Hence, I am not operating with a theological “premise,” but with a proposition which certainly is empirically tenable, that is, the proposition that experiences of transcendence and their rational articulation in metaphysics and theology are ordering facts in history. In order to recognize this fact, to theorize it, and so forth, you don’t have to be a theologian yourself anymore than you have to be a great artist in order to write a competent study on Rembrandt. Of course, in order to theorize these facts, your theoretical instrument must be adequate—and there comes the difficulty. For the most adequate theoretical instruments of the treatment of these facts happen to be (as might be expected) the theoretical articulations provided for such experiences by the men who had them. In brief: in order to interpret Plato or Christianity adequately, the theories developed by Plato or St. Augustine will prove considerably more adequate than the theories developed by such comparatively provincial thinkers as James or Dewey. But again, this should not be taken dogmatically, but as an empirical observation. As far as I am concerned, anybody is welcome to theorize the Platonic experiences of thanatos or eros, or the hesed of Hosea, by means of Humean skepticism or Jamesian pragmatism; I am quite ready to sit on the sidelines and to watch the performance. But nobody has done it yet; and I doubt that anybody could do it.

Well, that should clarify certain points.  Let me hear more from your side of the fence when it is convenient (CW, 30:187-8).

As with the remarks made in In Search of Order on the Beyond as quoted above, the significance seems clear enough. The task of the scientist or scholar is to account for experiences of transcendence insofar as they are part of the reality he studies. And, in fact, those experiences happen to be a significant constituent element of the order of the political world. In addition the scholar must reflect on his own experiences of philosophizing in order to understand the philosophizing experiences of others. Gebhardt then drew a perfectly sensible conclusion: that which “constitutes the intelligibility of the diverse civilizational processes is the historical equivalence of the plural modes of human participation in the one comprehensive reality of God, world, and human being. Voegelin expresses this common point of reference as the symbol ‘universal humanity’ that reflects the universal structure of human existence.”⁷

Once again, however, as with the symbol, the Beyond, universal humanity—or “universal mankind,” to use Voegelin’s term—is not “a society existing in the world, but a symbol that indicates man’s consciousness of participating, in his earthly existence, in the mystery of a reality that moves towards its transfiguration. Universal mankind is an eschatalogical index” (CW, 17:376).  In other words, even though historical events are founded in the biophysical existence of human beings on earth, who live their lives in the time of the external world of plants, animals, and things, this biophysical existence becomes “historical” insofar as it is lived not in the external world but in the presence of the divine, which is not a “spatio-temporal given.” There are plenty of complexities in Voegelin’s formulation that need to be clarified, but the general meaning is obvious: what Gebhardt referred to as “the universal structure of human existence” appears in the world as specific and particular symbolizations of experiences of a truth that transcends the occasion of its manifestation. Gebhardt’s focus, in short, was on the empirical.