In other words, there is no Beyond beyond the experience of the presence of a Beyond. And that being so, the focus of science is on the experience and its symbolization, not the imaginary hypostasis of a Beyond beyond experience. This is why Voegelinian political science is empirical in the precise, Aristotelian sense.⁶ 

A second piece of evidence, to which Gebhardt referred, was a 1953 letter Voegelin wrote to Thomas I. Cook, a professor of political philosophy at Johns Hopkins. Cook had taken issue with Voegelin’s “theological premises” in The New Science of Politics because, “being an agnostic with [respect to] religious sentiments” he could not share Voegelin’s approach (HI, 9:28). In his reply, Voegelin set him straight:

Your letter has been quite illuminating to me, because now I see—or I should say more cautiously, I believe to see—where the difficulties of our mutual understanding lie. The difficulty seems to be your conception of metaphysics or theology as a “premise” from which one starts in theoretical work; and you are worried about various such “premises.” This attitude is so utterly strange to me that, I must confess, I am not even familiar with its historical origins or its principal literary manifestations, though I know that it [is] widespread in our academic environment. Let me outline what my objection is:

The question whether anybody is an agnostic, or religiously inclined, or whether he is both at the same time, as it seems to be your predicament, has, in my opinion, nothing to [do] whatsoever with theoretical issues. I feel even unable to return your confidence on this point, for the good reason that I am not clear myself about my own state of sentiments in such matters. Metaphysics is not a “premise” of anything, as far as I am familiar with the works of philosophers, but the result of a process in which a philosopher explicates in rational symbols his various experiences, especially the experiences of transcendence. And the same goes for Christianity: theology is not a premise, but a result of experiences. As far as political science is concerned, we are faced with the fact that such experiences are constituent elements in social order [insofar] they are facts of political history. A theory of politics, therefore, must take cognizance of these facts and interpret them on their own terms, that is, as experiences of transcendent order, articulating themselves in metaphysics and theology. As a critical scientist I have to accept these facts of order, whatever my personal opinion about them should be. Their classification, not as facts of order, but as “metaphysical premises” etc., seems to me to express not a judgment in science, but a dogmatic misconstruction from the position of some ideology.

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