Getting to Know the Older Eric Voegelin
Eric Voegelin is one of the most prominent political theorists of the 20th century. Many theorists associate his name with the following works: The Political Religions (1938), The New Science of Politics, and Order and History. His life can be divided into four stages, which by and large correspond to four countries: Austria, America, Germany, and, after his retirement, America again. The Political Religions concludes the first stage in Vienna; here, Voegelin formulates a very harsh condemnation of the totalitarian Führer state: the deification of the non-divine is a religious act. The most popular work during his first stay in the United States is the New Science of Politics, in which Voegelin offers an interpretation of the historical development with a particular focus on modernity; at the same time, he starts his magnum opus, Order and History (Vol. I–III, 1956–57). During his time in Munich (1958–69), there was a shift in emphasis from a philosophy of history to a philosophy of consciousness; Anamnesis was published in 1966. After Voegelin returned to the US, he continued his philosophy of history and consciousness. The most important outcome is volume IV of Order and History: The Ecumenic Age (1974). Voegelin passionately continued his work until he died in 1985.
It is precisely this latter period to which the volume on Voegelin’s late writings refers. The editor of the volume, Michael Franz, has set himself the task of commenting or having others comment on precisely those essays that appeared between the publication of Anamnesis (1966) and the year of Voegelin’s death (1985). The point of reference is not just any collection of essays from this period, but volume 12 of the Collected Works, which brings together Voegelin’s most important publications under the title Published Essays 1966–1985. The former student, assistant, and later Voegelin scholar Ellis Sandoz has selected, compiled, introduced, and edited the essays collected in this volume. Volume 12 of the Collected Works (hereafter CW 12) contains exactly 14 essays, and the commentaries edited by Michael Franz refer precisely to these 14 articles. Voegelin published in 1966 in Anamnesis, the first major treatise of his theory of consciousness. In the following years he steadily enlarged and deepened his understanding of historical events and processes based on his philosophy of consciousness. Interestingly, Voegelin published only a series of articles in various journals between 1966 and 1985, except the book on OH IV: The Ecumenic Age. The question arises as to whether these articles are of less value than the monumental work on OH IV. The answer is a clear no. Just as the sections in The Ecumenic Age take up a considerable number of different topics, Voegelin also deals with a variety of themes in the essays published between 1966 and 1985, which particularly occupied him in the late phase of his life.
Ellis Sandoz, the editor of the essay collection in CW 12, characterizes the selection with the following words: “The essays gathered here bear on almost every aspect of Voegelin’s philosophy. They range in tone and subject matter from a scalding critique of the German intellectual establishment of the 1930s for countenancing the rise of Hitler (…) to a biting satire upon contemporary vulgarian culture (…) to magisterial analysis (…) to a magnificent meditation (…) to a remarkable deathbed reflection.” Michael Franz, the editor of the Commentaries on Voegelin’s Late Essays, shares Ellis Sandoz’s conviction that Voegelin’s thinking found its deepest expression in exactly these essays. Voegelin was “preeminently an essayist,” which becomes particularly clear in Sandoz’s essay collection. Although Voegelin’s late essays represent the end (and high?) point of his intellectual development, they have never been analyzed and commented on in detail. This collection closes this gap.
Beyond his studies in philosophy, theology, political theory, literature, and religious studies, Voegelin was also an eminently political thinker. This is expressed in the essay on “The German University and the Order of German Society.” Barry Cooper underlines the importance of the subject for Voegelin by pointing out that in 1964, he gave an entire lecture on Hitler and the Germans in Munich and wrote another article on the subject in 1966. Voegelin explains the support of the Nazi regime through the degeneration of people over the previous centuries. The spiritual dimension of man, recognized and expressed especially in Greek thought and the Christian faith, was questioned and ultimately denied. A “spiritual forsaken era” was the result. Nietzsche recognized this more than others. According to Voegelin, the decisive reason for this development is the German education system since Wilhelm von Humboldt, which obscured the “idea of man” and destroyed the sciences of human beings. The result: philosophy degenerated into epistemology, philology into linguistics, and historiography into historicism. The educational system radiated into the 20th century, influencing the development of values and the relationship of university graduates to politics: their participation decreased. Towards the end of the reconstruction of Voegelin’s original thoughts, Cooper asks, with a view to Hannah Arendt, whether this explanation can adequately explain the mass phenomenon of National Socialism.
Voegelin’s article “On Classic Studies” points in the same direction. The essay is not primarily about classic studies, as the title suggests, but about the education system at colleges and universities. Julianne M. Romanello maintains that the essay diagnoses a particular disorder, namely the academic hostility to the life of reason. The background for the article is the classical educational system and, in particular, Plato’s teachings. By studying Plato, Voegelin learns that philosophy responds to the concrete disorder, promotes order in the human soul, and that the philosopher’s ultimately mystical quest illuminates reality. Voegelin makes an impressive comparison of the characteristics of classical and modern science, which ultimately only serves the purpose of demonstrating the decline and degeneration of modern science. The contemporary academy is marked by the fragmentation of science through specialization, distance from the teachings and insights of the classical period, and, more recently, by student revolts and resorts to violence. Romanello makes a convincing case, also by referring to Voegelin’s correspondence, that the academy is severely damaged for him, that in view of this “utter debacle,” he felt not only sadness but anger, and that he attached the greatest importance to the restoration of the academic community. (Science is never a singlehanded achievement of a scholar, but always a cooperative effort.) Voegelin not only had the political intention of helping to prevent “disorder” in society and the state, he was also existentially driven to bring academic education back to the heights it had once reached. This pedagogical impetus is wonderfully made clear by Romanello.
A major topic of Voegelin’s late essays is, obviously, the topic of religion and Christianity. He tackles this area in at least the following articles: “Immortality: Experience and Symbol,” “The Gospel and Culture,” “Quod Deus dicitur.” The essay on “Immortality: Experience and Symbol” is interpreted and commented on by Henrik Syse. The subject is not so much immortality, as the title suggests, but rather the interplay between experience, symbol, and reality. According to Voegelin, in today’s world, the experience of God, the soul, or immortality has degenerated into merely an “idea” or a dogma. Some people defend it; others oppose it. With reference to the teachings of Marx and Freud, the opinion has spread that religious experiences and symbols are nothing but arbitrary illusions. Marx’s prohibition of questions is based on this conviction. In contrast to these and similar views, Voegelin protests this downsizing and minimalization of the human being: Man is a being who participates simultaneously in time and in the timeless. Participation in a higher order is just as characteristic of him. There is a divine presence in man, and the attempt to exclude, ridicule, deconstruct, and psychologize this element reveals more about its authors than about reality; such theories are evidence of man’s state of alienation.
The article on “The Gospel and Culture” is interpreted by Thomas Heilke. The essay tackles issues such as the success of the gospel in the Hellenic-Roman civilization, the meaning of the gospel in terms of philosophy, and how the gospel became the state religion of the Roman empire. Voegelin answers the question regarding the relationship between the gospel and the Greek-Roman civilization: “If the community of the gospel had not entered the culture of the time by entering its life of reason, it would have remained an obscure sect and probably disappeared from history.” The gospel was able to merge with the then-dominant civilization because it appeared to offer the answer to the philosopher’s search for truth. Voegelin comments on the proximity of philosophy and the Gospel later in his article: “The noetic core (…) is the same in both classic philosophy and the gospel movement.” There is the same field of pull and counterpull, the same consciousness of existence in an In-Between. The assertion that the gospel and Hellenic philosophy can meet and meld, thereby decreasing the gospel and increasing Greek philosophy, was the cause for heated debates and criticisms; Heilke enters the discussions, hints at relevant secondary literature, and takes a stand.
The next essay with a clear religious reference is the last article written by Voegelin on Quod Deus dicitur? The two commentators, Thomas Heilke and Paul Caringella, report on its genesis and central contents; the description of the situation shortly before Voegelin’s death, when Voegelin authored this essay, is at least as impressive as its contents. As a former assistant, Paul Caringella reports on the last days together and how the article came about. The article would never have reached its current form without the devotion of Paul Caringella, who wrote down the dictation from an almost inaudible voice under the saddest circumstances. Various arguments, contents, and the sequence were discussed and finally determined; it is, however, not a wholly elaborated and thought-through essay. Voegelin covers a wide range from the question of the knowability of God to various doctrines and theories of Thomas Aquinas, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Anselm, and Plato. He emphasizes that we are not facing God as a thing but as the partner in a questing search that moves within reality. But as civilization develops, men increasingly attune with the order of being. The event of the quest is a historical process that occurs at several levels in the course of history and finds different answers accordingly.
The volume of Voegelin’s late essays contains an article, “On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery.” The essay is supposed to be a frontal attack on Hegel. Hegel is, along with Fichte and Schelling, a representative of the so-called German Idealism, according to David Walsh, “the greatest philosophical explosion in the modern period.” Hegel is usually considered the culmination of German Idealism, and, therefore, the favorite object of Voegelin’s attacks. Walsh makes it clear from the outset that, despite labeling Hegel as a sorcerer, Voegelin has “a convergence with Hegel”; he is “the sorcerer’s apprentice.” One example consists in Hegel’s goal to reach the level of “absolute knowledge” in his Phenomenology of the Spirit. Hegel’s philosophy claims indeed to provide a coherent, systematic, and definitive interpretation of the whole of reality in the diversity of its manifestations, including its historical development. The term “absolute knowledge” is interpreted by Voegelin as if Hegel had become God who alone disposes of such knowledge; David Walsh corrects this interpretation by demonstrating that the talk of “absolute knowledge” does in no way suggest that Hegel has reached this level. The “absolute knowledge” is the highest form of the spirit, and as such, it is the gathering of various forms of consciousness. The past is saved from oblivion through comprehension. The term also means, very simply, that what one has comprehended is sometimes unavailable to others; one has glimpsed what can be glimpsed by all, even if most do not. Walsh emphasizes, too, that here Voegelin is remarkably close to Hegel, given Voegelin’s highlighting of the Metaxy as the horizon within which our thinking occurs and which is not reached by everybody (in the same way).
Another topic of Voegelin’s late essays is his critique of ideology. The article “Wisdom and the Magic of Extreme: a Meditation” discusses this topic in detail. Michael Franz characterizes the essay as one of “the author’s greatest and most important writings.” Voegelin focuses on the sense of imperfection and disordered spirituality. The opening sentences of the writing consist of a harsh statement in which Voegelin asserts that “all of us are threatened in our humanity, if not in our physical existence, by the massive social force of activist dreamers who want to liberate us from our imperfections by locking us up in the perfect prison of their phantasy.” Examples of these “activist dreamers” are Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche, whose interest is not a gradual reform of the situation, but a radical revolt. They are attracted by the “magic of the extreme” (Nietzsche) and know the “Zauberworte” (magic words) that will determine the future course of history (Hegel). Michael Franz provides an extremely careful interpretation of the text and traces the great distance between this meditation and the New Science of Politics. In “Wisdom and the Magic of Extreme: a Meditation,” Gnosticism is completely absent as the main characteristic of modernity, and the concept of history now deviates entirely from the linear construction of history with its world-historical cycle of ascent and descent developed in the New Science of Politics. Voegelin’s approach is, in many respects, now much more differentiated than it was years ago.
Beyond these selected articles, the volume edited by Michael Franz contains contributions by Steven F. McGuire, “On Debate and Existence,” by Paul Kidder on “Configurations of History,” by Glenn Hughes on “Equivalences and Symbolization in History,” by Charles R. Embry “On Henry James’s Turn of the Screw,” by William Petropulos on “Reason: The Classic Experience,” by Paulette Kidder on Voegelin’s “Response to Professor Altizer” and by Paul Kidder on “Remembrance of Things Past.” Each article is interesting and worth reading in its own way. Voegelin sometimes repeats some of his new experiences and insights, but often, the argumentation is new, instructive, and occasionally surprising.
Regarding the assessment, it could be critically noted that the volume does not indicate for every article whether it is a new publication written exclusively for this volume and that the author’s details are sometimes incomplete; for example, an author’s doctorate is missing in the contributor biographies. Another possible objection could be that some arguments are mentioned more than once, which is obviously because Voegelin has written the 14 articles over almost 20 consecutive years and that he, therefore, uses some arguments anew. The last objection can, however, easily be refuted with the counter-argument that it is precisely Voegelin’s late work that is to be examined and that a collection of essays spanning a certain (dense) period names important arguments not just once. To conclude, the volume on Voegelin’s late writings is a well-crafted commentary on some of Voegelin’s most important essays. By reading Voegelin’s writings in CW 12 and the accompanying commentaries, the reader gains numerous important insights into Voegelin’s original and profound work. The volume is a real enrichment of the research on Eric Voegelin. I wish the volume many curious readers!
In my remarks, I have not thoroughly distinguished between “essays” and “meditations.” This distinction must be made. An essay is, as the French word indicates, an attempt; a meditation is the conscious directing of attention to a specific topic that exceeds an essay in intensity and thoroughness. Some of Voegelin’s writings are more than mere essays; they are meditations in the best sense of the word. One outstanding example is “Wisdom and the Magic of Extremes: A Meditation.
Eric Voegelin’s Late Meditations and Essays
Edited by Michael Franz
South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2023; 375pp
Related Posts
