"One of My Permanent Occupations"
Eric Voegelin as Literary Critic -Part 3
by Charles Embry
Charles Embry is Professor Emeritus of Political Philosophy at Texas A&M-Commerce. He is editor of Robert B. Heilman and Eric Voegelin: A Friendship in Letters, 1944-1984. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004. The material that follows is taken from his The Philosopher and The Storyteller: Eric Voegelin and Twentieth-Century Literature. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008. This appears with permission and is presented in three parts.
Literature and the Time of the Tale (concluded)
For Voegelin it is clear that literature — in terms of both its experiential origins as well as its imaginative symbolization — is generically related to myth. That Voegelin understood a work of art as a cosmion reflecting the "unity of the cosmos as a whole" clearly connects it with a Cosmological style of truth and myth that are both rooted in compact experiences of reality — the primary cosmic experience. Voegelin understood Time of the Tale to be the primary literary form in two senses: primary as prior to other literary forms and primary as foundational to and underlying all later literary forms that result from human understanding of differentiated reality.
Literature, at least as we know it in the modern era, is created in a time after the differentiation of reality into immanence and transcendence.22 However, only when the tale being told combines human, cosmic, and divine elements does it approach the status of myth or the Tale with its Time that is out of time.
The Time of the Tale may indeed be an important critical aid for our understanding of the human experience as it has been articulated and symbolized by modern novels. Therefore, it behooves us at this point to focus for a bit on the related components of Voegelin's philosophical work. Before turning to this discussion of Voegelin's philosophy, however, several further observations about his understanding of literary criticism are in order.
Voegelin's Literary Criticism: an Overview
First, when Voegelin uses the term literary criticism, he applies it to literature both narrowly and broadly defined. On the one hand, literary criticism may mean the principles used in the interpretation of literature that falls into the modern disciplinary divisions of knowledge such as "English literature," "the history of literature," or "Shakespeare studies." On the other hand, literary criticism may refer to the hermeneutical principles for interpreting literature that is understood to include any written document that articulates or expresses human experience symbolically and that relies upon the imaginative capacities of individual human beings to create and understand. Material that may be recognized as "literature" in this second sense thus may include not only modern novels, plays, and poems, but also epic poems, ancient tragedies and dramas, the Gospels, and even analyses of language such as those of Karl Kraus or George Orwell.
Early in his correspondence with Heilman, especially in letter 9, April 9, 1946 (a commentary on Heilman's Lear manuscript), and letter 11, November 13,1947 (the now famous commentary on The Turn of the Screw), he expresses a reticence to interlope into the specialized areas of Shakespeare or James studies. On April 9, 1946, Voegelin wrote, "You will not expect a dilettante to indulge in a critical evaluation of details. Only to prove the carefulness of my reading let me relate some of the notes which I penciled down while going through the MS" (letter 9, p. 31).
Later, on December 30, 1969, Voegelin wrote a response to Heilman's comments on the Turn Postscript: "I am greatly relieved that you have no major objection to what I did with the Postscript. It seems that what you did when you initiated me to Henry James has come to a happy end after all. Of course, that is still not the last word about James by far, but I am quite content if you say that my effort is at least ahead of the current treatment of James in the expert literature" (letter 123, p. 258).
On other occasions, Voegelin freely and without concern for such disciplinary boundaries drew into his philosophical work the symbols created by artists. Examples abound. From Heimito von Doderer's novel, Die Dämonen, he adopted the symbol "second reality,"23 and from Flaubert he adopted "the grotesque' to replace "the burlesque" (that he had taken from his study of "novels and dramas by Doderer, Frisch and Durrenmatt"), as a symbol for adequately representing an ideological distortion of reality of Gnostic symbolism (letter 107, February 22, 1965, p. 233).
From Munich in August 1958, Voegelin wrote Heilman that "at present I am struggling with the literary form of the Gospels which, as always, is inseparable from its content — but at least some notable results are in sight now" (letter 79, August 31,1958, p. 183). It is important to emphasize, then, that Voegelin's principles of literary criticism are equally applicable to both the narrow and broad definitions of literature.
Second, the principles of Voegelin's literary criticism are rooted in a commonsensical approach to the texts of the human spirit and to experiences of reality that these texts symbolize. As Voegelin himself expressed it to Ellis Sandoz: "the men who have the experiences express themselves through symbols; and the symbols are the key to understanding the experience expressed."24 While this common-sense approach to literary texts is rooted in Voegelin's respect for the text and the author who wrote the text, as well as in a scholar's humility and refusal to privilege his own existence as a "modern" man, in a more technical way this common sense also undergirds much of his own approach to philosophy, especially after his discovery of English and American common sense philosophy.25 Moreover, as Voegelin argues in letter 65, it would be impossible to understand historical texts if the contemporary critic did not share his own human nature with that of the creators of historical symbolizations.
Third, several crucial statements in Voegelin's work provide the empirical-theoretical attitude that philosophically grounds his literary criticism. He opens the preface to Israel and Revelation, volume I of Order and History, with the statement that "the order of history emerges from the history of order," thereby establishing the empirical-historical intention of his work.26
In another startlingly bold declarative sentence, which opened the introduction to the same volume, Voegelin writes: "God and man, world and society form a primordial community of being." With this statement Voegelin announces both an empirical conclusion based upon his vast studies for the History of Political Ideas project and the range of an inquiry that would occupy his energies throughout the remainder of his life. After this opening, he continued: "The community with its quaternarian structure is, and is not, a datum of human experience. It is a datum of experience insofar as it is known to man by virtue of his participation in the mystery of its being. It is not a datum of experience insofar as it is not given in the manner of an object of the external world but is knowable only from the perspective of participation in it."27
It should be noted that by the time Voegelin writes the 1956 letters that are discussed above, he has already established the fundamental principles of his philosophy: that human existence is historical existence, that the reality to be understood through history is the community of being, that human existence is to be understood in the context of the community of being, and that human experience of that reality can only be known from the perspective of human participation in the community of being. These emphases focus attention upon the exploration of human nature and thus human consciousness; and art — to include literature — is seen by Voegelin as a vital resource for the philosopher who would understand human consciousness as it manifests itself historically in the biographies of concrete human beings through their imaginative symbolizations.
For Voegelin, then, "literature" supplies evidence that empirically grounds his inquiry into the historical existence of human beings as partners in the community of being. But literature and thus literary criticism occupy an even more personal place in the constellation of Voegelin's thought. Here it becomes rather difficult to delineate between Voegelin's philosophical enterprise and the personal quest that lies at its heart. It is in the person Eric Voegelin that vocation and philosophical inquiry intersect and come to be understood as rooted in the Platonic articulation of philosophy as the love of wisdom.28
Against the backdrop of Voegelin's experience in Vienna during his early years, an experience that witnessed the breakdown of institutions and linguistic integrity, this self-education process takes on a heightened significance, for when the literary culture and the educational institutions upon which literacy depends are compromised and even destroyed, a man must look to the classics as guides to the recovery of his own humanity, to the recovery of his own integrity as a human being.
Self-education, however, can only occur if one approaches the classics with a reverent attitude of "loving care." This approach results in a sudden discovery: "that one's understanding of a great work increases (and also one's ability to communicate such understanding) for the good reason that the student has increased through the process of study — and that after all is the purpose of the enterprise." The result — an increase in spiritual stature — furthers the purpose for which one engaged in the study initially. And then Voegelin, even though he buries it in parentheses, makes a remarkable confession that articulates his vocation: "At least it is my purpose in spending the time of my life in the study of prophets, philosophers, and saints."(letter 65, August 22, 1956, p. 157).
Finally, we must note that in this final confessional statement art, the arts, and thus literature, are absent from the final list of sources — the prophets, philosophers, and saints — that Voegelin spends the time of his life studying. Why? The quick response is that philosophy itself, as a symbolic form developed by Plato, relies upon and combines the literary forms of dialogue, myth, analysis, and anamnetic meditation to articulate experiences of the philosopher. Since it is now apparent that literary criticism in a Voegelinian mode is bound up with the philosophy that he developed over a lifetime of reading, research, reflection, and meditation, we now turn to a necessarily condensed exposition of his work — a consideration of Eric Voegelin's lifetime Search of Order.
29 
[This is the third of three parts. Part 1 may be read HERE.]
NOTES
(for full citations see the bibliography in Professor Embry's book)
22. There are certainly writers from traditions in which differentiation has not "occurred," or rather has occurred only externally to the tradition as an alien force, who have adopted the western, European novel form. This issue certainly would raise a number of interesting questions for exploration. For example, Hoye's work on Japanese novelists yields interesting observations about the "place" that literature (and hence the modern novel) occupies in Japanese society and culture. See Hoye, "Imagining Modern Japan: Natsume Soseki's First Trilogy."
23. Voegelin, "Autobiographical Statement at Age Eighty-Two," 434. Elsewhere, Voegelin attributes the first use of second reality to the novelist Robert von Musil in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities).
24. Quoted from Autobiographical Memoir, 81, in The Voegelinian Revolution, by Sandoz, 22.
25. See Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections, 28-29. Common sense for Voegelin is a form of rationality, to include practicality, that has not been developed to a level of self-reflective philosophical proficiency. See Voegelin, On the form of the American Mind, 29-31.
26. This sentence opened the manuscript that Voegelin asked Heilman to read in 1952, and it was retained as the opening sentence of the introduction when Israel and Revelation was published in 1956. Voegelin, Israel and Revelation, 19.
27. Ibid., 39
28. The philosopher's consciousness, like that of any other human being, is historically formed and thus rooted in the biography of the philosopher. For the complete development of this insight see Voegelin, Anamnesis.
29. For those interested in exploring more thorough and detailed discussions and analyses of Voegelin's work, I suggest: Hughes, Mystery and Myth in the Philosophy of Eric Voegelin; essays by Jürgen Gebhardt and Frederick G. Lawrence in International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Eric Voegelin, ed. McKnight and Price; essays by Lewis P. Simpson, Paul Grimley Kuntz, and Paul Caringella in Eric Voegelin's Significance for the Modern Mind, ed. Sandoz; and, Sandoz, The Voegelinian Revolution.
