Reflections on the Strauss-Voegelin Correspondence

Medieval Rationalism or Mystic Philosophy? —Part 4

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 one of several commentaries which appear in Faith and Political Philosophy: The Correspondence Between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934-1964, and which is available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay appears in four parts. It appears with permission of the publisher.

IV  Behind Strauss and Spinoza stood the Averroists

Hermeneutics: the Art of Understanding and Interpreting

This is taken from the video of the lecture given on November 24th, 1978 at York University, Toronto. The lecture was delivered at the conference "Hemeneutics and Structuralism: Merging Horizons" which was the same conference from which the DVD "Voegelin in Toronto" was taken. Nicholas William Graham organized the original conference in 1978 and has kindly prepared the transcription for our use here at VoegelinView.  Professor Graham is President of the Northrop Frye Society. This is the second part of a two part article.

 Part 2

Reading as the Stabilization of a Text

When I read a literary text, then I feel I should return to it; I should return to it again; and I shall discover more in it; it is not exhausted by the picking up of information conveyed by the text. Oh no! It becomes more and more a work.¹¹ 

We grow more and more familiar with it; it is a process of enrichment, which happens there. And I think going into the interplay of soundings and meanings, of allusions and descriptions, and moments of tension and moments of lowering the tension and all the different forms of literary works; all that is never exhausted by our acquaintance with it. But it is like a good painting: we begin to read it. We must read a text like a painting; a painting like a text.

And what is reading? Reading is a very complicated structure of temporal approach. It is not that we read one word or one letter after another; that is a form in which one learns reading but is not yet being able to read: then one must spell it, then one must construe. The construction in a foreign language: we learned it in Latin and Greek. Our schoolmasters would say: don’t divine it; construe it.

from  The Northern Lights

History and the Holy Koran

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 in New Political Religions, or An Analysis of Modern Terrorism, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, 2004. It appears as an appendix and the references are to chapters in the main volume. This is published  with permission of the publisher and appears in two parts.

In the course of the analysis of Islamist terrorism, we made a basic analytical distinction that needs to be discussed in more detail. On the one hand, we said, there existed the history of societies and political orders informed by Islam, an account of which we called a history of the Islamic community. We assumed here that the status of the history of this community, its res gestae, was as unproblematic as the history of the U.S. mail or of gunpowder. On the other hand we said there existed a paradigmatic Islamic history, which we tentatively described as the account of God and his messengers to humanity. Early in chapter 3 we said further that Islamic history, which we also identified as the "Islamic vulgate," by analogy with the Christian Bible given its official form by Saint Jerome in the fourth century, would be discussed "without preju­dice."

The intention of this terminology was to maintain the frontier between piety and political science; we assumed here that it was possi­ble to study the Islamic story of God and his messengers to humanity without taking a position with respect to the veracity or the literal truth of Islamic history. But this means that it is possible to be neutral before the actual messages that were delivered concretely on specific occasions. We have seen, notwithstanding the Koranic assurance that there can be no compulsion in matters of religion, that this second assumption, even more than the first one concerning the history of Islam, contains or expresses a major problem.

from The Collected Works

Conceptions of History,

the Mathematics of Progress,

and the Problem of Time

Man is constructed as a function of history in such philosophies of history as those of Comte, Hegel, and Marx, with an apocalyptic present, that is, a present in which all past reality is relegated to a dead past and all present is concentrated in this empirical present in time, loaded with expectations that something meaningful will come out of this present. That is the characteristic of the apocalyptic attitude, projecting into the future and forgetting about the past: the dead past and the living future.

With regard to such an opposition of a dead past to the living future, one should, for instance, be aware that these ideas of a time that flows from a past into a future on a symbolized line — just one line running through the point of present — is a conception, a meaning of the word future, which does not become current before the middle of the eighteenth century. Up to the middle of the eighteenth century we have no term for what today we call "the future"— a better future, a more peaceful future, or God knows what. This term, or meaning of, future did not exist in any European language before 1750. . . .