Page 4 of 9
The issue has resurfaced in recent years regarding Voegelin’s understanding of, and relationship to, Christianity.4 I would like, therefore, to say a bit more about “man the questioner” (CW, 12:173-9). The example used to illustrate the problem is a recent (1977) one. The point of using it is to indicate that the continuity in Voegelin’s philosophical questioning is more fundamental than the subject matter he addressed on any particular occasion.
In his article “The Vocation of a Scholar,” Jürgen Gebhardt argued that Voegelin was first and last a scientist, a Wissenschaftler and not, to use Gebhardt’s language, a prophet or a Church Father.5 In support of his view and of the distinction he drew between scientific and other vocations, Gebhardt quoted a remark Voegelin made in 1976 at the Thomas More Institute in Montreal, in answer to a question regarding the adequacy of a St. Thomas’s handling of the statement of Jesus, “before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58).
“That’s a large order,” Voegelin began (CW, 33:325-6). The problem, in summary form, was that the distinction made by Thomas, between philosophy as the achievement of “natural reason” and theology that results from “supernatural revelation” just “doesn’t hold water.” Many Greek poets and philosophers have discussed their revelation experiences in the context of their account of the structure of reality, Voegelin said. Thomas, on the other hand was concerned with salvation out of the structure of reality.
Voegelin then illustrated the problem with the example of a state-supported university housing a department of religious studies where students were taught every religion except Christianity because of concerns over the constitutional separation of Church and State. He continued,
Everywhere in such departments of religion you run into somebody who is bright enough to ask himself occasionally whether it is just a question of the Buddha having a conception of something, and Confucius having another one, and so on—or whether perhaps they have all experienced the same Divine reality and there is only one God who manifests Himself, reveals Himself, in a highly diversified manner all over the globe for all these millennia of history that we know. The mere fact that we now have in history a global empirical knowledge extending into the archaeological millennia all over earth requires a theology that is a bit less confined to Islam or to Christianity. It must explain why a God who is the God of some witch doctor in Africa is the same God who appeared to Moses as “I am” or to Plato in a Promethean fire. And that theology is unfortunately not yet in existence.
P. Coonan: But wouldn’t you have to use philosophy in order to try to understand the evidence and the formulation?
E. Voegelin: Absolutely.
P. Coonan: But it is a distinct job, you’re not yet doing theology?
E. Voegelin: It is a distinct job to develop a theology in the Platonic sense—to know all these various types of theologies, the various types of faith, and to analyze their structures—always with an eye to the problem that even the most exotic ones, ones that may appear primitive to us, are revelations that have to be respected (CW, 33:326).
