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What matters is not from whence an idea comes but whither it leads us. Does it bring us a step closer to a fuller appreciation of the reality in which we find ourselves? Toward a more adequate attunement to the order of Being? At the end of the day truth stands in judgment over authority, and whatever merit the latter possesses is entirely derivative from that subordination. Like the scribe of the New Testament, we are charged with searching through treasures old and new in order to bring forth what is of value (Mt 13:52).
Among such contemporary treasures in the meditative recovery of meaning, few figure more prominently than Eric Voegelin. As a member of the European emigre constellation who arrived in America as a result of the Nazi upheaval, Voegelin, together with Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, and others, brought about a rediscovery of the greatness of classical political philosophy as well as renewed respect for the revealed traditions.
Voegelin stands out from their broader efforts at the recovery of premodern sources of wisdom by virtue of his penetration of the experiential roots. His is a unique enterprise that finds its closest parallel among the novelists and artists who put us directly in touch with the sources of ideas in life itself. His great work, Order and History in five volumes, Israel and Revelation, The World of the Polis, Plato and Aristotle, The Ecumenic Age, and In Search of Order (Louisiana State University Press, 1956-1985), provides the most perceptive account of the experiential movements by which the ordering symbols of human history have emerged. Together with the other volumes of his Collected Works (all in publication from the University of Missouri Press [now also including Order and History]) it is by far the best education in the meditative and revelatory dynamics from which all meaning arises.
Other more recent approaches to the same problematic of the prearticulate sources of order within human experience include Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Harvard University Press, 1989) and a more popular version in The Ethics of Authenticity (Harvard University Press, 1992).
The much larger literature on the crisis of meaning in the modern era includes particularly Leo Strauss's Natural Right and History (University of Chicago Press, 1953), Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism (Vintage, 1968), Henri de Lubac's Drama of Atheist Humanism (New American Library, 1950), and Albert Camus's The Rebel (Vintage, 1956), as well as Voegelin's New Science of Politics (University of Chicago Press, 1952). They are all in one way or another classic midcentury statements concerning the bankruptcy of modernity in light of the totalitarian convulsion, and they are completed by the final demolition of communist legitimacy accomplished by Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago (3 vols.; 1974-1978).
Since then we have a more pervasive body of writing that exemplifies as much as it observes the collapse of all possible sources of meaning in the contemporary world. It is a mode of reflection perhaps best represented by Jacques Derrida in such works as Of Grammatology (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things (Vintage, 1973), and—with a more American flavor—by Richard Rorty in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge University Press, 1989). I have sought to avoid emphasizing the obviously "deconstructionist" tenor of their reflections, in order to draw attention to the deeper quest for construction by which alone interest in the project of deconstruction can be sustained. Among the more interesting exemplars of a thoroughly contemporary mode of reflection that goes beyond such self-imposed inhibitions I would mention Vaclav Havel, especially essays like "The Power of the Powerless" in Open Letters: Selected Writings 1965-1990 (Vintage, 1992) and Letters to Olga (Knopf, 1988). My own examination of such matters are contained in After Ideology: Recovering the Spiritual Foundations of Freedom (The Catholic University of America Press, 1995).
