The Spirit of Voegelin's Late Work —Part 1

by Ellis Sandoz

Professor Sandoz is the Editor of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. He has written many books and published many essays on the significance of Eric Voegelin's thought and on the political and spiritual foundations of the United States. This essay is taken from his most recent book, Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America, available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay will appear in four parts. It appears with permission of the publisher.

Did the "Scientific" Triumph over the "Spiritual"?

The principal work by Voegelin written in the final years of his life and published posthumously includes the final volume of Order and History, entitled In Search of Order, his deathbed meditation dictated to Paul Caringella, "Quod Deus Dicitur," and the unfinished Aquinas Lecture titled "The Beginning and the Beyond: A Meditation on Truth."¹ While a great deal need not be made of the patently incomplete character of each of these documents, construing the silence of omissions has led to various interpretive debates in the secondary literature about the possibly "changed" views of the "late" Voegelin on crucial matters. The principal issues raised deserve brief mention and clarification from my perspective at the outset of this discussion.

from The Collected Works

Freedom of Conscience -Part 2

The Fallible Conscience

Freedom of conscience in the political sense is the right to act according to one's conscience free of governmental prevention, interference, or subsequent sanction. Conscience itself can be defined as the act, or acts, by which we judge, approvingly or disapprovingly, our conduct in the light of our rational moral knowledge. Conscience in this sense is not infallible. It can err either because the facts of the case requiring our action or inaction are insufficiently known, or because an intricate conflict of obligations resists a correct solution within the time at our disposal, or because our general state of ignorance, our lack of intellectual training and imagination, our moral obtuseness and spiritual perversion, will produce false judgments . . . .

"One of My Permanent Occupations"
Eric Voegelin as Literary Critic  -Part 3

by Charles Embry

Charles Embry is Professor Emeritus of Political Philosophy at Texas A&M-Commerce. He is editor of Robert B. Heilman and Eric Voegelin: A Friendship in Letters, 1944-1984. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004. The material that follows is taken from his The Philosopher and The Storyteller: Eric Voegelin and Twentieth-Century Literature. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008. This appears with permission and is presented in three parts. 

Literature and the Time of the Tale (concluded)

For Voegelin it is clear that literature — in terms of both its experien­tial origins as well as its imaginative symbolization — is generically related to myth. That Voegelin understood a work of art as a cosmion reflecting the "unity of the cosmos as a whole" clearly connects it with a Cosmological style of truth and myth that are both rooted in compact experiences of reality — the primary cosmic experience. Voegelin under­stood Time of the Tale to be the primary literary form in two senses: pri­mary as prior to other literary forms and primary as foundational to and underlying all later literary forms that result from human understanding of differentiated reality.

Literature, at least as we know it in the modern era, is created in a time after the differentiation of reality into imma­nence and transcendence.²² However, only when the tale being told com­bines human, cosmic, and divine elements does it approach the status of myth or the Tale with its Time that is out of time.

from  The Northern Lights

The Genealogy of Islamic Terrorism

Part 5

by Barry Cooper

Professor Cooper is the author of numerous books and essays in political science. He is the editor of several volumes of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. This essay appears as Chapter 3 in New Political Religions, or An Analysis of Modern Terrorism, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, 2004. This is published with permission of the publisher and appears in five parts.

The spiritual challenge of modernity, even when unencumbered by Western dress, leaves the modernists in Islam vulnerable to criticism both from traditional religious leaders and later from jihadist and sala­fist revolutionaries on the grounds that their modernism was both inef­fective and "un-Islamic." Thus a modernist such as Al-Afghani (1837-1897) or Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905) whose views might be con­sidered unexceptionable and even mainstream in the salons of Mayfair or the cafés of Paris look in retrospect as if they were in a kind of lim­bo or halfway house on the way to radical, fundamentalist, or jihadist Islamism.⁷⁰

Political institutions created after the destruction of the Ottoman Empire opened a number of political possibilities. In Turkey, the aboli­tion of the caliphate in 1924 by Mustafa Kemal, the hero of the defeat of the Allies at Gallipoli, laid the foundation for what is arguably the most successful state whose citizens are chiefly Muslim.⁷¹ In contrast, in Egypt the foundations were laid at about the same time for a renewal of salafist and jihadist Islam by Hasan al-Banna, who in 1928 founded the Muslim Brethren, the Jamiyyat al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin, in direct emulation of the Ikhwan of Arabia.