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
Behind these formulations stand two philosophers both victimized and appalled by the deculturation and banality of modernity, who devoted their lives to the recovery of true philosophy, Strauss on the basis of the medieval Arabic and Jewish philosophy of Averroës, Alfarabi, and Maimonides; Voegelin by a far-reaching critical revision of the medieval Christian philosophy of Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, and Eckhart. This is not to question that from their divergent perspectives, both men took classical philosophy and the science of man and being it achieved with utmost seriousness, or that each deeply, even fervently, believed his interpretation to be both true to the texts and in accord with the "real" self-understanding Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle had of the philosopher's calling. It is entirely understandable that a "nonbeliever," as Strauss termed himself, and a mystic philosopher in the Christian tradition would not see eye to eye about ultimate things.
How, indeed, could it be otherwise? And both Strauss and Voegelin believed that they avoided religious dogma out of devotion to the quest for the truth of being, one in the name of ancient rationalism, the other in the name of the fundamental experiences and their noetic and pneumatic articulation through several modes of symbolization. Thus, to Voegelin the core problem of all philosophy was the problem of transcendence — meaning not the immanent transcendence of Husserl and of the nature-based philosophy of Strauss, but the transcendence of divine Being. His definition is given at the beginning of Order and History in the following words and are taken as true to philosophy as Plato perfected it:
Philosophy is the love of being through love of divine Being as the source of its order. The Logos of being is the object proper of philosophical inquiry; and the search for truth concerning the order of being cannot be conducted without diagnosing the modes of existence in untruth. The truth of order has to be gained and regained in the perpetual struggle against the fall from it; and the movement toward truth starts from a man's awareness of his existence in untruth. The diagnostic and therapeutic functions are inseparable in philosophy as a form of existence. And ever since Plato, in the disorder of his time, discovered the connection, philosophical inquiry has been one of the means of establishing islands of order in the disorder of the age. Order and History is a philosophical inquiry concerning the order of human existence in society and history. Perhaps it will have its remedial effect — in the modest measure that, in the passionate course of events, is allowed to Philosophy.28
As one recent commentator has remarked after surveying the Voegelinian corpus, "Voegelin adumbrates a philosophy of spiritual ascent, of which there are famous examples, such as Plotinus, Plato, St. Bonaventura, and Meister Eckhart."29 If the understanding of reason is so expanded as to reassert the participatory and intuitive dimensions of classical philosophy's Nous, the understanding of faith and revelation also is reevaluated — and it emphatically is not creedal, doctrinal, or dogmatic faith that is at issue in Voegelin's work. In reflectively groping toward his later (1975) formulation of the matter quoted at the end of the preceding section, he finds in Strauss's Philosophy and Law (1930) substantial agreement with his own understanding of the fundamental experience of the divine cosmos as the background of all experiences of order. "I have the impression that you have retreated from an understanding of the prophetic (religious) foundation of philosophizing (with which I would heartily agree) to a theory of episteme, and that you refuse to see the problem of episteme in connection with experience, out of which it emerges." Almost sorrowfully, Voegelin continues, "Why you do this, I do not know. And how this position can work . . . I cannot predict."30
As noticed earlier, Strauss acknowledges that "the law has primacy" and that "I basically still stand on the same ground" as fifteen years before, but with deeper understanding. "I believe still today that the theioi nomoi is the common ground of the Bible and philosophy — humanly speaking." But the multitude of divine laws so confuse things as to lead to solutions diametrically opposed to one another in the Bible and in philosophy. He rejects any blending of the two, contending that every "synthesis is actually an option either for Jerusalem or for Athens."31 For Voegelin, the theoretization of this problem by Augustine is essentially valid for an understanding of the relationship of science (especially metaphysics) and revelation.
Revealed knowledge is, in the building of human knowledge, that knowledge of the pregivens of perception (sapientia, closely related to the Aristotelian nous as distinguished from episteme). To these pregivens belongs the experience of man of himself as esse, nosse, velle, the inseparable primal experience: I am a knowing and willing being; I know myself as being and willing; I will myself as a being and a knowing human. (For Augustine in the worldly sphere, the symbol of the trinity: the Father — Being; the Son — the recognizable order; the Spirit — the process of being in history). To these pregivens belongs further the being of God beyond time (in the just characterized dimensions of creation, order, and dynamic) and the human knowledge of this being through "revelation." Within this knowledge pregiven by sapientia stirs the philosophic episteme.32
Strauss remains adamant, however, in seeing this as a problem traditionally comprehensible in terms of faith and knowledge, but not of universal faith, and as a particularly Christian, and by extension, a Jewish, problem. Hence, the problem is not a universal-human one but "presupposes a specific faith, which philosophy as philosophy does not and cannot do. Here and here alone it seems to me lies the divergence between us — also in the mere historical."33 The richness and subtlety of the debate does not lend itself to adequate summary. The prefiguration of the outcome is Strauss's early reaction: "What you wrote about Plato and Aristotle naturally interested me quite directly . . . . I do not hold this interpretation to be correct. But it is toweringly superior to nearly all that one gets to read about Plato and Aristotle."34
The gentleness and civility of Strauss himself, it must be said, is not always emulated by all who identify with his cause, and the silence that descended on these correspondents after publication of the initial volumes of
Order and History was briefly if stridently shattered by a long essay in The
Review of Metaphysics in which Voegelin's whole interpretation of Hellenic philosophy was resoundingly rejected (for, among other reasons) as existentialist, theologico-historicist, Christian, fideistic and not scientific, empiricist, mystical, Toynbeean, Thomistic, too concerned with experience and too little concerned with reason, theological, politically neglectful, egalitarian, liberal, reductionist in seeing Plato's myths as revelation, oblivious to the tension between theory and practice, inverting the classic philosophic theory of the relationship between being and history (historicism, again), blocking instead of fostering access to Greek philosophy because of Christian assumptions in quasi-Hegelian dress. "Voegelin is forced by his commitments both to reject Hellenism and at the same time to preserve it in unrecognizable form." "He excludes the possibility of a non-empiricist and non-mystical philosophy." "It is not easy," the author patronizingly sighs, "to make such a judgment of what may well be a devout man's life work."
35 After this blast, there was little more that could usefully be said. Silence reigned.
[This is the Third of 4 Parts. Part 1 may be read HERE.
Part 2 may be read HERE.]
NOTES
26. Strauss to Voegelin, 17 March 1949.
27. Strauss to Voegelin, 24 November 1942.
28. Voegelin, Israel and Revelation, xiv. For the express statement that transcendence is the "decisive problem of philosophy," see Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis: Zur Theorie der Geschichte und Politik (Munich: R. Piper Verlag, 1966), 36, 46-48; the first page references a line in Voegelin's letter to Alfred Schütz of 17-20 September 1943, which Voegelin invites Strauss to get from Schütz and read if he is interested and which Strauss, then, reads and reacts to (Letters 10 and 11, herein).
29. Paul G. Kuntz, "Voegelin's Experiences of Order Out of Disorder," in Sandoz, ed., Eric Voegelin' s Significance for the Modem Mind, 138.
30. Voegelin to Strauss, 21 February 1951, Letter 36. Thus, already in 1957 Voegelin wrote of the meaning of Nous:". . . even in Aristotle it still has an amplitude of meaning from intellection to faith" (Order and History, vol. II, Plato and Aristotle, 208).
31. Strauss to Voegelin, 25 February 1951, Letter 37. The medieval roots of the primacy of law in Strauss's thought are carefully explored in Hillel Fradkin, "Philosophy and Law: Leo Strauss as a Student of Medieval Jewish Thought," Review of Politics 53 (Winter 1991): 40-52, esp. 49-52.
32. Voegelin to Strauss, 22 April 1951, Letter 38.
33. Strauss to Voegelin, 4 June 1951, Letter 39. For "mere historical," see Letter 35.
34. Strauss to Voegelin, 20 December 1942, Letter 5.
35. Stanley Rosen, "Order and History," Review of Metaphysics 12 (December 1958): 258, 268, 276, and passim. The reader is helpfully directed to "a definitive discussion [of the relation between religion and philosophy], with full references," namely Strauss's Persecution and the Art of Writing (ibid., 267n.).
