The Spirit of Voegelin's Late Work —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 taken from his most recent book, Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America, available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay appears in four parts. It appears with permission of the publisher.

§ 2.  "A Dry Soul is Wisest and Best"

Our brief reflections on the two principal writings open with "Quod Deus Dicitur," and then turn to In Search of Order. Voegelin does in some degree move beyond earlier formulations even as he reiterates some of them in exploring the tension toward the divine Realissimum in his final meditation. In the process he gives hints on the Christian experiential horizon — a subject definitely on his mind. I say that ad­visedly, given the title of the meditation and on the grounds that, not only do we have here his very last utterances dictated during the last sixteen days of his life, but also because of Lissy Voegelin's report of their conversations to this effect, with Voegelin telling her: "At last I understand Christianity!" And she responding: "Yes, Eric, but you're going to take it with you!" ¹⁰ So he did. We have only a fragment, much of it drawn from previous writings. Does this confirm these earlier views? I think it does, and it thereby argues the continuity of Voegelin's thought. What is the tenor of the meditation?

"A dry soul is wisest and best," wrote Heraclitus, and Voegelin agreed.¹¹ On occasion of his discussion of Heraclitus, he concluded with the following:

The transcendental irruption which makes the generation of the mystic-philosophers an epoch in the history of mankind has profoundly affected the problem of social order up to the present because the old collective order on the less differentiated level of consciousness is under permanent judgment (krisis) by the new authority, while the new order of the spirit is socially an aristocratic achievement of charismatic individuals, of the "dry souls" who can say: "I have come to throw fire on the earth . . . . Do you believe I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, rather divi­sion" (Luke 12:49, 51).¹²

The spirit of his "Quod Deus Dicitur" is in this same vein of affective austerity and invocation of the authority of the dry souls for their in­sight. He wishes to know "what is said to be God?" — what is called " It," as the comprehending Divinity of the Beyond of the gods of myth and doctrine is symbolized in the language of In Search of Order. He explores this question during his final days and hours in sustained converse, as was his anamnestic method, with the great philosophical meditatives of history. Beginning from the formulation in the title as given by Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae 1.2.3), he analytically moves in succession to Anselm of Canterbury and Hegel, to Plato, to Psalm 13 (in the Vulgate, 14 in KJV), nods to Jeremiah and Isaiah, moves back to Plato's resistance to the sophists and especially to Gorgias and the distinction between apodeixis and epideixis for properly under­standing the so-called "proofs" of God's existence, to the meaning of theology in the Republic and Laws, to the ambivalent responsiveness of Aristophanes, to the recollection of the "One" in Parmenides's differen­tiation of the Beyond of the many gods of Hesiod, to the meaning of the differentiation in Plato's one "God" in the Timaeus, to end with thoughts remembered from In Search of Order:

For Hesiod, Zeus is no god unless there is a divine reality Beyond the gods. In these Hesiodian symbolizations we recognize the first intimations of the comprehending (periechon) Beyond that ulti­mately becomes the epekeina of Plato.¹³

The material intended for further reflection but unable to be di­rectly attended to, noted by Caringella, consisted of the following: the all enfolding divine of Anaximander and Aristotle's commentary on it; the prayer of Plotinus (Enneads 5.1.6); the prayer of the Timaeus (48d-53c); Goethe's "mental prayer"; the equivalent Christian experiences-symbolizations in Colossians 2:9: "For in [Christ] dwells all of the fulness [pleroma] of the Godhead bodily"; and in Aquinas's Tetragrammaton (ST1. 13.11.1).¹⁴

Voegelin's meditative path is an exploration of the consciousness of God experienced, not as an objectified thing, but rather as "the partner in a questing search that moves within a reality formed by participatory language." Moreover, the "noetic search for the structure of a reality that includes divinity is itself an event within the reality we are ques­tioning. . . . [A]t every point . . . we are faced with the problem of an inquiry into something experienced as real before the inquiry into the structure of its reality has begun."¹⁵ This is a primary event: Our reason in search of our faith is at the same time our faith in search of our reason!

The quest is an event and a historical process, seen against the back­ground of two major civilizational contexts: (1) the emergence of "God" from the polytheistic background of Hellas and (2) the emer­gence of "God" from "the tension between doctrinal and mystical theol­ogy in the Christian societies since antiquity."¹⁶ These experiences-symbolizations produce an array of language dominating discourse on the subject but "stabilized" at a comparatively compact level of intentionalistic topics ranging from philosophy and religion through natural theology and supernatural theology, without ever "penetrating to the fundamentally paradoxic structure of thought that is peculiar to the participatory relation between the process of thought and the reality in which it proceeds."¹⁷

The paradox (a prominent issue in the analysis of In Search of Order) principally lies in the relationship between (a) the divine-human encounter experienced in the search and (b) the reflective symbols arising in particular cultural and linguistic contexts that must be utilized in giving it noetic expression. In the instance of Thomas, the scriptural faith of I AM THAT I AM (Ex. 3:14; ego sum qui sum, in the Vulgate) is presupposed in the question concerning what is called God, at the core of which is the tension experienced-symbolized be­tween necessary Being and contingent being. "There is no divinity other than the necessity in tension with the contingency experienced in the noetic question."¹⁸ The nub of the paradox lies in the intentional, parochial, finite means of symbolization inevitably employed by philoso­phers (and other meditatives) to articulate the experiential event of their participatory encounter with the trans-finite divine Beyond.

The breaking out of the doctrinal impasse that compactly obscures the prob­lem of paradox composes significant parts of the history of Western philosophy (both differentiating and deforming) — sometimes, for in­stance, in terms of the so-called proofs of the existence of God from Plato to Aquinas through Descartes and Leibniz to Kant's rejection of such supposed efforts as untenable. But what, in fact, really is occurring in these places, Voegelin argues, is not syllogistic proofs but noetic analysis of the paradox of reality just circumscribed. So discerned by Hegel as being, not proofs, but descriptive analyses of the process of the Spirit (Geist) itself, he wrote: "The rising of thought beyond the sensual, the thought transcending the finite into the infinite, the leap that is made by breaking from the series of the sensual into the super-sensual, all this is thought itself, the transition is only thought itself."¹⁹

Clarifying though this is, Hegel's subsequent error is to deform his in­sight into the paradoxic structure by construing it as the definitive solu­tion of the problem of divinity in the process of thought and by then incorporating it into his finished conceptual system — thereby obscur­ing through "hypostatization" that "the noetic movement itself, the divine-human encounter, is still an active process in tension toward the symbols of faith."²⁰ Philosophy, Voegelin steadily insists, is ever the questing love of divine wisdom in the spiritual man responsive to the appeal of It-reality; philosophy can, therefore, never become the per­fected real science or knowledge (wirkliches Wissen) imagined by the li­bidinous systematizer and his epigones.²¹

Despite the deformation, however, Voegelin finds Hegel close to the optimal expression of the problem as experienced by Anselm of Canterbury; but he oversteps the bounds stated by Anselm in Proslogion XV: "'Oh Lord, you are not only that than which a greater cannot be conceived, but you are also greater than what can be conceived.' This is the limit of noetic conceptual analysis disregarded by Hegel." Voegelin then continues with this telling passage:

The noetic quest of Anselm . . . assumes the form of a prayer for an understanding of the symbols of faith through the intellect. Behind the quest, and behind the fides the quest is supposed to understand, there now becomes visible the true source of the Anselmian effort in the living desire of the soul to move toward the divine light. The divine reality lets the light of its perfection fall into the soul; the illumination of the soul arouses the awareness of man's existence as a state of imperfection; and this awareness provokes the human movement in response to the divine appeal.

The illumination, as St. Augustine names this experience, has for Anselm indeed the character of an appeal, and even of a counsel and promise. For in order to express the experience of illumination he quotes John 16:24: "Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full." The Johannine words of the Christ, and the Spirit that counsels in his name, words meant to be understood in their context, express the divine movement to which Anselm responds with the joyful countermovement of his quest (XXVI).

Hence, the latter part of the Proslogion consistently praises the divine light in the analogical language of perfection. Anselm's prayer is a meditatio de ratione fidei as he formulates the nature of the quest in the first title of the Monologion. The praying quest responds to the appeal of reason in the fides; the Proslogion is the fides in ac­tion, in pursuit of its own reason. St. Anselm, we must therefore conclude, clearly understood the cognitive structure as internal to the metaxy, the In-Between of the soul in the Platonic sense.²²

Voegelin's reliance on Saint Augustine must be stressed in connection with any assessment of the argument of In Search of Order. Thus, as he indicated in a letter to Leo Strauss:

With respect to the relationship of science (and especially meta­physics) and revelation, Augustine seems to me in principle to have shown the way. 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 as 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 important 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. I must confess that these pregivens appear to me quite acceptable.²³

The source of Voegelin's use of It to symbolize the encompassing di­vine Reality is vaguely given as the common expression "It rains"²⁴ and ascribed elsewhere to Nietzsche and to Karl Kraus, but it evidently also partakes of the neo-Platonic "light mysticism" of Saint Augustine and contemplatives influenced by his (and their) writings, including Anselm, Thus, Augustine writes:

By the Platonic books [i.e., Plotinus, Enneads 5.1.1, etc.] I was admonished to return into myself. With you [Lord] as my guide I entered into my innermost citadel, and was given power to do so because you had become my helper (Ps. 29:11). I entered and with my soul's eye, such as it was, saw above that same eye of my soul the immutable light higher than my mind — not the light of every day, obvious to anyone, nor a larger version of the same kind which would, as it were, have given out a much brighter light and filled everything with its magnitude. It was not that light, but a different thing, utterly different from all our kinds of light. It transcended my mind, not in the way that oil floats on water, nor as heaven is above earth. It was superior because it made me, and 1 was inferior because I was made by it. The person who knows the truth knows it, and he who knows it knows eternity. Love knows it. Eternal truth and true love and beloved eternity: you are my God. To you I sigh "day and night" (Ps. 42:2). When I first came to know you, you raised me up to make me see that what I saw is Being, and that I who saw am not yet Being. And you gave a shock to the weakness of my sight by the strong radiance of your rays, and I trembled with love and awe. ²⁵

In Julian of Norwich one finds the following meditation on I AM as more fully revealed in the Trinity:

I it am. That is to say, I it am, the Might and the Goodness of the Fatherhood; I it am, the Wisdom of the Motherhood; I it am, the Light and Grace that is all blessed Love; I it am, the Trinity, I it am, the Unity: I am the sovereign Goodness of all manner of things. I am that maketh thee to love: I am that maketh thee to long: I it am, the endless fulfilling of all true desires .²⁶         

[This is the second of 4 Parts. Part 3 will appear next week. Part 1 may be read HERE.]

NOTES   

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