from The Collected Works

Gnosticism
A Brief Introduction –Part 1

The Immanentization of the Christian Eschaton

The fallacious character of an eidos of history [the belief that the whole course of history can be known–ed] has been shown on principle–but the analysis can and must be carried one step fur­ther into certain details.

The Christian symbolism of supernatural destination has in itself a theoretical structure, and this structure is continued into the variants of immanentization. The pilgrim's progress, the sanctification of life, is a movement toward a telos, a goal; and this goal, the Beatific Vision, is a state of perfection.

Hence, in the Christian symbolism one can distinguish the move­ment–as its teleological component, from a state of highest value–as the axiological component.¹ The two components reappear in the variants of immanentization; and they can accordingly be classified as variants that either accentuate the teleological or the axiologi­cal component or combine them both in their symbolism.

The First Mystics?

Some Recent Accounts of Neolithic Shamanism–Part 6

by Barry Cooper

Professor Cooper has edited three volumes of the Collected Works. He has authored numerous essays and books relating to Voegelin, most recently, Beginning the Quest: Law and Politics in the Early Work of Eric Voegelin. This essay was delivered by Professor Cooper at the 2010 meeting of the Eric Voegelin Society and will be included in a forthcoming volume on the subject.

Remember that it is not you who sustain the root;

the root sustains you. –Rom. 11:18

The Dangerous Bridge

Apart from remarks regarding the meaninglessness of questions regarding the meaning of life or the notion that “religion” is simply a question of "altered states of consciousness" and thus of fantasy, there are additional internal reasons to indicate the limitation to this argument about scientific “form” and cultural “content.”

First, we recall from Mircea Eliade’s discussion of shamanism his mentioning of the “perilous passage” to the underworld and his provision of several examples from shamanistic practice.

He noted that the symbolism is linked, on the one hand, with the myth of a bridge (or tree, vine, etc.) that once connected earth and heaven and by means of which human beings effortlessly communicated with the gods.  On the other hand, it is related to the initiatory symbolism of the “strait gate” or of a “paradoxical passage.”⁹⁷

from The Collected Works

Jesus and the Unknown God –Part 3

The analysis of the experiential context into which the logion [Matthew] 11:27 must be placed, though far from being exhaustive, has been carried far enough to make visible the noetic problems of reality that lend themselves to misconstruction through doctrinal hypostases, through overemphasis on one area of reality as against others, or through plain lack of interest to engage in further noetic penetration.

In the present context, I must confine myself to a brief enumeration of no more than the principal questions:

1. The various problems transmitted to us through two thou­sand years have their center in the Movement in which man's con­sciousness of existence emerges from the primary experience of the cosmos. Consciousness becomes luminous to itself as the site of the revelatory process, of the seeking and being drawn.

Beneath the Southern Cross

Machiavelli

or The Demonic Confusion –Part 6

by Olavo de Carvalho

Olavo de Carvalho is a Brazilian philosopher and an exponent of Aristotle and Eric Voegelin. We present here in six parts his latest study, Maquiavel, ou a Confusão Demoníaca (Machiavelli, or the Demonic Confusion), in a special English translation made available to VoegelinView.

The Parodic Inversion of Christianity

Moving now from the center to the periphery, from the ends to the means, let us try to apprehend the internal order of Machiavelli’s thought as it formed and developed over time.

Removed from power, reduced to the solitude of a mediocre life, the Florentine secretary conceives a new formula for government that, he fancies, may seduce current or presumptive rulers so as to attract their sympathy to the competent official who had been excluded from State affairs.

The most attractive point of the formula is the offer to free the rulers from all the moral and psychic obstacles of religion. In short, Machiavelli apprehends the conflict between the noble and the priestly caste–a recurring theme since the beginning of the world, with mystical resonances, as one sees in the traditional symbolism of the she-bear and the wild boar^,60 –which then manifested itself rather acutely with the emergence of national States in opposition to the old ecclesiastical project of an European Empire.

He discovers a way to interfere in this conflict, favoring in such a way the noble caste that it could not refuse to reward him.

The Crisis of Americanism–Part 7

by Juergen Gebhardt

Dr. Gebhardt is emeritus Professor at the Insitute for Political Science at the University of Erlangen-Nürenberg. He is the editor of the  final volume of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Selected Correspondence, 1924-1949.  We are featuring here Chapter 5 from his Americanism: Revolutionary Order and Societal Self-Interprestation in the American Republic, Louisiana State University Press, 1993. It appears here in multiple parts.  Parts 1 to 3 appeared here in 2010. It is reproduced here with permission.

America Looks in the Mirror

Only after the convulsions of World War II did American self-criticism very reluctantly abandon the influence of monumental history.

The search of representative minds in the humanities, the churches, and the media for a nondogmatic interpretation of Americanism in postwar America will be demonstrated by an analysis of the works of Ralph Bar­ton Perry, Daniel J. Boorstin, Seymour Martin Lipset, Reinhold Niebuhr, John Courtney Murray, Walter Lippmann, and Louis Hartz.

This literature of self-criticism and self-analysis is given its coherence by the articulation, or at least the discussion, of an American awareness of consciousness of crisis as well as a constant effort to confer meaning on the power complex that the North American empire has become in the twentieth century.