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
The sharp contrast between a Middle Ages based on revelation and a classical antiquity not so grounded, according to Strauss, leads him to this further statement:
There is a double reason not to obscure this essential difference in any way. First, it is in the interest of revelation, which is by no means merely natural knowledge. Secondly, for the sake of human knowledge, episteme. You yourself have said that science matters very much to you. For me, it matters a great deal to understand it as such. . . . The classics demonstrated that truly human life is a life dedicated to science, knowledge, and the search for it . . . . Every synthesis is actually an option either for Jerusalem or for Athens.
Well, you speak of the religious foundation of classical philosophy. I would not do so.16
Of course, "religious foundation" was not part of Voegelin's speech either, but words put in his mouth by Strauss.17 He passes over the matter, however, and his responsive analysis qualifies the sharp distinction between "human knowledge and revealed knowledge" by noticing that the latter is human insofar as it is the knowledge of concrete persons who experience it as stemming from a divine source and (while pointedly rejecting psychologizing explanations, i.e., Feuerbach's and Marx's), he arrives at the following important formulations.
Revelation, then, is humanly debatable because it, like all knowledge, is human knowledge . . . . It distinguishes itself from "mere" human knowledge in that the experience of the contents of revealed knowledge is of "being addressed" by God. And through this experience of "being addressed," the essential contents of revealed knowledge are given: (1) a man who understands himself in his "mere" humanness in contrast to a transcendental being; (2) a world-transcendent Being who is experienced as the highest reality in contrast to all worldly being; (3) a Being who "addresses," and therefore is a person, namely, God; (4) a man who can be addressed by this Being and who thereby stands in a relation of openness to Him. In this sense I would venture the formulation: the fact of revelation is its content.18
This sense of revelation as the experience of divine presence19 is shown to require the development of self-reflective consciousness whereby the man separates himself clearly from the divine, the movement from compactness toward differentiation, a "process in which man dedivinized himself and realized the humanity of his spiritual life."20 This achievement of Greek philosophy is absorbed by Christianity in the early centuries. The erotic orientation toward divine Being of man in Plato meets with no response, however, in contrast with the amicitia of Thomas — a contrast familiar from the New Science of Politics but qualified by Voegelin in later work so as to take account of his subsequent understanding of both reason and revelation in Hellenic philosophy, as suggested below.21
Strauss's response is to appeal to Christian dogma, rather than enter into a discussion that appeals to experiential analysis, which Voegelin is steadily stressing. The former suggests that there may yet be a common ground between himself and Voegelin, if only the latter accepts dogma in the Catholic sense, "because [he writes] my distinction between revelation and human knowledge to which you object is in harmony with the Catholic teaching. But I do not believe that you accept the Catholic teaching."22 By this is meant the clear doctrinal distinctions reflected by the dichotomies natural human knowledge and supernatural revelation, reason and faith, science and religion, in particular — and again Strauss is right. Because, just as Voegelin has here discerned the human element in revelation and the presence of revelatory experience (faith) as undergirding Greek philosophy from its pre-Socratic beginnings through its climax in Plato and Aristotle, so also he is moving in the direction that takes him, in the decades ahead, to an analysis of reason (nous and noesis) in classical philosophy that greatly widens our understanding of it and attributes the notion of merely "natural reason" to a misunderstanding fostered by the medieval Christian philosophers.23 The human reality of philosophy no less than of Judaic and Christian revelation is the metaxy or participatory reality of the In-Between of divine-human encounter, to hint at the later formulations.
How closely faith and reason verge can instructively be seen from a passage from Voegelin's Candler Lectures of 1967, entitled "The Drama of Humanity," where he was able to enumerate ten meanings of Reason in Plato and Aristotle, as follows.
Reason is:
1. the consciousness of existing from a Ground, an awareness filled with content and not empty. Reason is thereby the instrument for handling world-immanent reality. Rebellion against reason since the eighteenth century creates a void in this dimension that must then be filled by substitutes
2. the transcendence of human existence, thereby establishing the poles of consciousness: immanent-transcendent
3. the creative Ground of existence which attracts man to itself
4. the sensorium whereby man understands himself to exist from a Ground
5. the articulation of this understanding through universal ideas
6. the perseverance through lifetime of concern about one's relation to the Ground, generative of existential virtue: phronesis (wisdom, prudence), philia (friendship), and athanatizein (to immortalize human existence)
7. the effort to order existence by the insight gained through understanding the self to be existentially linked to the Ground and attuned to it: the major intellectual operation of so translating consequences of this insight as to form daily habits in accordance with it
8. the persuasive effort to induce conscious participation of the self, and other men's conscious participation, in transcendent reason (Plato's peitho). The problem of communicating and propagating the truth of being
9. the constituent of man through his participation in (the reason of) the Ground; or the constituent force in man qua human through participation in the divine Nous which is his specific essence
10. the constituent of society as the Homonoia or "like-mindedness" of Everyman in a community formed through recognition of the reason common to all men. In Aristotle, if love within the community is not based upon regard for the divinity of reason in the other man, then the political friendship (philia politike) on which a well-ordered community depends cannot exist. The source of the Christian notion of "human dignity" is the common divinity in all men. Nietzsche perceived that if that is surrendered then there is no reason to love anybody, one consequence of which is the loss of the sense and force of obligation in society and, hence, of its cohesiveness
If any of the enumerated components of reason is lost, imbalanced constructions result which eventuate in psychological and social breakdowns and disintegrations. As is suggested by this listing of the meanings of reason in Plato and Aristotle, noetic reason is philosophic or scientific reason, an activity of the consciousness articulated out of experience in a variety of interrelated symbolisms and symbolic forms.24
In his Aquinas Lecture of 1975, entitled "The Beginning and the Beyond," Voegelin characterizes the relationships between philosophy and revelation in this way:
The dichotomies of Faith and Reason, Religion and Philosophy, Theology and Metaphysics can no longer be used as ultimate terms of reference when we have to deal with experiences of divine reality, with their rich diversification in the ethnic cultures of antiquity, with their interpretation in the cultures of the ecumenic empires, with the transition of consciousness from the truth of the intra-cosmic gods to the truth of the divine Beyond, with the contemporary expansion of the horizon to the global ecumene. We can no longer ignore that the symbols of "Faith" express the responsive quest of man just as much as the revelatory appeal, and that the symbols of "Philosophy" express the revelatory appeal just as much as the responsive quest. We must further acknowledge that the medieval tension between Faith and Reason derives from the origins of these symbols in the two different ethnic cultures of Israel and Hellas, that in the consciousness of Israelite prophets and Hellenic philosophers the differentiating experience of the divine Beyond was respectively focused on the revelatory appeal and the human quest, and that the two types of consciousness had to face new problems when the political events of the Ecumenic Age cut them loose from their moorings in the ethnic cultures and forced their confrontation under the multicivilizational conditions of an ecumenic empire.25
Had Leo Strauss lived to read these words, it seems likely that his reaction might have been much as it was in his ironic letter of 4 June 1951: "Said in one sentence — I believe that philosophy in the Platonic sense is possible and necessary — you believe that philosophy understood in this sense was made obsolete by revelation. God knows who is right." 
[This is the second of 4 Parts. Part 1 may be read HERE. ]
NOTES
14. Strauss to Voegelin, 10 December 1950.
15. Strauss to Voegelin, 25 February 1951.
16. Ibid.
17. On the point, see the instructive discussion of the transformation of the "living order of Israel" into "the 'religion of the book'" in Voegelin, Order and History 1:376-79; also 120, 288, 381; cf. ibid. 2:218-19. On nous and pistis in Plato's Republic see ibid. 3:113-14.
18. Voegelin to Strauss, 22 April 1951.
19. See the recent analysis of this defining theme by Paul Caringella, "Voegelin: Philosopher of Divine Presence," in Ellis Sandoz, ed., Eric Voegelin's Significance for the Modem Mind (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), 174-206.
20. Voegelin to Strauss, 22 April 1951.
21. Cf. Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, 76-80. For the later work, especially pertinent are the essays reprinted in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 12, Published Essays, 1966-1985, ed. Sandoz, including "Immortality: Experience and Symbol," 52-94 [reprinted in the present volume]; "Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History," 115-33; "Reason: The Classic Experience," 265-91; "Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme: A Meditation," 315-75; and "Quod Deus Dicitur," 376-94. Of capital importance for the matters at hand also is Eric Voegelin, "The Beginning and the Beyond: A Meditation on Truth," in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 28, What Is History: And Other Late Unpublished Writings, eds. Thomas A. Hollweck and Paul Caringella (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 173-232.
22. Strauss to Voegelin, 4 June 1951.
23. See the works cited in the previous note, especially Voegelin, "The Beginning and the Beyond," in Collected Works 28:210-11, for the present point. The relationship of noesis and pistis is analyzed in ibid. 12:273-74. That, and in what respects, Voegelin's position leaves him vulnerable on multiple grounds to being charged with the so-called "Modernist" heresy condemned by Roman Catholicism is observed and discussed by Fortin, "Men of Letters," Crisis, 34-35. Voegelin long ago understood this problem quite clearly himself, as is explicit in his letter to Alfred Schütz, 1 January 1953: "All that I have said about the problem of 'essential Christianity' is . . . untenable from the Catholic standpoint and would have to be classified as a variant of that Modernism which has been condemned as a heresy" (reprinted in Opitz and Sebba, eds., The Philosophy of Order, 457). On the meaning and extent of the heresy Modernism, see Richard P. McBrien, Catholicism: Study Edition (Minneapolis, Minn.: Winston Press, 1981), 55-56, 218-23, 644-55. On his concern for Christian orthodoxy, on the other hand, see Voegelin, "Response to Professor Altizer's 'A New History and a New but Ancient God?'" in Collected Works 12:292-95; also "Quod Deus Dicitur," ibid., 376-83.
24. Quoted from Ellis Sandoz, "The Philosophical Science of Politics Beyond Behavioralism," in George J. Graham and George W. Carey, eds., The Post Behavioral Era (New York: McKay, 1972), 301-2. This same volume, interestingly enough, included Leo Strauss's essay entitled "Political Philosophy and the Crisis of Our Time," 217-42. The Candler Lectures remained otherwise unpublished, but Voegelin's work along the lines indicated by the enumeration of nous's meaning in classical philosophy reached its finished form in the previously cited essay, "Reason: The Classic Experience," Collected Works 12:265-91.
25. Voegelin, Collected Works 28:210-11. For the references to "Ecumenic Age" and related matters, see Voegelin, Order and History, vol. 4, The Ecumenic Age (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), 114-70.
