The Spirit of Voegelin's Late Work —Part 1

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 taken from his most recent book, Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America, available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay will appear in four parts. It appears with permission of the publisher.

Did the "Scientific" Triumph over the "Spiritual"?

The principal work by Voegelin written in the final years of his life and published posthumously includes the final volume of Order and History, entitled In Search of Order, his deathbed meditation dictated to Paul Caringella, "Quod Deus Dicitur," and the unfinished Aquinas Lecture titled "The Beginning and the Beyond: A Meditation on Truth."¹ While a great deal need not be made of the patently incomplete character of each of these documents, construing the silence of omissions has led to various interpretive debates in the secondary literature about the possibly "changed" views of the "late" Voegelin on crucial matters. The principal issues raised deserve brief mention and clarification from my perspective at the outset of this discussion.

§1

In particular, there have been questions raised about the triumph of his "scientific" side over his "spiritual" side in the final writings — a false dichotomy, in my view. There was a hinted emergence of two "schools" of interpretation pitting a German against an alleged American interpre­tation of the master's thought. Such an odd outbreak of nationalism aside, the emergence of an interpretive divergence of some sort seems undeniable. But its depth and justifiability when measured against Voegelin's texts themselves are questions that are more opaque and probably must remain so as largely accounted for by the predispositions of the interpreters and not merely or even primarily by complexities in the work being interpreted.²

To put matters simply: Was Eric Voegelin a scientist to the marrow of his bones? Yes. Was he a mystic-philosopher in all of his work from the 1920s until the very end of his life? Yes — by express self-declaration so from the 1960s. Can one be both mystic-philosopher and political scientist in the philosophical sense estab­lished in classical antiquity by Plato and Aristotle? Yes — and that was Voegelin's position as I read it, as I think he himself intended it, and as I have tried to portray it in my own studies of him. I do not see a change of heart in the late Voegelin on these basic issues.

The silences in his late writings on the specific subject of Christianity cannot be construed as evidence of a change of heart. To argue otherwise involves something akin to reading tea leaves. The subject matter of Christianity lay ahead in In Search of Order, as he plainly indicates, and time ran out before he ever got to it. Shall we then fault Voegelin for an untimely death? He did all he could. Moreover, the experience of transcendent divine Reality is obviously and profoundly the subject of "Quod Deus Dicitur," evidently the latest of all the late writings. There is a different tone in the last volume of Order and History to which we must be atten­tive, to be sure. In "Quod Deus Dicitur," however, the tone is familiar, and one hears a mystic-philosopher speaking until he can speak no more — and quoting in the process from a document that contains (so far as I know) one of the most direct statements of his abiding devotion to Christianity ever reduced to the printed page,³ as well as from the final part of In Search of Order.

I take the "two-Voegelin" characterization to be at best misleading: There is one Voegelin whose complex and profound thought deserves to be understood on its own terms. But there may be real issues here nonetheless. Some evidently center, in part, on uneasiness with a per­ceived "religious" Voegelin and, in part, on the question of an academi­cally "useable" Voegelin in a period of rampant scientism where religion is passé or worse. This evident climate of opinion seems bleakly domi­nant for the foreseeable future, and it is plainly dominant at the expense of the life of the soul— as it always has been.

Thus, it may be arguably true that the power and stature of Eric Voegelin's scholarly achievement can never gain any real attention in the "mainstream" intellectual life of our time, if it is portrayed as fundamentally grounded in spiritual experiences and is, thus, in some sense "religious" and to be dismissed out of hand as such. There is more than a little to this argument, I must agree, and it poses something of a dilemma. To speak as I do in following the sources of a "philosophical science" rooted in the work of a "mystic-philosopher" who affirms the cardinal importance of human participation in the divine Ground of being, of the reality of the life of the spirit as the basis of noetic science, may seem to invite a strategic catastrophe for the intellectual and academic cause of Eric Voegelin. This is not because of what Voegelin did in fact achieve. Rather it is because of the company he may seem to be keeping (i.e., obscurantists, crackpots, fanatics, and other deluded enthusiasts as the religious are regularly caricatured by Hollywood, the public media, and sneering intellectuals, for instance) when his work of a lifetime is so characterized and pigeonholed.

He himself had mild misgivings on this score, fearful of possibly being identified as one more California guru. It is at least possible that the austere style of presentation of In Search of Order was partly intended as a prophylaxis against any such absurd confusion. Perhaps there is a perception and packaging prob­lem, in short. Protecting the core of the work of an erudite and ab­solutely solid analytical philosopher certainly assumes importance on this consideration.

Well, what shall we do about that, one wonders? Let him become a phenomenologist or a hermeneuticist or, perhaps, a quasi-Catholic philosopher so that the learned academy in its devotion to these re­spected strands of scholarship will at least be able to breathe a collective sigh of relief and relate him to their own respectable professional en­deavors? Voegelin's debts and suggested similarities to Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Scheler could be stressed.⁴ The connective tissue is truly there, the contexts and affinities legitimately cited, and the philosophical company suitably distinguished. Much good could come of it, to be sure.

But can the decisive differences unique to Voegelin survive such processes of comparison and assimilation, I wonder? Some such move does serve to underscore the steady and sustained interest of Voegelin early and late in devising the groundwork for a more adequate political science, one that thereby could be rendered more palatable to secular-minded contemporary academics and to their students. There is some­thing to be said in favor of this approach, considered as a stratagem. Better half a loaf than no bread at all, to think along with these advo­cates and to think politically. The real Voegelin is a scandal, we might whisper softly to ourselves in dark of night. We crave respectability and seek to make an impact, to be successful — not simply to disappear into the abyss of forgotten labors, unread books, and lost opportunities purged from memory, lemmings into the sea. Prudence itself dictates such a course, goes the siren song. Moreover, conscientious scholars with the best of good intentions will disagree over the meaning of the complicated material they are studying and do so in good faith. Honest disagreements are simply inevitable.

Under these circumstances, I can only say that, tempting as it may be, the prudential calculation — if that becomes the driving considera­tion — is inadmissible as distorting the material on principle, if and when it is carried out to the neglect of the overall content of Voegelin's work. To look for the context of Voegelin's science, to relate it to its origins in the history of German Geisteswissenschaft, and to see it as developing that scholarly mode as a dimension of contemporary philoso­phy and science may be entirely legitimate, providing the account does not become reductionist in the process.⁵ To discover ways in which Voegelin's work fits into the broad spectrum of movements of contem­porary theory is valuable and important — if one does not ideologize his thought in the process by (say) supposedly rescuing him from the conservative-reactionary camp by assimilating him to a left-liberal posi­tion more compatible with the interpreter's own political commitments.

It has to be stressed (as I have done elsewhere on more than one occa­sion) that Eric Voegelin was, indeed, above all a philosopher and a scientist, not a party hack or politically correct ideologue of any stripe. Nobody is entitled through any device whatever with impunity to turn him into one posthumously.⁶ Details regarding the complex debate over the scope of meditation and meaning of science in Voegelin's late work must be left to other occasions.⁷ However, it is important to re­mind ourselves of the rudiments of Voegelin's noetic science as he has stated matters himself. Such a concise statement is given in Science, Politics, and Gnosticism §1, where the episteme politike is discussed, and its reliance on Aristotle's Analytica Posteriora, with a caveat and elaboration — as follows:

When we speak or scientific analysis, we wish to emphasize the contrast with formal analysis. An analysis by means of formal logic can lead to no more than a demonstration that an opinion suffers from an inherent contradiction, or that different opinions contradict one another, or that conclusions have been invalidly drawn. A scientific analysis, on the other hand, makes it possible to judge of the truth of the premises implied by an opinion. It can do this, however, only on the assumption that truth about the order of being — to which, of course, opinions also refer—is objectively ascertainable.

 

And Platonic-Aristotelian analysis does in fact operate on the assumption that there is an order of being accessible to a science beyond opinion. Its aim is knowledge of the order of being, of the levels of the hierarchy of being and their interrelationships, of the essential structure of the realms of being, and especially of human nature and its place in the totality of being. Analysis, therefore, is scientific and leads to a science of order through the fact that, and insofar as, it is ontologically oriented. . . . The decisive event in the establishment of politike episteme was the specifically philosophical [i.e., noetic] realization that the levels of being discernible within the world are surmounted by a tran­scendent source of being and its order. And this insight was itself rooted in the real movements of the human spiritual soul toward divine Being experienced as transcendent.

In the experiences of love for the world-transcendent origin of being, in philia toward the sophon (the wise), in eros toward the agathon (the good) and the kalon (the beautiful), man became philosopher. From these experiences arose the image of the order of being. At the opening of the soul — that is the metaphor Bergson uses to describe the event — the order of being becomes visible even to its Ground and origin in the Beyond, the Platonic epekeina, in which the soul participates as it suffers and achieves its opening.

 

Only when the order of being as a whole, unto its origin in transcendent Being, comes into view, can the analysis be under­taken with any hope of success; for only then can current opinions about right order be examined as to their agreement with the order of being. When the strong and successful are highly rated, they can then be contrasted with those who possess the virtue of phronesis, who live sub specie mortis and act with the Last Judg­ment in mind.⁸

For those ready to object that this was formulated in 1958 and things changed afterward (and of course some things did change, but not the foundations of Voegelin noetic science), there is a pertinent reply by Voegelin to the question of a shift from the 1966 version of the theory of consciousness and the elaboration set forth in his final book, an answer he gave in March 1983.

Questioner: ". . . could you comment on any developments in your notion of Intentionality from Anamnesis to the first chapter of [In Search of Order]?'

Voegelin: "Well, I don't know if it's a development. It's just a more accurate description of the complexes; of the problem of complex itself; of the concept of tension (it's better developed); all of these tensions and systems of complexes."     

Questioner: "But you wouldn't deny anything you said in Anamnesis?"

Voegelin: "No. I rarely have something to deny because I always stick close to the empirical materials and do not generalize beyond them. . . . I would only hesitate to go beyond the formulation of the tensions and the complexes, because I see no real experiences of anything going beyond that formulation."'⁹        

[This is the first of 4 Parts. Part 2 will appear next week.]

NOTES   

(for full citations see the bibliography in Professor Sandoz' book)

 Eric Voegelin began dictating "Quod Deus Dicitur" on January 2, 1985, the day before his eighty-fourth birthday. He revised the last pages on January 16; further revisions were made on January 17 and in the afternoon of January 18, his last full day before his death on Saturday the nineteenth at about eight in the morning. 

  When the dictation reached Anselm's prayer, Voegelin provisionally inserted pertinent pages from an earlier manuscript, with minor adjustments. He simi­larly adapted at the beginning of Sec. 5 a paragraph from his "Response to Pro­fessor Altizer" (. . .1975 . . .). His discussion of Hesiod's Theogony and Plato's Timneus in the last pages and in the planned conclusion is based on the full ana­lytical treatment in the last thirty-odd pages of the unfinished fifth and last vol­ume of his Order and History.