The Spirit of Voegelin's Late Work —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 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.
§ 3. What is In Search of Order about?
The balance achieved by Anselm is never surpassed (as Voegelin's loving recollection of it implies), and the important implications can best be studied by the reader in the original. The stance of Voegelin at the end of his days is of a man living in responsive openness to the divine appeal. He finds that what is at stake is not God but the truth of human existence with the persuasive role of the philosopher unchanged since antiquity, the persistent partisan for reality — experienced in the propagation of existential truth: This is the scholar's true vocation. If there is an "answer" given to the question of his unfinished meditation, it may be glimpsed in an affirmation of the comprehending Oneness of divinity Beyond the plurality of gods and things. At the end of Voegelin's long struggle to understand, Reality experienced-symbolized is a mysterious ordered (and disordered) tensional oneness moving toward the perfection of its Beyond — not a system. 27
It is right, I think, to approach In Search of Order from the perspective gained through the foregoing consideration of "Quod Deus Dicitur." While the analysis there is directed toward the paradoxic structure of linguistic articulation of meditation as carried out by a philosopher, i.e., responsively by Voegelin himself, the substance of the study is that sketched already. Therefore, only the barest hints of the book need be attempted here. 28 This is because the dense intricacy of the analysis does not lend itself to cogent abridgment. But it is also because Voegelin himself is emphatic that no discursive teaching whatever can be derived from the class of decisive experiences such as the one just traced in Anselm. This is one further paradox to be considered, of course. Although he was writing explicitly about Plato's "fides of the Cosmos" in the Timaeus that "becomes transparent for the drama of the Beyond enacted, through the tensional process of the Cosmos, from demiurgic Beginning to a salvational End," Voegelin's strictures apply more generally, viz.:
No "Principles," or "absolutes," or "doctrines" can be extracted from this tensional complex; the quest for truth, as an event of participation in the process, can do no more than explore the structures in the divine mystery of the complex reality and, through the analysis of the experienced responses to the tensional pulls, arrive at some clarity about its own function in the drama in which it participates. 29
This is not a new insight on Voegelin's part, as one commentator summarizes his early perspective on the subject of participatory experience: "[A]nalysis of noetic acts and the person as the center of noetic acts revealed spirit to be incapable of reification. Spiritual and intellectual acts can only be understood by persons committing the same acts." With reference to the writings of Othmar Spann and Max Scheler, but also of the young Voegelin,
the "primacy of the spirit" in the human community is found in the primal community of man and God. In meditation as the ground form of philosophizing the conditions of noetic understanding are attained. Because the divine Ground of being resists reification, so too do the noetic acts of the person. The meditative movement of human consciousness, the via negationis which breaks every reification which interrupts communication between spirit and spirit (Gezweiung), is therefore the quintessential act of the human person. In the highest form of community, the unio mystica, the human discovers his true being in deo and through this his brother-and-sisterhood in humankind. This experience also gives the person the criteria for judging the untruthfulness of speculation which reduces humankind to mere worldly existence. 30
What then is In Search of Order about? Is there a guiding thread through the maze that gives meaning to the enterprise to the degree that it lies before us, an unfinished meditation? Perhaps the rule of reading is given in Voegelin's reiterated statement that the ineffable becomes effable in divine-human experience. In other words: The mystery of transcendent divine Being is not directly experientiable but only its effects (to use the "old" language of tradition and of his own earlier writings) as explored in the participatory quest of truth. The book is about Voegelin's quest of truth and the terms of that quest as the form of philosophizing dictated by his examination of the structure of his own reflective consciousness. We may grandly speak of his "theory of consciousness," of course. But the discipline of In Search of Order and its teaching for all who enter the quest for the truth of divine Reality is to avoid every intentionalist construction and every abstraction so as to stick to the concrete terminology of radically empirical analysis.
Thus, the old objectification of the dichotomous pairs immanent and transcendent and even of experience and symbolization all but disappears from the pages of this last book. That is not because Voegelin is safely back in the fold of naturalistic science in the mode of quantum theory or of hermeneutics. Rather it is because the rigor of analysis in the In-Between as participatory is more directly — i.e., economically and succinctly — articulated experientially by Plato's epekeina (Beyond) than it is when the more easily hypostatized language of entities and things creeps in as the mode of expressing the tension toward the divine Ground whose exploration is noesis proper.
The disciplined vocabulary attempts to obviate Intentionality in favor of the participatory perspective of the noetic quest, and thereby to make deformative lapses into doctrinalization, dogma, and hypostatization of the experiential tension's structure-process less likely in thought and discourse. These considerations should not, of course, be so construed as to obscure Voegelin's insistence upon the paradoxical Parousia of It-reality also in experiences of thing-reality, as intimated (for instance, within the biblical horizon) in Ephesians 4:6: "One God and Father of all, who [is] over all, and through all, and in all you." As one commentator summarizes: "Consciousness as metaxy or 'In-Between,' then, always participates intentionalistically in 'thing-reality' and luminously in 'It-reality' at the same time."31
Thus "God," so far from being abolished — to venture illustrations not given by Voegelin himself, to help clarify a cardinal point — is apperceived as the divine presence encountered in every waking hour. Reason (Nous) itself is not "natural" but partakes of the divine-human encounter and collaboration to understand. Parousia is so expanded as to include the experienced presence of the divine It-reality celebrated by meditatives as widely different as William Blake and the Psalmist, who experience the creation as transparent for the Creator behind it, and for the undisclosed (ineffable) divine depth Beyond, intimated through it — in harmony with the principle of analogia entis. While it may not be set to music, In Search of Order is Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus" in the chaste discourse of classical philosophy, the noetic effusion of a dry soul. It may not be poetry, but it is nonetheless filled with glimmerings of a mind ready
To see the world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower;
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour. 32
It breathes the vision of the Psalmist that
The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun. Which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race. 33
Already in his doctoral dissertation of 1922 on "Wechselwirkung und Gezweiung" (Interaction and Spiritual Community), following Max Scheler and Othmar Spann, and in the Herrschaftslehre (Theory of Governance), Voegelin understands the individual human person to be potentially imago dei, "the intersection of divine eternity and human temporality," and he never relinquished that fundamental insight into man and reality. As he later wrote, he regarded the experience of the Divine ground of being as the central problem of all philosophizing — whatever terminology he found from time to time to be most felicitous in exploring and articulating the experience. 34 A decade after Voegelin wrote the Herrschaftslehre T.S.. Eliot wrote:
But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless With time, is an
occupation for the saint —
. . . . . . . .
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is
Incarnation.
Here the impossible union. . . . 35
There is a thread to follow, indeed, and the continuity from Voegelin's young manhood onward is striking. Thus in his first book (published in 1928) he devotes a remarkable chapter to Jonathan Edwards's spirituality and writes: "In the first half of the eighteenth century, in the person of Jonathan Edwards, the separation of dogma from mysticism begins in [America]." As we observed in chapter 5, in The History of the Race Idea (1933) Voegelin opened his critique of the Nazi reductionist biological anthropology by resolutely juxtaposing classical and Christian understanding of human existence that it pretended finally to replace, as presented by Max Scheler and by Thomas à Kempis in Imitation of Christ: "'Every day is to be lived as if it were the last, and the soul should always be anxious for the world beyond the senses. Perfect calm of the soul can be found only in the eternal gaze upon God — . . . but this is not possible while I am in this mortal state.' "36
As previously noticed, The Political Religions (1938) concluded with Voegelin's contemptuous rejection of Nazi pretensions by invoking the Frankfurter: "The inner-worldly religiosity experienced by the collective body — be it humanity, the people, the class, the race, or the state — as the realissimum is abandonment of God . . . . According to the German Theology the belief that man is the source of good . . . is anti-Christian renunciation." 37 The epistemological issues were reflected in The New Science of Politics (1952) where Voegelin restricted existential faith to the arena of consciousness (glossing Hebrews 11:1) and revelation to the experiential fact of God's presence in reflective consciousness:
The experience of mutuality in the relation with God, of the amicitia in the Thomistic sense, of the grace that imposes a supernatural form on the nature of man, is the specific difference of Christian truth. The revelation of this grace in history, through the incarnation of the Logos in Christ, intelligibly fulfilled the adventitious movement of the spirit in the mystic philosophers [of antiquity]. The critical authority over the older truth of society that the soul had gained through its opening and its orientation toward the unseen measure [in Plato] was now confirmed through the revelation of the measure itself. In this sense, then, it may be said that the fact of revelation is its content. 38
Four years later in Israel and Revelation (1956) Voegelin formulated the matter at issue in these words: "Philosophy can touch no more than the being of the substance whose order flows through the world."39 The apparent meagerness of the contemplative's result is stressed by Voegelin on a number of occasions, partly a paradoxical outgrowth of what he took to be one of the most important insights of Jean Bodin in the midst of the sixteenth-century religious civil wars in France, an insight framed in Bodin's letter of 1563 to his friend Jean Bautru: "I had written to you in prior letters to this effect: do not allow conflicting opinions about religion to carry you away; only bear in mind this fact: genuine religion is nothing other than the sincere direction of a cleansed mind toward God." 40
Near the end of his life Voegelin stressed the signal importance of the sentiment and its prudential consequences for our pluralistic world: "Understanding the problem of mysticism as the simple doctrinal understanding of phronesis would be desirable as a task for educators today: reading Bodin's Lettre a Jean Bautru . . . as a fundamental text in every university of the future, which every student must learn." 41 
[This is the third of 4 Parts. Part 1 may be read HERE.]
NOTES
(for fuller citations see the bibliography in Professor Sandoz' book)
27. Voegelin, "Quod Deus Dicitur," 291-92; In Search of Order, 109; Voegelin, OH IV, The Ecumenic Age, 233-35.
28. The reader may also wish to consult the original and more recent introductions I prepared for the book's 1987 and 1999 republication as part of the Collected Works (CW 18).
29. In Search of Order, 123. William James pertinently observed over a century ago:
This incommunicableness of the [mystic's experience) is the keynote of all mysticism. Mystical truth exists for the individual who has the [experience], but for no one else. In this . . . it resembles the knowledge given to us in sensations more than that given by conceptual thought. Thought, with its remoteness and abstractness, has often enough in the history of philosophy been contrasted unfavorably with sensation. It is a commonplace of metaphysics that God's knowledge cannot be discursive but must be intuitive . . . . [W]e have seen . . . that mystics may emphatically deny that the senses play any part in the very highest type of knowledge which their [experiences] yield.
James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study of Human Nature, Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901-1902 (New York: Modern Library, n.d.) 396. I have substituted "[experiences]" in James's text for his transport(s), since Voegelin never reported having had any of the latter. Vision and the whole range of meditative experience is analyzed by Voegelin in "Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme," in CW 12, esp. 345-71; see the discussion in Sandoz, VR, 218-25.
30. Petropulos, "Eric Voegelin and German Sociology," 5, 21.
31. Robert McMahon, "Eric Voegelin's Paradoxes of Consciousness and Participation," Review of Politics 61 (1999): 117-39, at 124. Cf. Thomas W. Heilke, Eric Voegelin: In Quest of Reality (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), esp. chap. 1.
32. William Blake, from Auguries of Innocence, in The Pocket Book of Verse, ed. with an intro. by M. E. Speare (New York: Washington Square Press, 1940) 86.
33. Ps. 19:1-5 (KJV).
34. For the doctoral dissertation, "Wechselwirkung und Gezweiung" (1922), and the "'primacy of the spirit' [as the] crux of Voegelin's argument" therein, see the analysis of Petropulos, "Eric Voegelin and German Sociology," 5; the dissertation itself is published in translation as "Interaction and Spiritual Community: A Methodological Investigation," in CW 32:19-140. The quotation from Voegelin, "Herrschaftslehre" (ca. 1931), is given as follows in the original, at MS chap. 1, p. 7, in Eric Voegelin Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, Box 53.5: "Die Person, sagten wir, sei der Schnittpunk von göttlicher Ewigkeit und menschlicher Zeitlichkeit; in ihr offenbart sich die Endlichkeit also das Wesen der Welt. Person ist die Erfahrung der Grenze, and der ein Diesseitig-Endliches sich gegen ein Jenseitig-Unendliches absetz." This document is published in translation as "The Theory of Governance," in CW 32:224-372, and the passage quoted conies at the end of the section on Augustine and is rendered: "The person is . . . the point of intersection between divine eternity and human temporality; in the person finitude is revealed as the essence of the world. The person is the experience of the limits demarcating world-immanent finiteness from the transcendent infinite" (236). In 1953 Voegelin wrote: "Philosophizing seems to me to be in essence the interpretation of experiences of transcendence; these experiences have, as an historical fact, existed independently of Christianity, and there is no question that today too it is equally possible to philosophize without Christianity." "Essentially my concern with Christianity has no religious grounds at all." Quotations from Eric Voegelin to Alfred Schütz, January 1, 1953, in The Philosophy of Order: Essays on History, Consciousness, and Politics: For Eric Voegelin on His 80th Birthday, January 3, 1981, ed. Peter J. Opitz and Gregor Sebba (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981), 450, 449, respectively. By "religious" grounds Voegelin means no doctrinal or dogmatic grounds: His interest is empirical or experiential — and pneumatic or revelatory (religious) experiences interested him greatly, as is evident. For later (1965) expression of the human person as imago dei, cf. Voegelin, "The German University and the Order of German Society: A Reconsideration of the Nazi Era," in CW 12:1-35, at 17: In the context of a discussion of Thomas Mann, for instance, Voegelin there writes that "suffering . . . belongs to the essence of man, for though it is man's destiny to be imago Dei, the possibility is also present not to live up to it — to fall away from it and to close oneself off." Cf. the discussion in chap. 5, herein.
35. T. S. Eliot, from part V of "The Dry Salvages" (1941), in Four Quartets, quoted from Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1952) 136. Copyright © 1971 by Esme Valeric Eliot. Quoted by permission. I am grateful to Professor Todd Breyfogle for this citation. Sec Voegelin's study from the early 1940s of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, published in CW 33:33-40: "Voegelin's interpretation is governed by the fact that the work is the spiritual autobiography of a Christian poet" (p.4).
36. Voegelin, On the Form of the American Mind [Geist], 131. Thomas à Kempis as quoted in Voegelin, The History of the Race Idea from Ray to Carus, CW 3:4-5. Cf. his discussion in the companion volume from 1933, Voegelin, Race and State, CW 2: 19-36, 102-13, and passim; see also chap. 5 herein.
37. Voegelin, Modernity without Restraint, CW 5:71.
38. Ibid., 150-51. On Faith, see ibid., 187 n24. For the underlying analysis of these matters supplemental to the discussion in The New Science of Politics, cf. my section of "The General Introduction to the Series," History of Political Ideas, vol. I, CW 19:30-37, and citations therein.
39. Voegelin, OH, Israel and Revelation, 411. Cf. the discussion in Sandoz, Politics of Truth, 156-69 and notes.
40. Translated in Paul Lawrence Rose, ed., Jean Bodin: Selected Writings on Philosophy, Religion, and Politics (Geneva: Droz, 1980) 81. This theme and the religious toleration consequential to mystical insight is the subject of Bodin, Colloquium of the Seven about the Secrets of the Sublime: Colloquium Heptaplomeres de Rerum Sublimium Arcanis Abditis, trans. with intro, annotations, and critical readings by Marion Leathers Daniels Kuntz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). The matter is thematic in David Walsh, The Third Millennium: Reflections on Faith and Reason (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1999). For Voegelin's study of Jean Bodin, see Voegelin, History of Political Ideas, vol. V, CW 23:180-251, with the Letter to Jean Bautru discussed at 188-90: "This definition of true religion remains a constant in the work of Bodin" (188 n10).
41. The Beginning and the Beyond, ed. Lawrence, 106; on the same page Voegelin remarks: "I got into these problems of mysticism as a teenager, not because of religious education in school (I went to a Protestant Sunday School), but because Hindus came to give lectures. But one must get it from somewhere." Quoted from CW 33:426. Elsewhere he remarked relatedly: "I can quite definitely see that I got the practice of meditation by reading Upanishads, by reading the Symposium of Plato, by reading the Confessions of Saint Augustine. These are the classics of meditation to which one has to return — not Madame Guyon." Quoted from Conversations with Eric Voegelin, in CW 33:304. Cf. AR, chap. 25, "Consciousness, Divine Presence, and the Mystic Philosopher," 112-14.
