consciousness, or by engaging in millenarian reflective identity that fuses consciousness with the comprehending It and thereby claims to bring about an end to history. Let us call these “intentionalism” (in the superordination of intentionality over the paradoxical structure of consciousness that Voegelin finds articulated in the work of Husserl) and “apocalypticism” (in the collapsing of reflective distance), respectively. These demarcate the axes of anoia as imaginative oblivion in the individual consciousness, but find political expressions too.

On the individual level, Voegelin’s discussion of Hegel in In Search of Order is instructive. In discussing the “German revolution of consciousness,” he describes the German thinkers as diagnosing the triumph of intentionality over the mystery of being (through symbolisms such as propositional metaphysics) as profoundly problematic. The deformation diagnosed was the sublimation of propositional symbols or dogma over luminous experience of participating in or with the It-reality. The situation therefore called for a response, which—in the case of Hegel—led to apocalypticism. He writes:

“Noetic and pneumatic, Hellenic and Judaeo-Christian symbols had been transformed into intentionalist concepts to be manipulated by propositional thinkers. It is Hegel’s irreversible achievement to have thoroughly understood the dominant deformation of symbols; it is Hegel’s grandiose failure to have attempted a solution by fusing the It-reality and the thing-reality into the new symbolism of the Sein [a being thing beyond being things]”[35]

Hegel’s System of Science, according to Voegelin’s analysis, is the “millennial process of the absolute spirit” that reveals itself absolutely “in fully articulate conceptualizations of its self-consciousness.”[36] Hegel “could deform fundamental experiences only by first rediscovering them in opposition to symbols that had lost the experiential source of their meaning and, as a consequence, had become a dead body of ideas and opinions.”[37] The attempt to recover the truth of reality, obscured by intentionalist consciousness, may also be driven by anoia and “succumb to deformation through the desire to dominate in the mode of thing-reality over the experience recovered.”[38] Both intentionalism and apocalypticism are deformations rooted in dominium and exercised over the experience of reality. Indeed, Voegelin writes that Hegel has announced the eschaton as fully articulate in his System of Science, and that he apocalyptic end of history is unveiled to the world by Geist through the Hegelian System of Science. In both the intentionalist and the apocalyptic modes of anoia, resistance to truth proceeds as a forgetfulness in consciousness, and the will to dominate over reality finds it ground in the will to triumph over the paradox of consciousness-reality-language.

 b. Political Existence and Ideology

Unsurprisingly, anoia—as a distortion of consciousness—finds political expression too. Keeping in mind that the medieval achievement that interests us here is the enduring symbolization of order as authority foundationally experienced in the human person and, by extension, in his/her communities—captured in the Judaeo-Christian notion of imago Dei—any account of disorder has to be set against the Christian differentiation of consciousness and the primacy of the individual person. The distortions of order within the medieval cosmion therefore implicated this primacy and mirror Voegelin’s theoretical account. The medieval disorders either 1) submerged persons beneath a putative collective substance that could nonetheless be manipulated by power, or 2) collapsed reflective distance in apocalyptic thinking.

As examples of the former, Siger of Brabant’s Latin Averroism claimed the unity of the intellective soul of which single human beings were mere individuations. Mankind, according to Latin Averroism, is itself a collective soul and it is the collective that outweighs the individuations in dignity. Similarly, Frederick II wrote his Constitutions of Melfi with a notion of the collective unit of mankind as a troublesome mass to be managed. Frederick II could rule brutally over the troublesome mass, because it was justified by necessitas rerum, the understanding of which exemplifies the intentionalist mode of anoia. The individual person becomes a mere unit—a statistic—that disappears behind the collective unit.

As an example of the latter, Joachim of Fiore claimed the authority to speak the “eternal gospel” and announced a third and final age of the spirit. In modern and contemporary times, it may not be too much to suggest that there are currents of meaning in broad continuity with medieval disorder, if we accept that the medieval insight into order endures.[39] For example, intentionalist projects of managing human collectives (in left and right-wing group-identity politics, for example), or the apocalypticism of declaring a thousand year Reich, a Marxist meaning of history and its inevitable realm of freedom are mass movements, or a Progressivist social evolution, seem to be forged in imaginative oblivion that have forgotten the authority of personhood.

Insights into order and disorder occurred within a Christian arc of meaning. Voegelin explained that what Christianity presents, in the most abstract terms, is both a) a final state of transcendent perfection, and b) a purpose for human life in this world as a movement of attunement toward that perfection.[40] However, the luminous movement of consciousness in participation with the reality of the comprehending It, even as the It participates in bodily located consciousness, is a paradox too subtle for many. It requires, at a minimum, a humbling of the self beneath the mysterious truth of reality. It is resisted by a libidinous pride that wills dominium over reality. In The New Science of Politics, Voegelin writes

The bond [of Christian faith] is tenuous, indeed, and it may snap easily. The life of the soul in openness toward God, the waiting, the periods of aridity and dullness, guilt and despondency, contrition and repentance, forsakenness and hope against hope, the silent stirrings of love and grace, trembling on the verge of a certainty which if gained is loss—the very lightness of this fabric may prove too heavy a burden for men who lust for massively possessive experience.[41]

The truth of reality is resisted on both an individual and a social level, yet reality and its truth persist, as well as the human condition of existence as participation in what cannot be fully comprehended. Thus, the loss of Christian symbolism in the resistance to truth leaves something of a vacuum or a hole. The “death of God” does not necessarily mean the death of religiousness, but the generation of either a Nietzschean superman who is a Messianic source of truth and value, or a substitute religion to fill the hole. The problem with overcoming Christianity is that the mode of existential resistance to the truth of reality must reach for its own symbols within a civilizational landscape saturated by symbols that the Christian experience of reality have formed. In the Western context, the substitute religion must, at a minimum, be able to take on some of the “shape” that Christianity left behind, particularly those symbols of Christian perfection and pilgrim progress.

Substitutes for Christian perfection and progress present themselves in ideologies. Ideologies generate their own symbols to provide substitute perfections and substitute means to realize such perfections. Instead of the divine Logos of the Gospel of John, we have the substitute logoi of clever ideas, expedient ideas, intoxicating ideas that seek to make sense of being, or better said, of a selected part of being that can be dominated. It is the “selected part of being” that ideology makes sense of that becomes the focus of ideological action. Ideologies are essentially totalitarian—symbolically and politically—because they are conceived and born in “massively possessive experience” or, as the medievals termed it, dominium.

Ideologies select the part of being that is subject to their manipulation and become powerful in eclipsing the other part of being that is not subject to their manipulation. Ideologues, accordingly, are those who have distorted their own consciousness by either willfully eclipsing luminosity or collapsing reflective distance. Ideology therefore bears the character of intentionalism and/or apocalypticism. Truth-telling as anamnetic recollection of that part of being beyond manipulation is expressly resisted, whether through killing, or through speech codes and intimidation, or simply through the cascade of buzzwords and messaging that comprehensively fill the public space, squeezing the language of truth-telling into irrelevance. No matter its method, ideologies seek to resist the truth of reality by eclipsing 1) individual persons, because it is only the human person who can experience the truth of reality and manifest existential authority; 2) transcendent-divine symbolism that communicates authority above that part of reality that lies within the manipulative power of ideological action; and 3) political auctoritas grounded in the uncapturable existential authority of the people.

On form and content, two things can be said about ideological dominium. Firstly, there is the form that an ideology takes in order to substitute for the Christian landscape. In becoming politically articulate, it is always burdened by the pre-existence of symbols of Christian order. Voegelin explains that there are three ideal forms of ideological substitution. There is Utopianism where the final perfection of a heaven-on-earth is clearly seen, but the means of arriving there is not so clear. There is Progressivism where the emphasis lies on progress from a benighted past toward an enlightened future state, but what that perfected state will be need not be well-defined because we have the direction and the tools (potestas) to get there. Then there is Social Revolutionism in which both the final perfection and the means of getting there are clear.[42] Each of the ideological forms is a structural outcome of existential resistance to the historically Christian symbolism of the truth of reality.

Secondly, there is the content of ideology. The content is that part of being to be imaginatively clipped away from the whole of being and subjected to manipulation and domination. Socialist revolution and the Marxist realm of freedom that awaits, the pure race, the pure state, the progressive evolutionary present: the content of ideology varies according to the part of being to be dominated. However, the problem for every ideology, no matter its content or form, is the human person. Or more precisely, the authority of personhood, that we have termed existential authority, bears witness to the truth of reality that cannot be dominated. The human person and his/her communities experience the truth of the reality of being. Being, which infinitely overflows the finiteness of ideological manipulation, is the adversary; and the human person, constituted by experiences of the order and truth of being, is by extension the adversary. The manipulation of a selected part of being is always an act of resistance to being itself. Resistance to being and its truth is therefore is enacted by resistance to persons in whom experiences of the truth of being occur. If persons refuse to become “useful idiots,” then ideology aims to eclipse and supplant them. For the sake of dominium, the existential authority of personal reality, and the derivative political auctoritas grounded in the good of persons and their communities, is resisted.

Conclusion

Disenchantment, ressentiment, arrogance, and the will to dominate are attitudes that can be adopted toward particular and well-defined sociopolitical circumstances. On a deeper level, frustration at being itself can lead beyond political action and become destructive. Ressentiment at dominant religious, political, economic, or social hierarchies of value can deepen into a rejection, not simply of any localized value, but of being itself. Indignation and envy at the particular can metastasize, in its volcanic acuteness, into a willed rejection of the whole. This is nihilism, as the grandest expression of imaginative oblivion. Nihilism is not itself therefore simply value-neutral in the sense of believing in nothing. In its maximum, nihilism can manifest itself in the will to reduce everything to nothing, a rage to destroy as the deepest revolt against being which will not conform to the distorted libidinous or ideological image.

As Nietzsche wrote, “Nihilism is . . . not only the belief that everything deserves to perish; but one actually puts one’s shoulder to the plough; one destroys.”[43] The murderousness of nihilistic destruction is what he predicted in the vacuum left behind in the wake of Christianity.[44] Nietzsche reminded us that what is a possibility of consciousness is also a possibility of politics, and it is this reminder that Voegelin’s theory of consciousness has amplified. If nihilism is the intentional work of undoing and deformation, then it can be countered only by the work of anamnetic truth-telling. The Gospels have already told us that the “truth shall set you free.” Indeed, the sad experience of modernity could communicate the same message by its own witness: it is not truth but nihilism that awaits when the seductive hell of imaginative oblivion convinces us that dominium is preferable to the order of being, truth, and persons.

Notes

[1] Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 125.

[2] Voegelin, “Foreword,” The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume. 6: Anamnesis, ed. David Walsh (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 33. [Hereafter The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin will be denoted by CW].

[3] Eliade, Myth and Reality, 116.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid., 119.

[6] Ibid. 120-21.

[7] Ibid., 126. Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 30.

[8] Plato, Meno, 86a, b. In Plato: The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 371.

[9] Voegelin, “On the Theory of Consciousness,” in CW 6: Anamnesis, 83.

[10] Voegelin, “A Letter to Schütz Concerning Husserl,” ibid. 46.

[11] Voegelin, Ibid. 352.

[12] Voegelin, CW 18: Order and History, Volume 5: In Search of Order (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 56.

[13] Voegelin, ibid. 30. He continues that philosophers, “when they run into this structure incidentally in their exploration of other subject matters, have a habit of referring to it by a neutral ‘it’.”

[14] Ibid., 36.

[15] Ibid., 38.

[16] Ibid., 40.

[17] Ibid., CW 14: Israel and Revelation (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 39.

[18] Ibid. CW 18, 40.

[19] Ibid. 41

[20] Ibid., 52.

[21] Ibid., 49.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid., 56.

[24] What makes anamnesis or oblivion possible is the “reflective distance to the experienced paradox of existence.” Ibid.

[25] Tilo Schabert, The Second Birth: On the Political Beginnings of Human Existence, trans. Javier Ibáñez-Noé (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press: 2015), 62.

[26] Voegelin, “The West and the Meaning of Man in Industrial Society,” in CW33: The Drama of Humanity, (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004), 100.

[27] St. Augustine famously wrote “A people is an association of a multitude of rational beings united by a common agreement on the objects of their love.” See Augustine, Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans, Bk. XIX, ch. 24, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin Classics, 1984), 890. Augustine is highlighting the political goods which constitute the meaning of existence, and for the sake of which a people understand themselves as a society. Indeed, an aggregate of persons becomes a communion of people in the name of such political goods.

[28] Michael Oakeshott, Lectures in the History of Political Thought, ed. Terry Nardin and Luke O’Sullivan (Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2006), 235.

[29] For a discussion on the development of European kingship from the Germanic model, see “Germanic Kingship and the Problem of Overreaching Authorities” in my book, The Differentiation of Authority: The Medieval Turn Toward Existence (Washington DC: Catholic University of American Press, 2012), 30ff. Also Voegelin, CW 20: History of Political Ideas: The Middle Ages to Aquinas, Volume II, ed. Peter von Sivers (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 46ff.

[30] Oakeshott, Lectures, 459.

[31] Ibid., 278.

[32] This is in substantial continuity with the classical insight that politics is “mimesis of the gods” as symbolized in Plato’s tale of Kronos’s primordial care for mankind in the Statesman, 269a-274e. See Tilo Schabert’s discussion of the significance of this story for the meaning of political existence in The Second Birth, 55-58.

[33] One might characterize the common good as a multi-faceted symbolism of truth that emerges from attunement to the order of being, and the resulting panoply of goods under which persons and communities realize the truth of their own existence as participants in being. The “common good” is therefore a familiar phrase with a meaning not too dissimilar from the “order of being.”

[34] See Voegelin, CW 18, 57-58. Here he discusses equivalent historical symbols.

[35] Voegelin, CW 18, 79.

[36] Ibid. 80.

[37] Ibid. 85.

[38] Ibid. 68.

[39] See chapters four and five of my book that discuss these themes in James Greenaway, The Differentiation of Authority: The Medieval Turn Toward Existence (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2012).

[40] Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, in CW 5: Modernity Without Restraint (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 186

[41] Ibid. 122.

[42] Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, in CW 5, 186

[43] Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 18.

[44] “What I relate is the history of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism. . . . For some time now our whole European culture has been moving as toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end.” Nietzsche, “Preface,” ibid., 3.

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