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

Ellis Sandoz and the Foundations of American Liberty

To a considerable extent, Voegelin was led to prefer such words as “reality” and “divine reality” to more popular ones like “truth” and “God” because the latter were so abused that they had lost their original meanings in the world Voegelin lived. In his Autographical Reflections, Voegelin took a whole chapter to discuss this problem with Sandoz. It is entitled, “Why Philosophize? To Recapture Reality!”  From the question mark and the exclamation mark here, one might be able to feel the emotional way Voegelin spoke about the matter.¹⁰¹

For Voegelin, linguistic corruption is not unique to the modern age that is inundated by various ideologies. Similar ages include the time when Plato confronted the Sophists. Voegelin called the corrupted language “idols” by borrowing the classification from British philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626). He also mentioned Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) who, in his 1967 novel Cancer Ward, “had to fall back on Bacon and his conception of idols in order to defend the reality of Reason in his own existence against the impact of Communist dogma.”

In comparison, linguistic corruption in America is not reflected in the situation like that in the then Soviet Union where the authorities controlled scholars, but rather in what Voegelin called “the intellectual terrorism of institutions.” The institutions here include “the mass media, university departments, foundations, and commercial publishing houses.” Despite this, Voegelin pointed out that “science can continue, and even flourish” in America where “our Soviet Writer’s Union cannot enlist governmental power for the purpose of suppressing scholars,” and hence, “there are always enclaves in the West.”¹⁰²

When I got to know Professor Sandoz in 2006, a major concern I had was why “there are always enclaves in the West.” The West here mainly refers to North America and Western Europe. Professor Sandoz gave me his first reply by attaching a draft of his John Witherspoon Lecture delivered in Washington D.C. in 2004. John Witherspoon (1723-1794) was president of the College of New Jersey, later Princeton University. Among the 56 signatories of the Declaration of Independence, Witherspoon was the only active clergyman and the only college president. Sandoz’s lecture, “Republicanism and Religion: Some Contextual Considerations,” is also a part of his book published later in 2006, Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America.

Around 2006, I had consulted hundreds of experts and scholars in various fields across the world about how and why individual liberty under the rule of law was first institutionalized in the West and why it has survived there as nowhere else. Among the responses I received, Professor Sandoz’s is rare. Even among those who value Christianity or the Christian faith, his analysis is somewhat different.

Biblical Egalitarianism in America

In his John Witherspoon Lecture, Sandoz pointed out: “It is this ever-present balanced living tension with the divine Ground above all else, perhaps, that has made the United States so nearly immune politically to the ideological and eschatological maladies that have ravaged the modern world, such as fascism and Marxism and now Islamism.”¹⁰³ Here, Sandoz apparently borrowed from the way Voegelin analyzed the world to interpret the characteristics of American politics. The “divine Ground” is similar to “divine reality” but the “Ground” with a capital G places emphasis on a point that this reality is the supreme reality on which all created reality is grounded.¹⁰⁴ And “the ideological and eschatological maladies” belong to the symptoms of what Voegelin called “egophany” (as opposed to theophany) that deforms and eclipses reality. What “eschatological” means here is not biblical eschatology but “the metastatic apocalypse.”

More specifically, Sandoz pointed out “this ever-present balanced living tension with the divine Ground” is shown in two aspects. In the American political environment:

“the historically affirmed vocation of a special people under God still could be pursued through active devotion to public good, liberty, and justice solidly grounded in Judaeo-Christian transcendentalism.”

“Citizens were at the same time self-consciously also pilgrims aware that this world is not their home, that they were merely sojourners passing through this mysterious process of historical existence in the attitude of homo viator, since nothing better than hope through faith avails them.”¹⁰⁵

In the tension between the two aspects, America came close to being drawn into radicalism. Radicalism here includes all kinds of ideologies based upon egophany since the Enlightenment,¹⁰⁶as well as such sentiments as considering America “the new Israel or chosen people and even the site of the inauguration of the thousand-year reign of God’s saints on earth.”¹⁰⁷

Sandoz enumerated the factors that make America different. He wrote:

“Advocates of republicanism in the Anglo-American Whig tradition (to be distinguished firmly from French Jacobinism, which was both atheistic and anti-property) assert liberty and justice in resistance against tyranny and arbitrary government and do so in the name of highest truth.”

He stressed that the former had “a religious and specifically Protestant Christian root.”¹⁰⁸ British writer John Milton (1608-1674) and British republican politician and revolutionary Algernon Sidney (1623-1683) were mentioned as two main examples who were significant in the spread of the Whig Republicanism.¹⁰⁹

The Role of the Vernacular Bible

Then Sandoz portrayed a larger historical scene by quoting a point of British historian George Trevelyan (1876-1962) that the Bible played the most important role in shaping the British spiritual world since the 16th century. In this regard, Sandoz particularly referred to the pioneering work of John Wycliffe (1320-1384) and William Tyndale (1492-1536) in the translation of Scripture into English.¹¹⁰

John Wycliffe was an early proponent of reform in the Roman Catholic Church and William Tyndale a leading figure during the Protestant Reformation. Both paid a heavy price for the English Bible translation. Tyndale was eventually executed as a heretic. However, the Church never universally forbade vernacular Bible translation until the Council of Trent (1559-1563) following the Protestant Reformation.

Tyndale’s translation from the original Hebrew and Greek turned out to be a major source of the King James Version published in 1611. Apart from an unfinished part in the Old Testament, the majority of the King James translation is Tyndale’s own work.¹¹¹ For Sandoz, the translations of Scripture and their spread show the formation of Christian egalitarianism in Britain.¹¹² This egalitarianism further contributed to the rise of republican government in America. Sandoz traced Christian egalitarianism to a time long before Wycliffe and Tyndale. Around the year 1000, an author known as “Anglo-Norman Anonymous” elaborated on the idea of “the priesthood of all (baptized) believers” in the York Tractates (Tractatus Eboracenses).¹¹³

Sandoz on Religion in America Before the Revolution

Against this backdrop, Sandoz went on to highlight the foundational role which the “Great Awakening” played in moulding American spirituality, starting in 1730. He explained how the theology and sermons of such theologians as John Wesley (1703-1791) and Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) helped strengthen American Christians’ intimacy with God.

Sandoz emphasized that the rich experience of God–rather than doctrines and just one side of experience–constituted the common ground of the two theologians. “Knowledge of, obedience to, and delight in God all presuppose, reinforce, and interpenetrate one another,” forming “a creative and dynamic equipoise.” Sandoz quoted from theologian Richard B. Steele’s study of Wesley and Edwards:

“One who claims to know God without obeying him is an antinomian . . . to know God without loving him, a rationalist . . . to obey God without loving him, a Pharisee . . . to love God without obeying him, a hypocrite . . . to love or obey God without knowing the Scriptures in which he is revealed, an illuminist.”¹¹⁴

Sandoz also mentioned George Whitefield (1714-1770), a well-known evangelist whose views about free will and predestination differed from Wesley’s. Yet it is this difference that shows the richness in experiencing God and any side of experience in anyone’s life would not represent the whole experience. But that does not mean there are no fundamentals, as Whitefield said”

“Let a man go to the grammar school of faith and repentance, before he goes to the university of election and predestination. A bare head-knowledge of sound words availeth nothing. I am quite tired of Christless talkers.”¹¹⁵

Seeing such a religious richness already in America before the founding of the United States, Sandoz did not just focus on a few personalities. In 1991, he published Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 1730-1805. With more than 1600 pages, it includes 55 sermons of 55 preachers, their brief biographies and introductions to their sermons.

It would help today’s readers to know what those Christians of diverse backgrounds thought about politics in that turbulent time. And however different they were, they shared at least one common ground. In the book’s foreword, Sandoz wrote, “all our writers agree that political liberty and religious truth are vitally intertwined.” Sandoz elaborated on this point by not just borrowing French sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous phrase that it was religion that “gave birth to America,” but also quoting US historian Carl Bridenbaugh that for Americans before the Revolution, “the very core of existence was their relation to God.”¹¹⁶

Ignoring American Religious History

In today’s America, it appears not common for a political philosopher like Sandoz to look at politics from the viewpoint of man’s relationship to God. The present situation reminds one of what Voegelin said late in life, that a problem facing America was “the intellectual terrorism of institutions.” In Voegelin’s philosophical language, a typical manifestation of the problem is that “The realities excluded can vary widely, but the one item that always has to be excluded is the experience of man’s tension toward the divine ground of his existence.”¹¹⁷

Sandoz recalled that his interest in this dimension went back at least to his undergraduate years. In A Government of Laws: Political Theory, Religion, and the American Founding, published in 1990, Sandoz said he “was struck by the coincidence of concerns and insights of chief spokesmen of the American order and of the great classical philosophers of antiquity.”

He also found that “the In God We Trust imprinted on the coins in our pockets represented in laconic American fashion the report of a cultural consensus.” It would be more difficult to understand the existence of the Americans if this consensus is ignored. But Sandoz wrote, “that contextual and existential dimension is routinely ignored in typical secularizing accounts of the American mind and culture, once the Puritan epoch of the seventeenth century is left behind.”¹¹⁸

Sandoz’s Christianity

It was in such a secularizing intellectual environment that Sandoz ran across not only those authors who valued man’s relation to God but also a professor on campus who would help him go even further in this dimension. Sandoz cannot forget his first encounter with Voegelin: “From the time I first heard him lecture, when I was a young undergraduate student in 1949, I never doubted that Voegelin was profoundly Christian, whatever the ambiguities of his formal church affiliation.”¹¹⁹

Interestingly, one of Sandoz’s students also mentioned Sandoz’s Christianity. In a letter to Sandoz in 2008, this student wrote: “When I was in college I did not attend church regularly, but one Sunday I attended First Baptist Church in Commerce¹²⁰ and you were there. I don’t know anything about your religious beliefs then or now, but your presence at church said a great deal to me. It said that if a man with a mind and an education like Dr. Sandoz can have a place for God in his life, then I, too, can have a healthy life of both the mind and the spirit.”¹²¹

This letter from one of Sandoz’s students gives a glimpse of the diminished place of faith among intellectuals in contemporary America. At least some people appear to think that faith and intellect cannot coexist in a single person. A person of faith seems to be without intellect and a person of intellect appears not to need faith.

Most of the scholars I have contacted work at universities or research institutes in North America or Europe. Many hold a similar view about faith and intellect, especially those in Europe. I once sent an early draft of my manuscript exploring the history of freedom to an influential political historian whom I had gotten to know in 2006. This professor gave me a prompt and kind reply as he had before. He said the book “would I feel sure be of wide interest” and suggested I try to get it published, “but I’m afraid I am not in any way a religious person, so your Christian message passes me by.”

Modern Political Thinkers Compared to Sandoz and Voegelin

All this reminds me of a scene in my undergraduate days. I often went to the university’s library where among the section of politics A History of Political Theory by American political philosopher George Holland Sabine (1880-1961) was one of the books that impressed me most. Compared to the official Chinese books on the history of political ideas, Sabine’s was quite different in the way he wrote. I do not remember how many pages I read at that time. But his work was among the earlier ones that helped me begin learning to know Western political history.

Another memory is of reading Tradition, written by American sociologist Edward Shils (1910-1995). I bought a copy of the Chinese edition on July 15, 1994, a few days after finishing high school study and taking the National College Entrance Examination.

This copy remains on my shelf. On the title page is a passage I transcribed after reading this book. Its English translation reads as follows:

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

“And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”

It does not come from Edward Shils, but Karl Marx. During the period of December 1851-March 1852, Marx wrote an essay, “Der 18te Brumaire des Louis Napoleon” or “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” which appeared in 1852 in the first issue of a New York-based German monthly magazine, Die Revolution.¹²²

Though Marxism has been China’s state ideology since 1949, not many readers in China seem to have taken a closer look at Marx’s books. I finally got more time to read some books with interest instead of being under pressure to pass an exam upon wrapping up the high school years. The passage of Marx was what I stumbled upon after reading Tradition.

A feeling I had at that time and afterwards was that Marx’s own words were not the same as the Marxism propaganda prevalent across China that has been much more empty and hollow and meaningless. And if the passage Marx wrote somewhat makes sense, the same idea seems to apply in Marx himself and his followers as well, though it is not perhaps not the most apt phrase.

However, be they Shils or Marx or Sabine–or such thinkers I read later such as Austrian-British economist and political philosopher Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992) who penned The Constitution of Liberty and was a friend of Voegelin when they were both at the University of Vienna¹²³ –these intellectuals are quite different from Voegelin and Sandoz in terms of their world views. That is, despite the differences among them they are similar in their lack of attention given to the life of the spirit–a notable contrast from Voegelin and Sandoz. Nor are Voegelin and Sandoz similar to Alexis de Tocqueville or Max Weber, though the latter two attach importance to Christianity.

Compared to all these thinkers, the uniqueness of Voegelin and Sandoz may lie in the way they see the world: they do not treat man as the sole actor in the drama of history. In their eyes, both the rebellion of human beings against God, their quest for God, and God’s grace given to man as well as his judgment constitute the panorama of history.

Voegelin Undertakes a Political History

In Autobiographical Reflections, Voegelin told Sandoz about his brief time at Harvard where he taught the history of political ideas after his life in America had just begun. An editor approached Voegelin about enlisting him to write “a textbook of moderate size–I believe 200 to 250 pages were envisaged–for this series.”

In the field of political science at America’s institutions of higher learning, “the standard work” at that time was Sabine’s A History of Political Theory, mentioned above, that was first published in 1937. Voegelin planned to use it “as a model of what had to be included or excluded.” However, as he “began working more deeply into the materials,” Voegelin found that the previous treatments he had read were inadequate and what he had known was insufficient. Therefore, he was unable to finish the book on the terms proposed (He in fact wrote the huge manuscript that became The History of Political Ideas, in 8 volumes.)

Voegelin had also discovered that the conventional writing at the time about the history of political ideas started with the ancient Greek philosophers and then skipped forward to the age of enlightenment and modern ideologies. He said this limitation was untenable. While later teaching at the University of Alabama, Voegelin realized that he would not be able to grasp medieval politics without knowing more about the origins of Christianity. And that would require “going into the Jewish background.” So Voegelin began to study Hebrew with a local rabbi.

A Student of China and a Prophet to the Germans

Owing to both Voegelin’s linguistic talent and the growing interest in China after the Second World War, the political science department at Louisiana State University, where he now taught, chose Voegelin to teach China’s politics. Voegelin started learning Chinese and studying ancient China, especially the thoughts of Confucius and Lao-tse. He said this helped him a lot because he could “recognize in the revolutionary operas propagated by Madame Mao Tse-tung the pattern of the ballet libretti of the Chou period, with the slight difference that the Chou authors celebrated the victory of the Chou Dynasty, whereas the modern revolutionary operas celebrate the victory of the revolutionary armies.”

For Voegelin, the 1945-1950 years were “a period of indecision” or “a period of theoretical paralysis.” And yet it was just this seemingly deadend quest for reality that bore fruit in the latter half of Voegelin’s life.¹²⁴ Voegelin’s experience with Sabine reminded me not just of my own encounter with the same book but also of how one could easily live in the shadows of oneself and other selves without knowing the eclipse of the realty. But how to walk out of all these shadows? I thought of a passage quoted in Voegelin and Sandoz more than once. It is,

So you, son of man, I have made a watchman for the house of Israel; whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me. If I say to the wicked, O wicked man, you shall surely die, and you do not speak to warn the wicked to turn from his way, that wicked man shall die in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at your hand. But if you warn the wicked to turn from his way, and he does not turn from his way; he shall die in his iniquity, but you will have saved your life.¹²⁵

Voegelin read this passage to his audiences when he delivered the lecture, which later became the book of the same name, Hitler and the Germans, in 1964 in the University of Munich. However, Voegelin did not address it to those present alone but also to the clergy and theologians of the churches in Germany. Along with nine other injunctions, Voegelin wanted theseclerics to learn off this passage by heart:

“Lower clergy, copy it out daily ten times; bishops and theologians, daily a hundred times; theologians who have received a Cross of Merit from the Federal Republic, daily two hundred times, until they have got it.”¹²⁶

Discovering the Roots of Liberty in Christianity

Before my correspondence with Professor Sandoz began in February 2006, I learned about him and Voegelin by running across a book he had edited through a search of China’s National Library. This book was The Roots of Liberty: Magna Carta, Ancient Constitution, and the Anglo-American Tradition of Rule of Law.¹²⁷ During 2004-2005, I translated a book with a similar title: Roots of Freedom: A Primer on Modern Liberty, by Professor John W. Danford of Loyola University in Chicago.¹²⁸

What I did not expect then was that from these two books I would get to know more about the thinking of Sandoz, his teacher and friend Voegelin, some of Sandoz’s American and international colleagues, as well as Professor Danford and his friends like Joseph Cropsey and Thomas Pangle, a political science professor at University of Texas at Austin. What I did not expect in a deeper sense was that because of the appeal of the roots of liberty and freedom I would be drawn to know about those who have been attracted not just to the roots of liberty and freedom but also to “divine reality” and have more or less done the work of “a watchman.”

Ezekiel did not claim to be a watchman but “the word of the LORD came to Ezekiel”¹²⁹ However, human’s response is not unimportant. In this regard, different responses have different outcomes. As the LORD said to Ezekiel:

“Son of Man, say to the house of Israel, ‘This is what you are saying: ‘Our offenses and sins weigh us down, and we are wasting away because of them. How then can we live?’ ’Say to them, ‘As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live. Turn! Turn from your evil ways! Why will you die, O house of Israel?’”¹³⁰

In “The Gospel and Culture” published in 1971, Voegelin talked about God’s drawing and a man’s responding from the viewpoint of Voegelin’s “experiences of transcendence.”  Voegelin drew his audience’s attention to how the incarnate God has drawn individuals across the globe through His death on the cross and His resurrection. He stressed that it was after a group of Greeks requested to see Jesus that Jesus made these remarks:

“The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds . . . . Now is the time for judgment on this world; now the prince of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”¹³¹

It was similar when Jesus said earlier, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day.”¹³²

For Voegelin, a man’s seeking and God’s drawing a man “do not denote two different movements but symbolize the dynamics in the tension of existence between its human and divine poles.”¹³³ Of course, a man could still seek oneself rather than God. However, all this would ultimately not be in a man’s own hands. Voegelin quoted what God said in Jeremiah:

“Behold! What I have built, I will pull down; and what I have planted, I will tear up–and you see great things for yourself? Seek them not! For behold! I will bring evil upon all flesh–says Yahweh–But your life will I give you, as a prize of war, in every place where you go.”¹³⁴

Voegelin’s “Christ is History Written Large”

In this existential panorama where God interacts with men, one could see that the history recorded in the Bible refers not just to persons, countries, and time in the Old and New Testaments. The Scripture is not only about the past but also the present, the future and the eternity. It is like the sample or the epitome of history. As Voegelin laid it bare, “History is Christ written large.” ¹³⁵

In this multi-dimensional scene, one could see not just “nothing new under the sun,”¹³⁶ but also something new above the sun. But the new and the old are intertwined. The fallen human remains standing in this fallen and temporary world. Even a human being who has responded to God’s drawing by repentance and return and thus has been “set apart”¹³⁷ remains a sinner.

This is what the apostle Paul sighed, “We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time”¹³⁸  and “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God–through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.”¹³⁹

It is also what Paul saw about the present and the prospect, “Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”¹⁴⁰ And it is like what Sandoz quoted from British poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744) about the human existence of in-between:

“. . . He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest; In doubt to deem himself a god or beast; In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer; Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err; . . . Created half to rise, and half to fall, Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; Sole judge of Truth, in endless error hurl’d; The glory, jest and riddle of the world.”¹⁴¹ [Essay on Man, Epistle II]

Seeing the men and the wider world in this way, one would find the co-existence of both the simple and the complex and both the temporary and the eternal. In this light, it would be perhaps less difficult to make sense of the tension in the world of political ideas of Europeans and Americans both Voegelin and Sandoz mainly examined.

On the one hand, the Christian faith and the Christian church have played a shaping role in the West’s spiritual world over the past more than ten centuries. On the other hand, individuals and different groups of people in the West have been under the influence of diverse ideas and patterns of behavior. This means even the same Christianity could mean different among different persons. So it is no surprise at all to witness so many denominations and schools of ideas in the Western history.

Apart from the Christian faith, the Greek philosophy, the Roman politics, the British common law, the Continental European law, local customs and traditions, the Islam philosophy, the Enlightenment and many phenomena that cannot be suitably categorized may have exerted impacts to various extent over the West.

John Locke and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy

On the level of practical politics, things could be more complicated. Sandoz wrote, “Politics is itself a sort of mediocre thing, neither the noblest nor meanest realm but an in-between sphere; it is not the way to salvation, either in the beyond or in the world.” Sandoz referred to John Locke’s view, which was, “we being, in degrees of perfection, much more remote from the infinite being of God than we are from the lowest state of being, and that which approaches nearest to nothing.”¹⁴²

For Sandoz, Locke’s political idea itself reflects this mediocre state. Locke offered an effective solution to the political crisis of his time by, for example, appealing to natural law based on human reason, contract theory, private property, toleration, and liberty of conscience. But at the same time, Locke brought about “the incipient formulation of a radically immanentist conception of human existence.” As a reduction of the human reality, “this doctrine stimulated the rise of totalitarian democracy as the malformed brother of liberal democracy” after the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.

Sandoz borrowed from the comparison in Genesis between Cain and Abel, the first two sons of Adam and Eve.¹⁴³ It might be reminiscent of the contrast between East and West Germany, North and South Korea, Chinese mainland and Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, or in a wider sense, between East and West Europe, Soviet Union and the United States. Yet, the comparison Sandoz put forward is not confined to this world alone. He pinpointed a crisis facing “liberal democracy.” In The Politics of Truth and Other Untimely Essays: The Crisis of Civic Consciousness published in 1999, Sandoz quoted the first president of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850-1937), “our vulgar liberalism fears the ultimate questions of life as the devil fears holy water.”

Then, Sandoz went further by pointing out this:

“In a time when liberal democracy appears to be the only practicable alternative to authoritarianism or worse, it is precisely requisite that the ultimate questions of human existence be explored and, so far as possible, that the truth of reality be recovered as a living possession. Only thus can it be woven into the fabric of representative free government as the texture of political order, civic consciousness, and institutionalized statecraft in service of the good life.”

This, it appears to me at least, is the world-historic task of an authentic politics of truth–if a plunge into the abyss is to be averted.¹⁴⁴ That was part of the speech Sandoz gave on May 17, 1995 when he was awarded the degree Philosophiae doctorem, Honoris causa at Palacky University.

Sandoz Avoids “Vulgar Liberalism”

The Politics of Truth and Other Untimely Essays also included an article based on an address Sandoz delivered at the Federal Parliament of Czechoslovakia in May 1991. Again, Sandoz said that politics was not the way to salvation, and as “fallible and sinful human beings” no one “possesses a monopoly on truth.” In this respect, he held that “ ‘My kingdom is not of the world’¹⁴⁵ is the Gospel’s lodestar.” And the maxim of British statesman Winston Churchill (1874-1965) was borrowed to emphasize Sandoz’s view on politics in this world: “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.”

He talked about a range of specific issues concerning “creating democratic free government in Czechoslovakia after forty-odd years of communist Russian tyranny,” such as neutrality of lawyers, constitution as fundamental law, free press, secret police, the worldwide impact of ideologies in American universities, private property, federalism, personal liberties, the independence of the universities, local autonomy, elections. From these points, readers would find that Sandoz’s ideas about liberal democracy were not based upon what Masaryk described as “vulgar liberalism.” Instead, what Sandoz has been doing is to recover the reality of politics from both this world and beyond.¹⁴⁶

Which reminded me of a letter I received from Professor Sandoz in the evening of March 9, 2012. Since February 2006, the emails between Sandoz and me may have amounted to hundreds. But this note is among those that have impressed me most. I was then writing an article entitled “How to live in the two worlds at once.” Sandoz told me:

“Don’t Neglect St. Augustine’s CITY OF GOD on the subject! Start w/ Bk 14 last chap. then Bk 15 etc.  His theme is the 2 cities, earthly and divine, so close to your subject but a bit harsh. The tension is not easy to resolve. I’ve been working on related matter reading GALATIANS, esp. chap. 4:26-5:1. Very powerful. See also my discussion in REPUBLICANISM  pp. 17ff. on Wesley and the Second Reformation so influential in America.”

The “Second Reformation” is the Great Awakening discussed in Sandoz’s Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America. I had read part of Augustine’s City of God and Paul’s Galatians. But only with Sandoz’s reminder, have I become much more conscious of the tension between the two cities or two worlds visible in Galatians and City of God when I continued to read the history in the Bible, the history of the church and the society in the West, and the daily life.

In City of God, Augustine said Cain and Abel were of the two different cities with the former being the first-born and of the city of humans and the latter being born later and of the city of God.¹⁴⁷ For Augustine, the process of being born first as a natural life and born later as a spiritual life would happen in an individual person God predestinated and the human race as a whole. It is just like what Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians: “The spiritual did not come first, but the natural, and after that the spiritual.”¹⁴⁸

It is similar in Galatians:

“For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the slave woman and the other by the free woman. His son by the slave woman was born according to the flesh, but his son by the free woman was born as the result of a promise.”

These things are being taken figuratively: The women represent two covenants. One covenant is from Mount Sinai and bears children who are to be slaves: This is Hagar. Now Hagar stands for Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present city of Jerusalem, because she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem that is above is free, and she is our mother . . . At that time the son born according to the flesh persecuted the son born by the power of the Spirit.

It is the same now. But what does Scripture say? ‘Get rid of the slave woman and her son, for the slave woman’s son will never share in the inheritance with the free woman’s son.’ Therefore, brothers, we are not children of the slave woman, but of the free woman.¹⁴⁹ Immediately afterwards, Paul wrote: “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.”¹⁵⁰ In the past, I found this sentence had been widely quoted. But only with Sandoz’s reminder, did I begin to ponder more deeply about its meaning by reading these verses together.

Voegelin on Following Christ

In the spiritual dimension of daily life, freedom and slavery may happen more in the same person than in different persons. Therefore, freedom in this world alone is not freedom in a genuine sense; and yet while living in this temporal and unfree world, one could also exist at once–and thus not wholly–in the eternal and free world. What connects up these two worlds is God’s redemption of his humans through Christ and human’s response through faith in Christ.

This is like what Voegelin meant in his late life when he spoke of following Christ, “To follow Christ means to continue the event of divine presence in society and history: ‘As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world’ (John 17:18).”¹⁵¹ Following Christ in this sense is a far cry from following a great person or a model citizen in a moralistic sense. It is but a witness to God’s creation, redemption and governance because of God’s drawing. Only in the “divine reality”–Christ–that God on his own initiative revealed to his humans, would the human reality be shown.

It is not just about the human reality in this world or in eternity but in both. So, the human reality in this world is not completely meaningless. But one should not be content with the reality in this world alone, for that would prevent him or her from seeing the reality of this world. It is like Jesus using the metaphor of things in this world to illustrate things in heaven, “He did not say anything to them without using a parable. So was fulfilled what was spoken through the prophet: ‘I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter things hidden since the creation of the world.’ ”¹⁵²

And before being arrested, Jesus told his followers:

“Though I have been speaking figuratively, a time is coming when I will no longer use this kind of language but will tell you plainly about my Father . . . . I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”¹⁵³

Between the created and the creator, the finite and the infinite, the sinful and the sinless, the powerless and the powerful, the mortal and the immortal, the dishonor and the glory, the natural and the spiritual, the earthly and the heavenly, it is Christ who connects up the two worlds that would otherwise be incompatible and it is in the tension of Christ’s connection that provides the human existence with dynamics and vitality.

This scene brought me back to some time in 2004 when I worked at China’s state television. During the supper break, I would find a somewhat quiet place to read a book that was not very relevant to my work. I was then already beginning my quest in search of the history of liberty. One book was about the European medieval history. Written by American historian Brian Tierney, it was entitled, The Crisis of Church and State:1050-1300. Its Introduction impressed me much, “To maintain order and unity in groups larger and less homogeneous than extended family systems is a complex and difficult task. Mere force is seldom sufficient in the long run.”

The most common solution has been to endow the ruler who controls the physical apparatus of state coercion with a sacral role also as head and symbol of the people’s religion. Primitive societies commonly attribute magical powers to their chieftains; the Pharaohs of Egypt, the Incas of Peru, the emperors of Japan were all revered as divine beings; the Roman Caesars bore the title Pontifex Maximus. In modern totalitarian despotisms, where the party structure provides a travesty of a church, the simultaneous control of party and state is the very essence of a dictator’s authority.

We need not be surprised, then, that in the Middle Ages also there were rulers who aspired to supreme spiritual and temporal power. The truly exceptional thing is that in medieval times there were always at least two claimants to the role, each commanding a formidable apparatus of government, and that for century after century neither was able to dominate the other completely, so that the duality persisted, was eventually rationalized in works of political theory and ultimately built into the structure of European society.

This situation profoundly influenced the development of Western constitutionalism. The very existence of two power structures competing for men’s allegiance instead of only one compelling obedience greatly enhanced the possibilities for human freedom. In practical life over and over again in the Middle Ages men found themselves having to make genuine choices according to conscience or self-interest between conflicting appeals to their loyalty. On the theoretical level, intellectuals were led to formulate detailed arguments about the deposition of tyrannical kings or popes and to define with more and more precision the due limits of their respective powers.¹⁵⁴

The Tension of Existence

I was reminded of a letter I received in January of 2006 from Harold Berman (1918-2007)– a year before Berman passed away. Berman has been perhaps best known for his Law and Revolution. In his letter, Berman’s expressed opinions similar to those of Brian Tierney. He pointed out that “plural political and plural spiritual jurisdictions–in one word, ‘pluralism’–that was the chief source of freedom.” Berman preferred “pluralism” to Tierney’s “duality” because he saw that within the duality of church and state many additonal divisions had developed. That is, there have been separate churches within the church and separate governments within the government.

In the years 2004-2006 and several years before, scholars like Tierney and Berman presented me an image of the tension between the spiritual and the temporal in the European political history. Looking back, I now considered this tension to be a shadow of the deeper tension. It does not just show the tension between the two worlds or cities, but the tension originated with the Incarnation of Christ and the subsequent rise and growth of the Christian church in the European political history. If this tension was only manifested in the European history, it would be unique to Europe. But world history shows that this tension has been found in both the personal and social lives of people around the globe though it is not as prominent as it was in Europe and North America.

What Voegelin and Sandoz have witnessed in their lives and their books is testimony to the rise and fall of this tension in Europe and North America. In the years since I first got to know Professor Sandoz, I have begun to take note of this tension at work in many lives including mine in China and the wider world. All this has gone beyond my expectations. When I had started my quest for liberty, I had some curiosity about the unknown world and some respect for and pursuit of something eternal. And yet, all this looked dim and I did not know what on earth it would be. When this reality unfolded with the passage of time, it seemed to resemble what I had met before but was in fact much more than I could have then imagined.

It is like the first words I saw in Voegelin’s books describes, “In the study of creature one should not exercise a vain and perishing curiosity, but ascend toward what is immortal and everlasting.”¹⁵⁵  This is the epigraph of the five-volume Order and History, taken from De Vera Religione  [On True Religion], a book Augustine wrote when he was 36.¹⁵⁶ The context of this sentence is to help its readers know “how far reason can advance from visible to invisible things in its ascent from temporal to eternal things.”¹⁵⁷

The reason Augustine gave here differs significantly from the reasons advocated since the Enlightenment. It is not the reason whose measure is man but the reason whose measure is God’s Grace that allows men to know God and his creation.¹⁵⁸ Voegelin’s defintion of reason is similar.  He noted, “Reason itself isn’t natural,” “The ‘natural reason’ is due to God’s grace,”¹⁵⁹  and “The Life of Reason in the classic sense is existence in tension between Life and Death.”¹⁶⁰ Of course, Voegelin’s quote from Augustine itself also expresses what he means by reason.

Reason and Logos

If one were further exploring the meaning of reason in ancient Greece and the early church, one would find the relation of  reason in Augustine and Voegelin to God’s grace from another perspective. Reason in modern European languages, such as “reason” in English and raison in French, derives from ratio in Latin, which originates in λόγος (logos) in Greek. (Interestingly, “ideology,” that was mentioned earlier, derives from logos as well.)

Logos has multiple layers of meaning. Literally, it means “word” It also means idea, reason. For ancient Greek philosophers like Heraclitus (535-475), logos refers to both the description of existence and its explanation, both the word that can be heard and the word that reveals the reality and cause, both human’s ideas and the laws at work in the universe, both the form in spirit and its manifestation in the material.¹⁶¹

Perhaps more interestingly, logos is also used by John in the Bible. In the popular Chinese Union Version, it is translated as “道” (dao, or tao) , which likewise has such multiple layers of meaning in the Chinese language context as both word and way. According to John, God revealed himself through his Incarnation in Jesus Christ who is the logos or tao human beings have pursued.

However, the logos or tao revealed in God’s incarnation is not the same as the one men as limited and sinful creatures pursue. The logos or tao in a man’s understanding could be no more than dim. Only in God’s Incarnation–a way that humans can understand–will men really see the logos or tao in the sense of “the Word was with God” and “the Word was God.”¹⁶²

The logos or tao is both God’s word and God himself. It is like what Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him,”¹⁶³ for “No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known.”¹⁶⁴

Experience the Reality of God’s Presence

In the history of God’s interactions with men, men’s knowledge of the reality has moved from very dim to clear.¹⁶⁵ And according to Genesis, the process by which God created all things appears to move from dim to clear. Or it moves from “formless and empty” to “separated.” In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.¹⁶⁶

Facing the earth that “was formless and empty” and darkness that “was over the surface of the deep,” God created light and thus “separated the light from the darkness,” and hence the separation of day and night. After creating the expanse, God separated water from water. He then separated ground from water. And there was the separation of plants bearing seeds and trees “according to their various kinds,”¹⁶⁷ and the separation of stars, of creatures “according to their kinds,”¹⁶⁸ of man and woman, of the seventh day and six other days.¹⁶⁹

The separation here is consistent with “sanctification”¹⁷⁰ in the Bible. In the Old Testament, God set Noah, Abraham, the Israelites apart from other people. In the New Testament, God set those who believed in him apart from the world. In his redemption of humans, God seemed to continue his way in creation.

What the incarnate God said for his followers before his arrest might be viewed as both explanation and summary of this separation and sanctification–“For them I sanctify myself, that they too may be truly sanctified.”¹⁷¹ However, he added immediately:

“My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one.”¹⁷²

Though separation and sanctification are two characteristics of God’s creation and redemption, they are not in contradiction to being one. Neither separation nor sanctification would mean alienation from God. Instead, it is God’s self-revelation that allows his created beings to participate in him,¹⁷³expressed as those who “have been given fullness in Christ.”¹⁷⁴ Furthermore, in this process of being separated and being one at the same time, God’s self-revelation enables men to see not merely the reality of their relationship with God but also the reality of God’s inner relationship. Father and Son are different but are one. Father and Son are one but different . . . .

To know and experience the reality is thus far more than a matter of knowledge and experience. It is a matter of life and death. Towards the very end of Voegelin’s life, a woman named Hiawatha Moore helped Voegelin’s wife with his care. On the morning of January 19, 1985, Moore received a call from Mrs. Voegelin. When she got there, Voegelin was breathing heavily. Moore sat down on the bed putting her arms around Voegelin and prayed for him in her heart. Suddenly, she felt a voice saying, “You know that little Bible, when you cleaned up?”²⁰¹ She reached over and got that book and opened it without knowing what it was. It was Psalms 25. She began to read for Voegelin who was breathing still heavily. She read the 17th verse: “The troubles of my heart are enlarged. Oh, bring me out of my distress.”²⁰²

Voegelin breathed his last and heavy breath. Moore felt she was not shaking and the bed was not either. Voegelin was no longer breathing. She got up and called Mrs. Voegelin. That was about 7:30. “That was the way he went. It was like he was waiting for permission to leave, you know?” recalled Moore, “Like his heart was heavy, he was just stressed. but ‘How do I give this up?’ And when I read it, it was like someone gave him permission. He accepted it and went on.”²⁰³

Notes