Orienting One’s Zetema
“The world is experiencing a serious crisis, is undergoing a process of withering, which has its origins in the secularization of the soul and in the ensuing severance of a consequently purely secular soul from its roots in religiousness.” ~ Eric Voegelin, Die Politischen Religionen
“The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.” ~ Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
“We cannot begin with complete doubt…most modern philosophers have been, in effect, Cartesians…. it seems to me that modern science and modern logic require us to stand upon a very different platform from this…Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.” ~ Charles S. Peirce, Some Consequences of Four Incapacities
“…the creaturely activity of seeking the final interpretants of the myriad signs within the created order (whether instances of beauty or love, suffering or injustice) may be understood as the basis of creaturely participation in the life of God.” ~ Andrew Robinson, God and the World of Signs
“Credo, ut intelligam.” ~ St. Anselm of Canterbury
The Smoke from the Censer
Et lux in tenebris lucet. This is one writer’s story about the roles played by Eric Voegelin, Christianity, and Charles Sanders Peirce in his triadically conceived journey of self and of our modern chaotic dilemma’s Metaxy-resolution. The antinomous co-existence of the divine and intramundane is found and reconciled, individually and collectively, via Immanuel, the Eternal Interpretant logos-Light who orients and mediates Plato’s Cave of reality-Objects and shadow-Symbols. “I AM the Light of the world.” Yes, He is. For Eric Voegelin the polymathic Austrian American philosopher, for Charles Sanders Peirce, the brilliant but maladroit father of pragmatism, and for me, a lowly Texas-residing Baptist businessman. Pardon the association disparity and grant me a point of view.
Bonaventure opined that “neither can any absolute and final and evident truth be known with certitude without the divine light shining through the objects and ideas. The Light is always there; we have but to pay attention to it.” Christ uniquely does for mankind what mankind cannot do for itself- act as Interpretant of the transcendent and the intramundane. Christ’s Alpha and Omega atonement reveals and conveys His comprehensive and continuous mediation between Man and God, Man and Nature, Man and Men, and Man and Self. Christ perfectly immanentizes the eschaton. Consequently, Man does not leave Plato’s Cave of objects and symbols but instead acknowledges and actively yields to the illuminating Light entering therein, and in so doing unites his Spirit-breathed Identity with his active and ongoing historical and social Roles. Essence and Existence unite in Christ. For each and for all.
“Voegelin understands the individual human person to be potentially imago dei, the intersection of divine eternity and human temporality”, observed Ellis Sandoz. The Plight of Man is a random, disoriented, dyadic cycle of Reason and Revolution. The Plan for Man is triadic, a transcendent-oriented experience of Revelation and Redemption. Our natural dust harbors our spirit breath, actively mediated by Immanuel- “God with us”. Shema and Golden Rule, in that order. All else is endless storms of isolation and chaos. History is not Cartesian Rise and Fall. History is semiotic Exile and Return. Active Love precedes reason. Relationship, vertical and horizontal in an epic ongoing Cross-like intersection, continually resolves Metaxy. “I AM” was, is and will be. From Creation to Celestial City, for all people and all places and all periods in between.
The Lead Up
I am humbled by and grateful for my reception by VOEGELINVIEW. In May 2025 a short essay I wrote was selected and included in the View. My first. A short tale of a sailor-man intent on pursuing his destiny. And how even amidst the current of God’s will, there seems a role for Man as well. We must respond. We must pull up anchor and set out to unite our dreams with our destiny. True life demands action, particularly during the rough sea times and when the horizon does not easily come into focus.
I am proud of that first essay. And I am especially grateful for VoegelinView’s embrace of the personal side of things, particularly Eric Voegelin’s incredible life and trials and journeys. Voegelin and VoegelinView are first rate and serious, but not at the cost of forfeiting intimacy. Imagine what it must have been like in Baton Rouge sitting at a dining table with Eric Voegelin amongst a half-dozen other students, sipping tea and eating homemade South Louisiana pillowcase cookies served up by Lissy, Voegelin smoking his third cigar of the evening, and discussing the connection between Sumerian kings and Hegel, and how that affects our consciousness here today. “You can’t have fellowship with a philosophy. It’s impossible to be loyal to a law, and you can’t experience identity through an idea. At some point one must have relationship.” Voegelin and VoegelinView get that. So maybe my story has found the right venue; where intentional reason and relationship meet and abide, and how it all came about.
If you are reading this story, then I have been blessed again. This story is a bit longer than the first. When I originally submitted it, like the first one there were only a few hundred words. “Pretty good topic but too short. Add some words and fill in some gaps or keep it to yourself”, was the challenge conveyed in editor Krause’s encouraging, terse response. I had been called out to increase and enhance the ideas and concepts. “Enjoy your tea but get serious or no cookies.” So, accepting the challenge, I set out to bulk it up a bit. What started out as a few paragraphs scratching Voegelin’s unresolved Metaxy itch ended up seven-thousand words, simmered down from a couple of thousand pages of review and research to think through and arrive at this final version. I brooded and prayed a little too. Serious thought is hard. Communicating serious thought in a clear, memorable way is even harder. Hope I get an “A” and some cookies for the effort.
Oh, and the topic changed. It turns out that I really don’t have a lot to say about the particulars of Voegelin’s unresolved Metaxy, short or long form. He is lots smarter than me. Besides, it turns out that Voegelin throughout his life left a discernable wake and at the end of his life proclaimed the resolution of his Metaxy on his own thank you very much. When I got to that part of his story this essay was transformed from reluctant critique to grateful confirmation. Eric Voegelin, it turns out is a valuable compass of my own personal Zetema map. That’s what this story is about. Not about resolving Voegelin’s Metaxy but about resolving mine.
The following story is true. At least it is as true as an old, slightly bourbon-fogged mind can recollect and write down. I haven’t even changed the names to protect the innocent. There aren’t any innocents in this story. Plenty of victims though. And that is kind of the point of Eric Voegelin’s epic search and the point of this whole essay. In a world filled with perpetrators and victims, there are no innocents. Everybody is guilty of something. And yet somehow it is all supposed to matter. There is supposed to be some Purpose and Plan that explains it all and ties it all up in a bow. Big storms blow in but after that a rainbow and pots of gold, right? Reasonable minds expect and search for reasons why stuff happens. Eric Voegelin’s search was not in vain, right? In the end it’s all supposed to be OK. For me and my family, and for Voegelin and Lissy and their exile from a Nazi-infested homeland and incredible lifelong search. All that matters, it all means something. Right?
Anyway, that is the subject of this story and its inclusion in this particular publication. One man’s search for the universal nature and relationship of “what” and “how” to “why” and “ought”, and Eric Voegelin’s role in that tale. Readers of VoegelinView are familiar with the life story and incredible work of our periodical’s namesake. Voegelin was the real deal. Invested his whole life in looking for the “why” of this crazy world. My story, this story, tells the tale of how I crossed Eric Voegelin’s wake, both of us on similar, penultimate journeys. Two Zetema boats, two sailormen gliding through the night, tacking toward the true, common shore that unites Being and Becoming and ties all of life together for all of us for all time. This is my Zetema story. If it helps you orient yours wonderful! Or perhaps it can remind you that you are not alone on your own personal Zetema voyage and give you a boost. If not, then apologies for wasting your time. Skip ahead to another submission; there is always a great ship’s tale in the VoegelinView somewhere. Find your own. Or write and submit your own. Steady as she goes.
How Reading Became a Big Deal
While no Anamnesis, still it’s a good story to me. As a kid, I did not start out as a reader, but I have always been bright. When inspired I demonstrated easily the capacity for focus and study. Math, and later computer science, came naturally. Words were easy too, but baseball cards and BB guns took top honors. My grandfather couldn’t read at all- Mee Maw read him the papers every morning over breakfast. My Mom and Dad couldn’t afford college, so my learning to read was a big deal to them but reading by me not so much. No one in my North Nashville neighborhood read much either except the Bible thumpers and they only read on Sunday and then not more than a verse or two. More about that later. But still, even early on I knew reading and learning mattered. My family put a lot of their hopes and dreams in me. I was supposed to be the one that broke out, and I felt the pressure early.
Perhaps the single most impactful reading I have ever experienced came when I was seven years old in the form of a note left tucked under a milk carton in the refrigerator by the milk delivery man. Jumping off the bus from school I ran into the kitchen to grab a snack before supper. Mom was over my left shoulder behind me in the kitchen washing some dishes. Dad was still at work. “Mrs. Morgan, Boss man say if you don’t pay this milk bill we will have to stop the deliveries. $6.50 due by Monday. Final notice.” Oh man. We are poor and I am seven years old. What am I supposed to do?
Talk about Metaxy. This was painful and real. I am now a sixty-eight-year-old Texan. Married forty-seven years to my high school sweetheart, we have three sons, married and all doing fine. Seven grandkids- private classic Christian schools. I have two college degrees and multiple professional designations. President of the student association my final year of graduate school at Vanderbilt- Mom and Dad were alive to see me walk across the stage and receive the diploma. Venture capital. Investment banking. Real estate. Drilled a well in the Gulf of Mexico. A self-employed entrepreneur for forty years. But with all that, for a brief flashback moment, every day, I am that seven-year-old little boy holding that milk bill. I still feel the chill from that open refrigerator door stabbing at my chest. I have read that milk bill every day for sixty years, and every day a stern voice in my soul whispers, “Make up your mind boy, either die or get to work.” And so, I respond. Every day I get out of bed at 5 am and I read for two hours. And then I go to the office and get to work. I search for my Zetema’s destination.
On my sixtieth birthday each of my three sons wrote me a thank-you note. Priceless. My third son, the songwriter and producer, penned this advice: “You can stop running Dad. The Milkman has been paid.” I know he’s right. But I am still running. I’m not afraid of the Milkman much anymore. But I’m still running. Somewhere along the way I stopped running from the pain and started running toward the purpose, toward the “why” of it all. All this running-reading-working cannot be for naught. It all matters, right? So how does one reconcile and connect a Metaxy of meaningless, luck-of-the-draw circumstance of life on the poor side of town in the segregated South with the “otherness” of something- or someone- bigger and better? How do I make my everyday eternal?
It turns out Eric Voegelin knew that Milkman too. Picked up and left his Fatherland to keep his Milkman at bay. “Make up your mind boy, either die or get to work.” All the degrees, scholarship, articles and insights meant nothing in 1938. Voegelin and wife Lissy sailed away to America, leaving their cash and possessions in Vienna with the Nazis. Voegelin, and Lissy, responded, boarded that ship and went to work. “All this work and passion matters, right?” Millions never got the chance to respond. Voegelin had to borrow money from a refugee friend to buy a house and restart- he literally borrowed his milk money.
But Voegelin kept up the work. He spent the next fifty years paying his bills and chasing his own Zetema. “There must be a why and if it’s universal and eternal it can’t be solely intramundane. Lets scour every corner of history and science and see what we can find.” If polymaths still exist Voegelin was one. He studied everything. He had incredible energy and stamina. And Voegelin had opinions on the topics and critiques for the authors, living and dead. We are the beneficiaries of Voegelin’s Metaxy and his Zetema voyage. He took great notes, left us invaluable journals, and trained and inspired numerous apostles to continue the voyage in his absence. Voegelin, and VoegelinView, stepped up. And we inherit the prize. If we will respond. We must respond.
Jesus Saves
The men in my family did not go to church. They worked hard during the week six straight days. Sunday was for rest and watching football games. Mee-Maw, my paternal grandmother, was the Christian cornerstone of the family. She was a proud member of the Truth-Seekers Ladies Sunday School Class at the Cofers Chapel Free Will Baptist Church. She was convinced that God had my name on His short list. “Ricky, if you can’t see the Cross from where you are standing, you’ve gone too far. You’re a special little boy. Now go act like it.” She was a wonderful lady and took my sister and I to church every Sunday.
My grandfather was the oldest of five sons of Mattie Nicholson Morgan. He and all the siblings moved from the country in Robertson County to Nashville when her husband, my great grandfather Marcellus died of gastric disease. They settled in the poor working class Kalb Hollow section of North Nashville, right around the corner from the Church. Upon their arrival, my great grandmother got a job making burlap bags on the assembly line at the Werthan Bag Company. She walked to work six days a week. Sixty years later I was at a luncheon at Vanderbilt for Trustees and student presidents of the various schools. Sitting next to me was Howard Werthan. “Are you from the Morgans in Charlotte, North Carolina?” “No sir, I am from the Morgans in Kalb Hollow, just around the corner from your family’s old bag factory.” One goes a long way in life. Like Chesterton’s Everlasting Man, sometimes you end up where you started, but you’re never the same. It all matters. If you respond. You must respond.
I accepted, as they say, Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior as an eight-year-old little boy at Cofers Chapel Free Will Baptist on a hot summer Sunday morning, about a year after I met the Milkman. John 3:16 and Psalm 23 memorized, two verses of Jesus Paid It All, and I was baptized and mailed a stack of offering envelopes. Every nickel helps. There was lots of fire and brimstone in that working class congregation and no shortage of judgement. Hell was real and more discussed than Heaven. They ran my sister off and she has never gone back. Like kudzu vine they choked the hope right out of her. But for some reason I remembered and prioritized Mee-Maw’s encouraging words. All I heard was that He loved me and that this life matters and I should go out and act like it. With confidence and assurance. So I did.
My Southern working-class theology has been added to and amended a bit since then, but I have managed to keep Mee-Maw’s encouraging words and the Cross in my field of vision. Thousands of books and sixty years of struggle and prayer confirm the basics. Even as a kid I oriented my course against the Bright and Morning Star and His promises. “Christ wears two shoes in the world: scripture and nature, both necessary to understand the LORD. At no stage can creation be seen as a separation of things from God”, echoes John Scotus Eriugena.
Before Voegelin’s Metaxy tension, before Walker Percy’s seismic fault metaphors and before Charles Peirce’s triadic semiotics, I was unknowingly rejecting the Enlightenment’s Cartesian dualism and filtering object and symbol against a fixed, triadic transcendent interpretant. “X” marked my spot. I was actively orienting my maps with a transcendent Paraclete before I knew those words. Semiosis was the basis of my theosis. Eric Voegelin, it turns out, had that “X” on his maps as well, inscribed I am sure in the original, Greek Chi “” format:
When God is invisible behind the world, the contents of the world will become new gods. When the symbols of transcendent religiosity are banned, new symbols develop from the inner-worldly language of science to take their place. Like the Christian ecclesia, the inner-world community has its apocalypse too; yet the new apocalyptics insist that the symbols they create are scientific judgements.
Eric Voegelin was born in a house divided. His mother was Catholic and his father Lutheran. As incredible as she certainly must have been, in the early twentieth century the Parochet dogma-curtain separating those competing Holy of Holies was certainly not rent asunder. It left little room for ecumenical discourse. Even if his parents’ exercise of their faiths was not devout, the cultural pressure of the competing doctrines must have been drowning to a very intelligent and engaging little boy. Relationships matter. Just praying over tea and cookies in that household must have been awkward. Milkman tension can arise from the most intimate of places. And leave lasting scars.
Voegelin landed on the Lutheran side of the fence, though stripped down into his “pre-Reformation” format. Imagine his daily stress of refereeing Thomistic summa and Luther’s sola fides, and daily choosing which heretical parent was on the voyage to River Styx. Perhaps that stress fueled Voegelin’s lifelong, intentional pursuit of knowledge and mastery of languages, history, science, philosophy and all the rest. Perhaps Voegelin’s Metaxy germinated from and was propelled by his intolerable perceived duty to choose. “There must be a why and if it’s universal and eternal it can’t be solely intramundane. Let’s scour every corner of history and science and see what we can find.”
As it turned out, Voegelin’s Metaxy and his Zetema had life and death consequences far earlier than his flight from the Gestapo in 1938, but his frustration with Christendom was in full bloom by then. Reluctant, ambivalent Church leaders from all versions of the Faith had stepped aside too many times. Some even enrolled in the Nazi crusade. Many of Voegelin’s fellow academics were persecuted or worse. His reading and study groups consisted of businessmen, scientists, writers and historians. Some were Jews. Voegelin ended up on enemy lists, and his Lutheran leaders were too meek and mild to protest. Pope Pius XII was neutral. Karl Barth refused the loyalty oath and bailed in 1935. Detrich Bonhoffer left, then returned and resisted. They hanged him. Jews aboard the St. Louis were denied American port entry and ended up back in Europe. We know how that ended. So much for “huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. Zetemas can be rough-sea, life and death treacherous. And there are no innocents.
Between the faith-works imbalance of the Church and the judgmental secular modernism of the Academy, it is not unreasonable that Eric Voegelin kept his faith off his shirt sleeve. Maybe Man did not kill God, but Nietzsche- the Lutheran who went in the opposite direction on his Zetema- in the early twentieth century had enough acolytes in university classrooms to suppress any evangelical urges of prominent, ambitious professors. And Eric Voegelin was prominent and ambitious. Still, he insisted that immanentizing- at least in an intramundane manner- the eschaton was a devil’s agenda and said so. European history had confirmed that view if nothing else, and for Voegelin it was not an academic exercise. It was life and death personal. He kept his voyage map close to his vest, but he kept up the search. Abandoning faith could not resolve his mother-father dilemma nor his own. It simply condemned them all to lives adrift of any ultimate purpose or meaning. “All this work and passion matters, right?”
While Eric Voegelin was an esoteric believer, he remained nevertheless convinced of the existence of the transcendent. His commitment to rigorous study and facts and accurate commentary prohibited a blind-faith, uncharted voyage. “Credo, ut intelligam” might suffice for Anselm, but “I believe LORD, help my unbelief!” was, it seems, a better christening for Voegelin’s Zetema vessel. So, Voegelin and Lizzy left Austria in 1938 and sailed to America. He was determined to continue his Zetema search and determined to be an American. Refusing to muddle as unassimilated émigré, Voegelin dove in, not into the calm, elite Ivy League ports, but into the Louisiana State University bayou. Did the positivists and relativists blackball him over his faith? Had his earlier layovers at Columbia and Harvard worn out his welcome? There were whispers. Still, imagine that strong German accent, the demanding academic standards and that gruff demeanor facing nineteen-year-old kids in that Louisiana classroom. “No cookies for you!” Serious and determined students might be in short supply, but still they always seemed to end up in Voegelin’s classroom irrespective of their choice of major field of study. Wisdom, it turns out, attracts. Voegelin had fans, and they responded. He mattered.
Some have opined that Voegelin was an atheist. Some that he was pantheistic. I think they miss the quiet foundation part of his story. Ellis Sandoz- a strong believer and unapologetic Baptist it turns out thank you very much- and others so close to him knew better. Intimate relationship oftentimes quietly conveys the soul of a man where classrooms and books oftentimes hide and deflect. Eric Voegelin was certainly not orthodox, but let his own words orient his maps, conveyed in his 1982 Response to a Professor Altizer:
As far as my own vocabulary is concerned, I am very conscious of not relying on the language of doctrine, but I am equally conscious or not going beyond the orbit of Christianity when I prefer the experiential symbol ‘divine’ reality to the God of the Creed,…I am very much aware that my inquiry into the history of experience and symbolization generalizes the Anselmian fides quaerens intellectum [faith seeking understanding] so as to include every fides, not only the Christian, in the quest for understanding by reason. In practice this means that one has to recognize, and make intelligible, the presence of Christ in a Babylonian hymn, or a Taoist speculation, or a Platonic dialogue, just as much as in a Gospel.
Trailblazers are not orthodox. But Voegelin held tightly the existence and role of transcendence, and he had scoured enough alternatives to Christ to at least convince himself that nary a suitable nor superior alternative existed. Documented the whole thing in Origins and History and his other voyage tales. His funeral was the final profession of his Faith. He was buried with Lutheran liturgy and Bible verses of his own choosing. “Verily I say unto you, except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it dies, it brings forth much fruit.”, and “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world…but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever.” Lissy asked why the second passage. “For repentance”, was his testimony. I am not a theologian but if the thief on the Cross can claim redeeming grace and mercy at the point of death surely a lifelong seeker of Truth can claim redeeming roots on his deathbed. Who knows, maybe his Catholic mother met him at the Pearly Gates. I hope so. You go a long way in life. Sometimes you end up where you started, but you’re never the same. It all matters. If you respond.
Charbroiled Oysters, Tuberculosis, and Gnostic Gordian Knots
I love Southern novels. Harper lee, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor. As a fellow Vandy grad, I have a special bookshelf spot in my office for Robert Penn Warren. He graduated summa-cum-laude. I graduated lordy-cum-soon, but still. Several years ago, I was in New Orleans for a few days at an industry convention for one of our companies. I took an hour away from the handshakes and vendor display booths to walk over to the Acme Oyster House for beer and charbroiled oysters and then over to Pirates Alley, a block over from Jackson Square and Café Dumond. Near the Alley, one of the best bookstores in existence for Southern novels sits- Faulkner House Books. I almost bought a perfect first edition Sound and Fury there several years ago, whose handsome price would certainly have cost me a night or two in the doghouse. Anyway, at the Faulkner that day I bought a first edition, jacketed Love in the Ruins.
I am a big fan of Walker Percy. Moviegoer put him on the map but Love in the Ruins and Second Coming are my favorites. “You can get all A’s and still flunk life.” Greats can speak volumes in just a few words. All three novels echo Percy’s search for the transcendent amidst the everyday and amidst the off-the-wall weird. Southern novelists can think up some crazy stories, and Walker Percy’s life of trials provided some pretty good fishing holes. Walker Percy had his own Milkman. His grandfather, his father, and probably his mother, all died by suicide. As a boy Percy moved to Mississippi to live with his bachelor cousin William Percy, whereupon he became best friend to Shelby Foote, he of notable three-volume Civil War Narrative and Ken Burns documentary fame. Percy dedicated his life to medicine only to have it stripped away by tuberculosis- contracted during routine autopsy exercises at Bellevue. In recuperation, he discovered Kierkegaard, existentialism and Dostoevsky, and his voyage as great American writer was on. He even joined the Catholic church. Maybe Voegelin’s momma had a good chance after all. Anyway, like the lost cave in Second Coming, Percy fell unexpectedly into writing and his Zetema pursuit of the transcendent. To the world’s benefit. If we will respond.
As great as Percy’s novels are, perhaps the greatest impact Walker Percy made on me came from his wonderful essay, “The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind”. The Fateful Rift uses the fault metaphor to describe the incoherent split in modern thought, particularly within science, which excels at understanding the cosmos but fails “…at understanding man qua man”, creating a gap between the “ghost in the machine” and lived experience. Percy linked the problem to the loss of a unified view of human nature and meaning, and urged a return to holistic understanding through philosophy, art, and faith. I am not summa-cum-laude, but that sounds and behaves a lot like Voegelin’s epic sail amidst gnostic sea-monsters and the recurrent Metaxy whirlpools caused by absent or errant interpretants so prevalent in his modern, and in our own present artificial intelligence infused postmodern age. My own personal Zetema voyage was starting to feel the pull of trade winds. Rudders and adjustable sails and maps confirm Destiny’s existence- and call forth my response. Objects and symbols, actively and transcendently oriented and interpreted, propels one toward “why” and “ought”.
Orienting the Maps
Walker Percy’s suggested solution to our present chaotic dilemma was unveiled in his Fateful Rift essay: a serious application of Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic semiotics. Per Percy, “Most people have never heard of him, but they will.” Peirce was “the most original and versatile of America’s philosophers and America’s greatest logician.”, declared Paul Weiss. Karl Popper agreed. The big question Percy posed was how to plot a course for this voyage and how to synthesize the transcendent into the intramundane via a suitable interpretant. The trick, according to Percy, was not to cast overboard Cartesian dualism but to connect and complete it with a third, orienting interpretant. For Percy, Peirce’s semiotics was capable of calming the gyroscope-wobble of Voegelin’s Metaxy, and thereby potentially the reunification of reason and faith. Peirce drew up the maps. Percy, the writer of great stories, responded.
That interpretant has to be very special. Nicomachean Golden Means must balance upon that fulcrum. The interpretant must connect to nature and yet retain its divine essence. That is the Merriam-Webster definition of an antinomy; “a contradiction between two seemingly valid principles or conclusions, creating a fundamental conflict that appears unresolvable, like the ideas that the world is both finite and infinite”. Exactly. And most important, whatever-or whoever- that Interpretant is, it must apply fully, personally and communally, to the greatest minds in history and to me and to my Mee-Maw. Universal and eternal. And if that’s not enough, it must be capable of discernable interaction across all the senses and consciousness. It must be measurable. And it must respond.
Walker Percy knew these storms, and he knew his metaphors. He was living in South Louisiana in 1957 when Audrey rolled in, and the peril of its Category 5 status aptly describes any triadic interpretant that could check all those specific, antinimous boxes. Every Eric Voegelin book and commentary and biography I have read bleeds that same yearning for that missing link as well. Perhaps the great dyadic minds were not so incorrect as they were incomplete. Resistant to abduction, Leo Strauss gave up and chose induction and deduction alone, Athens over Jerusalem. Hegel and Hayek substituted their Epochal Accepted Conception, and Kant inserted his synthetic a-priori Categorical Imperative. Marx gave up on redeeming any of it and settled for permanent revolution against the bourgeoisie with him and his crew at the helm. The 1960’s Paris mafia agreed with Nietzsche, said screw the whole thing, and went full Bacchanalia. Voegelin scrubbed all those alternatives hard, found them instructive but gnostic counterfeits, and had no quit in him. He leaned into the storm and stayed the course like Ahab on a white whale even when he had trouble tacking towards it.
Voegelin is a living example of responding. All the philosophies and sciences share it seems the same fundamental problem: they lack a universal, third fixed point against which to orient their maps. Any Boy Scout knows you need a magnetic North to spin the compass and match the map to the terrain. Creation cannot orient itself, one must of necessity triangulate. To choose otherwise is to choose the Tree. “Come, follow Me.” Voegelin responded and kept responding. He accepted Max Weber’s empty chair and returned to the Fatherland for a decade and a heftier paycheck to pass along to students over there the first-person present version of his Zetema search. Came back to America and ended up at Stanford, just up the road from Harry Jaffa at Claremont. God bless California. And me, the lowly Texas-businessman, since the age of eight, triangulating and sailing toward that foggy destination just visible on the Zetema horizon right along with them. My Mee-Maw gave me the map and assurance, the Milkman gave me the compulsion to respond, the Church and Scripture and a couple of thousand books gave me the compass. Faith, Hope and Love incarnate graced me the inherited-assurance and destination-Promise. I have lived an existence of antinomy ever since, praying and worshiping as I do Jesus, known in Scripture by both of His nicknames- Son of Man and Son of God. Fully God and Fully Man is about as antinomous as antinomy can get. There are no innocents, and He makes it all OK. He responds, from beginning to end and all points in between. “Come, follow Me.”
Marks the Spot, From Vienna to Exeter
So, at this point in the story, I am six decades in. Family and career strong enough to get a league or two ahead of the Milkman. Participating in the Church for five-plus decades. And reading and ingesting a lot of books. How do I tie all these experiences, sensations, ideas and actions together? How do I orient all these matters into a coherent whole and properly align my life and circumstances with their essence? It turns out my triangulating Interpretant was not a “what” but a “who”. I was back where I started, but I was not the same. Somewhere in Heaven G. K. Chesterton was smiling. And Mee-Maw too.
Eric Voegelin claimed and documented his search for the transcendent across sixty plus years of search and life-focus. Walker Percy and his circumstance led him along a similar course, and he added the notion that triadic, Peircean semiotics, and not Cartesian dualism, held the key. The key was the Interpretant, constantly reconciliating terrain and map. But how does Peirce’s semiotics arrive at Christ and the Church? How does Christianity portray that antinimous natural and divine link, thereby ordering and orienting all of life? Fully God-Fully Man Christ was the transcendent-intramundane interpretant tying it all together. “I AM the way, the truth and the life.” In my middle age I could feel the pull of the divine current-wind, while at the same time the ideas and proclamations of the great minds of the scientific and philosophical and classic ages acted as the natural rudders and sails, rocking me along and guiding me in a Metaxy rhythm, to and fro toward my Purpose shoreline.
I had responded, but a fog remained. My testimony needed a connecting narrative. I don’t specifically remember how I got to Andrew Robinson and his God and the World of Signs: Trinity, Evolution and the Metaphysical Semiotics of C. S. Peirce. I think maybe I had searched the internet for a Peircean-Christianity book, and it popped up. Connecting dots is a habit. I’m pretty sure the timing of the discovery coincides with my viewing a Fateful Rift speech YouTube video as well. Preparing this essay, I checked my reading journal. A couple of months into 2021, I had reread and chronicled Second Coming. Just below on the journal list a few titles down, there it was- Andrew Robinson’s God and the World of Signs. Robinson is a medical doctor and a theology buff at the University of Exeter, where he focuses his life on the application of Peircean semiotics in a quest to unify science and faith. Robinson is a really smart guy, credited with multiple books, essays and scientific studies on the topic. To his credit, like Voegelin he leaves room for the transcendent in his voyage as well.
According to Robinson, vestiges of the Trinity reside in all parts and places in Creation, and a man with enough grit and determination can catch the Paraclete’s quiet voice and breeze via his inherent Spirit-breathed Identity and have a chance of having his prayers answered if he will manifest his Identity through his natural Roles, and thus orient his vessel against the Plan of Trinity God instead of the dyadic Tree of Chaos. “Choose this day whom thou shall serve…” Believer or not, God and the World of Signs is worthy of a place in the living room secretary. Anyway, the triadic currents were pulling me along strongly by then. And just a few entries further down the 2021 list was- wait for it- Voegelin’s Science, Politics and Gnosticism. With a “+++” sign, a high rating. I went downstairs and checked- it’s the only paperback in the secretary, sandwiched between my jacketed two-volume Nature and Destiny of Man by Reinhold Niebuhr and my Andrew Robinson God and the World of Signs. Robinson marked his spot with an (-) Eric Voegelin and Walker Percy could not have said it better:
Semiosis may be understood as a basis of theosis. A semiotic approach to theological anthropology suggests that the task of committing our whole self to the path of discipleship amounts to this: that all of our interpretative thoughts, interpretative feelings and interpretative actions are directed towards fulfilling the purpose of God. The nature and purposes of the infinite God can be known by finite creatures only because of the gift of abduction; that is, because the ontological structure of the cosmos is such that creatures can escape the epistemological confines of deduction and inductions. The kind of creature that can thereby be a hearer of the Word is one who, by God’s grace, has evolved a capacity to enter the ‘semiotic matrix’; that is, who is able dialectically to combine symbols and icons in such a way as to open up a semiotic window on the transcendent.
The Alter Call
Thus triangulated, Aristotle’s Nicomachean mean is not dyadic-Golden, but triadic-Godly, a gateway to communal adaptation, compromise and learning. The eternal transcendent interpretant guides and directs intramundane amidst constant evolution of nature, science, language, polis, consciousness and knowledge. God-directed semiosis does not replace dyadic sciences but orders and hones them for the ever-present age. God-directed semiosis reconciles and orders our past, provides clarity and unity in our present, and orients our intentions and actions toward our communal hope for the future. This ongoing orienting Metaxy connects and regulates the immanentization of the eschaton. Utopia is ultimately not ours to create but ultimately ours to inherit. In the meantime, we love our neighbors as we love ourselves.
But we must respond. Or we fight fire with fire while our cities burn. Perhaps the postmodern Left and Right are not opposites but instead complementary reflections of the same aimless, dyadic narcissism. When we abandon truth and our Spirit-breathed sovereignty, we exchange our liberties for the latest iPhones and the global bureaucracy that generates, supports, and taxes them. Mollified and entertained, we pass along to our children the price of our suffocating choice- to obediently pull the oars of the aimless, rudderless ship while other, self-appointed and ruthless elite officers reside above deck, guiding us all to destinations of their privileged making and choice. To them go the views and the thrills and the spoils. People project their predisposed bias, looking not for knowledge and wisdom but for confirmation of preexisting views. Lecterns and pulpits are replete with such behavior. Willingly blind leading the blind willingly.
We did not stumble into this fate. Free will exists. The Enlightenment has reached its apex. And Man has fallen to his nadir. Sans mediating God all Creation is thorns and thistles. We must acknowledge and look up. God is the Creator of our Metaxy. He is the Author of Voegelin’s Leap in Being, and His spark resides within us. But we must look up. A man can read ten thousand books and philosophies but without the fixed Star it’s just wandering in a Wide Sargasso Sea. “Love and Faith are at home in the mystery of the Godhead. Let Reason kneel in reverence outside”, A. W. Tozer proclaims. Exile and Return- to where you started, but you’re never the same. It all matters. If we respond. We must respond.
From the beginning, our Creator God has declared and willed a higher purpose and call. He anoints us and invites us into His primordial community of being. We are endowed to express and to consciously live out His Garden Work through our own, unique, participatory Roles. Existence is triadic, and God is the Creator, Guide and Mediator. We must acknowledge and look up. Eric Voegelin’s Metaxy is our Leap in Being, and Immanuel is the Guide.
Thus oriented, “I” and “We” require a grateful merging of our spirit-endowed Shema call with our active, compromising Golden Rule. Their Union assures our inheritance, our Leap in Being. God’s gracious Charity is antecedent to our responsive Reason. This is the universal truth and our individual and collective endowed right, emerging alongside our common assigned responsibility. Conveyed and embraced, nomadic chaos is transformed into guided journey and destination. I am Free, and as I look up, as I respond, I share and experience my inheritance with my neighbor. We are both redeemed and reside in our Leap in Being.
Being and Becoming merge in Eric Voegelin’s Metaxy, confirming that “I AM” “IS”- including me therein. My Leap in Being is a Holy Censer and you, and I and all of us, are called to respond. The Creator proclaims that Metaxy is active and deliberate, and its pursuit and destination are eternally oriented and assured, providing a perch not chained below, but peering out atop the mast of our ship’s great deck, while our fellow travelers briskly adjust the sails and the rudder according to the winds and the maps oriented against the Bright and Morning Star. How thrilling and adventurous is Our Leap in Being! How brisk and invigorating the wind and the mist! Oh, what a promise and call!
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