Taking a Chance on Love

by Fritz Wagner

In the Church calender, this past Monday was celebrated as the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul. In his homily at that Mass, the celebrant mentioned the late philosopher Martin Buber as representing the viewpoint that "the problem with Christianity is St. Paul."  It got us thinking. And, not surprisingly, our thoughts turned to Eric Voegelin and specifically the shock that many Christians experienced after reading Voegelin's appraisal of St. Paul. This happened with the publication of Volume IV of Order and History, The Ecumenic Age, in 1974.

Volume III of O & H, Plato and Aristotle, had appeared in 1957. So Voegelin admirers had eagerly waited the appearance of The Ecumenic Age some seventeen years later. They anticipated that after Voegelin had justly measured Israel and the Greeks in the first three volumes, he would now establish Christianity as the high point of culture, spirit and history, after first putting the ancient empires in perspective. 

It didn't quite work out that way. Voegelin had developed a new way of thinking in those intervening years. 

First, he came to see meaning in society and in the life of the individual as depending on personal experience and not received ideas. He came to think of ideas as being derived from experience, and the question became: Do I rely on someone else's ideas derived from his experiences, regardless of whether I have shared the underlying experiences?

Second, he concluded that his own emphasis on a single line of historical meaning beginning with Israel and the Greeks and passing through Rome and Christianity down to the present was in itself tinged with a kind of gnostic arrogance. There were parallel lines of development and the thought that "how lucky I am to be in the center of historical meaning" claims too much.

These shifts showed a new emphasis rather than a repudiation of his earlier thought, but it changed the way he wrote when he took up The Ecumenic Age.

Some people back in 1974 thought "The Pauline Vision of the Resurrected" repudiated traditional Christianity. Voegelin insists that the truth of Christianity is found in the experience of it and not in a critical examination of historical events. He examines what is available — in this essay St. Paul's experience as recorded in the epistles. As Voegelin puts it, the "content" is not an "object of propositional knowledge."  This is not any sort of assault on Christianity.  Rather it points the Christian to the experienced truth that makes up his own spiritual life.                        

January 27, 2010