Book review: The Voegelin Enigma
Order and History (Vol. 5): In Search of Order
(Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 18)
Reviewed by Montgomery Erfourth
Eric Voegelin
smashed every category, scrambled every dichotomy, and spurned every orthodoxy
he encountered to discover what ailed modern Western society.
In his later life
Voegelin worked to account for the endemic political violence of the
twentieth century, in an effort variously referred to as a philosophy of
politics, history, or consciousness. In Voegelin’s Weltan-schauung, he “blamed a flawed utopian interpretation of Christianity for spawning totalitarian movements like Nazism and Communism.” Voegelin eschewed any ideological labels or categorizations that readers and followers attempted to impose on his work
Voegelin perceived
similarities between ancient Gnosticism and modernist political
theories, particularly communism and nazism. He
identified the root of the Gnostic impulse as alienation,
that is, a sense of disconnection from society and a belief that this lack is
the result of the inherent disorder, or even evil, of the world. This alienation
has two effects: The first is the belief that the disorder
of the world can be transcended by extraordinary insight, learning, or
knowledge, called a Gnostic Speculation by Voegelin (the
Gnostics themselves referred to this as gnosis). The second is the desire to implement and
or create a policy to actualize the speculation, or Immanentize the Eschaton, i.e.,
to create a sort of heaven on earth within history. According to Voegelin
the Gnostics are really rejecting the Christian eschaton of the kingdom of God
and replacing it with a human form of salvation through esoteric ritual or
practice. (The above passages are from the Wikipedia entry on Voegelin)
Erich Hermann Wilhelm Vögelin was born in
Cologne, Germany in January 1901, just as Western civilization was about to
tear itself apart. He grew up in Vienna, the child of rather typical Protestant
parents, and joined the Law Faculty at the University of Vienna before becoming
a dedicated political science professor there. Because of his vocal opposition
to the Nazis—he had written two books criticizing their “master race”
absurdities—the university dismissed him soon after the 1938 Anschluss. He
narrowly escaped the Gestapo as he fled briefly first to Switzerland and then
to the United States.
Living through the
devastation of the World War and the terror of Nazi Germany fueled his desire
to understand the sources of acute disorder in Western civilization. It was a
desire evidently shaped by Vögelin’s American experience. When he came to the
United States during World War II it was not for the first time. When he was
but 23 years old, the newly minted Austrian Ph.D. had visited the United States
thanks to a Rockefeller Foundation grant. He stayed for about three years, not
ensconcing himself at a single university but roaming from Columbia to Harvard
to the University of Wisconsin and beyond in search of America’s greatest
thinkers. His experience of America’s stability, its Christian religiosity, and
its non-positivist philosophical environment heightened his sense that social
and political orders shared certain key features. Years later he continued to
pursue the answers to what he viewed as an ongoing crisis of western
Civilization, working as a professor of political science at several American
universities, as well as at one in Munich, until his death at age 84.
By the time he became
an American citizen in 1944, his name respelled to Eric Voegelin, his overarching
question had come down to this: What is political reality? In its simplicity,
it reminds one of Einstein’s early obsession: What is light? Voegelin’s query,
and the means of discovery he presents as the best way to an answer, in turn
produce a kind of orientation for how to live within that reality.
That is what
makes Voegelin relevant to a troubled late modernity that clearly sensed the
same ongoing crisis but, in Voegelin’s opinion, used inadequate tools to
understand the problem.
Modernity’s self-imposed
limits, one of which was to declare philosophy and theology incommensurate, or
at any rate not on speaking terms, simultaneously explain its crisis and its
inability to understand it. Voegelin’s ambitious political and philosophic
endeavor aimed to reunify the two disciplines, and by so doing move Western man
back in line with the revelatory and philosophical traditions that had made him
so successful. He came to believe that the truth of reality was revealed in a
simple precept: The basis of order is found in the “ground of being”, which is
the divine. Only through conscious interaction with the divine can man know
truth. Ancient Greek philosophy and the Mosaic revelation are both required to
comprehend this actuality; applying the logic of this world to a truth beyond
it is the necessary formula.
In his reverence for
the ancients, Voegelin is sometimes likened to Leo Strauss, but the comparison
becomes strained once it moves beyond the superficial. Strauss once claimed (on
a bad day, one would hope) that Maimonides could not be a Jew by religion
because he took philosophy seriously. Strauss immersed himself in philosophical
esoterica in presumed opposition to theology, perhaps in hopes that its
shimmering, elusive status would rub off on him—as indeed it has for some.
While Voegelin’s highly esoteric writing style belied it, he had little use for
gnostic shenanigans.
At the heart of modern
Western civilization’s dramatic struggle to maintain its inherited
understanding of truth, Voegelin believed, were new gnostic attempts to replace
traditional truths with a new formula for order that rejected any notion of
divine partnership. Voegelin’s personal and professional “resistance” to the
untruth he saw in modern Gnosticism—better known then as now as supposedly
secular, utopian ideologies, namely Marxism and fascism—led him to seek a
deeper understanding of the process by which humanity comes to know the
structure of reality and its attendant symbols and indices. Voegelin examined
the best our ancestors had to offer in tempering humanity’s darker angels. His
examination, he hoped, would reveal how to avoid the catastrophe of these dark
angels becoming our political rulers... read more:
The Smooth Transition from Authoritarianism to Political Theology: The Case of Eric Voegelin
By Eckhart Arnold
Gnosticism and Modernity: Voegelin’s Reconsiderations Twenty Years After The New Science of Politics By Stephen A. McKnight
