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Israel and the Cosmological Empires of the Ancient Orient

Israel and the Cosmological Empires of the Ancient Orient: Symbols of Order in Eric Voegelin’s Order and History, vol. 1, Eric Voegelin Studies, Supplements/01. Ignacio Carbajosa and Nicoletta Scotti Muth, with the collaboration of Aldo L’Erario (eds.). Paderborn: Brill/Wilhelm Fink, 2021.

The recent meeting of the Eric Voegelin Society at the APSA annual convention featured a roundtable discussion of this new book of essays, Israel and the Cosmological Empires of the Ancient Orient: Symbols of Order in Eric Voegelin’s Order and History (hereafter: ICEAO) on Voegelin’s initial volume of his 5 volume Order and History (hereafter OH), Israel and Revelation (hereafter: IR; all citations of Voegelin are from the Collected Works [CW] edition). ICEAO’s publication, motivated by the sixtieth anniversary of IR’s first publication in 1956, will enable the seasoned Voegelin scholar and reader to see how a “younger” or “new” generation is receiving IR, and it will enable those interested in “dipping into” this inaugural volume of Voegelin’s central œuvre a sense of its varied dimensions. ICEAO also offers the opportunity to weigh to what an extent IR, or at least its major parts/tenets, is a “classic” to be returned to again and again, or more of a “period piece,” whose relevance has largely evaporated. It is too early, of course, to offer anything like a final verdict about that, but raising the question this many years after its initial publication seems merited, given the many reviews and manifestations of interest in it over the years, this new book being the most recent.

The essays of the four parts of the book overlap to some extent, and that is to be expected of a book written by a polymathic, interdisciplinary thinker like Voegelin.  Some of the essayists focus simply upon various aspects of IR, while others endeavor to evaluate the work within the context of IR as a whole and/or of Voegelin’s entire oeuvre. Each perspective has its value, of course. And one cannot expect every scholar to have studied, let alone digested, all of Voegelin’s major works before asking one to evaluate a specific work by him. One must begin somewhere, and perhaps something of the “original” freshness of the book can emerge from a reader’s first, “fresh” encounter with Voegelin, whether that encounter be largely affirmative, contrarian, or a mixture.

The editors’ substantive introduction situates the work within the context of Voegelin studies, and offers an initial entry to the essays. The four parts of the book give a sense of the book’s movement, from what IR offers on the question of what constitutes a civilization (Part I, Forms of Civilization); to the question of how an historical consciousness emerges and Israel’s role in that especially, thus suggesting that not all civilizations necessarily have an historical consciousness, along with the question of what such a consciousness might mean for the nature of “order” in societies  (Part II, Order and History); to the question of IR’s treatment of the Old Testament in the light of biblical scholarship and, very interestingly and somewhat newly, also in the light of Max Weber’s important influence upon Voegelin in regard to the Old Testament (Part III, On the Old Testament); and finally (Part IV, Israel and Revelation), to the question of Voegelin’s understanding of revelation itself, in the light of contemporary political philosophy and theology.

Thus already the reader of this review essay may be sensing something of the polymathic texture of Voegelin’s quest. Why would a political philosopher consider the nature of civilizations and their different forms important for a study of politics? And the nature of history, historical consciousness, and its relevance to human society? Here Voegelin was breaking new ground in political science, or at least challenging reigning presumptions in the field, along with some others. Certainly when set over against the insular/nationalist and/or abstract, positivist, and behaviorist approaches to matters political. And this challenge becomes even more of an “affront” when he begins his series with, of all things, Israel and revelation, thus arguing that historical consciousness and the kind of critical “science” it can bring, is linked with God (or the” Divine Ground”), and that, consequently, a truly critical science loses its “critical” dimension when it backslides on its rootedness in matters having to do with divinity, transcendence, and the “Divine Ground.” Biblical and religious scholars are not spared either, for while they may initially sense something very appealing about a political “scientist” elevating the importance of Israelite and Christian revelation in matters political, they will soon learn that there is much of the Jeremiah-like critique of the rather dogmatically encrusted forms of theology and “religion” found in the religious thought of their particular confessions, at least on IR’s view.

IR’s first part on the cosmological order of the ancient Near East, in which Voegelin treats of the Mesopotamian, Achaemenian, and Egyptian empires as a background for and transition to the breakthrough to transcendence “beyond the cosmos” and emergence of historical consciousness in Israel, largely explains the second to fourth essays collected in ICEAO’s Part I. Peter Machinist’s “Eric Voegelin and His Orientalist Critic: The Case of William Foxwell Albright,” offers the reader a valuable overview of a biblical scholar who reviewed IR quite positively, and like Voegelin, approached the Old Testament in the light of Near Eastern history and archaeology. Voegelin referenced Albright’s From the Stone Age to Christianity as well as his Archaeology and the Religion of Israel as authoritative sources, for example. The characterization of Voegelin as an “historian of ideas,” however, misses Voegelin’s move away from a “history of ideas” approach toward a more experiential, historical orientation. This was perhaps a key to the difference between Albright and Voegelin; Voegelin’s wider view of “experience” (IR, CW 14 edition, 444: “the symbols [of Israel] weave their own way through experiences that are not sense perceptions”) is what enables Voegelin to argue that, inasmuch as transcendence is an experience within history, so too, then, is religious experience.

(Parenthetically, the roundtable discussion unsurprisingly went into a discussion of whether it is appropriate for scholars to speak as scholars of religious beliefs. The history of ideas approach lends itself to the notion that religious beliefs are just another form of subjective “idea” whose “scientific” basis is lacking. One might talk about such ideas, at best, somewhat as Weber, for example, would write about facts, which can be corroborated, and values, which can simply be discussed. Voegelin decisively broke from this history of ideas approach and varyingly worked out a view of “experience” which includes the senses, but also incorporates the full range of human capacities. You might say that in the experience of transcendence the Divine Beyond and the human subject meet. [Readers wishing more on this might consult The Politics of the Soul: Eric Voegelin on Religious Experience, ed. Glenn Hughes.] This is and perhaps will always remain a contested matter in Voegelin studies, and certainly in contemporary political theory. When Voegelin wrote of the divine, he was not simply writing “about” what others believed they had encountered, which might then be described as an “idea” others might discuss, at best. In fact, for the philosopher as Voegelin viewed it the experience of transcendence is the very reality enabling the philosopher to be “noetically open”; as such it is the “starting point that makes … argument possible in the first place” [Anamnesis, CW 6, 353].)

Returning now to ICEAO, Dietrich Wildung (“Zeitlos. Zum Geschichtsbild der alten Ägypter”) and Giorgio Buccellati (“The Cosmos before Cosmology: Foreshadowing of Order in Prehistory”) offer a kind of “thinking alongside” Voegelin’s own (proposed) sketch of the cosmic consubstantiality of the divine-human-nature-society (= cosmos)“awareness/consciousness” of pre-historical societies. Wildung suggests that the Egyptians moved toward a differentiation of the individual self through architecture and art/statuary (here perhaps advancing beyond Voegelin’s concern with “texts”), while Buccellati focuses upon various forms of compactness and differentiation as manifested in very early cosmological tool making.

The first essay, by Nicoletta Scotti Muth (“Eric Voegelins Rekurs auf aristotelische Denkmotive im Theorierahmen von Order and History”), stands apart a bit in this section, as it offers a review and suggestions regarding Voegelin’s recourse to Aristotle in his understanding of “science” and his use of the notion of “form” (see “symbolic form”) in some of his earlier writings and within the first three volumes of OH.  She suggests possible “contamination” between Voegelin’s usages, Max Weber’s notions of “type” and “idea” and Aristotle’s notions of “eidos” and “form,” although Voegelin gives these a more historical leaning. Voegelin wrote IR after he had finished the second and third volumes of OH, which treat of the Greek thinkers, and he largely claimed to adopt an Aristotelian view of science in his methodology, as we know from The New Science of Politics. Scotti’s essay here calls for more scrutiny in this regard, seeing a greater historical emphasis in Voegelin. This essay seems appropriate in this first section, as it helps us see the way in which symbolic forms serve as key structuring symbols in OH (the cosmological, the historical, philosophy and revelation, etc.), and yet it alerts us to the need for a more critical use of these categories.

Massimo Marassi (“Die symbolische und transzendentale Struktur der Geschichte: Order and History”) and John Milbank (“Truth and the Ambivalence of Empire: on the Theoretical Work of Eric Voegelin”) constitute Part II’s focus upon the emergence of historical consciousness within Israel as bringing about a new shape to order and history. Marassi’s essay is a very valuable sketch of Voegelin’s views, especially helpful for a German-speaking audience that may not be familiar with the architecture of OH. Milbank brings the skills and learning of a master philosophical and theological thinker to Voegelin, offering at times a very provocative and indeed challenging view of, not only IR, but Voegelin’s oeuvre in general.

Milbank forcefully argues that a somewhat “unresolved” (my word) or at least “ambiguous” (again, my word) tension between transcendence and immanence, spirit and material concreteness, the “vertical” and the “horizontal,” repeatedly opens up in Voegelin’s “work”/project. It is as if, on Voegelin’s view, Israel’s break from cosmological compactness, where spirit and this-worldly immanence saturate one another, to the vision of the unseen and world-transcendent God, especially in Moses and the prophets, results in a waffling back and forth between them, or devaluing of the immanent pole, or at least a loss of integration between them. Like others in this volume, he notes the lack of an appreciation of the role of cult/ritual/liturgy/doctrine, the lack of any sustained attention to the Temple cultus and priesthood (Ezechiel, for example, hardly being noted by Voegelin), a tendency to highlight the “isolated” individual prophet (e.g., Jeremiah) as over against the community and its this-worldly concerns (how can one infuse the work of the Spirit into a community apart from ritual and doctrine?), and a tendency for Voegelin to rely upon a more anti-cultic and anti-doctrine “Protestant” tradition of exegesis, rather than that of a more “catholic” tradition of exegesis.

We can return to some of these concerns later in this review. They are important, and touch on serious questions. For now let it be noted that Milbank at one point writes that “No doubt Voegelin is half-right about all of this.” All authors, I suspect, would be happy with that kind of judgment of their own work! Allow me to add at this point that Milbank’s essay, along with that of Walsh later in this volume, are in my view extraordinary in their eloquent erudition, in their stunning insightfulness, and in their ability to provoke further questions.

Dominik Markl (“Divine Law and the Emergence of Monotheism in Deuteronomy”), Eckart Otto (“Assyria and Israel: The Political Theory of the Book of Deuteronomy and Its Reception by Max Weber and Eric Voegelin”), and Ignacio Carbajosa (“The Exodus of Israel from Itself: The Role of the Prophets in Voegelin’s Israel and Revelation”) constitute Part III’s essays on IR in relation to Old Testament studies.

Like Milbank, but less philosophically and more in terms of biblical exegesis, Markl “relativizes” what he considers IR’s tendencies to dichotomize (my word) the law and the prophets, or perhaps we can read here, between “doctrine” and prophetic spiritual awareness. After all, Moses himself, the great prophet, is himself a lawgiver in Deuteronomy’s latest strata, as later Matthew’s Jesus is himself a lawgiver. Likewise, God is the giver of laws, and not simply of spirit, in the Old Testament (Ps 82; Deut 4:35, 39; Isa 45.5,6,14,18,21,22; 46:9).

Something not often done is a study of Weber’s importance for Voegelin, and Otto’s essay makes a helpful contribution toward that effort. Weber wrote extensively on Israel’s importance for politics, on the notions of charisma and political and social carriers of such charisms, on rationalization (perhaps not so different from a kind of doctrinal hardening?), and on the entire panoramic nature of religious traditions, not unlike Voegelin, and Voegelin lectured most appreciatively upon Weber as well. Carbajosa’s essay moves into the prophets as the “carriers” of the spirit of the transcendent God and, like Milbank but less negatively, sees the presentation of the prophetic challenge in IR as “the contraction of the universal potentialities of the Sinaitic revelation into the law of an ethnic religious community.” He places emphasis upon the need to recover Yahwist order in society, and thus focuses upon Deuteronomy as a “spiritual treasure” which was a “remarkable recovery of Yahwist order.” IR seemed to others, on the other hand, to accent the prophetic critique of the return to the “cosmological myth” (read: idolatry), and as is well known Voegelin viewed Deuteronomy rather negatively as moving in the direction of a doctrinal legalizing/hardening of the covenant.

Carbajosa highly regards IR’s characterization of the later Isaiah’s suffering servant texts as an expression of “the Exodus of Israel from Itself.” That is, life under the transcendent and universal God relativizes all nationalistic and ethnic pretensions to ultimacy. The breakdown of the empire of Israel/Judea on the socio-political level seems to have been a necessary but not sufficient condition for this.

But this “Exodus of Israel from Itself” experience can also be viewed as the nullification of Israel as a nation and ethnic people, as a kind of supersessionism, politically and theologically. Was this the necessary condition by means of which Christianity could emerge as the newly constituted people of God? This question is one of the shadows cast by the essays of Part IV. Marvin A. Sweeney (“Judaism and Revelation: Eric Voegelin’s Israel and Revelation Reconsidered”) and Catherine Chalier (“What about Judaism in Israel and Revelation?”) develop some of this matter, thus contributing to a series of important issues that have remained more or less present but subterranean in Voegelin studies until now.

Sweeney and Chalier question Voegelin’s almost only Christian interpretation of the Old Testament (that is, it is through Jesus the Christ that the universal implications of the transcendent God are finally recognized). There is no postbiblical Jewish “reading” of the Old Testament, or better, of the Torah, as occurred later with the Rabbinic Movement and the Mishnah, Talmud, etc., and as it continues on into the present. Of course, as they note, this was rather standard in Christian exegesis at the time that Voegelin was writing IR. Still, it is somewhat surprising, given Voegelin’s experience with the Nazis and their anti-Semitism. Voegelin does accord Martin Buber’s Moses central importance, however, in his treatment of Moses and the decalogue(s), as is noted by Sweeney and Chalier, and his Hitler and the Germans (CW 31) manifests a keen sensitivity to anti-Semitism, of course, not to mention his books on the race idea, which led to his flight to America eventually. But the Rabbinic tradition of interpretation, while noted, remained unfortunately unengaged by Voegelin.

David Walsh (“History as Constituted by What It Cannot Contain: Israel and Revelation”) links up with this question of supersessionism by another route, although it raises other important issues as well. Walsh deeply values the emphases in IR upon what might be called Voegelin’s articulation of Israel’s “personalism.” Walsh alludes to this in his study, but allow me to surface some texts:

There is a “latent quality of Yahweh as a nonpolitical, universal god who, because of his universality, could be the spiritual force that formed great individuals” (CW 14., 268); “… [these individuals] as individuals, have become the carriers of a spiritual force on the scene of pragmatic history” (269); the “history of prophetism of Israel … furnishes rich evidence for the tendencies to break through the universalism of a mankind under God and its collectivism through the personalism of a berith that is written in the heart” (419); “When man is in search of God, as in Hellas, the wisdom gained remains generically human; when God is in search of man, as in Israel, the responsive recipient of revelation becomes historically unique” (550).

As long as this personalism persists in view, then the personalism of the Christian Incarnation made possible through Jesus Christ takes on the world-significance it deserves. Because the divine reality itself is person(al), and this is made participable for all by Jesus’ incarnation, then the universal personalism under Yahweh becomes at last universally available to all. It is Voegelin’s seeming later (after IR) move away from a stress upon the incarnation toward a more apophatic sort of mysticism, perhaps glaring at us in the final volume of OH, that Walsh finds problematic.

Walsh raises important questions, but the unfinished nature of OH perhaps will always leave us not fully satisfied. Was Voegelin moving toward a kind of unpersonal or impersonal view of the Divine Ground, viewing a “personalized” view as too limited and so not truly universal, or was he moving toward a view which wants to avoid objectifying the Divine as one object among other objects (“ontotheology,” it is sometimes called since Kant)? One can be an apophatic mystic because one avoids all objectification, or one can be such because the person exceeds objectification, even while on some level needing to be approached on that level, given the soul/body interrelation. There are fascinating possibilities here on both sides which might be fruitful avenues of Voegelin studies in the future.

We might ask, for example, how and whether a kind of Jewish personalism exists within the Jewish tradition, and how this personalism arises from a very Jewish postbiblical tradition of exegesis. Martin Buber, after all, so influential over Voegelin’s presentation of Moses and the decalogue in IR, is the great author of I and Thou. Many of the great novelist Elie Wiesel’s works might also be considered relevant in this regard. Correspondingly, what is called Jewish “collectivism” in IR (“corporate personality” was an earlier term often used by exegetes) might also be looked at in some aspects as a kind of post-collectivist personalism (the covenant of the heart of Jeremiah, for example, is a covenant actualizing the covenant of the Exodus experience; it is not an individualism but a social kind of personalism). The Christian teaching on the Spirit (Voegelin seems to me very attuned to this in some of his writings) is another way into this question of how persons share with one another in koinonia/community. This would lead into the question of the Trinity, but it also has connections with Jewish thinking on the spirit.

A Christian personalism need not land us in a form of supersessionism, but why this might be so needs further clarification. It need not land us in a Christian exclusivism either, but just how this would be so, without denigrating all the other “carriers” of the Spirit in history, needs attending to. The universalist traditions in the Old Testament (the covenants with Noah and Abraham, for example, both noted in IR), which are echoed in the New Testament, and the continuing validity of the Torah Covenant in Romans, are relevant here.

It was a pleasure to read this book. Voegelin’s writings are multi-layered, making demands of a philosophical, theological, political, cultural, and historical nature upon readers. A first reading is just that, a first reading. I am thankful that ICEAO motivated me to reread large portions of IR. Sometimes I think I encountered what I had missed in earlier readings, sometimes I grew even more convinced of what I had earlier surmised, and generally I was encouraged that a fresh wave of new scholars were finding something of the richness that I have generally encountered in Voegelin’s writings. We are a “community of scholars within the ‘community of being,’” we might say, building on one of Voegelin’s key themes.

IR’s title tends to lead potential readers to the surmise that this is largely a biblical and theological study, or at least a contribution to those fields from the perspective of a political philosopher. As a consequence, in our highly specialized age, political scientists might be offput by what appears to be a rather “confessional” intrusion into matters political, while those with a religious/theological orientation might be offput by the intrusion of a non-specialist into what they regard as their “sacred” precinct. I have found that theologians seem never to find enough of a theologian in Voegelin, or at least enough of their kind of theologian. Both are missing potential enlightening.

Perhaps our (becoming) post-postmodern period is opening up a space, if not for a new “grand” narrative, at least for a narrative that strives for a sense of the “whole,” in however fragmentary a way. Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, helps us to see how the “left” brain tending toward fragmentation and narrowness and the “right” brain tending toward wholistic perspectivism need the correctives and balancing of one another. A number of the contributors of ICEAO’s essays (Milbank esp., Machinist as well) liken Voegelin’s effort to Hegel’s, at least in its grand sweep. Voegelin’s work is perhaps not so much a study moving toward “synthesis” in a Hegelian sense, but toward balance, and it is not accidental that his OH IV, The Ecumenic Age, arrives at an emphasis upon “the postulate of the balance” (CW 17, 291-302, 403-5). Of course, the road to balance is long, hard, and only temporary, and that is one of the reasons Voegelin emphasizes “tension” so much, as Milbank emphasizes and somewhat problematizes. And indeed tension too brings its dangers. Tension tends to bring “friction,” after all, which can be uncomfortable, leading to fright or flight. In any case, the vocation to balance can be an especially lonely one, as Voegelin knew well. “There are times when the divinely willed order is humanly realized nowhere but in the faith of solitary sufferers,” wrote Voegelin, perhaps a bit autobiographically, of the prophet (IR, CW 14, 519).

This volume’s attention to IR’s Part One, “The Cosmological Order of the Ancient Near East” (the essays by Machinist, Wildung, and Buccellati particularly) is welcome, and it hints at a very fruitful vineyard in Voegelin studies. Voegelin himself continued to refine his work on this, particularly in OH IV, The Ecumenic Age, and in his growing interest in paleolithic cave art symbolism (see now Barry Cooper’s Paleolithic Politics: The Human Community in Early Art, who has studied Voegelin’s work carefully and amplified it by bringing it into dialogue with other leading paleolithic thinkers). The break from the cosmological myth, which IR sought to describe and emphasize, was never a total break, nor could it be. For, as The Ecumenic Age helpfully emphasizes and refines, the cosmological symbolism is humanity’s primary language; we never leave its all-embracing soil, even if we think we do. IR tends to stress the “break,” on the other hand, wishing to highlight the emergence into consciousness of the world-transcendent God beyond the cosmos. It also tends to present the cosmological symbolism found “reworked” in the Old Testament in rather negative terms, as a fall into idolatry, following much of the prophetic symbolism here. It is often presented in IR as a “cultural mortgage.”

In The Ecumenic Age Voegelin reformulated much of this negativity into his notion of “historiogenesis,” a form of mytho-speculation which is a kind of deformed or inadequately differentiated form of historical consciousness, attempting to close off the historical process, bringing the present under God to a premature conclusion. Viewing the Chosen People of the Davidic Empire, for example, as the culmination of the historical process is an act of historiogenesis. Earlier cosmological empires seem to have engaged in this too, manifesting a form of linear thinking as well, despite the usual view that cyclicism characterizes the cosmological civilizations, argues Voegelin (CW 17, 51, 114-15, 149-50).

The more fruitful side of the cosmological myth and symbolism, however, tends to be lost from view in IR. Not completely, of course, for IR studies how much of the cosmological symbolism is “reworked” in the biblical texts (see IR, CW 14, 341-52; cf The Ecumenic Age, CW 17, 150, for example).

If Voegelin is correct, the “consubstantiality” between the partners in the community of being is the key element in the primary symbolism of the cosmological myth, and it is that consubstantiality that makes of us all one community. The breakthrough to philosophy and revelation builds upon that consubstantiality and strengthens it, and needs to find a way to protect it, albeit at a more differentiated level. The increasing awareness of our cosmic interconnectedness today, manifesting itself in the various ecological movements, is symptomatic of this need.

At the same time, largely lacking in IR is the positive and even irreplaceable role of myth for the protection of philosophy and revelation. Interestingly, Voegelin provides something of a self-corrective for his OH series in general in his treatment of Plato’s philosophy of the myth within the Timaeus especially (OH III, Plato and Aristotle, CW 16, 224-68). This lack is surprising in IR, since Voegelin seemingly wrote the second and third volumes of OH before writing IR. In any case, his succinct and likely controversial statement (also found in many other texts) that “myth is the only symbolism man has to express his experience of divine reality” (The Ecumenic Age, CW 17, 85) often does not quite come through in IR, or might be missed in any case.

The presentations of Moses, for example, in IR, and of the Deuteronomic Torah, and even of the royal symbolism, have much of this “mythic” cast to them, but the potentially positive side of it all seems rather muted. We can see some of this in IR’s discussion of the Deuteronomic Torah’s presentation of the “mythical Moses who reminds his people that the will of God is now spelled out to them … [t]he hayom [today] of Deuteronomy … symbolizes a peculiar time experience of ‘today and always today’ [cf Deut 30:11-14], in which the transcendent-eternal presence of God with his people has become a world-immanent, permanent presence of the revealed word … the inrush of the Holy Spirit has been toned down to the inspired exegesis of the written word” (IR, CW 14, 424-25). (Interestingly and happily, I believe, Voegelin presents a much more positive role to how Deuteronomy remembers  the Sinai Covenant through “liturgies and prayers” [re Deut 26:5b-9, “A wandering Aramaean was my father …”], in The Ecumenic Age, CW 17, 150).

Markl, in his essay on law within Deuteronomy, grants a positive significance to Deuteronomy’s stress upon the fact that God gives the laws directly; and Moses accordingly remains a prophet, even in Deuteronomy’s latest strata. Machinist, in line with this in his essay on Albright and Voegelin, singles out the “today” [hayom] of Deuteronomy as carrying a much more positive meaning. This “today” evokes something of the word’s transcendent ability to remain relevant, to remain an appeal. On the literal level it hardly makes sense at all, for the word of the Law has the ability to transcend space and time, becoming a covenant offered to all at all times (Deut 29:14-15). IR cites this text from Deuteronomy noted positively by Von Rad (425 n5), but unfortunately seems to read it as a deformation into creed (or tendency thereto) rather than as a positive encounter with the living word. Some of the later rabbinic interpretations of Deuteronomy, on the other hand, were much more attuned to the transcendent and universal possibilities of the covenant. Naturally so, as they would not have thought of Deuteronomy as a derailment into a “mummified pharaoh” or as an “entombment of Israel” (IR, CW 14, 415, 424; very unfortunate images indeed!), as Sweeney and Chalier are at pains to suggest in their important essays in this volume. (See, in addition, Karin Hedner Zetterholm’s Jewish Interpretation of the Bible: Ancient and Centemporary, esp. here 19-20, but throughout.)

Had Voegelin approached Deuteronomy with his more positive view of the myth as a protective device for the “likely story” of how the Divine communicates within history, guided somewhat by Plato’s Timaeus, he may have balanced his reservations about Deuteronomy with its more positive possibilities as well. As it is, in IR he fears the deformation “of existence in historical form into the secondary possession of a ‘creed,’” which is one of the signs of the “genesis of ‘religion’” (IR, CW 14, 427). This largely negative view of “religion” as distinct from a living, experiential (more “event”-oriented) view of the encounter with the Divine as an “engendering experience,” received even more emphasis in The Ecumenic Age (CW 17., 91-96).

Again, happily in The Ecumenic Age, Voegelin finds in the wisdom literature, “pneumatic equivalents to the philosophers’ noetic consciousness,” whereby “the meditative practice of the Wisdom-thinker becomes self-reflective,” even if wisdom becomes too identified with the Torah at times (CW17, 99-101.) IR, however, did not attend to the Wisdom literature (viz., Proverbs, Job, and Sirach).  The rabbis did grapple with the problem of how the Torah might be accessible to the non-Jew. In other words, wisdom as identified with Torah was not necessarily a loss of the covenant’s universal possibilities, for at least some rabbinic traditions. But again, IR did not study postbiblical rabbinic exegesis. (See Zetterholm, “The Non-Jew in Early Rabbinic Judaism,” Jewish Interpretation of the Bible, 140-43).

Voegelin did not find anything comparable to a Plato the philosopher of the myth in the Hebrew Scriptures, in the New Testament, and even in “a spiritually and intellectually sensitive thinker” like Philo, whose method of allegoresis still seems to detach doctrinal forms from engendering experience, not knowing about the Timaeus’ noetic myth (The Ecumenic Age, CW 17, 80-83). Yet it seems to me that here and there in some of his later writings Voegelin notes the more positive role of myth’s presence in Israel and early Christianity, albeit without a fully developed “noetic view” of the myth: “There is no alternative to the symbolization of the In-Between of existence and its divine Beyond by mythical imagination,” even granted the “more differentiated forms of philosophy, prophecy, and the gospel” (“The Gospel and Culture,” CW 12, 188).  I also suspect he would have considered the work of some of the mystics as providing something comparable here, and perhaps an attentiveness to Jewish mysticism may have been helpful here, but this brings us back to the non-attention to the post-biblical Jewish reading of the Hebrew Scriptures.

IR’s first part on the cosmological symbolizations is the book’s entry to how, if I may echo the famous “Preface” of the book, each society engages in the task of developing an order which brings meaning in terms of human and divine goals. Israel’s breakthrough to historical consciousness permits a qualitatively new possibility of order, and we might say that much of Voegelin’s treatment of Israel, again echoing the Preface, is a series of essays on how Israel’s search for order was a “perpetual struggle” against the fall from the new truth of order opened up by life under a universal God in the historical present. Voegelin, as the Preface continues to clarify, is following Plato’s view that diagnosis and therapy are the key functions of philosophy.

Voegelin, I am coming to think, was always, and perhaps especially around the time of the writing of the first three volumes of Order and History, attuned to the fragility of civilizational order, having witnessed it so closely in the horrors of Nazism and then in the Communist USSR and Far East, along with troubling tendencies in the democracies. Some of the essays in ICEAO are concerned with IR’s portrayal, or perhaps lack of portrayal, of Israel’s social order as an historically aware existence under God. IR’s view of the monarchy, along with a lack of attention to the Temple and priesthood, and the Deuteronomic Torah, presents a largely negative view. A rather positive exception on the institutional level, however, is the period of the Judges with its early confederacy of tribes forming a “democratic community”; Voegelin’s study of the Deborah Song is especially significant in this regard (IR, CW 14, 245-57). Another positive example is the treatment of the liturgical and cultic functions of the imperial psalms, following Gunkel and Mowinckel, with Voegelin even noting the need to overcome a kind of anti-liturgical prejudice coming from “Protestant scholars” (IR, CW 14, 332 esp, cf 330-60).

But more generally  it is almost as if no institutional carriers of Israelite order, other than perhaps an exceptional prophet like Jeremiah and a remnant here and there, were able to withstand the sources of disorder always pressing them. I do not think it would be accurate to say that Voegelin does not give enough value to the social embodiment of the spirit. It seems rather that he is keenly attuned to it, but finds its potentially positive force largely lacking, fastening upon the fragility and even deformations of its institutional embodiments within Israel’s “pragmatic history,” not unlike the prophets, especially Jeremiah and the prophetic voice of the Suffering Servant, and knowing that no institutional carrier of the spirit will give sufficient protection against the diseased spirit apart from attunement to the Divine Ground (to use one of his favorite expressions). “The word of the prophet is not spoken to the wind, it is not futile or impotent, if it does not reform the society he loves because it has given him birth. The Word that speaks through him is itself historical reality and forms the order of a new community wherever it is heard … the Word spoken by the prophets and preserved by the communities that heard it still forms the ‘remnant’ of Israel in the present.” (IR, CW 14, 536-37).

Voegelin’s diagnosis is, then, largely of Israel’s fragility on the social/institutional level. This brings us to what IR names “the terrible truth,” perhaps echoing and countering Nietzsche’s own “terrible truth” of the “revaluation of all values” in Ecce Homo. And what is that terrible truth? “… that the existence of a concrete society in a definite form will not resolve the problem of order in history, that no Chosen People in any form will be the ultimate omphalos of the true order of mankind” (IR, CW 14, 545). This is a troubling statement indeed, for Israel as a people, indeed for all peoples, and especially for an incarnational faith like Christianity, which places great emphasis upon the human mediation of life with God, especially Jesus’ humanity and his church community. Apparently it is not only Israel that will undergo the Exodus from itself.

IR had announced this “terrible truth” earlier: “The relationship between the life of the spirit and life in the world is the problem that lies unresolved at the bottom of the Israelite difficulties. Let us hasten to say that the problem by its nature is not capable of a solution valid for all times. Balances [again we are back to the postulate of the balance!] that work for a while can be found and have been found. But habituation, institutionalization, and ritualization inevitably, by their finiteness, degenerate sooner or later into a captivity of the spirit that is infinite; and then the time has come for the spirit to break a balance that has become demonic imprisonment. Hence, no criticism is implied when the problem is characterized as unresolved” (CW 14, 227).

Is this a relativization of historical form, or a rejection of it? Hearkening back to Scotti Muth’s discussion of the influence of history in Voegelin’s use of Aristotelian “science,” Voegelin is sensitive to the unfinished and tentative nature of form. When the Christian prays in the “Our Father” that “thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven,” what is it that is passing and relativized, and what is it that remains? Or does anything remain? Certainly God, on IR’s view. And God’s community? This is the question of the Church for Christians, and of the Jewish people for Jews, and of all other communities of the ecumene. IR poses the question quite poignantly for all civilizations, it would seem. It would not seem to be only Israel that undergoes supersessionism, on some interpretations of this “terrible truth.” But is that the only possible view? I do not think so, but to discuss this more adequately would entail a discussion of Voegelin’s distinctions between “universality” and “ecumenicity” and about the “process of the Whole of which the In-Between reality with its process of history is no more than a part” along with the “the modes of lasting” in The Ecumenic Age (CW 17, 192-93, 408-10).

IR’s very heightened attunement to institutional fragility and indeed deformations of the spirit may well be, looking at the matter from today’s very fragile, increasingly tribal, nationalistic, and conflicted global perspective (not unlike some earlier times of upheaval, like the 1930s, for example, but now more global, especially because of the new and “wild West-like” digitalized empires), one of its greatest contributions. Here is the place to note IR’s treatment of “metastasis,” which is certainly one of its major diagnostic tools. It was highly controversial in an earlier form when it was first proposed by Voegelin (IR, CW 14, 506n6, where he notes the resistance he received from Professors Glatzer, Von Rad, and Bultmann on the quality of a “magic component” among the prophets; in time Voegelin hit upon the notion of “metastasis”). It remains highly controversial now. Perhaps it was felt that this notion had received sufficient attention for now, and for that reason no essay is offered on it. In my view it grows ever more relevant. Location, location, location! Oh how things can look so differently from a different location! Is this a dimension of that “providence” or, in more Hegelian language, the “cunning of reason,” the List der Vernunft mentioned in IR’s Preface (CW 14, 19), which always exceeds “the plans of concrete human beings”?

In any case, Voegelin never abandoned metastasis as a key form of world alienation, with its belief in some kind of savior who will redeem us from it all, followed by increasing forms of further alienation when the savior fails to come (apocalyptic and gnostic), of either a more traditionally religious or a more secularized form (OH V, In Search of Order, CW 18, 48). The concrete example he offered in IR of the Syro-Ephraimite War (c. 734) remains rather perplexing, it is true, partly because the sources are conflicted (cf Isa 7:1-8:15, 2 Kgs 16:1-20, and 2 Chron 28). Voegelin also indicates our lack of knowledge about the war (IR, 531).

On one interpretation, Isaiah had counseled King Ahaz of Judah to rely on trust in Yahweh and not join a coalition against Assyria formed by Rezin of Aram-Damascus. In retaliation, Rezin and Pekah of Israel attacked Jerusalem, but it seems Assyria came to Ahaz’ aid at Ahaz’ request, on one reading (cf 2 Kgs 16:1-20). Was the prophet advocating a form of political quietism, thus paving the way for the great destruction and exile to come, or was he advocating a more crafty and shrewd form of neutrality? Voegelin opts for the metastatic quietism. Ahaz did not join the coalition but appears to have collaborated with and capitulated to Assyria on its own terms.

Was the prophet simply advocating a calm trust on the King’s part, trying to help him avoid falling into panic and consequently rushing into a hopeless anti-Assyrian coalition, by choosing neutrality, or was he truly opting for a kind of quietism, perhaps unknowingly? The texts are fuzzy at best. If Isaiah was striving to help Ahaz avoid extreme alienation through trust in Yahweh, then this would likely not be a form of quietism, it would seem. Ahaz’ refusal to join the alliance and Isaiah’s counsel of trust would then both be wise. Voegelin, however, opts for the quietist, metastatic view. We will never know with certainty. (Cf Jeffrey K. Kuan, “Ahaz,” Eerdman’s Dictionary of the Bible, ed. David Noel Freedom, 2000, 31-32)

There does seem to be enough historical evidence, however, to cause one to recognize the metastatic danger: the alienated, fearful state which can lead one foolishly to place one’s trust in a savior figure. It is not hard to sense Voegelin’s own experience of the Nazi regime behind this, along with the cold war experience of the USSR. Perhaps one might say also that it is not necessarily unwise to place one’s trust in a “savior.” It depends on who the savior is and the one who represents that savior, along with the quality of the “trust” (blind or wise) one brings.

Voegelin’s proffered therapy as expressed in IR would seem to be an ever deepening attunement to life under God, to the virtues necessary for that, to the berith of the heart. Readers of Voegelin have sensed in his later work his increasingly relative lack of attention to the “institutional” and more concrete “social” dimensions through which the spirit might be communicated. I suspect this has to do with his increasingly contemplative and mystical orientation, not unlike the Plato of the Seventh Letter or of the Republic. Such a contemplative stance need not render one less attuned to the political; it may make one even more keenly attuned to the political, because one “sees” more clearly. Here is a very good place to reread Voegelin’s own exegesis of the Seventh Letter, which seems somewhat autobiographical and ever more relevant (OH III, Plato and Aristotle, CW 16, 57-59, 69-72).

There are obvious dangers in this kind of mysticism. Not all mysticisms are the same, some more apophatic, some more kataphatic, and others a blend. Voegelin seems increasingly to tend toward the apophatic, but there are correctives to a kind of quietist tendency. The Ecumenic Age, for example, finds Voegelin making a place for doctrine’s role in shaping society, but with the mystic’s “precautions of meditative practice” (CW 17, 105), not unlike his treatment of the Plato of the Laws (OH III, Plato and Aristotle, CW 16, 310-22), where doctrine, myth/ritual, and guidance have their role to play in social formation.  Apparently it is not given to everyone to do everything, but to follow one’s charisms and make one’s contribution to the “postulate of the balance.”

In other words, Voegelin’s therapy is that of a philosopher, like his great mentor Plato. This goes along with other forms of therapy, of course, which may be the vocation of others. Each may inspire and encourage the other. But he did maintain that all of his work as a philosopher was political, as we well know. “The motivations of my work, which culminates in a philosophy of history, are simple. They arise from the political situation … what a philosopher can contribute today to the understanding of an ongoing process is the understanding of the factors that make for integration and disintegration …” on the way toward civilizational unity (Autobiographical Reflections, CW 34, 118, 132).

One final note, suggested by ICEAO, is perhaps the fruitfulness of a fuller exploration of Voegelin’s approach to interpretation, or perhaps better, approaches. Scotti Muth suggests some of this with her essay on the role of Aristotelian science in OH, and perhaps it might be well to end this review essay with some further comments on this question of interpretation (“hermeneutics”). The “Preface” and “Introduction” of IR are especially relevant here. The notions of the movement from compactness to differentiation, or the regression from proper differentiation, within our participation within the community of being, raises many questions. IR presents the berith and the prophets especially as representing a break from the compactness of cosmological compactness to the differentiation of the person under a universal God. Such is also a differentiation of history within an otherwise cyclical view of time. The present under the transcendent God opens up an awareness of a past and a future, and of regression from attunement to that God’s call or of proper movement toward it. Israel often regressed (historiogenesis), along with Christianity and much of modernity too, on Voegelin’s diagnosis.

“Participation” within the community of being is a key symbol already in IR, and a more dedicated study of its place in Voegelin’s developing thought deserves greater attention. It clearly evokes Plato’s influence, but it has an ability to connect with much of Paul’s thought (along with the Gospel of John) as well in the New Testament. What is genuine participation in the community of being? If we are a united community of being even on a very compact level, in what way do the dimensions of that community influence us? Are there varying qualities of participation, and how might one develop one’s capacities toward a “better” level of participation? How might societies and civilizations? Voegelin, we know, was working some of this out more fully in Anamnesis (esp “What Is Political Reality?,” CW 6, 341-412), and in OH V, In Search of Order, especially with his (only sketch) of Luminosity analysis, in which participation is the master symbol, and Intentionality analysis, where conceptuality and objectification dominate (CW 18, 28-31 esp).

Biblical interpretation itself might fruitfully be approached from within this perspective of a participationist hermeneutics. In varying ways, it is being so approached and practiced, and IR, along with the other volumes of OH, might be viewed as so many examples of such a participationist hermeneutics in fieri. Such an approach might offer a promising way to keep the various kinds of biblical interpretation in proper dialogue with one another, namely, (1) the authors, (2) the texts or work, (3) the world of meaning and truth potentially opened up for us by engagement with the text, and (4) the interpreters and “receivers” of the text. The notion that we are all already within the one community of being suggests that these four facets of interpretation may already have a unity to them. We do not need to create artificial connections between them, and the attempt to do so is itself already something of a deformation of the community of being.

Authors of the biblical texts, for example, do not simply fall out of the sky, but are participants within our one community of being. Their engendering experiences and symbols (which may well exceed their own conceptual grasp) are already possibilities and even actualities for all of us, inasmuch as we are in the flow of the same community of being. The text with its symbols offers a window into this community, and correspondingly various forms of literary/textual analysis are critical in this regard. Texts, in fact, are not simply windows into the community of being but “expressions” of that community in textual form. Guided by the text and our own and others’ attempts analogously to participate in the appropriate engendering experiences, we begin to participate in the worlds of meaning and truth being offered to us. Such is what it means to be a receiver of texts (reception criticism of various sorts).

This is only a hint of the potential fruitfulness of a participationist hermeneutics when brought into dialogue with various forms of interpretation. This connects, of course, with the study of the history of reception of texts, for participation is a dynamic and historical process. So called canonical criticism may be a form of this, of course. Voegelin’s own approaches to diagnosis and therapy, his study of various forms of deformation and pneumopathology (metastasis, apocalyptic, and gnostic), might also be brought into dialogue with various forms of social and personal critique. (Cf my study @https//voegelinview.com/participation-and-interpretation-theory/).

We are in debt indeed to the editors of and the contributors to ICEAO.

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William Thompson-Uberuaga is an Emeritus Professor of Theology at Duquesne University and past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America. He is author of eight books and a co-editor, with David L. Morse, of Eric Voegelin's Collected Works Volume 22: History of Political Ideas - Renaissance and Reformation.

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