It was clear from the subsequent questions Voegelin was asked that the more or less pious Catholics at the Thomas More Institute were distressed at the notion that the God who is the God of “some witch doctor in Africa” had anything to do with the Yahweh of Moses. It was also clear from the conversation with Patricia Coonan that she objected to Voegelin’s implication that theology was no longer the queen of the sciences, as it was for St. Thomas.

Gebhardt concluded from this exchange that Voegelin had no intention of formulating any such “new theology” because his analytical understanding of the experiential sources of symbolic orders led him to conclude that “the language of the gods . . . is fraught with the problem of symbolizing the experience of a not-experientiable divine reality” (CW, 18:83). As a result, because the language of gods tends to be misconstrued as referring to “a divine entity ‘beyond’ the experience of the [presence of the] Beyond,” then the gods must die when a more adequate language is achieved. In this way “the historical scene becomes littered with dead gods.”

On the other hand, if language is not misconstrued “the succession of the gods becomes a series of events to be remembered” as the history of the presence of the Beyond. What has history, what leaves a historical trace, is not the Beyond, which is also “beyond history,” but the presence of the Beyond “in the bodily located consciousness of questioning man.” That is, “the experience of the non-experientiable divine reality has history,” namely “the history of truth emerging from the quest for truth” that in turn occurs “in the bodily located consciousness of questioning man” and so constitutes an element of his (or her) biography. In this respect, “the serious effort of the quest for truth acquires the character of a divine comedy” (CW, 18:84).