Tag Archives: Voegelin

HomePosts Tagged "Voegelin"
Bruegel Tower of Babel Bertonneau

I. Guénon, Voegelin, and the Modern Crisis
The concupiscent subject’s response to the Siren Song of the ecumene, to conquer and possess it, qualifies as Voegelin’s privative exodus in at least two senses. Pragmatically, the conqueror in going forth leaves home; he generally leaves it, moreover, with the cream of the young men and a significant portion of the collective wealth…
Bruegel Tower of Babel Bertonneau

I. Introduction: The Diadochic Kingdoms
No area of Western history is quite as recondite as that of the Diadochic empires, the successor-kingdoms that sprang up in the wake of Alexander the Great’s meteoric campaigns (334 – 323 BC) to subdue Asia under militaristic Hellenism.  Educated people know that the unity of Alexander’s Imperium, ever tenuous and improvisatory, broke down immediately on…

Tilo Schabert's wonderfully vivid description of Eric Voegelin's work habits and his life in Palo Alto brings back many memories of my own during the years when I lived in Plato Alto, 1975-76, and the years following that initial time, when I was either spending my summers there or was a guest at Sonoma Terrace for shorter vacations. I kept…

Every religious tradition offers a soteriology – its own version of salvation called by whatever name – perhaps spiritual liberation as in the Hindu moksha or enlightenment as in the Buddhist samadhi. It claims to have exclusive possession of the one true “solution” to the human predicament, with the implicit premise that there is a single fundamental problem, such as…

Give Me Liberty: Studies in Constitutionalism and Philosophy. Ellis Sandoz. St. Augustine’s Press, 2013.
 
Ellis Sandoz’s Give Me Liberty: Studies in Constitutionalism and Philosophy is a collection of nine essays: four about American history and politics, four about the philosophy of Eric Voegelin, and a concluding essay about liberty. Two of the essays have been previously published elsewhere – one about…

Éric Voegelin et l’Orient: Millénarisme et religions politiques de l’Antiquité à Daech. Renaud Fabbri. Editions L'Harmattan, 2016.
 
Renaud Fabbri is a professor of political science at l’Université de Versailles. Over the past few years he has been quietly blogging away at a post-secular age, applying the ideas of Eric Voegelin to Hinduism and Islam. Éric Voegelin et l’Orient seems to be his…
peter emberly

I write this piece in memory of my Ph.D. Supervisor and dear mentor, Professor Peter Emberley whose illness and sudden demise has saddened many of us.  Peter Emberley’s contribution to liberal education, especially as a founder of the College of Humanities (where I taught until 2001) has been and will continue to be in the limelight in Canada. His recurring…

In the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell presents us with a world where systemic thinking, a form of solipsism represented by the Party and embodied in O’Brien, has come to permeate and dominate all aspects of human living. This type of thinking, which adheres rigidly to its own logic, becomes a form of closed-mindedness that recognizes no perspective other than…
Flaubert Tentation de Saint-Antoine

La Tentation from a Girardian perspective.
Flaubert in La Tentation has confronted the epoch, summed up in Anthony’s spiritual tribulation, in which archaic sacredness, passing through the urbanity of Hellenistic culture and mixing itself with the charisma of the Roman Empire, must acknowledge the new dispensation that accretes around the Passion of Christ and takes the form of a unique non-sacrificial…
Flaubert Tentation de Saint-Antoine

Introduction: A Nameless Genre. 
Gustave Flaubert’s Tentation de Saint-Antoine ou la révélation de l’âme (first version 1848; final version 1874), its sui generis character notwithstanding, belongs in a recognizable, yet largely unrecognized, genre of mid- and late-Nineteenth Century literature that includes, among other items, Charles Kingsley’s Hypatia (1850), Henrik Ibsen’s Kejser og Galileer (1871), Richard Wagner’s incomplete Jesus von Nazareth…