I would like to begin by accounting for the title of the book. To be sure, it has a Voegelinian resonance. At the beginning of the last book he wrote, Voegelin provided an interpretation of the question: where does the beginning begin? (CW, 18:27). A couple of pages later he wrote of “the millennial process of the quest for truth” (CW, 18:29), and of the many exemplars who have taken part in it. These are mature linguistic formulations that depend upon a meditative exegesis to be fully understood. Indeed, on occasion they have been taken to be formular, almost liturgical statements. Certainly by the time Voegelin came to write directly about these matters he had developed a precise vocabulary to describe the experiences of reality—including the experience of the beginning and of the quest or, as he sometimes said, The Question (CW, 17:399-400).  The deceptive attractions of such language and its mastery are well known (CW, 12:7-10). It is important, therefore, to be careful and to be aware of one’s focus, as well as what is not in focus.

One of the observations Voegelin made concerning the experience of the quest for truth, whether that of priests and prophets, or of Zoroastrians, Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, or philosophers, is that: first, it takes place in the specific or “concrete” consciousness of an individual human being; and second, such questioning people live in equally specific historical and social contexts or milieus. Moreover, the textual expression of the quest for truth is almost always formulated initially as a resistance to, or criticism of, already existing formulations. Typically the new insights or formulations are met with indifference or resistance from adherents of the earlier versions. Finally, although Voegelin in his later work was concerned with what might be called the Big Questions—of consciousness, reality, language, and so on—his observations regarding the quest for truth also bear upon the narrower fields of legal, social, political, spiritual, and intellectual life considered in the present study.

Neither Voegelin nor anyone else who begins a quest for truth starts by declaring: “I am on a quest for truth.”  Rather, and particularly if they are philosophers as was Voegelin, they typically begin by considering specific problems or mysteries. We begin with an even tighter focus, on Voegelin the (political) scientist, the Wissenschaftler, and his intellectual formation during the 1920s and 1930s. There is continuity in Voegelin’s work from the early 1920s to the mid-1980s but, as Sandro Chignola put it, this is because it had direction, Richtung, without an a priori goal, Ziel.¹ Even less was Voegelin’s quest presented in the same language over a period of forty years. As Voegelin said of his own work much later: “please do not hold me to anything that I have written previously, because science progresses and things change. Do not take seriously or in an absolute sense, what I have to say today, because these problems as I present them today are again subject to change and perhaps in two years I will have found other things which will demand a very different answer” (CW, 12:95).