The Spirit of Voegelin's Late Work —Part 4

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.

§ 4.  An Open Quest of Reality

In Search of Order can thereby be seen as Voegelin's valedictory analysis of a set of interrelated problems that he struggled with for more than sixty years. He did so from a remarkably consistent and resolute perspective of affirmation of man's participation in divine Being as the sine qua non of his very humanity.

If anything is surprising about the book, it lies, I have tried to suggest, primarily in the subtle shift of vocabulary away from objectivation, in the tautness of the prose, in the emphasis upon the mysterious impersonal depth of It-reality beyond the doctrinal God of ready invocation — all in the interest of so refining the participa­tory mode of discourse as more tellingly to express the philosopher's meditative process as the truly cooperative divine-human event of In-Between reality Voegelin experienced it as being. Voegelin rigorously adapts the radical empiricism of Plato and James to express the process of noetic meditation in quest of truth — the Anselmian fides quaerens intellectum that emerges as the standard of true philosophizing. More­over, as William Petropulos convincingly shows, this is not new in principle: Meditation as the essence of philosophizing is characteristic of Voegelin's published work from age twenty-one onward.

Chief among Voegelin's purposes in making these stylistic adjustments is a desire to safeguard insights through analytical precision against attack by those pests of every age, the dogmatists, sophists, and nabala: "The fool [nabal] hath said in his heart, There is no God" — i.e., the spiritu­ally obtuse among us of unlimited abundance. The type is analyzed in detail in "Quod Deus Dicitur." There Voegelin concludes that it is pri­marily for such pneumopathological personalities that "proofs" of the existence of God must have been devised; and he draws the distinction between apodictic and epideictic proofs, a distinction lost on fools. ⁴²  The status of such "proofs" is clarified, for instance, in relation to Bonaventure's Itinerarium, or Journey of the Mind to God:

The reasons taken from the exterior world, although not denied by Saint Bonaventure, are not of primary importance; they are stimuli inducing us to think and to become aware of the imme­diacy of our cognition of God. The being perceived in any created being cannot be perceived in its ultimate meaning without the knowledge of the Being which is God. Neither can any absolute and final and evident truth be known with certitude without the divine light shining through the objects and ideas. This light is always there; we have but to pay full attention to it. When we bring to full awareness the content of our first idea, it is impossible for us to think that God does not exist. ⁴³

Finally, the drift of my suggestions of what Voegelin is about in his last book, whose very title conveys the author's attitude of an open quest of reality, is borne out in many places but powerfully so in two pas­sages that give the philosopher's perspective on the search for truth and its ontic status:

In the analysis of Saint Thomas . . . there appears the personal God who bears the proper name "God," but behind the God who speaks his Word and hears the word of prayer, there looms the nameless, the impersonal, the tetragrammatic God [YHWH or JHVH]. The God who is experienced as concretely present re­mains the God beyond his presence. The language of the gods, thus, is fraught with the problem of symbolizing the experience of a not-experientiable divine reality . . . . [I]f the consciousness of experience and symbolization remains alive . . . the succession of the gods becomes a series of events to be remembered as the his­tory of the Parousia of the living, divine Beyond. Not the Beyond but its Parousia in the bodily located consciousness of questioning man, the experience of the not-experientiable divine reality, has history: the history of truth emerging from the quest for truth. Under this aspect, the serious effort of the quest for truth acquires the character of a divine comedy.  ⁴⁴

In a later passage he says:

[T]he quest for truth is ultimately penultimate. In the quest, reality is experienced as the mysterious movement of an It-reality through thing-reality toward a Beyond of things. Neither the things nor the non-things involved in this process are objects external to it; they are structures in the process, discerned through the quest for truth. Moreover, as the things and non-things are not external to the quest, the quest and its language are not exter­nal to them; in reflective distance, the quest itself is discerned as a "placed" event in the mysterious movement.

For the questioner has to tell the story of his struggle for the unflawed order from his position in the flawed order of thingly existence; and he can tell it, therefore, only in the flawed language that speaks of non-things [God, the soul, consciousness, etc.] in the mode of things. This flawed language includes the language of the "gods." Hence, the story of the quest does not put an End to the mystery but can only deepen the insight into its paradoxic penultimacy . . . . When the paradoxic experience of not-experientiable reality becomes conscious in reflective distance, the questioner's language reveals itself as the paradoxic event of the ineffable becoming effable. This tension of effable-ineffable is the paradox in the structure of meditative language that cannot be dissolved by a speculative meta-language of the kind by which Hegel wanted to dissolve the paradoxic "identity of identity and non-identity."

In reflective distance, the questioner rather experiences his speech as the divine silence breaking creatively forth in the imaginative word that will illuminate the quest as the questioner's movement of return to the ineffable silence. The quest, thus, has no external "object" but is reality itself becoming luminous for its movement from the ineffable, through the Cosmos, to the ineffable.  ⁴⁵

Setting aside the intentionalism of its formulation thirty years earlier, considered as "the analysis of existential consciousness," Voegelin wrote, "[t]he present analysis thus confirms the statement by which this study on Order and History opened, the statement: 'The order of history emerges from the history of order."' ⁴⁶

On more than one occasion in his writings Voegelin asserts the authority of the philosopher as truth-sayer amid the crisis of an age of mendacity and rebellion. He chides the Oxford political philosophers for abdicating duty and invokes from Marcus Aurelius the image of "the philosopher — the priest and servant of the gods." ⁴⁷  He reminds his auditors in Munich of the solemn words of the Watchman of Ezekiel (33:7): "So, you, son of man, I have made a watchman for the house of Israel; whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me." ⁴⁸

Jürgen Gebhardt rightly recurs to this ele­ment of Voegelin's work in noting that for him, when the church has abandoned its duty of spiritual leadership (as it had, for instance, during the Hitler period), "it is the philosopher-scholar who is called upon to accept the office of magisterium and defend it against intellectual usurpers." ⁴⁹  The theme is humbly sounded in In Search of Order when the old philosopher finally writes for the last time of Parmenides and philosophy:

The Being he has differentiated is the structure of the It-reality in consciousness . . . . The thinker has become the speaker of the It-reality with such self-assertive assurance that the balance of consciousness is disturbed. That he also is the speaker of a bodily located con­sciousness, of a human being known as Parmenides, becomes problematic . . . . The excitement that carried the "knowing man" from assertive to self-assertive symbolization provoked the balanc­ing resistance of the "philosopher," of Socrates-Plato who knows that he does not know and, even more important, who knows why he does not know. ⁵⁰

A profound serenity descends upon Voegelin's meditative quest, his faith in search of understanding, and the mood is synoptically captured in a sentence near the end of The Ecumenic Age: "Things do not happen in the astrophysical universe; the universe, together with all things founded in it, happens in God." ⁵¹     

[This is the last of 4 Parts.  Part 1 may be read HERE.]

NOTES   

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