The Reality of Politics and the Relevance of Voegelin (Part I)

It was a day in early September 2012. I went to see a friend at All Sages Bookstore, perhaps the most popular bookshop among intellectuals in Beijing. A few small black noticeboards were placed at the door. On them were the new titles and authors the bookstore recommended to the readers. On the middle one was written, in Chinese: Ellis Sandoz, The Voegelinian Revolution: A Biographical Introduction (Second Edition).

Before that, I had seen the Chinese version of this book. It was the translator, Mr. Xu Zhiyue or Daniel Hsu, who had sent it to me by express. Other than All Sages Bookstore, the website of China’s official news agency, Xinhua or New China, and Southern Weekend, a leading Chinese newspaper in China, had made their respective recommendations in August and October. In an interview concerning the role of reason in Chinese history, a professor at Central Party School of China’s ruling Communist Party had a passing reference to Voegelin’s comments on China. This interview was published in the website of China’s state newspaper, People’s Daily.¹

The reason why The Voegelinian Revolution caught my eye is that its author, Professor Ellis Sandoz, had mailed me by air an autographed copy of the original English version, along with many other books, in 2006. From this book and others I began hearing about the name of Eric Voegelin and his place in the world of political thought in America and Europe.

A Brief Biographical Sketch

Erich Hermann Wilhelm Voegelin was born in the western German city of Cologne on January 3, 1901. His father was a civil engineer, his mother a Viennese. In 1910, he moved with his family to the Austrian capital of Vienna. Voegelin studied in the law faculty of the University of Vienna from 1919 and obtained Dr. rer. pol. only three years later. He later became an assistant to Professor Hans Kelsen (1881-1973), who helped draft the Austrian constitution of 1920 and was one of the most influential legal scholars in Europe and America of the 20th century.

Facing the Nazi persecution, Voegelin and his wife Lissy Onken (1906-1996) emigrated to the United States in 1938. Voegelin mainly worked at Louisiana State University, University of Munich, University of Notre Dame, and Hoover Institution, Stanford. Notably, Voegelin accepted an invitation in 1958 to establish an institute of political science in Munich and fill the chair left vacant since the death of German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920).

Voegelin’s Books in China

From 2007 on, the Chinese edition of Voegelin’s works have begun to appear in China’s mainland. They include the first two volumes of the five-volume Order and History, Israel and Revelation, The World of the Polis; six volumes of the eight-volume History of Political Ideas: Hellenism, Rome and Early Christianity; The Middle Ages to Aquinas; The Later Middle Ages; Religion and the Rise of Modernity; Revolution and the New Science; Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man; and Modernity without Restraint (Vol 5 of The Collected Works). These works are part of the 34-volume The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. Its general editor is Ellis Sandoz who has worked with many of his American and international colleagues since Voegelin died in his Stanford home on January 19, 1985.

Sandoz set up The Eric Voegelin Institute at Louisiana State University in March 1987. He had political science under Voegelin at Louisiana and Munich during undergraduate and doctorate years. Sandoz is the Hermann Moyse Jr. Distinguished Professor of Political Science and director of The Eric Voegelin Institute at Louisiana. Before the publication of the Chinese translation of The Voegelinian Revolution in 2012, Voegelin’s  Autobiographical Reflections  (based on the interviews Sandoz conducted in 1973) was also translated by Daniel Hsu who published it in 2009.  Autobiographical Reflections, first published in 1989, is a major part of the 34th and final volume of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, published in 2006.

Understanding Voegelin

With all these 34 volumes, one might be all at sea even if he or she is interested in politics. For Chinese readers, Faith and Political Philosophy: The Correspondence Between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934-1964, which appeared in Chinese in 2007, might be of help in comparing the two political philosophers. The works of Leo Strauss (1899-1973) entered China much earlier than those of Voegelin. The earliest one seems to be the Chinese edition of History of Political Philosophy in 1993, sixty years after it first appeared in English. It was co-edited by Strauss and his then Chicago University colleague, Joseph Cropsey (1919-2012). From their correspondence, one could see how the two German-American political thinkers thought differently about the issues of mutual concern.

In comparison, Autobiographical Reflections and The Voegelinian Revolution provide a general introduction to Voegelin’s life and thought through both  the philosopher himself and his student and longtime friend. And in the 34th volume of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin one also finds a “Glossary of Terms Used in Eric Voegelin’s Writing,” which in 37 pages explain what Voegelin meant by the words he used–especially the Greek ones.² Without this help, readers in not just the Chinese mainland but also in America and Europe might find Voegelin’s books not an easy read.³ There is a world of difference between Voegelin and many other popular political scientists in writing and thinking.

A Chinese Sympathy for Voegelin’s Struggle

Nevertheless, even without the glossary, Voegelin’s life itself could still touch a chord with Chinese mainland readers. It might be just this aspect that first holds the Chinese attention. In his preface to the Chinese edition of The Voegelinian Revolution, Professor Sandoz points out the background Voegelin was in: “Voegelin himself, of course, wrote in the shadow of the great totalitarian tyrannies of the 20th century, Bolshevism and National Socialism, and was personally victimized by the latter.”⁴

On March 11, 1938, Nazi⁵ Germany occupied Austria. Voegelin’s 1936 book, The Authoritarian State: An Essay on the Problem of the Austrian State, was banned. On April 23, 1938, the commissary dean of the faculty of law and political science at Vienna University wrote to Voegelin notifying him that the Austrian education ministry has revoked his right to teach. In the 29th volume of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, one could see the photocopy of this letter of dismissal where “Heil Hitler!” is striking.⁶

On July 14 in the same year, Voegelin fled to Zurich, Switzerland. A week later, his wife, Lissy, joined him. On September 8, the Voegelins left Paris for America. Voegelin told Sandoz what it was like on his last day in Austria:

“The emigration plan almost miscarried. Though I was politically an entirely unimportant figure, and the important ones had to be caught first, my turn came at last. Just when we had nearly finished our preparations and my passport was with the police in order to get the exit visa, the Gestapo appeared at my apartment to confiscate the passport.^7″

“Fortunately, I was not at home, and my life [Lissy Onken Voegelin] was delighted to tell them that the passport was with the police for the purpose of getting the exit visa, which satisfied the Gestapo. We were able, through friends, to get the passport, including the exit visa, from the police before the Gestapo got it–that all in one day.”

“On the same day, in the evening, with two bags, I caught a train to Zurich, trembling on the way that the Gestapo after all would find out about me and arrest me at the border. But apparently even the Gestapo was not as efficient as my wife and I in these matters, and I got through unarrested.”⁸

Exposing the Shadow

It was in such personal experience that Voegelin devoted himself to exposing “the shadow.” Even before fleeing from Austria, Voegelin had already started trying to do that. For him, “ideology” makes up part and parcel of “the shadow.” The Authoritarian State was Voegelin’s “first major attempt to penetrate the role of ideologies, left and right, in the contemporary situation.”⁹ Voegelin used this book to show the difference between authoritarian state and total state.

While an example of the former is the 1934 Austrian constitution and its government after the civil war, an instance of the latter is such radicals as National Socialists who were ready to seize power then. Voegelin considered an authoritarian state “would keep radical ideologists in check” and “was the best possible defense of democracy.”¹⁰ For Voegelin, such totalitarianism as National Socialism is “the totality of ideology” where one would accept the supremacy of Volk as both people and nation not passively from the outside but voluntarily, “intellectually and spiritually from the inside.” Political rule like this is not confined to keeping social order but already a spiritual force, a religion.¹¹

Voegelin went on to elaborate on this point in The Political Religions, which was confiscated by the Gestapo immediately upon publication in April 1938. He wrote in its epilogue: “The inner-worldly religiosity experienced by the collective body–be it humanity, the people, the class, the race, or the state–as the realissimum¹² is abandonment of God”¹³. However, Voegelin later would not use “religions” to make sense of various ideologies. He thought the term “too vague and already deforms the real problem of experiences by mixing them with the further problem of dogma or doctrine”.¹⁴ Despite this, Sandoz viewed The Political Religions as “a new turn in the development of Voegelin’s thought.”

It is not just because the 1939 new edition of The Political Religions was the first work published after Voegelin arrived in America but that the “central ground of all his later work is clearly at the root of his argument” in this small book of less than 60 pages. In the eyes of Sandoz: “Voegelin in this brilliant essay sketches the problem of the ideologies in terms of the disease of the spirit whose cure lies in rediscovery of the order of the soul as a major task of his new science of politics.”¹⁵

Ideology

In Autobiographical Reflections, Voegelin described ideology as “the deformation of existence, which leads to the construction of ideological systems.”¹⁶ He made this statement about the nature of ideology when speaking of philosophy of history. For Voegelin:

“Philosophy of history as a topic does not go further back than the eighteenth century. From its beginning in the eighteenth century, it became associated with the constructions of an imaginary history made for the purpose of interpreting the constructor and his personal state of alienation as the climax of all preceding history.”

“Until quite recently, philosophy of history has been definitely associated with the misconstruction of history from a position of alienation, whether it be in the case of Condorcet, Comte, Hegel, or Marx. This rigid construction of history as a huge falsification of reality from the position of an alienated existence is dissolving in the twentieth century.”¹⁷

“Ideology” derives from a French word, “idéologie”, which is the combination of two Greek words, ἰδέα (idea) and λόγος (logos). It means science of ideas. The French philosopher, Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836), is widely believed to first coin the word of ideology in 1796. De Tracy’s goal was to free human beings from what he saw the slavery of theology through his “ideology” and to place the science of ideas as “the greatest of the arts . . . that of regulating society . . . .” For de Tracy, ideas come from sense that is a function of human faculties, and thus, to study ideas is to study human faculties.¹⁸ In a wider sense, de Tracy  proposed that “ideology is a part of zoology.”¹⁹ Briefly, the French philosopher held that social scientists should follow the natural scientists’ example to be neutral and objective rather than like theologians and metaphysicians who are opinionated and subjective. Among the thinkers who had made a serious impact on de Tracy were British philosophers Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and John Locke (1632-1704) and French philosophers René Descartes (1596-1650) and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715-1780).²⁰

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) is perhaps the first person who introduced “ideology” into the English-speaking world. The author of the Declaration of Independence, who served the U.S. minister to France between 1785-1789, published and edited in 1817 a translation of the fourth volume of de Tracy’s Eléments D’idéologie or Elements of Ideology.²¹ It appears that Voegelin never talked about de Tracy. But Voegelin often mentioned the French philosopher, Nicolas de Condorcet (1743-1794) who was a contemporary of de Tracy. Both experienced the French Revolution (1789-1799). Condorcet’s best-known work might be his Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain or Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. Along with the French philosopher, Auguste Comte (1798-1857), German philosophers, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) and Karl Marx (1818-1883), de Tracy and Condorcet are thinkers whose thoughts are typical of the Enlightenment.

Disease of the Spirit Not a Recent Phenomenon

In The World of the Polis published in 1957, Voegelin pointed to the similarity between the Sophists in the 5th century B.C. and the Enlightenment in the 18th century, that is: “insensitiveness toward experiences of transcendence.” To Voegelin, this insensitiveness “has the same result of destroying philosophy–for philosophy by definition has its center in the experiences of transcendence.”²² In Israel and Revelation came out a year earlier, Voegelin explained what he meant by “transcendence” when defining ideology and philosophy:

“Ideology is existence in rebellion against God and man. It is the violation of the First and Tenth Commandments, if we want to use the language of Israel order; it is the nosos, the disease of the spirit, if we want to use the language of Aeschylus and Plato.”

“Philosophy is the love of being through love of divine Being as the source of its order. The Logos of being is the object proper of philosophical inquiry; and the search for truth concerning the order of being cannot be conducted without diagnosing the modes of existence in untruth.”

“The truth of order has to be gained and regained in the perpetual struggle against the fall from it; and the movement toward truth starts from a man’s awareness of his existence in untruth.”²³

From this, one could see that “the shadow” Voegelin tried to expose is not confined to the recent centuries of European history. The disease of the spirit he tried to diagnose is not just the modern European problem.

Apart from the Sophists’ “insensitiveness toward experiences of transcendence” in ancient Greece, the shadow of ideology could also be found in ancient West Asian political order. Voegelin told Sandoz:

By transcendental representation I mean the symbolization of the governmental function as representative of divine order in the cosmos. That is the fundamental symbolism, back to the ancient Near Eastern empires where the king is the representative of the people before the god and of the god before the people. Nothing has changed in this fundamental structure of governmental order, not even in the modern ideological empires. The only difference is that the god whom the government represents has been replaced by an ideology of history which now the government represents in its revolutionary capacity.²⁴

Modern Gnosticism

In particular, Voegelin pinpointed Gnosticism as a serious form of the disease of the spirit. This is most evident in his The New Science of Politics in 1952 and Science, Politics, and Gnosticism in 1959. Gnosticism originates from the Greek, γνωστικός (gnostikos)，meaning learned, intellectual. By Gnosticism, Voegelin refers to “a type of thinking that claims absolute cognitive mastery of reality” and “considers its knowledge not subject to criticism.”²⁵ 

Voegelin listed six features of gnostic movements, “that, taken together, reveal the nature of the gnostic attitude.”

1. He or she is not satisfied with one’s situation.

2. The bad situation is attributed to the intrinsic problem of the world.

3. Salvation from the evil of the world is possible.

4. From this follows the belief that the order of being will have to be changed in a historical process.

5. With this fifth point we come to the gnostic trait in the narrower sense–the belief that a change in the order of being lies in the realm of human action, that this salvational act is possible through man’s own effort.

6. Gnostics proclaim the knowledge of this change.²⁶ In exploring history, Voegelin found different branches of Gnosticism in Jewish, Christian, Islamic and other cultures.²⁷

Metastatic Belief and Neo-Platonism

Voegelin later made further remarks about Gnosticism and the disease of the spirit. In 1973, he explained to Sandoz:

“The application of the category of Gnosticism to modern ideologies, of course, stands. In a more complete analysis, however, there are other factors to be considered in addition. One of these factors is the metastatic apocalypse deriving directly from the Israelite prophets, via Paul, and forming a permanent strand in Christian sectarian movements right up to the Renaissance.”²⁸

Metastasis literally means the spread of cancer to other parts of the body. To Voegelin, the metastatic apocalypse means “all unrealistically expected transformations of human beings, society, or the structure of existence.”²⁹

Another factor Voegelin took note of is neo-Platonism that revived in Florence of the late 15th century. He said “the attempt to regain an understanding of cosmic order through a revival of neo-Platonism miscarried; a revival of the divine order in the cosmos in the ancient sense would have required a revival of the pagan gods, and that did not work.”³⁰

The Egophanic Revolt

In Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man, which was finished in the 1950s but only published posthumously, Voegelin used Comte’s thought as an example to show all similar phenomena were “apocalypse of man” or “intramundane eschatology.”³¹ Voegelin developed a new concept, “egophanic revolt” in contrast to “theophany” when he wrote The Ecumenic Age³² that was published in 1974. A

gain Voegelin mentioned Condorcet, Comte, Hegel, Marx as well as three other German philosophers, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach (1804-1872), and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900).³³ Voegelin described “egophanic revolt” as “the best I can do terminologically at present.”³⁴ Voegelin introduced “egophanic revolt” or “egophany” as “the rejections of the theophany” in Chapter 5 of The Ecumenic Age in the chapter entitled “The Pauline Vision of the Resurrected.” He wrote:

“when the varieties of egophanic history have come to dominate the climate of opinion, as they do in our time, not surprisingly the ‘historicity‘ of Christ has become a problem for thinkers, including a good number of theologians, who have succumbed to the climate.”³⁵

The Second Coming

What Voegelin referred to is part of the apostle Paul’s letters in the Bible concerning the resurrection of Jesus and His second coming, especially Chapter 15 of 1 Corinthians. What Voegelin focused on is the different responses to the resurrection of Jesus and His second coming.In Voegelin’s eyes:

“the main Church had accepted Augustine’s symbolization of the present, post-Christ period as the saeculum senescens,³⁶ as the time of waiting for the Parousia³⁷ and the eschatological events, while the more fervent expectations were pushed to the sectarian fringe of apocalyptic and Gnostic movements.”

One of “the more fervent expectations” Voegelin elaborated on is “a new pattern of expectations: The age of perfection, the teleion, would be an age of the Spirit beyond the age of Christ.”

A representative is the thought of Joachim of Fiore or Joachim of Flora (c. 1135/1145-1202), a monk born in southern Italy whose theology was influential in 12th century Europe. For Joachim, “the flowering of the monastic life as the event that indicated a meaningful advance in the process of transfiguration” is “the approach of a Third Age of the Spirit, following the ages of the Father and the Son.” In other words, the Age of the Spirit would be the age of perfection. Joachim and his followers even calculated the year 1260 or so as the start of the Age of the Spirit.³⁸

Key Elements in Voegelin’s Philosophy of History

Eric Voegelin talked about Joachim of Fiore in more than one of his works, the earliest being The Political Religions.³⁹ In The New Science of Politics, Voegelin spoke of a theologian who was earlier than Joachim, Johannes Scotus Eriugena (c. 810/815-877), “John, the Irish-born Gael.” ⁴⁰

Ellis Sandoz traced the movement of the so-called “Age of the Spirit” back to an even earlier time when Montanus and his adherents were influential in the second century.⁴¹ Montanus was said to identify himself as “the Mouthpiece of the Holy Spirit.” Montanism, known for advocating new prophecy after the Bible, was widely considered to be a major heresy in the early church and thereafter.⁴²

Besides Joachim, Voegelin also mentioned Otto of Freising (c.1114-1158), a German bishop, and Petrarca [Petrarch], (c.1304-1374), the Italian poet and scholar.⁴³ Some historians call Petrarca the “father” of modern humanism. And Petrarca is believed to be the first to develop the idea of the “Dark Ages.” He thought the centuries from the collapse of the Roman Empire through his own time had been in darkness. He hoped the “radiance” of the old Rome would reappear.⁴⁴

People like Joachim, Otto, Petrarca, in Voegelin’s eyes, are forerunners of modern humanist intellectuals climaxing with Hegel. Voegelin wrote:

“Hegel, finally, brought the potential to fruition by identifying revelation with a dialectical process of consciousness in history, a process that reached its teleion in his own ‘system of science.’ The Logos of Christ had achieved its full incarnation in the Logos of Hegel’s ‘absolute knowledge.’ The transfiguration that had begun with the theophany in Paul’s vision of the Resurrected was now completed in the egophany of the speculative thinker. The Parousia, at last, had occurred.”⁴⁵

One might well feel unable to address such complex ideas and actions that have arisen in history. A standard might be of help in judging what is true or false. But people would not even agree whether such a standard exists. Even if people agree on its existence, a criterion for one man would not necessarily be acceptable to another. Such disagreement reinforces the impression of the incomprehensibility of the world.

For Voegelin, what makes the difference is whether the human being is the measure of all things or God the creator of humans and everything else is the measure of all things. For those who live in today’s world, “Man is the measure of all things” appears much better known than “God is the measure of all things.” The former comes from Protagoras (c. 490-420 B.C.), an ancient Greek philosopher, and the latter, Plato (c. 428/427-348 B.C.). Voegelin more than once displayed the contrast between the two measures in his works including Hellenism, Rome and Early Christianity, The New Science of Politics, The World of the Polis, Plato and Aristotle, The Ecumenic Age.⁴⁶

Exploring Man as the Measure

In his letter to Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) on March 16, 1951, Voegelin did this as well. He wrote, “whoever denies the Platonic ‘God is the measure of all things’ will find man as the measure.” ⁴⁷ Arendt was born in Germany of Jewish parents. She escaped from the Nazi persecution and first fled to France and eventually settled in America. As a political theorist, Arendt published in 1951 The Origins of Totalitarianism, one of her most important works. She praised Voegelin’s Race and State, which appeared in 1933 as the “best historical account of race-thinking in the pattern of a ‘history of ideas.’”⁴⁸

Arendt sent a copy of The Origins of Totalitarianism to Voegelin who was teaching at Louisiana State University. Voegelin’s letter was a response to the book. Voegelin said Arendt had done a “penetrating (and incredibly detached, objective) treatment of the Jewish problem.” He further suggested that Arendt go back to an earlier time saying:

“where modern anti-Semitism occurs it is a symptom of the decay of Christianity in the sociological sense, as a force that determines the character of civilization. The totalitarian movements would, in my opinion, have to be placed in the context of the decay of a Christian civilization; and the continuum of these destructive forces goes back to the medieval sectarian movement, at least as far back as the 12th century.”

The “decay” Voegelin mentioned lies in the fact that “God is the measure of all things” was replaced by “Man is the measure of all things.” For Voegelin, the relevant ideologies “were not harmless (and they still are not), but are symptoms of the kind of destruction of the person that is being carried out in the concentration camps.”⁴⁹

Sandoz on Dostoevsky

Such a conclusion is also presented in Political Apocalypse: A Study of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, a book Ellis Sandoz first published in 1971 based on his 1965 dissertation for his doctorate at the University of Munich. In Sandoz’s view, the nihilism, atheistic humanism, and socialism which Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) faced in the 19th century was similar to the Sophists whom Plato faced in the 4th century B.C. Confronting Protagoras’ “Man is the measure of all things,” Plato’s “God is the measure of all things” echoed “like a thunderclap across more than twenty centuries of history, found consummate expression in the last great work of each writer, the Laws and The Brothers Karamazov.”⁵⁰

Lamentations as the Language of Suffering

Despite “God is the measure of all things,” the “apocalypse of man” has led to the “destruction of the person” on numerous occasions, and “egophany” appears ever present. Even if Jesus Christ declared some two thousand years ago that “My kingdom is not of the world,”⁵¹ it looks as though there has never been a lack of people who, either voluntarily or involuntarily, have taken pains to build the kingdom of God in this world. What else could one do in the world as it exists?

In a 1965-1966 term lecture at the University of Munich, Voegelin spoke of Lamentations by quoting Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann (1875-1955).  Voegelin pointed out that Mann’s Doctor Faustus published in 1947 was “the great lamentation of a German over Germany.” Yet, the lamentation “is not to be understood in any conventional sense” but “in the sense of the Biblical Lamentations of Jeremiah.” It concerns not only “the atrocities of lesser evils of a period, but lamentations about man and his falling away from God.” Voegelin went on to mention a few verses quoted from Lamentations in Doctor Faustus:

“Why should a living man complain . . . about the punishment of his sins? Let us test and examine our ways, and return to the Lord. We have transgressed and rebelled, and thou hast not forgiven. Thou has wrapped thyself with anger and pursued us, slaying without pity. Thou has made us filth and refuse among the nations.”⁵²

For Voegelin, “Lament is not the return itself, but the insight into the defection and thus the beginning of the return . . . lament is the language of suffering from estrangement–the Ecce-Homo stance.”⁵³

Ecce Homo, coming from John 19:5, is translated as “Behold the man” in the King James Version of the Bible. It is what Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, said to the crowd that demanded that Jesus be crucified. Before that, Pilate had said: “Look, I am bringing him out to you to let you know that I find no basis for a charge against him.” Then, “Jesus came out wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe.” That is when Pilate said, “Behold the man!” The crowd’s response, “As soon as the chief priests and their officials saw him, they shouted, ‘Crucify! Crucify!’ ”⁵⁴ For Thomas Mann, lamentations are “a constant, inexhaustibly accentuated lament of the most painful Ecce-Homo variety.” Voegelin’s explanation:

“This suffering, however, belongs to the essence of man, for though it is man’s destiny to be imago Dei, the possibility is also present not to live up to it–to fall away from it and to close oneself off. The dignity of the imago Dei encompasses the suffering of the Ecce-Homo.”⁵⁵

An Age of Linguistic Corruption: Heidegger

Here, Voegelin highlighted the serious corruption of language. Contrary to a corrupted language, in lament, “language restores itself through insight into its own character as expression of reality.”⁵⁶ Voegelin said he lived “in an age of linguistic corruption.”⁵⁷ Linguistic corruption lies in the fact that language and the thought it carries fail to reflect reality. It is a symptom of spiritual disorder.

In Voegelin’s lecture on the German spiritual problem and the rise of National Socialism [Hitler and the Germans] he gave Martin Heidegger’s language is an example. Voegelin did not mention Heidegger by name but spoke of his Being and Time [Sein und Zeit]. And Voegelin “[chose] deliberately not one of his pronouncements from the National Socialist period” but a part of Being and Time first published in 1927 that concerns “the nature of a sign.” Voegelin pointed out that the philosophical language of Heidegger “transposes factual relationships of our everyday world into a linguistic medium that begins to take on an alliterative life of its own, and thus loses contact with the thing itself. Language and fact have somehow separated from one another, and thought has correspondingly become estranged from reality.”⁵⁸

Martin Niemöller

Linguistic corruption is not alone. Voegelin also brought to mind religious corruption within the Christian churches of Germany. An example in this regard is Martin Niemöller (1892-1984), a Lutheran pastor who had voted for Hitler but later was arrested because of his opposition to Hitler. Niemöller is believed to be the original author of the famous statement that repented of the inactivity of German intellectuals during and after the Nazi rise to power.⁵⁹

A source Voegelin used is an observer’s report of the Niemöller trial in 1938. The report called Niemöller “a National Socialist.” According to this report, Niemöller “described how since 1924 he had always voted for the Nazi party” and he “read aloud two pages from Mein Kampf, followed by a chapter from the New Testament, and finally a sermon from the year 1932 on the leadership question (Führerfrage).” Niemöller found the Jews “finds foreign and distasteful.” In his eyes, God’s revelation “in the Jew Jesus of Nazareth” is “very painful and vexing state of affairs” but “must be accepted for the sake of the gospel.”

For Voegelin, Niemöller’s problem was his juxtaposition of the word of the leader (Führer–referring to Hitler) with that of God as well as his understanding of the Incarnation as God’s revelation in the person of a Jew instead of in a representative of mankind. This distortion of the spirit no longer reflects a proper God-human relationship and  no longer represents the reality of faith.⁶⁰

The Focus on Reality

Voegelin used the word “reality” constantly. From his first book, On the Form of the American Mind, published in 1928, to his last article, “Quod Deus Dicitur,”  hich he revised right up to the afternoon before his death, Voegelin seemed to have always talked about the question of reality.⁶¹ On November 22, 1978, Voegelin gave a talk at York University in Toronto, Canada.

He explained that the word “reality” had a Greek root, ἀλήθεια (aletheia), literally meaning “unhidden” or “uncovered.”⁶² Aletheia has a double meaning of “truth” and “reality.” Briefly, truth is “reality becoming luminous for its structure” and “truth does not refer only to a reality outside of man and confronting man, but also to the process of reality in which man himself becomes an event, the event of the carrier of consciousness.”⁶³

Yet, one is unable to see reality clearly whenever one faces reality or takes part in it. On January 14, 1965, Voegelin delivered the Ingersoll Lecture “Immortality: Experience and Symbol” at Harvard Divinity School. Voegelin the philosopher told his audience, “a philosophy of consciousness is not a substitute for revelation. For the philosopher is a man in search of truth; he is not God revealing truth.” However Voegelin also said, “the philosopher can help to make revelation intelligible, but no more than that.”⁶⁴

Transcendence and the Metaxy

Here, one might see the difference between philosophy in Voegelin’s eyes and as it is understood in popular culture. For Voegelin, “philosophy by definition has its center in the experiences of transcendence.”⁶⁵ Or as Voegelin wrote in a 1953 New Year’s day letter to a friend,  “Philosophizing seems to me to be in essence the interpretation of experiences of transcendence.” ⁶⁶ For most men God’s revelation is the source of the experience “transcendence.”

In this regard, Voegelin borrowed from Plato a word to help make sense of the reality in which human beings live. It is μεταξύ (metaxy), literally meaning “in-between.” This word appeared in Plato’s Symposium and Philebus. ⁶⁷ In the Chinese translation of Autobiographical Reflections and The Voegelinian Revolution, Daniel Hsu rendered metaxy into 间际 and 兼际 respectively, both pronounced as jianji but with different Chinese characters.⁶⁸

The Incarnation

In this lecture about immortality, not only did Voegelin draw his audience’s gaze to the “in-between” but also to God’s revelation in Jesus Christ. If “in-between” captures the reality of human existence from the direction of a human being seeking God, the full divinity and full humanity of Jesus Christ is God’s revelation to human beings about the reality of human existence from the direction of the Incarnation.

Voegelin did this by quoting the definition of the Council of Chalcedon (A.D. 451):

“Since . . . the characteristic properties of both (divine and human) natures and substances are kept intact and come together in one person, lowliness is taken on by majesty, weakness by power, mortality by eternity, and the nature which cannot be harmed is united to the nature which suffers, in order that the debt which our condition involves may be discharged.”

“In this way, as our salvation requires, one and the same mediator between God and human beings, the human being who is Jesus Christ, can at one and the same time die in virtue of the one nature and , in virtue of the other, be incapable of death. That is why true God was born in the integral and complete nature of a true human being, entire in what belongs to him and entire in what belongs to us.”⁷⁴

In the sense of the Incarnation Voegelin could say “History is Christ written large.” By analogy it may be compared to the Republic in which Plato considered the polis “man written large.”⁶

Equivalences of Experience

In a 1970 article, “Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History,” Voegelin elaborated on this state of “in-between” by penetrating to the tension within it:

“The question of constants in the history of mankind, it will have become clear, cannot be answered through propositions concerning right order, or through a catalog of permanent values, for the flux of existence does not have the structure of order or, for that matter, of disorder, but the structure of a tension between truth and deformation of reality. Not the possession of his humanity but the concern about its full realization is the lot of man.”

“Existence has the structure of the In-Between, of the Platonic metaxy, and if anything is constant in the history of mankind it is the language of tension between life and death, immortality and mortality, perfection and imperfection, time and timelessness; between order and disorder, truth and untruth, sense and senselessness of existence; between amor Dei and amor sui, l’âme ouverte and l’âme close; between the virtues of openness toward the ground of being such as faith, love, and hope, and the vices of infolding closure such as hybris and revolt; between the moods of joy and despair; and between alienation in its double meaning of alienation from the world and alienation from God.”⁷⁰

Voegelin went on to caution that “if we split these pairs of symbols, and hypostatize the poles of the tension as independent entities, we destroy the reality of existence as it has been experienced by the creators of the tensional symbolisms.”⁷¹ The metastatic apocalypse Voegelin often spoke of is one of the examples manifesting such splitting. Even facing God’s revelation in Jesus Christ, one could not help turning a blind eye to the tension of the full divinity and full humanity in Jesus Christ by focusing on either pole of the tension. Various kinds of such splitting would result in a misunderstanding of God’s reality and hence the deformation of the reality of humanity and the wider world.⁷²

All this might bring to mind a letter that played a foundational role in helping establish the Chalcedon Definition. It was written by the bishop of Rome, Leo I (c. 391-461), to the bishop of Constantinople, Flavian (?-449) on June 13, A.D. 449.⁷³ One paragraph of the letter is especially relevant to the tension Voegelin highlighted:

“Since . . . the characteristic properties of both (divine and human) natures and substances are kept intact and come together in one person, lowliness is taken on by majesty, weakness by power, mortality by eternity, and the nature which cannot be harmed is united to the nature which suffers, in order that the debt which our condition involves may be discharged.”

“In this way, as our salvation requires, one and the same mediator between God and human beings, the human being who is Jesus Christ, can at one and the same time die in virtue of the one nature and, in virtue of the other, be incapable of death. That is why true God was born in the integral and complete nature of a true human being, entire in what belongs to him and entire in what belongs to us.”⁷⁴

Immortalization

If “History is Christ written large,” then one might see how God has revealed his creation, redemption and governance through Christ in the history of one’s life, the humanity and the wider world. One might see how God has helped his human beings who were created in his image to see his image through Christ. One might see how God has helped his human beings, the finite creature by nature, to enjoy the immortality of being with the infinite creator through Christ.

In this history, human beings live not just in this world nor out of the world but between the eternity of God and the transience of humanity through Christ. In this sense, it is no surprise to see Voegelin telling Sandoz about the philosophy of history in the final chapter of Autobiographical Reflections, “Eschatology and Philosophy: The Practice of Dying” this way:

“Hence, every philosophy of history must take cognizance of the fact that the process of history is not immanent but moves in the In-Between of this worldly and other-worldly reality. Moreover, this In-Between character of the process is experienced, not as a structure in infinite time, but as a movement that will eschatologically end in a state beyond the In-Between and beyond time.”

No philosophy of history can be considered to be seriously dealing with the problems of history unless it acknowledges the fundamental eschatological character of the process.⁷⁵

Jesus told human beings nearly two thousand years ago: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.”⁷⁶ Since then, various names have been given to the age in which human beings live. For Voegelin, the end of this world seems to be the most accurate description. As a human being who considered the center of philosophy to be the experiences of transcendence, Voegelin thought what a philosopher did was “the practice of dying.” In his view, “the practice of dying” is in fact “the practice of immortalizing.” In the eschatological tension, the understanding of the reality of human existence would “become luminous.” But this “does not mean that the nature of man can be transfigured within history.” In other words, the “consciousness of the eschatological expectation is an ordering factor in existence; and it makes possible the understanding of man’s existence as that of the viator in the Christian sense–the wanderer, the pilgrim toward eschatological perfection–but this pilgrimage still is a pilgrim’s progress in this world.”⁷⁷

The Metaxy

The “metaxy” first appeared in Voegelin’s published works in 1964.⁷⁸ That was in a German article, “Ewiges Sein in der Zeit,” translated into English as “Eternal Being in Time” by Gerhart Niemeyer (1907-1997), a political philosopher who left his native Germany after Hitler came to power in 1933 and later became a professor at the University of Notre Dame. In that article, Voegelin said metaxy was such an experience as “a meeting of time with eternity, and of man and God.” As in his Harvard lecture on immortality, Voegelin differentiated between philosophy and revelation with the former coming from the direction of “the human seeking-and-receiving pole” and the latter from the direction of “the divine giving-and-commanding pole.” ⁷⁹

From 1964 on, Voegelin frequently used metaxy in his remaining life. In addition to “Eternal Being in Time,” “Immortality: Experience and Symbol” and “Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History,” many of Voegelin’s essays had metaxy as a crucial viewpoint in exploring politics and history. They include “The Gospel and Culture” in 1971, “On Hegel: A History in Sorcery” in the same year, “Reason: The Classic Experience” in 1974, “Response to Professor Altizer’s ‘A New History and a New but Ancient God?’ ” in 1975, “Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme: A Meditation” in 1983, and his swan-song, “Quod Deus Dicitur.”⁸⁰ Of course, in the last two volumes of Order and History–The Ecumenic Age and In Search of Order–metaxy also figured prominently.⁸¹

It is true that Voegelin did not borrow metaxy from Plato until late in life. Yet, he had already expressed his understanding of this situation when he was young. In 1933, the 32-year-old Voegelin published his third book, The History of the Race Idea: From Ray to Carus. He pointed out in its introduction that man “stands between God and the subhuman world” and this “intermediate status” is not “a self-contained existence” but participates in “both the higher and the lower world.” He said “By virtue of his soul, man is united with the divine pneuma; in his sarx, he partakes of transitoriness; his existence is ‘inauthentic’ [uneigentlich]. The condition of his existence is that of being lost, an existence from which he must be freed in order to ascend to the realm of his true existence with his ‘authentic’ nature.”⁸²

Then, the words of Voegelin mingled with the quotes from The Imitation of Christ of Thomas à Kempis (c. 1380-1471), a medieval German monk: “Man must live according to the example of Christ and follow Him;” “‘Take care therefore to withdraw your heart from love of what is visible, allowing it to center on things unseen;’” “The most important event in man’s life is death; he must arrange his days with death in mind;” “Every day is to be lived as if it were the last, and the soul should always be anxious for the world beyond the senses. Perfect calm of the soul can be found only in the eternal gaze upon God–‘sed non est hoc possible, durante me in hac mortalitate’ [but this is not possible while I am in this mortal state].”

Immediately after this, Voegelin explained why earthly existence is to be called “mortal”–“not because life ends in death but because the quality of mortalitas makes the whole duration of life something contemptible, unreal, from which the soul is liberated into a higher life, a higher reality” which is manifested in “heavenly glory” in life after death. Only there can humans look upon God’s glory face to face and “taste the Word of God made flesh.”⁸³

The Young Voegelin Examines the Idea of Perfection

It might be puzzling to see the author of a book exploring the history of the race idea begin his writing by outlining his thoughts about life and death. But if reading just a little further, one would find that Voegelin wanted to sketch out his idea concerning “the image of man” or rather, what man is on earth, through sharing his comments about life and death. Voegelin went on to borrow the perception of German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) to express astonishment that:

“. . . philosophers could ever have come up with the idea that so imperfect and transitory a creature as man could ever fulfill the meaning of his life in his earthly existence and not need the hope of a life after death to perfect his faculties.”

Voegelin then sighed:

“. . . the Christian idea of the coming of the Kingdom of God is so secularized that the kingdom of perfected man is envisioned as attainable on earth in an unending historical process; on the infinitely distant temporal horizon the kingdom evolved on earth and the one effected by God come together.”

After this, Voegelin returned to Kant. He said the thought of German philosopher himself was vacillating and conflicting and it constituted “the first step on the way to a reworking of an image of man increasingly distant from the Christian one.” For Kant “sees the kingdom of heaven as a remote, earthly one,” though “life in this world is imperfect, a perfect existence in turn can only be conceived as an earthly existence–an otherworldly life, after careful reflection, seems to Kant to be only an imperfect substitute for life on this earth.”⁸⁴

One might see from here that the young Voegelin had already reflected on the deformation of the worldview brought by the Enlightenment. A key point lies in how to capture the reality of human beings through life and death. Obviously, such Christian idea as “not of the world” nor “out of the world” had a lifelong impact on Voegelin.⁸⁵

The Old Voegelin Prepares for his Death

In a book published in 2006, Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America, Sandoz recalled how Voegelin arranged his Lutheran form of funeral. Voegelin asked for two New Testament passages to be read at his interment service. One was “Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abides alone: but if it die, it brings forth much fruit. He that loves his life shall lose it; and he that hates his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.” The other, “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passes away, and the lust thereof: but he that does the will of God abides forever.”

Sandoz account continued: “When Eric’s wife, Lissy, asked him why he would want that second passage read, he is said to have replied, ‘for repentance.’” The one who witnessed this scene was not Sandoz, but Paul Caringella.⁸⁶ In the last six years of Voegelin’s life in this world, Caringella was his assistant. It was due to Caringella, at present a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, who “took down the dictation from an almost inaudible voice” of Voegelin, that “Quod Deus Dicitur,” Voegelin’s last work, reached paper.⁸⁷ Caringella is also one of the four members of the editorial board of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin.

The Letter to the Corinthians and a Personal Testament

Since 2006 when I first came to read Voegelin and Sandoz, I have seen this account of Voegelin’s funeral arrangement a number of times. But it was when I undertook this piece of writing in late 2012 and early 2013 that it impressed me most. Over this period of time, a passage of 1 Corinthians 15 often came to my mind:

“What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body.”

“All flesh is not the same: Men have one kind of flesh, animals have another, birds another and fish another. There are also heavenly bodies and there are earthly bodies; but the splendor of the heavenly bodies is one kind, and the splendor of the earthly bodies is another. The sun has one kind of splendor, the moon another and the stars another; and star differs from star in splendor.”

“So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. So it is written: ’The first Adam became a living being;’ the last Adam, a life-giving spirit. The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that the spiritual.”

“The first man was of the dust of the earth, the second man from heaven. As was the earthly man, so are those who are of the earth; and as is the man from heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. And just as we have borne the likeness of the earthly man, so shall we bear the likeness of the man from heaven. I declare to you, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.”

“Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed–in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: ’Death has been swallowed up in victory.’ ’Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?’ The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.”

“But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.”⁸⁸

That I quoted this long passage here is not just because Voegelin mentioned the death of “a grain of wheat” and eternal life before he died, nor just because he said in The Ecumenic Age that when “reading the First Letter to the Corinthians, I have always the feeling of traveling with Paul, from phthora to aphtharsia in a homogeneous medium of reality,”⁸⁹ but also because reading this long passage as well as the works of Voegelin and Sandoz has made an impact on my own understanding of life, death, and the reality of human existence.

When I sent my first email to Professor Sandoz consulting him about the history of freedom at about eight o’clock in the morning of February 19, 2006, I did not expect I would receive his reply less than four hours later. Even far beyond my expectation, our correspondence would still continue seven years after that and I would be baptized in a church after getting to know Professor Sandoz and later Daniel Hsu who unexpectedly helped me find this church.

Without all these surprises, I could not imagine I would somewhat get to understand what the books Professor Sandoz gave me were all about. Without these surprises, I could not imagine I would be able to begin writing down what I have learned from my initial reading of these books. Without these surprises, I could not imagine these books, 1 Corinthians and many other books of the Bible would make me learn to know afresh about myself and the wider world.

The Shadow and the Reality in the Bible

When I read Sandoz’s preface to the Chinese edition of The Voegelinian Revolution, “the shadow” it mentioned brought to mind “the reality” that often appeared in the works of Voegelin. When I saw “the reality,” I would think of “the shadow.” If it were just a few years ago, I would not be sensitive to the contrast between these two words. Only in the last couple of years did the contrast start taking shape in my mind. It all began towards the end of 2010. That was when my English Bible study group was reading Colossians. We met every Monday evening. We used the New International Version of the Bible.

During the weeks on Colossians, one verse caught my eye. It was, “These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ.”⁹⁰ In other popular versions like the King James Version, the translation would read, “Which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ.” Note the difference in the verses’ final clause. If one turns to the original Greek version, one would see the King James Version might be closer to the literal meaning.⁹¹ In Greek, “the body” is σῶμα (soma), which also means “the substance.” But “the reality” in the New International Version unexpectedly helped bring “a shadow” to my attention. Since then, the contrast between “the reality” and “the shadow” has seemed to become ever alive in my life. If I may use my own words to express what I have learned, I would say that it turns out that only in Christ could one see the reality of the world, or more straightforwardly, only Christ is the reality.

And yet in 2010, I did not expect this impression would be made even deeper in the following two years. After Colossians, my English Bible study fellowship spent more than a year on Exodus. After that, it was Galatians, and Matthew. In the first half of 2012, we came to the last 15 chapters of Exodus. The contrast between “the shadow” and “the reality” resurfaced when we studied how the LORD told Moses to make a sanctuary for the LORD himself to dwell in.

The Shadow and the Reality in Hebrews and Exodus

The copy of the Bible I have been using has a cross-reference system. It pointed to Hebrews 8:5 when I took a closer look at Exodus 25:9, 40. After turning to Hebrews 8:5, I found this verse that actually explained what the two verses in Exodus mean:

“They serve at a sanctuary that is a copy and shadow of what is in heaven. This is why Moses was warned when he was about to build the tabernacle: “See to it that you make everything according to the pattern shown you on the mountain.”⁹²

Previously, the chapters about building the tabernacle in Exodus read like a pedestrian account concerning architectural engineering. But in the context of the Hebrews response, all this took on a different look. The history in Exodus appears in a far wider dimension. Though it was made exactly according to the pattern God showed Moses, the tabernacle was not the real one but “a copy and shadow of what is in heaven.”⁹³ And what is the real tabernacle? The first two verses of Hebrews have made it clear:

“The point of what we are saying is this: We do have such a high priest, who sat down at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven, and who serves in the sanctuary, the true tabernacle set up by the Lord, not by man.”⁹⁴

The contrast between “the reality” and “the shadow” not only resurfaced before my eyes but also the tension between them was striking.

If the tabernacle in Exodus is but “a copy and shadow of what is in heaven,” then the things that are not made according to the pattern God shows cannot even be counted as “a shadow” of “the reality.” They might be counted as among “the shadow” Sandoz pointed out in his preface to the Chinese edition of The Voegelinian Revolution. If it could be expressed it in the Voegelinian way, what makes things a part of “the shadow” rather than of “the reality” is that they are not projected from theophany but egophany. If one does not know the reality and its shadow, one would not recognize the shadow that is not even an image of the reality but would see it as the shadow of the reality or even as the reality itself.

Voegelin’s Life as an Exemplar

For anyone who lives in the shadow but wants to know the reality, the life of Voegelin might offer heartening encouragement. Like many of his contemporaries, Voegelin lived in the shadow that is not of the reality. But unlike many of them, he bore a unique witness to a lifelong journey in recapturing the reality. In Voegelin, the difference lies not just in “God is the measure of all things” instead of “Man is the measure of all things,” but the image of God in his mind is much less from the human imagination than from God’s revelation through Christ.

The difference was shown in old Voegelin’s asking for the two passages of the Bible to be read in his funeral “for repentance.” It was also reflected in young Voegelin’s particular attachment to The Imitation of Christ. For Voegelin, “History is Christ written large,” and the gospel is “the truth of reality.”⁹⁵ For him, the message of “For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form”⁹⁶ is about the “divine reality,” which is only manifested fully in Christ since Christ is “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation” and “the head over every power and authority.”⁹⁷ The “divine reality” revealed only in Christ is the ground upon which the reality of all the things created is based, and hence ultimately real.⁹⁸ The “divine reality” has a two-fold meaning for human beings: on the one hand, human beings “have been given fullness in Christ;”⁹⁹  on the other hand, God is “beyond the In-Between of existence.”¹⁰⁰

Notes

1. http://news.xinhuanet.com/book/2012-08/02/c_123514825.htm; http://www.infzm.com/content/82349; http://theory.people.com.cn/n/2012/1022/c49157-19340054.html 。

2. Eric Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin: Volume 34, Autobiographical Reflections: Revised Edition, with a Voegelin Glossary and Cumulative Index (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 149-186. This glossary is based on Professor Eugene Webb’s compilation in his book Eric Voegelin: Philosopher of History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981), 277-289; Webb’s book was translated into Chinese by Cheng Qing and was published in 2011.

3. Barry Cooper and Jodi Bruhn, eds., Voegelin Recollected: Conversation on a Life (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2008), 49-52.

4. Ellis Sandoz, Xu Zhiyue trans., The Voegelinian Revolution: A Biographical Introduction (Second Edition), (Shanghai: Shanghai Joint Publishing Company, 2012), 7. There is some change to the Chinese translation in the Chinese version of this writing.

5. Nazi is short for Nationalsozialist, National Socialist.

6. Eric Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin: Volume 29, Selected Correspondence, 1924-1949 (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2009), Letter of dismissal.

7. Gestapo is short for Geheime Staatspolizei, Secret State Police.

8. Eric Voegelin, Ellis Sandoz ed., Xu Zhiyue trans., Autobiographical Reflections (Beijing: Huaxia Press, 2009), 43. There is some change to the Chinese translation in the Chinese version of this writing; Eric Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin: Volume 34, Autobiographical Reflections: Revised Edition, with a Voegelin Glossary and Cumulative Index (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 71.

9. Ibid., 69.

10. Ibid., 69.

11. Eric Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 4, The Authoritarian State: An Essay on the Problem of the Austrian State (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 73.

12. Literally, realissimum means the most real.

13. Eric Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 5, Modernity without Restraint: The Political Religions; The New Science of Politics; and Science, Politics, and Gnosticism (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 71.

14. Eric Voegelin, Ellis Sandoz ed., Xu Zhiyue trans., Autobiographical Reflections (Beijing: Huaxia Press, 2009), 51; Eric Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin: Volume 34, Autobiographical Reflections: Revised Edition, with a Voegelin Glossary and Cumulative Index (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 78.

15. Ellis Sandoz, Xu Zhiyue trans., The Voegelinian Revolution: A Biographical Introduction (Second Edition), (Shanghai: Shanghai Joint Publishing Company, 2012), 81-82. There is some change to the Chinese translation in the Chinese version of this writing; Ellis Sandoz, The Voegelinian Revolution: A Biographical Introduction (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2000), 65.

16. Eric Voegelin, Ellis Sandoz ed., Xu Zhiyue trans., Autobiographical Reflections (Beijing: Huaxia Press, 2009), 103. There is some change to the Chinese translation in the Chinese version of this writing; Eric Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin: Volume 34, Autobiographical Reflections: Revised Edition, with a Voegelin Glossary and Cumulative Index (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 127.

17. Ibid., 103. There is some change to the Chinese translation in the Chinese version of this writing.

18. Emmet Kennedy, The secularism of Destutt de Tracy’s “Ideology” http://www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de/v/grammaire_generale/Actes_du_colloque/Textes/Kennedy/Emmet_Kennedy.pdf .

19. Robert J. Richards, “Ideology and the History of Science,” in Biology and Philosophy, 8 (1993), 103-108 http://philosophy.uchicago.edu/faculty/files/richards/Ideology%20and%20the%20History%20of%20Science.pdf .

20. B.W.Head, Ideology and Social Science: Destutt de Tracy and French Liberalism (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1985), 25-34.

21. The Count Destutt Tracy, Thomas Jefferson trans. and ed., A Treatise on Political Economy, To which is prefixed a supplement to a preceding work on the understanding or, Elements of Ideology (Georgetown, D. C.: Published by Joseph Mulligan, Printed by W. A. Rind & Co., 1817) http://mises.org/books/tracy.pdf .

22. Eric Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin: Volume 15, Order and History: Volume 2, The World of the Polis (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 349.

23. Eric Voegelin, Order and History: Volume One, Israel and Revelation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), xiv.

24. Ellis Sandoz, Xu Zhiyue trans., The Voegelinian Revolution: A Biographical Introduction (Second Edition), (Shanghai: Shanghai Joint Publishing Company, 2012), 94. There is some change to the Chinese translation in the Chinese version of this writing; Ellis Sandoz, The Voegelinian Revolution: A Biographical Introduction (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2000), 78.

25. Eric Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin: Volume 34, Autobiographical Reflections: Revised Edition, with a Voegelin Glossary and Cumulative Index (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 160-161.

26. Eric Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 5, Modernity without Restraint: The Political Religions; The New Science of Politics; and Science, Politics, and Gnosticism (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 297-298.

27. Ibid., 191, 296－297.

28. Eric Voegelin, Ellis Sandoz ed., Xu Zhiyue trans., Autobiographical Reflections (Beijing: Huaxia Press, 2009), 67. There is some change to the Chinese translation in the Chinese version of this writing; Eric Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin: Volume 34, Autobiographical Reflections: Revised Edition, with a Voegelin Glossary and Cumulative Index (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 93.

29. Eric Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin: Volume 34, Autobiographical Reflections: Revised Edition, with a Voegelin Glossary and Cumulative Index (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 167-168; Eric Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin: Volume 33, The Drama of Humanity and Other Miscellaneous Papers: 1939-1985 (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2004), 90.

30. Eric Voegelin, Ellis Sandoz ed., Xu Zhiyue trans., Autobiographical Reflections (Beijing: Huaxia Press, 2009), 68. There is some change to the Chinese translation in the Chinese version of this writing; Eric Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin: Volume 34, Autobiographical Reflections: Revised Edition, with a Voegelin Glossary and Cumulative Index (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 93.

31. Other than Comte, Voegelin also referred to Marx, Lenin, Hitler. Eric Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 26, History of Political Ideas: Volume VIII, Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 5, 7, 9, 185, 193. Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man was published as From Enlightenment to Revolution in 1975. It was the only book published among the 8-volume   History of Political Ideas before Voegelin died. Eric Voegelin, From Enlightenment to Revolution (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1975).

32. “Ecumenic” derives from οἰκουμένη (oikoumene) in Greek meaning “(the) inhabited (world).” In The Ecumenic Age, Voegelinexamined its multiple layers of meaning:

The term ecumene, which originally means no more than the inhabited world in the sense of cultural geography, has received through Polybius the technical meaning of the peoples who are drawn into the process of imperial expansion. On this Polybian stratum of meaning could later be superimposed the meaning of the mankind under Roman jurisdiction (Luke 2:1; Acts 17:6; 24:5), and ultimately of the messianic world to come (Heb. 2:5)”

Polybius (c. 200 B.C.- 118 B.C.), a historian during the Hellenistic Period, wrote multi-volume Histories. For more details, see Eric Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 17, Order and History: Volume IV, The Ecumenic Age (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 178-179.

Regarding “Ecumenic Age”, Voegelin referred to:

“. . .  the period in which a manifold of concrete societies, which formerly existed in autonomously ordered form, were drawn into one political power field through pragmatic expansions from the various centers. This process has a recognizable beginning with the Iranian expansion; and it has its recognizable end with the decline of Roman power, when the ecumene begins to dissociate centrifugally into the Byzantine, Islamic, and Western civilizations”. Ibid., 188.

As for “the Iranian expansion”, Voegelin referred to “the rise of the Persian Empire” in the book’s second chapter. Ibid., 167.

In a chapter concerning China, Voegelin used “ecumene” to translate “t’ien-hsia” (all-under-heaven, below heaven, all below heaven, world). For Voegelin, in the cultural sense, “t’ien-hsia”, “as the carrier of human society”, is the exact equivalent of “oikoumene.” Ibid., 340-341, 352.

Voegelin further pointed out that with the rise of Ch’in, the idea of “kuo” replaced “t’ien-hsia” and “the principle of force swallowed up the ecumene and its order.” In the Han Dynasty that followed Ch’in, various movements and schools struggled to provide the spiritual substance of the power but the order of “t’ien-hsia” was never restored. Ibid., 370.

33. Eric Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 17, Order and History: Volume IV, The Ecumenic Age (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 326-327.

34. Eric Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin: Volume 34, Autobiographical Reflections: Revised Edition, with a Voegelin Glossary and Cumulative Index (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 94, 157.

35. Eric Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 17, Order and History: Volume IV, The Ecumenic Age (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 327-328.

36. Literally, saeculum senescens means age growing old.

37. Parousia, literally meaning presence, arrival, official visit, here refers to the second coming of Christ.

38. Eric Voegelin, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 17, Order and History: Volume IV, The Ecumenic Age (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 335. George H. Tavard, The Contemplative Church: Joachim And His Adversaries (Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Marquette University Press, 2005), 7-21.