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Decision, for Voegelin, is not an irrational act that brings to existence a political order from a normative nihil. It is the act of rational will, moved by a representation of the good. As medieval Aristotelians used to say, “quidquid appetitur, appetitur sub ratione boni” (“everything that is desired, is desired under the aspect of the good”). The question thus shifts from decision to the representation that motivates it, hence Voegelin’s conclusion: “The substance of the State, is belief, not . . . decision,” Any decision thus presupposes a normative aim and a prior orientation of will toward the good. This openness of the human mind toward the good is, for Voegelin, both the fundamental experience that man makes of his existence, and the substantial core of political order.
For both authors, political order structures itself around a core of transcendence. But transcendence does not have the same meaning for Schmitt and for Voegelin. For the former, it essentially means the radical heteronomy of a decision vis-à-vis all forms of legal rationality. For Voegelin, it refers to the subsumption of the legal order by a higher ethical and metaphysical order in which it finds its meaning. The two political structures are linked to two very different theological structures. Schmitt’s decisionist political structure fits with a theology of potentia absoluta Dei, which finds its roots in late medieval Scotist or Ockhamist theologies. Voegelin refers to a theology of a Platonic type, for which the divine is not understood as radical otherness, but as the transcendent good toward which the human soul is naturally open.
The radicalization of the transcendent characteristic of political power for Carl Schmitt, and its comprehension under a fundamentally irrational theological scheme–the origin of which is to be found in the Epicurean clinamen of the atoms–paradoxically leads to the realization of the divine at an intra-mundane level, and to the formation of what Voegelin calls a “political religion” in 1938. The similar reversal mechanism of a radical theology of potentia absoluta Dei to an immanent position of self-affirmation of man has been studied, in a different context (the transition between the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance), by Hans Blumenberg in his book on The Legitimacy of the Modern Ages. He wrote that “the provocation of the transcendent absolute passes over at the point of its most extreme radicalization into the uncovering of the immanent absolute.” 8
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