The Voegelinian Revolution: A Biographical Introduction by Ellis Sandoz (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981; Second Edition, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2000).
Eric Voegelin: Philosopher of History by Eugene Webb (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1981).
Mystery and Myth in the Philosophy of Eric Voegelin by Glenn Hughes (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993).
Eric Voegelin and the Foundations of Modern Political Science by Barry Cooper (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999).
During the past four decades, Eric Voegelin has received ever wider acknowledgement as one of the greatest political thinkers of the twentieth century. Even before his death in 1985, commentators asserted that Voegelin was “the leading political philosopher of our time,””1 and that his work “”is of epochal importance,”” constituting “”a revolution in philosophy and political science.”” 2 Since Voegelin’s death, “”the professional attention of scholars has resulted not only in an enormous growth in the secondary literature, but also in the creation of several specialized centers for the study of Voegelin’s thought, the establishment of two ordered archival collections, one at Stanford and the other in Munich, and a major publishing project, supported by two university presses, to bring out an English-language edition of Voegelin’s Collected Works.””3 A classified bibliography on Voegelin running to 180 pages in close print was published in book form in 1994,4 yet even this massive bibliography was quickly outdated by a torrent of new publications on Voegelin requiring thirteen published updates containing hundreds of additional citations.5
Why has Voegelin’s work provoked such an outpouring of commentary? No single answer can be given, since the torrent’s tributaries flow from a multitude of differing motivations. However, there are certain peculiarities of Voegelin’s career and thought that offer promising suggestions. First, Voegelin’s works are extremely demanding (indeed, notoriously so6) both in their range and mode of expression. In terms of scope, they demand that the reader “”know the history of ideas, philosophy (in all its dimensions), theology, the full sweep of history from prehistory to modernity, and the present development of scholarship in fields as widely separated as anthropology, biblical criticism, comparative literature, psychology, and others….””7 Obviously, few readers can truthfully lay claim to such erudition, and thus the challenges imposed by Voegelin’s work create a demand for commentaries that is greater than writings that fall neatly within a particular field. It is hardly less obvious that few (if any) commentators command such erudition themselves, and some analyses seem to have served as a process of scholarly digestion conducted as much for the benefit of the writer as the reader.
In terms of expression, Voegelin’s writings are peppered with neologisms spun out of his own philosophizing or transliterated from the many languages in which he could work (ten, by my count: German, English, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Hebrew, Latin, and Greek). This feature of his work poses significant difficulty for mere mortals, though in most cases one can eventually discern Voegelin’s meaning by working with dictionaries and from the immediate context, as well as the more extended discussion at hand. This is because Voegelin, though often not immediately clear, tries to be. That is, the difficulties attendant to his writings stem not from esotericism (as is sometimes said of Leo Strauss) or cunning ambiguity (as has been said of Hegel) or linguistic showboating for the sake of sheer display. Voegelin neologizes and transliterates because he frequently finds contemporary parlance—especially the parlance of the academy—laden with ideological baggage rendering it unfit for expressing his own authentic philosophizing or that of the earlier thinkers with whom he works. Once one has read enough of Voegelin’s work to become familiar with his patterns of usage and with what he wants to say, writing that once seemed impenetrable comes to seem quite clear and, ultimately, even exemplary in its transparency to the thoughts and experiences being expressed. However, such assurances offer cold comfort to the novice still struggling at the stage of seeming impenetrability, who might well chuck the whole business prematurely if not for the aid of a lucid commentary. Much of the secondary literature on Voegelin quite evidently displays a desire to light the linguistic way for others.
Access to Voegelin’s oeuvre is also complicated by two remarkable “”breaks”” in his program and a number of less dramatic shifts in emphasis over the course of his career. The first of the breaks occurred in the early 1950s when Voegelin abandoned the 4,000 page manuscript for his History of Political Ideas after “”it dawned on [him] that a conception of a history of ideas was an ideological deformation of reality.””8 A new program, outlined in The New Science of Politics and carried halfway to completion in the first three volumes of Order and History, was in turn abandoned.9 Voegelin acknowledged that his own conception of the process of history was marked by the very flaw that vitiates the ideological “”philosophies”” of history that he sought to surpass, and accordingly, he revised his exploratory methodology as well as his provisional conclusions.10 Voegelin was his own toughest critic, and to the very end of his life he continued to explore new directions in thought with no reverence for his own earlier accomplishments. Thus we are left with a body of work that is not only intrinsically difficult but also internally divided. Since Voegelin was more inclined to drive his explorations forward than to detail precisely what could or could not be salvaged from earlier works, those who wish to invoke his authority are, in my view, obliged to do this themselves.
This situation has served as a stimulus for secondary interpretations, as most of Voegelin’s admirers recognize, if only implicitly, that they cannot legitimately attribute views to him while treating his writings as an undifferentiated, seamless whole. For example, I believe it would be intellectually irresponsible to assert that “”Voegelin maintained X”” on the basis of, say, a 1952 writing such as The New Science of Politics, without considering the implications of a later work like 1974’s The Ecumenic Age for the issue at hand. And, under certain circumstances, “”intellectually irresponsible”” might be too lenient a judgment to place upon such a procedure. That is, if one were to do this because he or she has not bothered to undergo the rigors required to understand Voegelin’s late works, we would be compelled to conclude that such a person is lazy and unprofessional. Furthermore, if one were now to attribute the 1952 view to Voegelin because one prefers it to those he developed by 1974 (which is not an implausible scenario11), then we might judge the person guilty of misrepresenting Voegelin by misappropriating outmoded writings for partisan purposes. It is clear that a conscientious scholar is obliged—to an unusual degree—to address Voegelin’s work in its variegated entirety before attributing views to him. Commentaries addressing the different phases in Voegelin’s work have made it possible for those new to the writings to do this (albeit indirectly) without investing the several years otherwise required to canvass Voegelin’s vast output.
There are undoubtedly other important reasons why Voegelin’s work has drawn so much attention in print, but in any case, the secondary literature has grown so extensive—and includes contributions of such high quality—that a tertiary examination is now clearly in order. This article is the first examination of this type, and in determining its structure I have tried to balance two competing objectives. On one hand, I wish to offer as broad a survey as possible, but on the other hand, it is also important to offer reviews that are as extensive and detailed as befits the importance of the books considered. In order to limit the scope of the project, only books written in English that are directly devoted to Voegelin’s work were considered, and I chose to pass over edited collections on Voegelin, since they are necessarily less cohesive in approach. Although they cannot be treated here, it bears noting that all of the edited collections that have appeared to date are important resources meriting serious study.12 It will also be impossible to consider several excellent books that are strongly informed by Voegelin’s thought but which do not make it their centerpiece.13 Finally, it will not be possible to include several books that arguably follow the spirit of Voegelin’s research even more closely than books explicitly devoted to him, namely, works of original research that are inspired by Voegelin’s thought and methodology.14
Thus, only book-length commentaries written in English by a single author were considered, and even this relatively narrow category required further trimming, since no fewer than eleven texts fit this description.15 I have chosen the four books that will, in my view, prove most profitable for a first round of reading by those who are relatively new to Voegelin. This is not to disparage the remaining commentaries, all of which are rather more narrow and specialized in their approach, and are thus appropriately reserved for a second round of reading. In the present essay, my principal aim is to provide reviews offering clear indications of the objectives that inform each of the books, setting them forth explicitly and in detail, and then assessing how—and how well—the author succeeds in fulfilling them. The reviews will appear in the order in which the books were published (with alphabetical ordering of the two books published in 1981), since later works sometimes make use of earlier ones, and since the authors of later books may have structured their projects with a view to what has been accomplished or neglected in earlier treatments.
I
Ellis Sandoz, currently Hermann Moyse Jr. Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Louisiana State University, notes that his Voegelinian Revolution has the dual purpose of providing “”a general introduction to Eric Voegelin’s thought and to do so in such a way as to demonstrate its revolutionary character.”” (1) Although these objectives do indeed loom large in Sandoz’s discussion, it also becomes clear that the book is informed by two additional purposes. First, Sandoz is clearly intent upon making the biographical details of Voegelin’s life more familiar to English-language readers, and thus the book quotes frequently and at length from the transcript of a series of interviews conducted by Sandoz with Voegelin in 1973.16 Second, Sandoz is also intent upon demonstrating Voegelin’s greatness as a thinker, which is not precisely identical to showing the revolutionary character of his work (since all revolutions initiate major change, but not in every case for the better).
Both of these objectives tread rather thin lines that must be seen clearly for the book to be evaluated accurately. With regard to both objectives, it is apparent that Sandoz wishes to help remedy what he openly acknowledges (on the first page of his Introduction) as Voegelin’s obscurity among the general public. It is to this “”wider audience”” beyond “”the confines of the academy”” that Sandoz addresses his book,17 though he also notes Voegelin’s “”evident obscurity even within the restricted horizon of professional political scientists…”” (10) Obscurity is, of course, a “”relative thing,”” and Sandoz gives a more specific indication of Voegelin’s status when noting (with what I perceive as unspoken disgust) that “”Voegelin is not nearly so famous as, say, Herbert Marcuse or Angela Davis….”” (10) We may say that Sandoz is rightly rankled by a gross disparity between Voegelin’s stature and his status; that is, between his stature as a thinker of historical significance and his status among American “”intellectuals.””
Sandoz wishes to make inroads against this disparity, and in this sense it is correct to say that his book is, in the best sense, a popularization. Although this statement is correct, it should be supplemented by an explanation. Sandoz indicates in his opening chapter that the book “”is not an intellectual biography,”” and indeed the volume is dedicated more to Voegelin’s thought than his life. Discussions of biographical details are undertaken not as ends in themselves but toward the end of illuminating Voegelin’s thought, and the great majority of passages quoted from the taped interviews concern matters of theoretical substance. Thus the book does not seek to “”popularize”” Voegelin in the vulgar sense, but to make his thought accessible to a portion of the population broader than that which could gain access by means of Voegelin’s vast and difficult oeuvre. In doing so, Sandoz endeavors to show not only how Voegelin departs from other (especially modern) thinkers in revolutionary ways, but also to show the greatness of Voegelin’s thought within the broad context of Western philosophy. However, Sandoz explicitly indicates that the book is “”an interpretation, not merely an appreciation.”” (2) Sandoz indicates that, “”in all honesty,”” the book could not be a critical evaluation of Voegelin since Sandoz has been his student and friend for many years, but he also indicates that he is no disciple and that Voegelin “”strenuously avoided making disciples of his students.”” (2) Sandoz does not cross swords with Voegelin, but the book does not therefore come off as a mere celebration of his work, since Sandoz clearly displays an independent grasp of the problems and much of the literature that Voegelin pursues.
Sandoz is quite explicit about several other aspects of his design and intention for the book. He notes that he “”favored recent work and the current state of [Voegelin’s] philosophy”” (3), which is surely appropriate in light of the several “”breaks”” in Voegelin’s program, his relative obscurity in 1981, and the fundamental objectives pursued in the book. Sandoz also observes that he stresses “”the pragmatic and commonsensical dimensions of [Voegelin’s] thought”” (4), which I also regard as a theoretically justified and pedagogically sound approach. Voegelin strikes many new readers as a formidable and forbidding thinker in the stereotypical Teutonic mold, but this has more to do with peculiarities of his expression and the difficulties inherent to the problems he pursues than with an unusually speculative method or any deliberate obscurity. Indeed, Sandoz shows very effectively that Voegelin’s bent as a philosopher is strongly empirical, and that the motivations underlying his work are practical and easily understood in commonsense terms.18 Recalling again that Sandoz is writing an initial book-length introduction to a highly challenging and still obscure thinker, I think there is no question that his emphasis is well placed or that he executes it effectively. We shall see below that Eugene Webb sought to make Voegelin accessible in 1981 by means that, while notably different, were nevertheless equally justified and effective.
Sandoz’s emphasis on the greatness and revolutionary character of Voegelin’s work obliges him to account for “”the man’s evident obscurity,”” and Sandoz responds to the challenge with a multi-faceted explanation. He begins by citing observations offered by William C. Havard, Jr., and Gregor Sebba, namely, that Voegelin was authoring a new theory of politics from a single hand that was simply outpacing even his best readers and, second, that the multi-disciplinary foundation for the theory was overwhelming the capabilities of the highly specialized members of the contemporary academy. To these explanations Sandoz adds another that he regards as more fundamental still, namely, that Voegelin’s work constitutes a “”Copernican revolution”” that is difficult for others to appreciate because it requires a “”major shift in the structure of scientific thinking itself.”” (11) Voegelin’s work must therefore be approached on its own terms rather than in conventional categories of thought, and indeed an “”effect of Voegelin’s revolutionary originality is that he is (in varying degrees) at odds with all schools of thought.”” (11) The related fact that Voegelin has “”created a new language of philosophical discourse”” has also supplied a source of his obscurity and contributed to his being misunderstood. Finally, Sandoz identifies an additional source in Voegelin’s persistent effort to understand human order in the light of divine order, which has run afoul of both secular dogmatists (who dismiss him due to the presence of mystical or theological dimensions in his thinking, which they take to be infirmities) and spiritual dogmatists (who rage against him for not equating “”the divine”” with the Christ of dogmatic Christianity). In sum, Sandoz seeks to square the proposition that Voegelin is obscure with the proposition that his thought is of revolutionary significance by simply linking them: Voegelin is obscure because he is revolutionary. That is to say, his comparative obscurity “”above all results from his philosophical independence and originality.”” (16)
Sandoz’s second and third chapters, “”Biography and the Course of Thought to 1938,”” and “”Americanization: A Scholar’s Pilgrimage to 1981,”” are predominantly biographical in nature, drawing liberally from the “”Autobiographical Memoir.”” In addition to recounting the basic facts of Voegelin’s life and career, they offer an overview of his intellectual influences as well as brief sketches of his early writings. In one sense, works published since 1981 have superseded this portion of Sandoz’s book. Sandoz himself edited and published the “”Autobiographical Memoir”” in its entirety under the title, Autobiographical Reflections in 1989, and this book is obviously a more comprehensive biographical guide than the portions quoted in The Voegelinian Revolution. Regarding Voegelin’s intellectual influences and early works, readers now have access to a more extensive and detailed treatment in Barry Cooper’s Eric Voegelin and the Foundations of Modern Political Science. Sandoz’s account is complete but quite compressed by comparison to that found in Cooper’s much longer book.19 However, those desiring an efficient introduction that intertwines biographical information with an analysis of Voegelin’s writings will still find Sandoz’s book to be the best treatment available.
The central chapters in The Voegelinian Revolution are devoted to four “”crosscuts in [Voegelin’s] intellectual horizon”” that take stock of the “”stages”” of Voegelin’s inquiry at four points: 1952, 1957, 1966 and 1981. The first of these corresponds with the publication date of Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics: An Introduction,20 and is treated in Sandoz’s fourth chapter, “”The Science of History and Politics: 1952.”” The chapter does not actually take stock of Voegelin’s work in 1952 so much as offer a straightforward commentary on The New Science of Politics. In fairness, though, it must be acknowledged that The New Science of Politics was itself a work in which Voegelin took stock of his own findings and set a new course for his thought that was to run for about a decade.
Sandoz’s gloss on The New Science is excellent, far surpassing the quality of the many reviews that appeared in the wake of this controversial book. To single out a particularly valuable dimension of this chapter, I would mention Sandoz’s analysis of representation, which is an important and difficult theme in The New Science that has not received its due in the secondary literature. If pressed to note a shortcoming of this chapter, I would say that I find it unfortunate that Sandoz does not address the unusual rhetorical tone struck by Voegelin in this book. Sandoz does indeed discuss the controversy caused by the book and its provocative title, which successfully provoked many social scientists of the positivist persuasion. However, Sandoz does not address an aspect of the book’s tenor that seems even more significant in retrospect, namely, an anomalous exhortatory tone that seemed to place Voegelin somewhere in the camp of conservative Christian Cold Warriors. Voegelin endeared himself to Christians by writing of
…a civilizational cycle of world-historic proportions. There emerge the contours of a giant cycle, transcending the cycles of the single civilizations. The acme of this cycle would be marked by the appearance of Christ; the pre-Christian high civilizations would form its ascending branch; modern Gnostic civilization would form its descending branch.21
Voegelin also endeared himself to conservatives by explicitly identifying Gnosticism, a perennial pattern of spiritual disorder, as “”the nature of modernity,”” and by admonishing readers to “”recognize the essence of modernity as the growth of Gnosticism.””22 Gnosticism was in turn associated with a range of thinkers, activists and movements commonly vilified by conservatives, many of whom rallied to Voegelin’s account of “”the inner logic of the Western political development from medieval immanentism through humanism, enlightenment, progressivism, liberalism, positivism, into Marxism….””23 Voegelin closed the book with a call for “”repressing Gnostic corruption and restoring the forces of civilization,”” noting ominously that “”at present the fate is in the balance.””24
In the long run, The New Science of Politics caused trouble for Voegelin more by the friends that it attracted than the enemies it repulsed. Positivists and Marxists took only the briefest note of the book before going about their business, secure in the knowledge that Voegelin could be dismissed as either an antiquarian obscurantist or a right-wing reactionary. Christians and conservatives, on the other hand, came to regard Voegelin as their champion,25 as exemplified in the description of Voegelin by Frederick Wilhelmsen as, “”the scourge of positivism in political science, the hope of Christian conservatives in the dignity of philosophical meditation on the structure of history, and the living symbol of a new and fresh synthesis of disciplines in the service of our common Western tradition.””26 However, when subsequent publications (especially The Ecumenic Age) revealed the aberrant character of The New Science of Politics, some conservative Christians like Wilhelmsen turned on Voegelin with righteous fury. Wilhelmsen complained that, “”we anticipated, not without some justification, that he would culminate [Order and History] with an apotheosis given over to Christianity and history…. Nothing of the kind happened when Voegelin published The Ecumenic Age. Voegelin simply outfoxed his critics.””27 Wilhelmsen went on to call Voegelin “”a latter-day Pilate who is too pure to enter into the Golgotha of history”” who “”dismisses, as the ideologue that he is, two thousand years of Christianity,”” producing “”tons of erudition about folk in China and Egypt and other out of the way places but not one book about the adventure that has been Christianity.””28
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This intemperate reaction is born of several unfortunate misunderstandings, and is an admittedly extreme example of the backlash prompted by The New Science of Politics.29 Nevertheless, the example serves in its extremity to show that The New Science of Politics is, for all of its remarkable strengths, an atypical and problematic book in several respects that Sandoz leaves untreated. To be clear, this is not because Sandoz himself is prey to the misunderstandings of those such as Wilhelmsen; in fact, he quotes from this same writing by Wilhelmsen in The Voegelinian Revolution with implied disapproval. (10) Moreover, Sandoz also demonstrates his awareness of one of the factors that probably helps explain the aberrant dimension of The New Science of Politics when he mentions (in passing) that Voegelin was “”writing in the midst of Cold War anxieties.”” (113) However, Sandoz does not observe a significant inference derivable from this, which is that The New Science of Politics is perhaps the only one of Voegelin’s major works containing elements that appear dated and rhetorically excessive in retrospect. I believe this peculiarity of the book is especially worthy of emphasis when considered under Sandoz’s structural approach, which is to highlight certain years and works in order to show the “”successive stages”” of Voegelin’s “”enlarging horizons.”” Since The New Science of Politics represents a “”stage”” that Voegelin “”succeeded”” in his ever enlarging thought, one must wonder why Sandoz does not note the book’s unusual and potentially misleading shortcomings. Perhaps this is because doing so would be at odds with Sandoz’s objective of “”popularizing”” Voegelin. After all, only a very inept salesman—which Sandoz is not—would term “”dated”” or “”excessive”” a work that he knows “”is Voegelin’s most widely read book.”” (91)30
Sandoz’s fifth chapter, entitled, “”History and Its Order: 1957,”” is essentially a gloss on Volumes I-III of Order and History: Israel and Revelation (1956), The World of the Polis, and Plato and Aristotle (1957). Although the basic character of this chapter is shared with the preceding one on The New Science of Politics, it must treat works that incorporate more than twelve times as many pages. Not surprisingly, therefore, Sandoz’s treatment is impressive more for its concision than its comprehensiveness or detail. A concise treatment is achieved by following the “”central speculative thread”” running through these three volumes, which Sandoz regards as “”Voegelin’s attempt to trace the emergence of human consciousness through analysis of the experiences of the order of being and their attendant symbolic forms.”” (117) Sandoz devotes special emphasis to what Voegelin called the “”leap in being”” (or discovery of transcendent reality), which Sandoz understands as “”the crucial event in this historical continuum of experience and articulation.”” While this chapter is no more critical than its predecessor, Sandoz effectively focuses the reader’s attention upon the most important theoretical issues at stake in the volumes, and also points up “”a most serious difficulty”” in Voegelin’s “”metaphysical position”” that remained unresolved until the publication of Volume IV in 1974.31
Observations of this sort help readers navigate their way through Voegelin’s writings with a clearer sense of their stages of development, and Sandoz opens his sixth chapter (“”Myth, Philosophy, and Consciousness: 1966″”) with a helpful account of the theoretical differences distinguishing Voegelin’s Anamnesis from the earlier stages expressed in Order and History I-III and The New Science of Politics. Sandoz summarizes the progression as one expanding the theory of politics first into the theory of history (1952), second into the philosophy of order (1957), and then into the philosophy of consciousness (1966). To unpack these last two stages a bit, Sandoz describes the philosophy of order as one illuminating political reality “”through recollection and analysis of the trail of experiences and their symbols manifested in the field of history”” (143), whereas the philosophy of consciousness in Anamnesis further augments the philosophy of politics with “”the experiences and symbols through which the process of consciousness articulates itself in time.”” (144)
The sixth chapter on Anamnesis and Voegelin’s work as it stood in 1966 is the book’s longest and the one likely to prove most helpful to readers since, as Sandoz rightly observes, “”the philosophy of consciousness is both the core and the most difficult…part of Voegelin’s political theory.”” (167) Sandoz achieves an exceptionally illustrative account by showing not only what Voegelin means by his central concepts and formulations, but also by showing repeatedly what he does not mean. Sandoz continually pauses in his account of the theory of consciousness to head off misunderstandings of, for example, Voegelin’s usage of “”being”” or “”consubstantiality”” or “”experience”” or “”noesis.”” This explanatory strategy proves very effective, and the care demonstrated by Sandoz in structuring his explication is quite evidently based on his awareness that Anamnesis is in several ways the key to understanding Voegelin’s thought. The studies published under this title serve as a sort of theoretical bridge linking Voegelin’s life and work as a young scholar to later phases of his thought and writing, namely, to his mature work on the first three volumes of Order and History, to the breakthroughs requiring the remarkable work of reconception in The Ecumenic Age, and finally to the great meditative studies pursued in Voegelin’s final decade of activity. The studies in Anamnesis are also crucial for understanding the relations between the different components or aspects of Voegelin’s thought. In conventional terms, Voegelin works in modes that we associate with historians, philosophers, political scientists and theologians, and yet each of these disciplinary designations proves to be an ill-fitting garment when tried singly or even in combination. To understand how Voegelin’s thought intertwines these modes of inquiry, one can do no better than to use Anamnesis as a guide. This is, in effect, what Sandoz does in this sixth chapter, which is not a commentary on Anamnesis so much as a multi-faceted survey of Voegelin’s thought, sketched on the developmental plane of 1966 from which the essays in Anamnesis were written and/or assembled.
The chapter is far too intricate to be detailed here, but we can profitably indicate the eight points that Sandoz emphasizes in his own summary (184-187):
1) Whatever we know of reality we know through experience, which occurs in a wide range of modes and finds expression in a corresponding variety of symbolizations. Symbols can therefore serve as a sort of conduit for knowledge of reality, but only when regarded in the specific context of the experiences that engendered them.
2) Basic symbolic forms of human existence in reality include myth, revelation, philosophy, and mysticism. They cannot be ranked in qualitative terms, since they “”optimally express distinctively different, though related, kinds of experiences.”” All four forms can be expressive of truth, but “”the truth of them all lies at the level of the experiences they articulate, not at the level of the symbols themselves.””
3) Mythic participation in reality is “”compact,”” in the sense that it embraces comprehensively the entire range of reality experienced by human beings. The compactness of mythic participation is historically burst by the differentiation or dissociation of the modes of experience contained incipiently within it. However, though it is true that mythic experience is superseded by more sophisticated modes of “”noetic”” and “”pneumatic”” experience that differentiate the world from its transcendent ground, human experience of the ground remains so tenuous that, as Voegelin indicated, “”our knowledge of order remains primarily mythic, even after the noetic experience has differentiated the realm of consciousness and the noetic exegesis has made its Logos explicit.””32
4) The noetic mode of participation finds its symbolic form par excellence in philosophy, which arises from the philosopher’s discovery of reason as the essence of humanity and the faculty permitting participation in the divine Reason which is its source and ground. Thus, the core of the philosophical effort and of human nature itself “”is openness to the Ground as the vertical tension of existence rendered intelligible through the symbols of rational exegesis called noesis.””
5) Philosophical science suffers deformation or derailment when symbols expressing experiences of participation in the noetic mode “”are severed from their engendering experiential context and are treated as speculative topics—or as referring to subordinate realms of being, or as arising out of modes of experience other than noetic participation.”” Such deformations are not rare or obscure in their occurrences but, rather, “”a predominant characteristic of the history of philosophizing and remain so today.””
6) A restoration of the philosophical science of man entails both, “”the rediscovery of the technique of noetic meditation through a study of the writings of those philosophers who were its masters,”” as well as, “”the elaboration of a philosophy of consciousness and an ontology out of the revitalized noetic or theoretic activity as informed by philosophical resources available in the contemporary horizon.””
7) The new ontology that emerges from Voegelin’s analysis in Anamnesis does not approach reality as a closed rational system, nor as an external realm of things upon which thinking observers spectate. Voegelin’s account is nevertheless empirical, though not in the classical mold. Voegelin is not an empiricist after the fashion of Hobbes or those who believe that knowledge arises from things impressing themselves upon the senses. However, he does root all knowledge of reality in experience, though this is “”the reality of experience in the In-Between of participatory consciousness.”” Thus, as Sandoz summarizes, “”the plural field of reality is articulated tensionally through its symbolic indices (which are themselves part of the reality of experience) into thingness, the self-reflective consciousness as its articulately rational center, and the divine Ground.””
8) Voegelin’s work contains claims of considerable magnitude, but claims that must nevertheless be seen as strictly and rationally limited in their scope. That is, Voegelin’s restorative work in philosophy and political science should not be “”mistaken for the proclamation of a definitive or ultimate truth in an apocalyptic manner.”” Sandoz sees Voegelin as having claimed “”to have detected and rectified an error of consequence with respect to the nature of philosophical thought, its meaning and truth,”” but notes that “”there is none of the enthusiasm or millenarian overtone that characterized Hegel, for example.”” Voegelin does not regard his work as any sort of historical culmination, nor is he optimistic that his diagnostic analyses or therapeutic suggestions will have much worldly impact. For Sandoz, Voegelin remains a “”philosopher and physician”” rather than a prophet or a healer.
Sandoz’s seventh chapter examines Voegelin’s work as of 1981, a date selected not because it coincides with one of Voegelin’s major volumes, but rather because it permitted Sandoz to take stock of Voegelin’s achievements as his own book went to press. The chapter incorporates the considerable advances established by Voegelin in The Ecumenic Age as well as several late essays, and it is primarily devoted to a discussion of those advances and the general shape they gave to Voegelin’s thought as it stood in 1981. Interestingly, though, Sandoz offers his evaluation of Voegelin’s achievements not at the end of this chapter, but at its beginning. His characterization of those achievements is quite remarkable:
The picture of Voegelin’s work that emerges from the foregoing analysis of it adds up to a revolution in the science of man comparable in magnitude (if not in style) to the revolutions of Copernicus and Newton in mathematical astronomy, cosmology, and physics. That Voegelin’s work effects a radical break with dominant contemporary schools of thought and philosophical movements has been clear from the outset of our account. The Voegelinian revolution, though, is more than a new science of politics. It is a comprehensive new science of man which, when drawn together from the array of theoretical insights dispersed over the extensive work of a lifetime, may be said to compose a Philosophiae Principia Noetica, a turning point in man’s understanding of himself and the truth of existence. (188)
Sandoz is quick to add that Voegelin’s “”new noetic science of man”” neither proclaims any “”Truth to end the quest for truth”” nor establishes any “”System to end all systems.”” On the contrary, Sandoz notes that “”the core of the Voegelinian revolution is to show (among other things) the defectiveness of all such ‘stop history’ Answers as imposing fallacious second realities….””(189) For Sandoz, “”there are answers aplenty in Voegelin’s closely reasoned philosophy, but no doctrine, ultimate teaching, or ultimate Word is to be extracted from it.”” Indeed, Sandoz finds the revolutionary novelty of Voegelin’s work less in the answers it proposes but rather, as in Plato’s work, in its mode of asking questions.
These caveats and qualifications should head off some forms of misunderstanding, but they do little to diminish the striking nature of Sandoz’ claims regarding Voegelin’s achievements. They are so striking, indeed, that we must ask three questions about the claims, namely, are they unjustified, or premature, or imprudent? The three questions are all related to one another, in the following way: claims of revolutionary greatness in intellectual life are conventionally left to intellectual historians; when the historians have yet to pronounce upon a thinker, the claims may seem premature; and when premature claims are made, one wonders whether they are prudent, as they can seem to be motivated by sectarianism or discipleship, potentially tainting thereby the thinker about whom the claims are made. Although I would not be comfortable making claims as bold as those made by Sandoz, I nevertheless do not believe they are blameworthy on any of these three counts.
First, the notion that such matters should be referred to intellectual historians is highly questionable. Either these historians would reach their judgment based on a philosophical evaluation of the thinker’s stature relative to other great thinkers, or they would employ some purportedly “”objective”” methodology such as the “”reputational”” polls of historians used to rank American presidents. In the former case, one or a few historians would be engaged in exactly the same sort of enterprise as Sandoz (though from a more remote position), and there are only shaky grounds for preferring their judgment to his. In the latter case, a reputational survey would simply multiply the shaky grounds seen in the first case, and indeed the greater the number of historians consulted, the greater the likelihood that the outcome would be determined by mere opinions resting on dubious foundations. Second, if there are no solid reasons for postponing a decision on Voegelin’s stature or for referring the question to historians, then there are no solid reasons for regarding Sandoz’s claims as premature. Finally, if it is true that any well-founded claim of greatness would necessarily be grounded upon a close familiarity with the work in question, and if the work in question is so voluminous that familiarity requires years of concentrated study, then a verdict of discipleship is hardly necessary.
Still, suspicions on this score probably come with the territory. It is no secret that Sandoz’s book is suspect on this ground in some quarters, and such suspicions have probably been heightened by Sandoz’s decision to stay very close to Voegelin’s own language when formulating his synthetic overview of the work and writings. However, the fact is that an effective synthetic overview is impossible unless the writer has a strong and independent grasp of the material being synthesized, and those who actually read this book will be left with no questions regarding either the strength or independence of Sandoz’s grasp. Moreover, Sandoz’s use of Voegelin’s terminology is simply not a weakness in The Voegelinian Revolution. Although there are certainly advantages to the alternative tack taken by Eugene Webb and Glenn Hughes (both of whom break frequently from Voegelin’s terminology to recast his thinking in alternative language), Sandoz’s approach helps novice readers become accustomed to the particular terms and modes of expression they will encounter when digging into Voegelin’s texts on their own. In sum, it seems that the most likely explanation for Sandoz’s remarkable claims is itself fairly unremarkable. He is persuaded that Voegelin is a philosopher of the first rank whose thought carries explosive implications but is nevertheless only narrowly known. Under these circumstances, and given the fact that Voegelin’s work is vast and difficult, the only practical way to persuade scholars to invest the time required to size up Voegelin for themselves is to tell them that the task will be worth their while—and since the time required will be very considerable indeed, one had better not tell them in minced words.
Sandoz follows up on the laudatory opening of his seventh chapter with an explication—first negative and then positive—of the nature of the revolution constituted by Voegelin’s noetic science. He maintains that it consists, negatively, of,
very nearly a clean sweep of the major intellectual structures of the modern world that constitute the dominant climate of opinion he so often deprecates. Most especially the clean sweep thrusts aside the whole of ideological thought as deformed and doctrinaire: i.e., the leading currents of radical modernity as expressed most especially in Marxism, Freudianism, and positivism. These above all (along with Hegelianism) have generated the debilitating “”dogmatomachy of answers”” that forms as contending “”systems of science,”” each claiming a monopoly on truth, but each obscuring (rather than illuminating) reality…. The obscuring of reality through systems (scotosis) and the prohibition against the asking of the Question as a principle of the systems are, thus, the twin marks of the deforming contemporary reductionist climate of opinion marking our age. (190)
For Sandoz, “”resolute resistance to untruth is the indispensable first act in the reorientation of existence in openness toward truth in the lives of every spiritually sensitive man, whether a Plato or a Paul or a contemporary victim of a deadly climate of opinion, totalitarian or otherwise.”” (191) Viewed positively, Sandoz sees two paradigmatic characteristics in Voegelin’s new science. Primarily, he writes, “”it is the exemplification of the contemplative life in the person and work of Eric Voegelin in the ‘act of open participation in the process of both history and the Whole’ [The Ecumenic Age, 410], so that what noetic science is can best be answered by pointing to the concrete instance of a life and its work.”” (200-201) Secondarily, he maintains that “”the paradigm is discernable in questions asked and answers given in openness to reality as this concretely forms the wealth of scholarly information and analysis in published work.”” (201) Sandoz concludes the chapter with an explication of what he takes to be the four fundamental principles of noetic science, but before doing so, he enumerates five explicit cautions. (201-202) Even with these in hand, Sandoz still warns that articulation of the four principles is “”a kind of high-wire act conducted in imminent peril of failing.”” (203) In light of the extreme care (even reluctance) with which Sandoz approaches the task of summarizing the four principles, it would be an act of temerity to further abbreviate this section. Thus, I shall simply note that Sandoz associates the four principles with participation, differentiation, experience-symbolization, and reason, and direct the reader to pages 204-216.
The final chapter from the 1981 edition, entitled, “”The Vision of the Whole,”” consists predominantly of a condensed commentary on The Ecumenic Age. When The Voegelinian Revolution was published in 1981—and for years thereafter—Sandoz’s was among the best commentaries available on The Ecumenic Age. This was an unquestionably magnificent book (Voegelin’s greatest single work, in my view), but it was also extremely complex and challenging, in addition to being theoretically discontinuous in several important respects with the earlier volumes of Order and History. The initial round of reviews was, to state the matter politely, quite uneven in quality. Some reviewers, seemingly overawed by Voegelin’s accomplishment, issued reactions that were simply celebratory, and Voegelin was disappointed that many reviews failed to critically address or even adumbrate the substantive thrust of the volume.33 Another group of reviewers focused almost exclusively on the treatment accorded Christianity, complaining either that it did not loom sufficiently large or that it was centered on Paul’s experience of Jesus rather than on Christ himself. A third set of reviews was preoccupied with how The Ecumenic Age broke with the original plan for Order and History, and many of these either failed to examine the advances that dictated the need for a new approach or overestimated the extent to which Voegelin distanced himself from Volumes I-III.34 Sandoz’s account, though necessarily compressed in scope, is focused sharply on the core advances accomplished in The Ecumenic Age. Although the years since 1981 have witnessed the publication of several excellent, specialized commentaries that go a long way toward furnishing remedies for the shortcomings of early reviews,35 Sandoz’s summary is more than adequate to the needs that new readers of Voegelin will bring to the book.
The second edition of The Voegelinian Revolution includes a new “”Epilogue,”” divided into four parts. The first of these treats several issues of controversy regarding Voegelin’s final “”position”” regarding religion, as well as the bearing of this question on public receptivity to his work. The second and third parts address the two principal publications unavailable to Sandoz in 1981. These are In Search of Order, the final volume of Order and History, and a deathbed meditation dictated to Paul Caringella, “”Quod Deus Dicitur?”” Both are fragmentary in character, and, according to Sandoz, their silences and omissions have furnished a basis for “”various interpretive debates in the secondary literature about the changed views of the ‘late’ Voegelin on crucial matters.””36 Sandoz notes that “”brief notice of the issues raised will be in order.”” (253)
Sandoz is quite clearly not content merely to offer “”notice”” of the issues, as he shows himself perfectly willing to defend specific positions regarding the “”interpretive debates.”” Nevertheless, he seems intent upon doing so in the least provocative manner consistent with the need to make his points intelligible. Thus, he never names the author(s) of the views he contests, and sometimes introduces such views into the discussion in formulations couched in the passive voice, which is atypical in his writing (e.g., “”…there have been questions raised about the triumph of [Voegelin’s] ‘scientific’ side over his ‘spiritual’ side in the final writings…””). This is presumably done in a diplomatic effort to minimize aggravation of any schismatic tendencies underlying the interpretive debates. Sandoz notes that, “”there is a suggestion of emergence of two schools of interpretation pitting a so-called German against an alleged American interpretation of the master’s thought.”” The possibility of such an emergence is not farfetched, but Sandoz suggests that—at the level of real substance—there is not much available to sustain a dispute over whether Voegelin was a scientific or a mystical philosopher (which would be, respectively, the German and American positions, if we were to take seriously the emergence of two schools). Sandoz speaks of the “”interpretive divergence”” as “”an odd outbreak of nationalism,”” and contends that it should be seen as “”largely accounted for by the predispositions of the interpreters and not merely or even primarily by complexities in the work being interpreted.””
Continuing in this rather dismissive vein, Sandoz elects not to disentangle the controversy but to dispatch it in a manner that some may see as Solomonic (though others might be more inclined to liken it to the manner in which Alexander dealt with the Gordian knot):
To put matters simply: Was Eric Voegelin a scientist to the marrow of his bones? Yes. Was he a mystic philosopher in all of his work from the 1920s until the very end of his life? Yes—by express self-declaration so from the 1960s. Can one be both mystic-philosopher and political scientist in the philosophical sense established in classical antiquity by Plato and Aristotle? Yes—and that is Voegelin’s position as I read it, [and] as I think he intended it…. (253-254)
With regard to whether Voegelin’s mysticism was specifically Christian in type, Sandoz simply suggests that any silences regarding Christianity in Voegelin’s last writings cannot be construed as evidence of any change in heart, since it was Voegelin’s intention to take up Christianity in In Search of Order before this was rendered impossible by his death in 1985. With regard to what was held by the heart which is said not to have undergone any such late change, we can only infer Sandoz’s understanding from his reference to Voegelin’s “”abiding devotion to Christianity,”” of which Sandoz regards “”Quod Deus Dicitur?”” as a “”direct statement”” (and one we should consult when considering In Search of Order). (254)37
Although Sandoz writes off the “”two Voegelins characterization”” as being, “”at best misleading,”” he does acknowledge that “”there are real issues here nonetheless.”” As he summarizes them,
…it may be arguably true that the power and stature of Eric Voegelin’s scholarly achievement can never gain any real attention if it is portrayed as fundamentally grounded in spiritual experiences and is, thus, in some sense “”religious”” and to be dismissed out of hand as such. There is more than a little to this argument, I must agree, and it poses something of a dilemma. To speak as I do in following the sources of a “”philosophical science”” rooted in the work of a mystic philosopher who affirms the cardinal importance of human participation in the divine ground of being, of the reality of the life of the spirit as the basis of noetic science, may seem to invite a strategic catastrophe for the cause of Eric Voegelin. (254-255)
I suspect that Voegelin would wince at any reference to himself as a “”cause”” (even if the reference were made only figuratively and in passing, as may be the case here). In any event, Sandoz goes on—to his credit—to make it abundantly clear that he does not believe any “”prudential calculation”” in service of such a cause could justify any muting of “”religious”” elements in Voegelin’s writings, and that it would be “”inadmissible as distorting the material on principle, if and when it is carried out to the neglect of the overall content of Voegelin’s work.”” (256) This is a point I wish to underline as a final caution against any misunderstandings of my earlier references to “”popularization”” as one of the distinctive elements of The Voegelinian Revolution. Although I believe one cannot accurately review this book within a survey of secondary literature without remarking that Sandoz, among all the top commentators, is the most intent upon enlarging Voegelin’s readership and impact on the world, I would insist that it would be both unfair and inaccurate to suggest that this intention has a compromising effect on Sandoz’s commentary.
The Epilogue goes on to address “”Quod Deus Dicitur?,”” which is itself so intricate due to its many sources that Sandoz’s account cannot be summarized profitably here. However, his characterization of the upshot of this final meditation is worth noting:
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. (263)
Sandoz’s reflections on In Search of Order are likewise difficult to assess in brief, largely because of the character of the work in question; as Sandoz remarks, “”the dense intricacy of the analysis does not lend itself to cogent abridgement.”” (263) Yet, Sandoz’s concluding characterization will indicate the principal lines of his interpretation:
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 undeformed humanity. If anything is surprising about the book it lies, I have tried to suggest, primarily in the subtle shift of vocabulary away from objectification, 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 refining the participatory mode of discourse so 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. (268)
As this passage shows, Sandoz’s Epilogue concludes The Voegelinian Revolution by arguing that Voegelin’s final writings flow within the same channel that runs through his entire career—while also showing the relentless advances that make it meaningful to isolate particular phases marked by years such as 1952, 1957, and 1966. The Epilogue augments and updates an already outstanding book that will likely remain unsurpassed for years to come as an introduction to Voegelin’s life activity.
II
Eugene Webb, currently Professor of Comparative Religion and Comparative Literature and Associate Director, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington, indicates that his purpose in writing Eric Voegelin: Philosopher of History is to ease the difficulties encountered by many of Voegelin’s readers “”by providing an overview and some clarification of Voegelin’s basic concepts.”” (vii) His target audience includes specialists and non-specialists alike; he hopes “”to make Voegelin’s thought more readily available to those who have not studied it before,”” and to help those with prior exposure to Voegelin’s thought “”to a deeper understanding of its theoretical foundations.”” Webb’s book is divided into three parts:
The first is theoretical; it seeks to elucidate Voegelin’s philosophical principles and concepts and to explain how he developed them, both with reference to contemporary philosophical discourse and through the study of the history of thought. The second part briefly summarizes the main lines of Voegelin’s study of history as he has interpreted it in the light of those theoretical principles. The third part focuses on the two themes most central to Voegelin’s concern: the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of history.
Recognizing that access to Voegelin’s thought is also complicated by his use of technical terms, Webb provides a twelve-page glossary that will greatly benefit new readers.
Webb opens his introductory chapter in a vein similar to that of Sandoz in The Voegelinian Revolution, noting that Voegelin is a “”major philosopher”” who, though perhaps widely known, “”is far less widely read.”” (3) Webb’s explanation of this situation is again quite similar to Sandoz’s, though they were arrived at independently. Webb ascribes the disparity between Voegelin’s lofty stature and his small readership to the fact that “”he demands not only a radical shift in perspective but also a familiarity with the entire history of Western thought—mythological, philosophical, and religious.”” He also notes that many who have heard of Voegelin have picked up mistaken impressions of his way of thinking, most commonly “”that he is a ‘right-wing’ thinker in both politics and religion.”” (4) Contrary to this misimpression, Webb follows Dante Germino in observing that, “”as a political philosopher, Voegelin defies classification according to the language of political struggle: he is not left, right, or center, but is engaged in the critical study of politics.””38 Voegelin is no easier to classify philosophically than politically, since, as Webb observes,
he is not in any sense an “”ideological thinker”” and thus does not present a system of ideas that could be labeled according to any of the traditional designations—such as “”materialist,”” “”idealist,”” “”empiricist,”” “”realist,”” and so on—and, what must be still more disconcerting to many, he does not even present a standard philosophical argument of the sort that leads the reader from premises to a conclusion through the force of formal logic. (5)
This makes Voegelin’s thought “”difficult to grasp for any person accustomed to the more common type of philosophical exposition.”” By contrast to more common understandings, Webb sees Voegelin’s mature approach to philosophy as “”the recovery of the experiential ground of philosophy, the descent by way of historical memory through the various levels of symbolization, mythic and conceptual, to the deepest motivating center of the philosophical quest, which at its root is the spiritual quest of man for true existence.”” (9)
Webb’s emphasis on the element of “”recovery”” or “”rediscovery”” in Voegelin’s approach to philosophy is entirely appropriate, for Voegelin consistently maintained that human experience of the spiritual depths of the soul and the divine reality in which it participates does not change fundamentally over time (despite the fact that different elements of experience may be understood and symbolized in a fuller and more adequate manner at some times than others). However, though for Voegelin it is true that there is a perennial order of human nature and the human condition that has “”been known implicitly by thinkers of every period of recorded history,”” it is likewise true that this order “”has manifested itself historically.”” (10) Thus, Webb indicates that “”the question to which the present study as a whole is an attempt at an answer”” is: “”what are the features of an adequate philosophy of history and what does Eric Voegelin uniquely contribute to this subject?”” (9) In his initial description of Voegelin’s philosophy of history, Webb notes that
[f]or Voegelin the philosophy of history is the analysis of human life in its historical dimension, that is, of human life as a process in which choices are made and in which, through the values that are served or not served, one may or may not live up to the calling of one’s potential humanity. History is an enterprise, in other words, in which one may succeed or fail, and what the philosophy of history must offer is criteria by which that success or failure may be measured. (10)
These criteria can be found by studying humanity and its history, which can reveal central truths about human existence that are occasionally rendered explicit in a range of different symbolisms. The symbolisms are not the end points of historical research, however, and Voegelin does not treat them as fundamental propositions that can be assessed adequately in a philosophy that takes the customary form of a logical argument. Rather, according to Webb, Voegelin “”aims deeper, and he offers something different: an avenue of entry into the fundamental experience that underlies philosophy as such.”” (11) Thus, the core of Voegelin’s philosophy of history is an effort to “”recover the roots of philosophical thinking that for most of us lie buried under layers of uprooted symbols that have accumulated for centuries,”” an effort which he attempts by means of “”tracing the symbols that we call ideas to their origins in the philosophical experience of the thinkers who first developed them.”” (12)
Webb offers further clarification of these introductory remarks in his first chapter, “”Philosophy and History.”” He notes quite helpfully that, while the study of history
points toward the historical past,…it also points inward and downward—into the depths of the historical present. Historical inquiry, therefore, is an exploration not only of past events and their interrelations but also of the structure of human existence as a process or participation in being. This means that history as a study is in its essential character a philosophical discipline. Similarly, to Voegelin philosophy itself is a process of reflection in which the structure of human existence as a process of reflection in which the structure of human existence and its historical character become conscious…. History is a philosophical inquiry, and philosophy is intrinsically historical in structure. (17)
Webb observes that the starting point for the philosophy of history is always the philosopher’s present historical situation, and he locates the key elements of Voegelin’s situation in National Socialism, the irrational forces underlying the Nazi movement, and the deeper spiritual vacuum that permitted these forces to hold sway on the political level. More particularly, Webb specifies, “”the internal disorder of a mode of existence dominated by passion and appetite and lacking the orientation toward a transcendental summum bonum that the spiritual traditions of Christianity and Judaism had attempted to encourage.”” On the level of intellectual culture, Webb also cites the importance of “”a scientistic theory of knowledge that placed severe limits on inquiry and fostered an externalizing conception of existence,”” as well as “”a positivistic, immanentist theory of man, and a widespread belief in a supposed dichotomy between facts and values.”” (22) Webb correctly characterizes Voegelin within this situation not a
