Truth and Ecumenicity

The language of truth is spoken in many dialects and no absolute partition between revelation and noesis is empirically or theoretically supportable, whatever the institutional differentiations. As Voegelin informed his political science students in Munich from time to time, one cannot go back of revelation and pretend it never happened. If apperceptive experience forms the empirical ground of philosophical inquiry and exegesis, then one must attend to insights from that and every other quarter whenever they arise as events of consciousness in concrete individual human beings to form the articulate experiences-symbolizations of noetic exploration.  

That philosophy by this accounting must be in some sense empirically grounded, and not merely imaginative word-play or logorrhea, however brilliant, if it is to be epistemologically cogent, immediately puts Voegelin at odds with both ideologues devising imaginary second realities (for whom experience is terribly “inconvenient”) and much else that otherwise passes for contemporary “autonomous” philosophizing.¹³

That it bridges the distance between pneumatic and noetic discourse to embrace both offends the self-appointed custodians of both revelation and academic philosophy. (So there goes the readership.) Nonetheless, there is this firmly reiterated conclusion: “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. . . . The reflective action of [Plato and Aristotle] is a quest by concrete human beings in response to a divine appeal from the Beyond of the soul.”¹⁴