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On the Inside--

2012-02-03T02:00:00Z

on the Inside

". . .your place in the family of things. "
Poetry Editor Thomas D'Evelyn offers us a poem by Mary Oliver, whose work might remind one of the flower child era. One might wonder if immersion in perennial thought causes one to hesitate when presented with this kind of poetic sensibility. Read this week in Poetry " Wild Geese."

Pope Benedict Reprimands the US Government
It has been brought to our attention that a few days ago Pope Benedict gave a speech that can only be construed as a reprimand to the present administration in Washington. Read in Commentary "The Pope Reprimands the Obama Administration."

Recovering the Participatory Mode
We welcome Sarah Shea to VoegelinView. She reviews for us Lee Trepanier and Steven F. McGuire's Eric Voegelin and the Continental Tradition: "Overall the book is . . . a hopeful step forward in acknowledging Voegelin as an active participant in the great philosophical conversation." Read this week in Book Reviews "Diagnosing Modernity."

Immanentizing the Eschaton
Earlier this week we began Eric Voegelin's analysis from his first book in America, The New Science of Politics. He wrote there of the "immanentist hypostasis of the Christian Eschaton." Fifty-odd years ago, some students with a camera responded with a sense of humor, and we can see the result today in The Lighter Side.

A Big Round Subject -pt 1

2012-02-06T02:00:00Z

Chesterton (and the rest)

A Big Round Subject

by Max Arnott

G.K. Chesterton: A Biography by Ian Ker. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Although we don’t usually review books in this space, Ian Ker’s new biography of Chesterton deserves an exception.

It is certainly a great thick square book (on a great thick round subject). A lot of work went into this book and we will spread our review over a couple of columns. This time we will speak about the book itself, asking, Is it worth reading? Is it worth buying? And in the next column we will reflect on the image of Chesterton as herein presented, asking the tougher question, What can we do with it?

This is not the first biography of Chesterton, of course, by a long shot. Maisie Ward Sheed published hers in 1944, and in later decades Dudley Barker (1973), Michael Finch (1986) and Michael Coren (1989) have had a go. Ian Ker, who teaches theology at Oxford and is an expert on John Henry Newman, has now written what the publishers describe as the “first comprehensive biography of the man and the thinker and writer.” It is certainly the longest (729 pages).

Fortescue and Liberty Through Law -pt 1

2012-02-02T02:00:00Z

Sir John Fortescue
Securing Liberty Through Law –Part 1

by Ellis Sandoz

Professor Sandoz is the Editor of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. He has written many books and essays on Eric Voegelin's thought as well as on the political and spiritual foundations of the United States. This essay is taken from his The Politics of Truth and Other Untimely Essays, available from the University of Missouri Press. It is presented here in two parts.

Government both Political and Royal

The greatest English political thinker of the fifteenth century, Sir John Fortescue (ca. 1394-ca. 1477), served as a member of Parliament in eight Parliaments, as chief justice of King's Bench for nearly two decades, and as Lord Chancellor of England to Henry VI, the last of the Lancastrian kings.

He is chiefly known for the instructional dialogue he composed for the young heir apparent to the throne, Prince Edward, titled In Praise of the Laws of England.¹

The fame attaching to that work arises mainly from its prominence in the dispute two centuries later over the nature of the English monarchy and constitution conducted between the first Stuart kings (James I and Charles I) and Sir Edward Coke, John Selden, and Parliament leading up to the Petition of Right (1628) and the subsequent civil war.

Deformations of Faith -pt 1

2012-02-01T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Deformations of Faith

Eric Voegelin delivered a lecture at Hillsdale College in 1977 as part of a symposium entitled "Between Nothingness and Paradise: Faith." Hillsdale College recorded the lecture and the recording of the lecture was transcribed and annotated by Professor Charles Embry. Voegelin never prepared the lecture for publication, perhaps because portions of it are drawn from his earlier essays. It is presented here in three parts.

What Do We Mean by "Faith?"

Mr. Chairman, thank you very much for your kind introduction. Ladies and gentlemen.

The subject matter of these lectures is supposed to be "Deformations of Faith." The general topic of this meeting here is "On Faith." It was selected as a topic–not as a problem in any particular science. I shall try to stick as closely as possible to the topical implications of the problems of faith and deformations of faith.

Of course, when one speaks about deformations of faith one has first to determine what is meant by faith.

Again, adhering to the topical content, I should say the definition in the Epistle to the Hebrews, chapter 11, verse 1–"Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the proof [evidence] of things unseen [not seen]”¹–is the central formulation from the New Testament which has always been the basis of the theological and metaphysical examinations of what faith is–all through the Middle Ages right into the present. And we will start simply from there.

Hunting the Devils-Simone Weil and Eric Voegelin -pt 3

2012-01-30T02:00:00Z

Hunting the Devils

Simone Weil and Eric Voegelin–Two Paths to the Same Truth–Part 3

by Sylvie Courtine-Denamy

Sylvie Courtine-Denamy is the author of books on Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil, among them being Three Women in Dark Times: Edith Stein, Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil and her most recent book, Simone Weil. La Quête de racines célestes. She is also a translator of philosophical works into French, including those of Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin. This essay appears here in three parts.

An Unbaptised Christian Mystic

Simone Weil, for her part, thought that our time needed a "new saintliness," saints working among the unfortunate and not behind a frock or in a convent, as she objected to Father Perrin who planned to create a feminine secular movement under the aegis of Catherine of Sienna.

Born to a very assimilated Jewish family and brought up a complete agnostic, she later claimed, surprisingly perhaps, "I was born, I grew up, and I always remained within the Christian inspiration."⁷¹

Her own movement toward Christianity began at the time she experienced three mystical "person to person" encounters with Christ. They occurred between 1935 and 1938, after she had worked in the French factories in which she had endured in her own flesh the sufferings and misfortune of the workers.

Because she had not previously read the works of Christian mystics, her mystical experiences were not affected by such influences, and that made them that much more profound for her.

A Pattern of Timeless Moments -pt 4

2012-01-26T02:00:00Z

A Pattern of Timeless Moments
T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets –Part 4

by Glenn Hughes

Glenn Hughes is Professor of Philosophy at St. Mary’s University, San Antonio. The present essay, "A Pattern of Timeless Moments," is taken from his latest book, A More Beautiful Question. This excerpt appears with permission and is presented here in four parts.

Transcending Christian Symbolism

Beyond their Christian dimension of symbolization, the poems of the Quartets draw explicitly from Buddhist, Hindu, and Platonic or Neoplatonist traditions and language, and their evocations of mystical and meditative experiences are clearly intended to suggest a global range of references.

What seems obvious is that Eliot wanted to speak in the Quartets to the universal experience of human existence as situated in the in-between of time and timeless meaning and knew that he could do so only through a poetic language that both avoided a deliberately liturgical use of Christian language and employed a universal range of symbolic articulations of human-divine encounter.

He is writing of every person's existence and participation in history. Therefore he must establish the poem on the basis of experiences recognizable to any open mind and then show, through the employment and correlation of symbols and phrases from a multitude of religious traditions, how these speak to and illuminate such experiences.

Richard Rorty and the Core of Progressivism

2012-01-09T02:00:00Z

Richard Rorty and the Core of Progressivism

by Scott Segrest

Scott Segrest is Instructor in Political Philosophy at University of Alaska, Anchorage. He is the author of America and the Political Philosophy of Common Sense, University of Missouri Press, excerpts from which have appeared here at VoegelinView. He is also an editor at VoegelinView.This essay appears with permission.

The Religious Character of American Progressivism

The analysis of progressivism given by Eric Voegelin six decades ago in his New Science of Politics remains illuminating even today. The animating center of progressivism, he said, is the Christian idea of history gutted of spiritual substance and turned from its original destination.

The original idea, classically articulated by St. Augustine, was that the human history that really counts–the history of those who love and follow God–is a pilgrim’s progress to a perfect city, a journey with no map and no guide but God himself to a mysterious place not of this world.

The great modern ideological formations, Voegelin said –progressivism, utopianism, and revolutionary activism–are all moved by a similar vision, but God has dropped out of the picture, and the process has become a quest for political perfection in this world, to be achieved not by God’s but human hands.

Montesquieu-The Elements of Political Liberty

2012-01-25T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Montesquieu
The Elements of Political Liberty

The Climate in 18th Century England and France

The French revolt paralleling Hume's critique of reason came through Montesquieu [Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu–ed] (1689-1755).

Again a new set of problems was opened that could not be covered by the Myth of Reason or the contract theory of government. But here the parallel ends, for the approach of Montesquieu differs as widely from that of Hume as the French political situation differed from the English.

Hume was the philosopher of a settled society that had passed through a revolution. A splenetic humor is creeping up, tempered in Hume by a natural complacency; but through the veneer of his conformism and skepticism one can sense other possibilities: the century of Hume is the century of Beckford and his Vathek.

The France of Montesquieu is full of unrest presaging a revolution; the expectancy of movement, the smell of unknown horizons, is as characteristic of Montesquieu as a certain musty smell of stagnation is peculiar to Hume.

Hunting the Devils-Simone Weil and Eric Voegelin -pt 2

2012-01-23T02:00:00Z

Hunting the Devils

Simone Weil and Eric Voegelin–Two Paths to the Same Truth–Part 2

by Sylvie Courtine-Denamy

Sylvie Courtine-Denamy is the author of books on Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil, among them being Three Women in Dark Times: Edith Stein, Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil and her most recent book, Simone Weil. La Quête de racines célestes . She is also a translator of philosophical works into French, including those of Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin. This essay appears here in three parts.

The Cure for Uprootedness

The disease of uprootedness is in fact, for Weil, a spiritual one. “We suffer from a lack of balance, due to a purely material development of technical science. This lack of balance can only be remedied by a spiritual development in the same sphere, that is, in the sphere of work.”³³

This imbalance is, moreover, the result of our failure to understand the “Needs of the Soul,” which is the title of the opening chapter of The Need for Roots. For Weil, we may discover what these needs are by analogy with the needs of our bodies and they, too, must be satisfied in order that the soul should not die.

These needs are “sacred” inasmuch as they are those of a human being. To each of these needs corresponds an obligation which testifies indirectly to the bond which unites man “with a reality.”³⁴

A Pattern of Timeless Moments -pt 3

2012-01-19T02:00:00Z

A Pattern of Timeless Moments
T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets –Part 3

by Glenn Hughes

History as Metaxy

Though Four Quartets is described most simply as "a series of meditations upon existence in time," it also necessarily includes meditation on the meaning and structure of history.¹⁸

Through his understanding of incarnate human consciousness as participating in the timeless meaning of divine reality, Eliot draws the conclusion that it is improper to conceive history as being principally a process of chronological development.

David Hume

2012-01-18T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

David Hume
Spokesman for the Comfortable Class

While the new order [the secular settlements following the religious upheavals of the 16^th and 17^th centuries–ed] appeared roseate in the "Myth of Reason and Nature" to Hugo Grotius and John Locke, their greater contemporaries were not happy.

. . . . [Unfortunately the great] work of Giambattista Vico did not become effective in England and France; the resistance had to develop independently out of the forces of those societies. While the results are modest compared with the work of Vico, the change of sentiment that makes them possible merits our attention, at least in some outstanding examples.

In England the decisive break came through David Hume (1711-1776). The Treatise of Human Nature (1739-1740)¹ brings the attack on Reason with the purpose of revealing the true foundation of morals and politics in the sphere of sentiment.

Hunting the Devils-Simone Weil and Eric Voegelin -pt 1

2012-01-16T02:00:00Z

Hunting the Devils

Simone Weil and Eric Voegelin–Two Paths to the Same Truth–Part 1

by Sylvie Courtine-Denamy

Sylvie Courtine-Denamy is the author of books on Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil, among them being Three Women in Dark Times: Edith Stein, Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil and her most recent book, Simone Weil. La Quête de racines célestes . She is also a translator of philosophical works into French, including those of Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin. This essay appears here in three parts.

Rejecting Ideology

With Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) and Simone Weil (1909-1943), we are confronted with two philosophers who examine events, understand their present, and consider the "disorder" of their time caused by Marxism, Fascism, and National Socialism.

Their respective works constitute acts of resistance against ideology.

Wondering about the "dark times" (Bertolt Brecht), they diagnose a Europe that suffers from a disease that is not without precedent, a disease that affects the spirit, the soul, and a disease that can be grasped by its several symptoms.

In order to cure this disease, it is necessary to find remedies, and they both believe two countries in particular offer some hope.

A Pattern of Timeless Moments -pt 2

2012-01-12T02:00:00Z

A Pattern of Timeless Moments
T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets –Part 2

by Glenn Hughes

Time and Timelessness (concluded)

Eliot is intensely aware, of course, of the degree to which an explicit awareness of human life as existence in the in-between of immanence and transcendence is absent from modern consciousness.

And when awareness of the metaxy is eclipsed–as much of modern thought shows very well–human life comes to be conceived as an existence whose meaning is completely contained within nature or immanence–within the rhythms, repetitions, and inevitable defeats of temporal and material being.

Interpreted and self-embraced as such, this is an existence whose enjoyments tend to mask, if they don't yield to, a despair that reflects that the course of time unredeemed by a relation to timeless meaning is finally a pointlessness of "rising and falling. / Eating and drinking. Dung and death." (East Coker, I, 45-46).

Gnosticism–A Brief Introduction -pt 2

2012-01-11T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Gnosticism
A Brief Introduction –Part 2

The Anxieties that Lead to Gnosticism

The collapse of the ancient empires of the East,¹ the loss of independence for Israel and the Hellenic and Phoenician city-states, the population shifts, the deportations and enslavements, and the interpenetration of cultures reduce men who exercise no control over the proceedings of history to an extreme state of forlornness in the turmoil of the world, of intellectual disorientation, of material and spiritual insecurity.

The loss of meaning that results from the breakdown of institutions, civilizations, and ethnic cohesion evokes attempts to regain an understanding of the meaning of human existence in the given conditions of the world.

Among these efforts, which vary widely in depth of insight and substantive truth, are to be found: the Stoic reinterpretation of man (to whom the polis had become meaningless) as the polites (citizen) of the cosmos; the Polybian vision of a pragmatic ecumene destined to be created by Rome; the mystery religions; the Heliopolitan slave cults; the Hebrew apocalyptic; Christianity; and Manichaeism. And in this sequence, as one of the most grandiose of the new formulations of the meaning of existence, belongs Gnosticism.

Here Keller, Appropriate This

2012-01-02T02:00:00Z

{jcomments on}Chesterton (and the rest)

Here Keller, Appropriate This

by Max Arnott

Ian Ker’s new biography of Chesterton, Chesterton: a Biography (a good title that states the case) ought to be a natural for this column, so we admit with embarrassment that we haven’t read it yet. We hope to do a two part review later in the new year; but meanwhile we would like to touch on a problem that has been nagging at us, quietly, but steadily.

This is the question “Okay, I’ve read it, now what?”

One of the things that we seniors do a lot is cast our watery eyes back over expired decades and assess what we remember (if anything).

From your columnist’s rocker, the biggest thing in sight is a pile of books. We started reading in the first grade and haven't stopped, and it is a big, big pile of print.

But in considering this, we have to admit to our dismay, that from all those titles, we remember only about 5 percent.

A Pattern of Timeless Moments -pt 1

2012-01-05T02:00:00Z

A Pattern of Timeless Moments
T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets –Part 1

by Glenn Hughes

First Impressions

My first encounter with T. S. Eliot's masterpiece, the poem-cycle Four Quartets, took place when I was twenty years old.

The conditions were unusually felicitous. I was visiting family friends in southeast England, and during a period when my host family was away for a few days, I noticed a BBC program announcement in the newspaper. That evening there was to be a broadcast of Alec Guinness reading Eliot's Four Quartets in its entirety.

At the appointed time I turned off all but one lamp, lay down on a couch, and listened.

This first encounter with the Quartets was therefore appropriately auditory and incantatory. It was also vision-inducing, strangely moving, and deeply perplexing.

Gnosticism–A Brief Introduction -pt 1

2012-01-04T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Gnosticism
A Brief Introduction –Part 1

The Immanentization of the Christian Eschaton

The fallacious character of an eidos of history [the belief that the whole course of history can be known–ed] has been shown on principle–but the analysis can and must be carried one step further into certain details.

The Christian symbolism of supernatural destination has in itself a theoretical structure, and this structure is continued into the variants of immanentization. The pilgrim's progress, the sanctification of life, is a movement toward a telos, a goal; and this goal, the Beatific Vision, is a state of perfection.

Hence, in the Christian symbolism one can distinguish the movement–as its teleological component, from a state of highest value–as the axiological component.¹ The two components reappear in the variants of immanentization; and they can accordingly be classified as variants that either accentuate the teleological or the axiological component or combine them both in their symbolism.

The First Mystics? -pt 6

2011-12-22T02:00:00Z

The First Mystics?

Some Recent Accounts of Neolithic Shamanism–Part 6

by Barry Cooper

Remember that it is not you who sustain the root;

the root sustains you. –Rom. 11:18

The Dangerous Bridge

Apart from remarks regarding the meaninglessness of questions regarding the meaning of life or the notion that “religion” is simply a question of "altered states of consciousness" and thus of fantasy, there are additional internal reasons to indicate the limitation to this argument about scientific “form” and cultural “content.”

First, we recall from Mircea Eliade’s discussion of shamanism his mentioning of the “perilous passage” to the underworld and his provision of several examples from shamanistic practice.

He noted that the symbolism is linked, on the one hand, with the myth of a bridge (or tree, vine, etc.) that once connected earth and heaven and by means of which human beings effortlessly communicated with the gods. On the other hand, it is related to the initiatory symbolism of the “strait gate” or of a “paradoxical passage.”⁹⁷

Jesus and the Unknown God -pt 3

2011-12-21T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Jesus and the Unknown God –Part 3

The analysis of the experiential context into which the logion [Matthew] 11:27 must be placed, though far from being exhaustive, has been carried far enough to make visible the noetic problems of reality that lend themselves to misconstruction through doctrinal hypostases, through overemphasis on one area of reality as against others, or through plain lack of interest to engage in further noetic penetration.

In the present context, I must confine myself to a brief enumeration of no more than the principal questions:

1. The various problems transmitted to us through two thousand years have their center in the Movement in which man's consciousness of existence emerges from the primary experience of the cosmos. Consciousness becomes luminous to itself as the site of the revelatory process, of the seeking and being drawn.

Machiavelli -pt 6

2011-12-19T02:00:00Z

Beneath the Southern Cross

Machiavelli

or The Demonic Confusion –Part 6

by Olavo de Carvalho

Olavo de Carvalho is a Brazilian philosopher and an exponent of Aristotle and Eric Voegelin. We present here in six parts his latest study, Maquiavel, ou a Confusão Demoníaca (Machiavelli, or the Demonic Confusion), in a special English translation made available to VoegelinView.

The Parodic Inversion of Christianity

Moving now from the center to the periphery, from the ends to the means, let us try to apprehend the internal order of Machiavelli’s thought as it formed and developed over time.

Removed from power, reduced to the solitude of a mediocre life, the Florentine secretary conceives a new formula for government that, he fancies, may seduce current or presumptive rulers so as to attract their sympathy to the competent official who had been excluded from State affairs.

The most attractive point of the formula is the offer to free the rulers from all the moral and psychic obstacles of religion. In short, Machiavelli apprehends the conflict between the noble and the priestly caste–a recurring theme since the beginning of the world, with mystical resonances, as one sees in the traditional symbolism of the she-bear and the wild boar^,60 –which then manifested itself rather acutely with the emergence of national States in opposition to the old ecclesiastical project of an European Empire.

He discovers a way to interfere in this conflict, favoring in such a way the noble caste that it could not refuse to reward him.

The Crisis of Americanism -pt 7

2011-12-01T02:00:00Z

The Crisis of Americanism–Part 7

by Juergen Gebhardt

Dr. Gebhardt is emeritus Professor at the Insitute for Political Science at the University of Erlangen-Nürenberg. He is the editor of the final volume of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Selected Correspondence, 1924-1949. We are featuring here Chapter 5 from his Americanism: Revolutionary Order and Societal Self-Interprestation in the American Republic, Louisiana State University Press, 1993. It appears here in multiple parts. Parts 1 to 3 appeared here in 2010. It is reproduced here with permission.

America Looks in the Mirror

Only after the convulsions of World War II did American self-criticism very reluctantly abandon the influence of monumental history.

The search of representative minds in the humanities, the churches, and the media for a nondogmatic interpretation of Americanism in postwar America will be demonstrated by an analysis of the works of Ralph Barton Perry, Daniel J. Boorstin, Seymour Martin Lipset, Reinhold Niebuhr, John Courtney Murray, Walter Lippmann, and Louis Hartz.

This literature of self-criticism and self-analysis is given its coherence by the articulation, or at least the discussion, of an American awareness of consciousness of crisis as well as a constant effort to confer meaning on the power complex that the North American empire has become in the twentieth century.

The First Mystics? -pt 5

2011-12-15T02:00:00Z

The First Mystics?

Some Recent Accounts of Neolithic Shamanism –Part 5

by Barry Cooper

Remember that it is not you who sustain the root;

the root sustains you. –Rom. 11:18

The Shaman as Intracosmic Traveler

Those familiar with Voegelin’s concept of Metaxy can think of shamans as human beings whose lives are lived emphatically in the Metaxy, in permanent movement along the axis mundi, a concrete image of the Voegelinian philosophical concept of “tension.”

The mystic shamanic communication among the three realms is expressed in architectural structures such as ziggurats, but also in trees and bridges or the smoke-hole (and smoke) of a tipi or yurt.

Indeed the notion of a cosmic centre or omphalos, which Marie König found in the patterns and lines and cup-marks in the Fontainebleau rock-shelters, does not end with shamanism and the mystic cosmic flights of shamans but reappears as a millennial constant whatever the degree of compactness and differentiation of experience and symbolization.⁶⁷

Modernity and Secularization -pt 2

2011-11-21T02:00:00Z

Modernity and Secularization

According to Hans Blumenberg's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age – Part 2

by Thierry Gontier

M. Gontier is Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy, Université de Lyon Jean Moulin – Lyon III. He has written extensively on Bacon, Montaigne, Descartes and Voegelin and is an editor of the forthcoming Eric Voegelin, Politique, Religion et Histoire, Paris, éd. du Cerf. A biographical sketch may be found HERE. This essay was originally read at the annual meeting of the Eric Voegelin Society in Seattle, September 2011. It appears here in two parts.

Blumenberg's notion of historical progress is not born out of the secularization of Christian salvation, but out of the displacement of the question to which Christian theology had supplied an answer during the Middle Ages.

The question is no longer one of knowing how the constitutive evils of the human essence will find their ultimate meaning beyond the world (to put it simply, the question of salvation), but whether, and how, those evils, which are only relative to a fixed period in the history of mankind (and therefore contingent), will be, at least partially, reduced.

It is in this capacity that modernity constitutes for Hans Blumenberg, not a ‘relapse of Gnosticism’, in the way that Voegelin had written, but a movement beyond Gnosticism.⁷

Jesus and the Unknown God -pt 2

2011-12-14T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Jesus and the Unknown God –Part 2

By the time of the Passion, it appears, the great secret of Caesarea Philippi, the so-called Messiasgeheimnis, has become a matter of public knowledge after all.

In order to explain this oddity, however, one must not accuse the disciples of loquacious disregard for the charge of silence, for between this episode and the Passion, Matthew lets Jesus be quite generous with barely veiled allusions to his status as both the Messiah and the Son of God.

Hence, the charge of the Sanhedrin that Jesus had proclaimed himself the Son of God was well founded.

Machiavelli -pt 5

2011-12-12T02:00:00Z

Beneath the Southern Cross

Machiavelli

or The Demonic Confusion –Part 5

by Olavo de Carvalho

Fleeing from Experience

Would it make sense to call this “Realism”?

When Lord Lawrence Arthur Burd writes that Machiavelli, like his companions, has abandoned Scholastic argumentation, choosing instead to attach himself to “experience," he adds that “unfortunately the peculiar character of their experience often led them to fallacious results, as is seen most clearly in Machavelli.”⁵²

However, Machiavelli’s shortcomings did not end there. Lord Burd’s paragraph shows that for Machiavelli and his companions, Divine Scripture, the sentences of philosophers and the laudable examples of princes had become dead letters–fixed doctrinal formulas beyond which they could not see any content of internal or external experience.

This is the same as saying that they did not understand them at all.

The First Mystics? -pt 4

2011-12-08T02:00:00Z

The First Mystics?

Some Recent Accounts of Neolithic Shamanism–Part 4

by Barry Cooper

Remember that it is not you who sustain the root;

the root sustains you. —Rom. 11:18

Dismissive Views of Shamanism

A generation ago anthropologists often dismissed shamanism as “a made-up, modern, Western category, an artful reification of disparate practices, snatches of folklore and overarching folklorizations, residues of long-established myths intermingled with the politics of academic departments, curricula, conferences, journal juries and articles, and funding agencies.”³⁷

The reason for this severe judgment seems to have been a close association of the term with doctrines of cultural evolution that most anthropologists no longer considered appropriate.

On the other hand, a few years later, the study of shamanism underwent a renaissance as a result of a new interest in the study of altered states of consciousness, an interest in shamanism as therapy, as well as in assorted New Age experiments in spirituality.

Jesus and the Unknown God -pt 1

2011-12-07T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Jesus and the Unknown God –Part 1

In the historical drama of revelation, the Unknown God ultimately becomes the God known through His presence in Christ.

This drama, though it has been alive in the consciousness of the New Testament writers, is far from alive in the Christianity of the churches today, for the history of Christianity is characterized by what is commonly called the separation of school theology from mystical or experiential theology which formed an apparently inseparable unit still in the work of Origen.

The Unknown God whose theotes was present in the existence of Jesus has been eclipsed by the revealed God of Christian doctrine.

Machiavelli -pt 4

2011-12-05T02:00:00Z

Beneath the Southern Cross

Machiavelli

or The Demonic Confusion –Part 4

by Olavo de Carvalho

Olavo de Carvalho is a Brazilian philosopher and an exponent of Aristotle and Eric Voegelin. We present here in six parts his latest study, Maquiavel, ou a Confusão Demoníaca (Machiavelli, or a Demonic Confusion), in a special English translation made available to VoegelinView.

Machiavelli the Liar

If there seems to be something tortuous and dishonest about all this [ Machiavelli's flattering both the Republicans and the Prince], do not be surprised.

As we have seen, Machiavelli confessed:

I never say what I believe and I never believe what I say; and if it sometimes occurs to me that I say the truth, I conceal it among so many lies that it is hard to find it out.⁴¹

These words turn him into a living embodiment of the “liar’s paradox” and immediately put his reader at the center of the problem which I call “existential self-reference."⁴²

Is the confessed liar truthful in the moment of his confession or is he lying about all the other moments of his life? Has he led a life of lies or does he lie about the history of his life?

In these conditions, interpreters soon noticed that it was impossible to understand Machiavelli without uncovering the exact relation between the expressed meaning of his text and the unexpressed truth of his existence.

Why Do We Need Philosophy? -pt 2

2011-11-30T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Why Do We Need Philosophy? –Part 2

A further typical feature in the early stages of the process of symbolization is man's awareness of the analogical character of his symbols.

The awareness manifests itself in various ways, corresponding to the various problems of cognition through symbols.

The order of being, while remaining in the area of essential ignorance, can be symbolized analogically by using more than one experience of partial order in existence. The rhythms of plant and animal life, the sequence of the seasons, the revolutions of sun, moon, and constellations may serve as models for analogical symbolization of social order.

The order of society may serve as a model for symbolizing celestial order. All these orders may serve as models for symbolizing the order in the realm of divine forces. And the symbolizations of divine order in their turn may be used for analogical interpretation of existential orders within the world.

Chesterton as Journalist

2011-11-07T02:00:00Z

{jcomments off}Chesterton (and the rest)

Chesterton as Journalist

by Max Arnott

In the 12 October 1929 issue of the Illustrated London News, G.K. Chesterton wrote:

. . . How much more melancholy is the condition of those, in modernised and rationalised Western communities, who have to go about conducting secretly the cult of the Great God Namse! How much more uncomfortable it is to call on Namse morning, noon, and night, and yet never be allowed to call him by his name! How miserable is our condition in industrial Europe and America, who dare not call on Namse as Namse, but have to call him National Welfare or International Peace or the British Empire or the New Republic, or Progress . . . .

Chesterton was commenting on some photos, provided to the November 1928 issue of National Geographic Magazine by Joseph F.C. Rock, of certain religious processions at the Choni monastery in Tibet. Namse is the Tibetan god of wealth, whose image was carried in solemn reverence, just ahead of the Tibetan god of hell.

Chesterton goes on to argue the advantages of making Namse official god of England.

The Crisis of Americanism -pt 6

2011-11-17T02:00:00Z

The Crisis of Americanism–Part 6

by Juergen Gebhardt

The New Deal as Successful Salvage Operation

Roosevelt's principled political understanding of order resulted in the New Deal's confusing multiplicity of conceptual initiatives, ideas, and programs for institutional reform and the contradictory complexity of experiments and techniques for problem solving.

In the social context of the basic syndicalist structure, it was essential that the federal authorities proceed democratically in solving the power problems of industrial society in an "economic republic;" this method would supposedly guarantee that both social welfare and economic growth be preserved.

The economic republic had, in the words of the New Dealer A. A. Berle, "integrated the democratic process by which we operate our politics with visible or indirect controls of the private decisions by which we work our economics."⁶⁴ In his attempt to describe the results of the New Deal, Berle certainly defined the intention of Roosevelt, whose close adviser he was.

This is not the place to discuss the six hectic years from 1933 to 1938 but only to note that the New Deal, despite considerable failures, was successful on at least one point: it salvaged for organized society the social field of consciousness that exemplified it.

A Night in Heidelberg -pt 2

2011-10-27T01:00:00Z

A Night in Heidelberg—Part 2

Voegelin's Writings on Heidegger

by Myron Moses Jackson

Myron Jackson is a PhD student in philosophy at Southern Illinois University. His thesis explores Ironic American Exceptionalism and the Myth of the Open Self. His master's thesis explored Eric Voegelin's interpretation of natural law. His biographical notice may be found HERE. This study is presented here in two parts.

Voegelin's Response to Heidegger's "Magic"

As one may already suspect, Voegelin had little patience or sympathy for "the little magician from Messkirch." This was Heidegger’s nickname given by his students, according to Karl Löwith, who had been one of his most exceptional students, which is saying a lot considering the others–Strauss, Arendt, Marcuse to name only a few.

Löwith describes Heidegger’s masterful techniques that would razzle and dazzle his audiences:

He was a small dark man who knew how to cast a spell insofar as he could make disappear what he had a moment before presented. His lecture technique consisted in building up an edifice of ideas which he then proceeded to tear down, presenting the spellbound listeners with a riddle and then leaving them empty-handed.

This ability to cast a spell at times had very considerable consequences: it attracted more or less psychopathic personality types, and, after three years of guessing at riddles, one woman student took her own life.³⁷

Why Do We Need Philosophy? -pt 1

2011-11-23T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Why Do We Need Philosophy? –Part 1

God and man, world and society form a primordial community of being. 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.

The perspective of participation must be understood in the fullness of its disturbing quality. It does not mean that man, more or less comfortably located in the landscape of being, can look around and take stock of what he sees as far as he can see it. Such a metaphor, or comparable variations on the theme of the limitations of human knowledge, would destroy the paradoxical character of the situation.

It would suggest a self-contained spectator, in possession of and with knowledge of his faculties, at the center of a horizon of being, even though the horizon were restricted. But man is not a self-contained spectator. He is an actor, playing a part in the drama of being and, through the brute fact of his existence, committed to play it without knowing what it is.

Obedience to the Law

2011-11-16T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Obedience to the Law

The Normative Nature of the Rule

The Ought is not itself a "postulate" or a "norm" but the experienced tension between the order of being and the conduct of man.

In the orbit of this tension, rules concerning social order are more than empirical observations concerning regularities of action.

Since the problem of order is precisely the tension between empirical conduct and true order, legal rules, whether they are general rules or individual rules for the parties in a concrete case, have the character of projects of order.

Whether or not the rule employs the formula "Thou shalt" or "Thou shalt not," it has that meaning when it projects the types to which the conduct of human beings is supposed to conform.

The so-called "normativity" of the rule derives, therefore, from the ontologically real tension in the order of society.

Modernity and Secularization -pt 1

2011-11-14T02:00:00Z

Modernity and Secularization

According to Hans Blumenberg's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age –Part 1

by Thierry Gontier

M. Gontier is Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy, Université de Lyon Jean Moulin – Lyon III. He has written extensively on Bacon, Montaigne, Descartes, and Voegelin and is an editor of the forthcoming Eric Voegelin, Politique, Religion et Histoire, Paris, éd. du Cerf. A biographical sketch may be found HERE. This essay was originally read at the annual meeting of the Eric Voegelin Society in Seattle, September 2011. It appears here in two parts.

To ask the question concerning "legitimacy of the modern age" represents an act characteristic of post-modernity, i.e. of a modernity which is suspicious of its own foundations.

One of the recurrent forms of this question consists in asking whether the values proclaimed by modernity, the values of what we call "the Enlightenment" (secularism, the autonomy of reason, progress, political liberalism, etc.), are or are not authentic values.

Is modernity, in the words of Nietzsche, a high or a low civilization? Is it in particular a substitute for Christian theology or the moment at which values are created? Behind these apparently historical questions another lies hidden, namely, the relief from the anxiety of that modernity through the recovery of the intellectual act by which modernity was inaugurated.

Does this represent a reinstatement of the lost link with a premodern theology or the movement of the project of autonomy proclaimed by modernity towards its fulfilment?

The Crisis of Americanism -pt 5

2011-11-10T02:00:00Z

The Crisis of Americanism–Part 5

by Juergen Gebhardt

Bureacracy as the Vehicle for Reform

Heedless of the decay of the "movement" with the end of World War I, Progressivism left behind an all-American consensus concerning the dominant sociostructural components of the industrial society of the United States.

This genuine product of progressivist politics was, for one thing, a saturation of politics with the principles of industrial organization. The organization of social groups along the lines of function and efficiency gave to the political process a new structure; agriculture, labor, and capital became the constitutive units of American politics.

But what was decisive was the social breakthrough of a specific Progressive component: the bureaucracy as the vehicle for public reform.

The community, the state, and especially the nation were subjected to bureaucratization in an effort to coordinate the organized special interests cooperatively through a powerful central organization of the public interest.

The Order of Society and its Tensions

2011-11-09T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

The Order of Society, its Lasting Nature, and its Tensions

The Law's Inseparability from Society

We are faced with the following aporia¹:

On the one hand, the law is manifest phenomenally in a plurality of legal orders understood as aggregates of valid rules. These aggregates resist analysis under the categories of essence and individuation.

The obstacle proves to be the validity that pervades the legal order into every single rule. When analysis pursues validity into its consequences, however, the legal order disappears from existence altogether in the Zenonic paradox.

No assurances about a realm of normativity can confer ontological status on the legal order.

On the other hand, the result is at variance with the phenomena attesting the existence of "the law" in everyday parlance. In every country the statutes, the administrative orders, the administrative and judicial decisions form a literary corpus, increasing prodigiously under the legislative and administrative needs of modern industrial societies, to which no one will deny existence.

Machiavelli -pt 3

2011-10-31T01:00:00Z

Beneath the Southern Cross

Machiavelli

or The Demonic Confusion –Part 3

by Olavo de Carvalho

Olavo de Carvalho is a Brazilian philosopher and an exponent of Aristotle and Eric Voegelin. We present here in six parts his latest study, Maquiavel, ou a Confusão Demoníaca (Machiavelli, or a Demonic Confusion), in a special English translation made available to VoegelinView.

A Machiavelli to Suit Everyone

In Machiavelli’s politics there are elements of despotic immoralism, democratic republicanism, patriotism, cold description, and artistic idealization.¹Thus, all the various interpretations of his work have their share of truth.

Moreover, many illustrious readers in different times, though not producing radically new interpretations, sought to highlight a certain aspect of Machiavelli’s thought so as to somehow turn him into their own forerunner.

German nationalism, for example, in the footsteps of Hegel, easily assumed the form of a cult of the abstract idea of the State, and for this reason the historian Treitschke, an enthusiastic patriot, exalts the pioneer character of Machiavelli in discovering this idea. Machiavelli, he says, “was a powerful thinker, who cooperated with Martin Luther in the liberation of the State.”²

The Crisis of Americanism -pt 4

2011-11-03T01:00:00Z

The Crisis of Americanism–Part 4

by Juergen Gebhardt

The Progressive Attempt at Renewal

Charles Beard is an example of how little the intellectual revolt before the First World War was able to free itself from the ties to its own beginnings.

He developed his progressivist attack on the "American Way of Life," led by covetousness, greed, and acquisitiveness in his Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913), which revealed that among the members of the Constitutional Convention special interests were tied to decision making.

Similarly, Louis Boudin published his radical attack on judicial review as a device to block all social progress in a historical tract, Government by Judiciary (1911).

What is true for the critical literature of Progressivism applies even more to the Progressive political and social protest movement as well as to the earlier mass movement of Populism.

What is Society?

2011-11-02T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

What is Society?

Beyond Aristotelian Analysis

[Aristotle was plagued by such problems as whether a nation remained the same nation after a revolution]. He applied to the polis the categories of form and substance, assuming the constitution, the politeia, to be the form.

He had developed these categories when considering the natures of artifacts, organisms, and purposive action. Although suitable to these models, these categories created difficulties when applied to the polis.

What was the substance of a society, if the constitution was its form? Was it the citizens? If so, who was a citizen? Was everyone to be counted as a citizen who was a permanent resident on the territory of the polis? But then slaves and metics [resident foreigners] would be citizens, and that usage would be in conflict with preanalytical, everyday language.

Recovering Reality -pt 2

2011-10-26T01:00:00Z

Recovering Reality

An Interview with Eric Voegelin –Part 2

In 1973 Eric Voegelin was interviewed by Peter Cangelosi, associate editor of the New Orleans Review, and by John William Corrington, novelist, critic, poet, and former editor-at-large of the NOR. The interview originally appeared in the New Orleans Review, No.2 (1973) under the title “Philosophies of History: An Interview with Eric Voegelin.” In 2003 Bill McClain and Paul Caringella corrected several transcription uncertainties. It appears here with permission. We present it in two parts.

new orleans review: What about Christianity? What is the meaning of Christianity now, according to your thinking?

voegelin: I am not sure about its meaning, because I have my doubts as to whether Christianity exists at all.

I can say what the meaning is of the Gospels today, or, more specifically, of Matthew, Chapter 16–which is the perfect analysis of the existential tendency in relation to God, just as the fullness of Christ is. This is as true today as it was at the time the Gospel was written.

But the analysis in Matthew 16 is so buried at present in secondary doctrine and dogma that few people are now aware how grandiose an existential analysis is there. One could reactivate it by reading it.

Cabbalistic Cinema -pt 3

2011-10-10T01:00:00Z

Cabbalistic Cinema -Part 3

Robocop and the Aesthetics of Tragedy

by Eric G. Wilson

Eric Wilson is Professor of English at Wake Forest University. He has written a number of books, including the critically acclaimed Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy (2008). His most recent book is My Business Is to Create: Blake's Infinite Writing (2011). We offer here the 2nd Chapter from his Secret Cinema: Gnostic Vision in Film. New York: Continuum (2006). It appears with permission. This excerpt is presented in two sections of three parts each.

Tragedy à la James Joyce

Even if Blade Runner contains elements of tragedy and comedy, it ultimately offers a vision beyond suffering and laughter alike, a still point unmoved by the turning world. Can a tragic golem film achieve similar stillness?

In calling Robocop a tragedy, I do not have in mind Aristotle's Poetics; I am thinking of James Joyce's revision of the classic theory in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).

In the novel, Stephen Dedalus develops a theory of tragedy. Though he agrees with Aristotle's idea that tragedy raises terror and pity in the audience, he believes that the philosopher did not sufficiently define the terms. This vagueness has kept Aristotle's theory from demonstrating how tragic terror and pity affect the audience.

Voegelin in Munich -pt 3

2011-10-13T01:00:00Z

from The Northern Lights

Voegelin in Munich
-Part 3

by Barry Cooper and Jodi Bruhn

A Demanding Teacher

friedemann büttner: Peter Opitz was writing his habilitation on the process of the reformulation of order in China from the first reactions to the Europeans through various stages.

And we had discovered that there were very similar stages of intrusion and reaction in China and the Middle East. So, we held a joint seminar discussing the parallels of social and political change.

We were standing in the hall and talking, and Voegelin walked by and stopped and said, "What are you talking about?" And we said, "Well, it's about our seminar." "What's the seminar about?" And we told him. Then he said, "But you are not supposed to waste your time with seminars, you are supposed to write your theses."

Machiavelli -pt 2

2011-10-24T01:00:00Z

Beneath the Southern Cross

Machiavelli

or The Demonic Confusion –Part 2

by Olavo de Carvalho

Olavo de Carvalho is a Brazilian philosopher and an exponent of Aristotle and Eric Voegelin. We present here in six parts his latest study, Maquiavel, ou a Confusão Demoníaca (Machiavelli, or a Demonic Confusion), in a special English translation made available to VoegelinView.

The Scandal of Machiavelli

At the risk of jumping to conclusions before having enunciated the problem, it is necessary to point out immediately this astonishing phenomenon: one of the first philosophical icons of Modernity is an author that Modernity itself admits not to understand.

Once laid out in writing, his ideas were neither forgotten nor limited to generating other ideas: they transfigured themselves into aspirations and acts, they inspired coups and revolutions, they founded nations and political regimes; but in the sum total we do not understand them.

I ask the reader to keep this observation in mind, to which we will return in due time. For now, let us see how the confusion began.

A Night in Heidelberg -pt 1

2011-10-20T01:00:00Z

A Night in Heidelberg —Part 1

Letters from Voegelin on Heidegger

by Myron Moses Jackson

The Nazi Factor

In surviving letters we can often find those candid expressions that help us complete a portrait of the writer.

Such is the case with the publication of the thirtieth volume of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Selected Correspondence, 1950-1984 (2007).¹It presents aspects of Voegelin that will help us gain a fuller understanding of him as a man, a man who even at times resorted to what he termed a “peasant roughness.” ²

Of particular interest are the references to Martin Heidegger and his fundamental ontology. The letters contain Voegelin’s most detailed remarks assessing the influence and success of Heidegger’s work, which work is often seen to be marred by his early enthusiasm for Hitler’s regime.

Recovering Reality -pt 1

2011-10-19T01:00:00Z

Recovering Reality

An Interview with Eric Voegelin –Part 1

new orleans review: Dr. Voegelin, what would you consider to be your major contribution to human knowledge?

eric voegelin: Well, I have my doubts about the use of the term contribution. It smacks a bit of the progressivist conception that there is an advance in the history of mankind, and that everybody makes his contribution to it. Not that I doubt that there is any such continuity. But I doubt very much that my work can be categorized as a kind of contribution to anything.

The original meaning of science and of philosophy, of course, is that each has a purpose in itself and is not a contribution to anything at all. Purposes which are ultimate have no further purpose. They fall into the quite purposeless activity of exploring the structure of reality.

Machiavelli -pt 1

2011-10-17T01:00:00Z

Beneath the Southern Cross

Machiavelli

or The Demonic Confusion –Part 1

by Olavo de Carvalho

Olavo de Carvalho is a Brazilian philosopher and an exponent of Aristotle and Eric Voegelin. We present here in six parts his latest study, Maquiavel, ou a Confusão Demoníaca (Machiavelli, or a Demonic Confusion), in a special English translation made available to VoegelinView.

Introductory Note

This study was once a chapter of a work in progress I have called The Revolutionary Mind. The chapter grew too much and acquired an independent life. The same happened to several other chapters, which have impiously slashed the body of the mother-cell and, as a punishment, will be published in separate volumes, among which are Descartes and the Psychology of Doubt and Cognitive Paralaxis.

This Machiavelli began with the notes I prepared for three classes of a course on Political Philosophy delivered to the students of Public Administration at the Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná, Brazil, in 2004.

After giving the notes final touches in 2009, I had the occasion to read the essay of Sir Isaiah Berlin, The Originality of Machiavelli, ^[1] and to verify that the idea of searching the meaning of Machiavelli’s work through a historical review of its successive interpretations had an illustrious predecessor.

The Fatal Flaws in Positivism

2011-10-12T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

The Fatal Flaws in Positivism

Promoting All Facts to the Dignity of Science

As a consequence [of positivist assumptions], all propositions concerning facts will be promoted to the dignity of science, regardless of their relevance, as long as they result from a correct use of method.

Since the ocean of facts is infinite, a prodigious expansion of science in the sociological sense becomes possible, giving employment to scientistic technicians and leading to the fantastic accumulation of irrelevant knowledge through huge "research projects" whose most interesting feature is the quantifiable expense that has gone into their production.

The temptation is great to look more closely at these luxury flowers of late positivism and to add a few reflections on the garden of Academus in which they grow; but theoretical asceticism will not allow such horticultural pleasures.

What is the Law?

2011-10-05T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

What is the Law?

The Law as the Substance of Order

[One problem] will be singled out for present examination: the equivocal use of "the law" in the sense of valid rules made by organs of government and "the law" that somehow pervades the existence of man in society.

What is preserved in this pale equivocation of our everyday language is the profound insight, rarely to be found in contemporary legal theory, that "the law" is the substance of order in all realms of being.

As a matter of fact, the ancient civilizations usually have in their languages a term that signifies the ordering substance pervading the hierarchy of being, from God, through the world and society, to every single man.

Voegelin in Munich -pt 2

2011-10-06T01:00:00Z

from The Northern Lights

Voegelin in Munich
-Part 2

by Barry Cooper and Jodi Bruhn

The UnGerman Professor

tilo schabert: Voegelin also attracted some professors, people from other fields. There was a variety of people, ages, and origins in a very traditional lecture for the general public. He kept the attention of his audience throughout the semester. Usually people drop out, but with Voegelin there were very few dropouts.

Q. And this was because of his performance and his irony? Someone said they thought this was very American.

schabert: Yes and no. Certainly, it was American to the extent that Voegelin would speak without books or with only very few notes. As we now know from the archives, he had some kind of outline, but he very often extemporized and spoke about things that had just crossed his mind, so that you had the experience of someone sharing the wealth of his thoughts.

We All Worried

2011-09-19T01:00:00Z

{jcomments off}Chesterton (and the rest)

We All Worried

by Max Arnott

It is with some diffidence that we recall to our readership WILLIAM MAXWELL “BILL” GAINES, American publisher, bon vivant, eccentric, and founder of Mad Magazine. In the VoegelinView, a club where Plato rubs shoulders at the bar with Kant and Aquinas, Mr. Gaines seems a little lacking in . . . . gravitas. Yet the high is not possible without the low, and we would like to suggest that Gaines deserves remembering, praise, and thought.

W. M. Gaines was born in 1922, son of Max Gaines, inventor of the comic book (as opposed to the comic strip) and of EC Comics and Wonder Woman, for which he deserves the gratitude of all eleven-year-old boys.

In 1947, Gaines Jr inherited the company, which specialized at that time in comic book versions of Bible stories. Gaines sought new directions and moved into science fiction, war comics, and grand guignol. His most famous, or notorious, title was Tales From the Crypt. He also ran two satirical comic books. One was Panic, the other Mad.

Business boomed until 1954, when Fredric Wertham published Seduction of the Innocent, an alarmist tract about how comic books were Corrupting! Today’s! Youth! There was a public outcry, a Senate hearing, pressure toward censorship, a panic among publishers, and, by the end of it all, EC Comics was more or less bankrupt.

Cabbalistic Cinema -pt 2

2011-10-03T01:00:00Z

Cabbalistic Cinema -Part 2

Golem-Making in Blade Runner

by Eric G. Wilson

Between Miracle and Monstrosity

Self-conscious golem films–including Blade Runner, Robocop, and Making Mr. Right–vacillate between miracle and monstrosity: the golem figure as realization of spiritual potential, the same figure as violation of natural law.¹⁵

Though these films do not feature pure golems–beings made of dust and animated by a rabbi–they do feature androids that exhibit the same traits as their folkloric ancestors, artificial humans that vacillate between transcendence and laceration.

On the one hand, these versions of the golem suggest the anthropos, a harmony of matter and spirit. On the other, these same exemplars of the Cabbalistic humanoid–the Roy of Blade Runner, the Murphy of Robocop, the Ulysses of Making Mr. Right–intimate the worst conditions of the fallen world, the split between fate and freedom.

Voegelin in Munich -pt 1

2011-09-29T01:00:00Z

from The Northern Lights

Voegelin in Munich
-Part 1

by Barry Cooper and Jodi Bruhn

The Call To Munich

Q. Why did Voegelin found the institute in Munich?

peter j. opitz: About 1952 or '53, you can find letters where he expresses interest in going back to Europe. He was invited by [Max] Horkheimer and [Theodor] Adorno to give some lectures in Frankfurt, where a chair was open. Some of the professors there tried to get Voegelin to come, but he refused. Two years later, when the plans were drawn up to establish the Munich institute, he was willing to come. He wasn't the first choice, but had the strong support of Alois Dempf, author of Sacrum Imperium.

michael naumann: Did anyone ever tell you the story about how Adorno and Horkheimer tried to lure him to Frankfurt? It is an anecdote he told frequently. After the war, when they were rebuilding the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, he was invited to come. And he said that he went through Frankfurt, which was in ruins, and he was totally shaken by the sight.

Conversations II-Revelation, Community and Corrupt Scholarship

2011-09-28T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Revelation, Community, and Corrupt Scholarship
from Conversations

The following is the transcript of a discussion held at the Thomas More Institute on November 9, 1970. Participants in the conversation were: Eric Voegelin, Eric O'Connor, Charlotte Tansey, and Cathleen Going. This is the second of a five part discussion.

charlotte tansey: I don't quite see how to ask a question that doesn't come out of an overstatement.

eric voegelin: The questioning we are talking about now is a statement, not the fundamental openness of existence that can result in such metaphysical questions as the fundamental ones formulated by Leibniz: Why is there something and not nothing? Why is there something as it is and not different? There is a questioning that is inherent in existence. These are the fundamental questions of experience to which there is no answer.

cathleen going: To which there are answers?

voegelin: You can imagine answers, but there are no answers in the sense of verifiable statements. You can say, "God created the world; that's why it exists"; "He made it as it is; that's why it is thus." There you are.

eric o'connor: I see from your running all over the world to get a little further data that you're not satisfied with saying "that question has no answer; there's nothing more."

voegelin: There is something more.

Cabbaliistic Cinema -pt 1

2011-09-26T01:00:00Z

Cabbalistic Cinema -Part 1

The Fall of the Gnostic Anthropos

by Eric G. Wilson

The Perfection of Cary Grant

There are days when a person seeks the cinema not to flee the rough edges but to sand them smooth. In this mood, one does not yearn for an alternative realm blissfully foreign to the botched material plane; one hopes to experience this everyday world–composed of car wrecks and divorces, robins and dirt–in its finest light.

The moviegoer strides into the picture house for its vibrant strokes, its shimmering images of perfect forests, of men as graceful as Adam unfallen and women as alluring as Eve. He takes pleasure in the insouciance of George Clooney and the gorgeous yearning of Julia Roberts.

Witnessing these beautiful forms, he imagines the possibilities of his own life. He believes for an instant that he might meld into the hero and seduce the heroine, that in his better moments he resembles this man or that his wife in the right light looks like that woman.

The First Mystics? -pt 3

2011-09-22T01:00:00Z

The First Mystics?

Some Recent Accounts of Neolithic Shamanism–Part 3

by Barry Cooper

Professor Cooper has edited three volumes of the Collected Works. He has authored numerous essays and books relating to Voegelin, most recently, Beginning the Quest: Law and Politics in the Early Work of Eric Voegelin. This essay was delivered by Professor Cooper at the 2010 meeting of the Eric Voegelin Society and will be included in a forthcoming volume on the subject. This is the 3rd of 6 parts. Parts 4-6, which detail Professor Cooper's new work built on the foundational work recounted in Parts 1-3, will appear later this Fall.

Remember that it is not you who sustain the root;

the root sustains you. —Rom. 11:18

Symbolic Relics

“The oldest objects to have been found that were not tools and that therefore raised the question of their cultic purpose,” Archaeologist Marie König wrote, “were spheroids.” The oldest of these, she said, dated from the end of the Lower Paleolithic, some 300,000 years B.C.

If this dating is accurate, it belongs to the very earliest possible time, according to the fossil record, of human habitation, shortly after the separation of Homo erectus and Homo sapiens.

In any event, these spheroids were three or four inches in diameter and so could be held in the palm of the hand. That they were spheroids was of great significance to König. The spheroid, she said, “was the ideal shape (Gestalt) for the as yet undifferentiated fundamental concept (Grundbegriff) because alone it is the perfectly uniform figure” (Figur).

In addition, the visible cosmos, especially as made evident in the nocturnal motion of the planets and stars, made the sky look like a vault. So, König argued, the cosmos could be represented in this primordial way either from the outside, as a sphere, or from the inside, as a vault with the observer at the centre.

Conversations II-The Role of Dogma

2011-09-21T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

The Role of Dogma in History
from Conversations

The following is the transcript of a discussion held at the Thomas More Institute on November 9, 1970. Participants in the conversation were: Eric Voegelin, Eric O'Connor, Charlotte Tansey, and Cathleen Going. This is the 4th part of a five part discussion.

The Limits of Analysis

cathleen going: I wonder if the formulators of dogma are not really stating that which we would understand if we understood.

eric voegelin: No, they are quite clear about the solution of a philosophical problem, but the philosophical problem itself is fallaciously constructed.

I don't have that philosophical problem, therefore the answer is of comparatively little interest except as a historical phenomenon. If you have two natures you have to get them together in one person. But if you don't make assumptions about two natures it's no problem.

going: But also if you have God and man–and the man is monogenes theos–and if you're going to say one more thing and not just repeat that, what are you going to say?

Politics of Poetry -pt 2

2011-09-12T01:00:00Z

The Politics of Poetry —Part 2

by Ellis Sandoz

Professor Sandoz is the Editor of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. He has written many books and published many essays on the significance of Eric Voegelin's thought as well as on the political and spiritual foundations of the United States. This essay is taken from his The Politics of Truth and Other Untimely Essays, available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay orignally appeared as "The Politics of Poetry," Modern Age 34 (Fall 1991) and may be found online in the ISI journal, First Principles. This essay appears in two parts.

The Recovery of Truth in Eastern Europe

To a great degree, a recovery of Truth in the modes of classical philosophy and of Christian faith undergirds the repudiation of Marxist socialism in Eastern Europe. This is most evident in the role of the Roman Catholic Church in the rise of Solidarity in Poland, where the counter to communism is plainly rooted in the refusal of the Poles to abandon the faith.

Behind Wałesa and Solidarity looms a long tradition of underground education which includes Cracow's and Lublin's philosopher priest Karol Wojtyła, known to the world as Pope John Paul II, whose scholarly point of departure was a reworking of the phenomenology of Max Scheler, a starting pointing shared with Eric Voegelin.

According to Lech Wałesa, instead of force meeting countervailing force, the logic of action in Poland is infused by the consciousness of a third way: "the rebirth of man himself" through "conversion" with the promise not of violence but of hope for reconciliation and community.¹¹

The First Mystics? -pt 2

2011-09-15T01:00:00Z

The First Mystics?

Some Recent Accounts of Neolithic Shamanism–Part 2

by Barry Cooper

Remember that it is not you who sustain the root;

the root sustains you. —Rom. 11:18

Symbolizing Pre-Imperial Cosmological Order

In 1940, when Voegelin wrote the first introduction of the History of Political Ideas, Western history was not usually considered to have begun with Assyria and Egypt but with Homer or even with later Greek thinkers. Voegelin was already pushing the historical horizon of political science well into the area covered by the Altertumswissenschaft of Eduard Meyer. Indeed, his reference to “early ahistoric phases” may have pushed beyond what even Meyer might have considered proper.

Notice as well that, in principle, the creation of a political cosmion from the disorder of passions and against external threats was considered a cosmic analogy that need not, in principle, be limited by any particular set of political institutions.

The point of the cosmion, Voegelin stressed, was to provide a shelter within which meaning may flourish.

Conversations II-Explaining the Universe with Physics

2011-09-14T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Explaining the Universe with Physics
from Conversations

The following is the transcript of a discussion held at the Thomas More Institute on November 9, 1970. Participants in the conversation were: Eric Voegelin, Eric O'Connor, Charlotte Tansey, and Cathleen Going. This is the second of a five part discussion.

charlotte tansey: You don't think there are any new spatial experiences?

eric voegelin: You have the problem that if one tries to construct a "physical universe" out of the experience of physics, that doesn't work. One cannot construct a physical universe. I've made a study of that problem in modern physics and I have shown, in the manner of the Kantian aporias, that any attempt to construct the universe on the basis either of Newtonian or of Einsteinian conceptions of time and space runs into logical aporias.

eric o'connor: Basically why?

Proust and the Truth of the Novel -pt 3

2011-05-30T01:00:00Z

The Truth of the Novel -Part 3

Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu

by Charles Embry

Charles Embry is Professor Emeritus of Political Philosophy at Texas A&M-Commerce. The essay is taken from a new collection of essays he has edited entitled Voegelinian Readings of Modern Literature (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011). This essay is presented in three parts and appears with permission.

Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature. Life in this sense dwells within all ordinary people as much as in the artist.
—Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again

The Evocation of Lost Time (concluded)

In "the meditation" of Time Regained, Marcel realizes that the avalanche of impressions outside the Guermantes mansion and in the library–stumbling on stones, the tinkle of a spoon on china, the touch of a napkin to the lips, the sound of water running in the pipes, the sight of George Sand's François le Champi among the prince's books–have resurrected "the timeless man within me."

Moved to discover the cause of his happiness and the certainty that accompanied it, he writes:

The truth surely was that the being within me which had enjoyed these impressions had enjoyed them because . . . in some way they were extra-temporal and this being made its appearance only when . . . it was likely to find itself in the one and only medium in which it could exist and enjoy the essence of things, that is to say, outside time. This explained why it was that my anxiety on the subject of my death had ceased at the moment when I had unconsciously recognised the taste of the little madeleine, since the being which at that moment I had been was an extra-temporal being, and therefore unalarmed by the vicissitudes of the future.⁵²

Conversations II-Deformations in History

2011-09-07T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Deformations in History
from Conversations

The following is the transcript of a discussion held at the Thomas More Institute on November 9, 1970.Participants in the conversation were: Eric Voegelin, Eric O'Connor, Charlotte Tansey, and Cathleen Going. This is the second of a five part discussion.

eric voegelin : I have been doing other things also. In "Gospel and Culture" I worked on certain deformations of existence; for instance, the present revolutionary deformations—

eric o'connor: I'm not sure what you mean by "the present revolutionary deformations."

voegelin: In classic philosophy and Christianity, the solution to the sorrows of man—death and life and so on—are answered through turning toward God, the periagoge in the Platonic sense, the turning around. Deformations occur if you refuse to turn around and persist in a state of alienation.

The First Mystics? -pt 1

2011-09-08T01:00:00Z

The First Mystics?

Some Recent Accounts of Neolithic Shamanism–Part 1

by Barry Cooper

Remember that it is not you who sustain the root;

the root sustains you. —Rom. 11:18

Introduction: Voegelin, Mysticism and the Stone Age

Before discussing the evidence for shamanism in the late or Upper Paleolithic period (50,000 to 10,000 years B.C.) and its significance for political science, I would like to make two preliminary points.

The first concerns the meaning of Voegelin’s use of the term “mysticism” and why it can, with caution, be applied to shamanism. The second concerns the issue of why political scientists might be interested in prehistoric–or as we now say, "early historic"–periods, which include both the late Paleolithic (the focus of this paper) and the Neolithic (10,000 to 5,000 years B.C.).

Voegelin became interested in prehistory during the late 1960s, though arguably his concern with human symbolism and consciousness, which would include prehistoric consciousness, began forty years earlier.

Conversations II-Prehistoric Time

2011-08-31T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Prehistoric Time
from Conversations

The following is the transcript of a discussion held at the Thomas More Institute on November 9, 1970. Participants in the conversation were: Eric Voegelin, Eric O'Connor, Charlotte Tansey, and Cathleen Going. The conversation begins with questions regarding the unfinished state of his Order and History.

eric voegelin: What I have to do now is get all the analysis of concrete empirical material–which is horribly voluminous–into that fourth volume so that I have the basis for talking about these matters theoretically in the next volume.

eric o'connor: So the fourth volume will contain a good deal of the empirical matter–

voegelin: –and bring it to a close and make selections for the ecumenic empires, for Christianity, and for modernity.

o'connor: Then your search for when a symbol shows itself in history isn't vitiated but modified? What is the modification? (It is extremely interesting to determine when something appears.)

voegelin: I can give you examples of what I've been doing on my present trip.

I started in Rome with Mario Praz, the best man on symbolism. (He is bringing out a new volume this year.) The Italians during the last four or five years have done most of the work on the development of Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, alchemy–because that was mostly an Italian phenomenon.

Politics of Poetry -pt 1

2011-09-05T01:00:00Z

The Politics of Poetry —Part 1

by Ellis Sandoz

Autopsy of an Evil Empire

Let us be done with muddling explanations for the collapse of socialism and admit that it fell because the poetry of personal liberty makes a sweeter, truer song.

It is, indeed, spirit and not only bread that counts in the long run, and thus the future of socialism fades away into deserved oblivion. Better poetry wins the hearts of men, always did, always will. In other words, Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn have been proved right–or, at least half-right.

I leave it to others to recount details of the merely social, economic, military, and political dimensions of the collapse and what it portends. Allow me to reflect on the human essentials for a few pages.

Camus on St. Augustine -pt 2

2011-05-26T01:00:00Z

St. Augustine

The Second Revelation—Part I

(concluded)

by Albert Camus

French thinker Albert Camus (1913-1960) was a major critic of the excesses of modernity in the post World War II era. This excerpt is taken from his book, Christian Metaphysics and Neoplantonism, which has been translated into English by Professor Ronald D. Srigley. Professor Srigley's newest book is Albert Camus' Critique of Modernity (2011). This excerpt appears with the permission of the publisher, the University of Missouri Press.

"[Sartre is] not interesting. He's not to be compared with Albert Camus; HE was a thinker!" —Eric Voegelin "In Search of the Ground" CW Vol 11

Hellenism and Christianity in St. Augustine (concluded)

The Word and the Flesh: The Trinity. We have grasped in reality what in Saint Augustine is specifically Christian. If we think back to Plotinian metaphysics, we will see the infinite distance that separates the two attitudes. Thus, at least we will not be misled by the frequent parallels between the two, and we will know to make allowances for Saint Augustine's Christianity in his Neoplatonism.

As we have seen, what he has drawn from the Platonic authors is a certain conception of the Word. But his role was to include Christ in this conception and from there to develop it into the Word made Flesh of the fourth Gospel.

We must therefore follow closely to understand what Saint Augustine has been able to ask of Neoplatonism. We will then show how these borrowed conceptions were transformed by the doctrine of the Incarnation.

Speaking a Piece (Intro)

2011-05-30T01:00:00Z

{jcomments off}Chesterton (and the rest)

Speaking a Piece

by Max Arnott

But of bliss and glad life there is little to be said before it ends . . . only when they are in peril or broken forever do they pass into song.
—J.R.R. Tolkien.

There is a poem, written in the early part of the last century by Carolyn Wells, which is in the nature of a cultural time machine.

Please follow this link to see the poem in its proper place in this essay.

This is a parody of something long gone, that great Victorian tradition of public recitation of poetry. Recitation, not reading, and recitation of poems that were most of the time familiar to the audience, not new works. The little boy who is reciting, finding his mind blank, improvises with a cento of scraps from well known (to his audience) popular poetic favourites. We who have lost this tradition may find the sources mysterious.

Public recitation is something we don’t do very much and it raises the question: what did the Victorians want out of poetry?

Classic Philosophy and the Climate of Opinion

2011-08-24T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Classic Philosophy
and the Climate of Opinion

The effort of the Greeks to arrive at an understanding of their humanity has culminated in the Platonic-Aristotelian creation of philosophy as the science of the nature of man. Even more than with the Sophistic of their times the results are in conflict with the contemporary climate of opinion. I shall enumerate some principal points of disagreement:

1. Classic : There is a nature of man, a definite structure of existence that puts limits on perfectibility.

Modern : The nature of man can be changed, either through historical evolution or through revolutionary action, so that a perfect realm of freedom can be established in history.

2. Classic : Philosophy is the endeavor to advance from opinion (doxa) about the order of man and society to science (episteme); the philosopher is not a philodoxer.

Modern : No science in such matters is possible, only opinion; everybody is entitled to his opinions; we have a pluralist society.

Salvation in the Post-Christian Age

2011-08-17T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Salvation in the Post-Christian Age

The eighteenth-century revolt, enacted in the name of science and reason against the incubus of doctrinaire theology and metaphysics, was certainly an "epoch," and the unfolding of its momentum up to the present definitely marks an "age" in history.

As far as the formula "post-Christian age" expresses a revolutionary consciousness of epoch, we can make sense of it.

Moreover, the consummation of the revolt through social predominance of its doctrine may well infuse latter-day conformists with a warm glow that theirs is the epoch which in fact was that of the eighteenth century.

Inasmuch as the revolt against doctrinaire Christianity has been remarkably successful in our society, there are solid reasons to speak of the age as "post-Christian." As soon, however, as the realistic meaning of the formula is brought out, the limits to its sense as well as to the age it denotes becomes visible.

Absolute Space and Relativity -pt 6

2011-08-10T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Absolute Space and Relativity
–Part 6

The Pathos of Science and the Spiritual Eunuchs

We have spoken metaphorically of the cancerous growth of the rational-utilitarian segment in modern civilization. We now must go beyond the metaphor and indicate the concrete sentiments and ideas that determine this growth in its formative stage.

The sudden and disproportionate expansion of one single element in a total structure at the expense of other elements presupposes a serious disturbance of a previously existing balance.

We have amply discussed the nature of the disturbance already under such titles as the disorientation of existence through weakening or loss of faith, and we have seen the disturbance expressing itself in such symptoms as Locke's "primitivization" of intellectual culture.

The sentiments and attitudes that appeared on the occasion of the discussion of the problem of absolute space are further specific symptoms of primitivization in the wake of a general existential disorientation.

The absolutism of a Galileo or a Newton cannot be labeled and shelved as a theoretical mistake to be corrected in the future.

Absolute Space and Relativity -pt 5

2011-08-03T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Absolute Space and Relativity
–Part 5

Science, Power, and Magic

The further development of the problem of relativity from Mach to Einstein belongs in the history of science; it is not our concern in a history of political ideas. We can proceed now to an appraisal of the results of our analysis, and we shall begin this appraisal with a few reflections on the relation between power and the advancement of science. These general reflections will then be followed by a description of the pattern of ideas that emerges from our analysis.

The advancement of the science for which Newton is the great, representative genius has profoundly affected the political and economic structure of the Western world.

Let us list the principal features of this change: the ramification of science into technology; the industrialization of production; the increase of population; the higher population capacity of an industrialized economy; the transformation of an agricultural into an urban society.

Then there is the rise of new social groups, that is, of the industrial proletariat, white-collar employees, and an intellectual proletariat; the concentration of wealth and the rise of the managerial class; the ever increasing numbers of men who depend for their economic existence on decisions beyond their influence.

Absolute Space and Relativity -pt 4

2011-07-27T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Absolute Space and Relativity
–Part 4

Leibniz Solves the Problem in Principle

The differentiation of the problem [of absolute space] was, on principle, achieved by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. We have reflected already on his general relativistic position; we have now to add the principal points of his differentiating analysis.

First of all, he located the crucial point of the difficulty by differentiating between geometry and phoronomy ^FN on the one side and mechanics on the other. The relativity of position and motion is indisputable as long as we deal with them as "purely mathematical" problems.

Nature, however, does not offer the spectacle of abstractly shoving bodies that change their relative positions chaotically. It offers the spectacle of a calculable order in the relative movements. This order in the movements cannot be explained within the realm of geometry. For the purpose of its interpretation we have to go beyond the purely mathematical principles and introduce a "metaphysical" principle. "Whether we call this principle Form, or Entelechy, or Force, is irrelevant as long as we remember that only the notion of forces will express it intelligibly."⁶⁵

Absolute Space and Relativity -pt 3

2011-07-20T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Absolute Space and Relativity
–Part 3

Berkeley's Psychological Criticism of Newton

The genius of Newton lay in the field of mathematics and physics. When he let his thought wander beyond this province, the results were of doubtful quality.

The Principia was the great cornerstone for the edifice of science that was to be erected in the following centuries, but the definitions and theoretical excursions in the scholia could only arouse the vehement criticism of philosophers.

In particular Newton exposed himself to criticism with his proud declaration of autonomy for the new science.

Physics could go its course, as it actually did, conscientiously applying the well-established methods to observed phenomena, without regard for the debates of metaphysicians. The Scholium Generale had announced the precept hypotheses non fingo: "whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy."

The assumption of absolute space was a glaring contradiction to this declaration; certainly this fundamental "hypothesis" was not deduced from the phenomena.

Absolute Space and Relativity -pt 2

2011-07-13T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Absolute Space and Relativity
–Part 2

Newton's Assumption of Absolute Space

On occasion of Galileo's conflict with the Inquisition the issue of absolutism versus relativity became clear as far as the general problems of the truth of science and of the truth of speculation and religious symbolization are concerned.

These general problems were formidable. Nevertheless, they might have been cleared up quickly, and they were cleared up in principle by Leibniz.

The obstacle to a rapid advancement toward a theory of relativity in physics arose from the internal problems of the new science. This obstacle was present already in Galileo's theory of motion, but it became fully visible only with Newton's formulation of the general law of gravitation and the consequent elaboration of a general theory of physics in the Principia Mathematica.⁴⁸

Absolute Space and Relativity -pt 1

2011-07-06T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Absolute Space and Relativity
–Part 1

Mathematical Physics and Ontology

The loss of the concrete is substantially a spiritual disease. With the thinning out of faith into a reverential attitude toward symbols, the meaning of the symbols themselves is thinned out to propositions the truth of which has to be demonstrated by reason.

As a residuum of reality there remains only the structure and content of consciousness, that is, of a self no longer open toward transcendental reality. This general pneumo-pathological state, which in itself may occur and has occurred in other periods of history, receives its specific coloration as a result of the coincident rise of mathematical physics.

A new world-filling reality, emerging from Galilean and Cartesian physics and systematized in Newtonian mechanics, is ready to substitute for God and his creation. The new science, on principle, is a science only of phenomenal nature; that the edifice of science could assume ontological functions is a result of the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness."

The Schismatic Nations -pt 2

2011-06-29T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

The Schismatic Nations –Part 2

The Spiritual Closure of the National Cosmion (concluded)

The German Case

The German situation is complicated by the presence of three longstanding and interrelated tensions that enter into the history of the critical period as determining factors. The first is the tension between Catholicism and Protestantism, both entrenched regionally in the leading principalities in such strength that neither can form the nation to the exclusion of the other.

The second is the tension between the imperial tradition and the plurality of territorial states, on the one hand, and the trend toward national unification and closure, in analogy to the schismatic nations of the West, on the other.

The third is the tension between the colonial East and the old civilization of the South and West, which is precariously solved in the critical period by national unification under the leadership of Prussia.

From this initial situation a development is to be expected that will differ widely from the French and English. The absence of national political institutions and the regional division of religions made impossible a national revolution of reason as the French.

The Schismatic Nations -pt 1

2011-06-22T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

The Schismatic Nations –Part 1

A Climate Conducive to Nationalism

The revolutionary movement of the eighteenth century broke with the idea of the unity of mankind in the spirit of Christ. [In the previous chapter on apostasy we traced the transition from the Christian transcendental universalism of spirit to the intramundane universalism of reason, on the occasion of the great dialogue on universal history between Bossuet and Voltaire.]

In the work of Voltaire, the intramundane sentiment found its expression in two principal assumptions: first, in the assumption of a common sense morality, motivated by the sentiments of humanity and compassion and guided by social usefulness as the criterion of right conduct; and second, in the assumption that the methods of science,

which had proved their value in the creation of Newtonian physics, were the only methods leading to valid knowledge.

The establishment of morality and knowledge on the new level was accompanied by the atrophy of Christian transcendental experiences. We considered as well Voltaire's spiritual obscurantism, which expressed itself negatively in the loss of cognition by faith and positively in attack on the symbols of faith that had become opaque as a consequence of the loss of the Cognitio fidei.

Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation

2011-06-15T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation

The Theory and Practice of Indulgences

[Among the perverse practices of Luther's time], perhaps the most dangerous was the exploitation of indulgences, which actually touched off the storm of 1517 [Luther's 95 Theses].

The practice of indulgence as such was of long standing in the Church. It is meant to be a remission of the temporal punishment that is imposed by the Church authority as an outward sign of true contrition. Such remissions of sometimes very onerous punishments were granted as early as the seventh century; and the commutation into money fines conformed frequently to the rules of Wergeld as remission for punishments according to Roman law.

The custom was supplemented by the doctrine of the thesaurus meritorum, first developed by Alexander of Hales in the thirteenth century, which is the doctrine of an accumulation of "superfluous" expiation through the saints in the "Treasure of the Church." Up to this point, the system of indulgence was no more than a concession of the Church to a civilizational environment that could hardly have become Christianized in the broad masses if the rigors of punishment of the early Church had been retained.^FN

The abuse began with the popular misunderstanding of indulgence as a remission, not only of temporal punishment but also of guilt; and in particular with the misunderstanding of plenary indulgences as a remission even of future guilt. Indulgences, especially when coming from Rome, could popularly be understood as entrance tickets to Heaven.

English Quest for the Concrete -pt 5

2011-06-08T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

The English Quest for the Concrete

— Part 5

This excerpt is taken from the The History of Political Ideas, Volume VI (CW vol 24) and is presented here in five parts.This excerpt considers the replacement of universal Christianity by what Voegelin calls "schismatic political-religious bodies;" with his emphasis on the English developments, particularly the developments in philosophy and physics stemming from the religious displacement.

The Loss of the Concrete (continued)

Locke's "Primitivization"

We may resume now the problem of "primitivization." Locke's civilizational destruction is not idiosyncratic or arbitrary. It is not incidental to his ecclesiastical politics but an instrumental part in his program of restoring spiritual authority.

The question now arises as to whether the spiritual authority of Christianity can be restored by the Lockean method. And if, as we think, the means is not adequate for reaching the end, what is the end that actually will be reached if this means is brought into play?

In reflecting on these questions we must, first of all, be clear that the authority of the spirit does not disappear from the world if its institutionalization in a historical society breaks down. The spirit bloweth where it listeth, and if it does not blow through the soul of men in community it may still blow through the soul in solitude.

English Quest for the Concrete -pt 4

2011-05-25T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

The English Quest for the Concrete

— Part 4

The Loss of the Concrete (continued)

Locke's Reason

The last step [of something] is taken by Locke in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. "Reason is natural revelation, whereby the Father of Light and fountain of all knowledge, communicates to mankind that portion of truth which he has laid within the reach of their natural faculties."

This part of the passage sounds comparatively harmless, so harmless that in isolation it could perhaps be taken as Thomistic in meaning.

The sequel is less harmless:

Revelation is natural reason enlarged by a new set of discoveries communicated by God immediately, which Reason vouches the truth of, by the testimony and proofs it gives that they come from God. So that he that takes away Reason to make a way for Revelation, puts out the light of both, and does much the same as if he would persuade a man to put out his eyes, the better to receive the remote light of an invisible star by a telescope.

Now, indeed, Reason is made the judge of the truth of Revelation. "Whatsoever God hath revealed is certainly true. No doubt can be made of it. But whether it be a Divine Revelation or no, Reason must judge, which can never permit the mind to reject a greater evidence for that which is less evident, or prefer less certainty to greater."

The bond of faith is broken and the experiences that give meaning to the symbols of myth and religion are lost.

Proust and the Truth of the Novel -pt 2

2011-05-27T01:00:00Z

The Truth of the Novel -Part 2

Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu

by Charles Embry

The Evocation of Lost Time (part 1)

Time–both uppercase and lowercase–as the controlling metaphor of À la recherche du temps perdu, symbolizes simultaneously Time that is timeless and time that passes.

In particular moments, scattered throughout the novel and collected into an agglomeration for meditation in the final volume, Time as the timeless intersects with the episodes of time passing that are being filled up by the many and varied activities that divert Marcel from the moments of the intersection of the two. Until the avalanche of remembrances and resurrections in the last volume, these activities have constituted the sum total of Marcel's life or what he thinks of as his life.

I contend that Time regained is equivalent to what Voegelin calls "the primary experience of the cosmos."

The proof of Proust is in the reading, and you, my reader, in order to be persuaded to the truth of my assertion, must commit to following the Socratic method that advises, Let us look and see if this is not the case.

Voegelin at Baton Rouge -pt 6

2011-05-16T01:00:00Z

from The Northern Lights

Voegelin at Baton Rouge
-Part 6

by Barry Cooper and Jodi Bruhn

Life in America in the '40s and '50s

Q. And what about what he didn't have here that he had had in Germany or Austria? Did he ever speak of European academic life?

jo scurria: I never heard him mention anything. In fact, it was the longest time before I found out that he was Austrian, because it just never came up. I always just assumed that he was German. I never knew anything about his life previous to LSU. He never talked about it with students, either.

Certainly in some of the correspondence there is a great sense of gratitude to the United States for giving him a place to live and supporting him, and so on. And he was happy to teach American Government for the same reason.

scurria: Well, everybody [in the department] had to teach American Government. But he said that he enjoyed it, because he obviously wanted to learn about America.

Proust and the Truth of the Novel -pt 1

2011-05-23T01:00:00Z

The Truth of the Novel -Part 1

Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu

by Charles Embry

The Approach to Proust

I approach the great novel, as I approach all great novels, simply as a lover of literature and a philosopher, that is, as a lover of wisdom. I lay great stress upon the word "lover," and I pretend neither to finality nor comprehensiveness in what I have to say about any novel, but especially about À la recherche du temps perdu, (In Search of Lost Time).¹

I assume this stance intentionally from the conviction that all great literature can be read, understood, and enjoyed by ordinary human beings who love stories because the stories that have been vouchsafed us by the great writers arise from that "place" and timelessly dwell in that "place" where we all live: the embodied consciousness of a human being.

Camus on St. Augustine -pt 1

2011-05-19T01:00:00Z

St. Augustine

The Second Revelation —Part I

by Albert Camus

"[Sartre is] not interesting. He's not to be compared with Albert Camus; HE was a thinker!" —Eric Voegelin "In Search of the Ground" CW Vol 11

The Psychological Experience of St. Augustine

Before demonstrating how the evolution that we have attempted to retrace finds in Augustinianism one of its most admirable formulas, it is necessary for us to consider the Neoplatonism of Saint Augustine.

Let us first state the problem: the new Platonic philosophy has exercised its influence over the great doctor. He cites several texts of the Enneads.¹ We can compare a certain number of Augustinian texts and Plotinian thoughts.

The most suggestive in this regard concern the nature of God. On God's ineffability: Sermon 117, 5; De civitate Dei IX, 16 with Enneads VI, 9, 5; De Trinitate, VIII, 2 and XV, 5 with Enneads V, 3, 13; on his eternity: Confessions XI, 13 and Enneads III, 6, 7; on his ubiquity: Sermon 277, 13 and 18 with Enneads VI, 4, 2; on his spirituality: De civitate Dei XIII, 5 and Enneads VI, 8, 11.

From this influence some have been able to draw excessive conclusions.² However, Saint Augustine's testimony is sufficiently explicit. And the celebrated passage of the Confessions on the "books of the Platonists" gives us a very clear account of the question.

English Quest for the Concrete -pt 3

2011-05-18T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

The English Quest for the Concrete

— Part 3

The Loss of the Concrete

[The suicidal orgy of drinking that led to the early deaths of many] indicates the degree to which English existence had lost its meaning in this period of material prosperity, and the sermons of Warburton are a representative example of the intellectual and moral decline that had followed the great age of Puritanism in the Church of England. The two symptoms characterize the amplitude of the loss of the concrete to which we now turn.

The concrete is lost with regard to the fundamental orientation of existence through faith, and it is lost with regard to the system of symbols and concepts by which the orientation of existence is expressed.

The two losses are related to each other because the loss of orientation through faith prevents the creation and clarification of symbols, and at the same time the perversion of meaning in the realm of symbols and concepts prevents the return to the orienting experiences.

The devastation is far-reaching. The experiences in which meaning originates are smothered, and the symbols by which meaning is expressed are destroyed so thoroughly that it is impossible to give an account of the disorientation in terms of the literary documents of the period. Attempting to present the contents of the works of this period would be an attempt at reproducing a chaos.

Voegelin on the Christian Imperium in the Middle Ages -pt 4

2011-05-12T01:00:00Z

Eric Voegelin on the Christian Imperium in the Middle Ages –part 4

by Jeffrey C. Herndon

Jeffrey C. Herndon is Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M University, Commerce, and is the author of Eric Voegelin and the Problem of Christian Political Order, which appears in the Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy, University of Missouri Press, 2007, and from which this excerpt is taken. It is presented here in four parts.

Joachim and the New Age

The movement [toward unmediated spirituality] reached its peak in the speculation of Joachim of Flora (d. 1202) and his new construction of immanent Christian history.

Prefigured by the ideas advanced by the Norman Anonymous, Joachim of Flora's influential history of the three realms would result in the appearance of the symbolic "Third Realm" that "has remained ever since a basic category of Western speculation, reappearing when a rising force wished to express its claim to dominance of the age" (CW 20:111).

Joachim, according to Voegelin, represents "the end of an evolution" away from the understanding of the Augustinian construction of history (CW 20:127).

The impetus for the evolutionary change was the existence of the religious orders that began to infuse European life with a new religious sentiment and a "feeling that the rise of the orders was symptomatic of progressive spirituality inaugurating a new phase of Christian life."

Lonergan and Historiography pt 5 - History of Philosophy

2011-04-25T01:00:00Z

Lonergan and Historiography

–part 5 History of Philosophy

by Thomas J. McPartland

Thomas McPartland is Professor and Chairman of the Whitney Young School of Honors and Liberal Studies at Kentucky State University in Frankfort.This exposition based on the thought of Bernard Lonergan is taken from Chapter 3 of his latest book, Lonergan and Historiography: The Epistemological Philosophy of History, which appears in the Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy, 2010,University of Missouri Press. This excerpt is presented in five parts.

What is History of Philosophy?

There is, as we have implied in our discussion, a close link between intellectual history and the history of philosophy.

The kind of interpretation we have been gleaning from Bernard Lonergan's ideas achieves lucid formulation in A. O. Lovejoy's observation that "in the history of philosophy is to be found the common seed plot, the locus of initial manifestations in writing, of the greater number of the more fundamental and pervasive ideas, and especially of the controlling preconceptions, which manifest themselves in other regions of intellectual history."⁸⁵

And is not intellectual history–at least an authentic intellectual history, which is faithful to the desire to know–philosophy in its existential sense, which is the love of wisdom? Surely it is.

Yet, despite the intimate connection between intellectual history and the history of philosophy, the two are distinct.

English Quest for the Concrete -pt 2

2011-05-11T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

The English Quest for the Concrete

— Part 2

Regaining Firm Ground (concluded)

How a Rump Churchman Defended the Status Quo

The peculiar process of a free constitution emerging from the totalitarian devastation of a nation has found its reflection in the political thought of the age.

As a representative example of the manner in which a member of the rump church would come to grips with this problem we select the sermons delivered by William Warburton, the later bishop of Gloucester, in Lincoln's Inn, on occasion of the Scotch Rebellion of 1745-1746.⁷

Warburton starts from a preestablished harmony between Christianity and constitutional government: faith prescribes the rules of civil justice, and a free and equal government favors the profession of the truth. This harmony has become actuality in England, because the civil constitution leaves the consciences free and protects their liberty, and the religious constitution has more than once supported the rights of citizens when they were threatened by arbitrary and illegal power.

Opposed to this harmony of light is the harmony of the powers of darkness, that is, of Superstition and Despotism. Concretely, the powers of darkness are Popery and the Arbitrary Power of the Stuarts.

Voegelin at Baton Rouge -pt 5

2011-05-09T01:00:00Z

from The Northern Lights

Voegelin at Baton Rouge
-Part 5

by Barry Cooper and Jodi Bruhn

Voegelin and Leo Strauss: Mutual Respect

Q. In the letters between Voegelin and Strauss, there are many statements about how they're going to meet in Chicago, or going to meet in New York. Did they ever?

lissy voegelin: Oh yes. I don't remember how many times, but I suppose it wasn't very often.

And they got along quite well?

l. voegelin: Oh yes.

ernest j. walters: I had talked with Voegelin about graduate work, and Voegelin recommended that I study with Strauss. He simply said, "If you want to study political philosophy, there's only one person to study with, and that's Leo Strauss."

Now, this would have been late '49, early '50. Some years later, Voegelin came to Chicago. I think it was under the auspices of the Catholic group, the Newman Club. I went to hear that lecture, and afterward, they had a reception. I chatted briefly with Voegelin and with Mrs. Voegelin, but I don't think Voegelin recognized me at first.

Voegelin on the Christian Imperium in the Middle Ages -pt 3

2011-05-05T01:00:00Z

Eric Voegelin on the Christian Imperium in the Middle Ages –part 3

by Jeffrey C. Herndon

The Investiture Controversy and
the Contraction of Reality

The dispute that began in the conflict between Gregory VII (d. 1085) and Henry IV (d. 1108) known as the Investiture Controversy (1000-1122) is notable for Voegelin because it illustrates some of the inherent tensions in the West and pointed in the direction that events would take.

Voegelin’s interpretation of the Investiture Controversy is based on the perception that all too often in history, "the spectacular tends to obscure the essential."

English Quest for the Concrete -pt 1

2011-05-04T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

The English Quest for the Concrete

— Part 1

Introduction: The Growth of European Nationalism

[In an earlier chapter we characterized the structure of political ideas in the age of Revolution under its most general aspect, that is, the breakdown of Western Christianity and the emergence of the national communities as schismatic politico-religious bodies.]

The development of political ideas after 1700 becomes increasingly parochial in the sense that problems that are specific to the several national communities are misunderstood as problems of universal import, and the ideas advanced for their solution are misunderstood as a political theory of general validity.

This characterization, however, which is correct for the general structure of ideas, will obviously not exhaust the problems of the age. As soon as we descend to the more concrete levels of the problems, an infinity of complications arises owing to the survival of the general Western tradition in the particular national histories, as well as to the interaction among ideas that arise within the national regions.

The "breakdown" of Western Christianity does not mean that it disappears without a trace. Rather it means the refraction and gradual transformation of the common Christian tradition within the national areas.

Voegelin at Baton Rouge -pt 4

2011-05-02T01:00:00Z

from The Northern Lights

Voegelin at Baton Rouge
-Part 4

by Barry Cooper and Jodi Bruhn

Teaching Law Students

robert pascal: I had been able to convince the dean of the law school and some of the senior colleagues that we should have a course in the philosophy of law in the very first year of law school, and also a course in elementary legal science–one covering both the Romanist tradition and the Anglo-American.

I proposed that I teach the legal science part and that Voegelin teach the course in jurisprudence, even though he was not a member of the law faculty. So, we worked on that. And until Voegelin left, I think that we had the very best introductory law program in the United States.

Voegelin's course is written up to some extent in his volume The Nature of the Law. I had suggested that perhaps jurisprudence should be offered first, in the fall semester, and my course in the spring semester, but Voegelin wanted to reverse that. He wanted the students to have some basic knowledge of the legal order before tackling the problem of its philosophy. So, that is how that occurred.

I must tell you that I didn't have anything to do with dictating the content of Voegelin's course–you understand that very well. Nor did he attempt in any way to tell me how I should teach mine. We worked together in the sense that we were in constant communication, knew what the other one was doing.

Voegelin on the Christian Imperium in the Middle Ages -pt 2

2011-04-28T01:00:00Z

Eric Voegelin on the Christian Imperium in the Middle Ages –part 2

by Jeffrey C. Herndon

Construction of the Imperium (concluded)

Of course, the new evocation took centuries to fully materialize until it was realized and institutionalized with the coronation of Charlemagne (d. 814) in 800–and even then it would never reach the status of completeness. With the understanding that God was the partner in the destiny of the church, the "slow ripening" of the "situation that was consummated in the coronation of Charlemagne" was understood by Voegelin "in the symbolism of the time" as

decisions of God. For the contemporaries of the coronation, the transfer of the empire was neither an act of the pope, nor an act of the Frankish king, nor an act of the people of Rome, but an act of God. Divine providence had shown its intentions through the course that it let history take, and the acts of man could do nothing but accept the divine decision (CW 20:52).

It was within the scope of the new evocation that the entity properly understood as "Europe" came to be. Christopher Dawson observes, "It was only in so far as the different peoples of the West were incorporated in the spiritual community of Christendom that they acquired a common culture. It is this, above all, that distinguishes the Western development from that of the other great world civilizations."⁴

Voegelin notes the irony of the situation: "the papacy and the Frankish monarchy had developed in directions that, on the surface at least, seemed to contradict the Gelasian declaration on separation of powers" (CW 20:59-60).

Human Dignity and Radical Stupidity

2011-04-27T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Human Dignity and Radical Stupidity

This excerpt follows "Democracy: a Society of Patricians"–both taken from the lecture series In Munich entitled "Hitler and the Germans."

What is Man?

In the series of definitions of democracy I have just given you, I have focused on the question of being human or of not being human.

Now we must become clear about a number of concepts: first, What is man? and second, What are the symptoms of the falling down and the derailment of man? For they all play a big role in the decline of a society and made it possible for a type like Hitler to come to the top.

The idea of man is not a question of arbitrary definitions; rather, man is discovered in quite specific historic places and in quite concrete situations. We have two such points where what man is was experienced, and from the experience of man in the concrete case, the idea of man was then generalized as binding on all men.

I say this as a methodological introduction, so that you do not come up with the objection that man can be defined in one or the other way, and that human nature may be such and such but that it changes, and so on.

We are dealing here with strictly empirical questions: When was man as such discovered? and What was he discovered to be?

How Voegelin Read Kant -pt 3

2011-04-14T01:00:00Z

How Voegelin Read Kant

–Part 3 Progress, Politics, and Propensities

by Thomas W. Heilke

Thomas Heilke is Professor of Politcal Science at the University of Kansas and is Director for Special Projects, the International Program. He is the author or co-author of a several works, including Eric Voegelin: In Quest of Reality, and is the editor of three volumes of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. This essay is taken from Eric Voegelin and the Continental Tradition, University of Missouri Press, 2010. It is presented in three parts and appears with permission.

Kant's Dilemma

The Enlightenment doctrine of infinite immanent progress toward the perfecting in reason of the human race is well known. Equally well known is Kant's conflicted evaluation of this doctrine. His attitude was "determined, on the one hand, by his conviction of the shortcomings of human existence and, on the other, already colored by a sense of the meaningfulness of existence."⁶⁰

Human progress toward immanent perfection had the following problematic: "Where will this continual progress of science lead us? What is the benefit to us men here and now from the fact that in the future others will live in a more perfect realm of ratio? Our life will be unaffected by that [final end]."

Voegelin's solution to Kant's dilemma composed a core aspect of his own philosophical work: this last meaninglessness, which aroused Kant's sense of "alienation," can be resolved only by openness to transcendence in the sense of life's opening toward meaning. It does not lie in the world.⁶¹

Voegelin on the Christian Imperium in the Middle Ages -pt 1

2011-04-21T01:00:00Z

Eric Voegelin on the Christian Imperium in the Middle Ages –part 1

by Jeffrey C. Herndon

Jeffrey C. Herndon is Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M University, Commerce and is the author of Eric Voegelin and the Problem of Christian Political Order, which appears in the Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy, University of Missouri Press, 2007, and from which this excerpt is taken. It is presented here in four parts.

A Preliminary: Voegelin's "Political Ideas"

In the introduction to the History of Political Ideas, Voegelin writes, "the function proper of order is the creation of a shelter in which man may give to his life a semblance of meaning."

As such, the political idea is representative of "a little world of order, a cosmic analogy, a cosmion, leading a precarious life under the pressure of destructive forces from within and without" (CW 19:225).

This, in turn, informs Voegelin’s discussion of the functional component of the political idea. "The political idea is only to a limited extent descriptive of any reality; its primary function is not a cognitive but a formative one. The political idea is not an instrument of description of a political unit but an instrument of its creation" (CW 19:227-28).

As a practical matter, this explanation is important to an understanding of the sense in which Voegelin examines political ideas as they occur in history; for in its character and in an evocation of meaning, the idea itself may never reach its fruition in an institutional form. Since the idea itself is pure, the realization of the idea may not be fully realizable in the historical existence of human beings in reality. At this point in Voegelin's development there may, in fact, be something of the Platonist within him.

The use of the term idea may, in itself, be misleading when it comes to a reading of Voegelin’s History of Political Ideas. Generally speaking, when Voegelin uses the term political idea he is not referring to an "idea" per se, or an idea in the singular. Rather, Voegelin is usually describing matrices of ideas that serve as the basis upon which the Idea is constructed.

Democracy: A Society of Patricians (2011)

2011-04-20T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Democracy: A Society of Patricians

This excerpt expands a quotation that appeared here almost two years ago, in May of 2009. It seems especially relevant at a time of increasing political restlessness at home and abroad, two decades following the disolution of the common threat of Soviet Communism and the consequent dissolution of a consensus of internal restraint in the face of the common threat. It is this lack of restraint, as well as the confidence in the State's omnicompetence, which suggests reflection is appropriate.

The Clichés of "State" and "Democracy"

First, the clichés of the State and of Democracy, clichés that must be removed if we wish to get hold of any kind of political problem at all.

"The State" has had a quite particular meaning in Germany since the Romantic period, and particularly through Hegel's philosophy of law and of the State. I will, therefore, quote the key passage from Hegel's Philosophy of Law in which the State is defined, so that you may see how one cannot and should not carry out political science.

Lonergan and Historiography pt 4 -Intellectual History

2011-04-18T01:00:00Z

Lonergan and Historiography

–part 4 Intellectual History

by Thomas J. McPartland

Seeking the Zeitgeist

The subject matter of intellectual history, as we have been defining it, is what Lonergan variously calls the "intellectual climate of opinion," "intellectual milieu," "intellectual context," or "intellectual atmosphere"–the fundamental ideas and assumptions of a period as articulated by theorists, scholars, philosophically sensitive artists, and such metaphysical poets as Rilke and Eliot.⁶⁵

This is similar in substance to John Green's claim that "the primary function of the intellectual historian is to delineate the presuppositions of thought in given historical epochs and to explain the changes which those presuppositions undergo from epoch to epoch."⁶⁶

We must discern the status of the Zeitgeist–its main carriers, its dynamic properties, its most crucial kind of presuppositions. To speak of the "fundamental assumptions of an age" is clearly to speak of the assumptions that stipulate common problems and concerns among intellectual disciplines. But the intellectual historian must ask whether the Zeitgeist is more of an ideal-type than of an actual description of historical reality.

Winters contra Everybody

2011-04-08T01:00:00Z

{jcomments off}Chesterton (and the rest)

Winters contra Everybody

by Max Arnott

Yvor Winters, American poet, critic, and grouch, is by no means forgotten. Amazon lists 196 hits, including two selections of letters, and his magnum opus, Forms of Discovery, is available, although no one on Amazon has reviewed it. Never mind that, many of his pupils are still alive, and they cherish his memory.

And with merit too. Winters’ poetry stands up well to second reading–it is clear, polished and austere.

This is the terminal, the break.
Beyond this point, on lines of air,
You take the way that you must take;
And I remain in light and stare–
In light, and nothing else, awake.
–from “At the San Francisco Airport”

His literary criticism is a well of good sense and his core poetic stance– “post-symbolism”–is attractive. More about that stance later. Your columnist was introduced to the work of Winters by the late Dr. E. Bundy and has been reading Winters off-and-on for years: we have never met a dictum by Yvor Winters that was impractical, immoral, or low.

But in present-day culture wars, Winters is, alas, not a player. He was caviar for the general, and the general has walked away.

Ideology and the Art of Statesmanship

2011-04-13T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Ideology and the Art of Statesmanship —A Conversation

This excerpt is from a conversation between Eric Voegelin and graduate students following a lecture at the St.Thomas More Institute in Montreal. The identified questioners are Winston Arnold, Eric O'Connor, Felix Karpfen, Richard Jacobsen and Stanislaus Machnik. "Q" designates unidentified questioners.

". . . you must have the masters at your fingertips"

Q.: About that notion of apocalypse: Civilizations have eventually destroyed themselves. We might be able to stop that process if we could sum up past ideologies and leave them?

E.V.: Oh yes. If you follow your common sense and forget about the ideologies, you're already on safe ground.

R.J.: You referred to a person's having a desire placed in him so that he would strive. If he were willing to accept the technical aid others might give him, he might end up on a higher plane. An element of desire that some people have and some don't: Doesn't that seem a bit like occasionalism, in the sense of Berkeley's "God gives you the right things to do at the time he thinks you should do them," and in the sense that somehow there's no inherent control of human nature?

E.V.: Occasionalism is a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century doctrine that arose in connection with psychophysical parallelism. What I was talking about has nothing to do with that. I simply meant that we don't know why some people have such a desire and are willing to undergo the labor to work themselves out of a mess, and others don't. It just is so–I don't know why.

Lonergan and Historiography pt 3 -History of Ideas

2011-04-11T01:00:00Z

Lonergan and Historiography

–part 3 The History of Ideas

by Thomas J. McPartland

What is Meant by "History of Ideas?"

Lonergan frequently uses language to describe what we have termed cultural history (and intellectual history). Thus, he often speaks about "cultural context," "cultural milieu," and "climate of opinion."⁴³

On the other hand, he has virtually nothing to say explicitly about the history of ideas. To deal with this field, we must, accordingly, draw inferences from his thought and pick the fruit of his cognitional theory.

Perhaps the closest Lonergan comes to identifying the history of ideas is in his category of "doctrinal movements"–where "doctrinal" seems to be much broader in scope than the functional specialty of that name. But is it so broad as to encompass both history of ideas and intellectual history?

"Doctrinal movements," according to Lonergan, include "mathematics, natural science, human science, philosophy, history, theology."⁴⁴And does this total restriction of "doctrinal movements" to the cultural superstructure do violence to the possibility that the history of ideas can embrace, even if in a less prominent fashion, cognitive activity on the level of the cultural infrastructure?⁴⁵

What precisely differentiates history of ideas from intellectual history and cultural history? How, or to what extent, does history of ideas complement intellectual history and cultural history? Can the discipline of history of ideas avoid the extremes of heady idealism or radical empiricism? In what sense can "ideas" have histories?

Corrupt Communications in a Democracy -pt 2: 'Pluralism'

2011-04-06T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Corrupt Communications in a Democracy: -Part 2: "Pluralism"

[This lecture was delivered in 1956 under the title "Necessary Moral Bases for Communication in a Democracy." It was topical at that time and it remains topical today. —Ed.]

I shall now turn to the second topic of this lecture, to the actual structure of opinion in contemporary society, to that pluralism of opinion that supposedly is the guaranty of peaceful advances toward truth. The contemporary structure is the result of the waves of political movements that have rolled off since the Reformation. In these waves a certain pattern can be discerned.

A movement like the Reformation was countered by the society, against which it was directed, by organized resistance, by a "counter-Reformation.” The clash between the opposing camps brought the eight civil wars in France in the sixteenth century, the Thirty Years War in the seventeenth century, and the English Revolution. And the centuries of war were followed by the great peace settlements of Westphalia in 1648 and Utrecht in 1713.

This pattern of (1) movement, (2) countermovement, (3) wars, and (4) peace settlement, now, repeated itself in the next great wave, beginning with the French Revolution. The terminology, to be sure, changed in accordance with the secularist complexion of this second wave. The "revolution" (the term came into use on this occasion) was countered by "reaction," "conservatism," and "counter-revolution.” But the clash between revolutionary forces and the conservative alliance again resulted in the period of the great wars that came to their conclusion with the Congress of Vienna (1815).

How Voegelin Read Kant -pt 2

2011-04-07T01:00:00Z

How Voegelin Read Kant

–Part 2 The Race Books

by Thomas W. Heilke

In 1933 Voegelin published two studies of European race thinking: Race and State and The History of the Race Idea.³⁰ In 1950 Hannah Arendt named them the best works available on the topic, and Voegelin regarded the latter in 1973 as among his "better efforts."³¹

Oddly enough, however, they arose as side steps in the same project for which the 1931 Kant essay had been a "preliminary study," namely, the development of a full political science [Staatslehre] "on the basis of a philosophical anthropology." The entire study of the race idea thus "grew out of [Voegelin's] work on a system of 'theory of the state' [Staatslehre]," wherein a "section on the various ideas about the state" was also to contain a presumably brief discussion of "body ideas."³²

These 422 pages (in the English editions) of analysis of race ideas therefore began as a subsection of Voegelin's much larger project. Race and State presents the idea of race as one in a class of political-intellectual formations or "ideas"—namely, body ideas [Leibideen]— that are among the intellectual-imaginative elements that produce political communities.³³

Etty Hillesum and the Flow of Presence -pt 2

2011-03-24T01:00:00Z

Etty Hillesum and the Flow of Presence - part 2

by Meins G.S. Coetsier

Meins Coetsier is Director of the Centre of Eric Voegelin Studies (EVS) at Ghent University and staff member and researcher at the Etty Hillesum Research Centre (EHOC). He holds a PhD in Philosophy from Ghent University, Belgium. This excerpt is taken from his Etty Hillesum and The Flow of Presence: A Voegelinian Analysis, published by the University of Missouri Press. The following appears with permission and is presented here in two parts.

The Event Character of the Flow

Voegelin uses the phrase "the event character of the flow" to express the fact that encounters with the Divine take place on particular occasions and find expression in the different symbols that emerge in each encounter. With this phrase, Voegelin puts us on our guard against assuming that the symbols can be understood and interpreted without referring to the spiritual events that gave birth to them.

There is flowing presence because while the same divine ground is met on each occasion, its impact on the human soul differs from one occasion to another. Recognition of this event character helps significantly in our understanding of The Letters and Diaries.

What is taking place in them has many dimensions. On the surface, the writing is a chronological record of events over a number of years. On a deeper level, it is a story of a struggle for emotional healing. On another level, it tells the story of Hillesum's coming to terms with the fate that awaited her.

Voegelin at Baton Rouge -pt 3

2011-03-21T01:00:00Z

from The Northern Lights

Voegelin at Baton Rouge-Part 3

by Barry Cooper and Jodi Bruhn

Ill Health and a Lot of Cigars

When Voegelin lived in Baton Rouge he was ill a couple of times, too, wasn't he?

jo scurria: I'll never forget it. He had serious colon surgery and he came to work–he never stopped teaching, very rarely –all bandaged up. I said, "Voegelin came to work with a hole in his side." He must have still been draining or something. He just didn't want to miss any time. But he had had serious colon surgery, I remember that. He actually had a hole in his side. It must have been a draining tube under the bandages. But he didn't take time off; he came right on back to teaching. He was something else.

ellis sandoz: He got some kind of parasite from eating lettuce in Baton Rouge. That's when he was hospitalized, because of this intestinal parasite he got from a salad. It was a very serious attack. That's how he got acquainted with a famous physician who had a fine medical clinic, like the Mayo Clinic in the North.

But that's the only illness I can think of. He came back and said, "They handled me like a piece of meat." He didn't want to be handled like a piece of meat. These physicians didn't know what an important piece of meat he was, and they cared less! They were just trying to get the parasites out.

lissy voegelin: Eric had this operation. It was very painful. It was an awful operation, really.

Lonergan and Historiography pt 2 -Cultural History

2011-04-04T01:00:00Z

Lonergan and Historiography

–part 2 Cultural History

by Thomas J. McPartland

Thomas McPartland is Professor and Chairman of the Whitney Young School of Honors and Liberal Studies at Kentucky State University in Frankfort. This excerpt is taken from Chapter 3 of his latest book, Lonergan and Historiography: The Epistemological Philosophy of History, which appears in the Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy, 2010,University of Missouri Press. This excerpt is presented in five parts.

The Project of Human Self-Interpretation

Bernard Lonergan defines culture as "the set of meanings and values that inform a way of life."¹⁹ If culture is so defined, then it would seem quite appropriate to apply the term "cultural history" to descriptive approaches sweeping across all the diverse landscapes of popular culture, art, literature, religion, tastes, manners, morals, science, scholarship, philosophy, and theology.

Cultural history would be distinguished from such other broad categories as technological, social, or political histories because its primary concern would be the project of human self-interpretation. In short, it would seem appropriate to include under the rubric of the "history of culture" both the history of the cultural infrastructure and the history of the cultural superstructure.

And yet Lonergan does on at least one occasion restrict "cultural history" to art, literature, religion, and language.²⁰ Why? He provides no answer.

How Voegelin Read Kant -pt 1

2011-03-31T01:00:00Z

How Voegelin Read Kant

–Part 1 An unsystematic Conversation

by Thomas W. Heilke

Out of Such Crooked Wood

To start with the premise that the philosopher is entirely free–the governing assumption of . . . all analytic philosophy–might only end with the assertion that what he can teach us is infinitely less than what political life requires. Conversely, to be bound to a history of ideas . . . might liberate thought and politics from the negative and dissolving conclusions of analytic philosophy.

—Eldon Eisenach, Two Worlds of Liberalism

In this essay we will consider Eric Voegelin's response to Immanuel Kant, the magisterial Prussian philosopher of the late eighteenth century. The questions that serve as the bases for interpreting Voegelin's reception of any particular modern philosopher, such as Kant, would be those that are important to both:

1. The nature and order of reality,
2. The epistemological challenges of modernity, and
3. Plausible social and political arrangements we might hope for in the modern world.

Our general approach is to explore how Voegelin's own work of understanding human experience in a philosophically adequate way might have been helped by his sympathetic reading of certain modern philosophers.

Corrupt Communications in a Democracy -part 1

2011-03-30T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Corrupt Communications in a Democracy –Part 1

[This lecture was delivered in 1956 under the title "Necessary Moral Bases for Communication in a Democracy." It was topical at that time and it remains topical today. —Ed.]

Communication between human beings is the modus procedendi through which a society exists. The fact that the "Moral Bases for Communication in a Democracy" are in question at all, and with good reason can be made the topic of a lecture, indicates the graveness of moral confusion in our time. For if we feel the urge to discuss communications in contemporary democracy, we betray our awareness that something is problematic about our procedures of communication.

Moreover, with regard to the substance of society, it is supposed to be always moral. And if we raise the question of morality in connection with our democracy, we betray the awareness that something is wrong with the moral substance that flows through the channels of communication.

If, finally, we connect the two problems of moral substance and procedure of communication, as the title of this lecture does, we suggest that certain procedures of communication in our time are unfit for the achievement of moral purpose, or even destructive of morality.

Lonergan and Historiography pt 1 -Psychohistory

2011-03-28T01:00:00Z

Lonergan and Historiography

–Part 1 Psychohistory

by Thomas J. McPartland

Thomas McPartland is Professor and Chairman of the Whitney Young School of Honors and Liberal Studies at Kentucky State University in Frankfort.This exposition based on the thought of Bernard Lonergan is taken from Chapter 3 of his latest book, Lonergan and Historiography: The Epistemological Philosophy of History, which appears in the Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy, University of Missouri Press, 2010. This excerpt is presented in five parts.

The Pitfalls of Attempting Psychohistory

Perhaps of all the fields in the history of thought, psychohistory is the most controversial, the least developed, the least settled, and yet, in certain of its practitioners, the most inclined to aspire to totalitarian ambition over other fields.

Can psychohistory really contribute to the knowledge of the past? Even if it can do so, in what sense can it be said actually to constitute a definable field of historical studies?

Notwithstanding the extravagant reductionist claims and glaring errors of the more zealous partisans of psychohistory, which may seem to discredit it, the answer to the first question, we shall argue, is a clear yes. The answer to the second question must be a more guarded yes.

Political Theory and Anglo-Saxon Democracy

2011-03-23T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Political Theory and Anglo-Saxon Democracy

The wars and revolutions of the twentieth century bring to its end a period that begins with the consolidation of the Western national states in the fifteenth century. An upheaval of such magnitude, convulsing the whole of a civilization, affects not the institutions only but also the sentiments and beliefs that went into their building, the verities that they represent, and the body of ideas and symbols used for denoting, justifying, and interpreting them.

Political philosophy today is concerned with sifting the debris, with testing in the light of contemporary experience the validity of problems and symbols still taken for granted a generation ago, and with repairing the edifice of critical theory that has become badly dilapidated in the course of the so-called modern centuries . . . .

A theory that insists on discussing politics in terms of Anglo-Saxon democracy cannot deal adequately even with the Western national states, and not at all with the political organization, e.g., of Asiatic civilizations. It will, therefore, be a second problem of political philosophy to separate the essential from the historically contingent and to break with the habit of treating the institutions of a particular national state at a particular time as if they truly manifested the nature of man.

Voegelin and the Troubled Greatness of Hegel -pt 2

2011-03-10T02:00:00Z

Voegelin and the Troubled Greatness of Hegel –Part 2
by Cyril O'Regan

Cyril O'Regan is Huisking Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. He is author of, among other works, Gnostic Apocalypse: Jacob Boehme's Haunted Narrative This essay is taken from Eric Voegelin and the Continental Tradition, edited by Lee Trepanier and Steven F. McGuire (University of Missouri Press, 2011) and appears here in two parts with permission.

The Good and Bad in Hegelian Speculation

It is important not to be so swayed by Voegelin's often polemical tone that one fails to notice what is being affirmed of a thinker's position, as it is equally important not to neglect those moments in which Voegelin suggests differences within groups of thinkers, under condemnation for some point, that reflect to the credit of one thinker or another. This is especially important in the case of Hegel, against whom on occasions the negative noise can be deafening.

Still, it would be pure revisionism to claim that Voegelin exempts Hegel from his general problematizing of modern thought, believes that Hegel articulates the history of truth adequately, and is convinced that Hegel elaborates in a fully satisfying way the relation between discourses.

What is allowed on Voegelinian grounds, even at the apex of affirmation, is that Hegel differs from other major modern thinkers not so much in whether he goes wrong but rather when and how he goes wrong, for it is Voegelin's considered judgment that Hegel does go wrong. He goes wrong, however, later than many modern thinkers, in that some fundamental truth seems to have been grasped, even as Hegel proceeds to elaborate it in a way that fundamentally distorts it and pushes it in a Promethean direction.

Ontological Reductionism and Pragmatic Speech

2011-03-16T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Ontological Reductionism and Pragmatic Speech

[The] sliding down of the substance of order over the ranks of the ontological hierarchy holds as much interest for the historian as it does for the philosopher. For from the eighteenth century to the present, the ontological reduction has been completed. The range of theoretical possibilities to find substitutes for the summum bonum is, on principle, exhausted.

This observation does not imply that new variants of the earlier steps of reduction cannot be developed and find temporary acceptance; nor does it suggest that the firmly entrenched earlier reductions will lose their power as social creeds in the near future. Nevertheless, the fact that the reduction has run its whole gamut must not be belittled. This fact is for the social scientist the most important index that "modernity" has run its course.

I shall now draw some conclusions from the brief sketch of selected topics. Morality is inseparable from rationality. The connection will be clarified by the definition of conscience given by Étienne Gilson: Conscience is the act of judgment by which we approve or disapprove our actions in the light of rational moral principles. In order to act rationally, a man must know who he is, in what kind of a world he lives, and what his station is in the order of being. A man who is confused about the essentials of his existence is incapable of rational action; and if he is incapable of rational action, he is incapable of moral action.

Etty Hillesum and the Flow of Presence -pt 1

2011-03-17T01:00:00Z

Etty Hillesum and the Flow of Presence - part 1

by Meins G.S. Coetsier

"Just Be"

Etty Hillesum had to reintroduce or restore the values that were under attack by Nazi terror. She faced her path with at least two sets of symbols: first, the language symbols that were part of her social reality, her upbringing, and her academic career; and second, the language symbols that arose in the course of her writing and reflection.

The relation between the two sets was complex. The second was derived from the first, but the first set could contain symbols derived from the clarifying process of other writers, such as Rilke and Jung. She reminded herself, however, that in the end she desired to become "wordless" and just be, that is, to be the "flow:"

Such words as "god" and "death" and "suffering" and "eternity" are best forgotten. We have to become as simple and as wordless as the growing corn or the falling rain. We must just be . . . . I cannot find the right words cither for that radiant feeling inside me, which encompasses but is untouched by all the suffering and all the violence. But I am still talking in much too philosophical, much too bookish a way, as if I had thought it all up just to make life more pleasant for myself. I had much better learn to keep silent for the time being and simply be. (EH, 511; EHe, 483)^FN

Voegelin at Baton Rouge -pt 2

2011-03-14T01:00:00Z

from The Northern Lights

Voegelin at Baton Rouge
-Part 2

by Barry Cooper and Jodi Bruhn

Robert B. Heilman and Eric Voegelin

Voegelin says that Robert Heilman helped him a great deal with his English. Do you know anything about that?

lucille mcdowell: I know they seemed to be very friendly. I know that Dr. Voegelin would come over. As I said to you, Dr. Heilman was one of these men who gathered–not as much as Brooks and T. Harry Williams, who were just pals, it seemed to me, but Heilman was much in that group. Dr. Heilman was a remarkable man in his own right. As a pair–they were both very big men–they were both impressive, a little bit reserved.

It seemed to me there was more likeness between Heilman, who was just a magnificent lecturer, a straight-out lecturer, and Voegelin, with his manner of straight-out lecturing in his class. It was not a seminar or that sort of thing. I would say that those men were probably more alike than T. Harry Williams and Cleanth Brooks would have been.

Dr. Heilman was pretty formidable; he was a more formidable person, a more orderly person. In fact, a friend and I did something very funny in his class. We were reading The Prince by Machiavelli. And on just one page there were so many footnotes. It was a little bitty book and we were just laughing–she and I were laughing and laughing because some of the footnotes were in Chinese, some were in Greek, and so forth. And we just thought it was all ridiculous.

We were two eighteen-year-old kids who really thought this was funny. So, she was writing her research paper and I said, "You ought to put a lot of footnotes in it, and you ought to put some of them in Chinese, and some of them in Greek, and so on."

Species Problem, An Exposition -pt 2

2011-03-09T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

An Exposition of the Species Problem

—Part 2

The following excerpt is taken from The History of the Race Idea: from Ray to Carus, which appears as Volume 3 of the Collected Works. Although it was one of Voegelin's earliest books, he said about it many years later: "[The Nazi annexation of Austria] is the reason why this book, which I consider one of my better efforts, has remained practically unknown, though it would be of considerable help in the contemporary, rather dilettantic, debates between evolutionists and anti-evolutionists." It appears here in two parts.

The Natural and Scholastic Systems (Ray to Kant)

From these beginnings, [John] Ray's Methodus Plantarum penetrates the problem most deeply. The concept of the total habitus had been attained, and this phenotypical habitus, whose traits can be summarized as a type, was now understood as the expression of a life unity, a vital essence.

Outwardly, the way it is defined still follows the traditional logical forms: "Definitio perfecta conficitur e Genere proximo et Differentia essentiali" [A perfect definition consists of a proximate genus and an essential difference]–but the differentia specifica has been replaced by the differentia essentialis.

The species-distinguishing trait was traditionally understood as a trait of the phenotype pure and simple, but the essential characteristic is for Ray the manifestation of an essence behind the appearance. "At essentiae rerum nobis incognitae sunt, proinde et Differentiae earum essentiales." [But the essences of things are unknown to us, inasmuch as their essential differences are.]

The real-ontological concept of essence is introduced to contrast on the linguistic level the real natural life unity with the concept, weighed down by logic, of the species, and the expression differentia essentialis has the function of relating the individual trait to the life form in which it appears, while the differentia specifica points to the position of the concept in the logical system of classification.

Heidegger, Voegelin and the Human Predicament

2011-02-28T02:00:00Z

Heidegger, Voegelin and the Human Predicament

by Juergen Gebhardt

Dr. Gebhardt is emeritus Professor at the Insitute for Political Science at the University of Erlangen-Nürenberg. He is the editor of the final volume of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Selected Correspondence, 1924-1949. The following was presented to a meeting of the Eric Voegelin Society at Washington, D.C. in 2005 and is offered here with permission.

Living under the Spell of Heidegger

Modern intellectual discourse is still under the spell of the Heideggerian project. Once it had broken away from its German moorings, Heideggerian thought proliferated and was received into non-German cultures. Their intellectual elites appropriated it according to their own reading of Heideggerian texts. While they came to divergent and often contradictory conclusions about the philosophical and political significance of his work, they still regard Heidegger’s symbolic evocation as a most fascinating intellectual response to the multifaceted crisis of modernity.

Heidegger’s international reputation is not in the least owed to his many legitimate and illegitimate children ranging from Gadamer, Arendt, Strauss, Löwith, Marcuse, and Jonas to Sartre, Levinas, and Derrida.

Eric Voegelin could neither by biography nor by his own testimony be counted among the intellectual offspring of Heidegger. But their common German background and the later Voegelin’s exposition of a philosophy of human existence lent itself to a tendency to read Heidegger into Voegelin, thus eclipsing the fact that Voegelin followed a different intellectual path–philosophically and politically–in order to come to grips with the totalitarian challenges of our time.

Question of the Ground -pt 3

2011-02-24T02:00:00Z

The Question of the Ground- Part 3

by Glenn Hughes

Glenn Hughes is Professor of Philosophy at St. Mary’s University (San Antonio). He is the author or editor of four books, most recently Transcendence and History: The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity. He is also Poetry Editor here at Voegelinview. The present essay, "The Question of the Ground," is taken from his book, Mystery and Myth in the the Philosophy of Eric Voegelin. This excerpt appears with permission and is presented here in three parts.

Faith, Hope and Love: the Virtues of Existential Tension

Voegelin's writings return with steady regularity to an emphasis on the need for a certain existential disposition as the precondition for suffering the differentiating experiences. Indispensable is trust in the intelligibility and goodness of reality. Such trust he considers to be the very essence of consciousness, which, as the desire to know, must always be pushing ahead of its present understanding.

Questioning is de facto oriented toward what is as yet unknown; and the growth of consciousness toward its implicit goal, which is the complete fulfillment of knowing and loving, comes only by way of approaching the surmised unknown through such attitudes as hope and faith and love. Though this is true of consciousness at all times, a heightened and explicit dependence on hope, faith, and love–the "virtues of existential tension" as Voegelin calls them–is required if consciousness is to suffer the understanding that its very identity is constituted by that which it knows cannot be humanly known with exhaustive adequacy.

According to Voegelin, the philosophers' self-exegeses–particularly those of Heraclitus, Plato, and Aristotle–are impressively clear about this existential context for their differentiating experiences: "Reason [or nous] is differentiated as a structure in reality from the experiences of faith and trust (pistis) in the divinely ordered cosmos, and of the love (philia, eros) for the divine source of order."

Voegelin at Baton Rouge -pt 1

2011-03-07T02:00:00Z

from The Northern Lights

Voegelin at Baton Rouge
-Part 1

by Barry Cooper and Jodi Bruhn

The Voegelins in the United States

LISSY VOEGELIN: After we arrived from Europe, we were in New York for two days.

PAUL CARINGELLA: They arrived in New York, and just as they got to their hotel, the great hurricane of 1938 came up the coast.

L. VOEGELIN: And the windows were all falling out onto the streets. Oh, it was terrible. The wind–oh, it howled. And we were on the twenty-second floor. But Eric just said, "That's the way it is in the United States.”

CARINGELLA: Eric said: "You have to get used to it! It's a new country.” The next day, I think, Eric went somewhere for a meeting, or to a library. He made sure you knew that, if you went out, you should stay close to the building. You were to go around the block and not wander off. So, you went out for a walk, and you turned around the corner . . .

L. VOEGELIN: And the first thing I saw was two rough girls in brown uniforms singing songs about refugees. Then I started crying. I turned around, and cried and cried.

Voegelin and the Troubled Greatness of Hegel -pt 1

2011-03-03T02:00:00Z

Voegelin and the Troubled Greatness of Hegel –Part 1
by Cyril O'Regan

Cyril O'Regan is Huisking Professor of Theology at The University of Notre Dame. He is author of, among other works, Gnostic Apocalypse: Jacob Boehme's Haunted Narrative This essay is taken from Eric Voegelin and the Continental Tradition, edited by Lee Trepanier and Steven F. McGuire (University of Missouri Press, 2011) and appears here in two parts with permission.

Returning to Hegel Again and Again

It would challenge credulity to claim that, contrary to appearances, Voegelin's relationship with G.W.F. Hegel is positive. The tone Voegelin adopts toward modern thinkers in general, and Hegel in particular, is so consistently vituperative that it does seem partially to justify the characterization of Voegelin as a "demonologist.”¹

In addition, while Voegelin's critique of Hegel is both episodic and unsystematic, in that one has to patch together a Voegelinian view on Hegel in the absence of any one text offering a definitive statement, the substance of his objections to Hegel's views cuts deep and necessarily puts Voegelin in the company of other Hegel "naysayers,” such as Kierkegaard, Adorno, Heidegger, and even Derrida, even if his criticisms repeat none of them exactly.

Still, Voegelin continually returns to Hegel, and illustrates the more than biographical truth of Derrida's remark that "we have never finished with a reading or rereading of Hegel.”² If Hegel is frequently mentioned in passing, he is also the object of more sustained analysis at various junctures throughout Voegelin's long writing career.

Species Problem, An Exposition -pt 1

2011-03-02T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

An Exposition of the Species Problem —Part 1

Linnaeus' Concept of Species

Linnaeus' biological theory of the fixity of the species is so superbly suited to serve as the point of departure for our investigations because of its persuasive simplicity. In a few lucid sentences the fixity of the living type is exhaustively formulated, and at the same time a catalogue of problems is presented that would be desirable in race theory today, since the modern studies are caught up in the difficulties of one or another subordinate detail and thus lose sight of the whole.

In his "Observationes" in Regna III Naturae, Linnaeus developed in a series of propositions the axioms of biology as he practiced it; and the first four of these propositions formulate the problem of species.

The first proposition states the fact that all living beings emerge from an egg and that each egg produces a creature that resembles its parents. Linnaeus concludes from this that no new species are produced in the present time.

Letter to Alfred Schütz on Husserl -pt 3

2011-02-23T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

A Letter to Alfred Schütz concerning Edmund Husserl —Part 3

This letter has earned a place alongside Voegelin's important published essays. It sets forth his analysis of Husserl's achievements and shortcommings as well as Descartes'. Because it is a long letter it is presented here in three parts. Contributor David Walsh makes reference to it in his concurrently appearing essay "Voegelin and Heidegger."

Husserl's Misunderstanding of Descartes

Husserl's misinterpretations are due to the fact that he imputes his own philosophic theme, the epoche of the world with the aim of reaching the transcendental sphere of the ego, to Descartes as the latter's exclusive, although only unclearly and imperfectly realized, intention.

As a matter of fact the Cartesian meditation has a much richer content than the thematic subject matter reduced to epistemological theory, and only because it has this richer content can it be incidentally utilized for the unfolding of this set of problems.

First of all, the Cartesian meditation is not so shockingly new in its principal form, as Husserl would have it. The Cartesian meditation is in principle a Christian meditation in the traditional style; it may be even classified more specifically as a meditation of the Augustinian type as it has been undertaken in the history of the Christian spirit hundreds of times since Augustine.

Voegelin and Heidegger -pt 4

2011-02-21T02:00:00Z

Voegelin and Heidegger
–Part 4
by David Walsh

This essay is taken from Eric Voegelin and the Continental Tradition, edited by Lee Trepanier and Steven F. McGuire (University of Missouri Press, 2011) and appears here in four parts.

A Mutual Enlargement of Understanding

The remarkable convergence we have traced between Voegelin and Heidegger suggests that we might also reflect on the point at which they could actually meet.

Would it be possible for them to effect a mutual correction in the understanding that each of them had reached? This enlargement of their separate perspectives is, after all, one of the goals served by their juxtaposition in relation to one another. Our aim is to travel that much further with the assistance of both Heidegger and Voegelin than either of them might have been able to support alone.

We are prepared to ask, therefore, what Heidegger might have gained if he had thoroughly read and understood Voegelin, and vice versa. Such a conversation is not wholly imaginary. One side of it was definitely initiated in Voegelin's reading of Heidegger, although it remained at a somewhat cursory level. Heidegger might well have undertaken a reading of Voegelin, although his curiosity remained strangely confined to the canonical philosophical texts. Like many potential meetings in the life of the mind, the encounter remains inconclusive. That is, of course, its allure.

Actually, this is Kansas, Dorothy

2011-02-18T02:00:00Z

{jcomments off}Chesterton (and the rest)

"Actually, This IS Kansas, Dorothy"

by Max Arnott

On our desk lie a number of small and rather drab books.

They are 3 ½ by 5 inches, a size that fits nicely into a shirt pocket. The covers are stiff paper, some faded blue, some pale yellow. Each book contains about 64 pages, stapled not bound. The paper is pulp; the print is tiny.

The titles are eclectic: Irish Fairy Tales, Bookbinding Self Taught, Five Essays (by G. K. Chesterton), Debate on Spiritualism (between Conan Doyle and Joseph McCabe), and so on.

Hardly impressive evidence of a major intellectual phenomenon.

In 1915, a man from Philadelphia named Emmanuel Julius, an immigrant's son, a Jew, an atheist, a socialist, and (wait for it) a reporter moved to Girard, Kansas to work for a socialist newspaper, The Appeal to Reason.

Kansas is not now a bulls-eye of radical reform, but those were other days. Capitalism of the no-holds-barred sort was in command, some people were becoming preternaturally rich, and a great many more were hurting, badly. A lot of them read The Appeal to Reason, which had reached a circulation of 500,000 and published Sinclair Lewis, Jack London, Mary "Mother" Jones, Stephen Crane, and Eugene Debs, although it was now slowly declining.

In 1916, Julius married fellow employee Anna Marcet Haldeman, a former actress, author, and the owner, by inheritance, of a bank, which was handy, because shortly thereafter she lent her husband $25,000 and together they bought the Appeal to Reason. It may have been sinking but its assets included a three-deck, straight-line Goss machine that would print four hundred twelve-page papers, in colors, folded, per minute, and a subscription list of 450, 000 names.

Voegelin at Notre Dame -pt 3

2011-02-03T02:00:00Z

from The Northern Lights

Voegelin at Notre Dame -Part 3

by Barry Cooper and Jodi Bruhn

Professor Cooper is the author of numerous books and essays in political science and has edited several volumes of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. Jodi Bruhn is the editor of Vol 13 and also translator of Vols 8, 13, and 32 of The Collected Works. This essay appears as Chapter 4 in Voegelin Recollected–Conversations on a life, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, 2008. This is published with permission and appears in three parts. Most of the interviews here were conducted by Barry Cooper. A list of the contributors and some information about them is found at the end of this article.

Church, Faith and Dogma (concluded)

Do you ever recall Voegelin discussing the Catholic Church while he was at Notre Dame?

KLAUS VONDUNG: He didn't publish Volume IV [of Order and History] before he was back in the United States and had more leisure to write it and to break with the original concept of Order and History. But while I was studying with him in the '6os, everybody was waiting for the publication of Volume IV.

People were always asking, "When will Volume IV come out? What about Volume IV?" Because one of the most interesting things to look forward to was what he would say about Christianity, what he would say about Jesus Christ and about Saint Paul in Volume IV.

He was not very outspoken. What he thought about the Israelite prophets and the apocalyptics and about Plato and Aristotle, of course, we knew, and then later on the philosophers of modernity. But not what he really thought about Christianity. So, everybody was waiting for Volume IV because everybody thought, "Finally, we will see what he says about Christianity."

Question of the Ground -pt 2

2011-02-17T02:00:00Z

The Question of the Ground- Part 2

by Glenn Hughes

Athens and Jerusalem Do Embrace

Voegelin's complex and voluminous treatment of the discovery of transcendent reality in the West is one of his richest achievements, the cornerstone of his philosophy of history and one of the most intellectually challenging areas of his work. Certainly, his interpretations of Israelite history, Christian revelation, and Greek philosophy are not free from controversy; while his erudition and philosophical brilliance are generally credited, scholars, especially theologians, with backgrounds of specialized expertise and with less ecumenical interests, have taken issue with some of his major conclusions.¹³

As already pointed out, Voegelin's position is that there are distinct Israelite and Hellenic discoveries of transcendence and that these complement rather than contradict each other. The manner and extent of that complementarity he considers to be almost universally unrecognized–an oversight due, he would say, primarily to the Greek philosophical achievements not being commonly understood as having their roots in experiences of the transcendence of the ground of reality at all.

Voegelin and Heidegger -pt 3

2011-02-14T02:00:00Z

Voegelin and Heidegger
–Part 3
by David Walsh

This essay is taken from Eric Voegelin and the Continental Tradition, edited by Lee Trepanier and Steven F. McGuire (University of Missouri Press, 2011) and appears here in four parts.

The Convergent Understanding
of Voegelin and Heidegger

It may indeed be the case that Voegelin and Heidegger set philosophy on a path they themselves were not capable of traveling as far as might have been expected. The greatness of a thinker is surely measured not by his accomplishments so much as by the goals that he sets for himself. It is thus not surprising that our explorers should find themselves overtaken by philosophical developments they themselves had marked out. Their greatness lies in opening rather than blocking the paths they have created.

This is what must be emphasized, for they are distinguished by a remarkably new understanding of philosophy. Both Heidegger and Voegelin were extremely conscious of the philosophical innovation on which they embarked. Looking back toward the Greek beginnings, they lavished all the more attention on an inception from which a new beginning must be launched. This was their revolutionary character. In breaking most profoundly with the past, they restored it to its origin, although not without effecting a thorough renovation.

Theirs was a radically traditional approach. The ambition was nothing short of breathtaking, for they were acutely conscious of aiming at a new beginning that would remedy the defect that had vitiated the whole philosophical tradition. While reverencing the Greek beginning of philosophy more deeply than at any time in its history, they were absolutely convinced that philosophy could not continue within the pattern it had received from that impulse.

Letter to Alfred Schütz on Husserl -pt 2

2011-02-16T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

A Letter to Alfred Schütz concerning Edmund Husserl —Part 2

Husserl and Averroes' World Soul

In the uppermost and most general layer Husserl's historical teleology calls for classification under the category of Averroist speculation.^FN I have addressed this topic in detail in my Authoritarian State as a motive occasioning the rise of national socialist and fascist speculations. My article on Siger de Brabant, with which you are likely to be more familiar, should make clear the reasons for this classification. We have to distinguish in Western philosophy between two fundamental positions concerning the essence of man; they are represented most clearly by the Christian orthodoxy of Saint Thomas Aquinas and the heterodoxy of Siger. The Thomistic position places emphasis on the singularity of human substance (intellectus), Siger's on the world soul, of which the singular human substance is a particle. Both positions can be historically traced back to Aristotle's doctrine of the soul (De Anima 3), which left this question hanging in the balance, so that in fact either one of the two positions can be deduced from De Anima.

Question of the Ground -pt 1

2011-02-10T02:00:00Z

The Question of the Ground- Part 1

by Glenn Hughes

Glenn Hughes is Professor of Philosophy at St. Mary’s University, San Antonio. He is the author or editor of four books, most recently Transcendence and History: The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity. He is also Poetry Editor here at Voegelinview. The present essay, "The Question of the Ground," is taken from his book, Mystery and Myth in the the Philosophy of Eric Voegelin. This excerpt appears with permission and is presented here in three parts.

The "Tension" found in Consciousness

Voegelin's notion of the differentiation of consciousness may be clarified by setting it off against what he considers to be the foundational structure of consciousness that does not change, but rather constitutes the transhistorical basis for its historical transformations. Implicitly rejecting modern and postmodern arguments for a radically historicist view of conscious experience, Voegelin asserts that there are indeed invariant structures in consciousness, the most elementary of which is the "tension" of questioning. Consciousness is in essence the Question itself, arising from wondering ignorance and continuing to press beyond everything that comes to be known.

The concrete questions and answers change, but not the dynamism of questioning, nor the incompleteness of its satisfaction. For as explained in the last chapter, the Question, the search for meaning, is for Voegelin at its core a search for the mysterious "where-from and where-to, the ground and sense of existence.” Existence is a "tension toward the ground, " and it cannot but ask questions about the ground, about the origins of things, about why things are as they are, about what they came from and how they came to be, about what they ultimately mean. If the ways in which such questions are asked and answered vary, nevertheless "the complex of experience-question-answer as a whole is a constant of consciousness.”¹

Letter to Alfred Schütz on Husserl -pt 1

2011-02-09T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

A Letter to Alfred Schütz Concerning Edmund Husserl —Part 1

903 Camelia Avenue

Baton Rouge, LA.

September 17, 1943

Dear Friend,

Please accept our heartfelt thanks for those fine evenings which we were able to spend with you and your dear wife. Unfortunately, the time we spent together was all too brief, not allowing us to discuss many things that are certainly of great interest to both of us . . . .

Even now the impossibility of communicating with you face-to-face causes me great pain. Kaufmann was so kind to lend me Husserl's essay "The Crisis of European Sciences," which figures in volume I of the Philosophia. I just finished reading it and would love to discuss it with you. Allow me to offer just a few brief comments–you might not have time to enter into particulars in your answer, but perhaps you might be able to let me know when I might have misunderstood Husserl.

To start with: The overall impression is magnificent–not only in comparison with other philosophical output of our time, but also in comparison with many other works by Husserl. It is most gratifying that Husserl does not indulge in the officious tomfoolery ("stupendous" and "laborious" analyses, and so on) that mars a number of pages of the Ideas; no more than two or three times does he break into a sweat over "philosophical existence." In spite of the dry language the essay moves in the Olympian atmosphere of pure philosophical enthusiasm.

Voegelin and Heidegger -pt 2

2011-02-07T02:00:00Z

Voegelin and Heidegger
–Part 2
by David Walsh

This essay is taken from Eric Voegelin and the Continental Tradition, edited by Lee Trepanier and Steven F. McGuire (University of Missouri Press, 2011) and appears here in four parts.

Misunderstanding Heidegger

The charge that Voegelin misunderstood Heidegger is indeed a hard saying. Before undertaking my own intensive reading of Heidegger, I would not have been inclined to accept it. The notoriety of Heidegger's unapologetic avowal of Nazism that has in recent years attracted far more substantial scrutiny would seem to confirm Voegelin's perception. And there is the undeniably apocalyptic tone that permeates his writings.

Voegelin would seem to be on good grounds in characterizing Heidegger as the end point of modern parousiastic speculation. Heidegger might even be taken to fit Derrida's formulation of "apocalypse without apocalypse."⁸

The problem is that having reached that limiting conception, we begin to suspect that the accusation has become unstable. At the apex of definition we sense the possibility of reversal. What, after all, is a parousia that never occurs, an apocalypse that is continually postponed, if not what we have always understood by those terms?

Saint Augustine was the one who squeezed the last drop of immanence out of millenarian speculation in the early church. He simply proclaimed that the millennium is already under way through the reign of Christ on earth within his church. Apocalypse is what we live within, not a future event that we await. Could it be that Heidegger aimed at the same realization?

What is Nature? -pt 3

2011-02-02T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

What is Nature?

Part 3

In Metaphysics Alpha, Aristotle pursues this idea further ["And so there are two kinds of production (poietike), the one human, and the other divine."]. Following his report on the Ionian speculation, he asks himself how matter could be the cause of change, since wood does not make the bed, nor bronze the statue. How could fire, earth, or any other element cause things to be good and beautiful? Since these qualities of things cannot be attributed to automatism or chance, one must look to other causes (aitia) besides matter, above all, for an arche of the movement.

In the midst of the confused ideas of his predecessors came a moment of sobriety (Met. 984b15) when a certain thinker (Anaxagoras) declared that nous is present (eneinai) not only in animate beings but also in nature, and that it is the cause (aition) of order (kosmos) and all arrangement (taxis).

It now becomes clear why Aristotle patterned his concept of nature on the model of an artifact, even though he was aware of the philosophical inadequacy of this procedure. This otherwise shocking feature now becomes understandable in light of the experience of a demiurgic God.

Voegelin and Heidegger -pt 1

2011-01-31T02:00:00Z

Voegelin and Heidegger
–Part 1
by David Walsh

This essay is taken from Eric Voegelin and the Continental Tradition, edited by Lee Trepanier and Steven F. McGuire (University of Missouri Press, 2011) and appears here in four parts.

Heidegger's Place in Modern Philosophy

Martin Heidegger was the culminating figure of twentieth-century philosophy. For better or worse he is the one who carries philosophy forward to the point it has reached today.

The most convincing evidence of this is that his critics, at least those who actually understand rather than simply dismiss him, operate of necessity within the framework he has provided. Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida can legitimately claim to have advanced and departed from the Heideggerian project, but this is, fundamentally, to have remained within it. He remains the toweringly original figure from whom philosophy today takes its bearings.

It is impossible to philosophize without taking account of Heidegger's primordiality. To ignore him is to remain anachronistically within an earlier phase of philosophical reflection, a little like continuing to compose music as period pieces in a style no longer capable of development. This is why the question of how a thinker stands in relation to Heidegger is not simply an idle curiosity. At stake is the vitality of his or her thought.

Reunion of Faith and Reason -pt 2

2011-01-24T02:00:00Z

from the Irish Navigator

The Reunion of Faith and Reason in Our Time -Pt 2

Reflections on Fides et ratio

by Brendan Purcell

Fr. Brendan Purcell is Emeritus Senior Lecturer at University College, Dublin, Ireland. He is currently engaged in pastoral work in Sydney, Australia and has been appointed visiting professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, Sydney. He is editor of Hitler and the Germans, Vol 31 in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. He has a book forthcoming on human origins. This article is adapted from a 2005 lecture delivered to the Atlantis Society, University College Dublin and appears in 2 parts.

A Christological Union of Faith and Reason

(concluded)

In natural science, there is also a related boundary-problem connected to human rights. All the legal discussion regarding genetic engineering, the right to be born in a certain way, the right to die — these discussions aren’t just the beginning of a slippery slope on the way to who knows what barbaric practice. Rather, they open up an abyss: the abyss of creating something that will have rights of a certain kind.

But that’s an incoherent use of the language of rights which presupposes human beings, and ultimately makes no sense without them. Human beings are of infinite dignity, and any discourse about human rights flows from that dignity, never the other way round.

In the concluding section of Guarded by Mystery, David Walsh explores a second boundary problem posed by modern artists and their art.¹ Often in their experience of the anguish of the cry without an answer, these artists are far closer to the radical intersection at the heart of the experience of Jesus than they are aware.

Pictorial Approach to Philosophy -pt 2

2011-01-13T02:00:00Z

A "Pictorial Approach" to Philosophy –Part 2

by Francesca Aran Murphy

Francesca Aran Murphy is Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana. Her most noted recent book, God is not a Story (Oxford University Press, 2007) is available in book form or as an electronic download. This excerpt is taken from Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Étienne Gilson, (University of Missouri Press, 2004) which is published in the Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy. This appears with permission . It appears here in two parts.

Gilson and Maritain Split over Art

The two sets of Mellon lectures gave rise to a rupture between the two Thomists, Jacques Maritain and Étienne Gilson. Raïssa Maritain was a poet, and her beliefs about the process of composition influenced her husband's aesthetic philosophy. The disagreement between the two men was exacerbated to the breaking point by a visit from Gilson to Princeton, on which she misheard him tell her, "You are not a poet."²¹ Raïssa's poetry was not widely admired among the critics and writers who gathered around the Maritains in Princeton,²² and she may have been tacitly aware of this.

Gilson believed that his position stood firmly on Aquinas, who said no such things as Maritain did about art and poetry; Jacques believed that the disagreement was planted firmly on Raïssa's toes. In vain did Gilson protest that "I still distinctly remember telling her 'you are a poet,'" for Raïssa had placed him "on the Index." That was because she "was pained by the critique"²³ of Creative Intuition that she discerned in Painting and Reality.

Voegelin at Notre Dame -pt 2

2011-01-27T02:00:00Z

from The Northern Lights

Voegelin at Notre Dame -Part 2

by Barry Cooper and Jodi Bruhn

Alone in the Stratosphere

Could you say something about the 1971 symposium?

JOHN GUEGUEN: "Departures in Western Political Thought: The School of Eric Voegelin." I think he objected to that title. He was somewhat truculent during that session at the end of April in 1971. He found himself quite put on the spot and intimidated by the whole idea of this symposium. He was argumentative and sharp in his remarks that day.

There was a great deal of tension in the atmosphere. He was quite defensive, concerned–and that's a sign of his sort of mind–that this would obscure the record of his achievements. That's my recollection. I had come from Chicago, and a lot of other people came from different places. Very many of the people who were on the program were his former students. I think he was afraid that those who had come to take part or listen who hadn't had much previous contact with Voegelin would find his stature diminished. And I think, in fact, that that's what happened, because he didn't seem very appreciative of this kind of exposure.

What is Nature? -pt 2

2011-01-26T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

What is Nature?

Part 2

When the gods, too, having become homeless through the dissociation of the cosmos, relocate themselves in the truth of God, and thereby the relation of the divine to the world has become clear, this clarity leads in turn to new problems, as soon as the relationship is interpreted in the language of the experience of being.

The difficulties are caused by an only slowly dissipating obscurity concerning a number of points. In order to avoid lengthy historical investigations, we prefer to formulate them as theses:

(1) The being of philosophical experience is not a newly discovered entity to be added to the things that are already given in the primary experience of the cosmos.

(2) The experience of being differentiates the order of things (a) in their autonomy, (b) in their relation to one another, and (c) in their relation to their origin. This experience discovers the order of the cosmos.

Voegelin at Notre Dame -pt 1

2011-01-20T02:00:00Z

from The Northern Lights

Voegelin at Notre Dame -Part 1

by Barry Cooper and Jodi Bruhn

The South Dining Hall

JOHN ROOS: We would often watch out for Voegelin on campus. There was a professor named Anton-Hermann Chroust, a real character. He was a lawyer, philologist, and classicist who had written on various texts of Aristotle. He and Voegelin would hold court, so to speak, over in the South Dining Hall, in a place called the Oak Room. They both smoked cigars, and they would go over there in the mornings and have their coffee. They were both about the same age and had gone through some of the same experiences. Chroust had this line when he would go to class; he would tell Professor Voegelin (I still call him Professor Voegelin, this gives you an idea of the ambience at the time!) that he was going to cast real pearls before real swine.

JOHN KENNEDY: I recall a kind of tableau there in the South Dining Hall. Eric lived at the Morris Inn when he was here, but he generally went over to the South Dining Hall for dinner. And Tony Chroust inhabited the place. I can still see him and Tony and a couple of other faculty members at a table together. Their erudition was very impressive. Voegelin's in particular was really impressive.

What is Nature? -pt 1

2011-01-19T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

What is Nature?

Part 1

Any assertion that this or that is, or is not, "right by nature" must remain void of meaning unless we know what nature is. In this matter we are not too well off. The texts we have consulted so far lead us to believe that Aristotle lived in a tradition going back beyond Plato and the tragedians to the older philosophers, and that he counted on being understood when speaking of nature.

The contexts in which this term is used indicate that "nature" refers to constant structures in the movement of being, comprising gods and men, organic and inorganic matter — in other words, to something like a constitution of being. That, however, is all that can be inferred. Where can we learn with a higher degree of accuracy what is meant by nature?

Whoever is looking for an answer to this question will first of all think of the philosophical dictionary in Metaphysics Delta, which offers precise definitions of nature and related concepts. This source, however, is a disappointment. It develops the concept of nature in its three meanings of (a) matter, (b) form or shape (eidos kai morphe), and (c) the unity of form and matter in a thing (Met. 1014b16-1015a5), by means of the experiential models of organism and artifact.

The Homeric Gods, Style, and Blunt Criticism

2011-02-15T05:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

The Homeric Gods, Style, and Blunt Criticism

The following is taken from a letter written by Eric Voegelin to Elizebeth de Waal, found in his correspondence files and published in Volume 30 of the Collected Works.

February 11, 1954
741 Canal Street
Baton Rouge 2, La.

Dear Elizabeth: ¹

Thanks for your kind letter of February 3rd. I hasten to answer it, in order to assuage all sorrows that I would take your criticisms (or any criticisms which you ever have to offer)[ in an ill light]. Of course not, on the contrary, I am grateful for it, especially when it concerns my style, which I know all too well leaves much to be desired.

Hence, I acknowledge the justice of your remarks with regard to slangy expressions, especially since I am also aware of this defect, and I am doing my best in the revision in which I am engaged at present to eliminate such sores if I can catch them. There will be no "healthy specimen" or "rotter" in the book-form of the "History."

Not so sure am I about the justice of your remarks about the "tone" of contempt with regard to Homeric heroes. While "rotter" is slang and should not be used when speaking of the suitors, I cannot be blind to the fact that for Homer they are "dogs." (Also the adjective is used which is difficult to render in English. In the German translations it reads "hündische Freier" and "hündische Weiber," when Penelope speaks of the women of her household who side with the "dogs.")

Reunion of Faith and Reason -pt 1

2011-01-17T02:00:00Z

from the Irish Navigator

The Reunion of Faith and Reason in Our Time -Pt 1

Reflections on Fides et ratio

by Brendan Purcell

On this occasion we will consider the Encyclical Letter of John Paul II, Faith and Reason ( Fides et ratio), which he released on September 15th, 1998. We will begin with a few introductory remarks on the cultural context for the encyclical and then consider two of its aspects.

It is obvious that Faith and Reason (hereinafter “FIDES”) addresses the crisis of contemporary Western culture, a crisis marked by a yawning emptiness that still idolizes individual reason and individual autonomy. It is a disillusioned, deconstructed culture, where many, ‘distracted from distraction by distraction,’¹ get seriously lost in various divertissements.

But that is not all there is to it. Alongside this loss of confidence in autonomy, whether of the individual, of science, of legal and political rights, even of art, there is also the excitement of widening horizons in space and time. So that now we are able to be in contact with every contemporary culture, along with all those cultures found in human history going back to the paleolithic, some 50,000 years ago.

Lincoln, Charity and 'We, the People' -pt 3

2011-01-10T02:00:00Z

Lincoln, Charity, and "We the People" –Part 3

by Grant N. Havers

Grant Havers is Professor of Philosophy and Political Studies at Trinity Western University (Canada). He has recently written Lincoln and the Politics of Christian Love (University of Missouri Press) and it appears with permission. It is offered here in three parts.

Willmoore Kendall and Lincoln's Charity

Lincoln, who considered himself a conservative preserver of the true founding principles, insisted that charity must be the true morality of Americans.

Many on the American Right, who would otherwise heartily endorse Lincoln's trust in the people and his valuation of Christianity, have questioned whether Americans need to be both conservative and charitable at the same time. Willmoore Kendall was one of the famous teachers of this position, an influential theorist who rejected Kirk's aristocratic conservatism as easily as he repudiated Hartz's liberalism. Still, he did not embrace Lincoln's use of Christian morality as a suitable basis for American politics.

I focus here on Kendall’s thought for two reasons. First, it represents the most serious objection to the egalitarian legacy of Lincoln, as Kendall's longtime opponent, Harry Jaffa, has admitted.⁴⁴ Second, his ideas (unlike those of Hofstadter and Kirk) reveal a deeper appreciation for the founding documents (especially The Federalist). At present, there are a few signs of a revival of interest in Kendall's thought.⁴⁵The irony is that Kendall, whose thinking has influenced the thought of other critics of Lincoln (Mel Bradford in particular), seemed to share the core assumptions of Lincoln, particularly the defense of majority-rule democracy and an appreciation of the role of Christianity in American thought.

University and the Order of Society pt 2

2011-01-12T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

The University and the Order of Society—Part 2

Please see the endnote which explains the origin and format of this lecture delivered in 1970.

Education Should Counteract Existential Disorder

So what is the purpose of [an Academy] which has resulted in the creation of ethics as a science — in the Aristotelian case, politics as a science, then the psychology of science of passions, and so on, all necessary for understanding the structure of reality surrounding you. ^FN And what is the purpose which an academy — or university with such an academic core — possibly can have? The first is to counteract existential disorder — what today is usually called alienation — by education. That is the first — what I refer to as “the therapeutic function.”

And then, in the society, which is — beyond the period of the mythical cult society of the Greek polis that exploded in the 5th century and in the fourth century — we are already down now in the time of Plato to the intellectually disordered society — to serve in a society which is plagued by intellectual disorder as an instrument of cultural balance. That is, you cannot abolish the disorder in the society — the disorder in society goes on — but you can balance a tendency to disorder and the active forces of disorder by providing at least the understanding of what rational balance is for those who are able and willing to take it. Then hopefully expect those who can take it will become educated, will become influential in society and do something to improve, at least to a small degree, the disorder in the direction of order. that is all you can expect from a university under such circumstances.

Gnosis and Film -pt 5

2010-12-23T02:00:00Z

Secret Cinema—

Gnosis and Film -Part 5

by Eric G. Wilson

Eric Wilson is Professor of English at Wake Forest University. He has written a number of books, including the critically acclaimed Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy (2008). His most recent book is The Mercy of Eternity — A Memoir of Depression and Grace (2010). We offer here the Introduction from his Secret Cinema: Gnostic Vision in Film. New York: Continuum (2006). It appears with permission. This excerpt has been presented in five parts.

William Blake as Gnostic Prototype

The idea of the particular as liberating energy comes initially from William Blake. A prototype of the Gnostic filmmaker, Blake the painter and poet persistently undercut his words with images and challenged his images with words. This ironic interplay ensured that his works would escape easy conceptualization and strike audiences with the immediacy of particular things. Blake had good reasons for wanting to achieve this concreteness. Deeply influenced by Gnostic ideas, he wanted to escape the "mind-forged manacles" of oppressive ideologies — tools of the demiurge — and experience energies beyond conception, powers gesturing toward the plenitude.

Blake in his marginalia once intoned, "To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is Alone Distinction of Merit."²⁴ "General Knowledge," he continued, does not exist, while "Singular & Particular Detail is the Foundation of the Sublime." These distinctions reverse traditional expectations. Ideas — generally the essentials of knowledge — are delusions. Immediate perceptions — flashes usually corralled into concepts — are now revelations of the real. Theories are ignoble reductions. Direct apprehensions of particulars open into the sublime: the infinite.²⁵

Pictorial Approach to Philosophy -pt 1

2011-01-06T02:00:00Z

A "Pictorial Approach" to Philosophy –Part 1

by Francesca Aran Murphy

A Modern Aesthetic

Étienne Gilson regarded himself as a Burgundian. Although his paternal family tree tends against that supposition, he had planted himself in the maternal soil by acquiring a home in Yonne. The priest who presided over his musical education, at the Petit Séminaire Notre Dame Des Champs, Abbé Victor Thorelle, came from Pont-sur-Yonne and had "said his first mass" in the Cathedral of Auxerre. These mediaeval villages "became shrines to Etienne as he grew older and he loved to tell his friends how and why to visit them, even as he sent them to Vézelay and La Cordelle."¹ During his years at the Petit Séminaire, the Parisian made a ritual visit to the Louvre each week. So as not to divide the conjunctum, we may say that Romanesque Vézelay and Paris each contributed to his aesthetic tastes.

A lifelong friend recalled that the "most demanding forms of art did not displease him; to visit an exhibition of Picasso's designs and engravings in his company was a great privilege." Gilson's aesthetic sensibility was modernist. He was something of an artistic puritan both in his preference for the purely formal beauty of "ancient Greek temples, primitive Roman churches or Cistercian chapels" and in his admiration for the "geometrical painting" of Mondrian, which has "form without content." So austere was his conception of each specific art that he recommended a silent ballet — Jerome Robbin's Moves, of 1961.²

University and the Order of Society -pt 1

2011-01-05T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

The University and the Order of Society —Part 1

Please see the endnote which explains the origin and format of this lecture delivered in 1970.

Mr. Chairman, let me thank you for your kind words of introduction.^FN

Ladies and Gentlemen, I have to make a preliminary remark. I have acquired a grippe [flu], and I do not feel quite well. I hope you will excuse me if I cannot stick it out, for I don’t know how much time is provided — an hour or two hours — and we’ll see how far it goes.

This subject matter — “The University and the Order of Society” — is, in itself, about as hashed to death in the last two years as anything possibly could be. There is hardly a day when you do not get a paper or article or something of the sort in one of the major communications media on the subject.

I just picked up this yesterday in The Wall Street Journal — there is an article by Mr. [Robert] Nisbet — here from California [U. of California Vice-Chancellor] — on the restoration of academic authority. Let me reflect on that for a moment, so that you can see the manner in which I shall handle the subject matter a little bit differently.

Lincoln, Charity and 'We, the People' -pt 2

2011-01-03T02:00:00Z

Lincoln, Charity, and "We the People" -Part 2

by Grant N. Havers

A Contempt for "the People" in America

Like the founders, Lincoln worried about the dangers of factions (the slave-owning minority of the South rather than Southerners as a whole were the real enemy in his mind) in the form of a minority imposing its will on a larger number of the American people, particularly after Dred Scott opened the door to the toleration of slavery nationwide.¹⁴ Ultimately, the majority must decide. As he observed earlier in the same address, "Unanimity is impossible; the rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy, or despotism in some form, is all that is left."¹⁵

The fact that Lincoln presupposed goodwill among Southerners — which even led him to believe (perhaps with some naïveté) that the planters' aristocracy had manipulated the good Southern folk into war with the North — did not deter him from his belief that the majority must triumph in the end.¹⁶

Still, was the majority truly virtuous?

Another Young Man with a Horn

2010-12-17T02:00:00Z

Chesterton (and the rest)

Another Young Man with a Horn

by Max Arnott

Every hour, day and night, year in and year out, from the higher of the two towers of the Basilica of St. Mary, a trumpet call sounds over the ancient Polish city of Krakow. The call is repeated four times, from the north, south, east and west windows of the tower. Each time the melody, a medieval Polish hymn, is played, it stops before its finish, as if cut off.

The trumpet call is the signal of the city watch of Krakow. The interruption of the melody commemorates a trumpeter in 1241, who refused to abandon his post during the siege of Krakow by the Mongols. As he played, he took an arrow through the throat.

It is a story very important to Poles. The trumpet at noon is broadcast over the national radio.

In 1928, American author Eric P. Kelly wrote an historical novel for young people, The Trumpeter of Krakow, which bears on this tradition.

The Trumpeter of Krakow was a great success in both the United States and in Poland itself. There was a triumphant book tour, and Mr. Kelly received the Newbery Medal for children`s literature in 1929. It remains an established classic.

Historical Horizon: Classical and Christian

2010-12-22T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

The Historical Horizon— Classical and Christian Experiences

In speaking . . . about the experiences of the mystic philosophers and their fulfillment through Christianity, an assumption concerning history is implied that must be explicated. It is the assumption that the substance of history consists in the experiences in which man gains the understanding of his humanity and together with it the understanding of its limits.

Philosophy and Christianity have endowed man with the stature that enables him, with historical effectiveness, to play the role of rational contemplator and pragmatic master of a nature that has lost its demonic terrors.

With equal historical effectiveness, however, limits were placed on human grandeur; for Christianity has concentrated demonism into the permanent danger of a fall from the spirit—that is man's only by the grace of God—into the autonomy of his own self, from the amor Dei into the amor sui. The insight that man in his mere humanity, without the fides caritate formata, is demonic nothingness has been brought by Christianity to the ultimate border of clarity that by tradition is called revelation.

Lincoln, Charity and 'We, the People' -pt 1

2010-12-20T02:00:00Z

Lincoln, Charity, and "We the People" -Part 1

by Grant N. Havers

They said, some men are too ignorant, and vicious, to share in government. Possibly so, said we; and, by your system, you would always keep them ignorant and vicious.

—Abraham Lincoln, “Fragment on Slavery,” July 1, 1854

A Crisis of the People's Spirit

Lincoln's trust in the judgment of the American people presupposed a stern condition: "We, the People" must act charitably. The presence of Christian mores was essential in keeping the people virtuous, lest they fall back into the "mobocratic" spirit of which he famously warned in his Lyceum speech of 1838. Although other American leaders had recognized the importance of charity, they had not required it as a moral test of citizenship. The institutions of democracy alone do not guarantee a charitable people.

The president's thoughts about the capacity of Americans to be charitable are so emblematic of the typically populist rhetoric of a democrat that it is tempting to forget just how debatable they truly are.

John Stuart Mill -pt 3

2010-12-13T02:00:00Z

John Stuart Mill and the Minimum Consensus -Part 3

by David Walsh

David Walsh is professor of politics at Catholic University of America. He is the author or editor of many books; he is editor of three volumes of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. His Guarded by Mystery has been serialized here at VoegelinView in its entirety. His most recent book is The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. The book from which the current offering is taken, The Growth of the Liberal Soul, is available from the University of Missouri Press and appears here with permission. The following excerpt is taken from Chapter 4, "Liberal Achievement of Order from Disorder," and appears here in three parts.

The Failure of Liberalism to Articulate its Sources

John Stuart Mill's essay "Utilitarianism" is among the most illuminating examples of the liberal tension we have earlier remarked upon that is characterized by an utter inability to acknowledge the profound moral sources of the convictions publicly espoused. He insists that even though virtue and heroic self-sacrifice may be the highest ideals, their value is measured by their contribution to the happiness of the greatest number.

The utilitarian is not opposed to the sacrifice of individual happiness for the good of others but insists only that the sacrifice is not in itself good and is of no value if it is wasted (148). The telos must remain that of service toward the common good, not the empty pride of becoming virtuous. It is the reality of virtue that counts, not its trappings.

But at this point the principle of utility ceases to play any regulative role in the determination of action, for it has become indistinguishable from the realization of justice as the highest form of utility. Instead of utility being the measure of justice the traditional measure has been restored, so that justice becomes the criterion of what constitutes social utility.

Gnosis and Film -pt 4

2010-12-16T02:00:00Z

Secret Cinema—

Gnosis and Film -Part 4

by Eric G. Wilson

Eric Wilson is Professor of English at Wake Forest University. He has written a number of books, including the critically acclaimed Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy (2008). His most recent book is The Mercy of Eternity — A Memoir of Depression and Grace (2010). We offer here the Introduction from his Secret Cinema: Gnostic Vision in Film. New York: Continuum (2006). It appears with permission. We present this excerpt in five parts.

Transcendental Irony and Gnostic Film

In viewing matter as an illusion blocking knowledge of spirit, Gnosticism, as we shall see in detail in chapter one, necessarily suffers a complex relationship to material. On the one hand, the Gnostic must reject matter as unreal; he simply cannot take palpable events seriously because they ultimately do not exist. On the other hand, this same Gnostic must take matter somewhat seriously either as a negation of spirit that suggests the positive qualities of its opposite or as a corrupt pattern of spirit that intimates the virtues of its original.

Irony is the only way that the Gnostic can negotiate between these extremes, the only way that he can pretend that matter is significant while knowing it is meaningless, that he can study matter as negative disclosure and ignore matter as obscuring veil.

The Cabbalist golem-maker must view matter in a similar fashion — both as a covering film and a transparent window. The golem-maker knows that the material plane is a discordant copy of spiritual harmony. However, he also realizes that the best way to transcend matter is through matter. His golem is meant to be both a material form, a fallen shape, and a spiritual vessel, a redeemed human. This duplicity is troubling. It means that the magus must embrace the matter he manipulates into a man and hate the very material that he hopes to transcend. Only an ironic stance can empower him to achieve this double business, this authentic effort to meld matter into a noble form and this equally serious attempt to destroy this same shape.

Testing the Truth of the In-Between

2010-12-15T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Testing the Truth of Man's Experiences in the In-Between

Man's existence in the In-Between of imperfection and perfection, time and timelessness, mortality and immortality is indeed not an object of sense perception; and the propositions or a consciousness reflecting on its own structure of participation are indeed self-reflective.

From this state of things, however, it does not follow that we are falling into "subjectivity." For the process of self-reflection by which consciousness becomes luminous to itself is not a flight of imagination; nor are symbols engendered by the process one more ideology, or one more project of Second Reality.

The effort of self-reflection is real; it is recognizably related to a less reflected experience of participation and its less differentiated symbolization; and the propositions engendered by the effort are recognizably equivalents of the symbols which had been found unsatisfactory and whose want of differentiation had motivated the effort of reflection. Hence, the propositions engendered in a process of self-reflection can be tested objectively, even though we cannot use the tests that we would apply to propositions concerning objects of the external world.

Guess Who Came to Dinner

2010-11-26T02:00:00Z

Chesterton (and the rest)

Guess Who Came to Dinner?

by Max Arnott

[The local children] . . . soon sensed that there was something mysterious about [their guests] . . . that they had gone through certain experiences which had left deep marks upon them . . . and . . . they tried to reach out to them by being very nice to them.

That we might speak to the dead is a wish universally felt. In fact, most of us have spoken to the dead, albeit only in dreams, and have woken with a sigh. To remit death's overbearing interruption of our social intercourse gives the psychic his victim, and the theme of conversations with the dead in literature is as old as Homer, and probably much older.

One of the most charming examples of this innocent literary genre is a book we recently obtained from under a pile in a very messy second hand bookstore: Van Loon’s Lives by Hendrik Willem van Loon.

Van Loon (1882 to 1944) was born in the Netherlands, emigrated to the United States in 1902 and became a professor of history at Cornell. He made his mark however, as the author of a long series of popular works, including The Story of Mankind, which won the first Newbery award in 1922. He sold a lot books, for he wrote well and with a generous spirit. He is now forgotten.

Gnosis and Film -pt 3

2010-12-09T02:00:00Z

Secret Cinema—

Gnosis and Film -Part 3

by Eric G. Wilson

Eric Wilson is Professor of English at Wake Forest University. He has written a number of books, including the critically acclaimed Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy (2008). His most recent book is The Mercy of Eternity — A Memoir of Depression and Grace (2010). We offer here the Introduction from his Secret Cinema: Gnostic Vision in Film. New York: Continuum (2006). It appears with permission. We present this excerpt in five parts.

Screen, Projector, Auditorium

Obviously, the screen and the projector and the dark auditorium are not literally vehicles of redemption. They figuratively point to ideal powers—the Gnostic plenitude, the Cabbalistic Adam, the alchemical retort—that reconcile the polarities pulling the world apart.

These elements intimate these invisible potencies beyond empirical registers because of their interesting physical qualities. These three visible patterns constitute what Paul Valéry calls "privileged objects," forms, like crystals or flowers or nautiluses, that stand out "from the common disorder of perceptible things" because they are "more intelligible to the view, although more mysterious upon reflection." Duplicitous sites of "order and fantasy, invention and necessity, law and exception," these palpable shapes are disclosures of secret relationships between opposites, unexpected interstices and unions.¹²

If Valéry's crystals, crocuses, and conchs are natural specimens that appear to be artificial, then the screen, camera, and theater are artificial products that seem to be organic. Let us pause on the vital mysteries of these familiar contraptions.

Divine Sonship

2010-12-08T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

The Divine Sonship—
Not a Piece of Information

At a time when the reality of the gospel threatens to fall apart into the constructions of an historical Jesus and a doctrinal Christ, one cannot stress strongly enough the status of a gospel as a symbolism engendered in the metaxy of existence by a disciple's response to the drama of the Son of God. The drama of the Unknown God who reveals his kingdom through his presence in a man, and of the man who reveals what has been delivered to him by delivering it to his fellow men, is continued by the existentially responsive disciple in the gospel drama by which he carries on the work of delivering these things from God to man.

The gospel itself is an event in the drama of revelation. The historical drama in the metaxy, then, is a unit through the common presence of the Unknown God in the men who respond to his "drawing" and to one another. Through God and men as the dramatis personae, it is true, the presence of the drama partakes of both human time and divine timelessness, but tearing the drama of participation asunder into the biography of a Jesus in the spatiotemporal world and eternal verities showered from beyond would make nonsense of the existential reality that was experienced and symbolized as the drama of the Son of God.

John Stuart Mill -pt 2

2010-12-06T02:00:00Z

John Stuart Mill and the Minimum Consensus -Part 2

by David Walsh

Perpetual Tutelage under Government

The worst form of government is that in which there is a democratic constitution without the practice of democratic institutions pervading it. Then, John Stuart Mill warns, the rhetoric of self-government will be quickly overtaken by the impulse to secure the means of domination, as everyone realizes that it is only access to political power that can secure them against the domination of others and ensure the realization of their interests.

In a passage that sounds eerily similar to a description of our own politics of interest-group competition for influence, he explains how in proportion as all real initiative and direction resides in the government, and individuals habitually feel and act as under its perpetual tutelage, popular institutions develop in them not the desire of freedom, but an unmeasured appetite for place and power: diverting the intelligence and activity of the country from its principal business, to a wretched competition for the selfish prides and petty vanities of office (Principles of Political Economy, 314). This situation can be avoided only by extending the reality of self-government to encourage all levels of society "to manage as many as possible of their joint concerns by voluntary co-operation" (313).

Gnosis and Film -pt 2

2010-12-02T02:00:00Z

Secret Cinema—

Gnosis and Film -Part 2

by Eric G. Wilson

Eric Wilson is Professor of English at Wake Forest University. He has written a number of books, including the critically acclaimed Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy (2008). His most recent book is The Mercy of Eternity — A Memoir of Depression and Grace (2010). We offer here the Introduction from his Secret Cinema: Gnostic Vision in Film. New York: Continuum (2006). It appears with permission. We present this excerpt in five parts.

The Culture Industry

(concluded)

Jean Baudrillard radicalizes the arguments of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Jean-Louis Baudry, and Laura Mulvey. These earlier thinkers [discussed in Part 1] suggest that real differences exist between art and life but that the culture industry blurs these distinctions to further its capitalistic ends. Baudrillard does away with these gaps. He argues that the mass media is so pervasive and powerful that it has irrevocably collapsed the distinction between simulation and reality.⁵

The media presents "ideal" models for behavior that bear no direct relation to material or spiritual reality. In mimicking these models — simulations (images with no originals) and simulacra (words pointing to no things) — consumers become simulations of simulations, simulacra of simulacra. Information and politics, artistic creativity and violent rebellion — all are boiled down to entertainment, to commodity: newscasters purvey pseudo-facts, politicians play politicians, artists and rebels act out marginality.

In this welter of unmoored images and words, populations become cynical, apathetic, and nihilistic. They dwell in a flatland in which no one thing is better than any other thing, in which values are as lubricious as the ceaseless flow of illusions.⁵ These denizens unconsciously become instances of what Herbert Marcuse has called the "one-dimensional" man, a thin allegorical mask of the dominant ideology.⁶

Henry VIII and First Totalitarian State -pt 3

2010-12-01T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Henry VIII and

the First Totalitarian State

Part 3— The Literary Chorus

We should like to warn the reader that the preceding section has not given a historical survey of enactments concerning the Church of England in the sixteenth century. We have selected only a very few decisive statutes that were apt to illustrate the commonwealth idea. Nothing could be gained for our study of the typical features, for instance, by going into the details of the Six Articles, or by dwelling on the Ten Articles of Henry, or the Forty-Two Articles of Edward VI, or the Thirty-Nine Articles of Elizabeth — except additional proof that the Tudor mess was truly gorgeous.

The idea of the commonwealth as a closed, world-immanent, secularized polity has become clear. The church is an "aspect" of the commonwealth; and the symbols of faith are defined by the king in Parliament. Nonrecognition of royal supremacy in matters of faith is high treason. A dangerous development that began in the thirteenth century has now reached its grotesque end.

John Stuart Mill -pt 1

2010-11-29T02:00:00Z

John Stuart Mill and the Minimum Consensus -Part 1

by David Walsh

The Question Posed by L0cke

For John Locke, the foundation of the social contract was not a problem because it was identical with the moral law. The breach of one was tantamount to the breach of the other, neither more nor less. All that the language of contract compact did was make the situation explicit.

Revolution was thus not an fact that dissolved the government; rather, it was a response to the situation in which the government had already dissolved itself by breaking the bond of trust on which it had been based. The breach is not simply of a contract or agreement but of the moral law on which all agreements are premised.

Hence it is that Locke anathematizes the betrayal of this trust of mutual respect for rights as the most serious offense possible. It is immaterial who does it for, "whoever, either ruler or subject, by force goes about to invade the rights of either prince or people, and lays the foundation for overturning the constitution and frame of any just government, is guilty of the greatest crime, think, a man is capable of, being to answer for all those mischiefs of blood, rapine, and desolation, which the breaking to pieces of governments bring on a country" (Second Treatise, 230).

The "compact" is merely shorthand for the maintenance of the moral commitments on which community is based. But how much consensus is needed? Can order be maintained with much less consensus than Locke presupposed? Evidently, the answer is yes, because order has been maintained even though we have expanded the toleration of diversity beyond the limits suggested by Locke. He had, for example, excluded atheists, Catholics, the intolerant, and advocates of civil disorder (A Letter Concerning Toleration, 50-52).

Gnosis and Film -pt 1

2010-11-25T02:00:00Z

Secret Cinema—

Gnosis and Film -Part 1

by Eric G. Wilson

Eric Wilson is Professor of English at Wake Forest University. He has written a number of books, including the critically acclaimed Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy (2008). His most recent book is The Mercy of Eternity — A Memoir of Depression and Grace (2010). We offer here the Introduction from his Secret Cinema: Gnostic Vision in Film. New York: Continuum (2006). It appears with permission. We present this excerpt in five parts.

Flickers from the Void

To equate the Hollywood movie industry with a dream factory is to flatter films with more reality than they merit. Dream images, though hopelessly tenuous, at least exist. They possess a modicum of ghostly substance. They gesture toward the energies of the unconscious. They are essential elements of the sleeping mind. In contrast, film images hardly deserve ontology. The scenes on the revolving reel are pure illusions produced by the persistence of vision.

If a series of static images moves before our sight at a rate of sixteen to twenty-four frames a second, we enjoy the semblance of continuous motion. When this procession of pictures is borne on a filmstrip, in some cases only 50 percent of the reel is constituted of exposed images. The remaining half is made of unexposed blank spaces. A moving picture is only half there. It is nothing as much as it is something. It is but a flickering of yes and no.

The haunts of the dream chamber open to the mysteries of self. The illusions of the Hollywood movie house dissolve into more illusions. The physical negations of motion pictures, issuing from the laws of optics and technology, generate psychological attenuations as well: desires to be duped, to dwell in deceptions. The content of the half-present exposures is composed of unreal perfections: the comforting closures of predictable genre plots, the ravishing grace of well-lighted stars, the elegantly artificial rooms and forests.

Henry VIII and First Totalitarian State -pt 2

2010-11-24T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Henry VIII and

the First Totalitarian State —Part 2

The Closure of the Commonwealth

The idea of the commonwealth, as it became articulate during the sixteenth century, is the idea of the closed, secularized, autonomous polity. In order to understand the implications of the idea, we must briefly enumerate the various aspects of closure and secularization. By closure is meant jurisdictional independence from empire and papacy.

Jurisdictional independence from the empire could be formalized very simply through a declaration enunciating the principle of imperator in regno suo, which had become current in the Middle Ages.

The jurisdictional independence from the papacy was a more complicated matter. Here we have to distinguish between the autonomy of the Ecclesia Anglicana, achieved by submitting its canonical legislation to the consent of the king; and the actual secularization of spiritual power, achieved by transferring the infallible authority in matters of faith to the king in Parliament.

Drama of History -pt 3

2010-11-22T02:00:00Z

The Drama of History- Part 3

by Glenn Hughes

Glenn Hughes is Professor of Philosophy at St. Mary’s University (San Antonio). He is the author or editor of four books, most recently Transcendence and History: The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity. He is also Poetry Editor here at Voegelinview. The present essay, "The Drama of History," is taken from his book, Mystery and Myth in the the Philosophy of Eric Voegelin. This excerpt appears with permission and is presented in three parts.

History and Mythos

Order and History begins with a singularly poignant metaphor: every human being, Voegelin writes, is an actor in "the drama of being," who must play his or her role in ignorance of its essential meaning. The full meaning of the role cannot be known because its essence is the function it serves in the meaning of the drama as a whole, while the drama as a whole cannot be known because the only perspective available to the actor is from within the unfolding story. The story has neither begun with, nor will end with, the actor's existence. Rather, one is lifted temporarily into the obligation to act appropriately, with the freedom at one's disposal, in the ongoing action, whose origin and outcome remain a mystery.

As Voegelin immediately goes on to emphasize, this "ultimate essential ignorance is not complete ignorance." The dramatic metaphor is applicable, in fact, because to be human means to recognize, and to partially comprehend, one's situation within being, and to have the freedom to orient oneself in light of available knowledge about its order and significance. So we can say that human beings are able, because of limited but real knowledge, to attempt to shape the roles they have been granted in a way that seems fitting in light of what the drama of being is understood to require.¹⁶

American Political Culture and Revivalism -pt 3

2010-11-18T02:00:00Z

The Political Culture of Americanism
and the New Political Revivalism

-Part 3

by Juergen Gebhardt

Dr. Gebhardt is emeritus Professor at the Institute for Political Science at the University of Erlangen-Nürenberg. He is editor of the final volume of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Selected Correspondence, 1924-1949. We excerpt here portions of "The Crisis of Americanism" from Americanism: Revolutionary Order and Societal Self-Interpretation in the American Republic, Louisiana State University Press, 1993. This installment appears in three parts. It is reproduced here with permission.

Restoring the Republic to its First Principles

Creedal passion is a civil-theological way of recourse to the original source of ordering at the founding; it is the response to politics inspired by cynicism, self-satisfaction, and hypocrisy, and its objective is to try to restore the "paradigmatic republic." "Creedal passion periods," as Samuel P.Huntington summarizes his findings, "involve intense efforts by large numbers of Americans to return to first principles. They are characterized by a distinctive type of political cleavage, major efforts at reform, and significant shifts in alignments between political institutions and social forces."²⁰⁹

W. G. McLoughlin goes one step further, defining the periods of creedal passion as phases of the "Great Awakening and revivals," which form the basis for the historical development of American self-understanding:

"Great Awakenings (and the revivals are part of them) are the results . . . of critical disjunctions in our self-understanding. They are not brief outbursts of mass emotionalism by one group or another but profound cultural transformations affecting all Americans and extending over a generation or more. Awakenings begin in periods of cultural distortion and grave personal stress, when we lose faith in the legitimacy of our norms, the viability of our institutions, and the authority of our leaders in church and state."²¹⁰

Americanism-Community in Politics -pt 2

2010-11-01T01:00:00Z

Americanism

The Question of Community in Politics —Part 2

by Ellis Sandoz

Professor Sandoz is the Editor of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. He has written many books and published many essays on the significance of Eric Voegelin's thought and on the political and spiritual foundations of the United States. This essay is taken from his most recent book, Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America, available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay appears in two parts. It appears with permission of the publisher.

The Declaration of Independence⁹ is a primary text for any understanding of Americanism and a concise, creedal statement of its meaning. But to be rightly understood it must be placed in the biblical context just limned. The evocation of transcendent divine Being in the Creator-creaturely relationship and the sense of providential governance of human affairs beyond any sectarian divisions are authoritatively communicated therein, as is also an anthropology hinting of man as imago dei and as, thereby, indelibly stamped with Liberty, expressed in the rhetorical mode of inalienable rights reflective of the Creator's salient attributes.

The "Lockean" liberal political theory therein advanced thus ontologically foots on this anthropology as demanding consent for legitimacy of laws and of government itself, whose powers are thus inherently limited and whose cardinal purpose is salus populi: to serve its citizenry and not they it. The Declaration expressed the Whig consensus of Americans at the time, Jefferson later said.

Henry VIII and First Totalitarian State -pt 1

2010-11-17T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Henry VIII and

the First Totalitarian State

Part 1— The Beginnings of English Political Thought

While continental thinkers groped their way through the troubles of the Reformation toward the idea of an autonomous, secularized polity, England entered the age of Reformation with a polity that was autonomous and centralized enough to reform the church by transforming it into an adjunct of the secularized commonwealth.

In the wake of the Norman Conquest, and aided by geographical isolation, there had grown a national society, politically articulated and represented in Lords and Commons, institutionally unified through royal administration, courts, and common law. By the time of the Tudors, England had become "in fact," that is, in sentiment and institutions, a closed national polity ready to crown this development by the idea of its autonomous existence when the emergency should arise.

Drama of History -pt 2

2010-11-15T02:00:00Z

The Drama of History

- Part 2

by Glenn Hughes

Glenn Hughes is Professor of Philosophy at St. Mary’s University (San Antonio). He is the author or editor of four books, most recently Transcendence and History: The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity. The present essay, "The Drama of History," is taken from his book, Mystery and Myth in the the Philosophy of Eric Voegelin. Professor Hughes is also poetry editor here at VoegelinView. This excerpt appears with permission and is presented in three parts.

Lost Assurance and Irreversible Change

When, under the pressure of questioning, the transcendence of the ground, along with the rational and spiritual centers of personality through which it is able to be discerned, originally came into view, the traditional mythic symbols through which the order of reality was understood by compact consciousness began to lose power as guiding and convincing answers to the search for meaning.

The shock of these developments, stretched out over centuries (and in fact continuing into the present), can scarcely be overestimated. For they called for a new mode of participation in reality, in which one is oriented by new insights and symbols corresponding to the discovery and exploration of the interior rational or spiritual personality — the "mind" or "spirit"— and to the revelations of a ground of reality that lies beyond the visible, the imaginable, the figurable, the spatial and temporal.

The inadequacy of the traditional mythic answers and symbols for mediating the sense of existence and for guiding action in the face of these discoveries induced an acute and protracted disequilibrium (again continuing into the present) as the condition out of which a new equilibrium had to be sought.⁸

American Political Culture and Revivalism -pt 2

2010-11-11T02:00:00Z

The Political Culture of Americanism
and the New Political Revivalism

-Part 2

by Juergen Gebhardt

The Greening of America

As Philip Slater did before him, Charles Reich also dogmatizes the social environment and, with apocalyptic undertones, announces a unique revolution, the "greening of America." Reich sees the heterogeneous components of the counterculture as the social genesis of a new consciousness — consciousness here representing the ideal type of a picture of reality encompassing the total existence of man. Reich's "Consciousness III" successfully shakes the premises of the two socially prevalent types of consciousness of American society.

"Consciousness I" probably arose with the principle of nineteenth-century property individualism; "Consciousness II" is expressed in the principle of functional rationality. The "new consciousness is based on the present state of technology, and could not have arisen without it. And it represents a higher transcendent form of reason; no lesser form of consciousness could permit us to exist, given the present state of technology." ¹⁹⁰

Max Weber and Positivism -pt 6

2010-11-10T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Max Weber and Positivism —Part 6

The End of Positivism and

the Restorative Analysis

In the work of Max Weber positivism had come to its end, and the lines on which the restoration of political science would have to move became visible. The correlation between a constituent "value" and a constituted "value-free" science had broken down; the "value-judgments" were back in science in the form of the "legitimating beliefs" that created units of social order.

The last stronghold was Weber's conviction that history moved toward a type of rationalism that relegated religion and metaphysics into the realm of the "irrational." And that was not much of a stronghold as soon as it was understood that nobody was obliged to enter it; that one simply could turn around and rediscover the rationality of metaphysics in general and of philosophical anthropology in particular, that is, the areas of science from which Max Weber had kept studiously aloof.

Drama of History -pt 1

2010-11-08T01:00:00Z

The Drama of History

Part 1

by Glenn Hughes

Glenn Hughes is Professor of Philosophy at St. Mary’s University (San Antonio). He is the author or editor of four books, most recently Transcendence and History: The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity. The present essay, "The Drama of History," is taken from his book, Mystery and Myth in the the Philosophy of Eric Voegelin. Professor Hughes is also poetry editor here at VoegelinView. This excerpt appears with permission and is presented in three parts.

What is meant by "Philosophy of History?"

History, it may be argued, is Eric Voegelin's ultimate theoretical concern. Just as his theory of consciousness is the stable core of his larger, more comprehensive analysis of existence as the ongoing search for meaning, so that analysis forms part of an even broader design, which is the philosophy of history developed and presented in the five volumes of Order and History.

To describe Voegelin's overarching accomplishment as a "philosophy of history," however, is apt to give rise to misunderstanding, since the phrase suggests that he offers an interpretation of the overall meaning and goal of history. Also, ever since its invention in the eighteenth century, the title has typically referred to systematic accounts of universal history that are "scientific" in the sense of being secular in orientation, expressly intended to provide alternatives to the Christian interpretation of history that dominated Western speculation on history from Augustine to Bossuet.

American Political Culture and Revivalism -pt 1

2010-11-04T01:00:00Z

The Political Culture of Americanism
and the New Political Revivalism

-Part 1

by Juergen Gebhardt

Americanism and the Behavioralists

The implicit Americanism of the consciousness and behavior patterns of the population substantiates investigations analyzing voting behavior to document Americans' "beliefs," "values," etc.¹⁷⁹

No matter whether the empirical structural analyses of "political life," including the in-depth studies of individuals and groups, are intended to supplement, deepen, or confirm an understanding of the manifold manifestations of the American zoon politikon in a quantitative-empirical dimension, all — regardless of the differing conclusions drawn from the far-reaching sociopolitical changes in formal and informal government — are in agreement that the continuity of the political process, in the absence of intense polarization of society, allows the conclusion that a "basic consensus" exists.

Max Weber and Positivism -pt 5

2010-11-03T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Max Weber and Positivism —Part 5

Disenchantment and De-divinization

Thus far the work of Weber can be characterized as a succesful attempt to disengage political science from the irrelevances of methodology and to restore it to theoretical order. The new theory toward which he was moving, however, could not become explicit because he religiously observed the positivistic taboo on metaphysics.

Instead, something else became explicit; for Weber wanted to be explicit on his principles, as a theorist should be. Throughout his work he struggled with an explication of his theory under the title of construction of "types." The various phases through which this struggle passed cannot be considered on this occasion.

In the last phase he used types of "rational action" as the standard types and constructed the other types as deviations from rationality. The procedure suggested itself because Weber understood history as an evolution toward rationality and his own age as the hitherto highest point of "rational self-determination" of man.

Around the edge of the plot

2010-10-29T01:00:00Z

Chesterton (and the rest)

Around the Edge of the Plot

by Max Arnott

There are many mysteries: most are read and shelved, but a few are reread, and sometimes reread again. Sherlock Holmes comes to mind, another series is that concerning Nero Wolfe, by American author Rex Stout.

Stout (1886-1975) was a crew-member for Theodore Roosevelt, a cigar store clerk, a financial wizard, a propagandist, a novelist of the psychological school, and a pulp writer.

The Nero Wolfe mysteries, however, are his immortality. The series is long (1934 to 1975!), popular, and much admired (The Nero Wolfe novels were nominated Best Mystery Series of the Century at the world's largest mystery convention in 2000).

Americanism-Community in Politics -pt 1

2010-10-28T01:00:00Z

Americanism

The Question of Community in Politics

by Ellis Sandoz

I write here in a synoptic way, summarizing themes addressed more fully [in the previous three chapters] for the purpose of concisely clarifying the meaning of Americanism. Let me open with the words on the subject from a representative expert, Theodore Roosevelt, who said the following just over a century ago:

There is one quality which we must bring to the solution of every problem, — that is, an intense and fervid Americanism. We shall never be successful over the dangers that confront us; we shall never achieve true greatness, nor reach the lofty ideal which the founders and preservers of our mighty Federal Republic have set before us, unless we are Americans in heart and soul, in spirit and purpose, keenly alive to the responsibility implied in the very name of American, and proud beyond measure of the glorious privilege of bearing it. (1894)¹

I shall suggest that it is, indeed, Americanism that best symbolizes who we are and shall understand that term as designating the "common sense" of the country's founding generation — its homonoia (likemindedness) in Aristotle's usage, or senso commune in Vico's terminology. This is the way Thomas Jefferson and John Adams seem to have understood the term when they coined it at the end of the eighteenth century. This understanding therefore appeals both to the old and new science of politics as denoting a complex matter of fundamental importance. Once the meaning has been clarified a bit, I shall try, by implication at least, to indicate how to meet some of the challenges we face in preserving and defending the convictions and the way of life historically built on Americanism.

Secret Cinema- Gnostic Film -pt 2

2010-10-25T01:00:00Z

Secret Cinema—

Gnostic Vision in Film -Part 2

by Eric G. Wilson

Eric Wilson is Professor of English at Wake Forest University. He has written a number of books, including the critically acclaimed Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy (2008). His most recent book is The Mercy of Eternity — A Memoir of Depression and Grace (2010). We offer here the Prologue from his Secret Cinema: Gnostic Vision in Film. New York: Continuum (2006). It appears with permission. We present it in two parts.

From Gnostic Underground to Allen Ginsburg

I side with theorists who maintain that popular culture need not be opposed to religious impulses but can indeed serve as a fruitfully complex expression of religious ideas. The exclusionary tendencies in Gnosticism and its offshoots, however, present special difficulties for someone who believes that the Gnostic vision now thrives in the multiplex.

To demonstrate fecund interchanges between Christianity and popular culture is not so very hard because Christianity has from the beginning been a somewhat worldly religion devoted to transforming the fallen universe to an earthly heaven. But to articulate rich interactions between Gnosticism and the commercial collective is much harder. How can one find a place for a radically unworldly vision in the culture industry?

Max Weber and Positivism -pt 4

2010-10-27T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Max Weber and Positivism —Part 4

Stopping Short of a Science of Order

The whole complex of ideas — of "values," "reference to values," "value-judgments," and "value-free science" — seemed on the point of disintegration. An "objectivity" of science had been regained that plainly did not fit into the pattern of the methodological debate. And, yet, even the studies on sociology of religion could not induce Weber to take the decisive step toward a science of order. The ultimate reason for his hesitation, if not fear, is perhaps impenetrable; but the technical point at which he stopped can be clearly discerned.

His studies on sociology of religion have always aroused admiration as a tour de force, if not for other reasons. The amount of materials he mastered in these voluminous studies on Protestantism, Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Israel, and Judaism, to be completed by a study on Islam, is indeed awe-inspiring. In the face of such impressive performance it has perhaps not been sufficiently observed that the series of these studies receives its general tone through a significant omission, that is, of pre-Reformation Christianity.

Eric Voegelin's Formative Years -pt 4

2010-10-21T01:00:00Z

Eric Voegelin's Formative years:

A Student in America -Part 4

by Barry Cooper

Professor Cooper has edited three volumes of the Collected Works. He has authored numerous essays and books relating to Voegelin, including a volume of reminiscences, Voegelin Recollected, and most recently, a volume about Voegelin's early life, Beginning the Quest, from which this excerpt is taken. It appears with permission of the publisher and is presented here in four parts.

Capitalism and the Business Cycle

Two papers published in 1928 dealt with the Federal Reserve system, a matter about which [Voegelin] disagreed with [John R.] Commons (CW 7:255-73; see also CW 1:244-45, 245n51). A discussion of "Research of Business Cycles and the Stabilization of Capitalism" (CW 7:274-84) is interesting not simply because of its discussion of Daniel Defoe, whom Voegelin treated as a serious economic thinker and not merely the author of "utopian" South Seas escapist literature (CW 13:69-70; CW 7:276-79; CW 10:200), but also because Voegelin criticized Marx's economic doctrine: the capitalist order had stabilized itself about the same time as he and Engels were writing the Communist Manifesto — a point first made by Commons (CW 1:258-59; CW 7:280).

Indeed, in Voegelin's view, research on the business cycle was the most recent evidence of the long-term stability of capitalism.

Terror of History -pt 3

2010-10-11T00:00:00Z

The Terror of History

Part 3

by Glenn Hughes

Glenn Hughes is Professor of Philosophy at St. Mary’s University (San Antonio). He is the author or editor of four books, most recently Transcendence and History: The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity from which this excerpt is taken. He is also poetry editor here at VoegelinView. This excerpt appears in three parts and with permission of the publisher.

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which

I am trying to awake. —James Joyce, Ulysses

The Modern Loss of God

and the Problem of World-Immanent History

As discussed in the Introduction, the most recent act in the drama of the Western historical imagination involves a wide-scale dwindling of confidence in transcendent reality. Images and symbols of divine transcendence have become, for increasing numbers of people, ciphers that fail to communicate a genuinely intelligible or felt sense of truth. (Friedrich Nietzsche explains, in The Joyful Wisdom, that the phrase "God is dead" is to be understood as meaning that "the belief in the Christian God has ceased to be believable.") ²³Some of the many and complex reasons for this have already been mentioned.

These complex reasons include the rise of the modern mathematical sciences, and the impact on popular imagination of the use of their methods as an ultimate measure of truth and reality; the failure of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theologies of history to respond adequately to changing political and economic circumstances involving global commerce and exploration, the emergence of nation-states, and the rise of industrial technologies; the defensive hardening of religious doctrines concerning transcendence into various voices of fundamentalist assertion that respond to the challenge of secular worldviews only with increasingly inexplicable commands.

And Prayers Come Limping After

2010-09-29T01:00:00Z

Chesterton (and the rest)

And Prayers Come Limping After

by Max Arnott

On our desk lies an elderly paperback, somewhat yellowed and a genuine curiosity.

In the upper right hand corner is a green seal with a penguin.

In the centre of the cover is a face: a man, beardless, of middle age, wearing a fur cap with an elaborate jewel. His face is calm, but somber. The eyes look withdrawn, the lips are thin and tight. The subject looks like a worried man in a tough business.

The book is The Daughter of Time, from 1951, by British (Scottish to be exact) crime writer Josephine Tey (real name Elizabeth Mackintosh). It is a detective story, of sorts.

Max Weber and Positivism -pt 3

2010-10-20T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Max Weber and Positivism —Part 3

Introducing Principles through

the Back Door

. . . [It] has been repeatedly stressed that the arbitrariness of method did not degenerate into complete irrelevance of scientific production, because the pressure of theoretical traditions remained a determining factor in the selection of materials and problems.

This pressure, one might say, was erected by Weber into a principle. The three volumes, for instance, of his sociology of religion threw a massive bulk of more or less clearly seen verities about human and social order into the debate about the structure of reality.

By pointing to the undisputable fact that verities about order were factors in the order of reality—and not perhaps only lust for power and wealth or fear and fraud—a tentative objectivity of science could be regained, even though the principles had to be introduced by the back door of "beliefs" in competition, and in rationally insoluble conflict, with Weber's contemporary "values."

Secret Cinema- Gnostic Film -pt 1

2010-10-18T01:00:00Z

Secret Cinema—

Gnostic Vision in Film

by Eric G. Wilson

Eric Wilson is Professor of English at Wake Forest University. He has written a number of books, including the critically acclaimed Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy (2008). His most recent book is The Mercy of Eternity — A Memoir of Depression and Grace (2010). We offer here the Prologue from his Secret Cinema: Gnostic Vision in Film. New York: Continuum (2006). It appears with permission. We present it in two parts.

Gnosticism in the Post-Modern Age: A Prologue

This is about the old problem, the virus that will not go away: the relationship between appearance and reality. After Plato placed this difficult relation at the center of his philosophy, thinkers through the ages have struggled to understand how lubricious surfaces — quick grackles and dying crocuses — might connect to something stable and lasting: spirit still vital, soul beyond corruption. Meditations on this dilemma — ranging from the essays of Kant and Descartes to the apologias of Aquinas and Augustine to the visions of alchemists, Cabbalists, and Gnostics — have been a curse as much as a blessing. They have solaced those weary of time and hungry for eternity. They have torn the world between surface and depth, fate and freedom, conformity and conversion.

Even in our postmodern age, ostensibly focused on material environments over spiritual realms, this problem, along with its salves and lacerations, persists. Though most intellectuals are skeptical of metaphysics and tired of dualism, they have been forced to grapple with the old Platonic difficulty, for this reason: In concocting "virtual realities," contemporary technologists have blurred essential distinctions. What is the difference between an empirical form and its computerized simulation? How can one distinguish between an autonomous organ and its mechanized double? Are conscious computers capable of ethics? Does mechanical dependence dehumanize men?

Eric Voegelin's Formative Years -pt 3

2010-10-14T01:00:00Z

Eric Voegelin's Formative years:

A Student in America -Part 3

by Barry Cooper

Professor Cooper has edited three volumes of the Collected Works. He has authored numerous essays and books relating to Voegelin, including a volume of reminiscences, Voegelin Recollected, and most recently, a volume about Voegelin's early life, Beginning the Quest, from which this excerpt is taken. It appears with permission of the publisher and is presented here in four parts.

John R. Commons and the Pioneer Spirit

The final chapter, "On John R. Commons" (CW 1:205-82), reflected both Voegelin's close personal relationship with the man and his significance for the social, economic, political, and spiritual or intellectual formation of American democracy. Commons's life, Voegelin said, "overlaps the shaping of the American nation, and his work is woven into this process," but its beginning lay in the pre-Civil War expansion of the country to the Midwest, where he was born, and beyond.

He had been influenced by his Quaker upbringing and by Josiah Warren, "the American anarchist," but especially by the experience of pioneer life, which confirmed existentially the doctrine of self-sovereignty proclaimed by Warren.

Max Weber and Positivism -pt 2

2010-10-13T00:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Max Weber and Positivism —Part 2

The 'Ethics of Intention' and

'Value-Free' Science

[Weber's conception of science] assumed a social relation between scientist and politician, activated in the institution of a university, where the scientist as teacher will inform his students, the prospective homines politici, about the structure of political reality. The question may be asked: What purpose should such information have?

The science of Weber supposedly left the political values of the students untouched, since the values were beyond science. The political principles of the students could not be formed by a science that did not extend to principles of order.

Could it perhaps have the indirect effect of inviting the students to revise their values when they realized what unsuspected, and perhaps undesired, consequences their political ideas would have in practice? But in that case the values of the students would not be quite so demonically fixed. An appeal to judgment would be possible, and what could a judgment that resulted in reasoned preference of value over value be but a value-judgment? Were reasoned value-judgments possible after all?

Eric Voegelin's Formative Years -pt 2

2010-10-07T01:00:00Z

Eric Voegelin's Formative years:

A Student in America -Part 2

by Barry Cooper

Professor Cooper has edited three volumes of the Collected Works. He has authored numerous essays and books relating to Voegelin, including a volume of reminiscences, Voegelin Recollected, and most recently, a volume about Voegelin's early life, Beginning the Quest, from which this excerpt is taken. It appears with permission of the publisher and is presented here in four parts.

The "open self" versus the "closed self"

Voegelin discussed [this new American experience, essentially different from the European tradition of skepticism] by analyzing the "emotional motive," which from the introduction was understood to be primary, in [William] James's Pluralistic Universe. The traditional Christian doctrine of "monarchic theism" discussed the divine creation of the world in a way that was obsolete even though it may still be affirmed and "confessed at church in formulas that linger by their mere inertia." But, James said, "the life is out of them." Instead of an "alien" relationship between Creator and creation, a more intimate symbolism, which did not first emphasize the difference between the two, was needed.

According to James, the needed symbolism would be more intimate and organic, "more like a federal republic than like an empire or kingdom." In short, James and Peirce abandoned "the attempt to structure a rational image of the world." Rather, several images might be invoked and, depending on the context, may be equally acceptable or adequate. Even polytheism was a possibility.

Max Weber and Positivism -pt 1

2010-10-06T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Max Weber and Positivism

Part 1: The Ethics of Responsibility

The movement of methodology, as far as political science is concerned, ran to the end of its immanent logic in the person and work of Max Weber. A full characterization cannot be attempted in the present context. Only a few of the lines that mark him as a thinker between the end and a new beginning will be traced.

A value-free science meant to Weber the exploration of causes and effects, the construction of ideal types that would permit distinguishing regularities of institutions as well as deviations from them, and especially the construction of typical causal relations. Such a science would not be in a position to tell anybody whether he should be an economic liberal or a socialist, a democratic constitutionalist or a Marxist revolutionary, but it could tell him what the consequences would be if he tried to translate the values of his preference into political practice.

Terror of History -pt 2

2010-10-04T01:00:00Z

The Terror of History

Part 2

by Glenn Hughes

Glenn Hughes is Professor of Philosophy at St. Mary’s University (San Antonio). He is the author or editor of four books, most recently Transcendence and History: The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity from which this excerpt is taken. He is also poetry editor here at VoegelinView. This excerpt appears in three parts and with permission of the publisher.

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which

I am trying to awake. —James Joyce, Ulysses

Understanding Historiogenesis

Historiogenesis is a mythopoeic speculation on ultimate beginnings. As cosmogony is a mytho-speculation on the origins of the cosmos, and theogony on the origins of the gods, and anthropogony on the origins of humankind, so historiogenesis speculates on the ultimate beginnings of the presently experienced social order. It functions in the same way as does all myth: it explains how a phenomenon — in this case the speculator's society — came into existence in an ultimate sense.

It does this by telling the story of this society beginning at an absolute point of divine-cosmic origins, proceeding through mythical and legendary events that merge into the known events of recent history, and concluding with the establishment of the society in which the author is writing, now firmly revealed in its inevitability.¹²

An example of historiogenesis can be seen in the Sumerian King List (ca. 2050 b.c.e.). The list identifies a continuous line of Sumerian kings and dynasties beginning with a divinely creative origin — "When kingship was lowered from heaven, kingship was first in Eridu" — and culminating in the author's present (which was a period of imperial restoration).

Periagoge: Liberal Education -pt 3

2010-09-23T01:00:00Z

from the Northern Lights

Periagoge: Liberal Education in the Modern University Part 3

by John von Heyking

The following excerpt is taken from The Democratic Discourse of Liberal Education, ed. Lee Trepanier. Cedar City, UT: Southern Utah Univesity Press, in cooperation with the Grace A. Tanner Center for Human Values, 2009. This essay appeared there as "Periagoge: Liberal Education in the Modern University" and "Obstacles to Liberal Education in the Modern University." It appears here in three parts.

Niemeyer the teacher; Voegelin "the phenomenon”

In addition to being a great teacher, Gerhart Niemeyer was a friend of Eric Voegelin and student of his thought.⁵⁵ While Niemeyer left behind an important legacy of written work, it is no insult to Niemeyer to characterize Voegelin as the profounder and more original thinker. This is one reason Voegelin’s capacity as a teacher gets mixed reviews.⁵⁶

Tom Flanagan, who took undergraduate classes from both, regarded Niemeyer the better teacher. Niemeyer’s teaching method was Socratic. He was:

[constantly] asking people questions and getting them to explore. And he orchestrated all this so that we would also come together. I can remember all the books I read in Niemeyer’s class. In contrast, I can’t remember anything specific that Voegelin said, although he was there for an entire term.”⁵⁷

Niemeyer, who exercised Socratic eros as well as caritas, evoked a greater reaction from this particular former student. If Michael Oakeshott is correct in his observation that a teacher is not really a teacher unless the student learns, then Flanagan’s memory of his experience and of his readings might serve as a useful marker of Niemeyer’s greater capacity as teacher. However, we should be cautious to avoid drawing too hasty a conclusion.

Eric Voegelin's Formative Years -pt 1

2010-09-30T01:00:00Z

Eric Voegelin's Formative years:

A Student in America -Part 1

by Barry Cooper

Professor Cooper has edited three volumes of the Collected Works. He has authored numerous essays and books relating to Voegelin, including a volume of reminiscences, Voegelin Recollected, and most recently, a volume about Voegelin's early life, Beginning the Quest, from which this excerpt is taken. It appears with permission of the publisher and is presented here in four parts.

During its brief period of operation, from 1918 to 1929, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, according to Robert M. Hutchins, "did more than any other agency to promote the social sciences in the United States."¹ It was not until 1921 that a modest amount of money, well under 1 percent of the funds of the memorial, was directed toward "scientific research and investigation." Social welfare, support for religious organizations, and emergency relief absorbed over 80 percent of the funds available from the memorial. By 1924, 86 fellowships were available, chiefly for "able young American social scientists," to provide them with "time for research at a crucial time in their careers."

By 1928, 165 out of 450 were available for foreigners; assuming the same ratio for 1924, about 32 fellowships would have been available for non-Americans. Along with Oscar Morgenstern and Denis Brogan, Voegelin received one of them, which paid him $1,800 a year — as compared to $30 a month, which he received in 1927 as Hans Kelsen's assistant in Vienna.² It was, therefore, a highly competitive and generous award.

Voegelin arrived in New York on October 4, 1924, and started a well-thought-out program of study. He began his work at Columbia, studying sociology with Franklin H. Giddings, educational theory with John Dewey, and public administration with Arthur W. MacMahon, as well as biology in the lab of Thomas Hunt Morgan (who won a Nobel Prize a decade later), and economics with John Wesley.

Literary Criticism: Its Proper Method

2010-09-29T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Literary Criticism: Its Proper Method

The following is taken from the correspondence between Eric Voegelin and renowned literary critic Robert B. Heilman. They had become close friends when they were both in the faculty at Louisiana State University.

And now let me take up some of the principles I have discerned, or believe to have discerned [in Heilman's then new book on Othello, entitled Magic in the Web,] and which I admire both for clarity of conception and force of execution.

First of all, the principle of exhaustion of the source. The interpretation of a literary work by a first-rate artist or philosopher must proceed on the assumption that the man "knew" what he was doing — leaving in suspense the question of the level of consciousness at which the "knowing" in the concrete instance occurs. Under that assumption the interpretation will be adequate only, if every "part" of the work makes sense in the comprehensive context.

Moreover, the sense must emerge from the texture of the linguistic corpus, and it must not be prejudged by "ideas" of the interpreter. No adequate interpretation of a major work is possible, unless the interpreter assumes the role of the disciple who has everything to learn from the master.

Terror of History -pt 1

2010-09-27T01:00:00Z

The Terror of History

Part 1

by Glenn Hughes

Glenn Hughes is Professor of Philosophy at St. Mary’s University (San Antonio). He is the author or editor of four books, most recently Transcendence and History: The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity from which this excerpt is taken. He is also poetry editor here at VoegelinView. This excerpt appears in three parts and with permission of the publisher.

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which

I am trying to awake. —James Joyce, Ulysses

Each person has his own understanding of history

HISTORY, to be precise about the term, is not everything that has ever happened, but the remembered and recorded past, the past judged worthy of reflection and narration. A "history" is a story comprising, not all events, but significant events. The weight of significance is something to be determined by the person trying to make sense of the flow of events, and the result is a tale, a story worth narrating, a pattern of the significant and essential.

History is therefore a somewhat complex phenomenon, in that two components are required for its constitution: the occurrence of the significant events themselves, and the subsequent recognizing and telling of them. For this reason, when we speak of a "history" we might be referring to (1) a course of events, (2) the recorded narrative of those events, or (3) the combination of the two. Not only must there be a tale worth telling, but the tale must be drawn out or deciphered from the flux of events, and must be told, heard, and remembered, for history to exist.¹

What makes events memorable? In general, we could say that memorable events are those that have the most explanatory, or revelatory, power. A biographer eliminates the dross, the insignificant, from a life story, in order to expose the essential identity — the essential development, self-understanding, decisions, actions, and influences — of a person.

Theology and Fools-

2010-09-22T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Theology and Fools

The following is an excerpt from a conversation between Eric Voegelin and graduate students at the St. Thomas More Institute in Montreal on March 12th, 1976. He was giving an example of how one must escape conventional categories if one is to give meaning to new empirical historical knowledge.

The Two Types of Theology

As you know, the term theology was invented by Plato. There was no theology before him; it's a new term. (Every term was new at some time.) Think of how it arose and on what occasion — as we might have it today with our students. These young people are corrupted by all sorts of sophistic nonsense in the environment. You have to explain things to them and you hit on the following problem.

The ideas of all of these young people with whom we talk (in the Republic; later, in the Laws, the ideas of their elders) can be summarized in a triad of propositions advanced by Sophists — a very comprehensive triad: 1. The gods don't exist; 2. If they exist they do not care what men are doing; 3. If they care what men are doing you can bribe them by sacrifice. (Go ahead — make a few sacrifices out of the profits from your crimes.)

Common Sense Tradition -pt 4

2010-09-20T01:00:00Z

Common Sense and the Common Sense Tradition -Part 4

by Scott Philip Segrest

Scott Segrest is Instructor in American Politics at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York. This essay is taken from Professor Segrest's new book, America and the Political Philosophy of Common Sense, available now from the University of Missouri Press. This is offered here with permission and appears in four parts. This excerpt is part of a larger and richly illustrated discussion.

Thomas Reid and Common Sense Philosophy

(concluded)

Aristotle’s failure to fully appreciate obligation and duty

According to Reid's understanding of human moral goodness, Aristotle's notion of morality as a matter of moderation, of achieving the mean between excess and deficiency in feeling and action, while true as far as it goes, is inadequate.¹³⁴ What Aristotle lacks, specifically, is a full appreciation of the nature of obligation and duty.¹³⁵ Reid does agree with Aristotle that, in Reid's words, "the fundamental maxim of prudence, and of all good morals [is] that the passions ought, in all cases, to be under the dominion of reason," but for Reid submitting to the rule of reason is not only wise, it is obligatory.¹³⁶

This is not to deny that an element of obligation is implied in the Aristotelian account, but Reid seems right to think that Aristotle lacks clarity about the lawlike, binding character of obligation, perhaps the reason Aristotle does not push beyond his notion of natural right to a full-blooded conception of natural law.

Mystery of the High Sales of C.S. Lewis

2010-09-10T01:00:00Z

Chesterton (and the rest)

The Mystery of the High Sales
of C.S. Lewis

by Max Arnott

We welcome you back after the summer vacation, and wish you insight and satisfaction during the coming winter season. We would like to thank VoegelinView for the opportunity to publish these little pieces and, of course, our readers for their forebearance.

* * * * *

Insight usually begins with a question, sometimes an unexpected one, and today's question is:

Why is C.S. Lewis loved so hard by so many people?

He was a man of wide reading (very wide reading), but as a scholar he was no Rosemond Tuve, and certainly no Voegelin. He produced few hard-core academic articles. His most famous scholarly work, The Allegory of Love, is learned, entertaining, and evocative, but its reader; rarely feels the pressure of massive intellectual muscle.

In his apologetics, he wrote as an amateur, and said so. He certainly did not have the theological chops of Josef Pieper. He never learned Hebrew.

Periagoge: Liberal Education -pt 2

2010-09-16T01:00:00Z

from the Northern Lights

Periagoge: Liberal Education in the Modern University Part 2

by John von Heyking

Gerhart Niemeyer: Caritas in the Classroom

The Critique of Ideologies

Gerhart Niemeyer, like Eric Voegelin, had fled from Nazism in Germany. Unlike Voegelin, however, he mainly saw the social sciences as one of the elements in the story of modern ideology.²⁰ After teaching at Princeton University and Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, he came to the University of Notre Dame where he taught from 1955 to 1992. He and Voegelin were friends and Niemeyer incorporated many of Voegelin’s insights on ideology, reason, and faith, into his numerous essays and books, most notably, Between Nothingness and Paradise. ²¹

For Niemeyer, the positivism of social science is rooted in the modern disposition, seen in thinkers including Thomas Hobbes, to view human beings in terms of their physical properties, which constitutes a reduced view of humanity. The biggest problem with social science is that while it can provide numerous details about external facts, its “taboo on theory” means it cannot understand their meaning. For someone of Niemeyer’s generation, the failure of social science to understand totalitarianism was damning.

Loss of the Concrete

2010-09-15T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

The Loss of the Concrete

[There was an intellectual and moral decline in English society from the late 17th century onward despite material prosperity.] [These] two symptoms characterize the amplitude of the loss of the concrete. . . The concrete is lost with regard to the fundamental orientation of existence through faith, and it is lost with regard to the system of symbols and concepts by which the orientation of existence is expressed. The two losses are related to each other because the loss of orientation through faith prevents the creation and clarification of symbols, and at the same time the perversion of meaning in the realm of symbols and concepts prevents the return to the orienting experiences. The devastation is far-reaching. . . .

[The contemporary critic Bishop George] Berkeley focused his diagnosis in the symbols of materialism and freethinking, and we shall follow his analysis. We shall accept the two symbols as signifying the principal sources of confusion, and we shall lend them a preliminary precision by defining them as materialization of the external world and psychologization of the self.

The Materialization of the External World

By materialization of the external world we mean the misapprehension that the structure of the external world as it is constituted in the system of mathematized physics is the ontologically real structure of the world. The tendency of mistaking the laws of mechanics for the structure of the world makes itself felt strongly even by the middle of the seventeenth century under the influence of Galileo's discoveries and even more so under the influence of Cartesian physics.

Common Sense Tradition -pt 3

2010-09-13T01:00:00Z

Common Sense and the Common Sense Tradition -Part 3

by Scott Philip Segrest

Thomas Reid and Common Sense Philosophy

The Importance of Thomas Reid

Thomas Reid's name after his death quickly became almost a synonym for common sense philosophy. For the better part of a century, from the late 1700s to the late 1800s, Reid's common sense philosophy "enjoyed enormous popularity in the United States, Great Britain, and France."⁵⁵ But for much of the last century and a quarter, he has not been considered a philosopher of great importance, and the reputation of common sense philosophy suffered along with Reid's own flagging fortunes. This is beginning to change, however.

A recent resurgence of Reidian scholarship testifies to a growing sense that Reid was in fact a philosopher ahead of his time. Nicholas Wolterstorff's judgment that Reid was "one of the two great philosophers of the latter part of the eighteenth century, the other being of course Immanuel Kant," is no longer an implausible position, as witness the impressive collection of essays in the recently compiled Cambridge Companion to Thomas Reid.⁵⁶

Part of the reason for Reid's disappearance from the story of modern philosophy was Kant's publicly expressed opinion that Scottish Common Sense thought was not worthy of serious consideration ⁵⁷. . . .

Periagoge: Liberal Education -pt 1

2010-09-09T01:00:00Z

from the Northern Lights

Periagoge: Liberal Education in the Modern University Part 1

by John von Heyking

Conversation and the "Turning Around"

of the Soul¹

One of the common criticisms of the contemporary university is that it lacks individuals willing or even capable of conversing. Critics such as Anthony Kronman and Stephen Miller rightly observe that there’s something about contemporary culture and the contemporary university hostile to the arts or habits of conversation.

Conversation has had a place in liberal education going back at least to the Platonic dialogue, if not back further — should one wish to see things this way—to the point in evolution where bipeds who had sat conversing long enough lost their tails and became human beings.²

Conversation as the primary mode of liberal education is not meant to produce “results” but is an ongoing quest for understanding the human condition in its manifold aspects. As Kronman notes of its participants, whether scholars or great texts: “They refer to each other, commending, correcting, disapproving, and building on the works of those who have gone before.”³ Michael Oakeshott captures the spirit of conversation by comparing it to gambling: “Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize, nor is it an activity of exegesis; it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure. It is with conversation as with gambling, its significance lies neither in winning nor in losing, but in wagering.”⁴

Invention of Humanity

2010-09-08T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

The Invention of "Humanity"

Turgot and the "Masse Totale"

The French philosophe, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune, was the first intellectual to formulate plausible ideological language that provides meaning in life without invoking God. It is noteworthy that Voegelin's analysis seems to describe quite accurately the current [2010] rulers of the United States.

Turgot [1727-1781] transposes the Christian dichotomy of [sacred history, which does have meaning] and profane history [which can have no meaning because its whole is not yet known] into the context of intramundane thought through his dichotomy of the “thread of progress” [softening of the mores, enlightenment of the mind and the intensification of world trade] and the vast ballast of historical ups and downs and asides that have no meaning in themselves. However, he cannot extract from the “sacred” thread of progress a meaning for the spiritual destiny of the concrete person [man in the fullness of his dimensions, including the intellectual and spiritual]. . . .

Since the finite lines of meaning, which can be found in the civilizational process, can have no meaning for man as a spiritual person, man and his concrete problems have to be brushed aside; since concrete man cannot be the subject for whom history has a meaning, the subject has to be changed; man is replaced by the masse totale.

Common Sense Tradition -pt 2

2010-09-06T01:00:00Z

Common Sense and the Common Sense Tradition -Part 2

  by Scott Philip Segrest

Scott Segrest is Instructor in American Politics at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York. This essay is taken from Professor Segrest's new book, America and the Political Philosophy of Common Sense, available now from the University of Missouri Press. This is offered here with permission and appears in four parts.

Giambattista Vico, Lord Shaftesbury, and Francis Hutcheson

Vico and the Sense of Community

In the early eighteenth century, Giambattista Vico employed the Latin sensus communis in his theory of common sense, giving it, however, a rather more involved significance than Aquinas contemplated. Vico's sensus communis, in fact, combined the meanings of koine aesthesis and koine ennoiai together with the notion of the sense of a community to produce the very rich conception of "the primary truths residual in society," that is, the primary truths that are universal but linguistically and culturally mediated.²⁵

As John D. Schaeffer observes, Vico's sensus communis contains a sense of the natural law in recognizing the "underlying agreements" about basic human needs and utilities that obtain among all nations.²⁶ At the same time, according to Vico's understanding, "The sensus communis cannot be merely a static set of values embodied in a literary canon [but, rather,] is a capital constantly changing its outline as it is invested in various causes. The sensus communis is constantly reinterpreted and reshaped by the decisions of the community."²⁷

Help Save the Eric Voegelin Institute

2010-08-11T15:41:48Z

HELP SAVE THE ERIC VOEGELIN INSTITUTE

A letter from Ellis Sandoz

Dear Friend,

I write with urgency to you to ask for your help. As you may know, the Eric Voegelin Institute has recently fallen under the budget axe at LSU. After receiving state support for administrative help and some operating money for 20 years, we now are being completely cut off and must function solely on private donations. Our only staff position has been eliminated from the state budget and can only be filled part time from private funds. I will continue as Director but receive no state money for so serving and will teach full-time as Moyse Distinguished Professor of Political Science.

With only very limited funds available, finishing work on our Voegelin documentary film, our unique ongoing monograph series, and such other important research as conferences, fellowships, and lectures may have to be delayed or abandoned. For details on our operations see our Web site www.ericvoegelin.org/

To avert the worst,

Judgment of the Dead -Pt 2

2010-09-01T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

The Judgment of the Dead -Part 2

"Only the Good Souls are in Hell" —Nikolai Berdiaev

We conclude Eric Voegelin's account of the Gorgias. Voegelin uses language equivalent to Christian mysticism to describe the immortalization that can take place while we still live.

Life can mean either earthly existence, or freedom of the soul from the frenzy of the body. The shifting between these several meanings is the source of the richness of the Gorgias.

Let us begin with the meaning of the symbols on the level of history. In the historico-political process those who live lustfully like Callicles are the "dead," entombed in the passion and frenzy of their body; they are judged by the "living," that is, by the philosophers who let their souls be penetrated by the experience of death and, thus, have achieved life sub specie mortis in freedom from somatic passion. The transfer of authority means the victory of the life of the soul over the deadliness of earthly passions.

This tension between the life of the soul and the tomb of the body, however, has only "recently" developed in history. Formerly, in the age of the myth, the distinction between life and death had not been so clear; at that time earthly existence could easily be mistaken for the life of the soul. The soul had first to be separated from the body through the experience of death. Only when Thanatos had entered the soul could it be distinguished clearly from the sema of the body; only then could its nonsomatic nature, the co-eternity of its existence with the cosmos and the autonomy of its order, become intelligible.

Judgment of the Dead -Pt 1

2010-08-25T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

The Judgment of the Dead -Part 1

The Meaning of Life and Death

We continue with Eric Voegelin's account of the Gorgias. The soul of a man must be purified of injustice either here and now or after death. The myth explains the necessary process of purgation.

The transfer of authority from Athens to Plato is the climax of the Gorgias. The meaning of the transfer and the source of the new authority, however, still need some clarification. Let us recall what is at stake. The transfer of authority means that the authority of Athens, as the public organization of a people in history, is invalidated and superseded by a new public authority manifest in the person of Plato. That is revolution.

And it is even more than an ordinary revolution in which new political forces enter the struggle for power in competition with the older ones. Plato's revolution is a radical call for spiritual regeneration. The people of Athens has lost its soul. The representative of Athenian democracy, Callicles, is existentially disordered; the great men of Athenian history are the corruptors of their country; the law courts of Athens can kill a man physically but their sentence has no moral authority of punishment.

The fundamental raison d'etre of a people, that it goes its way through history in partnership with God, has disappeared; there is no reason why Athens should exist, considering what she is. The Gorgias is the death sentence over Athens.

Political Corruption

2010-08-18T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Political Corruption:

The Man who Dares to Resist

We continue with Voegelin's account of the Gorgias. Pathos is the precondition for Philia; it is better to strive for philia and lose one's life than to live on as an advocate or agent of the tyrant.

In the present context we have to concentrate on the existential enmity between Callicles and Socrates-Plato and on the critical analysis of political corruption. Above all, Socrates now resumes the issue of communication in a more radical manner. Only if the soul is well ordered can it be called lawful (nomimos) (504D); and only if it has the right order (nomos) is it capable of entering into communion (koinonia) (507E).

The pathos is no more than a precondition for community; in order to actualize it, the Eros must be oriented toward the Good (agathon) and the disturbing passions must be restrained by Sophrosyne. If the lusts are unrestrained, man will lead the life of a robber (lestes). Such a man cannot be the friend (prosphiles) of God or other men, for he is incapable of communion, and who is incapable of communion is incapable of friendship (philia) (507E). Friendship, philia, is Plato's term for the state of existential community.

Philia is the existential bond among men; and it is the bond as well between Heaven and Earth, man and God. Because philia and order pervade everything, the universe is called kosmos (order) and not disorder or license (akosmia, akolasia) (508A).

Socrates confronts the smug insider

2010-08-11T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Socrates confronts the Smug Insider:

Exposing the Inversion of Existence

We continue with Voegelin's account of the Gorgias. Socrates now faces the assault of Callicles, who offers his hedonistic existentialism: justice is the success of the stronger; the life of luxury, license and freedom is happiness.

[There is more] to the resistance of Callicles than the fear of a Socratic popular success. The situation of the dialogue is not that of an assembly of the people. Members of the ruling class are among themselves. In such company the propositions of Socrates are in bad taste.

It is the same complaint as that of Polus. But while Polus was indignant because Socrates did not conduct himself en canaille, Callicles protests that Socrates does not conduct himself as a gentleman of the superior type. The subsequent remarks of Callicles have, therefore, in spite of their threatening undertone, the character of a not altogether unfriendly admonition to Socrates to mend his ways.¹

Nature of Pathos

2010-08-04T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

The Nature of Pathos:

Reaching the hearts of the corrupt

In Voegelin's account of the Gorgias, Socrates has refuted the old sophist, Gorgias, and his pupil, Polus. They are mainly interested in advancing themselves through skillful argument. But the third man, Callicles, is interested in power — and will kill for it.

The violent reaction comes from the activist, from Callicles, the enlightened politician. He has followed the course of the debate with increasing astonishment and wrath and now he asks Chaerephon [a pupil of Socrates present during the discussion] whether Socrates is in earnest about these things or whether he is joking. Being assured that he is in earnest, he turns on Socrates: If that were true, would not the whole of human life be turned upside down; and would we not do in everything the very opposite of what we ought to be doing? (481C).

Callicles has rightly sensed the revolution in the words of Socrates. This is not a mere intellectual game. If Socrates is right, then the society as represented by the politician Callicles is wrong. And since the wrong goes to the spiritual core of human existence, the society would be corrupt to the point that it can no longer have a claim to the loyalty of man. The existence of the society in history is at stake. The battle has now reached the real enemy, the public representative of the corrupt order. And Callicles does not hesitate to join battle.

Lost in the Original

2010-05-28T01:00:00Z

Chesterton (and the rest)

Lost in the Original

by Max Arnott

When we enter middle age we shed the illusions of youth (such as the merit of keg parties). As we approach the far border of that period we begin occasionally to lose faith in our disillusionment.

When I took Latin in high school, there was a certain unspoken consensus that the main point of dealing with original texts was to allow for translations. Some who read this may remember, for example, the intricate process of turning Latin conditional clauses into English conditionals. Cicero had many merits, but the greatest, it was clear, was to provide a bottomless well of Latin unseens.

As I said good-bye to youth and my waistline, I more and more reacted to this notion.

I began to deprecate translation as such. Real students read without a translation. Really good students never used a translation at all. And there was a fundamentalist school that argued it was better to misunderstand in the original Latin than to understand with the aid of an English crib.

Common Sense Tradition -pt 1

2010-05-24T02:43:00Z

Common Sense and the Common Sense Tradition -Part 1

  by Scott Philip Segrest

Scott Segrest is Instructor in American Politics at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York. This essay is taken from Professor Segrest's new book, America and the Political Philosophy of Common Sense, available now from the University of Missouri Press. This appears here with permission and will be shown in three parts.

I. What is Common Sense?

The philosophical and political import of common sense is strikingly suggested in a passage from Eric Voegelin's Autobiographical Reflections. The passage has the additional merit of highlighting the surprising philosophic richness of American culture and outlook. As a young German scholar studying in America at Columbia University around 1922, Voegelin found himself "overwhelmed by a new [cultural and intellectual] world of which hitherto I had hardly expected the existence." He took courses with John Dewey, among others, and repairing often to the university library "started working through he history of English philosophy and its expansion into American thought." His account of what he learned in the process is illuminating:

St.Augustine and Moral Action -pt 3

2010-05-20T01:00:00Z

from the Northern Lights

St. Augustine, the Limits

of Moral Action, and Politics -Part 3

  by John von Heyking

John von Heyking is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Lethbridge. He is an author and editor and has edited Vols 7 and 8 of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. His biographical notice is found here. The following is taken from his book Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World, which is available here from the Publisher. This excerpt is taken from chapter 4 of the book, "Ordo Amoris and Political Prudence" and appears here with permission. It appears in three parts.

Moral Reasoning in Extreme Circumstances

§3. The Possibility of Tyrannicide and Rebellion    (concluded)

Augustine's distinction between virtue and officeholder is seen in the fact that he actually treats politics in personalist terms; he refers to each human being, rather than the city's institutions and physical attributes, as the primary element or seed of a city (CD 4.3 ; EnP 9.8). The dictator's power (imperium) was conferred upon citizens, almost always private citizens, by the constitutional form of lex curiata, and the most common and most general function he had was to be the dictatura rei gerundae causa, literally, "the dictatorship for getting things done."

For instance, early in Augustine's career he explicitly regarded such a power as just: "would it not also be right, provided some honest man of great ability was found at the time, to strip these [corrupt] people of the power to elect public officials and to subject them to the rule of a few good men, or even to that of one man?" (DLA 1.6.14). Augustine's recognition of this power is seen in his observation that Cincinnatus was entrusted with Rome's security because of his extreme poverty (Ep. 104; CD 3.17, 5.18). In the case of Hortensius, he notes that instituting a dictator was a "measure commonly adopted in times of gravest peril" (CD 3.17). Thus a Roman, upon reading the above passage, would have heard the gerens publicae potestatis as "the bearer of the public power." He would have understood it as the power conferred to a virtuous human being who would be called in on a particular occasion to save the republic.

Bound by the errors of our time?

2010-07-28T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Are we bound by the errors of our time?

Escaping through desire and Grace

This excerpt is from a conversation between Eric Voegelin and graduate students following a lecture at the St.Thomas More Institute in Montreal. The identified questioners are Richard Jacobsen, Martin O'Hara and Cathleen Going. "Q" designates unidentified questioners.

R.J.: You mentioned that certain civilizations can run a particular course for two hundred and fifty years and then switch and try another path. Now, what of individuals? They are born into a particular context. Has there been any study done to show that they must run through sets of errors and eventually come out of those? The examples you were showing seemed to imply that those people ended up knowing that everything was wrong before their time but not anything that was right, and that would imply that there hadn't been any study done in that direction.

VOEGELIN: Such studies are done. There are various problems of that kind. For instance, to what extent is a man bound, if he is born into his time as we all are, by the errors of his time? That is a very important problem for judging such fantastic phenomena as National Socialism in Germany. For individual people who have done extremely stupid things—not murder, but things in support of Hitler — to what extent can one plead as extenuating circumstance that they were so grossly ignorant because nobody told them any better? That's what they learned in school, in the universities, in the newspapers, every day from everybody. You can only grant them that they are not super-geniuses who can break out of a rotten situation. That's a great problem.

A Remembrance of First Principles

2010-05-27T01:00:00Z

HISTORIC PRESERVATION

A REMEMBRANCE OF FIRST PRINCIPLES

                    by Jack D. Elliott, Jr.

I. Introduction

The greatest potential of historic preservation isn’t merely in temporarily saving a vast potpourri of old buildings and sites from the inexorable ravages of time. Instead, in recalling the significance of the past, we potentially dip into a great reservoir of personal and collective experience. The term significance — or meaning — recalls the symbolic dimensions of the past where words and images, good and evil, facts and mystery interplay in memory. This stands in contrast to the modern, narrower emphasis on the empirical and material.

Despite the current focus on preserving old things and information, an occasionally recalled intuition hints that preservation is about more. Richard Moe writes that historic places help us understand “who we are, where we came from, and what is the legacy that shapes . . . us.” Or a preservation film similarly tells us that historic places ask the questions: “Who are we? Where do we come from? And, where are we going?”

Doctrine, Deculturation and Renewal

2010-07-21T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

The Collapse of Doctrine, Religious Deculturation and Renewal

Creating Community à la Woodstock

The following is from a conversation between Eric Voegelin and graduate students after a lecture at the Thomas More Institute in Montreal. His interlocutor was Fr. Eric O'Connor, Director of the Institute.

VOEGELIN: [One] of the imaginary obstacles (to give a time-problem again) is that one believes much has happened in history. Not much has happened. Two thousand years of doctrinization is a very short period — and we are at the end of it now.

O'CONNOR: The end of it in what sense? It won't go that way again?

VOEGELIN: It has run to its death in practice. Everybody knows today that doctrines are wrong. Every leftist student is as much against the communist establishment as against our establishment. They are against doctrine. Their solutions are wrong, but their revolution is right.

The forms are of course atrocious. If you go into the details, say, "community, " and ask "What is it? What are those Beatles ? That Woodstock ?" — it is a perversion (don't be shocked) of the perichoresis of the Trinity. You get an immediacy of reality on the community level but without the dimension of divinity. You are God yourself on that community level.

From Magna Carta to Abraham Lincoln

2010-07-14T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Political Articulation from Magna Carta to Abraham Lincoln

Democracy: an historical development

Obviously, the representative ruler of an articulated society cannot represent it as a whole without standing in some sort of relationship to the other members of the society. Here is a source of difficulties for political science in our time because, under pressure of the democratic symbolism, the resistance to distinguishing between the two relations terminologically has become so strong that it has also affected political theory.

Ruling power is ruling power even in a democracy, but one is shy of facing the fact. The government represents the people, and the symbol "people" has absorbed the two meanings that, in medieval language, for instance, could be distinguished without emotional resistance as the "realm" and the "subjects."

Failure of Immanentist Metaphysics

2010-07-07T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

The Failure of Immanentist Metaphysics

Truth is not about world-immanent objects

The Aristotelian speculation ends in a serious impasse, both practically and theoretically. Practically, the discovery of the truth seems to serve no other purpose than to forge a new instrument for keeping the rest of mankind in the untruth of their existence. Theoretically, we are faced with an aporia that affects the theory of human nature and its actualization.

The philosopher who is in possession of the Truth should consistently go the way of Plato in the Republic; he should issue the call for repentance and submission to the theocratic rule of the incarnate Truth. Aristotle, however, does not issue such a call and, consequently, the imperfections of actualization (although technically called "perversions") tend to become essences in their own right, forming the manifold of reality; they become "characters," and the category of character is even extended from human individuals to the types of constitutions.

The dimension of potentiality-actualization, thus, is crossed by a plane on which the grades of imperfection appear as coordinated types to be respected and preserved in their essence; the imperfections become actualizations of their specific types. This theoretical conflict could not be reconciled within the "system" because the problem that caused it had not become sufficiently explicit.

Ethics and Politics: Sciences for the Mature

2010-06-30T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Ethics and Politics: Sciences for the Mature

Politics in the narrower sense of nomothetics [constitution-making science] intends to teach the lawgiver how to create the institutions that will inculcate the ethical excellences in the citizens. Assuming for the moment that such a science of means for the desired end can be successfully developed, there remains the great question whether the desired end is valid in itself and whether we should invest any efforts in its realization.

The value of nomothetics depends on the validity of the prudential science of ethics as developed by Aristotle. What if somebody should challenge the truth of the Aristotelian propositions concerning excellences? What if he should advance an alternative catalogue of goods to be realized in society? If, for instance, we should make a rising standard of living the supreme value to be realized, the governmental institutions favoring the realization of this end would diverge widely from the standards developed in Politics VII and VIII. In brief: Aristotle has to face the famous "That's What You Think!"

A Spiritually Decapitated U.S.?

2010-06-23T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

America: a Spiritually Decapitated Rational Apparatus?

Eric Voegelin reviewed many books between the year 1923, when he was only twenty-two, and 1955, when his horizons became occupied with the project of Order and History. Sixty-five reviews are collected in Selected Book Reviews, CW Vol 13, translated and edited by Jodi Bruhn and Barry Cooper.

In the following review extract, Voegelin showed his personal knowledge of the United States following his two years of study at Columbia, Wisconsin, etc. It is also noteworthy that at the time of this review he was still a single man living in an independent Austria and occupied with pre-totalitarian issues. After he had found refuge in the U.S. some eight years later, he showed little interest in publishing critiques of a flawed America.

Staat und Gesellschaft in Amerika, by Charlotte Lütkens (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1929). Review originally published 1930.

[In a] sociological study of America of the rank of Charlotte Lütken's book. . . . the essential elements, which then are pieced together in a picture of American society, are considered with great knowledge and extraordinary delicacy, such as is to be acquired only after a period of many years spent in America.

This society, so entirely different from European ones, is richly endowed with technology, and compared to Europe achieves very high levels of production. Superficial observers could draw from this the conclusion that, as a social body, America is ahead of, or superior to, Europe in terms of development. Lütkens rejects this conclusion because a high level of economic development is only an external characteristic of a society that is entirely different from European ones.

The Ugliness of Intellectual Fraud

2010-06-16T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

The Ugliness of Intellectual Fraud:
The Case of an Apologist for Communism

Eric Voegelin reviewed many books between the year 1923, when he was only twenty-two, and 1955, when his horizons became occupied with the project of Order and History. Sixty-five reviews are collected in CW Vol 13, Selected Book Reviews, translated and edited by Jodi Bruhn and Barry Cooper. In some respects the following review is typical. Things that can be praised are praised and mention is made of underlying principles of political science which determine the selection of materials. In this particular review Voegelin has also chosen to show the slight-of-hand techniques of a dishonest intellectual. This review might also be taken to suggest a cautionary note concerning contemporary political thought.

Professor Schuman has written a comprehensive volume on Soviet politics that will remain the representative treatise for quite some time to come. An introductory part, subtitled "A Book of Origins," deals with Marxism and its penetration into Russia, with the background and career of Lenin, the history of the Russian Communist movement, and the victory of the revolution, and with those factors of Russian history that still are determinants in the period of Soviet rule. The principal part, "A Book of Peace and War," presents Soviet political history, the development of institutions, and the policies, both foreign and domestic, from the victory of the October Revolution to the end of the Second World War. The concluding part, "A Book of Prospects," deals with the outlines of post-war politics as far as they have become visible and with the probabilities of internal development and foreign relations of the Soviet Union in the future.

The amount of material digested in these more than 600 pages is enormous; and every one who wishes to inform himself on any aspect of Soviet politics (with the exception of economic problems and institutions, which are excluded from treatment) will do well, as a first approach, to consult this volume.

It was not the purpose of the author, however, to present a piece of original research; the scope of the volume reflects rather the intention "to see steadily and to see whole the total fabric of Soviet politics, from the barbarian migrations to the Changchun Railway Co., from Marx in the British Museum to the Soviet Intelligentsia, from peasant rebellions to collective agriculture, from Portsmouth and Brest-Litowsk to Potsdam and Lancaster House." This plan, rather of encyclopedic synthesis than of intensive monographic study, does not, however, prevent the author from treating certain aspects of Soviet constitutional life, to which he draws specific attention (xv), with a thoroughness surpassing earlier attempts.

Sartre"s Facticity of Existence

2010-06-09T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Sartre's Facticity of Existence and the Cartesian Deformation



Well, existence is not a fact. If anything, existence is the nonfact of a disturbing movement in the In-Between of ignorance and knowledge, of time and timelessness, of imperfection and perfection, of hope and fulfillment, and ultimately of life and death. From the experience of this movement, from the anxiety of losing the right direction in this In-Between of darkness and light, arises the inquiry concerning the meaning of life. But it does arise only because life is experienced as man’s participation in a movement with a direction to be found or missed; if man’s existence were not a movement but a fact, it not only would have no meaning but the question of meaning could not even arise.

The connection between movement and inquiry can best be seen in the case of its deformation by certain existentialist thinkers. An intellectual like Sartre, for instance, finds himself involved in the conflict without issue between his assumption of a meaningless facticity of existence and his desperate craving for endowing it with a meaning from the resources of his moi. He can cut himself off from the philosopher’s inquiry by assuming existence to be a fact, but he cannot escape from his existential unrest.

Preservation of Democracy -pt 3

2010-06-02T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

The Preservation of Democracy

Part 3 The Obligation of Promises

[This is taken from a paper delivered in November, 1939, two months after the outbreak of World War II. Voegelin's descriptions of the actions and attitudes required for democracy to survive at that time are just as valid today. This excerpt appears in three parts.]

The promises of Hitler that he would be finally satisfied when just this last demand should be granted are highly interesting in another aspect. After the creation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, British statesmen realized that something might be wrong with Hitler's promises. They did not know exactly what, and they do not seem to know yet, but at least they found a pattern to cover it: Hitler lies, he lies habitually, pathologically.

The case is not as simple as that. A lie, we may say for the purpose of this paper, is a statement known to be untrue by the man who utters it, who nevertheless makes it with the intention to have it appear true.

Now, first, it is not quite certain that the statements and promises made by Hitler and broken later were always lies subjectively when made. He may have been at the time of making them in a state of auto-suggestion which made him sincere. However, this is a minor point for our present problem. The more interesting one is that the National Socialist movement has developed a theory of truth, most amply elaborated by Alfred Rosenberg, to the effect that truth is what is useful to the German people.

Preservation of Democracy -pt 2

2010-05-26T03:39:00Z

from The Collected Works

The Preservation of Democracy

Part 2 Political Frustration

This is taken from a paper delivered in November, 1939, two months after the outbreak of World War II. Voegelin's descriptions of the actions and attitudes required for democracy to survive at that time are just as valid today. This excerpt appears in three parts.

One of the leit-motifs of Hitler's speeches explaining his expansion is always the wrong done to the German people by the Treaty of Versailles, a wrong that can be righted only by the successive steps he takes. The motif is clad recurrently in the promise that he will settle down peacefully if only just this last of his burning desires is quieted. This screen has proved successful again and again. The reason for the success, as far as it can be gathered from British speeches and editorials, letters to the editor of the Times, etc., seems to be a curious belief, current in the Anglo-Saxon world, in the psychology of frustration.

Eric Voegelin-A Recollection -pt 3

2010-05-17T01:00:00Z

Eric Voegelin — A Recollection

Part 3

by Robert B. Heilman

The late Robert B. Heilman wrote many books. He was a distinguished teacher and literary critic who flourished at Louisiana State Univeristy. It was a remarkable time and place; his colleagues included Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks and Alan Tate. He became a close friend of Eric Voegelin and nurtured his understanding of American culture and English language. This essay is taken from Professor Heilman's book, The Professor and the Profession, available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay appears here in three parts. It appears with permission of the publisher.

VI    Visiting the Voegelins in Munich

In 1948 Ruth and I left for Seattle, and after that Eric and I exchanged letters regularly, if not frequently (as did our wives).^fn The correspondence continued when the Voegelins returned to Europe in 1958. Eric had accepted the directorship of the Bavarian state political science institute in Munich. This was a professional advancement, I suppose, but it never seemed to me that Eric suffered from the institutional angst so common among American professors. He thought about his work; in no way did his status, or his sense of achievement, depend upon what post he held or what university he served in. So though the Munich post may well have seemed a promotion, I imagine that his motivating influence in taking it was the strong pull of Europe after twenty years away, and of the Voegelins' native language.

They must have crossed the ocean about the time we were returning from a 1957-1958 sabbatical. When we returned to Europe in 1964-1965, the Voegelins generously asked us to visit. Eric invited me to speak at a seminar of his, and he also managed — against what resistance I know not — to encourage the department of English to sponsor a lecture by me. The chair of English was Wolfgang Clemen, and since we had both trafficked somewhat in Shakespearean imagery, there were grounds for our finding ourselves at least mildly simpatico.

Then I received a letter — a sort of warning I took it to be — from a member of the Munich faculty who had taken his Ph.D. in our department at the University of Washington, where, the gifted son of an immigrant family, he had established himself both as a superior student and as a talented one-upper.

Preservation of Democracy -pt 1

2010-05-19T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

The Preservation of Democracy

Part 1 The First Condition

This is taken from a paper delivered in November, 1939, two months following the outbreak of World War II. Voegelin's descriptions of the actions and attitudes required for democracy to survive at that time are just as valid today. This excerpt appears in three parts.

According to the popular idea, [democracy] is a form of government where the government does what the people want; and the people secure a government, which acts according to their interests, by participating in governmental procedure through the election of legislative representatives and executive and judicial officers who depend for their reelection on the conduct of affairs while they hold office. This is a fairly correct description of the structural side of democracy, and the only trouble with it is that the structural side does not mean very much.

We know — through the efforts of the leading scholars who have analyzed the problems of parliamentarism and popular representation in the last hundred years, through Hegel and Bagehot, through Grey and Renan, through Mosca, Pareto, LeBon, and Max Weber — that the essential problem of a working democracy is not the vote of the people but the type of the governing elite and its relation to the mass of the people. The election of men and the voting on issues is the last and relatively least important phase of the democratic process. The decisive question is, Who shapes the issues and who presents the men?

The Crisis of Americanism -pt 3

2010-04-29T01:00:00Z

The Crisis of Americanism:

The Destructive Tradition of Spiritual and Political Individualism — Part 3

by Juergen Gebhardt

Dr. Gebhardt is emeritus Professor at the Institute for Political Science at the University of Erlangen-Nürenberg. He is editor of the final volume of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Selected Correspondence, 1924-1949. We feature here Chapter 5 from his Americanism: Revolutionary Order and Societal Self-Interpretation in the American Republic, Louisiana State University Press, 1993. This is the first part of a muti-part article. It is reproduced here with permission.

The Dynamics of the Expanding Self (concluded)

In terms of world history, the imperial republic understood itself primarily as the new Rome, destined to spread throughout the world the novus ordo seclorum, that is, the republican order. The expansion not of imperial power but of republican order, whether in the form of a republic encompassing the entire continent or in the form of a republican federation of states, was the primary objective of the Founders, and in this they cleverly combined the power-political continental claim with clear economic-political interests.²⁶

But the Roman model and the Fathers' own theoretical insight similarly planted the seeds for justified doubts about the possibility of combining imperial politics and republican order. This contradiction intensified in the latent psychic crisis at the end of the nineteenth century, when increasingly libidinously motivated apocalypses were substituted for the original consciousness-shaping spiritual-political experiences of order, and when Manifest Destiny treated other people and nations as objects of one's own libido dominandi. So, on one hand, imperial foreign policy was always tied to the mental, political, and economic crisis within the country, thus also the crisis of Americanism. On the other hand, time and again, foreign affairs dealings by the political leadership and the majority that supported it showed that the various strands of motivation were intertwined: republican pathos, the modes of imperial apocalyptics, and the power-political and economic-political pragmatism of dominant social interests.

Thomas More and Murderous Idealism

2010-05-12T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Thomas More and Murderous Idealism

[Note: This excerpt is taken from a long essay considering St. Thomas More's writings and personality. The original should be consulted in order to appreciate its breadth, originality and nuanced thought. It strongly suggests the political and spiritual situation in Western civilization in this year 2010. —ed]

Nevertheless, with all due allowance for More's critical intentions and personal reservations, there remains, as in the case of his other institutional devices [as set forth in Utopia—ed], the hard fact that he could indulge in such flights of fancy at all. What strikes the reader as loathsome in this relation of the causes and methods of war is the infallibility of the ideal. ^FN

Those who live by the ideal can do no wrong; the ideal decides on the justice of conduct of those who do not accept it; and, as a consequence, the carriers of the ideal combine in their persons the functions of party, judge, and executor. When through endowment with an absoluteness that properly is the Spirit's, the temporal order acquires the characteristics of an "ideal," the effect is a peculiar "moralization" of political conduct.

St.Augustine and Moral Action -pt 2

2010-05-13T01:00:00Z

from the Northern Lights

St. Augustine, the Limits

of Moral Action, and Politics -Pt 2

  by John von Heyking

John von Heyking is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Lethbridge. He is an author and editor and has edited Vols 7 and 8 of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. His biographical notice is found here. The following is taken from his book Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World, which is available here from the Publisher. This excerpt is taken from chapter 4 of the book, "Ordo Amoris and Political Prudence" and appears here with permission. It appears in three parts.

Moral Reasoning in Extreme Circumstances (continued)

§1. Lying   (concluded)

Augustine provides some exceptions to this general prohibition [against lying] that actually fulfill the obligation to love God and neighbor. In considering the example of hiding an innocent human being from persecution, he cites as exemplary the actions of Bishop Firmus of Thagaste who suffered tortures to protect a persecuted man. Firmus stated that he would neither lie nor betray the man. He suffered physical torments until the impressed emperor granted pardon for the man whom Firmus was protecting. In cases where one refuses to betray and lie, Augustine argues: "Whatever you suffer for this act of fidelity and kindness, then, is not only judged as unmerited but even as praiseworthy, with the exception of those pains which are said to be suffered not courageously but basely and shamefully."

Augustine praises Firmus's fortitude and righteousness. However, he considers the more likely possibility of how a more timid person, placed in similar circumstances, would react. Augustine does not state that a more timid person sins because he cannot undergo similar torments. Instead, he states that Firmus understood the principle of Scriptures "better (melius) and fulfilled their commands more courageously (fortiter)."¹⁶ He does not state categorically that the timid person does not understand Scripture or does not fulfill its commands. He wrote in the comparative case, which leaves room for telling falsehoods in certain extreme circumstances where truth telling would cause one to suffer shamefully and basely.

Eric Voegelin-A Recollection -pt 2

2010-05-10T01:00:00Z

Eric Voegelin — A Recollection

Part 2

by Robert B. Heilman

The late Robert B. Heilman wrote many books. He was a distinguished teacher and literary critic who flourished at Louisiana State Univeristy. It was a remarkable time and place; his colleagues included Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks and Alan Tate. He became a close friend of Eric Voegelin and nurtured his understanding of American culture and English language. This essay is taken from Professor Heilman's book, The Professor and the Profession, available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay appears here in three parts. It appears with permission of the publisher.

III    Finding a Home in Baton Rouge

Our relations with the Voegelins took a special turn in the summer of 1944, when they were in Cambridge, Massachusetts: as in many summers, Eric was working in the library at Harvard. During their absence from Baton Rouge, the rented house in which they had been living was leased or sold out from under them, this in accordance with a wartime regulation that permitted the dispossession of occupants if the premises were then to be occupied by the owners or members of their family.

This must have been another severe blow to people who, after the troubles that led to their flight from Austria, might have felt they were beginning to get a foothold in America. They evidently felt that they could not contest what amounted to an eviction. It would have been costly; as "foreigners" (though naturalization was imminent, they had not yet gone through it) they would have been at a disadvantage in a legal dispute; and Eric desperately needed all the time he could get at Harvard on materials unavailable at LSU. Had they made the long and expensive trip back to Baton Rouge, they might not have been able to find other rental housing. Apparently the only solution was to buy a house, provided a suitable one could be found for sale. At this point they phoned us and asked us to buy a house for them, that is, to find one for sale, commit them to buying it, and perhaps put down (I'm not sure about this) some earnest money. This was a forbidding assignment; picking out a house for someone else could never be easy, and for people of the Voegelins' fine taste it seemed close to impossible.

Utopian Forgetfulness -pt 4

2010-04-26T02:35:00Z

UTOPIAN FORGETFULNESS OF DEPTH -Part 4

by David Walsh

David Walsh is professor of politics at Catholic University of America. He is the author or editor of many books; he is editor of three volumes of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. His Guarded by Mystery has been serialized here at VoegelinView in its entirety. His most recent book is The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. The book from which the current offering is taken, The Growth of the Liberal Soul, is available from the University of Missouri Press and appears here with permission. "Utopian Forgetfulness of Depth," Chapter 3, appears here in four parts.

The Hollowness of Liberal Construction (concluded)

The notion that we are in possession of a means of evaluating truth that does not involve our own inchoate struggle toward it is one of the great distorting conceptions of our world. "This belief in its ability to understand everything from human culture and history, no matter how apparently alien, is itself one of the defining beliefs of the culture of modernity" (385). It is evident in the conceit that all the richness of traditional meaning can be captured through our meager placement of them in museums, lists of great books, or under the impoverished rubrics of aesthetics. The governing assumption is that all historical wisdom can be absorbed in ways that do not fundamentally challenge the shallowness of our own world. The culminating expression of this approach is reached in contemporary deconstructionism, which no longer even regards texts as wholes and permits us to interpret them freely without any controlling reference to historical context or authorial intention.¹⁶

St.Augustine and Moral Action -pt 1

2010-05-06T01:00:00Z

from the Northern Lights

St. Augustine, the Limits

of Moral Action, and Politics

  by John von Heyking

John von Heyking is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Lethbridge. He is an author and editor and has edited Vols 7 and 8 of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. His biographical notice is found here. The following is taken from his book Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World, which is available here from the Publisher. This excerpt is taken from chapter 4 of the book, "Ordo Amoris and Political Prudence" and appears here with permission. This appears in three parts.

The Compatability of Personal Virtue and Politics

People hope and pray that their nation will enjoy peace, security, and at least a modicum of neighborly flourishing. They are willing to suffer and bear large amounts of corruption and injustice in the body politic until a time comes when measures are required to save the polity, and perhaps even the cause of justice in the world. Unfortunately, people in such dark times generally are least likely and least suited to save their polity; thus hoping for such action is like hoping for nature to act outside its usual course that would allow a corrupt body politic to decompose and die. Saving the cause of justice in the world and preserving political life requires unusually austere virtue. The devil tempted Christ with a kingdom over the world.

Can one preserve political life without losing one's soul by proclaiming oneself Caesar? Augustine is usually seen to think that one cannot preserve one's virtue, or at least that one can keep one's soul only if one follows the absolute rules of engagement as set by Scripture and by the Church. Taking extreme actions in extreme circumstances is forbidden because forbearance and submission purify the soul.

We will try to show that Augustine, though not denying the virtue of forbearance, thought that one can know the right and good, and act upon it, through right-by-nature, and that moral and political reasoning is not restricted to the application of universal rules to all circumstances. His treatment of political reasoning is considered where following the letter of the law would have disastrous consequences in rare extreme circumstances (lying, adultery, and tyrannicide and rebellion). What appear as exceptions to the absolute rule (based either on natural law or on God's commandment) actually fulfill the law's purpose.

More's Utopia and Pride

2010-05-05T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Thomas More's Utopia and Unbounded Human Pride

[Note: This excerpt is taken from a long essay considering St. Thomas More's writings and personality. The original should be consulted in order to appreciate its breadth, originality and nuanced thought. It strongly suggests the political and spiritual situation in Western civilization in this year 2010. —ed]

Superbia without restraint is More's accusation against the society of his time. The problem is fundamentally the same as that of Erasmus, but More's horizon is much wider. He recognizes the evil not only in the pleonexia of the princes but generally among all classes of the people; the lust for power and political aggrandizement is only one manifestation among others. For More's famous description of the state of England and of Western society at large, the reader should refer to the monographic literature, or better to the Utopia itself.

Let us only recollect the lords who, after a war, release their retainers who are unfit for regular work and a plague for the country; the landowners who drive away their tenants in order to convert their estates to sheep farming; as a consequence, the propertyless beggars who fill the country and live by charity, robbery, and thievery; the cruel criminal law that punishes petty thefts of hungry people with hanging; the degradation through whoring, drinking, and gambling; the rigging of the law in favor of the upper class; the brutal exploitation of labor, and the dismissal of the aged and sick, leaving them to starvation and death; the corruption of the court society and its loafing hangers-on; the machinations for war; the kings who are not satisfied with tending to the welfare of their own country but want to conquer a second kingdom that they cannot rule anyway; the degradation of the people through excessive taxes, and the king who is not fit to rule over free men; the complete absence of a sense of social obligation and of governmental duty to repair such evils by poor laws, reform of the criminal law, provision for hospitals, building up of a native industry that will give employment to the dispossessed tenant-farmers, and educational institutions.

Eric Voegelin-A Recollection -pt 1

2010-05-03T01:00:00Z

Eric Voegelin — A Recollection

by Robert B. Heilman

The late Robert B. Heilman wrote many books. He was a distinguished teacher and literary critic who flourished at Louisiana State Univeristy. It was a remarkable time and place; his colleagues included Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks and Alan Tate. He became a close friend of Eric Voegelin and nurtured his understanding of American culture. This essay is taken from Professor Heilman's book, The Professor and the Profession, available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay will appear here in three parts. It appears with permission of the publisher.

I First Impressions

I first met Eric Voegelin in 1940 or 1941 when he came to Baton Rouge to lecture under the auspices of the department of government at Louisiana State University. He may have given a single lecture or a series, and the subject, I suppose, was something that would be part of Order and History, though that large work did not begin appearing for another decade and a half.

My first impression of Voegelin was of a speaker of great dignity and ease, of vast learning easily borne and not trimmed to please a general audience, of formality and yet graciousness. Here was a philosopher who had no marks of either the pedant or the popularizer; the gentleman as thinker. Despite a highly technical vocabulary and occasional, but not intrusive, problems of idiom and accent, Voegelin seemed comfortable and fluent in American English. During his stay in Baton Rouge, Eric — I use an informality that was slow to develop — attended a meeting of a faculty discussion group at which I was also present, whether as visitor or regular attendant (I am relying entirely on memory; I have no file of documents, formal or informal, to consult). I remember vividly the type, though not the specifics, of the argument that broke out there between him and several of my colleagues.

The latter were depending, as faculties often do, on the fundamental rightness of the current beliefs of social and political liberalism, and no doubt Eric challenged one or more of these; it was not that he was antiliberal in principle, but that he was a vigilant challenger of the going clichés of both left and right. Perhaps his point was that Hitler and Nazism represented less a violation of American democratic ideas than an enduring disorder of a distinguishable philosophical and theological type. I do not remember the details, but I do retain a strong impression that my colleagues, several of whom were my good friends, were badly though unknowingly overmatched.

The Bridge

2010-04-14T04:00:00Z

Chesterton (and the rest)

T h e B r i d g e

by Max Arnott

A sensible man doesn't put too much stock in first impressions, of course, but there may be profit, now and then, from the shock of introduction.

The first man ever to see a horse might have things to say that would break through our matter-of-factness, a little, and Chesterton once imagined how a man might feel landing in Brighton under the assumption that it was New Guinea.

Now in today's case, like a man who knew about Angkor Wat only that it was large, old, famous and orienta, our reading led us to someone familiar to the wise, but about whom we knew no more than a name, and that he was famously pragmatic.

How then does one react to a first view of Charles Sanders Peirce?

(Peirce, by the way, pronounced his name "Purse.")

How except with admiration and horror?

Beginning of the Beginning -pt 5

2010-04-28T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

The Beginning of the Beginning

§5. The True Story

The authors of Genesis 1, as I said, were conscious of beginning an act of participation in the mysterious Beginning of the It, when they put down the first words of their text. As a literary document, the text is to be dated in post-Exilic times, somewhere between the middle of the sixth and the middle of the fifth centuries b.c. It opens a story of mankind from its beginning in Creation, through the history of the Patriarchs, of captivity and Exodus, of Palestinian settlement, of the Davidic-Solomonic empire, of the kingdoms and their catastrophe, of Exile and return, down to the Deutero-Isaianic dream of a world-Israel, under the guidance of God's covenants with man.

Through Israel, the history of man continues the creational process of order in reality; it is part of the comprehending story of the It; and the point at which the story arrives in the event of Genesis derives its significance from the revelation of the truth that the epiphany of structure in reality culminates in the attunement of human history to the command of the pneumatic Word.

The story and the truth it is meant to convey are clearly told, but what do the story and its truth mean in terms of experience and symbolization?

The Crisis of Americanism -pt 2

2010-04-22T01:00:00Z

The Crisis of Americanism:

The Destructive Tradition of Spiritual and Political Individualism — Part 2

by Juergen Gebhardt

Dr. Gebhardt is emeritus Professor at the Institute for Political Science at the University of Erlangen-Nürenberg. He is editor of the final volume of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Selected Correspondence, 1924-1949. We feature here Chapter 5 from his Americanism: Revolutionary Order and Societal Self-Interpretation in the American Republic, Louisiana State University Press, 1993. This is the first part of a muti-part article. It is reproduced here with permission.

The Decentralized Politics of Laissez-faire

The continuity of the imperial self became evident only retrospectively, after the social breakthrough of this dynamic-expansive ego to the dominant type that attempted to reconstruct the lost reality in its own image.¹⁷But even during the incubation phase of the spiritual, political, and economic dynamization of the person, this concentration on the individual under American conditions unleashed powerful energies: Jackson's so-called revolution perfected political democracy.¹⁸ Taney's decision in Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge (1837) ¹⁹ ceded the order of the conditions of production to the liberal politics of laissez-faire.

This statement, however, should not be misunderstood in the sense of the doctrine of the "free enterprise" of a liberal "competitive capitalism" that hovers over the textbooks of liberal political economics (and its critics). It means, rather, that the psychosocial structural patterns of industrial economic society were accorded public status—that is, the original conception of the political solution of economic problems was replaced by a laissez-faire attitude.

Beginning of the Beginning -pt 4b

2010-04-20T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

The Beginning of the Beginning

§4b. Digression on Conventional Misunderstandings

In the intellectual climate of our time, the experienced tensions of consciousness, their expression through symbols, and their differentiating exploration are exposed to certain misunderstandings. At this point it will be prudent to mention some of them; by warding them off it will be possible to clarify the structure of the present quest still further:

(1) One source of misunderstandings is the various psychologies of projection. The symbolism of Genesis 1 must not be misconstrued as an "anthropomorphism," or the projection of a human into a divine consciousness; nor would the opposite misconstruction as a "theomorphism," or a projection of divine into human consciousness, be admissible. On principle, the poles of an experienced tension must not be deformed into entities existing apart from the tension experienced; the tension itself is the structure tobe explored; it must not be fragmentized for the purpose of using one of the poles as the basis for clever psychologizing.

That is not to say that projections do not really occur; on the contrary, they occur quite frequently, but as secondary phenomena, be it the humanization of gods or the divinization of men. One such phenomenon is the Feuerbach-Marx divinization of man for the purpose of explaining divine reality as a human projection that, if returned to man, will produce full humanity.

Utopian Forgetfulness -pt 3

2010-04-19T01:00:00Z

UTOPIAN FORGETFULNESS OF DEPTH

from The Growth of the Liberal Soul -Ch 3 Pt 3

by David Walsh

David Walsh is professor of politics at Catholic University of America. He is the author or editor of many books; he is editor of three volumes of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. His Guarded by Mystery has been serialized here at VoegelinView in its entirety. His most recent book is The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. The book from which the current offering is taken, The Growth of the Liberal Soul, is available from the University of Missouri Press and appears here with permission. "Utopian Forgetfulness of Depth" appears here in four parts.

The Hollowness of Liberal Construction (concluded)

All of the critiques point toward the fundamental objection that Nietzsche was to express so powerfully. That is, that liberal politics had cut itself off from its own roots in philosophy and Christianity and had no comparable motivating appeal to put in their place. His prediction of its impending collapse has still not materialized but that does not negate the force of the warning that he has only been the most prominent in sounding.¹² Without the formative spiritual traditions that produced order in the soul, liberal democracy seemed only to provide the outer shell that concealed the hollowness within. The liberal construction had merely been a secularization of the philosophic-Christian understanding of the person, but once it cut itself off from those roots it cut itself off from its own means of support. That step had been taken when the liberal ethos came to regard itself as self-sufficient.¹³

The process by which this self-subversion took place was, of course, gradual. Eighteenth-century liberals were still aware of the innovation they were taking in de-emphasizing the dependence of the legal order on its transcendent authorization. "Is there a possibility," John Adams asks, "that the government of nations may fall in the hands of men who teach the most disconsolate of all creeds, that men are but fire flies, and this all is without a father? Is this the way to make man as man an object of respect? Or is it to make murder itself as indifferent as shooting plover, and the extermination of the Rohilla nation as innocent as the swallowing of mites on a morsel of cheese?" Even Robespierre is perhaps not disingenuous when he declares that a legislator cannot be an atheist since he depends on a "religious sentiment which impresses upon the soul the idea of a sanction given to the moral precepts by a power greater than man" (quoted in Arendt, On Revolution, 192).

The Crisis of Americanism -pt 1

2010-04-15T01:00:00Z

The Crisis of Americanism:

The Destructive Tradition of Spiritual and Political Individualism —Part 1

by Juergen Gebhardt

Dr. Gebhardt is emeritus Professor at the Institute for Political Science at the University of Erlangen-Nürenberg. He is editor of the final volume of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Selected Correspondence, 1924-1949. We feature here Chapter 5 from his Americanism: Revolutionary Order and Societal Self-Interpretation in the American Republic, Louisiana State University Press, 1993. This is the first part of a muti-part article. It is reproduced here with permission.

"The decade of the nineties is the watershed of American history. As with all watersheds the topography is blurred, but in the perspective of half a century the grand outlines emerge clearly."

(Henry Steele Commager)¹

On the level of pragmatic existence, the watershed results from the civilizing process. Self-contained, autonomous, independent agrarian America is transformed into urbanized, industrialized America, and this new entity was, by force of its stage of development, inevitably drawn into the tension field of world economics and world politics. The apocalyptically motivated idea of the nation of 1776 had, by the time of the Civil War, been realized in the continental American empire that not only had freed itself from the threat posed by the competing imperial enterprises of the European powers, but had also risen to be the hegemonic power in the Western hemisphere.

The internal consolidation of this empire had progressed to the point at which the mechanism, inherent in American society, of solving conflicts through avoidance, the principle of separatism or secession, had become ineffective. The Civil War proved that any antagonism taken to the extreme between two types of social organizations could no longer be solved in this empire through the collective secession of one, so that one had to fall back on the instrument for solving conflicts employed in such cases in the Old World—armed confrontation.

Beginning of the Beginning -pt 4

2010-04-14T01:17:00Z

from The Collected Works

The Beginning of the Beginning

§4. The Beginning of Genesis 1

In Genesis 1:1, we read: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." We can hardly come closer to the real beginning of anything than in an original act of creating everything. But what is creation? and how does God proceed when he creates? Genesis 1:3 gives this information: "And God said, 'Let there be light'; and there was light" or, in the more literal Buber-Rosenzweig translation, "God spoke: Light be! Light became." The reality light appears in this verse when the divine command calls it forth, into its existential luminosity, by calling it by its name. The spoken word, it appears, is more than a mere sign signifying something; it is a power in reality that evokes structures in reality by naming them. This magic power of the word can be discerned even more clearly in Genesis 1:5 (Buber-Rosenzweig translation): "God called to light: Day! and to the darkness he called: Night! And there became evening and morning: A Day."

Utopian Forgetfulness -pt 2

2010-04-12T00:50:00Z

UTOPIAN FORGETFULNESS OF DEPTH

from The Growth of the Liberal Soul -Ch 3 Pt 2

by David Walsh

David Walsh is professor of politics at Catholic University of America. He is the author or editor of many books; he is editor of three volumes of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. His Guarded by Mystery has been serialized here at VoegelinView in its entirety. His most recent book is The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. The book from which the current offering is taken, The Growth of the Liberal Soul, is available from the University of Missouri Press and appears here with permission. "Utopian Forgetfulness of Depth" appears here in four parts.

The Illusion of Progress (concluded)

Other thinkers, generally those whose ruminations remain within the parameters of liberal democratic politics, still betray the lingering influence of the idea of progress. Again, [John] Rawls provides a measure because he has been one of the very few with the theoretical range to make most of his presuppositions visible. By attempting a comprehensive theory of justice, rather than the more conventional small-scale work on "problems," he inevitably exposes more of the links that hold the liberal worldview together. Not surprisingly, one of the essential elements has been a certain uncritically accepted notion of the malleability of human nature. What human beings are, he insists, is not to be determined on the basis of our own social and political experience, because we would then be describing merely the kind of individuals who happen to arise from the institutional structures of our own time.

Instead, we should look to the possibility that some of the most intractable moral shortcomings, such as envy or domination, might not be so problematic under different social circumstances. Rawls builds into his thought experiment not only the weak assumption that most people will want more rather than less of the primary goods but also the assumption that individuals in the original position will be relatively disinterested in one another. That is, their own happiness will not be substantially affected by the happiness or unhappiness of others.

The Spirit of Voegelin's Late Work -pt 4

2010-04-01T01:06:00Z

The Spirit of Voegelin's Late Work —Part 4

by Ellis Sandoz

Professor Sandoz is the Editor of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. He has written many books and published many essays on the significance of Eric Voegelin's thought and on the political and spiritual foundations of the United States. This essay is taken from his most recent book, Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America, available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay appears in four parts. It appears with permission of the publisher.

§ 4. An Open Quest of Reality

In Search of Order can thereby be seen as Voegelin's valedictory analysis of a set of interrelated problems that he struggled with for more than sixty years. He did so from a remarkably consistent and resolute perspective of affirmation of man's participation in divine Being as the sine qua non of his very humanity.

If anything is surprising about the book, it lies, I have tried to suggest, primarily in the subtle shift of vocabulary away from objectivation, in the tautness of the prose, in the emphasis upon the mysterious impersonal depth of It-reality beyond the doctrinal God of ready invocation — all in the interest of so refining the participatory mode of discourse as more tellingly to express the philosopher's meditative process as the truly cooperative divine-human event of In-Between reality Voegelin experienced it as being. Voegelin rigorously adapts the radical empiricism of Plato and James to express the process of noetic meditation in quest of truth — the Anselmian fides quaerens intellectum that emerges as the standard of true philosophizing. Moreover, as William Petropulos convincingly shows, this is not new in principle: Meditation as the essence of philosophizing is characteristic of Voegelin's published work from age twenty-one onward.

Eric Voegelin's Search of Order -pt 2

2010-03-22T01:00:00Z

"The Attunement of the Soul"

Eric Voegelin's Search of Order -Part 2

by Charles Embry

Charles Embry is Professor Emeritus of Political Philosoohy 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 is offered in two parts and appears with permission.

We will recall that one of the motivations for Voegelin's philosophy — and for all philosophy — was the experience of political disorder and the desire to understand the nature of political disorder and, thereby, to search for the source of political order. In seeking to understand the political disorder that he experienced, Voegelin focused on the discovery made by Plato that the "state is man writ large." Voegelin called this the Platonic Anthropological Principle and developed Plato's insight by reflecting and meditating on what it means to be human. His meditations led him to focus on the nature of consciousness — as it is embodied in human beings who live in the metaxy, the In-Between. In the foreword to Anamnesis, Voegelin wrote that "the problems of human order in society and history originate in the order of consciousness. Hence the philosophy of consciousness is the centerpiece of a philosophy of politics."¹¹

Beginning of the Beginning -pt 3

2010-03-31T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

The Beginning of the Beginning

§3. The Complex of Consciousness-Reality-Language

There is indeed no beginning to be found in this or that part of the complex; the beginning will reveal itself only if the paradox is taken seriously as the something that constitutes the complex as a whole. This complex, however, as the expansion of equivocations shows, includes language and truth, together with consciousness and reality. There is no autonomous, nonparadoxic language, ready to be used by man as a system of signs when he wants to refer to the paradoxic structures of reality and consciousness. Words and their meanings are just as much a part of the reality to which they refer as the being things are partners in the comprehending reality; language participates in the paradox of a quest that lets reality become luminous for its truth by pursuing truth as a thing tended. This paradoxic structure of language has caused certain questions, controversies, and terminological difficulties to become constants in the philosophers' discourse since antiquity without approaching satisfactory conclusions.

Utopian Forgetfulness -pt 1

2010-03-29T01:00:00Z

UTOPIAN FORGETFULNESS OF DEPTH

from The Growth of the Liberal Soul -Ch 3 Pt 1

by David Walsh

David Walsh is professor of politics at Catholic University of America. He is the author or editor of many books; he is editor of three volumes of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. His Guarded by Mystery has been serialized here at VoegelinView in its entirety. His most recent book is The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. The book from which the current offering is taken, The Growth of the Liberal Soul, is available from the University of Missouri Press and appears here with permission. "Utopian Forgetfulness of Depth" appears here in four parts.

Customary Liberal Silence

Discussion of an existential depth to our discourse inevitably engenders a degree of methodological discomfort. This is particularly the case among theorists whose occupation is in dealing with the discursive level of argumentation. What cannot be detected through the medium of language can scarcely be detected at all, let alone rendered transparent through the methods of analysis. Without the theoretical equipment to examine experiences and symbols, most contemporary philosophers are content simply to follow Ludwig Wittgenstein's observation that "what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence."¹ More recently, many have also abandoned even the notion that coherent discourse is possible because of the incommensurability of all starting points. Largely overlooked is the possibility that the starting point lies in the existential resonances that can be reconstructed on the basis of their discursive elaborations.

The neglect of the experiential becomes politically significant when it converges with the customary liberal silence concerning its own foundations. It has been deeply impressed upon the liberal mind frame that its particular construction is specifically designed to prevent the resurfacing of the question of foundations.

The Spirit of Voegelin's Late Work -pt 3

2010-03-25T01:00:00Z

The Spirit of Voegelin's Late Work —Part 3

by Ellis Sandoz

Professor Sandoz is the Editor of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. He has written many books and published many essays on the significance of Eric Voegelin's thought and on the political and spiritual foundations of the United States. This essay is taken from his most recent book, Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America, available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay appears in four parts. It appears with permission of the publisher.

§ 3. What is In Search of Order about?

The balance achieved by Anselm is never surpassed (as Voegelin's loving recollection of it implies), and the important implications can best be studied by the reader in the original. The stance of Voegelin at the end of his days is of a man living in responsive openness to the divine appeal. He finds that what is at stake is not God but the truth of human existence with the persuasive role of the philosopher unchanged since antiquity, the persistent partisan for reality — experienced in the propagation of existential truth: This is the scholar's true vocation. If there is an "answer" given to the question of his unfinished meditation, it may be glimpsed in an affirmation of the comprehending Oneness of divinity Beyond the plurality of gods and things. At the end of Voegelin's long struggle to understand, Reality experienced-symbolized is a mysterious ordered (and disordered) tensional oneness moving toward the perfection of its Beyond — not a system.²⁷

Beginning of the Beginning -pt 2

2010-03-24T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

The Beginning of the Beginning

§2. The Paradox of Consciousness

By now the Beginning has wandered from the opening of the chapter to its end, from the end of the chapter to its whole, from the whole to the English language as the means of communication between reader and writer, and from the process of communication in English to a philosophers' language that communicates among the participants in the millennial process of the quest for truth. And still the way of the beginning has not reached the end that would be intelligible as its true beginning; for the appearance of a "philosophers' language" raises new questions concerning a problem that begins to look rather like a complex of problems.

There was a boy they called Hillaire

2010-03-03T03:16:00Z

Chesterton (and the rest)

There was a Boy they called Hillaire

by Max Arnott

The Scorpion is black as soot,

He dearly loves to bite;

He is a most unpleasant brute

To find in bed, at night.

As everyone knows, many societies have at their root a song book or "hymnal," familiarity with which unites the members of the club and divides "us" from "them." The Chinese cherish the Shih Ching, or Book of Odes; devout Jews memorize Psalms (in Hebrew!); Greeks consider those ignorant of Homer as barbarians or Italians.

The point carries on a less grand level too: those who carry around Frank Sinatra in their memory are marked as a slightly different "civilization" than those who nostalgically hum the Ramones.

And, of course, when the members of these civilization-ettes (can we call them cosmia?) pass away, their "songbook" fades too, and declines from Music to a document.

With this in mind, we may briefly consider that sole work of Hillaire Belloc, out of all he did, which still has cultural life.

The Spirit of Voegelin's Late Work -pt 2

2010-03-18T01:00:00Z

The Spirit of Voegelin's Late Work —Part 2

by Ellis Sandoz

Professor Sandoz is the Editor of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. He has written many books and published many essays on the significance of Eric Voegelin's thought and on the political and spiritual foundations of the United States. This essay is taken from his most recent book, Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America, available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay appears in four parts. It appears with permission of the publisher.

§ 2. "A Dry Soul is Wisest and Best"

Our brief reflections on the two principal writings open with "Quod Deus Dicitur," and then turn to In Search of Order. Voegelin does in some degree move beyond earlier formulations even as he reiterates some of them in exploring the tension toward the divine Realissimum in his final meditation. In the process he gives hints on the Christian experiential horizon — a subject definitely on his mind. I say that advisedly, given the title of the meditation and on the grounds that, not only do we have here his very last utterances dictated during the last sixteen days of his life, but also because of Lissy Voegelin's report of their conversations to this effect, with Voegelin telling her: "At last I understand Christianity!" And she responding: "Yes, Eric, but you're going to take it with you!" ¹⁰ So he did. We have only a fragment, much of it drawn from previous writings. Does this confirm these earlier views? I think it does, and it thereby argues the continuity of Voegelin's thought. What is the tenor of the meditation?

Beginning of the Beginning -pt 1

2010-03-17T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

The Beginning of the Beginning


§1. Where does the Beginning Begin?

As I am putting down these words on an empty page, I have begun to write a sentence that, when it is finished, will be the beginning of a chapter on certain problems of Beginning.

The sentence is finished. But is it true?

The reader does not know whether it is true before he has finished reading the chapter and can judge whether it is indeed a sermon on the sentence as its text. Nor do I know at this time, for the chapter is yet unwritten; and although I have a general idea of its construction, I know from experience that new ideas have a habit of emerging while the writing is going on, compelling changes in the construction and making the beginning unsuitable. Unless we want to enjoy the delights of a Sternean stream of consciousness, the story has no beginning before it has come to its end. What then comes first: the beginning or the end?

Genealogy of Islamic Terrorism -Pt 5

2010-03-04T02:45:00Z

from The Northern Lights

The Genealogy of Islamic Terrorism

Part 5

by Barry Cooper

Professor Cooper is the author of numerous books and essays in political science. He is the editor of several volumes of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. This essay appears as Chapter 3 in New Political Religions, or An Analysis of Modern Terrorism, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, 2004. This is published with permission of the publisher and appears in five parts.

The spiritual challenge of modernity, even when unencumbered by Western dress, leaves the modernists in Islam vulnerable to criticism both from traditional religious leaders and later from jihadist and salafist revolutionaries on the grounds that their modernism was both ineffective and "un-Islamic." Thus a modernist such as Al-Afghani (1837-1897) or Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905) whose views might be considered unexceptionable and even mainstream in the salons of Mayfair or the cafés of Paris look in retrospect as if they were in a kind of limbo or halfway house on the way to radical, fundamentalist, or jihadist Islamism.⁷⁰

Political institutions created after the destruction of the Ottoman Empire opened a number of political possibilities. In Turkey, the abolition of the caliphate in 1924 by Mustafa Kemal, the hero of the defeat of the Allies at Gallipoli, laid the foundation for what is arguably the most successful state whose citizens are chiefly Muslim.⁷¹ In contrast, in Egypt the foundations were laid at about the same time for a renewal of salafist and jihadist Islam by Hasan al-Banna, who in 1928 founded the Muslim Brethren, the Jamiyyat al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin, in direct emulation of the Ikhwan of Arabia.

Eric Voegelin's Search of Order -pt 1

2010-03-15T01:00:00Z

"The Attunement of the Soul"

Eric Voegelin's Search of Order -Part 1

by Charles Embry

Charles Embry is Professor Emeritus of Political Philosoohy 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 is offered in two parts and appears with permission.

* * * * *

On the coming of evening, I return to my house and enter my study; and . . . I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them with affection, I feed on that food which only is mine and which I was born for, where I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their kindness answer me . . . I am not frightened by death; entirely I give myself over to them.

~ Niccolò Machiavelli to Francesco Vettori December 10, 1513

* * * * *

At the time of his death, Voegelin left unfinished the fifth volume of Order and History, In Search of Order, which was published posthumously in 1987. Although the book is unfinished, its fragmentary nature should not "convey a suspicion of its being imperfectly deliberated," points out Ellis Sandoz in his introduction to the volume. For "it is fragmentary only in not extending the analysis to other materials plainly in the author's view and in not illustrating the theoretical presentation in greater detail than he was able to do before time ran out. But the theoretical presentation itself is essentially complete, and the fact that the quest of order is an unfinished story as told by Voegelin is most fitting."¹

The Spirit of Voegelin's Late Work -pt 1

2010-03-11T02:00:00Z

The Spirit of Voegelin's Late Work —Part 1

by Ellis Sandoz

Professor Sandoz is the Editor of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. He has written many books and published many essays on the significance of Eric Voegelin's thought and on the political and spiritual foundations of the United States. This essay is taken from his most recent book, Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America, available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay will appear in four parts. It appears with permission of the publisher.

Did the "Scientific" Triumph over the "Spiritual"?

The principal work by Voegelin written in the final years of his life and published posthumously includes the final volume of Order and History, entitled In Search of Order, his deathbed meditation dictated to Paul Caringella, "Quod Deus Dicitur," and the unfinished Aquinas Lecture titled "The Beginning and the Beyond: A Meditation on Truth."¹ While a great deal need not be made of the patently incomplete character of each of these documents, construing the silence of omissions has led to various interpretive debates in the secondary literature about the possibly "changed" views of the "late" Voegelin on crucial matters. The principal issues raised deserve brief mention and clarification from my perspective at the outset of this discussion.

Freedom of Conscience -pt 2

2010-03-10T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Freedom of Conscience -Part 2

The Fallible Conscience

Freedom of conscience in the political sense is the right to act according to one's conscience free of governmental prevention, interference, or subsequent sanction. Conscience itself can be defined as the act, or acts, by which we judge, approvingly or disapprovingly, our conduct in the light of our rational moral knowledge. Conscience in this sense is not infallible. It can err either because the facts of the case requiring our action or inaction are insufficiently known, or because an intricate conflict of obligations resists a correct solution within the time at our disposal, or because our general state of ignorance, our lack of intellectual training and imagination, our moral obtuseness and spiritual perversion, will produce false judgments . . . .

Eric Voegelin as Literary Critic pt 3

2010-03-08T02:42:00Z

"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.

Freedom of Conscience -pt 1

2010-03-03T03:16:00Z

from The Collected Works

Freedom of Conscience -Part 1

St. Thomas Aquinas and Liberty of Conscience

The humanists may well be right if they do not follow the classical philosophers in developing principles based on the bios theoretikos, or Christian thinkers into a conception of politics orientated toward the sanctification of life. But this question can be answered only through a closer study of their argument. I shall proceed by analysing in some detail their position with regard to a theoretically central problem, to the principle of liberty of conscience . . . .

We may appropriately start from the final judgment passed by [Mr.A.P.] D'Entrèves on the politics of Saint Thomas. When Mr.D'Entrèves proceeds from his impeccable account to an evaluation, he arrives at the following conclusions: "We find that the matters which the State is supposed to leave to the Church are precisely those which the modern man has struggled for centuries to secure against the interference of Church and State alike: such as the pursuit of truth and the worship of God according to his conscience. There is no room for religious freedom in a system which is based on orthodoxy." "Medieval intolerance . . . was a thorough, totalitarian intolerance."

Eric Voegelin as Literary Critic pt 2

2010-03-01T03:16:00Z

"One of My Permanent Occupations"
Eric Voegelin as Literary Critic-Part 2

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.

Voegelin's Criticism of Henry James's

The Turn of The Screw

A third significant statement regarding literary criticism originated in the Heilman-Voegelin correspondence and culminated with the publication in 1971 of a postscript to a letter first written by Voegelin in 1947. Voegelin's analysis focused on The Turn of the Screw by Henry James as a response to a critique that Heilman had published of a Freudian interpretation of the novella.⁸ In his postscript, Voegelin raised the twin issues of the "dustiness" of the symbols in James's story and the consequent necessity that a valid literary criticism must be firmly based upon a critical-existential assessment by the critic. These issues led to a conversation between Donald E. Stanford, editor of the Southern Review, and Voegelin.

After Stanford completed work on the issue in which both Voegelin's original letter on James's The Turn of the Screw and the newly written postscript appeared, Stanford and his wife visited the Voegelins at their home in Palo Alto.

Growth of the Liberal Soul Ch1 pt 5

2010-02-15T02:57:00Z

THE GROWTH OF THE LIBERAL SOUL

by David Walsh

Chapter One: The Crisis of Liberal Politics

Part 5

David Walsh is professor of politics at Catholic University of America. He is the author or editor of many books; he is editor of three volumes of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. His Guarded by Mystery has been serialized here at VoegelinView in its entirety. His most recent book is The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. The Growth of the Liberal Soul is available from the University of Missouri Press and appears here with permission. "Crisis of Liberal Politics" appears here in five parts.

Tumbling Liberal Defense (concluded)

We recall Socrates's argument that the tyrant is of all men the least powerful because he was unable to do anything to advance his own good, and all that he did made him worse (Gorgias 466). What of the many human beings today who cannot find a reason to be serious about their own good, who without being responsible toward themselves can hardly be responsible for others, and whose actions are driven by blind impulse from one self-destructive behavior to another? [Alan]Gewirth's principle presupposes the rational purposiveness it seeks to demonstrate. His principle says nothing to those who are not yet convinced that they ought to be purposive and should respect the liberal institutions of rights that are its expression.

Gewirth is peripherally aware of the problem and wonders aloud about the possibility that democratic majorities may "fail to endorse the redistributive justice of the supportive state" to implement the full recognition of rights (Reason and Morality, 321). In extreme cases, such as starvation, we can bypass the democratic process entirely; in the ordinary course of events, the process of "moral education" will render such emergency measures unnecessary. But what if the educational efforts are less than successful? No answer is forthcoming to this disturbing possibility.

The Politics of Faith -Pt 2

2010-01-28T02:12:00Z

The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Skepticism - Part 2

by Elizabeth Campbell Corey

Elizabeth Campbell Corey is Assistant Professor of Politics in the Honors Program at Baylor University. More information is available at her department website. She is the author of Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics, 2006, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, from which the following excerpts are taken. This appears with permission and is the second of two parts.

The Politics of Individuality

In a series of lectures Oakeshott gave at Harvard in 1958, now published as Morality and Politics in Modern Europe, he casts the faith/skepticism distinction in the terms of collectivism versus individuality, even going so far as to call these categories (as he does faith and skepticism) "the poles of the modern European political character." Collectivism postulates a common good that is chosen by government for the individuals who compose a society. This good is "preferred above all other possible conditions of human circumstance" and is believed "to be at least the emblem of a 'perfect' manner of human existence."²² In other words, it is the politics of faith.

The politics of individuality, on the other hand, springs from an entirely different conception of the role of government. Indeed, it has no "vision of another, different and better, world," but takes its bearings from observation of "the self-government practiced . . . by men of passion in the conduct of their enterprises." It calls not for great concentrations of power, but for an authoritative "ritual" that can minimize the chances for great collisions between individuals. The government is thus merely "custodian" of this ritual, called "law." Government's functions, on this reading, are to minimize circumstances in which violent collisions of interest are likely to occur. It provides redress for those who have been wronged, maintains sufficient power to carry out its functions, and protects itself and its subjects from foreign threat.²³ But unlike collectivism, the government of individuality is not in the business of generating grand visions that would guide an entire people.

Genealogy of Islamic Terrorism -Pt 4

2010-02-25T02:22:00Z

from The Northern Lights

The Genealogy of Islamic Terrorism

Part 4

by Barry Cooper

Professor Cooper is the author of numerous books and essays in political science. He is the editor of several volumes of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. This essay appears as Chapter 3 in New Political Religions, or An Analysis of Modern Terrorism, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, 2004. This is published with permission of the publisher and appears in five parts.

Indeed, generally speaking, the history of Islam prior to and during al-Wahhab's lifetime [1703-1787] was one of spiritual decline and political humiliation. The large topic of the decline, or at least the decentralization, of the Ottoman Empire has been debated at great length both inside and outside the empire, starting in the sixteenth century. Much of the discussion has centered on the changing balance of power between the empire and the new states of the West, rather than between Istanbul and other Muslim states.

From the battle of Lepanto in 1571 until the time of al-Wahhab, Ottoman power was, if not in retreat, then certainly undergoing reconfiguration in the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Crimea, southern Ukraine, and Hungary. At the same time, British, Dutch, and Portuguese ships were trading into the gulf. In the Ottoman homeland, these developments generated an extensive political literature dealing not just with themes of decline but also of religious reform.⁵³ For al-Wahhab, as for many other less successful reformers, the answer to political decay was a salafist restoration of the virtue and piety of the pristine early days.⁵⁴ As with all such movements, including those that have emerged from Judaism and Christianity, al-Wahhab's salafism was defined more by what he sought to destroy than by what he sought to build.

Eric Voegelin as Literary Critic pt 1

2010-02-22T04:16:00Z

"One of My Permanent Occupations"
Eric Voegelin as Literary Critic —Part 1

by Charles Embry

Charles Embry is Professor Emeritus of Political Philosoohy 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.

* * * * *

The occupation with works of art, poetry, philosophy, mythical imagination and so forth, makes sense only if it is conducted as an inquiry into the nature of man. ~ Eric Voegelin to Robert B. Heilman

* * * * *

There are many reasons for writing a book that relies upon the philosophical work of Eric Voegelin for the interpretation of modern literature. Not the least of these is Voegelin's own understanding of the nature of his work and vocation. In a letter dated December 19, 1955, he wrote to his friend Robert B. Heilman, the English literature scholar and literary critic:

Your letter of Dec.11th came just in time this morning, for I wanted to write you today anyway to thank you for the delightful review of Critics and Criticism. It had thrown me into a mood of indecision, because your refined politeness left me in doubt whether I should not read the volume, because literary criticism is after all one of my permanent occupations. (AFIL, letter 57, p. 142)¹

Eric Voegelin considered literary criticism one of his permanent occupations because of the necessity that confronted him as he worked toward the preparation of what he intended as his first major work in English — The History of Political Ideas.

Radical Alienation in Western Civilization

2010-02-24T02:20:00Z

from The Collected Works

Radical Alienation in Western Civilization
and the Modern Apocalyptic Mood

[In Western civilization] there is nothing on which one can fall back. As distinguished from a Greek civilization or Egyptian civilization, there is no archaism, for instance, possible in the Western civilization because Western civilization has no archaic period. There is no such thing in Western civilization as, for instance, the late Egyptian period, in which one can fall back on the sculpture and art forms of the third millennium B.C. And you cannot fall back on the Vikings; they are just too remote from any developed civilization.

Thus, from the early beginnings to the present, there is no internal coherence in Western civilization. But when you have an acculturation process of this kind, the deculturation process, with the resultant disorder, is considerably more dangerous than periods of disorder in other civilizations that have connections with an original mythical order. . . .

Genealogy of Islamic Terrorism -Pt 3

2010-02-18T01:00:00Z

from The Northern Lights

The Genealogy of Islamic Terrorism

Part 3

by Barry Cooper

Professor Cooper is the author of numerous books and essays in political science. He is the editor of several volumes of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. This essay appears as Chapter 3 in New Political Religions, or An Analysis of Modern Terrorism, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, 2004. This is published with permission of the publisher and appears in five parts.

Before returning to the question of Islamic history, there is one final issue about which it is important to be clear. There is a magical component to metastatic faith. More bluntly, demanding that God perform a miracle or alter the structure of reality does not work. The metastatic faith of the prophets cannot be fulfilled by any pragmatic organization, an insight made abundantly clear in Deutero-Isaiah. For metastatic prophets, the only thing to do is sit down and wait for the miracle to take place, from which experience arises the cry, "How long, O Lord? How long?" Prophets die waiting; generations of their disciples may die waiting as well.

One might anticipate that eventually, after several generations died awaiting a metastatic transformation, someone would undertake a close and critical examination of what had become an article of faith. On the other hand, once the agency for the miracle is transferred from God to human beings, there is no reason to expect any end to it at all: futuristic dreams practically by definition have an indefinite shelf-life.

The Pauline Vision -Pt 4

2010-02-17T02:31:00Z

from The Collected Works

The Pauline Vision of the Resurrected

— Part 4

§6. The Truth of Transfiguration

In the letters of Paul, the central issue is not a doctrine but the assurance of immortalizing transfiguration through the vision of the Resurrected. Transfiguration is experienced as a "historical" event that has begun with the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. This experience must now be pursued a few steps beyond the previous analysis.

In Galatians I:11-17, Paul insists on the purely divine source of the good tidings he has to bring. The evangel he has to evangelize, he has not "received or learned from any man," especially not from the apostolic pillars in Jerusalem, but exclusively through the "visionary appearance [apokalypsis] of Jesus Christ" (1:12), accorded to him by the grace of God who "revealed [apokalypsai] his Son in me" (I: 16). I am rendering these key passages literally, because paraphrases as one finds them in standard translations would obscure Paul's precision in articulating his experience of the God who enters him through the vision and by this act of entering transfigures him.

Growth of the Liberal Soul Ch1 pt 4

2010-02-08T01:05:00Z

THE GROWTH OF THE LIBERAL SOUL

by David Walsh

Chapter One: The Crisis of Liberal Politics

Part 4

David Walsh is professor of politics at Catholic University of America. He is the author or editor of many books; he is editor of three volumes of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. His Guarded by Mystery has been serialized here at VoegelinView in its entirety. His most recent book is The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. The Growth of the Liberal Soul is available from the University of Missouri Press and appears here with permission. "Crisis of Liberal Politics" appears here in five parts.

Tumbling Liberal Defense

An awareness of the depth of the critique ranged against liberal theory is what has inspired its late flowering in our own time. Viewed in a wider historical perspective, it is astonishing to see the revival of concepts and modes of thought that received opinion had long declaimed as outré. Even ideas that in liberal circles had not had much play since the eighteenth century, such as the social contract, began to assume a new prominence. A rediscovered pride in the liberal understanding of individual rights, especially by contrast with the dismal record of individual protection within any more expansive construction of rights, led to a new appreciation of the centrality of liberal political order. Protections for the individual and, limitations on the power of government became the currency of political discussion. Even liberal political economy, so long disdained as laissez faire, acquired new respect and influence. The political counterpart is found in the universal embrace of liberal democracy as the only legitimate political model around the globe.

Yet there has been something enormously brittle about this liberal rejuvenation, a brittleness that ultimately is the source of the sense of crisis that has reached into public consciousness.

Genealogy of Islamic Terrorism -Pt 2

2010-02-11T02:36:00Z

from The Northern Lights

The Genealogy of Islamic Terrorism

Part 2

by Barry Cooper

Professor Cooper is the author of numerous books and essays in political science. He is the editor of several volumes of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. This essay appears as Chapter 3 in New Political Religions, or An Analysis of Modern Terrorism, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, 2004. This is published with permission of the publisher and appears in five parts.

Even before the expansion of Islam, therefore, there remained some important and unanswered political questions, along with additional issues about which we need only offer a few hints in order to indicate the outline of the problem. To see the full amplitude of the issue involved in undertaking what was provisionally termed closing the gap between the earthly city and the City of God, it would be necessary to begin with the original experience of what is currently termed history, namely, the Israelite covenant. It would then be necessary to summarize three millennia of defections, returns, reforms, restorations, renaissances, revisions, insights, and losses because, as Voegelin said, "we are still living in the historical present of the covenant."²² This is a tall order, indeed. Fortunately, to see the bearing of this question on Islamic history it may be sufficient to sketch the experiential dynamics, or the dramatic action of the Israelite covenant alone. Again we follow Voegelin's account.

The Pauline Vision -Pt 3

2010-02-10T01:44:00Z

from The Collected Works

The Pauline Vision of the Resurrected

— Part 3

§5. Truth and History

The truth of existence emerges from the theophanic events in history. Paul's exegesis of his vision, with its concentration on the dynamics of the theophany, brings the historicity of existential truth into sharper focus than did the philosopher's exegesis of the noetic theophany. Regarding the relation of truth and history, a new accent falls on the area of "history" and its rank in the whole of reality. The account of the hard structure of truth, as I have called it, in the Pauline myth would be incomplete if this issue, with its rich potential for misunderstandings, and deformations, were not clarified.

In classic philosophy, the discovery of noetic consciousness is inseparable from the consciousness of the discovery as an event that constitutes meaning in history. The statement summarily refers to a field of relations in reality that now must be detailed. The discovery has "meaning," because it advances man's insight into the order of his existence. The meaning of the advance, therefore, derives from the "meaning" of existential order in the sense of man's openness toward the divine ground, as well as from man's desire to know about the right order of existence and its realization. This derivation of historical meaning from the meaning of personal existence should be noted as peculiar to the noetic experience of reality; in the Pauline context we shall find the relation inverted. The advance of insight, furthermore, is an "advance" indeed. For the discovery is not dumped as a block of meaning into a "history" in which previously nobody had ever been concerned with such problems of meaning.

The Pauline Vision -Pt 2

2010-02-03T03:34:00Z

from The Collected Works

The Pauline Vision of the Resurrected — Part 2

§3. Death and Transfiguration

Such assurance met with skepticism among the recipients of the message, and Paul felt compelled to answer pertinent questions concerning the source of his assurance. In I Corinthians 15:12-19, he established the connection between his prediction (kerygma) of resurrection and his vision of the Resurrected. "If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; if Christ has not been raised, then your faith is vain (mataia)" (16-17). "If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is empty (kenon) and your faith is empty" (14). The argument closes with the revealing sentence: "If we have no more than hope in Christ in this life, then we are of all men the most pitiful" (19). This sentence is the key to the understanding of Paul's experience of reality—or so at least it appears to me. Hope in this life, in our existence in the Metaxy, not only is not enough, it is worse than nothing, unless this hope is embedded in the assurance that derives from the vision.

Genealogy of Islamic Terrorism -Pt 1

2010-02-04T03:00:00Z

from The Northern Lights

The Genealogy of Islamic Terrorism

Part 1

by Barry Cooper

Professor Cooper is the author of numerous books and essays in political science. He is the editor of several volumes of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. This essay appears as Chapter 3 in New Political Religions, or An Analysis of Modern Terrorism, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, 2004. This is published with permission of the publisher and will appear in five parts.

There are major differences between the way that the political implications of Islam have been worked out historically and the political order of liberal, constitutional democracy. It is as important not to ignore those differences as it is to begin from the self-evident consideration that, although Islam broadly considered does not provide a threat to Western liberal democracy, militant jihadist Islam, what we have been calling Islamism, most certainly does. That, quite simply, was the meaning, the significance, and the message of September 11, 2001.⁹

Let us begin to consider this problem with the commonsense observation of Max Weber: "Neither religions nor men are open books. They have been historical rather than logical or even psychological constructions without contradiction. Often they have borne within themselves a series of motives, each of which, if separately and consistently followed through, would have stood in the way of the others or run against them head-on. In religious matters consistency has been the exception and not the rule."¹⁰ With respect to Islam, understood in as wide a sense as possible, we should not expect consistency between the pious traditional Muslim who seeks in his or her religion only to learn how to live in accord with God's will, and the fanatic who is clear that he knows God's will and that God's will demands that he attack the Great Satan by flying airplanes into buildings or by other murderous deeds.

Growth of the Liberal Soul Ch1 pt 3

2010-02-01T02:08:00Z

THE GROWTH OF THE LIBERAL SOUL

by David Walsh

Chapter One: The Crisis of Liberal Politics

Part 3

David Walsh is professor of politics at Catholic University of America. He is the author or editor of many books; he is editor of three volumes of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. His Guarded by Mystery has been serialized here at VoegelinView in its entirety. His most recent book is The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. The Growth of the Liberal Soul is available from the University of Missouri Press and appears here with permission. "Crisis of Liberal Politics" appears here in five parts.

Liberalism without Clothes (continued)

Nietzsche understood the enormity of the modern secular experiment, the creation of a human order in which the question of God had become obsolete, because he realized the degree to which our whole moral tradition had depended on divine authorization. In contrast to the glibness with which the idea of a rational moral order was endorsed by liberal intellectuals, he was among the very few who foresaw the crisis of morality that would unfold. The death of God meant the advent of nihilism. All of Nietzsche's efforts were directed to awakening his contemporaries to this realization and struggling courageously, if tragically, to find a means of confronting it.

He understood that the abandonment of faith in God would put all the greater pressure on morality. But it would soon collapse. "Every purely moral value system (that of Buddhism, for example) ends in nihilism: this is to be expected in Europe. One still hopes to get along with a moralism without religious background: but that necessarily leads to nihilism. — In religion the constraint is lacking to consider ourselves as value-positing" (Will to Power, 16). Now we are constrained by the realization of our own responsibility for positing values. There can be no grounding or authorization beyond the discretionary impositions of our own will. Opposing what he considered the typically English assertion of George Eliot — that morality can survive unaffected by the loss of God — Nietzsche insisted on the wholeness of Christian morality. When they continue to insist that good and evil remain intuitively self-evident to them, "we merely witness the effects of the dominion of the Christian value judgments and an expression of the strength and depth of this dominion: such that the origin of English morality has been forgotten, such that the very conditional character of its right to existence is no longer felt. For the English, morality is not yet a problem" (Twilight of the Idols, 516).

History and the Holy Koran- Pt 2

2010-01-14T05:00:00Z

from The Northern Lights

History and the Holy Koran - Pt 2

by Barry Cooper

Professor Cooper is the author of numerous books and essays in political science. He is the editor of several volumes of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. This essay appears in New Political Religions, or An Analysis of Modern Terrorism, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, 2004. It appears as an appendix and the references are to chapters in the main volume. This is published with permission of the publisher. This is the second of two parts.

Today, for Muslims living within Islamic history, matters are made worse when the inquiring minds are also Western and so doubly damned as both infidel and formerly or neo-colonial. For Westerners derailed by dogmatic postcolonial, postmodern sensibilities, things are no better: there can be no serious distinction between scholarship and polemic for postmoderns because there are no inquiring minds. There are only interested minds. Or, as Michel Foucault once put it, there is no knowledge, only power-knowledge. Notwithstanding the unpropitious context for the appearance of a mind inquiring into the text-critical problems of the Koran, or into what the Koran "really says," a good deal of the traditional understanding has been radically revised by the past generation of scholars — inquiring Muslim and non-Muslim minds working in the area of Middle Eastern studies — to give as neutral a designation as possible. Their concerns, to reiterate a point just made, are not with the perverse interpretations of ijtihad nor of the politics of the Ikhwan, though we shall argue that it has political as well as scholarly significance.

The Pauline Vision -Pt 1

2010-01-27T02:58:00Z

from The Collected Works

The Pauline Vision of the Resurrected — Part 1

§1. The Pauline Theophany

The potential of distortion through metastatic imagination, it should be understood, is inherent to the mystery of meaning. If the mystery were not real, the distortions would have no appeal. This tension inherent to the mystery has received its classic formulation through Paul in Romans 8:18-25. In the wake of the Fall, the whole creation has been submitted to a state of futility or senselessness (mataiotes) of existence (20). The whole creation exists in the earnest expectation (apokaradokia) of the revelation (apokalypsis) that will come to the sons of God (19). "We know that the whole creation is groaning in the one great act of giving birth; and not only creation but we ourselves, who possess the first fruits of the spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for our bodies to be set free (apolytrosis)" (22-23). Together with creation, our bodies will be set free (or: ransomed) from bondage (douleia) to the fate of perishing (phthora) and enter into the freedom (eleutheria) and glory (doxa) of the children of God (21). In Anaximander's language, transfigured reality will have the structure of genesis without phthora. ^FN

Growth of the Liberal Soul Ch1 pt 2

2010-01-25T04:09:00Z

THE GROWTH OF THE LIBERAL SOUL

by David Walsh

Chapter One: The Crisis of Liberal Politics

Part 2

David Walsh is professor of politics at Catholic University of America. He is the author or editor of many books; he is editor of three volumes of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. His Guarded by Mystery has been serialized here at VoegelinView in its entirety. His most recent book is The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. The Growth of the Liberal Soul is available from the University of Missouri Press and appears here with permission. "Crisis of Liberal Politics" appears here in five parts.

The Irony of Liberal Nihilism

The irony is that it was precisely the confrontation with totalitarian nihilism that provoked the contemporary rejuvenation of liberal convictions. We have difficulty remembering the extent to which the liberal ethos died in the period between the two world wars. The Great War had discredited the nineteenth-century brand of liberal politics that had seemed so helpless to avoid the conflagration. Social and economic upheavals that reached a crescendo in the Great Depression seemed to have sealed the fate of liberal economics. Even the historically stable democracies of the West appeared to be in a prerevolutionary state. Communist and fascist movements were not exclusively a German or Italian or Slavic phenomenon. Ideological mass movements were to be found in most of the countries of Europe and the Americas.

The realization of the destructiveness of such movements if they were to attain power was the shock that jolted liberal democracies back to life. Suddenly, liberals discovered that they were unarmed, militarily and spiritually, against far more vigorous opponents. Faced with movements that inspired fanatical commitment, with members that were willing to kill and be killed for the cause they overwhelmingly believed in, liberal democracies discovered the depth of their own ambivalence. Having drifted along as the danger mounted before it, liberal societies and liberal intellectuals suddenly awoke to the realization that history was about to pass them by. Without any apparent deep, sustaining convictions they were no longer a match for the more vital revolutionary forces of the day.

The Politics of Faith -Pt 1

2010-01-21T03:12:00Z

The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Skepticism -Part 1

by Elizabeth Campbell Corey

Elizabeth Campbell Corey is Assistant Professor of Politics in the Honors Program at Baylor University. More information is available at her department website. She is the author of Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics, 2006, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, from which the following excerpts are taken. This appears with permission and will be shown in two parts.

[It is] in The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism (Brit. sp.) that we see the full extent of [Michael] Oakeshott's transposed Augustinianism and his religious objections to the Pelagian character of modern politics.The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism implicitly recalls Oakeshott's 1929 essay "Religion and the World," in which he presents a choice between "worldly" and "religious" ways of living. In the book he presents a similar pairing: faith and skepticism. Here, however, the two alternatives are not presented as styles of government that might be explicitly chosen by an individual or a society. Instead, Oakeshott calls them the "poles" of an activity (politics), an activity that may at times swing from one extreme to the other but generally ends up somewhere in between.

Faith and skepticism are thus necessarily "ideal" types and alternative visions of what politics might look like. Neither of these is a style of politics, per se, but rather, in Oakeshott's words, they are "logical opposites."¹² In reality, politics partakes of each type, and neither can exist without the other. Faith and skepticism sprang up together over the past five hundred years as a result of specifically modern conditions that Oakeshott describes over the course of the work.

Hannah Arendt and the Constants of Human Nature

2010-01-20T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Hannah Arendt and The Constants of Human Nature

. . . .The delimitation of subject matter through the emotions aroused by the fate of human beings is the strength of Dr. Arendt's book. ^FN The concern about man and the causes of his fate in social upheavals is the source of historiography. The manner in which the author spans her arc from the presently moving events to their origins in the concentration of the national state evokes distant memories of the grand manner in which Thucydides spanned his arc from the catastrophic movement of his time, from the great kinesis, to its origins in the emergence of the Athenian polis after the Persian Wars.

The emotion in its purity makes the intellect a sensitive instrument for recognizing and selecting the relevant facts; and if the purity of the human interest remains untainted by partisanship, the result will be a historical study of respectable rank—as in the case of the present work, which in its substantive parts is remarkably free of ideological nonsense. With admirable detachment from the partisan strife of the day, the author has succeeded in writing the history of the circumstances that occasioned the movements, of the totalitarian movements themselves, and above all of the dissolution of human personality, from the early anti-bourgeois and antisemitic resentment to the contemporary horrors of the "man who does his duty" and of his victims.

Growth of the Liberal Soul Ch1 pt1

2010-01-18T02:00:00Z

THE GROWTH OF THE LIBERAL SOUL

by David Walsh

Chapter One: Crisis of Liberal Politics

Part 1

David Walsh is professor of politics at Catholic University of America. He is the author or editor of many books; he is editor of three volumes of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. His Guarded by Mystery has been serialized here at VoegelinView in its entirety. His most recent book is The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. The Growth of the Liberal Soul is available from the University of Missouri Press and appears here with permission. "Crisis of Liberal Politics" appears here in five parts.

In one sense liberal theory and politics have always been in a state of crisis. Even in its earliest appearance in the reflections of John Locke and his contemporaries, in their uneasiness with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, there was hesitation about the foundations. The American framers at Philadelphia and afterward frequently sounded their uncertainties as to whether their historical experiment in self-government was destined to survive. The advent of mass democracy in the nineteenth century, when "liberalism" became both a movement and a creed, provoked the most profound misgivings in such leading theorists as Tocqueville and Mill. And our own century has witnessed the global confrontation with totalitarianism that has made it the century of the fall and rise of the liberal tradition. So what is different about the present crisis? In what way is liberal democracy, that most defyingly durable of all modern political forms, particularly in danger today?

The Problem of Belloc

2010-01-13T02:40:00Z

Chesterton (and the rest)

The Problem of Belloc

by Max Arnott

I wonder why I don't read more Belloc?

In the ordinary way of things, if one likes this (Agatha Christie, Shakespeare, or cheddar), it would seem reasonable that one would like that (Ngaio Marsh, Ben Jonson, or stilton) which seems so similar.

G.K. Chesterton, whom we read often, worked so long and so closely with Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953), particularly on issues of the Distributionist economic movement, that G.B. Shaw called them Chesterbelloc. They were a sort of intellectual tag-team.

Belloc lived by his pen and he turned out a Missouri River class flow of topical journalism, history, alternative history, poetry, children's poetry, novels, and social commentary and, as might be expected from one who had to please or diet, it is lively stuff.

There is still a Distributionist movement (very small) and one of his books, The Servile State, is very much alive, as background influence, especially in libertarian circles, comparable to the better known Road to Serfdom.

The Idea of Progress and the Authoritative Present

2010-01-13T02:40:00Z

from The Collected Works

The Idea of Progress and "the Authoritative Present"

. . . . When the intellectual and spiritual sources of order in human and social life dry up, there is not much left as a source of order except the historically factual situation. . . .
When, however, a situation of fact is to be used as a source of order, the situation has to be surrounded by a body of doctrine that endows it with a specific legitimacy. Hence, one of the typically recurrent ideas in this contingency is the assumption that the situation of the moment, or a situation that is envisaged as immediately impending, is superior in value to any prior historical situation of fact.

Art and Philosophy in the Life of Étienne Gilson Pt 3 Ch 1

2010-01-07T02:59:00Z

Art and Philosophy in the Life of Étienne Gilson –Pt 3 of Chapter 1

by Francesca Aran Murphy

Francesca Aran Murphy is Professor of Christian Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom. Her most recent book, God is not a Story (Oxford University Press, 2007) is available in book form or as an electronic download. This excerpt and the earlier excerpts were taken from Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Étienne Gilson, (University of Missouri Press, 2004) which is published in the Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy. This appears with permission.

Social Modernism or Action Française?

Where Bergson took individually experienced time as the key to the creativity activating the cosmos, Auguste Comte thought of ideas as emerging from set stages of humanity's social evolution toward positivism. Fr. George Tyrrell asserted that the thought of Aquinas was produced by the civilization of the Middle Ages. Tyrrell complained that Leo's promotion of Thomism, in Aeterni Patris, makes "the medieval expression of Catholicism its primitive and its final expression." In effect, for Tyrrell, Thomism can be reduced to mediaeval culture. He felt it was absurd to expect anyone living in a modern liberal society to think as Thomas had done.³⁰ Assigning the former Jesuit to the cohorts of the modernists, Pius X responded to Tyrrell's contentions by denouncing what he called "social modernism," that is, liberal individualist society, as a corollary of doctrinal modernism.

Medieval Rationalism or Mystic Philosophy? -Pt 4

2010-01-04T02:30:00Z

Reflections on the Strauss-Voegelin Correspondence

Medieval Rationalism or Mystic Philosophy? —Part 4

by Ellis Sandoz

Professor Sandoz is the Editor of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. He has written many books and published many essays on the significance of Eric Voegelin's thought and on the political and spiritual foundations of the United States. This essay is one of several commentaries which appear in Faith and Political Philosophy: The Correspondence Between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934-1964, and which is available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay appears in four parts. It appears with permission of the publisher.

IV Behind Strauss and Spinoza stood the Averroists

In modern philosophy the hard line drawn between religion and philosophy is exemplified in Spinoza's attitude as expressed in Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670) where the principle is laid down as follows: "Between faith or theology, and philosophy, there is no connection, nor affinity. I think no one will dispute the fact who has knowledge of the aim and foundations of the two subjects, for they are as wide apart as the poles." "Philosophy has no end in view save truth; faith . . . looks for nothing but obedience and piety. Again, philosophy is based on axioms which must be sought from nature alone."³⁶

"The core of Strauss's thought is the famous 'theological-political problem,' a problem which he would say 'remained the theme of my studies' from a very early time."³⁷ Strauss's gloss on the quoted Spinoza passage suggests that the philosopher who knows truth must refrain from expressing it out of both convenience and, more so, duty.

Hermeneutics: the Art of Understanding Pt 2

2009-11-30T02:00:00Z

Hermeneutics: the Art of Understanding and Interpreting

by Hans-Georg Gadamer

This is taken from the video of the lecture given on November 24th, 1978 at York University, Toronto. The lecture was delivered at the conference "Hemeneutics and Structuralism: Merging Horizons" which was the same conference from which the DVD "Voegelin in Toronto" was taken. Nicholas William Graham organized the original conference in 1978 and has kindly prepared the transcription for our use here at VoegelinView. Professor Graham is President of the Northrop Frye Society. This is the second part of a two part article.

Part 2

Reading as the Stabilization of a Text

When I read a literary text, then I feel I should return to it; I should return to it again; and I shall discover more in it; it is not exhausted by the picking up of information conveyed by the text. Oh no! It becomes more and more a work.¹¹

We grow more and more familiar with it; it is a process of enrichment, which happens there. And I think going into the interplay of soundings and meanings, of allusions and descriptions, and moments of tension and moments of lowering the tension and all the different forms of literary works; all that is never exhausted by our acquaintance with it. But it is like a good painting: we begin to read it. We must read a text like a painting; a painting like a text.

And what is reading? Reading is a very complicated structure of temporal approach. It is not that we read one word or one letter after another; that is a form in which one learns reading but is not yet being able to read: then one must spell it, then one must construe. The construction in a foreign language: we learned it in Latin and Greek. Our schoolmasters would say: don’t divine it; construe it.

History and the Holy Koran- Pt 1

2010-01-11T04:08:00Z

from The Northern Lights

History and the Holy Koran

by Barry Cooper

Professor Cooper is the author of numerous books and essays in political science. He is the editor of several volumes of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. This essay appears in New Political Religions, or An Analysis of Modern Terrorism, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, 2004. It appears as an appendix and the references are to chapters in the main volume. This is published with permission of the publisher and appears in two parts.

In the course of the analysis of Islamist terrorism, we made a basic analytical distinction that needs to be discussed in more detail. On the one hand, we said, there existed the history of societies and political orders informed by Islam, an account of which we called a history of the Islamic community. We assumed here that the status of the history of this community, its res gestae, was as unproblematic as the history of the U.S. mail or of gunpowder. On the other hand we said there existed a paradigmatic Islamic history, which we tentatively described as the account of God and his messengers to humanity. Early in chapter 3 we said further that Islamic history, which we also identified as the "Islamic vulgate," by analogy with the Christian Bible given its official form by Saint Jerome in the fourth century, would be discussed "without prejudice."

The intention of this terminology was to maintain the frontier between piety and political science; we assumed here that it was possible to study the Islamic story of God and his messengers to humanity without taking a position with respect to the veracity or the literal truth of Islamic history. But this means that it is possible to be neutral before the actual messages that were delivered concretely on specific occasions. We have seen, notwithstanding the Koranic assurance that there can be no compulsion in matters of religion, that this second assumption, even more than the first one concerning the history of Islam, contains or expresses a major problem.

History, Progress and Time

2010-01-06T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Conceptions of History,

the Mathematics of Progress,

and the Problem of Time

(Transcript of a Lecture)

Man is constructed as a function of history in such philosophies of history as those of Comte, Hegel, and Marx, with an apocalyptic present, that is, a present in which all past reality is relegated to a dead past and all present is concentrated in this empirical present in time, loaded with expectations that something meaningful will come out of this present. That is the characteristic of the apocalyptic attitude, projecting into the future and forgetting about the past: the dead past and the living future.

With regard to such an opposition of a dead past to the living future, one should, for instance, be aware that these ideas of a time that flows from a past into a future on a symbolized line — just one line running through the point of present — is a conception, a meaning of the word future, which does not become current before the middle of the eighteenth century. Up to the middle of the eighteenth century we have no term for what today we call "the future"— a better future, a more peaceful future, or God knows what. This term, or meaning of, future did not exist in any European language before 1750. . . .

Ezra Pound and the Balance of Consciousness Pt 3

2009-11-26T05:00:00Z

Ezra Pound and the Balance of Consciousness   —Pt 3

by Glenn Hughes

Glenn Hughes is Professor of Philosophy at St. Mary’s University (San Antonio). He is the author or editor of four books, most recently Transcendence and History: The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity (University of Missouri Press, 2003), from which this excerpt is taken. He is also the poetry editor here at VoegelinView. This excerpt appears in three parts with permission of the publisher.

Pound's Resisitance to Radical Transcendence

Pound's brand of immanentism, of course, is quite different from those of philosophical materialists or secular progressivists: it has ample room for the divine and its mystery, but still at a certain limit Pound balks at the full implications of transcendence. The closest he gets to an embrace of radical transcendence is his approving use of the light symbolism he finds in the Neoplatonic mystical tradition, the notion of the "undivided light" of which all visible things are but manifestations.

Shines

in the mind of heaven    God
who made it
more than the sun
in our eye.
(51/250)
Light tensile immaculata
the sun's cord unspotted
"sunt lumina" said the Oirishman to King Carolus,
"OMNIA,
all things that are are lights"
(74/429)²⁰

Pound is comfortable with the notion of the divine mind, the Platonic Nous, as an original "light" that both constitutes reality and is refracted in the "light" of human understanding, and he gives credit to Plato for establishing the symbolic tradition: "What we can assert is that Plato periodically caused enthusiasm among his disciples. And the Platonists after him have caused man after man to be suddenly conscious of the reality of the nous, of mind, apart from any man's individual mind, of the sea crystalline and enduring, of the bright as it were molten glass that envelops us, full of light."

The Ministry of Love

2009-12-03T04:22:00Z

from the Northern Lights

The Ministry of love

The War on Hate: The Past and Future of Political Correctness and Liberty

  by John von Heyking

Professor von Heyking is a prolific author of books and papers in political science and is a regular contributor to VoegelinView. His biographical notice is found here. The following paper was delivered to the Eric Voegelin Society at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Toronto in September of 2009 and appears here with permission.

Alexis de Tocqueville thought the future democratic despotism would degrade men without tormenting them. Canadian Human Rights Commissions do an effective job doing both because defending oneself against charges of promoting “hate” — or political incorrectness — consumes vast amounts of one’s time and money, so much so that even in the rare of event of successfully defending oneself, one can be sure that, in Ezra Levant’s words, the “process is the punishment.” Moreover, defending oneself means engaging in the same whining exercise as that of the complainants. Reading the transcript of a HRC proceeding displays this degradation of character that a contemporary Karl Kraus (or Mark Steyn) easily could, and has, parodied.¹

Roger Scruton charitably observes that political correctness in Western societies — most notably the United States — originated in the attempt to promote civility. As people became more aware of the effect of language and terminology on prejudice and discrimination, attempts were made to find more respectful terms that cultivated civility instead of rudeness and disrespect.²

Art and Philosophy in the Life of Étienne Gilson Pt 2-Ch 1

2009-12-24T02:08:00Z

Art and Philosophy in the Life of Étienne Gilson –Pt 2 of Chapter 1

by Francesca Aran Murphy

Francesca Aran Murphy is Professor of Christian Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom. Her most recent book, God is not a Story (Oxford University Press, 2007) is available in book form or as an electronic download. This excerpt and excerpts that follow are taken from Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Étienne Gilson, (University of Missouri Press, 2004) which is published in the Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy. This appears with permission.

Alfred Loisy and Henri Bergson

Loisy struggles to reconcile old and new

Gilson thought that the problems the modernists tackled were real ones, that there was something wrong with the orthodox portrayal of dogma and doctrine. So, of course, did they. A further aspect of modernism is what it meant to those who taught some variant of it. They wanted to change the theological outlook of their times, to do theology in a different way. Why? What did they see as being at fault in the late-nineteenth-century exposition of Christian doctrine? Loisy, Lucien Laberthonnière, and Baron von Hügel were each regarded in the Roman Curia as a subjectivist, but each of these men had touched upon subjectivity in answer to different questions. In order to understand what modernism was, one has to ask what questions were in the minds of each protagonist, what problem they were trying to solve, and how.

History is Christ Written Large

2009-12-23T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

History is Christ Written Large

St. Thomas has asked the question and sharpened it to its critical point: he asks “whether Christ be the head of all men” (ST III.8.2), and answers unequivocally that he is the head of all men, indeed, and that consequently the mystical body of the church consists of all men who have, and will have, existed from the beginning of the world to its end.

Philosophically, the proposition implies that Christ is both the “historical Christ,” with a “pre-” and “post-” in time, and the divine timelessness, omnipresent in the flow of history, with neither a “pre-” nor a “post-.” In the light of these implications, then, the symbolism of incarnation would express the experience, with a date in history, of God reaching into man and revealing him as the Presence that is the flow of presence from the beginning of the world to its end. History is Christ written large.

Medieval Rationalism or Mystic Philosophy? -Pt 3

2009-12-21T02:38:00Z

Reflections on the Strauss-Voegelin Correspondence

Medieval Rationalism or Mystic Philosophy? —Part 3

by Ellis Sandoz

Professor Sandoz is the Editor of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. He has written many books and published many essays on the significance of Eric Voegelin's thought and on the political and spiritual foundations of the United States. This essay is one of several commentaries which appear in Faith and Political Philosophy: The Correspondence Between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934-1964, and which is available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay will appear in four parts. It appears with permission of the publisher.

III Sharing the Quest but with Differing Assumptions

One has the familiar sense of ships passing in the night, after this review of some of the salient passages in the correspondence. Is there more to it than that? What conclusions can be drawn, however tentatively?

The restraining sentiment to be remembered as a kind of motto of civility for whatever one concludes about the debate under consideration may be taken from a remark Strauss made to Voegelin: ". . . the agreement in our intentions . . . so long as we have to combat the presently reigning idiocy, is of greater significance than the differences [between us], which I also would not wish to deny."²⁶

That said, some of the differences can be noted, on the assumption that the agreements have become clear enough by now. What lies behind the basic disagreement is expressed already in 1942 by Strauss and is accurate for the entire subsequent relationship with Voegelin: "The impossibility of grounding science on religious faith . . . . Now, you will say . . . that the Platonic-Aristotelian concept of science was put to rest through Christianity and the discovery of history. I am not quite persuaded of that."²⁷

Art and Philosophy in the Life of Étienne Gilson Pt 1-Ch 1

2009-12-17T03:18:00Z

Art and Philosophy in the Life of Étienne Gilson –Pt 1 of Chapter 1

by Francesca Aran Murphy

Francesca Aran Murphy is Professor of Christian Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom. Her most recent book, God is not a Story (Oxford University Press, 2007) is available in book form or as an electronic download. This excerpt and excerpts that follow are taken from Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Étienne Gilson, (University of Missouri Press, 2004) which is published in the Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy. This appears with permission.

The Modernist Crisis and French Politics

A crisis occurred in France in 1902 through 1914 — a crisis about modernism. It affected Étienne Gilson at the time, and for always. To understand him, we have to look at what happened; but we need to do more, and, in a way, less, than that. The more objectively photorealistic a war movie is, the less true it is to the experience of war. Lacking the omniscience of the movie camera, combatants only see what is going on in their immediate vicinity. An aerial and yet telescopically naturalistic overview of the modernist crisis would likewise play false to how it was experienced by one nineteen-year-old French onlooker, Étienne Gilson. An exhaustively objective account of modernism would not necessarily help us to understand how Gilson felt about it. What we need is not just a detached comprehension of what modernism actually was but also what Gilson believed was going on.

What influenced Gilson was what the modernist crisis looked like to him, and what it represented to him. He was nineteen when it began and thirty when it simmered out. He was to have a near lifelong sympathy for Alfred Loisy, one of the authors of French theological modernism. Gilson could write vitriolically about French paleo-conservatives seventy years after the events that we shall now describe. We will pinpoint several different viewing positions on modernism and observe where Gilson stood in relation to them. The first is the cultural and political environment of the French modernist crisis.

Psychological Phenomenalism

2009-12-16T03:28:00Z

from The Collected Works

Psychological Phenomenalism

Psychological phenomenalism has penetrated our civilization so thoroughly that the problem can be supposed to be well known. It will be sufficient to remind the reader of some varieties of phenomenal psychology, and then of some of the consequences.

We have an experimental, physiological psychology that has lost the spiritual substance of man entirely; we have furthermore a behavioristic psychology in which the actions of the mind have become “language behaviors” and ideas are “thought materials”; and we have a depth psychology in which the soul is reduced to an economy of sex quanta and their sublimation. Under the impact of psychologies of this type the life of the spirit, with its operation of substance on substance, tends to become dissolved into a manifold of manageable causal relations; the “psychological manager” takes the place of the directeur de l’âme.

Medieval Rationalism or Mystic Philosophy? -Pt 2

2009-12-14T05:00:00Z

Reflections on the Strauss-Voegelin Correspondence

Medieval Rationalism or Mystic Philosophy? —Part 2

by Ellis Sandoz

Professor Sandoz is the Editor of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. He has written many books and published many essays on the significance of Eric Voegelin's thought and on the political and spiritual foundations of the United States. This essay is one of several commentaries which appear in Faith and Political Philosophy: The Correspondence Between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934-1964, and which is available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay will appear in four parts. It appears with permission of the publisher.

II The Refusal of Strauss to Address the Experiential Basis of Philosophy

Now to the crux of the disagreement between the two writers: Strauss, in his letter of 25 August 1950, had written that this second thesis was "the root of our disagreement," and in this he was not wrong. In response to Voegelin's asserted "historical fact," Strauss flatly denies it and adds: "Whatever noein might mean, it is certainly not pistis in some sense. On this point Heidegger . . . is simply right."¹⁴

This becomes the "one point where our paths separate," Strauss states, although Voegelin reads Philosophy and Law (1935; English translation, 1987) and finds that Strauss had in that earlier book held a view much like his own. But this, too, Strauss denies. The "classics are the Greeks and not the Bible," he argues. "The classics demonstrated that truly human life is a life dedicated to science, knowledge, and the search for it." "I believe still today," writes Strauss, "that the theioi nomoi is the common ground of the Bible and philosophy — humanly speaking. But I would specify that, in any event, it is the problem of the multitude of theioi nomoi that leads to the diametrically opposed solutions of the Bible on the one hand and of philosophy on the other."¹⁵

Art and Philosophy in the Life of Étienne Gilson -Introduction

2009-12-10T03:33:00Z

Art and Philosophy in the Life of Étienne Gilson (Introduction)

by Francesca Aran Murphy

Francesca Aran Murphy is Professor of Christian Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom. Her most recent book, God is not a Story (Oxford University Press, 2007) is available in book form or as an electronic download. This excerpt and excerpts that follow are taken from Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Étienne Gilson, (University of Missouri Press, 2004) which is published in the Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy. This appears with permission.

Religion and Politics

—the French Background

This is an "intellectual life" of Étienne Gilson. The "intellect" follows a thematic order, but lives are chronological. I have tried to give both chronology and thematicism their due, for certain intellectual themes shaped Gilson's life. The thematic currents all flow from one historical fact, the French modernist crisis. Gilson was an impressionable nineteen-year old when the modernist crisis began in France. It was like being nineteen during the French Revolution, or like being a real-life Johnny Tremaine at the start of the American Revolution. One can hardly imagine a real Johnny Tremaine putting it all behind him when the War of American Independence concluded. This book tries to show how Gilson was marked throughout his life by his reactions to modernism.

If Gilson's reaction had been straightforward, it would have been easy to describe, but perhaps not worth describing. If a historian could play with counterfactuals, one would say that if, between 1903 and 1914, Gilson had been simply for the modernists, or if he had simply been against them, he would have made no contribution to twentieth-century philosophy. In fact, his response made for a serious internal conflict. Gilson was a devout and loyal French Catholic who felt a great sympathy with the modernists. So modernism worked in him like the grit in the oyster, producing a pearl.

Self-Appropriation pt 2

2009-11-16T01:53:00Z

Self-Appropriation in Lonergan and Voegelin—Part 2

by Thomas J. McPartland

Thomas McPartland is Professor and Chairman of the Whitney Young School of Honors and Liberal Studies at Kentucky State University in Frankfort. This essay is taken from his book, Lonergan and the Philosophy of Historical Existence, which appears in the Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy, and is available from the University of Missouri Press. This is the second of two parts. It appears, with permission of the publisher. The previous chapter, Noetic Science, may also be read here at VoegelinView.

Voegelin's Existential Exegesis

It is obvious that in his later writings Lonergan has entered the territory of Voegelin. We see Lonergan articulating the reality of tension as the equivalent of Voegelin's in-between participatory reality; suggesting the negotiation of the psychic depths, reminiscent of Voegelin's portrait of consciousness opening to the unfathomable psychic reaches below, as depicted in Plato's Timaeus; and showing the centrality of the divine human encounter.¹⁹ Voegelin, however, has a somewhat precise and perhaps novel idea of meditation as it is related to his version of self-appropriation. Voegelin, of course, has explored his own territory in a more concerted and detailed manner by a style evocative of the very existential consciousness being investigated.

Voegelin does not mention the "self" often, and when he does, he usually refers to the creation of imaginary selves as "second realities," as substitute, false selves, exemplifying what Lonergan calls the existential gap. The idea of a false self, however, points, by contrast, to a true self. And Voegelin indeed speaks of a "true self": the self that experiences the divine pull and responds with the loving search for being; the self whose reaction to the anxiety of existence is not flight but instead the search for the ground; the self who exists in the tension, the in-between, of time and the timeless, the human and the divine; the self who is aware of participating in the order of being.²⁰

Economic Phenomenalism and Karl Marx

2009-12-09T02:04:00Z

from The Collected Works

Economic Phenomenalism

(with a note on Karl Marx)

. . . . In the case of economic theory we have again a science of phenomena operating with certain assumptions such as a rational, economic individual, guided by self-interest, and the further assumption that from the rational economic actions of the multitude of individuals in a society there will result a maximum equipment with goods for the whole society. Assuming the assumptions to be valid, nothing follows from them concerning the desirability of a society with a legal order that favors unhampered rational, economic action. The problems of the substantial order would be whether there are not a few things more important for man and his life in society than a maximum equipment with goods and whether an economic order that produces a maximum of wealth is worth the cost in values that have perhaps to be sacrificed in order to maintain it.

The theory of economic phenomena quite legitimately does not deal with these questions. The element of phenomenal obsession enters only when the laws developed by a theory of economic action are erected into standards of action, when the theoretical system of economic relations is considered a right order of society that should not be disturbed by interventions.

Medieval Rationalism or Mystic Philosophy? -Pt 1

2009-12-07T02:24:00Z

Reflections on the Strauss-Voegelin Correspondence

Medieval Rationalism or Mystic Philosophy? —Part 1

by Ellis Sandoz

Professor Sandoz is the Editor of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. He has written many books and published many essays on the significance of Eric Voegelin's thought and on the political and spiritual foundations of the United States. This essay is one of several commentaries which appear in Faith and Political Philosophy: The Correspondence Between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934-1964, and which is available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay will appear in four parts. It appears with permission of the publisher.

The fascinating correspondence between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin raises more questions than it answers, if merely taken by itself.^l To be sure, a number of extremely valuable debates arise between the two writers, especially in the letters of 1949 through 1951. Often, however, the exchange gives only straws in the wind and a sense of agreements and disagreements, but much that unites and much that separates them ultimately remains obscure. To account adequately for everything would require a review of the correspondence in the context of the entire corpus of the technical writing and teaching of both men. That large task cannot be undertaken on this occasion, although some tentative suggestions will be ventured by way of conclusion. Since this correspondence is an exchange between the two giants of political philosophy of our time, there should be no doubt of its importance and great intrinsic interest.

Kipling or Chesterton but Not Both

2009-11-18T02:15:00Z

Chesterton (and the rest)

Rudyard Kipling or G.K. Chesterton: but not both

by Max Arnott

When G.K Chesterton died on 14 June 1936, about six months after Rudyard Kipling, both men were long out of fashion. By now in 2009, as they recede in our vision, surely we ought to have some sort of consensus on both men.

Not hardly.

Each author still has devoted fans and each makes some people angry.

Why, after so long?

Biological Phenomenalism and Charles Darwin

2009-12-02T02:30:00Z

from The Collected Works

Biological Phenomenalism

and Charles Darwin

[The success] of the theory of evolution in the nineteenth century [is a source of bewilderment to the historian of ideas]. The evolution of the forms of life, as we observed [earlier in the text], was treated thoroughly in the biological theory of the eighteenth century. The creational theory of the species was abandoned; the idea of a chronological succession of living forms from primitive to the most complicated was conceived. The increase of phenomenal knowledge concerning their unfolding was acknowledged, but the insight was also gained that the idea of an evolution of living forms did not bring us one step nearer to an understanding of the mystery of the substance that was evolving through the chain of forms.

Orwell, Dostoevsky, Flaubert: Obsession & Cruelty

2009-11-25T03:22:00Z

from The Collected Works

Orwell, Dostoevsky, Flaubert: Obsession as the Sensuous Outburst of Cruelty

You speak in your letter of a change in dramatic style from expressionist morality to a new realism represented by Dürrenmatt and Frisch.

As I am not accustomed to think in these categories, and am not quite sure with regard to their exact meaning, I should like to hear more about the matter. The reason is that just now I am dabbling again in your field of literature, and I feel that I am after the same problem. Let me present it briefly — but I must warn you that I can only hope I have not completely misunderstood you.

I hit on what seems to me the same problem through dealing with language and some other symbolisms in connection with my eternal problem of Gnosis. [George] Orwell develops in 1984, as you know, the symbolism of "Newspeak." His elaboration of the issue is in my opinion weak, but he is after a real issue.

Hermeneutics: the Art of Understanding Pt 1

2009-11-23T03:10:00Z

Hermeneutics: the Art of Understanding and Interpreting

by Hans-Georg Gadamer

This is taken from the video of the lecture given on November 24th, 1978 at York University, Toronto. The lecture was delivered at the conference "Hemeneutics and Structuralism: Merging Horizons" which was the same conference from which the DVD "Voegelin in Toronto" was taken. Nicholas William Graham organized the original conference in 1978 and has kindly prepared the transcription for our use here at VoegelinView. Professor Graham is President of the Northrop Frye Society. This is the first part of a two part article.

Part 1

Understanding as a Natural Gift

Well, of course, the first thing I have to say is that I cannot read a paper because my English is too bad and I know by experiences that improvisatory speaking is more tolerable. So you understand that the improvisatory character of my speech is legitimated by my own limitations. On the other hand, I have it easy by the fact that this morning Fred Lawrence¹ gave a very comprehensive outline of the background of my own thoughts in combination, of course, with his own interests and thoughts. And so, I think, I can do what you will expect the most in this conference — to speak exactly about literary texts and the task of understanding them.

Well, you know, hermeneutics, as I renewed this word in past years, is the art of understanding and interpreting. And it is parallel with rhetoric. To speak and to understand speech are obviously two corresponding activities and excellences of human beings.

Ezra Pound and the Balance of Consciousness -Pt 2

2009-11-19T03:12:00Z

Ezra Pound and the Balance of Consciousness   —Pt 2

by Glenn Hughes

Glenn Hughes is Professor of Philosophy at St. Mary’s University (San Antonio). He is the author or editor of four books, most recently Transcendence and History: The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity (University of Missouri Press, 2003), from which this excerpt is taken. He is also the poetry editor here at VoegelinView. This excerpt appears in three parts with permission of the publisher.

Pound on Divine Reality and Historical Truth

Turning now to Ezra Pound, we find that his work reveals a remarkable range of agreement with Eric Voegelin's philosophical account of existence in the In-Between. To begin with, for Pound the gods are real, and so for him as for Voegelin experiences of human-divine encounter are a fact of existence. As Voegelin is a mystic philosopher in an age profoundly suspicious of mystery, so Pound is a genuinely religious poet in a generally irreligious age. As George Kearns points out at the start of his excellent guide to Pound's Selected Cantos, divine reality is constantly affirmed in his epic poem, through repeated descriptions and evocations of " 'magic moments,' visions of the light, divine energies, paradisal states of mind," an affirmation that must not be misinterpreted as a mere "literary conceit."⁶ Divine energy is the font of reality, the source of all things, the force that draws into patterns of beauty and order both the works of nature and those of human invention. This is true now, as it has always and everywhere been true.

Constant Nature of Man

2009-11-18T02:15:00Z

from The Collected Works

The Constant Nature of Man, Changing self-understanding and Autobiography

The title of these lectures is "The Drama Of Humanity." They are not about man but about our humanity. Now why? We are accustomed, for instance, to talk about the nature of man, and then you usually have the great fights between adherents of classical philosophy, who will tell you that the nature of man is a constant, and the apocalyptically excited intellectuals, who will tell you that the nature of man changes and that it will change ever more in the future, that all our expectations for the future and for a new realm on this earth depend on changes in the nature of man.

Voegelin and his Contemporaries Pt 2

2009-11-05T01:30:00Z

Voegelin and

his Contemporaries -Pt 2

by Barry Cooper

Professor Cooper has edited three volumes of the Collected Works. He has authored numerous essays and books relating to Voegelin, including a volume of reminiscences, Voegelin Recollected. This essay was delivered by Professor Cooper at Careleton University, Ottawa, on October 24th, 2008. This is the second of two parts.

Turning to Hans Kelsen, who was Voegelin’s Doktorvater, matters were extremely complex. To begin with, early in his career Voegelin was identified, quite properly, as a member of the “Vienna School” of jurisprudence. His early work was unquestionably part of the Staatslehre tradition though with his first publications he expressed his reservations about the neo-Kantian methodology that was central to Kelsen’s work. Voegelin also came to the conclusion that Staatslehre was itself both a parochial German discipline and radically defective inasmuch as it was useless in the understanding of British, French, or American political reality and, even when confined to German phenomena, could not handle what, during the 1930s, he was already calling political ideas. This was especially significant in his analysis of the “race idea” as it was employed by the National Socialist.

The difference with Kelsen, at least in retrospect, can be detected in Voegelin’s work during the 1920s. His concern was directed at “units” or “lines” of meaning that were found in social and political self-understanding. In contrast, as Kelsen put it, “the object of knowledge is determined by the aim of knowledge,” namely science as defined by neo-Kantian premises. The purity of Kelsen’s “pure theory of law” was achieved by ensuring its independence from what Kelsen called “social events.” For Voegelin it was a virtuoso performance that described the formal order of a logic of norms independent of any particular content.

Ezra Pound and the Balance of Consciousness -Pt 1

2009-11-12T01:50:00Z

Ezra Pound and the Balance of Consciousness   —Pt 1

by Glenn Hughes

Glenn Hughes is Professor of Philosophy at St. Mary’s University (San Antonio). He is the author or editor of four books, most recently Transcendence and History: The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity (University of Missouri Press, 2003), from which this excerpt is taken. He is also the poetry editor here at VoegelinView. This excerpt appears in three parts with permission of the publisher.

________________

M'amour, m'amour

                     what do I love and

                                where are you? That I

lost my center

                             fighting the world. The

dreams clash

                            and are shattered— and

that I tried to make a paradiso

                                                                   terrestre.

—EZRA POUND, THE CANTOS

The human mind is so constructed that moral issues, if we are honest with ourselves, cannot be resolved. The conflicts between ideality and practice, between love and justice, are everlasting, at least in finite intelligence.

HAYDEN CARRUTH, "THE TIME OF FALLING APART"

________________

THE MOST EFFICIENT way to approach Ezra Pound's artistic struggle with the problem of transcendence will be to use Eric Voegelin's philosophy of human existence and history to analyze some of Pound's guiding ideas about divine reality, history, language, and political order, especially as they shape and inform his epic poem The Cantos. To a reader familiar with both Pound and Voegelin, this might seem an odd pairing, not least because Voegelin's philosophical achievement and outlook contrast so glaringly with the trajectory and incoherences in Pound's poetic vision and personal life. In fact, though, some of Voegelin's basic theoretical principles regarding divinity, consciousness, and history have their reflections in Pound's deepest convictions.

On the Pathos of Science

2009-11-11T01:40:00Z

from The Collected Works

On the Pathos of Science and the Spiritual Eunuchs

The transfer of [the pathos of autonomy and self-reliance that animates the advancement of science] from science to existence expresses itself concretely in the growth of the belief that human existence can be oriented in an absolute sense through the truth of science. If this belief is justified, then it becomes unnecessary to cultivate knowledge beyond science.

As a consequence of this belief, the preoccupation with science and the possession of scientific knowledge has come to legitimate ignorance with regard to all problems that lie beyond a science of phenomena. The spreading of the belief has had the result that the magnificent advancement of science in Western civilization is paralleled by an unspeakable advancement of mass ignorance with regard to the problems that are existentially the important ones.

Self-Appropriation pt 1

2009-11-09T02:09:00Z

Self-Appropriation in Lonergan and Voegelin—Part 1

by Thomas J. McPartland

Thomas McPartland is Professor and Chairman of the Whitney Young School of Honors and Liberal Studies at Kentucky State University in Frankfort. This essay is taken from his book, Lonergan and the Philosophy of Historical Existence, which appears in the Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy, and is available from the University of Missouri Press. This chapter appears in two parts, with permission of the publisher. The previous chapter, Noetic Science, has appeared here in three parts.

What does it mean to appropriate the self? Is the self somehow a "something" that can be "appropriated"? Is this mysterious appropriation something added on to the mysterious self coming from outside the self? Or is it an enrichment of the already present self? Or is it a fundamental constituent of the very being of the self? Indeed, if Kierkegaard is correct and the self is a relation that relates itself to itself, then perhaps self-appropriation concerns the very being of the self.¹ Lonergan and Voegelin would, in fact, agree with Kierkegaard's assessment, each from his own distinct, but substantially equivalent, perspective, Lonergan highlighting more the role of mediation (and Intentionality) in the enterprise, Voegelin more the role of meditation. But, given their respective emphases on mediation and meditation, how can we speak of their equivalent positions? For the former conveys the image of scientific discourse, whereas the latter suggests the practice, if not the silence, of the mystic.

Luminosity Symposium

2009-10-26T02:00:00Z

Click anywhere below to see the Symposium Papers

      from the Eric Voegelin Society meeting in Toronto, September 4, 2009.

The Divine Sonship

2009-11-04T01:30:00Z

from The Collected Works

The Divine Sonship—

Not an Information Tendered by Jesus

At a time when the reality of the gospel threatens to fall apart into the constructions of an historical Jesus and a doctrinal Christ, one cannot stress strongly enough the status of a gospel as a symbolism engendered in the metaxy of existence by a disciple’s response to the drama of the Son of God. The drama of the Unknown God who reveals his kingdom through his presence in a man, and of the man who reveals what has been delivered to him by delivering it to his fellow men, is continued by the existentially responsive disciple in the gospel drama by which he carries on the work of delivering these things from God to man.

The World We Think In

2009-10-28T02:00:00Z

THE WORLD WE THINK IN

by James V. Schall, S.J.

We are pleased to offer this review of David Walsh's The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence in addition to those reviews already presented here from the Toronto Eric Voegelin Society Symposium. Father Schall is Professor of Government at Georgetown University. He is the author of books on politics, religion, Chesterton and Maritain. Among his more recent books are The Regensburg Lecture, The Life of the Mind, and The Order of Things. Part of this review first appeared in Ignatius Insight and is reprinted here with permission.

This is why we are engaged in a drama of which we are not the source, and we sense the importance of responding rightly to the pull of Being. What is at stake far transcends any immanent good. It is nothing less than the loss of our participation in Being. The soul of man is, as Dostoevsky noted, a battlefield in which God and the devil are contending. Our decisions are of surpassing significance because they carry a dimension that endures beyond the universe itself. This is the drama of existence that is glimpsed by the Greek discovery of Being, but that reaches its full transparence only in Christ. (David Walsh, The Third Millennium) ¹

Indeed, there is hardly a ‘world’ or an ‘age’ at all when we see that each individual exists within an eternal scale of measurement that utterly outweighs any finite calculation. (David Walsh, The Modern Philosophical Revolution:The Luminosity of Existence) ²

Noetic Science- Pt 3

2009-11-02T01:55:00Z

Noetic Science —Part 3

by Thomas J. McPartland

Thomas McPartland is Professor and Chairman of the Whitney Young School of Honors and Liberal Studies at Kentucky State University in Frankfort. This essay is taken from his book, Lonergan and the Philosophy of Historical Existence, which appears in the Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy, and is available from the University of Missouri Press. This chapter and the related succeeding chapter appear in five parts, with permission of the publisher.

Limits of Aristotle's Analysis

If we can extrapolate this core of noetic science from the writings of Aristotle with some plausibility, we nevertheless should not be surprised that it has been muddled, overlooked, or even denied by commentators and philosophers. Aristotle, however, has himself contributed to the confusion. Aristotle first develops terminology applicable to the most generic discipline possible: that which deals with being as being. From the Metaphysics he then can gather terms for his investigation of being as changing, his Physics.

From both the Metaphysics and the Physics he can employ terms in his study of being as self-changing, his De Anima. This hierarchy of disciplines causes problems when he reaches the specifics of the human situation. When he examines, for example, nous, he is examining a principle of rational self-change, but the categories of metaphysics, physics, and psychology cannot do strict justice to the nuances of noetic consciousness. The faculty psychology Aristotle relies upon differentiates souls by potencies, potencies by acts, acts by objects, and objects by either efficient or final cause.

Voegelin and his Contemporaries Pt 1

2009-10-29T02:27:00Z

Voegelin and

his Contemporaries

by Barry Cooper

Professor Cooper has edited three volumes of the Collected Works. He has authored numerous essays and books relating to Voegelin, including a volume of reminiscences, Voegelin Recollected. This essay was delivered by Professor Cooper at Careleton University, Ottawa, on October 24th, 2008. It appears here in two parts.

It would take a very fat volume or two to do justice to the subject of Voegelin and his contemporaries. I would like to begin by indicating the magnitude of the problem more or less empirically by referring initially to Voegelin’s extensive correspondence. To begin with, it fills over forty boxes in the Hoover Institution archival collection. Second, the significance varies enormously — from pesky intellectuals asking him for his views on American conservatism, which receive, quite properly, amusing rebukes, to lengthy exchanges that penetrate to the heart of a serious problem in political science.Looking over this vast collection of documents, I would divide it into five or six categories. The least important for our purposes is probably largest — casual inquiries and business, including some very interesting exchanges with publishers as well as the amusing rebukes.

Language Symbols- Pt 2

2009-10-28T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Language Symbols —Part 2

The Theorist, Symbolic Confusion, and The Limits of Definition

When a theorist reflects on his own theoretical situation, he finds himself faced with two sets of symbols: the language symbols that are produced as an integral part of the social cosmion in the process of its self-illumination and the language symbols of political science. Both are related with each other in so far as the second set is developed out of the first one through the process that provisionally was called critical clarification.

In the course of this process some of the symbols that occur in reality will be dropped because they cannot be put to any use in the economy of science, while new symbols will be developed in theory for the critically adequate description of symbols that are part of reality. If the theorist, for instance, describes the Marxian idea of the realm of freedom, to be established by a Communist revolution, as an immanentist hypostasis of a Christian eschatological symbol, the symbol "realm of freedom" is part of reality; it is part of a secular movement of which the Marxist movement is a subdivision, while such terms as "immanentist," "hypostasis," and "eschatology" are concepts of political science. The terms used in the description do not occur in the reality of the Marxist movement, while the symbol "realm of freedom" is useless in critical science.

Education and the American Founding Pt 3

2009-10-22T01:20:00Z

Education and the American Founding —Part 3

by Ellis Sandoz

Professor Sandoz is the Editor of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. He has written many books and published many essays on the significance of Eric Voegelin's thought and on the political and spiritual foundations of the United States. This essay is taken from his most recent book, Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America, available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay will appear in three parts. It appears with permission of the publisher.

The Classics (concluded)

A further illustration of the centrality of classics to the American mind can be seen in James Kent (1763-1847), chancellor of the State of New York and author of the celebrated work of jurisprudence entitled Kent's Commentaries on American Law, which appeared in four volumes (1824-1830). Based on his lectures as professor of law at Columbia, the Commentaries went through a number of editions. In his review of it, George Bancroft stated: "Now we know what American law is."⁴⁵

Young James began his education at age five and the study of Latin at age nine, then with the Reverend Ebenezer Baldwin, the distinguished preacher at Danbury. By age thirteen Kent had read Eutropius, Justin, Cornelius Nepos, and Virgil. He entered the New Haven College (Yale) of Ezra Stiles at fourteen, received the bachelor of arts degree in 1781 and the master's in 1784. The classics provided the backbone of instruction with Virgil, Cicero, and Horace in Latin and the New Testament, Homer, and Xenophon in Greek.

Noetic Science- Pt 2

2009-10-19T01:57:00Z

Noetic Science —Part 2

by Thomas J. McPartland

Thomas McPartland is Professor and Chairman of the Whitney Young School of Honors and Liberal Studies at Kentucky State University in Frankfort. This essay is taken from his book, Lonergan and the Philosophy of Historical Existence, which appears in the Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy, and is available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay and the related succeeding essay will appear in five parts. It appears with permission of the publisher.

Cognitive Acts

We have thus far dealt with Aristotle's treatment of episteme and nous as distinct but functionally related habits in his effort to differentiate scientific demonstrations from the undemonstrable principles of demonstrations. How, then, are we to take Aristotle's seemingly paradoxical, if not contradictory, assertions that not all episteme is demonstrable and that there is an epistemic grasp of immediate principles?¹⁵

The paradox, and contradiction, disappears if we interpret episteme in this context as act.¹⁶ For a cognitive act to be epistemic it can meet either of two requirements: (1) it can know the cause of a fact and that it could not be otherwise; and (2) it can be the answer to the scientific question, what is it?¹⁷ A clear example of such an epistemic act would be knowing a scientific demonstration, for a demonstration entails knowing that a fact is, knowing that it could not be otherwise, and knowing what it is. The knowing what it is (to ti estin) provides the middle term of a syllogism, but it is not itself ultimately the result of deduction; it is a preconceptual insight into a formal cause. Although the insight plays off images, it is not reducible to images, percepts, or sensations. Here Aristotle extends the meaning of science beyond an ordered set of propositions and rejects the reduction of scientific meaning to sense experiences, thereby avoiding both conceptualism and radical empiricism.

Try to Remember, Artfully

2009-10-14T02:00:00Z

Chesterton (and the rest)

Try to Remember, Artfully

by Max Arnott

A few weeks ago, we touched on The Art of Memory, by Dr. Frances Yates, well known scholar of the Renaissance.

When that book came out in 1966, it caused some stir. Her subject, the history and kinds of mnemonics, was novel to the public; moreover she argued that the traditional use of these techniques fed, eventually, into the world of Renaissance magic, citing Giordano Bruno (a popular intellectual martyr) and even the Globe Theatre!

We make mention of The Art of Memory on this particular site, because it seemed to bear on EV's studies of the somewhat louche roots of modern philosophy and scientism. Also because it is a neat topic.

In 1990, the subject was revisited, with a new slant and on a much larger scale, by Dr. Mary Carruthers of New York University.

Language Symbols- Pt 1

2009-10-21T01:56:00Z

from The Collected Works

Language Symbols —Part 1

Society as a Cosmion of Self-Interpretation

Political science is suffering from a difficulty that originates in its very nature as a science of man in historical existence. For man does not wait for science to have his life explained to him, and when the theorist approaches social reality he finds the field pre-empted by what may be called the self-interpretation of society.

Human society is not merely a fact, or an event, in the external world to be studied by an observer like a natural phenomenon. Although it has externality as one of its important components, it is as a whole a little world, a cosmion, illuminated with meaning from within by the human beings who continuously create and bear it as the mode and condition of their self-realization.

Beginning the Quest

2009-10-05T01:20:00Z

Beginning the Quest:

Law and Politics in the Early

Work of Eric Voegelin

by Barry Cooper

Professor Cooper has edited three volumes of the Collected Works. He has authored numerous essays and books relating to Voegelin, including a volume of reminiscences, Voegelin Recollected, and most recently, a volume about Voegelin's early life, Beginning the Quest, which is discussed in this presentation, taken from a talk Professor Cooper delivered at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., on February 17, 2009.

“Inside baseball” has become a metaphor to describe sports reporters who rely on locker room gossip rather than what happens on the playing field. There is an equivalent temptation for those who report on the playing-fields of academe. In literary criticism, for example, one often finds arguments developed at great length and with a highly refined technical vocabulary that refer not to literature but to other critics. Likewise, in political science one can find plenty of examples of articles, books, and papers that do little more than situate themselves in relation to other arguments rather than to political reality. This is true with respect to studies devoted to the exegesis of the writings of political scientists such as Eric Voegelin as well. If to some extent inside baseball is inevitable, that does not mean it must be the focus.

Voegelin and Carl Schmitt

2009-09-28T02:00:00Z

From “Political Theology” to “Political Religion”—
Voegelin and Carl Schmitt

by Thierry Gontier

M. Gontier is Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy, Université de Lyon Jean Moulin – Lyon III. This text is the summarized version of a longer article which will appear shortly in French as: "De la théologie politique aux religions politiques: Voegelin et Carl Schmitt" in Th. Gontier & D. Weber, Eric Voegelin, Politique, Religion et Histoire, Paris, éd. du Cerf.

In his book on Politics as Religions, Emilio Gentile credits Eric Voegelin with the invention of the concept of “political religions,” a concept that will be systematically used in the 1960s to describe totalitarian regimes.¹ We know that Voegelin himself was not particularly attached to this expression, which he does not use in his published work after 1938. He briefly explains himself in his Autobiographical Reflections: "I would no longer use the term 'religions' because it is too vague and already deforms the real problem of experiences by mixing them with the further problem of dogma or doctrine."²

The term “religion” is therefore ambivalent. We mean by it a fundamental experience that man makes of his existence and his participation to an order that links the two levels of temporal and eternal. In this sense, every politic, for Voegelin, has a religious dimension and, vice versa, every religion has a function of structuring the social order. By the term “religion” we also mean a body of dogmas and doctrines. For Voegelin, this is a secondary aspect of the problem. It is true that totalitarianisms– and maybe not only totalitarianisms– have produced a form of religious propaganda. But what is characteristic of totalitarianisms is not this instrumentalization of theology, which is only a concomitant phenomenon, but a spiritual perversion.

Education and the American Founding Pt 2

2009-10-15T02:08:00Z

Education and the American Founding —Part 2

by Ellis Sandoz

Professor Sandoz is the Editor of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. He has written many books and published many essays on the significance of Eric Voegelin's thought and on the political and spiritual foundations of the United States. This essay is taken from his most recent book, Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America, available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay will appear in three parts. It appears with permission of the publisher.

The Bible and Christianity (concluded)

Noah Webster is famed for his blue-backed speller, The American Spelling Book (1783: more than 100 million sold by the twentieth century), and as a great lexicographer whose American Dictionary of the American Language (1828) rested on an unprecedented philological apparatus involving more than twenty languages and was the most monumental work produced in America up until that time. In fact, Webster was the most prolific American author of the age, and his published bibliography runs more than six hundred pages. Having proposed a revision of the general government in May 1785 in Sketches of Public Policy, which he gave to Washington, he and Alexander Hamilton were among the first persons to anticipate the need for something like the Federal Convention of 1787.²³

Webster agreed with [Benjamin] Rush on the centrality of the Holy Bible for education, regarding it as the source of all true wisdom.²⁴ He revised the King James Version (1611) and published an American edition of the Bible (1833). In its preface Webster wrote: "The Bible is the chief moral cause of all that is good, and the best corrector of all that is evil, in human society; the best book for regulating the temporal concerns of men, and the only book that can serve as an infallible guide to future felicity." Webster believed that duty to God was superior to any earthly obligation and toward the end of his life adopted the jeremiad style traditional with preachers throughout the Revolutionary period in judging America flawed, sinful, and depraved. "We are an erring nation ... we deserve all our public evils." "We have forsaken God, and he has forsaken us," he wrote in 1838.²⁵

Naked Power and Political Morality

2009-10-14T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Naked Power and Political Morality



The success of the French, Spanish, and German invaders [of the Italian Peninsula in 1494] and the reduction of the Italian states to political impotence was an event without sense beyond the sphere of naked power. Italy, at the time, was a prosperous, wealthy country; and it was the most highly civilized area of Europe. The upheaval did not make sense in terms of a reduction of a poor, backward colonial region by economically progressive countries; neither did it make sense in terms of a social revolution, perhaps the rise of a third estate, or a populist uprising; neither were any issues of moral or political principles involved; neither was there any question of a religious movement, as later in the wars of Reformation.

Noetic Science- Pt 1

2009-10-12T02:00:00Z

Noetic Science —Part 1

by Thomas J. McPartland

Thomas McPartland is Professor and Chairman of the Whitney Young School of Honors and Liberal Studies at Kentucky State University in Frankfort. This essay is taken from his book, Lonergan and the Philosophy of Historical Existence, which appears in the Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy, and is available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay and the related succeeding essay will appear in five parts. It appears with permission of the publisher.

  Aristotle, Voegelin, and the Philosophy of Consciousness

PERHAPS MORE THAN any other philosopher in the twentieth century, Eric Voegelin has offered a philosophy of consciousness that parallels and complements that of [Bernard] Lonergan. Voegelin, whose life spanned much of the twentieth century, was educated in a German philosophical environment that emphasized neo-Kantian methodologies and Husserl's transcendental ego. Voegelin’s own philosophical development took him beyond the perspectives of these restricted horizons, as he would come to view them, to consider the true experiential origins of order in personal life and in historical existence. Voegelin's prodigious scholarly work in numerous volumes of his history of political ideas and his history of symbols, comparable in scope to that of Toynbee's, had as its motivating center his philosophy of consciousness.¹

Education and the American Founding Pt 1

2009-10-08T02:25:00Z

Education and the American Founding —Part 1

by Ellis Sandoz

Professor Sandoz is the Editor of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. He has written many books and published many essays on the significance of Eric Voegelin's thought and on the political and spiritual foundations of the United States. This essay is taken from his most recent book, Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America, available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay will appear in three parts. It appears with permission of the publisher.

While virtually everyone has agreed that the American founding and the generation that achieved it were extraordinary, of towering significance and formative importance in modern history, what besides blind good luck and raw talent in able men somehow disposed to collaborate and to act at a propitious moment lay behind the achievement?

Thus, in looking for at least a few explanatory clues, I propose to approach this large subject by raising a further (no doubt preliminary) question: What spiritual and intellectual resources enabled the founding generation to achieve what it did? That question, in turn, requires a brief recollection of their achievement, the founding itself. This I would venture to summarize roughly as follows.

Myth and Misunderstandings- Pt 2

2009-10-07T02:10:00Z

from The Collected Works

Myth and Misunderstandings—Part 2

The Types of Mythical Content—

Rhythmical Renewel rather than Eternal Return

Now let me make good what I have said, that in the myth you have a lot of things that are not stories. For instance, I have listed nine different types. Let me just enumerate them; I shall deal with two of them as examples.

1. These are symbolizations of the established order of empire. The empire is an analogy of the cosmos; you might call it a small cosmos—a cosmion. Such formulations of the analogy between empire structure and cosmic structure are, for instance, found in the famous preamble to the Code of Hammurabi—no story at all; rather, parallel structures between the heavens and the earth. The empire, the small cosmion, is parallel to the heavens.

2. Then a case in which you have history, but a history of a very peculiar kind, a foundation myth of empire. In the case of establishment, the myth is symbolized by the parallel, the analogy, while the foundation myth must be symbolized by an action among the gods. The form is not strictly a history but a drama, such as the Theology of Memphis, of probably 3000 B.C., a drama that tells the story of the foundation of Egypt as a drama enacted among the gods.

Americanism: The Genesis of a Civil Theology Pt 10

2009-10-01T02:00:00Z

Americanism:

The Genesis of a Civil Theology —Part 10

by Juergen Gebhardt

Dr. Gebhardt is emeritus Professor at the Insitute for Political Science at the University of Erlangen-Nürenberg. He is the editor of the just released final volume of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Selected Correspondence, 1924-1949. We are featuring here Chapter 4 from his Americanism: Revolutionary Order and Societal Self-Interprestation in the American Republic, Louisiana State University Press, 1993. This is the last of ten parts. It is reproduced here with permission.

On the Concept of Civil Theology (concluded)

The compactly experienced life ambience of each organized society as a rule represents itself as the reality of society and obfuscates other experiential inventories of man and society.

Of course the evidence of the structural and relational conditions of a social order is analytic, since empirically it is experienced only under the horizon of participation in a multidimensional overarching reality. Analytically, we are dealing with a configuration in which psychic structure, symbolic structure, and behavioral and institutional structure can all be identified. This structural pattern gains process reality in the various dimensions of social existence: in spiritual processes, power and domination processes, and economic and generative processes.

Two points are important for relational conditions. The first is primarily the area of the psyche, with the illumination dimension of consciousness as the center of order, from which the described structural constellations are determined and the respective dimensions of the social processes are shaped. Second, the establishment of a social field of consciousness qua organized society necessarily sets up a determination of the particular consciousness of the majority of the members of society through the shaping solidarity in psyche, symbol, behavior, and institution. Marx linked this insight to the determination of individual existence through dominant psychosocial fields with the fact of the material foundation of existence and the consequent dependence of all social order on an economic structure and turned it into a causal relationship.

The Philosopher's Vocation Pt 2

2009-09-21T02:00:00Z

The Philosopher's Vocation:

The Voegelinian Paradigm—Part 2

by Ellis Sandoz

Professor Sandoz is the Editor of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. He has written many books and published many essays on the significance of Eric Voegelin's thought and on the political and spiritual foundations of the United States. His most recent book is Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America, available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay appears in two parts. It was originally published in the quarterly, The Review of Politics, Vol. 71, at pp 54-67 (2009). It appears with permission of Cambridge University Press.

Personal Action

At the concrete level of political action, an array of consequences follow that texture the critique of the Nazi period recounted in Hitler and the Germans and elaborate the cardinal principle energetically asserted in Voegelin’s Antrittsvorlesung, one that connects the philosopher as a representative figure with every man: “The spiritual disorder of our time, the civilizational crisis of which everyone so readily speaks, does not by any means have to be borne as an inevitable fate; [but], on the contrary, everyone possesses the means of overcoming it in his own life. . . No one is obliged to take part in the spiritual crisis of a society; on the contrary, everyone is obliged to avoid this folly and live his life in order.”¹⁷

Divine-Human Partnership

The transcendent source of order is identified in the first lecture of the course in terms of the immanent present of time and political action as occurring in the “presence under God.”¹⁸ “Insofar as. . .man exists under God, he has presence [which is a problem not just for Germans] but for everyman: to place the immanent present within the immanent process under the judgment of the [divine] presence.” It is the calling of the philosopher to utter that judgment and to claim the authority of public order when necessary, for example, under conditions of social schism and disintegration when political and other institutional power and the truth of spirit separate.

A Clean, well lighted Place

2009-09-25T02:00:00Z

Chesterton (and the rest)

A Clean, well lighted

Place with everything Labeled

by Max Arnott

Many will recall the famous passage from In Search of Order, where EV analyses Hesiod’s invocation of the Muses and how the Muses “remember” the gods of their divinity.

Memory is an elusive and fascinating topic. How often we wish we had a “better memory “ may be witnessed by the number of books, on public library shelves, that offer patent mnemonic strategies for mastering names or grocery lists.

With that in mind, may we “remember” to our readers a book on this topic, that is, on mnemonics, once famous, and still worth attention?

Dr. Frances A. Yates, a scholar of the Renaissance, through being intrigued in the fifties of the last century with Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), came on the “Memory Theatre” of one Guilio Camillo (c. 1480-1544). Having caught her sleeve in the machinery, she was pulled into the subject, and the result, in 1966, was The Art of Memory.

Myth and Misunderstandings- Pt 1

2009-09-30T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Myth and Misunderstandings: The Nature of Myth in Cosmological Civilizations

—Part 1

I especially want to draw your attention to the problem that the gods are intracosmic. There is no such thing as a world-transcendent God in any cosmological civilization; and for a very long time even in revelation and philosophy there is no world-transcendent God. That's a very peculiar problem, how that problem arises at all. But in the cosmological civilizations, the gods are intracosmic, part of the cosmos.

With that in mind, let me say a word about the expressive forms, the symbolizations, in which such an idea, such an experience, is expressed. It is usually called the myth.

Modern Views of Platos Silence Pt 11

2009-08-24T02:00:00Z

Modern Views of Plato's Silence

by James M. Rhodes

Part 11

This excerpt from Professor Rhodes's Eros, Wisdom and Silence: Plato's Erotic Dialogues is offered here with permission of Professor Rhodes and his publisher, the University of Missouri Press, from whom more information about the book may be obtained. This is the final excerpt from Chapter Two which has been presented here in its entirety.

Plato and his Modern Readers

This survey of Plato's modern readers has identified several questions that are crucial to the proper interpretation of his texts: Is Plato's dramatic dialogue form an integral part of his philosophy or merely a charming artistic wrapping for his real substance? Does it have a necessary role in advancing our insight into reality, or is it a philosophically useless trifle that impedes communication and comprehension? Is Plato silent about his most profound truths, or does he put them into the mouths of Socrates, Timaeus, the Strangers, and, perhaps, others? Is every Platonic sentence understood correctly only in its place, and in the connections and boundaries in which Plato has set it, or may Platonic propositions be transported into various contexts? What is Socratic or Platonic irony? A manner of speech, a "pleasant rallying" that prods students toward the good, hiding nothing except what the readers are too lazy to work out for themselves (as Hegel believed)?

Americanism: The Genesis of a Civil Theology Pt 9

2009-09-24T01:30:00Z

Americanism:

The Genesis of a Civil Theology —Part 9

by Juergen Gebhardt

Dr. Gebhardt is emeritus Professor at the Insitute for Political Science at the University of Erlangen-Nürenberg. He is the editor of the just released final volume of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Selected Correspondence, 1924-1949. We are featuring here Chapter 4 from his Americanism: Revolutionary Order and Societal Self-Interprestation in the American Republic, Louisiana State University Press, 1993. It appears here in ten parts. It is reproduced here with permission.

On the Concept of Civil Theology (continued)

My presentation of the material so far should have made it clear that from the first I placed the weight of the study on presenting the constituents of the "underlying and latent coherence in political life" of American society. An explication of the theoretical background of the foregoing inquiry is necessary only to the extent that the choice of the term "civil theology" needs further justification and that the theoretical implications of the concept must be briefly developed. The attempt at such an elaboration takes its bearings from the analyses of the social world carried out by Alfred Schütz and his students as well as the works of Eric Voegelin, who undertook the integration of these analyses into a theory of political reality under the contemporary horizon of the scientific experience of man and beyond dogmatic reifications.

In continuing the work of Max Weber, Edmund Husserl, and Max Scheler, Schütz showed that before there is any social science, the social world has a meaningful structure for those who live in it. "Now this same social world which we immediately experience as meaningful is also meaningful from the standpoint of the social scientist."²⁴⁴ The methodical study of the "meaningful structures within the social world," the discovery of its basic elements, as well as the boundaries of the individual and separate layers subsequently engaged Schütz and his followers and resulted in important contributions to the analysis of social self-understanding. The volume The Problem of Social Reality in Schütz's Collected Papers, as well as the works by Thomas Luckmann and Peter Berger, furnishes a number of insights germane to our purpose precisely because the perplexities that emerge compel further theoretical penetration of the problem.

The Depth-as the Antidote

2009-09-23T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

The Depth

—As the Antidote to Misplaced Concreteness

. . . . Such phrases as "a shift of the search from the symbols to the experiences," or "the lack of originality as the test of validity," are clear enough to avoid the fallacy of permanent values, and suggestive enough to point the inquiry in the right direction, but analytically they are unsatisfactory. In part, this vagueness served the purpose to avoid a conventional terminology that is badly permeated by ideological jargon; in part, however, it was meant to protect the analysis from the danger of the fallacies of misplaced concreteness which in such matters lurk behind every unanalyzed concept. There would be no sense in replacing the fallacy of permanent values by the subtler fallacies of existential tension and experiences of participation.

The first fallacy to be avoided is the hypostasis of experience as an absolute. If we understand symbols in spite of their differences as equivalent because, as we have said, they are intelligibly engendered by the same type of experience, the experience is in danger of becoming the resting point in our search for constants in history. This resolution of the problem would be tempting, but it is untenable. For the constant experience, in order to be identified, would have to become articulate, and once it has been articulated the result would be a symbolism claiming to be exempt from the fate of being one more historically equivalent truth. We would be back to the system to end all systems—Hegel's solution.

Guarded by Mystery-Pt 14

2009-06-18T02:00:00Z

GUARDED BY MYSTERY -- Part 14

Meaning in a Postmodern Age

by David Walsh

Chapter 7 Cultural Transparence (conclusion)

and Bibliographic Note

[Editors' note: Professor Walsh and his publisher have given us permission to reproduce the entire meditation. We have kept available the two most recent preceding parts in addition to the current part. Part 14 is the final part. The book may be obtained directly from the Publisher.]

Rediscovery of Tradition

In many respects this is the untold side of the twentieth-century story. We are inclined to regard ourselves as an era precariously set adrift from all steadfast principles and traditions. But the wasteland is not all. While we may lack the spontaneous access to powerfully unreflective truths, that does not mean that we lack the reflective capacity to undertake a deliberate sifting of the remnants of tradition we can recover. This is the hidden side of our time which is full of significance for the future. Although it is little known or appreciated, we live in a period of momentous traditional rediscovery. The fact that it is the work of explicitly historical research, that it seems to be motivated by an admiration for a vanished past, does not mitigate the undoubted appeal and eventually authority that such work of recovery exercises on us. We have a deeper understanding of the ancient and medieval worlds, together with the other great spiritual traditions of mankind, than at any other time in human history.

Americanism: The Genesis of a Civil Theology Pt 8

2009-09-17T01:50:00Z

Americanism:

The Genesis of a Civil Theology —Part 8

by Juergen Gebhardt

Dr. Gebhardt is emeritus Professor at the Insitute for Political Science at the University of Erlangen-Nürenberg. He is the editor of the just released final volume of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Selected Correspondence, 1924-1949. We are featuring here Chapter 4 from his Americanism: Revolutionary Order and Societal Self-Interprestation in the American Republic, Louisiana State University Press, 1993. It appears here in ten parts. It is reproduced here with permission.

On the Concept of Civil Theology

The American self-interpretation fused the cult of the hero and monumental history, Christian spirituality, philosophical and political doctrines of the Enlightenment with very concrete behavior patterns, institutional arrangements and social practices into a whole encompassing all of man's existence in society and history. In spite of all its vagueness, blurredness, and amorphousness, it always appeared with the claim of truth. The symbolism of this "patriotic faith" or "social myth" encompasses the dominant field of consciousness of organized society.

Tocqueville treated this situation at length. No society, he noted, exists "without such common belief . . . for without ideas held in common there is no common action, and, without common action there may still be men, but there is no social body. In order that society should exist and, a fortiori, that a society should prosper, it is necessary that the minds of all the citizens should be rallied and held together by certain predominant ideas."²⁰⁹ For, he went on, there is hardly any human activity "that does not originate in some very general idea men have conceived of the Deity, of his relation to mankind, of the nature of their own souls, and of their duties to their fellow creatures."²¹⁰ In the American case this meant that "almost all the inhabitants of the United States use their minds in the same manner, and direct them according to the same rules; that is to say, without ever having taken the trouble to define the rules, they have a philosophical method common to the whole people."²¹¹

The Insight into Being and Scientific analysis

2009-09-16T18:18:17Z

from The Collected Works

The Insight into Being and Scientific Analysis

[The philosopher's] questioning leads to a conflict with opinion. This is quite another kind of conflict than that between differing opinions; for although the philosopher's questions are concerned with the same subjects as those of the philodoxer (these are the terms Plato adopted to describe the adversaries), the nature of his inquiry is radically different.

The philosopher's question represents an attempt to advance beyond opinion to truth through the use of scientific analysis as developed by Aristotle in the Analytica Posteriora. With the instrument of analysis current statements about political matters are broken down into pre-analytic opinions and scientific propositions in the strict sense; and the verbal symbols, into pre-analytic or insufficiently analyzed expressions and the analytic concepts of political science. In this way, advocates of opinions who attack one another in daily politics are grouped together over against their common adversary, the philosopher.

Americanism: The Genesis of a Civil Theology Pt 7

2009-09-10T01:00:00Z

Americanism:

The Genesis of a Civil Theology —Part 7

by Juergen Gebhardt

Dr. Gebhardt is emeritus Professor at the Insitute for Political Science at the University of Erlangen-Nürenberg. He is the editor of the just released final volume of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Selected Correspondence, 1924-1949. We are featuring here Chapter 4 from his Americanism: Revolutionary Order and Societal Self-Interprestation in the American Republic, Louisiana State University Press, 1993. It appears here in ten parts. It is reproduced here with permission.

  Lincoln's mastery of both Rhetoric and Reality (concluded)

The politics of the Republicans once more raised the patterns of consciousness and symbolism of revivalism and millenarianism from the underground of the social subculture of churches and sects to the national level in a design for existence socially dominant for the North. Its interpretation of the Civil War, with the victory of the truth of spiritual-political reform over the untruth of the South, became once and for all the definitive integral element of the national symbolic universe. The Civil War achieved the public status of a spiritual-political reformation—of course, first of all, in the life and death of Lincoln as the Redeemer.

In his beginnings, of course, Lincoln, a local politician, was no political-ethical revivalist, as were his later allies Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stephens, Joshua Giddings, William Seward, and others from the New England belt, who called themselves "political abolitionists." But his regional revivalist background, together with his nonsectarian, national-American, biblical-Unitarian religiosity marked by "faith in the Fathers," allowed Lincoln to discover a persuasive interpretation of his political actions in the symbolism of spiritual-political awakening and restoration.¹⁷⁵ "A redeeming nation, a Redeemer-President: the combination is appropriate. The fact that, in the crucial hour, there was elected a President who did indeed have the qualities of such a figure was further proof that the millennial mission was no dream."¹⁷⁶

The Philosopher's Vocation Pt 1

2009-09-14T02:00:00Z

The Philosopher's Vocation:

The Voegelinian Paradigm

by Ellis Sandoz

Professor Sandoz is the Editor of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. He has written many books and published many essays on the significance of Eric Voegelin's thought and on the political and spiritual foundations of the United States. His most recent book is Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America, available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay appears in two parts. It was originally published in the quarterly, The Review of Politics, Vol. 71, at pp 54-67 (2009). It appears with permission of Cambridge University Press.

PART 1

In his personal and scholarly demeanor, Eric Voegelin’s stance was overtly and explicitly that of a philosopher and teacher professing truth and resisting corruption. The mark of his life was intellectual integrity in the Weberian sense, and his only professional commitment was that of a partisan of truth. This was more than academic duty, however. It was quite distinctly a vocation—or calling (klesis)¹—of the highest order and responsibility, one intrinsic to the paradigm of philosophizing Voegelin accepted from Plato and Anselm and differentiated in his own life and work. It is exemplified, directly evoked, in the “introduction to political science” he taught as a lecture course at the University of Munich in spring semester 1964, now published under the title Hitler and the Germans.² But it can be traced everywhere in his writings, beginning in the 1930s, as a constant and defining attitude.³

The implications are important not only for Voegelin but for philosophy itself when rightly done as embracing the science of human affairs palpably akin to that first elaborated in antiquity by Aristotle. It is this decisive, unfashionable, and somewhat elusive contextual dimension of Hitler and the Germans that I wish briefly to explore on the present occasion.

The Church and Humanity Pt 5

2009-08-26T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

THE CHURCH AND HUMANITY (Part 5)

Karl Rahner, Sacramental Humanity and the Corpus Mysticum

Against this tendency [to view with indifference people outside the Church] there are now a few passages to be noted. I am speaking only of the German situation; in general, of course, people know that everywhere. But within the German churches it is not so well known. I refer you to a very interesting treatment by Karl Rahner, "Membership of the Church according to the teaching of Pius XII's Encyclical, Mystici Corporis Christi " ¹ This encyclical, which first appeared in 1943, makes the most severe contraction of the membership of the church that it had ever received, insofar as here the community of the corpus mysticum is limited very strictly to members of the Catholic Church who have received the sacrament. Whoever does not have this sacramental character is not a member of the church, and since "church" is now identified with corpus mysticum, he is, so to say, not a member of the corpus mysticum.

Americanism: The Genesis of a Civil Theology Pt 6

2009-08-27T10:00:00Z

Americanism:

The Genesis of a Civil Theology —Part 6

by Juergen Gebhardt

Dr. Gebhardt is emeritus Professor at the Insitute for Political Science at the University of Erlangen-Nürenberg. He is the editor of the just released final volume of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Selected Correspondence, 1924-1949. We are featuring here Chapter 4 from his Americanism: Revolutionary Order and Societal Self-Interprestation in the American Republic, Louisiana State University Press, 1993. It appears here in nine parts. It is reproduced here with permission.

Lincoln's mastery of both Rhetoric and Reality

The social relevance of this reduction of the dominant symbolic form to national patriotism unquestionably lies in the fact that structures of social organization can be taken for the quality of society itself, and the unquestioning loyalty to the whole of society relieves the citizen of the question of his own quality without any loss in the terms of meaning for his existence.

The language of this early form of patriotic orthodoxy transfers the spiritual and symbolic consensus to the social unconscious; for that very reason it was so important to the survival of American society well into the twentieth century. Even more characteristic of this aspect than Clay and Webster are the messages and addresses of President Pierce. Here the fathers appear as efficient and practical patriots who wasted no energy "upon idle and delusive speculations." The belief in the national institutions and the preservation of the grand constitutional doctrine, along with renunciation of all wild and chimerical plans for change brought forth by the unstable minds of visionary sophists and self-seeking demagogues, the "restless spirit," now elevates a mature nation in the fulfillment of its purpose to the "Great Republic of the World."¹⁴⁴

Cult of Antiquarians

2009-06-08T10:00:00Z

CULT OF ANTIQUARIANS

THE PRESERVATION MOVEMENT AND THE CULTURE WAR

by Jack D. Elliott, Jr.

The Forms of the Tradition have lost the background against which they could be understood and now give the impression of something in a museum, guarded by antiquarians and unthinkingly photographed by tourists. — Hans Urs von Balthasar

I

Today we are bombarded with allusions to the "culture war," the conflict over the basic values that govern public life in the West. However, because the media tend to publicize more sensational aspects of the conflict, such as abortion and church-state relations, those aspects that cannot easily be reduced to sound bites, including the deeper roots of conflict, tend to fall outside the realm of public awareness. The potential depths of these roots are implied in the term culture, in that it refers to a complex framework of meaning that locates everyday life within a comprehending understanding of reality and the good.

The culture war therefore by its very nature implies tensions between basic assumptions about reality that often remain unspoken and subliminal. Today these tensions are in part represented by a clash between the traditional West with its roots in the Christian heritage and a growing disillusionment with truth and meaning itself arising from a worldview that sees reality as matter driven by random forces. [1] However, few recognize the full dimensions of the conflict primarily because of a superficial understanding of cultural heritage, an understanding that stems from an educational emphasis on the material aspects of life.

On behalf of Ignorance

2009-07-31T02:00:00Z

Chesterton (and the rest)

On behalf of Ignorance

by Max Arnott

Last winter, your correspondent began to brush up his German, hoping to patch together a reading knowledge that would allow him to tap into some scholarly and cultural resources locked in that gnarly tongue.

Among the scholars, of course Eric Voegelin comes to our mind, and Hegel (rather as Batman brings to mind the Riddler), and among the poets, along with Goethe and Rilke, Stefan George.

Now, at this point, July 2009, what we know about Stefan George [is the common knowledge of the ignorant and] could be summarized as:

Item: Once, he was famous.

Item: Now, he's infamous.

Item: He was 100% top-to-bottom no-holds-barred weird.

Americanism: The Genesis of a Civil Theology Pt 5

2009-08-20T02:00:00Z

Americanism:

The Genesis of a Civil Theology —Part 5

by Juergen Gebhardt

Dr. Gebhardt is emeritus Professor at the Insitute for Political Science at the University of Erlangen-Nürenberg. He is the editor of the just released final volume of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Selected Correspondence, 1924-1949. We are featuring here Chapter 4 from his Americanism: Revolutionary Order and Societal Self-Interprestation in the American Republic, Louisiana State University Press, 1993. It will appear in nine parts. It is reproduced here with permission.

The Spiritual Roots of the Civil War

The South's self-understanding—which dealt with the tiny minority of the large planters (about 2 percent of the slaveholding families) and the group of those who owned from ten to twenty slaves (about 24 percent of the slaveholding families), along with the mass of those who owned fewer slaves, as well as the 75 percent of the white population that owned no slaves at all—could, on the basis of economic reality, nevertheless refer to a certain rationality in the system. The southern economy was thoroughly profitable in the capitalist sense; agriculture in particular was considerably more efficient than the system of western family farms. A similar situation prevailed in reference to the use of slaves in urban industry. As Moore had already unequivocally noted, slavery was by no means irreconcilable with industrial capitalism. Just the opposite was true; the cotton of the South was the principal impetus to industrialization in the North and played an important role in the industrial revolution in England.¹²⁷

The Church and Humanity Pt 4

2009-08-19T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

THE CHURCH AND HUMANITY (Part 4)

The Church's Duty and Failure to Represent Humanity

. . . . The church exists in relation to the world and thus must also define its behavior with regard to the temporal aspect of its existence in the world. On both sides, the spiritual side from revelation and the noetic side from philosophy, the representative function—being human in history has traditionally been encumbered by the fact that the insight became part of the respective dogma.

This means, that on the one side, the temporal side, there is the insight that the order of society has to be at the level of humanity—in the sense that the nature of man achieves fulfillment in the order of society and has to determine its order. But this insight is restricted, because the order only occurs within a limited community, so that the interests of the limited community in history enter into an amalgam with the general problematic of order at the level of humanity. And the particular interests of a society can thus appear in the cloak of more universal formulations of humanity—and thereby again denature and deform humanity in general.

Modern Views of Platos Silence Pt 10

2009-08-17T03:00:00Z

Modern Views of Plato's Silence

by James M. Rhodes

Part 10

This excerpt from Professor Rhodes's Eros, Wisdom and Silence: Plato's Erotic Dialogues is offered here with permission of Professor Rhodes and his publisher, the University of Missouri Press, from whom more information about the book may be obtained. This excerpt is from Chapter Two which will be presented here in its entirety. The last part will appear next week.

Eric Voegelin and Paul Friedländer

Eric Voegelin, whose claim to be the twentieth century's greatest reader of Plato seems to me to excel that of Leo Strauss, pays no direct attention to the dispute about Platonic irony that I have been following throughout this chapter, except to assert that the Platonic dialogue is "an exoteric literary work, accessible individually to everybody who wants to read it."¹³⁰ However, his statements about the proper interpretation of Plato show that he is well aware of the most important issues and that he has serious opinions about them.

Like Strauss, Voegelin contends that one cannot understand a Platonic dialogue unless one knows what it is. He holds that "in the history of Hellenic symbolic forms," the Platonic dialogue was "the successor to Aeschylean tragedy" in a time when Athenians had closed their hearts to Aeschylus's "struggle for the order of Dike [Justice]." Socrates had become the new defender of right in Athens, with Plato succeeding him. With regard to the Platonic dialogue, Voegelin infers: "The drama of Socrates is a symbolic form created by Plato as the means for communicating, and expanding, the order of wisdom founded by its hero."¹³¹ This means that if we wish to understand Voegelin's Plato, we need to learn what a "symbolic form" is.

Americanism: The Genesis of a Civil Theology Pt 4

2009-08-13T02:00:00Z

Americanism:

The Genesis of a Civil Theology —Part 4

by Juergen Gebhardt

Dr. Gebhardt is emeritus Professor at the Insitute for Political Science at the University of Erlangen-Nürenberg. He is the editor of the just released final volume of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Selected Correspondence, 1924-1949. We are featuring here Chapter 4 from his Americanism: Revolutionary Order and Societal Self-Interprestation in the American Republic, Louisiana State University Press, 1993. It appears in nine parts. It is reproduced here with permission.

The Normative Power of the Symbolism of

the Constitution (concluded)

With the exception of Washington, all the Founding Fathers had, of course, to travel the road from the controversial to the noncontroversial sphere. Franklin, Jefferson, and Lincoln accomplished the journey more rapidly than did Madison and Marshall.¹⁰⁵ Hamilton and Adams had to wait until the middle of the twentieth century to become noncontroversial. A congressional resolution for July 4, 1926, commemorated the centennial of Jefferson's death and the sesquicentennial of Independence Day, but John Adams was not mentioned.¹⁰⁶

However, as soon as the controversial and noncontroversial symbols had sufficiently penetrated the consciousness of the members of society, they also became a manipulatable medium on every level of the political and social process. The venerable principles, norms, and traditions were from the beginning weapons in the war for power, the names of the Founding Fathers symbols for parties and movements and their "cause;" all the combatants on the extended field of privately motivated interest battles, the fabric of everyday politics, made use of the language of the socially dominant interpretation of order.

The Church and Humanity - Pt 3

2009-08-12T04:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

THE CHURCH AND HUMANITY (Part 3)

The Function of the Prophets and Natural Law

[The problem of the conflict between the power of the king and the covenant of the people with God] reaches into the modern era: There is always the question that the order of man to God and to his fellowmen has been laid down through the covenant with God.

Now if the ruler, who has the instruments of power at his disposal, violates this order by setting up a temple for other gods, or violates the duties of the Decalogue regarding his fellowmen by building up the military or at least some kind of bureaucratic organization where certain levels of society, of employers and merchants, emerge who no longer display the right behavior in the decalogical sense toward their fellowmen, then there arises the question of the control of the ruler in the social as well as political sense, through representatives of the idea of the covenant, of the covenant with God.

That means that the prophet will now be the critic of the political and social organization. This is a new phenomenon. So, the prophet is first and foremost a social critic, because he must keep the political organization under control, in accord with the standards of the covenant.

Modern Views of Platos Silence Pt 9

2009-08-10T02:00:00Z

Modern Views of Plato's Silence

by James M. Rhodes

Part 9

This excerpt from Professor Rhodes's Eros, Wisdom and Silence: Plato's Erotic Dialogues is offered here with permission of Professor Rhodes and his publisher, the University of Missouri Press, from whom more information about the book may be obtained. This excerpt is from Chapter Two which will be presented here in its entirety.

Stanley Rosen

Stanley Rosen himself is a grateful student of Leo Strauss who nevertheless announces: "I am in considerable disagreement with Strauss's general program."¹¹⁵ His dissent from Strauss assimilates irony to postmodernism, pressing esotericism in rhetorical directions that Strauss does not wish to take.

Rosen agrees with his teacher about much. Like Strauss, he proclaims "recognition of irony as the central problem in the interpretation of Plato." Although he dislikes the "great theologian," he also accepts Schleiermacher's "canon of interpretation," especially with regard to the nexus between form and substance in Plato's works, and the importance of context. He echoes Strauss, and reaffirms Schleiermacher, in asserting that "those who extract what they take to be Plato's theoretical views or 'arguments' from their dialogical and poetic presentation are studying images of their own theoretical presuppositions, but not Plato." Again like Strauss, he disavows Schleiermacher by saying: "In sum, it is entirely clear that Plato practices 'esotericism.' "¹¹⁶ How, then, does he differ from Strauss?

Americanism: The Genesis of a Civil Theology Pt 3

2009-08-06T04:00:00Z

Americanism:

The Genesis of a Civil Theology —Part 3

by Juergen Gebhardt

Dr. Gebhardt is emeritus Professor at the Insitute for Political Science at the University of Erlangen-Nürenberg. He is the editor of the just released final volume of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Selected Correspondence, 1924-1949. We are featuring here Chapter 4 from his Americanism: Revolutionary Order and Societal Self-Interprestation in the American Republic, Louisiana State University Press, 1993. It appears in nine parts. It is reproduced here with permission.

The Apotheosis of the Founders (concluded)

Adams and Jefferson each left behind a kind of Founding Father's last will and testament. Adams did so in his reply to the Boston organizers of the semicentennial celebration, Jefferson in his letter to the mayor of the capital. Let us recall Adams' self-understanding as a Founding Father and his debate with Rush concerning the meaning of such testaments. He was opposed to apotheosis but subscribed to spiritual patriarchy, deeply convinced of the truth that penetrated society through the founders. But there is evidence not only of a common private and individual continuity from the founders to the apotheosis of 1826, but also of a public continuity, which we must briefly document.

On September 15, 1790—representatives and government had just settled in the provisional capital of Philadelphia—the College of Philadelphia issued invitations to a series of lectures "On Law." The lecturer was James Wilson,⁷⁵ a prominent leader of the Revolution in Pennsylvania, influential delegate to the Constitutional Convention, a judge of the Supreme Court under the new government, and a tireless land speculator who would come to a bad end in a shabby small-town inn while fleeing from his creditors. This lawyer was one of the most brilliant minds of his generation's political class; his Lectures on Law may be considered among the few theoretical achievements in the political literature of his day.

Socrates and the Media Pt 2

2009-07-09T02:00:00Z

from the Irish Navigator
Socrates and the Media

by Brendan Purcell

Part 2 of 2 Parts
Fr. Brendan Purcell is Senior Lecturer at University College, Dublin. This essay is a revision of a lecture that was anthologized in Media in Ireland:The Search for Ethical Journalism, ed. Damien Kiberd (Dublin: Open Air, 1999). It was written at the time of the media circus that arose during the Clinton scandals and the celebrity life and death of Princess Diana.The arguments developed here on the occasion of those events remain pertinent with the celebrity death this week of Michael Jackson.

From Part 1: "Following political philosopher, Eric Voegelin, I would like to speak of genuine truth-sharing as substantive communication, its opposite as intoxicant communication, and a kind of half-and-half form as pragmatic communication."

Pragmatic Communication

As we know, what is often referred to as "the fourth estate," the institution of a free and uncensored press, arose as a corrective to an older establishment of power. But the fourth estate is no freer from the desire to say l’état c’est moi than was Louis XIV.¹⁸

It is evident that there can be disintegrative communication as well as substantive communication. Some media professionals express a systematic underestimation, if not downright contempt, for their audience. But that underestimation, as we’ve suggested, may be colluded in by an audience that doesn’t want to be addressed at the full level of its humanity. The result of such collusion is a pseudo-community grounded in the lie. Let us first look at attempts at manipulation by advertisers and politicians who themselves wish to instrumentalize the media.¹⁹

The Church and Humanity - Pt 2

2009-08-05T03:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

THE CHURCH AND HUMANITY (Part 2)

Existence under God—The Central Problem of Order

Regarding the question of this tension between the broad Thomasic definition of the corpus mysticum and the very narrow ideas of churches as made up of persons who through the sacrament are received into a community, and which do not extend beyond this circle of persons, there is the general problem that mankind in history is not egalitarian, but has a history. And that means that men, insofar as their history is known at all, are always under God and express this knowledge of their existence under God through corresponding organizational and ritual institutions.

But in the insight into the nature of man's existence under God there are developments from relatively compact conceptions of this order of existence of individual men and of society under God to the highly differentiated ones. And the unfolding of this problem of existence under God as the central problem of order, that is history. Please note this definition; it is very carefully considered. The problem of history lies here, not anywhere else. So there is history insofar as the presence under God and the knowledge of such presence under God runs through phases of compactness and differentiation.

Modern Views of Platos Silence Pt 8

2009-08-03T02:00:00Z

Modern Views of Plato's Silence

by James M. Rhodes

Part 8

This excerpt from Professor Rhodes's Eros, Wisdom and Silence: Plato's Erotic Dialogues is offered here with permission of Professor Rhodes and his publisher, the University of Missouri Press, from whom more information about the book may be obtained. This excerpt is from Chapter Two which will be presented here in its entirety.

Leo Strauss (concluded)

The general drift of these arguments, with their natural elites who deftly shape public opinion, their aristocratic class consciousness that arrogates to philosophers the sole responsibility for advancing the highest interests of all mankind, and their government by gentlemen and princes who listen to philosophers, generates the suspicion that Strauss secretly—but not too secretly—longs for the realization of some vestige of Platonic philosopher-kingship. In Strauss's own words, he wants philosophers to have an impact on gentlemen and princes that amounts in some modest but meaningful way to "the secret kingship of the philosopher who, being 'a perfect man' precisely because he is an 'investigator,' lives privately as a member of an imperfect society which he tries to humanize within the limits of the possible."¹⁰³ Not even Jefferson would have tolerated this. The liberal president was strongly opposed both to Plato and to kings. The more recent liberals are apoplectic about Strauss's ambition; it is this, more than anything else in his advocacy of esotericism, that has made Strauss "one of the most hated men in the English-speaking academic world."

Americanism: The Genesis of a Civil Theology Pt 2

2009-07-30T03:00:00Z

Americanism:

The Genesis of a Civil Theology —Part 2

by Juergen Gebhardt

Dr. Gebhardt is emeritus Professor at the Insitute for Political Science at the University of Erlangen-Nürenberg. He is the editor of the just released final volume of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Selected Correspondence, 1924-1949. We are featuring here Chapter 4 from his Americanism: Revolutionary Order and Societal Self-Interprestation in the American Republic, Louisiana State University Press, 1993. It appears in nine parts. It is reproduced here with permission.

The Apotheosis of the Founders

In 1800, when the Federalists, after twelve years in power, had lost almost all regional and national offices to the Republicans, the promotion of the cult of Washington was more than a consolation to them; it also gave them an opportunity to use this national symbol to solicit the lost sympathies of the majority of their fellow citizens. Until this time the Federalists, as officeholders, had been able to monopolize the nation's birthday. Now that the Republicans governed the symbols, cult, and rites of the Fourth of July, they celebrated less the fact of independence (as the Federalists did) than the democratic import of the preamble and its author, Thomas Jefferson, of whom not much had been said until this time. As a countermove, the Federalists turned to Washington's birthday.³²

Of course, underlying the pragmatic occasion for easy manipulation of the symbols was the general problem of the national cult of the hero. "Is this not a unique practice," asked Benjamin Rush, "in the history of nations thus to perpetuate the memories of their benefactors and deliverers? I exclude from this question the homage that has been paid by all nations to the birthday of the Saviour of the world." ³³ Rush believed that the motive was deification of the founders, and that motive surely accounted for the movement's social success.

The Church and Humanity - Pt 1

2009-07-29T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

THE CHURCH AND HUMANITY (Part 1)

The Failure to Understand the Church as both Institution and Humanity

One of the most interesting theoretical problems, however, which indeed is at the basis of [the German churches' cooperation with the Nazi government]—the intellectual slovenliness and sloppiness, as [Fr. Alfred] Delp called it—is the fact that there is no worked-out idea of the nature of the church, neither in the Evangelical nor in the Catholic Churches, and that the relationship of the church members to their humanity is not the object of theoretical investigations. That was not always so.

And so I will now present to you a text from which you will see how one spoke about such things in better times, when spiritual heads were still dominant in the church. For this purpose I will read out to you Thomas Aquinas's section on the corpus mysticum in the Summa theologiae, third part, chapter 8, article 3. It is headed "Utrum Christus sit caput omnium hominum," "whether Christ is the head of all men."

Modern Views of Platos Silence Pt 7

2009-07-27T04:00:00Z

Modern Views of Plato's Silence

by James M. Rhodes

Part 7

This excerpt from Professor Rhodes's Eros, Wisdom and Silence: Plato's Erotic Dialogues is offered here with permission of Professor Rhodes and his publisher, the University of Missouri Press, from whom more information about the book may be obtained. This excerpt is from Chapter Two which will be presented here in its entirety.

Leo Strauss (continued)

So, the next logical step is to resume the inquiry into Strauss's most important subject, crucial things, and philosophic truth. However, we must now expect serious difficulties. If the causes of class hatred between philosophers and the multitude are "fundamental to thought as such," this implies that the philosopher's truths are intrinsically offensive to the many. It follows that they can never be pronounced in public "by a decent man," for this will always "do harm to many people who, having been hurt, would naturally be inclined to hurt in turn him who pronounces the unpleasant truths." Again, if the sources of the class antagonism are "fundamental to society as such," the many could never be fit to hear the truth.

Americanism: The Genesis of a Civil Theology

2009-07-23T03:00:00Z

Americanism:

The Genesis of a Civil Theology

by Juergen Gebhardt

Dr. Gebhardt is emeritus Professor at the Insitute for Political Science at the University of Erlangen-Nürenberg. He is the editor of the just released final volume of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Selected Correspondence, 1924-1949. We are featuring here Chapter 4 from his Americanism: Revolutionary Order and Societal Self-Interprestation in the American Republic, Louisiana State University Press, 1993. It will appear in nine parts. It is reproduced here with permission.

1. Monumental History

The process by which the founders' consciousness created itself a social field in the new society and the authority of an ultimate source of order was accrued to them lasted half a century. This process was accelerated because it fit seamlessly into the traditional thought patterns of New England speculation on history and heroes.

New England historiography,¹ formally an Anglo-Saxon variant of reformation historiography, has, since the end of the seventeenth century, dealt with "the wonders of the Christian religion, flying from the deprivations of Europe to the American strand"² and thus dealt predominantly with those "godly men" who were at once founders and fathers of the New England colonies: "particularly after 1676, a theme receives literary formulation which henceforth was to be a staple of the New England mind: ancestor worship. Virtually every one who migrated as an adult before 1640 was gone; in order to lay the covenant of the golden age upon their descendants. . . , the spokesmen called for such a veneration of progenitors as is hardly to be matched outside China."

D.H. Lawrence: a Question of Stature

2009-07-22T02:15:59Z

from The Collected Works

D.H. Lawrence:   a Question of Stature

When your copy of the Sewanee Review arrived, we were just reading Lady Chatterley —submitting to the social necessity of having to read a book everybody talks about. Previously I had read only Sons and Lovers; all other novels by Lawrence which I tried bored me so much that I did not finish them (I remember distinctly the Plumed Serpent among the unfinished because of boredom).

. . . .With the recent reading of Lady Chatterley still in memory, I fervently agree with your remarks on L's style, especially his femininity of expression, the tedious use of repetitive adjectives and nouns, and so forth. Especially I remember with disgust the conversation among the four gentlemen in Chapter 4—either the conversation is realistic in the sense that people with whom Lawrence was acquainted slung words like that, then certainly the raw material has not been informed by the artist and should be scrapped as not worth being preserved; or if it is not realistic (at least, I have never heard people talk as insipidly as that), then it would be Lawrence's "creation"—and if that is his creative insight into the workings of an intellectual's mind, then L. is just no good.

Modern Views of Platos Silence Pt 6

2009-07-20T04:00:00Z

Modern Views of Plato's Silence

by James M. Rhodes

Part 6

This excerpt from Professor Rhodes's Eros, Wisdom and Silence: Plato's Erotic Dialogues is offered here with permission of Professor Rhodes and his publisher, the University of Missouri Press, from whom more information about the book may be obtained. This excerpt is from Chapter Two which will be presented here in its entirety.

Leo Strauss

Leo Strauss joins the debate about Platonic silence on the side of Gott-hold Lessing.⁶⁰ Perhaps he also sides with Friedrich Nietzsche secretly. He opposes Friedrich Schleiermacher and G. W. F. Hegel. He treats Socratic and Platonic irony specifically in The City and Man and the esotericism of great philosophers generally in Persecution and the Art of Writing. At first, his analysis of irony seems straightforward. As one reads further into his work, however, one realizes that he writes esoterically about esotericism. Therefore, his account of its purposes is difficult to understand.

Kant, Infinite Progress and Personal Immortality Pt 2

2009-07-15T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Kant, Infinite Progress and Personal Immortality (Pt 2)

....[According to Kant] infinite progress is possible only if the existence and personality of rational beings continue on into infinity; the immortality of the soul is therefore a postulate of pure practical reason. The attainment of the highest good, the coincidence of happiness and virtue, lies in the far reaches of infinite personal existence and is not possible in a finite existence. Kant was so completely imbued with the truth of this train of thought that he was astonished that philosophers could even entertain the possibility of this-worldly perfection and fulfillment [Sinnerfüllung] of existence.

Adler, Hutchins et al.

2009-06-25T05:00:00Z

Chesterton (and the rest)

Adler, Hutchins and
The Great Books

by Max Arnott

Few people under fifty now remember Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchins [1899-1977], educational reformer and president of the University of Chicago. Neither do they remember Mortimer Adler [1902-2001], free-lance philosopher, nor the "Great Books," the cultural and publishing program Hutchins and Adler created and promoted.

In the 1930's, Hutchins had reorganized the undergraduate program at Chicago around a core of "Great Books" taught by the Socratic method. There were no electives. Hutchins backed this with a "Great Books Foundation" and an intensive, and popular, adult education program. (Incidentally, he abolished football at Chicago in 1939.)

Modern Views of Platos Silence Pt 5

2009-07-13T02:00:00Z

Modern Views of Plato's Silence

by James M. Rhodes

Part 5

This excerpt from Professor Rhodes's Eros, Wisdom and Silence: Plato's Erotic Dialogues is offered here with permission of Professor Rhodes and his publisher, the University of Missouri Press, from whom more information about the book may be obtained. This excerpt is taken from Chapter Two which will be presented here in eleven parts. The most recent four parts will be shown.

Friedrich Nietzsche (concluded)

It now seems that Nietzsche sees Socratic and Platonic irony as one part psychological self-deception that arises out of a cowardly inability to face the absurdity of being and one part swindle that emanates from the desires of inferior men for revenge upon their betters and power over the human race. Should one be satisfied with this, or are there reasons to suspect that Nietzsche has a deeper teaching about the classical philosophers that uses these censures as exoteric cover?

Kant, Infinite Progress and Personal Immortality Pt 1

2009-07-08T04:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Kant, Infinite Progress and Personal Immortality (Pt 1)

We will take up the problem [of the primary phenomenon of the human form in the fullness of its physical-spiritual {leiblich-geistig} totality] at the place where Kant dealt with it, although it has a long and great history prior to that. The mathematical aspect of the problem of the infinite basically had already been elucidated by Leibniz, though neither he himself nor thinkers of the late eighteenth century drew the appropriate conclusions regarding the treatment of the problem of the person.

In Leibniz' letter to Bernoulli of August, 1698, cited earlier, we find the statement: "Sane ante multos annos demonstravi, numerum seu multitudinem omnium numerorum contradictionem implicare, si ut unum totum sumatur." [Many years ago I completely demonstrated that the number or multitude of all numbers implies a contradiction if it be construed as one whole.] The infinite amount of numbers is already clearly seen as a contradiction in terms by the end of the seventeenth century, but for a number of epistemological problems pertaining to the infinite an appropriate analysis was not provided until Kant's antinomies, and even here the issue of infinity as applied to the person remains entirely unsettled.

Modern Views of Platos Silence Pt 4

2009-07-06T02:00:00Z

Modern Views of Plato's Silence

by James M. Rhodes

Part 4

This excerpt from Professor Rhodes's Eros, Wisdom and Silence: Plato's Erotic Dialogues is offered here with permission of Professor Rhodes and his publisher, the University of Missouri Press, from whom more information about the book may be obtained. This excerpt is taken from Chapter Two which will be presented here in eleven parts. The most recent four parts will be shown

Friedrich Nietzsche (continued)

If Nietzsche's truths are concealed in the sense that they are much too profound for the vulgar to understand, and also in the sense that Nietzsche stops articulating implications, our remaining puzzles about his esoteri-cism become all the more interesting. What is it that could be so opaque to the many? Whatever it is, why does Nietzsche not simply announce it if the unqualified never could grasp it anyway? Why should he bother to write books to veil it?

We are not yet in a position to ascertain the content of the truths that Nietzsche hides, not least because Nietzsche himself suddenly, surprisingly creates a suspicion that such truths do not exist. "Indeed," he declares, the hermit "will doubt whether a philosopher even could have 'final and genuine' opinions, whether behind every one of his caves there does not lie, must lie, another deeper cave—a more comprehensive, stranger, richer world on the other side of the surface, an abyss behind every ground, under every 'grounding.' "³⁸ Thus, for the moment, we must leave the question of what Nietzsche hides in abeyance.

Socrates and the Media Pt 1

2009-07-02T02:00:00Z

from the Irish Navigator

Socrates and the Media

by Brendan Purcell

Part 1 of 2 Parts

Fr. Brendan Purcell is Senior Lecturer at University College, Dublin. This essay is a revision of a lecture that was anthologized in Media in Ireland:The Search for Ethical Journalism, ed. Damien Kiberd (Dublin: Open Air, 1999). It was written at the time of the media circus that arose during the Clinton scandals and the celebrity life and death of Princess Diana.The arguments developed here on the occasion of those events remain pertinent.

We shouldn't pretend that in the course of a short lecture we can establish a foundation for media ethics. But we can move towards a foundation if we first clear up one thing: there is no such thing as a depository of "media ethics" in the sense of there being some kind of filing cabinet labeled "Ethics" containing different files for Law, Medicine, Journalism, and so on. Just as the legal and medical professions must work out what’s right and wrong in the light of their own requirements to serve justice or health respectively, so must the media works things out in the light of their requirements to serve the truth.

Evolutionary Theory and Kant's Critique

2009-07-01T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Evolutionary Theory and Kant's Critique

. . . .The theory of the descent of the species is fully developed [in the Critique of Judgment ], even including, as an explanation for the current fixity of the species, a theory of the former, now extinct, fertility of the productive force, such as Georges Cuvier was to advocate subsequently. Nineteenth-century theories of evolution, especially Darwin's, added factual details to Kant's theory and improved it by removing many objective difficulties, but they changed nothing in the basic framework. On the other hand, compared to Kant's theory, the theories of the nineteenth century actually represent a huge step backward on account of the decline of theoretical culture and the consequent naiveté with which relatively insignificant details are considered important and lauded as progress in treating the question, while the crucial speculative-theoretical basic questions are overlooked.

Modern Views of Platos Silence Pt 3

2009-06-29T02:00:00Z

Modern Views of Plato's Silence

by James M. Rhodes

Part 3

This excerpt from Professor Rhodes's Eros, Wisdom and Silence: Plato's Erotic Dialogues is offered here with permission of Professor Rhodes and his publisher, the University of Missouri Press, from whom more information about the book may be obtained. This excerpt is taken from Chapter Two which will be presented here in eleven parts. The most recent four parts will be shown

Søren Kierkegaard and G.W.F. Hegel (continued)

Plato is distorted greatly by Tennemann's remark: "Plato availed himself of the right that every thinker has, that of sharing only so much of his discoveries as he found good, and of sharing only with those whom he thought receptive. Aristotle also had an esoteric and an exoteric philosophy, only with this difference, that with him the distinction was simply formal, while with Plato, on the contrary, it was also simultaneously material." Hegel retorts: "How absurd! That looks as if the philosopher possessed his thoughts like external things. But thoughts are something entirely different. It is quite the other way around: the philosophic idea possesses the human being. When philosophers explicate philosophic topics, they must judge according to their ideas; they cannot keep them in their pockets."

Amor amicitiae in the Bhagavad Gita (Pt 3)

2009-06-01T05:00:00Z

Amor amicitiae in the Bhagavad Gita

by Brendan Purcell

Part Three of Three Parts

Fr. Brendan Purcell is Senior Lecturer at University College, Dublin. This essay is taken from the book, Amor Amicitiae: On the Love that is Friendship. Essays in Medieval Thought and Beyond, in Honor of Professor James McEvoy, Edited by Thomas A. F. Kelly & Philipp W. Rosemann (Leuven: Peeters, 2004). This is reprinted with the permission of the publisher.

Chapter Eleven unveils the vision of all things in Krishna. Just as Chapter 6 was the culmination of the first section, on Listening, so this chapter is the culmination of the section on the Singer. It's probably our own experience too that love is a light, that we come to understand the mystery of another's being only after we love them. Perhaps these remarks of Lévinas on the priority of what he calls desire over knowledge may be useful in this context:

In Descartes, the idea of infinity remains a theoretical idea, a contemplation, a knowing. I think, rather, that the relation to the Infinite is not a knowing, but a Desire. I have tried to describe the difference between Desire and need by pointing out that Desire cannot be satisfied, that in some way Desire is nourished by its own hunger and increases with its own satisfaction, that Desire is like a thought that thinks more than it thinks or more than what thinks. A paradoxical structure, without a doubt, but no more paradoxical than the presence of the Infinite in a finite act.[46]

We can articulate this chapter as expressing both Arjuna's desire to see Krishna, and Krishna's response to that desire.

Locke’s Reasonable Method

2009-06-24T03:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Locke's Reasonable Method

On Cleansing Christianity of its Accretions

Let us consider what Locke is actually doing [in Reasonableness of Christianity, 1695, in which Locke proposes to restore the true core of Christianity: the acceptance of Christ as the Messiah, the belief in the one God, and genuine repentance and submission to the law of Christ].

Christian doctrine as it has grown in the tradition of the church is not an arbitrary addition to the Gospel. It is the labor of generations in the attempt to find an adequate expression to the substance of faith in the historically changing economic, political, moral, and intellectual environment of Mediterranean and Western civilization.

George Grant and Eric Voegelin on the United States Part 1

2009-02-26T05:00:00Z

from The Northern Lights

"A Cow Is Just a Cow”: George Grant and Eric Voegelin on the United States- Part 1

Part One of Four Parts

by John von Heyking and Barry Cooper

George Grant and Eric Voegelin both invoked the stories and the symbols of “Jerusalem and Athens” – to use a trope made famous by Leo Strauss (1) – as aids to understanding modern life. Grant often described himself as a Christian Platonist whose reflections on technology, the good life, beauty, and Canada were informed by a mixture of Platonic rationalism and Christian exegesis of the depths of meaning symbolized by the cross. Voegelin’s reflections on history, modernity, and ideology, featured most prominently in his New Science of Politics and Order and History, were formed by his understanding of the Platonic or “noetic” quest for order – Athens – as well as the biblical, Israelite, Christian, “pneumatic” quest for order – Jerusalem.

Modern Views of Platos Silence Pt 2

2009-06-22T03:00:00Z

Modern Views of Plato's Silence

by James M. Rhodes

Part 2

This excerpt from Professor Rhodes's Eros, Wisdom and Silence: Plato's Erotic Dialogues is offered here with permission of Professor Rhodes and his publisher, the University of Missouri Press, from whom more information about the book may be obtained. This excerpt is taken from Chapter Two which will be presented here in eleven parts. The most recent four parts will be shown

Friedrich Schleiermacher (continued)

Schleiermacher starts his positive meditation by declaring that it is desirable to render his opponents' mistakes and their causes perfectly transparent. To this end, he says ironically that it would be laudable to lay Plato's philosophy out analytically, piece by piece, stripped as much as possible of its context, relations, and form, leaving nothing but its bare yield, thereby proving to all that it is integral, with no lost wisdom that needs to be sought. However, this would lead only to an "imaginary" understanding of Plato's work, for "in it form and content are "inseparable, and every sentence is understood correctly only in its place, and in the connections and boundaries in which Plato has set it." Also, Plato's intention is not only to present his Sinn (a difficult German concept that combines the English ideas of sense, understanding, intellect, consciousness, and meaning) to others in a living way, but also to stir up and elevate the Sinn of others in a living way. Hence, it is necessary to comprehend each of Plato's dialogues as a whole and in its relationships to all the others.¹²

George Grant and Eric Voegelin on the United States, Part 2

2009-03-05T14:00:00Z

from The Northern Lights

"A Cow Is Just a Cow”: George Grant and Eric Voegelin on the United States

                    Part Two of Four Parts

by John von Heyking and Barry Cooper

“Experiences” of the United States

Voegelin and Grant had in common the biographically unique encounter of a foreigner with the United States. For both men, that experience was critical and significant. Moreover, both were aware of the link between biography and philosophy; both knew that philosophical consciousness was somebody’s philosophical consciousness. That is, concrete human beings, with specific and identifiable names such as George Grant and Eric Voegelin, participate in the order and disorder of particular times and places. Their reflections are already under way in their pre-reflective experiences of participation in the here and now of the America they knew. Looked at in terms of the accounts they rendered of their participation in the reality of America, what they said was also an account of how they understood themselves. In order to see their respective assessments of the United States, it is first necessary to consider where they were standing and where they were going.

Creativity in Art, Empirical Reality, and the Stunted Man

2009-06-17T02:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Creativity in Art, Empirical Reality, and the Stunted Man

[Let us] consider your highly important worries about creativeness in art.... I quite agree with you that literature constitutes reality, if it is any good, and does not merely imitate or interpret it. The starting point for theoretical consideration would be for me the Aristotelian observation (in the Poetics) that the poets give better insights into human nature than the historians, because they do not report reality but imaginatively create the "nature" of things. "Reality" as observed is always nature in the state of potentiality; the "true" reality of actualized nature is rarely a given, but must be constructed from the resources of the artist.

George Grant and Eric Voegelin on the United States, Pt 4

2009-03-09T04:00:00Z

from The Northern Lights

"A Cow Is Just a Cow”: George Grant and Eric Voegelin on the United States -Part 4

   by John von Heyking and Barry Cooper

Transcendent Representation

According to Grant, the confusion of the West, and of North America in particular, is a result of the “dialectic” between Calvinism and secular liberalism, which constitutes the West’s “transcendent” representation. The two have cooperated historically in maintaining the liberal state: liberalism provides principles of consent and Protestantism provides the moral glue that holds society together. Grant distinguished the two by observing how Protestants have always hesitated to accept the view of secular liberalism that avoidance of violent death is man’s greatest purpose; in this way, Protestantism provided a justification for self-sacrifice when liberalism fell short. (59)

George Grant and Eric Voegelin on the United States, Pt 3

2009-03-02T14:00:00Z

from The Northern Lights

"A Cow Is Just a Cow”: George Grant and Eric Voegelin on the United States

Part Three of Four Parts

Elemental and Existential Representation

Our analysis of each thinker’s view of the United States is guided by Voegelin’s theory of representation, which, as noted above, Grant also found useful. Each political society understands itself in its own unique way and explains itself to itself in order to make its own particular existence intelligible. Voegelin identified three levels of representation: elemental, existential, and transcendental. Elemental representation refers to the external existence of society, to the various agents that hold society together physically, including, for example, the laws, the institutions, the mechanics of voting, and geographical districts. (37) Existential representation signifies an idea, spirit, or political culture that animates a society.

Toronto for Beginners II

2009-06-10T05:00:00Z

Chesterton (and the rest)

Toronto for Beginners Part II

by Max Arnott

Part 1 of Toronto for Beginners, covering the city layout, transportation and some of its attractions may be read HERE.
In the first part of our survey, we discussed the city of Toronto as a whole and mentioned some of the major points of interest—the sort of things that are found in guidebooks. This week, let's touch on bookstores and bars.

First though, a minor point regarding our telephone system: in Toronto you have to dial ten numbers, that is, include the area code. For example: 416-555-5555, not just 555-5555.

Looking for Books

As far as new books, Toronto is average. The big retail chain is Chapters-Indigo. There is a smaller local operation called Book City, with a three outlets, and a more eclectic selection. The Book City outlet on Bloor street (at 501 Bloor Street West). has a complete selection of Loeb Classical Texts. You can never have enough Loeb Classical Texts.

Modern Views of Platos Silence Pt 1

2009-06-15T02:00:00Z

Modern Views of Plato's Silence

by James M. Rhodes

Part 1

This excerpt from Professor Rhodes's Eros, Wisdom and Silence: Plato's Erotic Dialogues is offered here with permission of Professor Rhodes and his publisher, the University of Missouri Press, from whom more information about the book may be obtained. This excerpt opens Chapter Two which will be presented here in its entirety. Chapter One was presented here previously and will remain available through the next four weeks.

Introduction

Plato directly and indirectly cautions his students that he does not communicate with them straightforwardly. To repeat the warnings quoted previously, Plato fiercely denies in his Seventh Letter that Dionysius II and other dubious individuals could have known that about which he is serious (περί ων εγώ σπουδάζω). They could not have understood it, "For there is no writing of mine about these things (περί αυτών), nor will there ever be. For it is in no way a spoken thing like other lessons (ρητόν γαρ σϋδαμώς εστίν ως άλλα μαθήματα)" (341cl-6). He remarks further that an effort to write or speak about these things to the many would not be good for human beings, "except for some few who are able to learn (άνευρεΐν) by themselves with a little guidance." As for the rest, some would be filled "with a contempt that is not right and that is in no way harmonious, and others with lofty and empty hopes, as if they had learned some mysteries" (341e2-342al).

Guarded by Mystery-Pt 13

2009-06-11T04:00:00Z

GUARDED BY MYSTERY -- Part 13

Meaning in a Postmodern Age

by David Walsh

Chapter 7 Cultural Transparence (continued)

[Editors' note: Professor Walsh and his publisher have given us permission to reproduce the entire meditation. We will keep available the two most recent preceding parts in addition to the current part. The book may be obtained directly from the Publisher.]

Art without Common Language

Perhaps the peculiar temptation to which art in the modern period is exposed arises from the unique position of the artist. Since the Renaissance artists have definitively shed their anonymity. Today they occupy positions of great social prominence and celebrity. They are exalted to a quasi-divine status because of what they do. No longer merely the servants of reality, they are also viewed as its creators. Men like Leonardo da Vinci were filled with the self-confidence that they possessed the means not only of imitating nature but of improving on it. It you look at his Madonna of the Rocks you will see what this means. No real-life Madonna ever had such translucent flesh and no stones ever contained such radiant depth.

That pattern of regarding artists not only as discoverers but as creators of meaning continues up to recent times. For many, art becomes a religion, and we hear sufficient discussion of the capacity of art to evoke a spiritual awakening. That whole pattern is of course no accident. The new centrality of art begins at precisely the time when the spiritual coherence of Western civilization is becoming dislodged. In a time of growing uncertainty art holds out the promise of an authoritative transparence.

Ethics, Machaivelli and Cruelty

2009-06-10T05:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Ethics, Machiavelli, and the Mystery of Existential Cruelty

Philosophically, the problem of Machiavelli’s ethics consists in nothing but the recognition of the elementary fact that the existence of man is burdened with conflicts of values. A spiritual morality will arrive at the Platonic insight that doing evil is worse than suffering evil. In practice, this insight can be made the governing rule of conduct only at the price of endangering, or making impossible, the realization of other values that also are given in human existence, such as one’s own existence, the existence of the community, and the civilizational values realized in community.

Since the existence of man is social, his actions are burdened with the responsibility for their effects on the values realized in the lives of other men. A statesman who does not answer an attack on his country with the order to shoot back will not be praised for the spiritual refinement of his morality in turning the other cheek, but he will justly be cursed for his criminal irresponsibility. Spiritual morality is a problem in human existence, precisely because there is a good deal more to human existence than spirit. All attacks on Machiavelli as the inventor or advocate of a "double morality" for private and public conduct, etc., can be dismissed as manifestations of philosophical ignorance.

Guarded by Mystery-Pt 12

2009-06-04T05:00:00Z

GUARDED BY MYSTERY -- Part 12

Meaning in a Postmodern Age

by David Walsh

Chapter 6 The Politics of Liberty (concluded)

[Editors' note: Professor Walsh and his publisher have given us permission to reproduce the entire meditation. We will keep available the two most recent preceding parts in addition to the current part. The book may be obtained directly from the Publisher.]

Even if the patient has already decided that his or her quality of life has slipped below an acceptable level, we cannot avoid entering into the same judgment if we are to facilitate their wishes. What criteria will we use? We can think of none that do not involve a process of measuring and weighing the value of human life. We will inevitably be involved in the process of defining what a person is worth. What pain or inconvenience costs too much? We can no longer use the standard of every person as an end-in-himself or herself, since they must now be assessed in terms of their aggregate contribution to themselves or others. The euthanasia situation compels such a finite reduction of the value of human life.

Humanistic Historiography

2009-06-03T10:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Humanistic Historiography as War and Personalities

The new style of [humanistic] historiography was established by the Florentine History of Bruni [published from 1416-1449], and certain characteristics of the model still determined the treatment of political history in Machiavelli's Istorie Firoentine, as well as his delimitation of political subject matter at large.

Let us briefly enumerate these characteristics. The humanists used Livy as their model. This choice had certain consequences insofar as the treatment of history had to concentrate on such exciting events as wars and revolutions to the exclusion of the permanent factors and the long-range developments that determine the texture of history.

Eros, Wisdom and the Silence of Plato Pt 4

2009-05-11T04:00:00Z

Eros, Wisdom, and Silence in Plato

by James M. Rhodes

Eros and Wisdom Part 4 of 4 parts

This excerpt from Professor Rhodes's Eros, Wisdom and Silence: Plato's Erotic Dialogues is offered here with permission of Professor Rhodes and his publisher, the University of Missouri Press, from whom more information about the book may be obtained. This excerpt concludes Chapter One. We hope to present Chapter Two in the near future.

First, in his Alexander, Plutarch says of Aristotle's education of the young prince: "It seems that Alexander received not only the ethical and political argument, but also shared in those forbidden and deeper teachings which the men call by the private terms 'acroamatic' and 'epoptic' and which they do not impart to many." ²⁶ Plutarch continues by informing us that the conqueror later rebuked Aristotle for publishing his acroamatic teachings. The master answered that his arguments were "both given out and not given out." Plutarch embellishes Aristotle's reply by maintaining that "truly his study of metaphysics is useless for those who would either teach or learn but is written as an example for those who have already been taught" (7.3.5). Of course, Plato is believed to be one of the men to whom Plutarch refers.

Toronto for Beginners, part I

2009-05-22T05:00:00Z

Chesterton (and the rest)

Toronto for Beginners Part I

by Max Arnott

Part 2 of Toronto for Beginners, covering Toronto's bookstores and bars appears June 10th.

The approach of our annual meeting and friendly suggestion leads me to a few words on Metropolitan Toronto, pronounced "To-rawn-to", also, T'rawna, and "T.O."

This will be a two-parter. This week, briefly, the city lay-out, and a few of the major "Official" attractions.

First, the essence. What we have is a Scots-English-Irish core, formerly relying on mixed industry and a Great Lakes port, now a finance and tourism centre, over which has been laid, since the sixties, a massive influx of third world immigration. Toronto used to be the second city of the Canada—our New York was Montreal— but it is now the centre ring.

Guarded by Mystery-Pt 11

2009-05-28T05:00:00Z

GUARDED BY MYSTERY -- Part 11

Meaning in a Postmodern Age

by David Walsh

Chapter 6 The Politics of Liberty (second part)

[Editors' note: Professor Walsh and his publisher have given us permission to reproduce the entire meditation. We will keep available the two most recent preceding parts in addition to the current part. The book may be obtained directly from the Publisher.]

The summary essence of a liberal political order, which has remained fairly stable up to the present, sounds astonishingly spare. Generations of liberal thinkers have themselves wondered if their construction contained enough in the way of a substantive core to hold it all together. Was it, for example, merely an arrangement of convenience destined to come asunder as soon as individuals no longer found their interests served by it? How was it possible for governments to promote even the minimum virtues required to sustain their order, if they could no longer play a formative role in moral and spiritual affairs? How could we be sure that individuals would not misuse the power, especially the power of the majority, to extort and burden members of minority factions? If they entered into a contract to create society, what was to prevent them from contracting to commit injustice?

Democracy: A Society of Patricians

2009-05-12T01:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Democracy:
A Society of Patricians

One can do nothing at all with a textbook definition of democracy, which again is only a cliché. It is no use to you to know that there are three forms of government, a monarchy, an aristocracy, and a democracy, and that in a monarchy one is at the head, that in an aristocracy several rule, and that in a democracy all rule. It is also no use to you if you know that in the democracy the people rules and that there is the great principle of popular sovereignty. All of that is of no use at all for a human understanding of democracy. One must draw upon other definitions of democracy, which are not intended as definitions in the textbook sense but as empirical observations of intelligent human beings.

I will now give three such definitions. The first is from George Santayana, the American philosopher: Democracy is the unrealizable dream of a society of patrician plebeians. If men were all patricians, which however they are not, then a democracy could work. But since the majority is made up of plebeians, the greatest objections can be raised against the practicability of a democracy.

You see that this definition is geared to the human problem, but it is no textbook definition. You cannot write it down and take it home as a dogma about democracy. But there are still other views on democracy that complement this one, without their thus being false. [Winston] Churchill once defined democracy as the worst form of government with the exception of all the others. All forms of government are bad, because they have to take account of the human factor of imperfection. Democracy is a wretched form of government simply for the reasons Santayana mentioned in the first definition. . . . A third such definition is from the American humorist Mark Twain, . . . [who] says democracy rests on three factors: "freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them."

. . . . Every society that works, a society of patricians, is based on courtesy, on compromises, on concession to the other people. Whoever has a fixed idea and wants this to be carried into effect, that is to say, whoever interprets freedom of speech and freedom of conscience to the effect that the society should behave in the way that he considers right, is not qualified to be citizen of a democracy.

The political interplay of [every functioning society] is patrician. It is based on the fact that one thinks a lot about what the others do, but does not say it; that one is always aware that in the society there is more than one good to achieve, not only the good of freedom, but also the good of security, the good of welfare, and that if I specialized in one or other of these goods, I could thereby bring the whole society into disorder, because I could destroy the balance between the realization of goods on which the society is based. . . . If I harden myself with a particular idea and pursue only this goal, this one good, then in reaction there arises the counterstasis, the counterhardening, and with this the impossibility of social cooperation.

Hitler and the Germans, CW VOL 31,
Chapter 2, Development of Diagnostic Tools
§7,Clichés of "State"and "Democracy,"

pp 84-85.

This quote is taken from a collection of brief Voegelin quotes which can be found HERE.

Amor amicitiae in the Bhagavad Gita (Pt 2)

2009-05-25T10:00:00Z

Amor amicitiae in the Bhagavad Gita

by Brendan Purcell

Part Two of Three Parts

Fr. Brendan Purcell is Senior Lecturer at University College, Dublin. This essay is taken from the book, Amor Amicitiae: On the Love that is Friendship. Essays in Medieval Thought and Beyond, in Honor of Professor James McEvoy, Edited by Thomas A. F. Kelly & Philipp W. Rosemann (Leuven: Peeters, 2004). This is reprinted with the permission of the publisher.

Allowing for the level of personal differentiation in the West, the Gita describes a process of liberation (moksha) from the merely incidental, the merely temporal, and the very brute facticity that provoked Roquentin's nausea at mere absurdity in Sartre's novel of that name. Despite its being rooted in the cosmological experience, there's a refreshing openness in the Gita that leads beyond such willed immanence. Because what's proposed is both a living within, a genuine interiority, and a living outside, a genuine exteriority. This equilibrium, recalling us to the depths within ourselves and the depths beyond ourselves, a living for, from within, is what is developed here:

The immature think that knowledge and action are different, but the wise see them as the same. He who is established in one path will attain the rewards of both. The goal of knowledge and the goal of service are the same. (5: 4-5)

Emerging from the National State

2009-05-20T05:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Emerging from the National State
and Restoring Political Theory

The wars and revolutions of the twentieth century bring to its end a period that begins with the consolidation of the Western national states in the fifteenth century. An upheaval of such magnitude, convulsing the whole of a civilization, affects not the institutions only but also the sentiments and beliefs that went into their building, the verities that they represent, and the body of ideas and symbols used for denoting, justifying, and interpreting them. Political philosophy today is concerned with sifting the debris, with testing in the light of contemporary experience the validity of problems and symbols still taken for granted a generation ago, and with repairing the edifice of critical theory that has become badly dilapidated in the course of the so-called modern centuries. . . .

A theory that insists on discussing politics in terms of Anglo-Saxon democracy cannot deal adequately even with the Western national states, and not at all with the political organization, e.g., of Asiatic civilizations. It will, therefore, be a second problem of political philosophy to separate the essential from the historically contingent and to break with the habit of treating the institutions of a particular national state at a particular time as if they truly manifested the nature of man.

Amor amicitiae in the Bhagavad Gita (Pt 1)

2009-05-18T10:00:00Z

Amor amicitiae in the Bhagavad Gita

by Brendan Purcell

Part One of Three Parts

Fr. Brendan Purcell is Senior Lecturer at University College, Dublin. This essay is taken from the book, Amor Amicitiae: On the Love that is Friendship. Essays in Medieval Thought and Beyond, in Honor of Professor James McEvoy, Edited by Thomas A. F. Kelly & Philipp W. Rosemann (Leuven: Peeters, 2004). This is reprinted with the permission of the publisher.

The Bhagavad Gita means "The Lord's [or Giver's] Song," a song which requires and repays an effort from a Western reader who's prepared to try to listen to it adequately. Since its core topic is that of the relationship of devotion or love between "man" and "God" (although neither man nor God in the Gita has the fully differentiated meaning of Greek philosophy or Judaeo-Christian revelation), I believe a meditation on the Gita can complement the other essays on friendship in this Festschrift.

What we'll try to develop here is a philosophical reading of the Bhagavad Gita, drawing on Eric Voegelin's philosophy of humanity in history as heuristic context for such an interpretation.

Human Emergence as Cosmic Metaxy, Part 3

2009-04-13T15:00:00Z

from the Irish Navigator

Human Emergence as Cosmic Metaxy

By Brendan Purcell

Part three of three

Brooklyn-born Stephen Jay Gould grew up in a secular Jewish, even Marxist, background. But his recent writings have shown him open to religion, even if he considers himself an agnostic. The central idea in his Rocks of Ages is that

Science tries to document the factual character of the natural world. Religion operates in the equally important, but utterly different, realm of human purposes, meanings and values. I propose that we encapsulate this central principle of respectful non-interference — accompanied by intense dialogue between the two distinct subjects — by enunciating the principle of NOMA, or Non-Overlapping Magisteria.

Recovery of the Life of Reason Pt 2

2009-05-13T05:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

Recovery of the Life of Reason (Part 2):

The Principles of Completeness, Formation and Foundation

The present essay [ Reason: The Classic Experience ] obviously is an act of resistance in continuity with the classic effort. The tactics used will have become clear. In the first place, the practically forgotten experiential context on which the meaning of Reason depends had to be restored. Moreover, as far as that was possible in the brief space, I have tried to establish the inner coherence of pieces of analysis which in the sources are scattered over a vast body of literature. From the basis of the restored experience, then, it was possible to branch out into the psychopathology of alienation and the aspernatio rationis. And from this basis broadened by the Stoic analysis, finally, it was possible to characterize the modern revolt against Reason as well as the phenomenon of the system.

Contra Gopnik

2009-04-24T05:00:00Z

Chesterton (and the rest)

Contra Gopnik

by Max Arnott

In the 7 ^th of July 2008 issue of the NewYorker , Mr. Adam Gopnik published "The Back of the World" (G.K. Chesterton's 'The Man who was Thursday') and Chestertonians are still sore as a gumboil.

What that has to do with Voegelin? A good deal, I think, but first let's look at the article, or a bit of it.

Recovery of the Life of Reason -Pt 1

2009-05-06T10:12:37Z

from The Collected Works

Recovery of the Life of Reason
and Its Modern Deformations (Part 1)

The unfolding of noetic consciousness in the psyche of the classic philosophers is not an "idea," or a "tradition," but an event in the history of mankind. The symbols developed in its course are "true" in the sense that they intelligibly articulate the experience of existential unrest in the process of becoming cognitively luminous.

Though the classic analysis is neither the first nor the last symbolization of man's humanity in quest of its relation to the divine ground, it is first in articulating the structure of the quest itself: of the unrest that offers the answer to its questioning, of the divine Nous as the mover of the quest, of the joy of luminous participation when man responds to the theophany, and of existence becoming cognitively luminous for its meaning as a movement in the metaxy from mortality to immortality.

Eros, Wisdom and the Silence of Plato Pt 3

2009-05-04T05:00:00Z

Eros, Wisdom, and Silence in Plato

by James M. Rhodes

Eros and Wisdom Part 3 of 4 parts

This excerpt from Professor Rhodes's Eros, Wisdom and Silence: Plato's Erotic Dialogues is offered here with permission of Professor Rhodes and his publisher, the University of Missouri Press, from whom more information about the book may be obtained. This excerpt will include all of Chapter One and will be presented in installments over four weeks.

In the Theages, Demodocus, a rural landowner and a committed democrat, approaches Socrates with his son Theages in tow. Demodocus is fearful because his son wants to become wise (121c-d), and he knows what Theages means by that term. Theages craves knowledge of how to rule human beings (123a). In fact, Theages openly confesses to wishing to be a tyrant (124e). Socrates succeeds in shaming the youth and his father, whereupon Theages retracts his statements, declaring that he desires to rule over only those who are willing to be governed by him. He does not propose to become a tyrant or a god (125e-126a).

Politics as Melodrama

2009-04-29T09:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

  Politics as Melodrama

Politics is indeed melodrama, if politics is understood as a relation between friend and foe; as a compulsion to take sides in a struggle for power. . . . Insofar as politics actually assumes this form, and unfortunately it does all too often, the description is empirically adequate. . . .

This conception of politics, however, is in radical opposition to the classic conception of Aristotle: that the essence of politics is the philia politike, the friendship which institutes a cooperative community among men, and that this friendship is possible among men insofar as they participate in the common nous, in the spirit or mind.

Eros, Wisdom and Silence of Plato Pt 2

2009-04-26T22:00:00Z

Eros, Wisdom, and Silence in Plato

by James M. Rhodes

Eros and Wisdom Part 2 of 4 parts

This excerpt from Professor Rhodes's Eros, Wisdom and Silence: Plato's Erotic Dialogues is offered here with permission of Professor Rhodes and his publisher, the University of Missouri Press, from whom more information about the book may be obtained. This excerpt will include all of Chapter One and will be presented in installments over four weeks.

Fifth, it cannot be denied that sex has become the American national project. A great many of our students have been swept up in this enterprise. Together with their countrymen, many have abolished sexual limits and modesty, as evidenced by their conversation and jokes, by the entertainments that they enjoy (including steamy movies, MTV, and frankly sexual dancing), and by their clothing. Many do have serial sexual relationships. Indeed, many young people feel tremendous pressure to establish their credentials as liberated individualists by cohabiting with their sexual partners ostentatiously. The recent annihilation of the great barrier to this behavior, fear of pregnancy and childbirth, has probably made such casual sex more common than it used to be. It seems likely that in the majority of these cases, the students' sex has really become so easy that it is "no big deal."

The Purpose of Theory (5)

2009-04-22T05:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

The Purpose of Theory (5)
Receptivity for the unseen measure

The truth of man and the truth of God are inseparably one. Man will be in the truth of his existence when he has opened his psyche to the truth of God; and the truth of God will become manifest in history when it has formed the psyche of man into receptivity for the unseen measure. This is the great subject of the Republic; at the center of the dialogue Plato placed the Parable of the Cave, with its description of the periagoge, the conversion, the turning-around from the untruth of human existence as it prevailed in the Athenian sophistic society to the truth of the Idea.

Eros, Wisdom and Silence of Plato Pt 1

2009-04-20T04:00:00Z

Eros, Wisdom, and Silence in Plato

by James M. Rhodes

Part 1 of 4 parts

This excerpt from Professor Rhodes's Eros, Wisdom and Silence: Plato's Erotic Dialogues is offered here with permission of Professor Rhodes and his publisher, the University of Missouri Press, from whom more information about the book may be obtained. This excerpt will include all of Chapter One and will be presented in installments over four weeks.

What, if anything, does Socrates know about Eros?

The Platonic Socrates is renowned for proclaiming his ignorance. His reputation owes primarily to several statements that he makes in Plato's Apology of Socrates. For example, he denies that he is a clever speaker (17a-b). He argues that his enemies have said "nothing true" (ούδέυ άληθές 18b6) in their snide accounts of him, one of which is that he is a "wise man" (σοφος άνήρ, 18b7). . He disclaims any share of wisdom about "the things under the earth and in the heavens" (19b-d). He insists that he has no knowledge of the virtue of the human being and the citizen (20b-c). He remembers that he was profoundly shocked when the priestess at Delphi, the Pythia, pronounced him the wisest man, "For I am aware that I am not wise at all, not much, not little" (21b4-5). He relates that the prophecy began to make sense when he questioned a politician who falsely judged himself wise. Then he thought to himself: "I am wiser than this person. For probably neither of us knows anything beautiful and good, but he assumes that he knows something when he does not, whereas I neither know nor suppose that I know" (21d2-6).

The Plot so far

2009-04-08T05:00:00Z

Chesterton (and the rest)

The Plot so Far

by Max Arnott

Solvitur acris hiems – Horace Ode.1.4

Well, spring does come back as strongly as ever, Horace observes, though we do not.

At any rate, the stronger light, and the shift of hours, turn the mind to a couple of reflections on time.

We'll try to keep Proust out of this however.

A few months ago, your correspondent re-read "Immortality: experience and symbol, " the third essay in Volume 12 of the Collected Works, an essay published first in the Harvard Theological Review in 1967, but delivered to the public two years before that as the Ingersoll Lecture on Immortality, on 14 January 1965.

The Purpose of Theory (4)

2009-04-15T05:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

The Purpose of Theory (4)
The Theological Principle

The anthropological principle, thus, must be supplemented by a second principle for the theoretical interpretation of society. Plato expressed it when he created his formula "God is the Measure," in opposition to the Protagorean "Man is the Measure."

In formulating this principle, Plato drew the sum of a long development. His ancestor Solon already had been in search of the truth that could be imposed with authority on the factions of Athens, and with a sigh he admitted, "It is very hard to know the unseen measure of right judgment—and yet it alone contains the right boundaries of all things." As a statesman he lived in the tension between the unseen measure and the necessity of incarnating it in the eunomia of society; on the one hand: "The mind of the immortals is all unseen to men"; and on the other hand: "At the behest of the gods have I done what I did."

The Purpose of Theory (3)

2009-04-08T20:16:27Z

from The Collected Works

The Purpose of Theory (3)
The Openness of the Soul as the New Authority

[The examples given] should be sufficient to evoke the class of experiences that form the basis of theory in the Platonic-Aristotelian sense. It must now be ascertained why they should become the carriers of a truth about human existence in rivalry with the truth of the older myth, and why the theorist, as the representative of this truth, should be able to pit his authority against the authority of society.

The answer to this question must be sought in the nature of the experience under discussion. The discovery of the new truth is not an advancement of psychological knowledge in the immanentist sense; one would rather have to say that the psyche itself is found as a new center in man at which he experiences himself as open toward transcendental reality.

Human Emergence as Cosmic Metaxy, Part 2

2009-04-06T05:00:00Z

from the Irish Navigator

Human Emergence as Cosmic Metaxy

By Brendan Purcell

Part two of three

I’ll be suggesting that a similar philosophical context will be needed for understanding the hominid sequence, including Neanderthals and the emergence of humans.

[Bernard] Lonergan gives examples first, of two levels of things in chemistry, both 1. the chemical elements — so each of the 92+ chemical elements may be seen as roughly equivalent at the chemical level to a biological species) — and 2. their compounds. Second, similarly in biology, where the things are the series of biological species, both 1. at the cellular level — the 3 major types of bacteria — and 2. as multicellular living things:

The Purpose of Theory (2)

2009-04-01T05:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

The Purpose of Theory (2)
The Catalog of Experiences to be explicated

A study of the experiences is impossible in the present context. In view of the vastness of the subject, even a lengthy sketch would be pitiably inadequate. No more than a brief catalogue can be given that will appeal to your historical knowledge.

To the previously mentioned love of the sophon may now be added the variants of the Platonic Eros toward the kalon and the agathon, as well as the Platonic Dike, the virtue of right superordination and subordination of the forces in the soul, in opposition to the sophistic polypragmosyne; and, above all, there must be included the experience of Thanatos, of death as the cathartic experience of the soul which purifies conduct by placing it into the longest of all long-range perspectives, into the perspective of death.

Human Emergence as Cosmic Metaxy, Part 1

2009-03-30T13:00:00Z

from the Irish Navigator

Human Emergence as Cosmic Metaxy

Part one of three

By Brendan Purcell

Michael Ruse, who has written extensively on evolution and philosophical issues, noted a few years ago that “Unfortunately, there is simply nothing in the literature by philosophers on human origins.” (2) There is enormous data, both on pre-human and archaic human materials, with the capacity for expanding our understanding of human emergence, but philosophy hasn’t kept up. Certainly, Voegelin was concerned with this issue, devoting several pages of notes in the late ’60s to “The Phylogenetic Field,” reflecting both on evolution and on the hominid sequence leading up to human emergence. (3) In his “Nachwort” to the German edition of the Ecumenic Age, Manfred Henningsen quotes Tilo Schabert’s recollection of Voegelin, after his encounter with Marie König’s paleolithic studies, remarking that he would need to write a Volume “0” to his Order and History which would take into account the latest studies in the earliest human symbolizations of order. (4)

The Purpose of Theory (1)

2009-03-25T05:00:00Z

from The Collected Works

The Purpose of Theory (1)
To Formulate the Meaning of Existence
by Explicating Certain Experiences

. . . .Theory is not just any opining about human existence in society; it rather is an attempt at formulating the meaning of existence by explicating the content of a definite class of experiences. Its argument is not arbitrary but derives its validity from the aggregate of experiences to which it must permanently refer for empirical control.

Aristotle was the first thinker to recognize this condition of theorizing about man. He coined a term for the man whose character is formed by the aggregate of experiences in question, and he called him the spoudaios, the mature man.The spoudaios is the man who has maximally actualized the potentialities of human nature, who has formed his character into habitual actualization of the dianoetic and ethical virtues, the man who at the fullest of his development is capable of the bios theoretikos. Hence, the science of ethics in the Aristotelian sense is a type study of the spoudaios.Moreover, Aristotle was acutely aware of the practical corollaries of such a theory of man.

Self Help? A Protrepticon

2009-03-16T05:00:00Z

Self Help? A Protrepticon

by Max Arnott

At the end of Volume 8 of the Collected Works we find a Voegelin essay from 1932, "Postscript to The Art of Thinking."

The essay begins as a book review of The Art of Thinking by Ernest Dimnet, which was originally published in 1928 in English, and later in French and German. The essay then develops into a discussion of culture as it applies, on the one hand, to the Anglo world and France, and, on the other, to Germany.

Can a Philosopher be a Prophetic Witness to the Truth?

2009-03-23T14:32:00Z

from the Irish Navigator

Can a Philosopher be a Prophetic Witness to the Truth?

by Brendan Purcell
        University College Dublin

Since we are in Chicago, ¹ I’d like to start with some lines from Saul Bellow’s principal character. Albert Corde, a college dean in Chicago, says in The Dean’s December : “We couldn’t ourselves observe the dulling of consciousness, since we were all its victims…The genius of these evils was their ability to create zones of incomprehension .” And Corde is later noted as saying, “Scholars who were supposed to represent the old greatness didn’t put up a fight for it. They gave in to the great emptiness. And 'from the emptiness came whirlwinds of insanity. . .”’ ²

I’d suggest Voegelin too in the "Hitler and the Germans" lectures was trying to deal with those pervasive “zones of incomprehension,” but that he certainly did put up a fight against the great emptiness. One way of seeing that fight is in terms of his being a witness to the truth.

Can a Philosopher be a Prophetic Witness to the Truth?

Let’s leave out “prophetic” for the moment, and ask simply, can a philosopher in the Heraclitean-Platonic-Aristotelian tradition not be a witness to the truth? It’s enough to remind ourselves of Voegelin’s remarks in the talk he gave a year after the "Hitler and the Germans" lectures when he reminds us of Heraclitus’s insistence on public commitment to actualizing our participation in the common logos and criticizes von Humboldt’s notion of an academic existence closed off from such shared actualization. So it can surely be suggested that the lectures themselves were an expression of Voegelin’s consciousness of his responsibility as a political philosopher to witness to the truth. What I’ll try here is to suggest a way in which he can be seen to do this throughout the lectures.

Eric Voegelin and the Stefan George Circle

2009-03-12T05:00:00Z

Eric Voegelin and

the Stefan George Circle [1]

by William Petropulos

[Editor's Note: On the recently issued DVD "Voegelin in Toronto" both Eric Voegelin and Hans-Georg Gadamer expressed their deep gratitude to Stefan George and his circle, but neither explained at that time the basis for their gratitude. We hope Dr. Petropulos' paper will go some distance to explain George's importance to them.]

Late in life Eric Voegelin recorded that his own work on Plato was done "in the spirit" of the Plato scholars of the Stefan George circle. [2]

Today I want to talk about George's influence on the Plato scholarship of his own circle, and thereby his indirect contribution to Voegelin's understanding of Plato. The high point of George's influence on Voegelin was in the early 1930's, and I will confine my remarks to Voegelin's works of that time.

Erasmus the pre-Reformation Humanist

2009-03-14T18:42:16Z

from The Collected Works

On Erasmus, the pre-Reformation Humanist

[There] can be no doubt that Erasmus had already lost touch with speculative philosophy and theology to such a degree that he no longer understood the stabilizing, civilizational function of a conscientious and systematic intellectual analysis of such complex and explosive spiritual forces as those that are contained in the New Testament.

What surprises most in Erasmus—and the reader of his work must always remind himself of the general situation in order not to become unduly critical of him—is his almost unbelievable historical naïveté.

A Confidential Document

2009-03-05T14:00:00Z

A Confidential Document

by Max Arnott

The following was passed to this column anonymously. It seems to originate in a major security agency. Which agency, we can only conjecture.

From: Special Agent Gnash
Deputy Assistant to Manager East Region
North American Operations

To: Special Agent Grind
Topeka, Kansas, United States

Agent Grind:

I am sending you this e-mail as your mentor, because I have a stake in you. You would do well to remember that.

The Use of Force (Part II)

2009-03-07T17:40:53Z

from The Collected Works

The Use of Force (Part II):

Slaves by Nature—

The Outward Directed Personality

The third and final reason why the sanction by force is necessary is the one to which Aristotle accords prime importance. The whole social organization for making and enforcing the law would be superfluous, he argues, if men would act in accordance with true order without compulsion or the threat of compulsion.

The Use of Force (Part I): The Necessity to Limit Disobedience and Indecision

2009-02-28T21:56:20Z

from The Collected Works

The Use of Force (Part I):

Limits to Disobedience and Indecision

. . . . The use of force for the imposition of the legal order is necessary for a number of reasons. The first of these reasons is the just-discussed calculus of error. Since there is a discrepancy between true order and empirical order, enforcement is necessary in order to eliminate disobedience on the part of citizens contending that the content of the rule is not in accord with the Ought in the ontological sense.

What is a Miracle?

2009-01-05T20:01:35Z

Beneath the Southern Cross

What is a Miracle?

by Olavo de Carvalho

To explain a fact by a supernatural cause [is to presuppose] that there are facts with non-supernatural causes, but since God, theologically speaking, is the ultimate or first cause of everything that happens, then that is a merely tautological statement; to say that something happened because God wanted it to happen is to imply that other things may happen without God wanting them to, which is contradictory to the definition of God as omnipotent and as first cause.

So I cannot understand how it is that a scientific investigation can be carried out upon such erroneous logical foundations by both those who accept the existence of the miraculous and those who do not.

Now, why do these difficulties that I have just presented seldom or never appear to those discussing the subject? Because of the following reason: When one intends to investigate whether a fact is miraculous or not, what one usually does in the first place is to assign that fact to a class of similar facts whose origins are regarded as non-miraculous.

Take, for instance, a man who has been cured of cancer. From the outset this fact is thus considered: "Here is Mr. John Doe, who is said to have been miraculously cured of cancer. There are, however, several people who have been non-miraculously cured of cancer." You first fit that particular fact into the general class called "cure of cancer" and then proceed to investigate whether that cure in particular had supernatural origins or not. With that the miraculous fact is already predefined as non-miraculous, for it has already been placed under a class of similar phenomena which can be otherwise explained. If, having done so, you look for a miraculous cause for that fact, that is tantamount to looking for something where you have already established that it cannot be.

Eric Voegelin as Master Teacher

2009-02-09T19:00:00Z

from The Irish Navigator

Eric Voegelin as Master Teacher

by Brendan Purcell

[Editor's Note: What we call "The Irish Dialogue with Eric Voegelin" was published by us in four installments over two weeks. We preceded it with a talk originally delivered by Brendan Purcell at the annual meeting of the Eric Voegelin Society at Boston in 2004. He talked about the six letters he had received from Eric Voegelin over the years. Three of the letters are found in The Collected Works but three have never been published. Fr. Purcell's talk provides a background for the discussion itself, held between Eric Voegelin and students at University College Dublin in September of 1972. The Dialogue itself begins February 12th.]

I’m not that happy with the “master teacher” title, bearing in mind André Glucksmann’s questioning of the so-called “master thinkers,” except in the sense that I think everyone here is thinking of. That is to say, of Voegelin as an intellectual and spiritual authority. Unlike the other contributors to this panel, I didn’t have Voegelin as a teacher in the sense that I attended his lectures or that he directed my thesis. Still, I had no hesitation in the Foreword of my 1980 doctoral thesis in thanking him “for his wisdom and kind guidance—for me he has been the Socrates who bears in his heart the image of Everlasting Beauty.”

Chalk and Cheese

2008-12-26T07:27:47Z

Among the things that puzzle us about each other (and we are mysterious to each other, and ought to be) is how so-and-so can like X and yet also like Y.

Mary, meeting Fred, rejoices that he is sound on classical music. Too late, oh too late, she discovers among the DVDs his collection of the Three Stooges.

Fred approves Mary's devotion to golf but is bewildered that she should also like chess.

This phenomenon is a universal irritation.

Some people like beer and wine. Some people like Trollope and Stephen King.

The Irish Dialogue with Eric Voegelin

2009-02-17T13:00:00Z

The Irish Dialogue with Eric Voegelin (complete)

Eric Voegelin: You have something about history. May I ask you just for a piece of paper because I want to draw a little diagram and show it to you? It represents what is perhaps the most important change today in science in the conception of history. What we have in public domination in the climate of opinion are conceptions of history starting from an origin and running up to the present; they are one-line histories. Take a typical example from the nineteenth century, the Comtean conception of history. There is first a theological phase; then you get a metaphysical phase; and then you get a phase of positive science. When they are arranged in a line you get something like that, a line with phases on it, one following the next, and when the next comes, the older one has become obsolete:

Now that no longer works empirically.

English Common Sense Philosophy

2009-02-20T12:47:02Z

from The Collected Works

English Common Sense Philosophy

We are faced with the oddity that English philosophy, or thought in general, acquires a peculiar subduedness after the Glorious Revolution. After Hobbes, Locke, and Berkeley, English thinking loses the incisiveness which characterizes the French Enlightenment and the German outburst from Kant, via [Johann Gottlieb] Fichte and Hegel, to Schelling and Marx.

The English 18th century— setting aside Hume and his belated skepticism based on Sextus Empiricus, an aftermath of the Pyrrhonian revival of the sixteenth century—has produced the "common sense" philosophy from [Thomas] Reid onward. And "common sense" is, for Reid and his successors, a deliberate toning down of philosophy, from Aristotelianism and Stoicism, to Reason, in the same sense as Aristotle and the Stoics have understood it, on the level of the common man who does not engage in philosophical meditations.

Love of God and Love of Self

2008-12-24T06:15:18Z

God is not just the Good, as Plato claimed, but Love.

In the context of human virtue, which some would call the "value dimension," the final issue in a discussion is between amor dei and amor sui. I would suggest that this was Voegelin's main interest. It was his call to understand and expose tyranny. He thought that this was a more fundamental issue than, for example, his early interest in economics in the Austrian school with Ludwig von Mises.

On the Anxiety of Existence

2009-01-03T15:48:54Z

from The Collected Works

On the Anxiety of Existence

A New fundamental Mood

. . . . The dynamic of existence is determined, for Pascal, by the impossibility of a state of complete quiet or rest (repos). "Nothing is as unbearable for man as to be completely at rest, without passion, without business, without distraction, without application to something." In such a state of rest man becomes aware of "his nothingness, his foresakenness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his impotence, his emptiness."

VoegelinView Home

On the Inside--

A Big Round Subject -pt 1

A Big Round Subject

Fortescue and Liberty Through Law -pt 1

Sir John Fortescue Securing Liberty Through Law –Part 1

Government both Political and Royal

Deformations of Faith -pt 1

Deformations of Faith

What Do We Mean by "Faith?"

Hunting the Devils-Simone Weil and Eric Voegelin -pt 3

Hunting the Devils

Simone Weil and Eric Voegelin–Two Paths to the Same Truth–Part 3

by Sylvie Courtine-Denamy

An Unbaptised Christian Mystic

A Pattern of Timeless Moments -pt 4

A Pattern of Timeless MomentsT. S. Eliot's Four Quartets –Part 4

Richard Rorty and the Core of Progressivism

Richard Rorty and the Core of Progressivism

The Religious Character of American Progressivism

Montesquieu-The Elements of Political Liberty

Montesquieu The Elements of Political Liberty

The Climate in 18th Century England and France

Hunting the Devils-Simone Weil and Eric Voegelin -pt 2

Hunting the Devils

Simone Weil and Eric Voegelin–Two Paths to the Same Truth–Part 2

by Sylvie Courtine-Denamy

The Cure for Uprootedness

A Pattern of Timeless Moments -pt 3

A Pattern of Timeless MomentsT. S. Eliot's Four Quartets –Part 3

David Hume

David Hume Spokesman for the Comfortable Class

Hunting the Devils-Simone Weil and Eric Voegelin -pt 1

Hunting the Devils

Simone Weil and Eric Voegelin–Two Paths to the Same Truth–Part 1

by Sylvie Courtine-Denamy

Rejecting Ideology

A Pattern of Timeless Moments -pt 2

A Pattern of Timeless MomentsT. S. Eliot's Four Quartets –Part 2

Gnosticism–A Brief Introduction -pt 2

Gnosticism A Brief Introduction –Part 2

The Anxieties that Lead to Gnosticism

Here Keller, Appropriate This

Here Keller, Appropriate This

A Pattern of Timeless Moments -pt 1

A Pattern of Timeless MomentsT. S. Eliot's Four Quartets –Part 1

Gnosticism–A Brief Introduction -pt 1

Gnosticism A Brief Introduction –Part 1

The Immanentization of the Christian Eschaton

The First Mystics? -pt 6

The First Mystics?

Some Recent Accounts of Neolithic Shamanism–Part 6

The Dangerous Bridge

Jesus and the Unknown God -pt 3

Jesus and the Unknown God –Part 3

Machiavelli -pt 6

Machiavelli

or The Demonic Confusion –Part 6

The Parodic Inversion of Christianity

The Crisis of Americanism -pt 7

The Crisis of Americanism–Part 7

America Looks in the Mirror

The First Mystics? -pt 5

The First Mystics?

Some Recent Accounts of Neolithic Shamanism –Part 5

The Shaman as Intracosmic Traveler

Modernity and Secularization -pt 2

Modernity and Secularization

According to Hans Blumenberg's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age – Part 2

by Thierry Gontier

Jesus and the Unknown God -pt 2

Jesus and the Unknown God –Part 2

Machiavelli -pt 5

Machiavelli

or The Demonic Confusion –Part 5

Fleeing from Experience

The First Mystics? -pt 4

The First Mystics?

Some Recent Accounts of Neolithic Shamanism–Part 4

Dismissive Views of Shamanism

Sir John Fortescue
Securing Liberty Through Law –Part 1

A Pattern of Timeless Moments
T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets –Part 4

Montesquieu
The Elements of Political Liberty

A Pattern of Timeless Moments
T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets –Part 3

David Hume
Spokesman for the Comfortable Class

A Pattern of Timeless Moments
T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets –Part 2

Gnosticism
A Brief Introduction –Part 2

A Pattern of Timeless Moments
T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets –Part 1

Gnosticism
A Brief Introduction –Part 1

Voegelin in Munich
-Part 3