Eric Voegelin on the Incarnate Christ

MICHAEL HENRY is Professor of Philosophy at St.
John’s University in New York City.

In his 1965 Ingersoll Lecture “Immortality:
Experience and Symbol” Eric
Voegelin declared that “the symbolism of
incarnation would express the experience,
with a date in history, of God reaching into
man and revealing him as the Presence that
is the flow of presence from the beginning of
the world to its end. History is Christ written
large.”¹ Despite the fact that the Incarnation
was a subject to which Voegelin devoted
relatively little space in his extensive writings,
as this statement indicates it does play a
critical role in his philosophy. Nevertheless,
as Mark Mitchell observed at the beginning
of an essay critical of Voegelin, “Eric
Voegelin’s treatment of Christianity is notoriously
problematic”² in the sense that it
demands at the very least a revaluation of the
meaning of core Christian beliefs, particularly,
as some critics have pointed out, the
Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Resurrection.
Gerhart Niemeyer, for example, who
deeply admired and was greatly influenced
by Voegelin’s work, nonetheless expressed
disappointment at Voegelin’s inadequate
treatment of the historical person of Christ in
The Ecumenic Age.³ Mitchell argues that
because Voegelin’s philosophy cannot account
for fallen human nature and salvation it
is “simply inadequate.”⁴ David Walsh characterized
Voegelin’s treatment of Christianity
as incomplete and unsatisfactory, Bruce
Douglass argued that Voegelin lacks “a sense
of the Gospel as salvation in the specifically
Christian sense,” and others such as John
Gueguen and Frederick Wilhelmsen have
also pointed out what they see as significant
problems in Voegelin’s understanding of
Christianity.⁵ Ultimately all of these criticisms
raise a question about Voegelin’s understanding
of Christ and the Incarnation.

Despite their serious reservations about
the implications of Voegelin’s philosophy for
Christian belief, these same critics do not
reject Voegelin’s philosophy out of hand
because they find too much common ground
with Ellis Sandoz who “never doubted that
Voegelin was profoundly Christian” (although
not a “Christian philosopher” because of his
desire to maintain an impartial stance) since
“the whole of his discourse was luminous
with devotion to the truth of divine reality.”⁶
That is, Voegelin’s philosophy resonates so
powerfully with the soul’s hunger for God
that it cannot be simply dismissed. This
creates a dilemma for Christians who believe
in traditional Christianity but also find profound
truth in Voegelin. I shall argue that
despite the insights by which Voegelin en-
hances our understanding of Scripture and
Christianity there remains a fundamental
incongruity between his philosophical analysis
of the Incarnation and traditional Christian
belief.

To be sure, Voegelin did not claim to be
an apologist for Christian doctrines. What he
did, implicitly, claim was that he had grasped
better than anyone in modern times the true
pre-dogmatic meaning of Christianity, not
as a theologian but as a philosopher who
began to reflect on Christianity in order to
understand its effects on political phenomena
(although his meditations eventually took
him far beyond this). In his New Year’s Day,
1953 letter to Alfred Schutz he explained that
his interest in Christianity was not based on
religion but on the impossibility, for a serious
“theoretician of politics,” of simply ignoring
“1500 years of Christian thought and Christian
politics.” The rational and responsible
philosopher’s requirement to attend to Christian
thought means that he must concede the
clearer insight into, and articulations of,
experiences of reality wherever they occur,
for example in Christianity’s reinterpreting
the philosopher’s forced removal from the
cave in Plato’s parable as the new understanding
of “the experienced intrusion of
transcendence into human life which can
break in from outside so overwhelmingly
that it may call human freedom into question.”
⁷ The nature and history of Christianity
compel the objective “theoretician of
politics” not to “throw Christianity overboard”
but to analyze its symbolization of
transcendence experiences along with all of
the historical consequences of this articulation,
just as he would have to analyze every
other phenomenon that has had political
ramifications. Sandoz was certainly right in
his observation that Voegelin was not a
“Christian philosopher” because of his desire
to maintain a “dispassionate even fiercely
independent stance of impartiality.”⁸

That Voegelin’s objective philosophical
approach to understanding Christ and Christianity
resulted in the rejection of traditional
theology as a distinct form of inquiry is
apparent in his 1970 comment in response to
a question at a panel discussion at the Thomas
More Institute that “If you were to speak of
theology in the Christian sense, we would get
into problems, because there is no theology
in the Christian sense which is not at the same
time philosophy, also.”⁹ What he meant is
somewhat ambiguous, for his comment could
mean either that Christian doctrine is formulated
using the concepts developed in Greek
philosophy, formulations that succeeded only
in deforming and burying the symbolism of
the Gospel under “two thousand years’ accretion,”
or that philosophy in the true sense
is the only way to approach Christian theology.
For Voegelin it could and probably did
mean both. To understand Jesus Voegelin
said that he had to “go back of theology and
work directly on the sources of the time [of
the Gospels].”¹⁰ In a response to a question at
a panel discussion Voegelin deplored the use,
at the Council of Chalcedon in the fifth
century, of inadequate substantive terms
(terms which Voegelin said he himself would
never use) to “solve a problem, which is an
entirely ridiculous problem in theology, on
the basis of the depositum fidei,“¹¹ by defining
Christ as one person who is a hypostatic
union of human nature and divine nature,
meaning that Christ is, mysteriously, truly
and fully God and truly and fully man.

Voegelin did not, however, consider the
use of Greek philosophy by Christian theologians
entirely unfortunate. In “The Gospel
and Culture” he points out that Christianity
had no choice but to enter “the life of reason
in the form of Hellenistic philosophy”¹² in
order to avoid failure as an obscure sect, that
is, Christianity needed to adopt the philosophical
language understood by the educated
people of the time to articulate its
insights into transcendence. But Voegelin
saw this as more than just the expedient of
adopting an already comprehensible and
familiar vocabulary, for he mentions, as “an
early statement of the issue,” Justin Martyr’s
“conception” that “the Logos of the gospel
is rather the same Word of the same God as
the logos spermatikos of philosophy, but at a
later stage of its manifestation in history” and
therefore “Christianity is philosophy itself in
its state of perfection.”¹³ The problem he
found in the alliance of Christianity with
Hellenistic philosophy is that even though
philosophical concepts were initially necessary
to preserve the insights gained through
experiences of transcendence from those
who failed to understand, philosophically
formulated doctrines and dogmas inevitably
ossified into verbal propositions that themselves
became disconnected from the originating
experiences and, as a result, distorted
the meaning and lost the reality.

One of the few labels Voegelin would
accept was “mystic philosopher,” by which
he meant that he searched for the meaning of
the dynamism of human consciousness as it
searches for and is illuminated by experiences
of the ground of its existence, experiences
it endeavors to express in symbols
rather than in the propositional, factual statements
of doctrine and dogma.¹⁴ This, of
course, created a frame of reference so broad
that Christianity became one articulation of
transcendent experiences among many others.
Voegelin rejected the distinction between
revealed truth and truth attained by
“natural reason,” as he rejected the distinction
between philosophy and faith, for he
understood all truth to emerge from a divine-
human encounter that is universal in
man, who is the imago Dei, and he regarded
faith as the philosophical attitude of trusting
openness to transcendence. His conviction
that the truth of divine reality is universal
and varies only in the adequacy, or “differentiation”
of its symbolization along a continuum
of theoretical insights¹⁵ is the reason
why he often lists Christianity in the midst of
other, more or less equivalent, symbolizations
of such experiences—Platonic philosophy,
Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism,
Confucianism, Taoism, etc.—and he frequently
compares Christianity with Platonic
philosophy, finding it in some ways superior
to Plato but in other ways inferior. For
Voegelin Christianity is really better understood
in terms of the more differentiated
philosophy that he was able to develop because
of his deeper insight into the originating
experiences, rather than by the dogmatic
theology based on traditional concepts and
categories with an inferior articulation of
reality. It is on the basis of this philosophical
analysis of universal encounters with the
divine that he said that “one has to recognize,
and make intelligible, the presence of
Christ in a Babylonian hymn, or a Taoist
speculation, or a Platonic dialogue, just as
much as in a Gospel.”¹⁶ What, then, did
Christ and Christianity mean to Voegelin
and how did he philosophically arrive at the
conclusion that history is specifically Christ
written large?

An explanation of the meaning of Christ
and the Incarnation for Voegelin must begin
from one of his fundamental assumptions,
that the “nature” of our experience of ultimate
reality is the flowing or flux of divine
presence.¹⁷ It is on the basis of this assumption
about flux that Voegelin can make the
initially startling assertion that “existence is
not a fact.” Since the word “fact” comes
from the Latin verb facio and means something
done, finished, accomplished, and since
for Voegelin human existence is best understood
as movement, process, flux, because it
is illuminated by the flowing divine presence
in consciousness, “existence is the nonfact of
a disturbing movement in the In-Between of
ignorance and knowledge, of time and timelessness,
of imperfection and perfection, of
hope and fulfillment, and ultimately of life
and death. From the experience of this movement,
from the anxiety of losing the right
direction in this In-Between of darkness and
light, arises the inquiry concerning the meaning
of life. But it does arise only because life
is experienced as man’s participation in a
movement with a direction to be found or
missed. If man’s existence were not a movement
but a fact, it not only would have no
meaning but the question of meaning could
not even arise”¹⁸ because in a world of
facticity life has no direction but is only a
“wasteland” of sterile “things.” This “inquiry
concerning the meaning of life” is
philosophy.

Voegelin’s understanding of philosophy,
which embraces his understanding of Christianity,
flows from this sense of conscious
human existence located in an unfathomable
region that can only be described, somewhat
apophatically, as neither this nor that, because
as soon as one attempts to gain certainty
by declaring precisely what it is in terms of
our worldly concepts, we lose it. To refer to
it as flux really means that it defies any
attempt to confine it within humanly generated
categories. For this enigmatic region of
experience he adopted the Platonic symbol
of the metaxy, the “In-Between,” the region
of reality where human consciousness searches
for, is drawn by, and encounters the awesomely
mysterious transcendent flux of divine
presence. In his essay “Eternal Being in
Time” he says that “in the philosophical
experience, neither does eternal being become
an object in time nor is temporal being
transposed into eternity. We remain in the
‘in between’, in a temporal flow of experience
in which eternity is present. This flow
cannot be dissected into past, present, and
future of the world’s time, for at every point
of the flow there is the tension toward the
transcending eternal being. This characteristic
of the presence of eternal being in temporal
flow may be best represented by the term
flowing presence.“¹⁹ “Transcendence” and
“immanence” denote not places but directions
in the structure of reality encountered
in the experience. Plato first used this symbol
of the In-Between in The Symposium when
Socrates asks Diotima whether Eros, the
psychic force that drives the soul to seek the
divine, is a mortal or an immortal, and she
replies, using the preposition metaxy, that
Eros is neither but instead is in tension
“between” them, partaking of both but not
fully identifiable with either. This is the
ground of the experiences of transcendence
that cannot be described or defined but only
symbolized. Major problems arise, Voegelin
believed, if the loss or obscuring of the
original experience causes the symbol to
harden into a literal truth or dogma that has
the effect of eliminating the tension by
creating the illusion of a certain grasp of
Truth. I use the word “hardens” deliberately,
because Voegelin thinks of metaxic
experiences as steeped in the tension of the
fluidity and unpredictability of divine presence.
²⁰

All human beings, by virtue of having
human consciousness, exist in the metaxy,
although to varying degrees and with different
levels of tolerance for the tension and
uncertainty in the experience of flow, change,
appeal and response, movements and countermovements,
and questioning that cannot be
translated into propositions, all of which can
be only inadequately articulated as symbols
that are really meant to point others to their
own metaxic experiences. The greater the
awareness of the “structure” of this process
the greater the degree of what Voegelin calls
the “differentiation of consciousness.” When
the emphasis of the symbolization falls on the
human quest for the divine and the anxiety
of losing the right direction he uses the term
“noetic.” When the emphasis is on the other
pole of this tension, the divine presence and
the “pull” that draws the soul beyond itself,
the term is “pneumatic.”²¹ For Voegelin
either term points to the same uncontrollable
and unpredictable flux that cannot be captured
or communicated in the concepts developed
to describe the “things” in the world
of our sense experience. He follows Plato and
Aristotle in using the term “psyche” for the
sensorium of divine reality, the site of “divine-
human mutual participation, as the
metaleptic [participatory] reality,” and the
“site in which the comprehensive reality
becomes luminous to itself.”²²

As Voegelin put it, “the specific area of
reality in which the process occurs…is neither
divine nor human, neither transcendent
nor immanent, but rather has the character
of an In-Between reality.” This means that
the partners, or poles, in the metaxy cannot
be “reified” into independent entities.
Therefore, “neither must the divine partner
be hypostatized into an object, nor the
human partner into a subject, of cognition.”
Consciousness in the metaxy is not one of
subject-object, of human cognizance of an
objective thing. Rather it is a “process” in
which divine mystery becomes “cognitively
luminous” as the divine movement of “revelatory
appeal” and the human counter-movement
of “apperceptive and imaginative response.”
It is simply not the case that human
beings acquire conceptual knowledge of God
as the object of knowledge in the metaxy.
Furthermore, because the metaxy cannot be
dichotomized into God and man, and because
the appeal and the response “belong to
the one reality that becomes luminous in the
experience” the language that erupts in the
experience “is as much divine as it is human,”
²³ that is, the divine and the human
expressions of the experiences of this inbetween
encounter are indistinguishable.

Now, the question that Voegelin says
“Christian visionaries” must ask is “‘Who is
this Son of God?’—who is this Messiah, this
Christ, this vessel of divinely immortal presence,
this living Word of the truth.”²⁴ The
basic assumption in Voegelin’s Christology
is that Christ can be spoken of as “the
representative human being,…the Son of
God incarnate in his full perfection” because
he dwelled in the metaxy more fully and
intensely than other human beings.²⁵ Rejecting
all of the hypostatic terms of person,
substance, and nature as distortions or loss of
the flowing divine presence, Voegelin found
it much truer to reality to understand the
impenetrable mystery of the identity of Christ
as one who was able to endure the highest
possible tension of living fully in the metaxy,
in the flux of divine presence, while other
human beings have a lesser experience of
metaxic tension and reality.

Although Voegelin refers to Christ by the
traditional term “Son of God” he did not
mean that Christ was the Son, the Second
Person of the Trinity, or that Christ naturally
had a divine nature. The term “Son of God”
he traced to Ancient Egypt where “every
pharaoh [was] the son of God.”²⁶ In the
Exodus story this symbol was transferred to
the Chosen people and was later transferred
to Christ when he was baptized by John.
There is, therefore, according to Voegelin,
nothing unique or unprecedented in bestowing
on Christ the title “Son of God” or
even the “only-begotten Son,” for the history
of the terms amounts to “the realization
that the existential presence of God is experienced
in existence in consciousness.”²⁷
While in Israel and Revelation he does refer to
“the Christian revelation that only God can
be the Son of God—the mystery expressed in
Trinitarian theology and the Christology,”²⁸
it is not at all clear that he meant to say that
Christ was truly God, because in his comments
on the dogma of the Trinity in his
letter to Schutz he says that the achievement
of this symbol is to combine the experiences
of the radical transcendence of God (the
Father) with the experiences of divine power
over nature (the Son) and the Christian
community’s participation in the spirit (the
Holy Spirit). If the Trinity symbolizes human
experiences of the divine but not what
God is in himself, then Trinitarian theology
cannot say that Christ is the incarnation of
the Second Person of the Trinity.

To explain the meaning of “the Son of
God incarnate in his full perfection” Voegelin
frequently turned to the Epistle to the
Colossians²⁹ where he found the critical passage
explaining what is meant by “incarnation”
in the second chapter in which Paul
says that in Christ “katoikei pan to pleroma tes
theotetos,” that is, “dwells all the fullness of
divine reality,” as Voegelin preferred to
translate the neologism theotes. “And if you
read only Colossians and not [any other text],
you would assume that Christ is to be defined
[…] as the optimal presence—the pleroma of
parousia—of the divine in a human being,
while all other human beings have lesser
presences of the divine, and are only aware
that there is one person, the Christ, in whom
there is the pleroma of presence. And the
theotes is not identified as a personal god, but
as…the presence of divine reality experienced
in reality by the people who stand
around and hear the Christ talk.”³⁰ This is the
core of Voegelin’s Christology, that while
everyone has some degree of participation in
divine reality, in the metaxy, simply because
we all have human consciousness, Christ is
the optimal Presence that is the fullness of the
flowing divine presence “from the beginning
of the world to its end.”

When Voegelin analyzes the passage in
Matthew (16:13-20) in which Jesus puts to
his disciples the question of who they believe
he is, he finds in the Gospel a careful distinction
between the past experiences of divine
presence in individuals called “prophets,”
experiences open to ordinary people who
have accordingly concluded that Christ is
one of the prophets, the disciples’ greater
awareness that Christ is in some obscure way
different from the prophets, and Peter’s even
greater internal experience of divine presence
that enables him to discern “the even
fuller presence of ‘the living God’ in Jesus.”
Peter “recognizes” him as “the Son of the
living God,” which is another symbol for the
fullness of divine reality, theotes. Voegelin
then comments that “the God of whom the
pneumatic visions are true has to be the
anonymous theotes, the immortal Beyond
that can save from the struggle by its suffering
participation in human existence. The apostolic
visionaries were better philosophers
than some of the doctrinaire theologians of
our own time.”³¹

Voegelin, of course, understands theotes to
refer to the presence within the metaxy of a
nameless but immortal divine reality Beyond
our world and consciousness, one that constitutes
consciousness by reaching into it, rather
than to a Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit. In fact, Voegelin understands theotes
in a more Platonic than Christian sense. He
explains that he prefers the translation “divine
reality” to others such as “godhead,”
“divinity,” or “deity,” because they imply a
personal God, but “divine reality” “renders
best the author’s intention to denote a
nonpersonal reality which allows for a degree
of participation in its fullness while remaining
the God beyond the In-Between of
existence.”³² But, assuming that the divine
presence in the metaxy is, in fact, an anonymous
theotes, rather than a particular and
personal theos, why does this mean that God
cannot also reveal Himself in his personal
existence? Why is God necessarily anonymous?
The abstract noun theotes does seem to
refer to God in impersonal terms,³³ but why
should that one word used only once in the
entire New Testament be the pivot on which
all of Christian belief must turn?³⁴ Christians
have never believed that Christ was filled
only with an impersonal and anonymous
divine reality, although Voegelin seems to
consider this an error, for when he says that
“the Unknown God whose theotes was present
in the existence of Jesus has been eclipsed by
the revealed God of Christian doctrine,”³⁵
he means that the true God of mystical
philosophy has been obscured by Christian
dogma.

Still, why didn’t Paul say that in Christ
dwells all the fullness of God (to pleroma tou
theou)? In that particular passage he is referring
to the dangers of a purely philosophical
(non-metaxic) worldview, arguing that what
makes the divine what it is can be found fully
only in Christ and not in the elements (ta
stoicheia) of the cosmos. He continues, “And
you, having been made full [pepleromenoi],
are in Him who is the head of all rule and
authority.” That is, because Paul is emphasizing
the union between Christ and those
who believe in him, through being circumcised,
buried, and raised from the dead with
him, he speaks of the dynamic source of life
that all share with Christ, which he names
not bios or zoe or theos but theotes, “divineness”
or divine presence. Christ is the locus of
indwelling divine “fullness” while we are the
“having-been-made-fullness” of divine reality,
to the limits of our own capacity,
through an intense transforming union with
Christ. In terms of Christian doctrine, we
participate in the divine presence in Christ
who is fully God, but we are not fully God
ourselves.

Voegelin does not interpret either the
Caesarea Philippi or Colossians passage to
mean that either Peter or the Evangelist
believed that Christ was anything as static or
thing-like as a hypostatic union of divine
and human natures, or God and man. What
he believes these writings were attempting to
communicate was the experience of the
intensity of divine presence, since, Voegelin
said, what we experience is a dynamic presence,
not a static “nature.” This is almost
certainly correct as far as it goes, but it
ignores the meaning of tradition, of the belief
that the long-term reflection on the meaning
of this intense encounter with divine presence,
which concluded that it was an encounter
with God himself, was just as divinely
inspired as Scripture. After discussing
the Caesarea Philippi question in the essay
“Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme”
Voegelin goes on to raise for himself the vital
question who this person of the Christ really
is. “He is neither a man, moving in the
struggle of the metaxy toward immortality,
nor the divine reality beyond the metaxy.
The [pneumatic] visions see in the Christ the
historical event of God’s pleromatic presence
in a man, revealing the suffering presence of
the God in every man as the transfiguring
force that will let mortal reality rise with the
God to his immortality. The pleromatic
metaxy seen in the Christ reveals mortal
suffering as participation in the divine suffering.”
³⁶ This is in accordance with Christian
belief in the sense that Christ was not anxiously
searching for the ground of existence,
nor was he merely an apparition of the
unincarnated God. But it contradicts Christian
belief if it means that Christ was neither
fully God nor fully man.

Voegelin considers the phrase “pleromatic
metaxy” to be the most exact possible expression
of Chalcedon’s textual summary, arrived
at after several centuries of complex
struggle to define Christ. According to the
Council’s definition Christ is “the same perfect
in godhead [theotes], the same perfect in
manhood [anthropotes], truly God and truly
man [theos alethos kai anthropos alethos], the
same of a reasonable soul and body;
homoousios with the Father in godhead
[theotes], and the same homoousios with us in
manhood [anthropotes], like us in all things
except sin; begotten before ages of the Father
in godhead [theotes]…acknowledged in two
natures…the difference of the natures being
by no means taken away because of the
union.”³⁷ Despite the complexities and ambiguities
of this definition, it is quite clear
that Christ is understood to be both theos and
anthropos, as well as both theotes and anthropotes
(human reality). This text, with its alternation
between Christ as theos and theotes,
conveys the sense of a groping to find adequate
expression for something that defies
verbal formulation, since the mystery of the
Incarnation is indeed, as Voegelin said, “impenetrable”
by human understanding. Nonetheless,
despite its inadequacy, it does go
beyond theotes to say that Christ is “truly theos
and truly anthropos,” which Voegelin interprets
as an attempt to convey “the visionary
truth of the Christ’s existence in a metaxy that
is distinguished from the noetic metaxy by
the pleromatic presence of divine reality.”³⁸
What he meant is that unlike the philosophical
noetic experience of searching for what
loves to hide (to borrow from Heraclitus), the
experience of Christ is one of overwhelming
divine presence, or “unconcealedness” (to
borrow from Heidegger).

Here, consistent with his understanding of
the metaxy, Voegelin interprets Christ as
neither fully God nor fully man, in the sense
that we normally mean by the term “man,”
rather than fully both. Because He is the
fullness of divine presence as it can dwell in
and be perceived by consciousness within the
limits of human reality, he is more than a
man, but because He is filled, according to
Voegelin’s reading of Colossians, with theotes
rather than theos, it is not accurate to say
simply that He is God. When Voegelin says
that Christ was not “a man, moving in the
struggle of the metaxy toward immortality”
he means that, “as far as consciousness is the
site of participation, its reality partakes of
both the divine and the human without being
wholly the one or the other,”³⁹ which would
entail that Christ could not be “true God and
true man” but rather something ineffable inbetween
“mundane humanity and something
transmundane.”⁴⁰ A man in this “not
quite human,…not quite divine” tension is
neither the “mortal man” in the Homeric
sense, nor an immortal god, but “a new kind
of man,” that Plato calls the daimonios aner,
which Voegelin translates as a “spiritual
man,” the man who dwells fully in the
metaxy as he is filled with divine presence.
But how much difference there is between
Plato’s daimonios aner, of whom a prime
example is Socrates, and Voegelin’s Christ is
not entirely clear.

Voegelin says that in John’s Gospel “there
is no doctrine to be taught but only the story
to be told of God’s pull becoming effective in
the world through Christ, the Saving Tale.”⁴¹
Christ is the exemplar, the man transparent
for the presence of the Unknown God, a
revelation that is “in conscious continuity
with the millennial process of revelation”
that Voegelin found constituting human history.
⁴² This God encountered in the metaxy
is an unknown God whom, Voegelin believed,
Plato knew “just as much as Jesus,”
although Plato did not differentiate God in a
man but instead regarded the “son of God”
(or the monogenes theos) as the cosmos rather
than a human being.⁴³ Nevertheless, Voegelin
determined that, despite Plato’s equal knowledge
of the unknown God and the noetic
superiority of Platonic philosophy to Christianity
on some points, “the full differentiation
comes only through Jesus, not through
Plato.”⁴⁴ For Voegelin the whole point of the
New Testament is the experiential revelation
of the fullness of divine presence in
Christ, who is, on the whole, more pneumatically
but less noetically differentiated
than Platonic philosophy. The real mingling
of divine and human is not so much in Christ
as in the metaxy. Christ, as the Mediator, is
the metaxy made visible.

Therefore, the drama of revelation in
Christ is also the drama of history, a subject
that Voegelin often discussed. He believed,
and said that Plato and Paul believed, that
history and its meaning as the movement of
consciousness toward greater differentiation
and luminosity⁴⁵ are constituted by theophanic
events in the metaxy of which one of the
most important is Paul’s Vision of the Resurrected.
In other words the meaning of
history is “transfiguring incarnation [which]
does not begin with Christ, as Paul assumed,
but becomes conscious through Christ and
Paul’s vision as the eschatological telos of the
transfiguring process that goes on in history
before and after Christ and constitutes its
meaning.”⁴⁶ Therefore, history for Voegelin
is the process by which man participates
more and more fully in divine presence and
becomes, in effect, more Christ. Just as
revelation is a process in which divine reality
becomes luminous to itself in humanity, so
history is a process in which humanity becomes
the incarnation of God, a process that
becomes conscious not in a philosopher but
in Christ, although we must also draw the
inference that after a period of obscurity this
process has returned to awareness in the
consciousness of the philosopher Voegelin.

Therefore, for Voegelin, what constitutes
history and is therefore important is not the
abstract question whether Christ was truly
God and truly man but the theophanic event,
the metaxic vision of divine reality in Christ
that motivated the disciples to preach the
revelation of God in Him. Hence, Voegelin
often refers to “the Christ event” rather than
simply to Christ. Similarly, since the Resurrection
is an essential Christian belief it
should be noted that Voegelin apparently did
not accept the actual physical resurrection of
Christ, but thought of resurrection in terms
of the metaxic “vision of the Resurrected.”⁴⁷
The historically significant event is the vision
in the metaxy, not the empty tomb in
the physical world. But what happens to
Christianity if Christ is not really physically
risen from the dead, but is only “resurrected”
in visions?

All of this leaves Christians with a significant
problem. We might attempt to read
Voegelin as saying that the understanding of
Christ as theotes but not theos, a human
consciousness living fully in the metaxy but
not actually God, is a purely philosophical
exegesis of Christ, and further illumination
of who he is must be left to the theologians.
However, Voegelin has precluded this reading
by his stance on dogma and theology. If
theology is merely a deformation of philosophy,
which is the true science, then his
philosophical interpretation of Christ must
become all of the truth of Christ that we can
ever know. This significantly changes the
Christian sense of who Christ is, for, hypothetically,
if Voegelin’s understanding is the
accurate one, then much of Christian belief
is false. Christ is not, as the Nicene Creed has
it, “deum verum de deo vero” or “consubstantialem
patri,” since these are dogmatic
propositions that according to Voegelin have
deteriorated into verbal formalities that have
lost the original living experiences of mysterious,
ineffable reality. Who is he then? In
Voegelin’s mind, how much difference is
there between Christ and Plato as avatars of
divine presence? If Christ was not really God
but was only a Jewish version of the daimonios
aner, and if the knowledge of the unknown
God is in Plato just as much as in Jesus, only
less differentiated, then why should anyone
be a Christian? If William Thompson is right
in saying that “Jesus’ death as that of Socrates
is representative because it expresses this
pull” by which God “draws” the soul,⁴⁸ then
how is Christ significantly more central to
history than was Socrates? If Christ is most
adequately understood as the man who lived
more intensely in the metaxy than anyone
else, then what does it mean to worship or
pray to Christ? If the advantage of Christianity
over Platonic philosophy is only that of
greater “differentiation,” then to what degree
is it better to be a Christian than a
philosopher?

Voegelin’s philosophical analysis seems to
undermine completely the Christian belief in
the radical uniqueness of Christ, for if He is
merely the fullness of the metaxic theotes and
not God himself, then how do we know that
he has been the only such person in history,
particularly if Plato “knew just as much?”
How do we know that other itinerant preachers
did not have the same fullness of divine
reality but lacked a literate Paul and evangelists
with the necessary symbols to articulate
the experience, insight, and vision? How do
we know that there will not be future
“Christs” who will have just as much theotes?
Why should Jesus be the only or the last
instance of the fullness of divine presence
manifested in a human being? Glenn Hughes
in his commentary on Voegelin’s Christianity
asserts that Jesus’ uniqueness is not in his
consciousness shaped by divine-human encounter
and his share in divine presence, for
these are true to some degree of all human
beings, but it is rather in the fact that, for
those with the ability to experience it, “there
is in him such a fullness of revelation, such a
fullness of imaging-forth of the unseen, transcendent
divine reality, that it must be affirmed
to be unsurpassable.”⁴⁹ We must ask if
he was experienced as unsurpassable as God
or as metaxic theotes.⁵⁰ Christ as God is
indeed unique and unsurpassable, but Christ
experienced as fullness of presence of an
Unknown God is another matter. In short,
Christ defined as fullness of divine presence
does not seem as necessarily and radically
unique as Christians have always believed.

The implications of this for Christianity
are profound. As Eugene Webb put it, “To
digest the implications of Voegelin’s thought
for Christian theology will require the efforts
of a generation of theologians, and it will
have to involve radical reconsideration of the
traditional claims of Christianity to exclusive
validity as a religion,” something that Webb
admits would be both difficult and dangerous
because “the question of the relative truth of
various religions cannot be solved by giving
up all doctrinal claims.”⁵¹ Some seem to think
the radical reconsideration is indeed warranted
by the doctrinalization that distorted
the original meaning, such as Michael
Morrissey who commented that “Voegelin
challenges Christian theology to break from
its doxic conception of truth,”⁵² and to
recognize that the traditional identification
of Jesus with God was “a development authorized
by some later, enthusiastic but flawed
Church theologizing that overlooked the
explicit and implicit nuances of Nicea and
Chalcedon, not to mention the Gospel sources
themselves.”⁵³ However, a theologian of the
stature of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, while
acknowledging the mysterious nature of revelation
and the symbolic character of doctrine,
nonetheless bluntly insists “it has always
been a basic tenet of the Christian faith that
Jesus is completely God and completely man.”⁵⁴

If the traditional belief in the Incarnation
as the mysterious union of true divinity and
true humanity in Christ is correct, then there
must be an error in Voegelin’s philosophy. In
my view the questionable assumption that
Voegelin makes is that regarding knowledge
of God we are limited to symbols that articulate
the experience of consciousness in the
“In-Between” and that God cannot or does
not communicate anything to us about what
he is in himself, beyond the metaxy. The
Nicaean and Chalcedonian formulations of
doctrine grew out of centuries of struggling
to refine and clarify what the Scriptural
accounts of Christ were telling us and to
reject false or inadequate interpretations.
The similarity or even continuity between
philosophy and Christianity does not necessarily
mean that Christ is Socrates raised to a
higher power but rather that philosophy
grasped the nature of human participation in
metaxic divine reality without being able to
foresee that the ultimate gift of God would be
to cross over the metaxy and actually become
man. The substance of Christianity, after all,
is not the metaxy but the Incarnation, and
while Voegelin’s thought can certainly enrich
Christianity, its interpretation of the
Incarnation as the metaxy excludes much
that is vitally important in traditional Christian
theology. Consider, for example, the
following theological statement of Christian
belief that opens a book by a contemporary
theologian: “The Christian doctrine of God
is to be understood from within the unique,
definitive, and final self-revelation of God in
Jesus Christ his only-begotten Son, that is,
from within the self-revelation of God as
God become man for us and our
salvation….[and] it is in the Lord Jesus, the
very Word and Mind of God incarnate in
our humanity, that the eternal God ‘defines’
and identifies himself for us as he really is.
Only in Christ is God’s self-revelation identical
with himself, and only in Christ, God for
us, does he communicate his self-revelation
to us in such a way that authentic knowledge
of God is embodied in our humanity….”⁵⁵
For all of the welcome richness and profundity
of Voegelin’s philosophy, and for all that
the metaxy has added to our understanding
of the depths of consciousness, I believe there
are far greater depths of wisdom and mystery
here that are simply invisible within the
range of the spectrum of truth to which
Voegelin’s philosophical assumptions restrict
him.

NOTES

1. Eric Voegelin, “Immortality: Experience and Symbol,”
   The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, [CW] Vol. 12:
   Published Essays 1966-1985, ed. Ellis Sandoz (Baton
   Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 78.

2. Mark Mitchell, “Regaining the Balance: An Augustinian
   Response to Eric Voegelin,” Humanitas, Vol. XV, No.
   1 (2002), 4.

3. Gerhart Niemeyer, “Eric Voegelin’s
   Philosophy and the Drama of Mankind,” originally
   published in Modern Age, Winter, 1976 and reprinted in
   Gerhart Niemeyer, Aftersight and Foresight: Selected Essays
   (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988), 169-
   189. Near the end of his life he devoted an essay to arguing
   that textual and anecdotal evidence supports the conclusion
   that Voegelin was at least favorably disposed to
   Christianity, and that Voegelin’s personal beliefs were a
   matter of his solitude with God. Niemeyer mentions in
   this essay that if he were writing his critique of The
   Ecumenic Age then, his criticism would have been “milder.”
   “Christian Faith, and Religion, in Eric Voegelin’s
   Work,” Within and Above Ourselves: Essays in Political
   Analysis, (Wilmington: Intercollegiate Studies Institute,
   1996), 126-142. Originally published in The Review of
   Politics, Vol. 57. No. 1 (Winter, 1995), 91-104.

4. Ibid.,
   31.

5. David Walsh, “Eric Voegelin and Our Disordered
   Spirit,” Review of Politics, Vol. 57, no. 1 (Winter 1995),
   134; Bruce Douglass, “A Diminished Gospel: A Critique
   of Voegelin’s Interpretation of Christianity,” in Eric
   Voegelin’s Search for Order in History, ed. Stephen A.
   McKnight (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
   Press, 1978), 146; Frederick Wilhelmsen, “Professor
   Voegelin and the Christian Tradition,” in Christianity and
   Political Philosophy (Athens: The University of Georgia
   Press, 1978), 193-200; John Gueguen, “Voegelin’s From
   Enlightenment to Revolution: A Review Article,” The
   Thomist 42:1 (January, 1978), 134.

6. Ellis Sandoz, “Carrying
   Coals to Newcastle,” Eric Voegelin Society panel
   on Voegelin and Christianity, 2002, 1. Available on the
   Eric Voegelin Society website.

7. “Letter from Eric
   Voegelin to Alfred Schutz,” The Philosophy of Order:
   Essays on History, Consciousness and Politics, ed. Peter J.
   Opitz and Gregor Sebba (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981),
   449-450.

8. Sandoz, 2.
9. Eric Voegelin, “Responses at
   the Panel Discussion of “The Beginning and the Beyond,”
   CW, Vol. 33, 420.

10. Eric Voegelin, Conversations
    with Eric Voegelin at the Thomas More Institute
    for Adult Education in Montreal” CW, Vol. 33, The
    Drama of Humanity and Other Miscellaneous Papers, 1939-
    1085, ed. William Petropulos and Gilbert Weiss (Columbia:
    University of Missouri Press), 2004, 282.

11. Eric
    Voegelin, “Responses at the Panel Discussion of ‘The
    Beginning of the Beginning’,” CW, Vol. 33, 420. He also
    wrote that the creedal definition that the Father and the
    Son are homoousios, consubstantial, was “sublimely meaningless.”
    The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago:
    The University of Chicago Press, 1952), 100.

12. Eric Voegelin, “The Gospel and Culture,” CW, Vol. 12,
    173.

13. Ibid., 173. This seems to reflect Justin’s own
    approach to Christianity by a kind of ascent of the soul
    through the successive study of Stoicism, Aristotelianism,
    Pythagoreanism, and Platonism. Jaroslav Pelikan, The
    Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine,
    Vol. I, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600)
    (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971), 63.

14. As Sandoz put it, “If the exploration of the human
    relationship to the transcendent divine ground of being
    is the cardinal problem of philosophy, as Voegelin
    thought, and if he devoted his life to the task in its manifest
    diversity over time from prehistory into the present, the
    designation [mystic philosopher] seems appropriate
    enough.” Sandoz, 2.

15. See Eugene Webb, “Eric
    Voegelin’s Theory of Revelation,” Eric Voegelin’s Thought:
    A Critical Appraisal, ed. by Ellis Sandoz (Durham, NC:
    Duke University Press, 1982), 160.

16. Eric Voegelin,
    “Response to Professor Altizer’s ‘A New History and a
    New but Ancient God?'” CW, Vol. 12, 294. Voegelin
    makes this statement with reference to the belief of
    Aquinas that the Christ is “the head of the corpus mysticum
    that embraces, not only Christians, but all mankind from
    the creation of the world to its end.”

17. Although this
    emphasis on flux would seem to put him in the Heraclitean
    camp, I believe a more apt modern comparison is with
    Bergson, who argued that the inner, metaphysical,
    absolute reality is not Being but becoming, flowing,
    time, and change that can be known only intuitively. .It
    was Bergson’s belief that the static, “scientific” concepts
    of ordinary language are the artifacts of an intellect that
    must analyze and use the world in order to survive, but
    all such concepts artificially stop the vital motion so that
    we might surround ourselves with a world of “things”
    that have constant and reliable properties that we find of
    use. To grasp reality, the constant flow, Bergson thought
    metaphysics “must transcend concepts to reach intuition”
    that could be expressed only in “supple, mobile,
    and almost fluid representations” that are “always ready
    to mold themselves on the fleeting forms of intuition”
    to convey the reality of constant change and are very close
    to what Voegelin meant by symbols. Henri Bergson, The
    Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, (New York:
    Philosophical Library, 1946), 168. Voegelin frequently
    commented that the concepts that we use in propositions
    are inadequate to express the flux of reality because they
    were developed to deal with the material realm in which
    we must engage in practical action to preserve our
    physical existence.

18. “The Gospel and Culture,” 176.
19. Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis, tr. and ed. by Gerhart
    Niemeyer (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame
    Press, 1978), 133.

20. For an eloquent account of this
    metaxic experience, see Voegelin’s description of the
    uncertainty of Christianity in The New Science of Politics,
    122.

21. Philosophy is characteristically noetic, while
    Scripture and visionary sources are predominantly pneumatic.

22. Ibid., 184. The metaxy has been well described
    as the psyche’s searching, uncertainty, and hope in The
    Cloud of Unknowing, a classic mystical work that Voegelin
    frequently mentioned as an example of his own approach
    to philosophy. The anonymous author speaks of God’s
    grace arousing the soul to enthusiasm and ultimately joy
    while bringing it to a deep experience of himself, but the
    soul must be willing to enter the darkness of “unknowing”
    with only “a naked intent toward God.” This
    meditative consciousness that is acutely experienced
    between the “cloud of forgetfulness” of everything in the
    world and the “cloud of unknowing” that obscures the
    vision of God is the metaxy. The Cloud of Unknowing and
    The Book of Privy Counseling, ed. by William Johnston
    (New York: Doubleday, 1973), 48-49.

23. Eric Voegelin,
    “The Beginning and the Beyond,” CW, Vol. 28, What
    Is History? And Other Late Unpublished Writings, ed. by
    Thomas A. Hollweck and Paul Caringella (Baton Rouge:
    Louisiana State University Press, 1990),178-180.

24. Eric
    Voegelin, “Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme,”
    CW, Vol. 12, 366.

25. Eric Voegelin, “Natural Law in
    Political Theory: Excerpts from the Discussion,” CW,
    Vol. 33, 119. The statement quoted is actually part of a
    question raised by one of the participants who described
    Christ “as far as faith is concerned” as quoted and asked
    Voegelin where the representative human being is to be
    found otherwise. Voegelin responded “Nowhere!” As
    Glenn Hughes put it, “Jesus existed in the metaxy like
    every other human being. But…his response to the
    divine appeal was of unparalleled completeness, in such
    a way that the divine partner in his existence was
    experienced, by himself and his followers, as what
    Voegelin calls ‘an extraordinary divine irruption.'”
    “Eric Voegelin and Christianity,” The Intercollegiate
    Review (Fall/Winter 2004), 28.

26. “Conversations,” 293.
27. Ibid., 293.
28. Eric Voegelin, Order and History, Vol.
    I, Israel and Revelation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
    University Press, 1956), 467.

29. He says that this epistle
    is “of dubious origin but is certainly Pauline.” Eric
    Voegelin, “Structures of Consciousness,” CW, Vol 33,
    372.

30. Ibid., 372-73.
31. “Wisdom and the Magic of
    the Extreme,” 368.

32. “The Gospel and Culture,” 190.
33. The Greek suffix –tet (-tes in the nominative)
    expresses the abstract notion of the adjective or substantive
    from which the word is derived, such as philotes,
    friendship, from philos, friend.

34. Romans 1:20 does use
    the word theiotes, which is similar. Voegelin comments,
    “If the author [of Colossians] belonged to the Pauline
    ‘school’, one can understand his symbol theotes as an
    attempt to overcome certain imperfections in Paul’s
    symbol theiotes.” “The Gospel and Culture,” 193.

35. “The Gospel and Culture,” 199.

36. “Wisdom and the
    Magic of the Extreme,” 369. Voegelin includes in these
    pneumatic visions not only those of disciples such as St.
    Paul but also visions attributed to Christ himself, such as
    in Matt. 3: 16-17.

37. The English is from Pelikan, 263-
    264.

38. Ibid., 370.
39. “Immortality: Experience and
    Symbol,” 90.

40. “Conversations,” 250.
41. “The Gospel
    and Culture,” 190.

42. Ibid., 198.
43. The Gospel of John
    uses the word monogenes, usually translated as “onlybegotten”
    to refer to Christ, such as in 3:16.

44. “Conversations,”
    281.

45. Eric Voegelin, Order and History,
    Vol. IV, The Ecumenic Age, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
    University Press, 1974), 242.

46. Ibid., 270.
47. One of
    Niemeyer’s criticisms of Voegelin is “the elimination of
    the Resurrection by reducing the resurrection experiences
    of the disciples to the type of Paul’s vision.” Gerhart
    Niemeyer, “Faith and Reason in Eric Voegelin,” Within
    and Above Ourselves, 123.

48. William M. Thompson,
    “Voegelin on Jesus Christ,” Voegelin and the Theologian:
    Ten Studies in Interpretation, ed. by John Kirby and
    William M. Thompson. (Toronto Studies in Theology,
    Vol. 10. New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1983), 183.

49. Hughes, 28.
50. As James Rhodes comments on the
    position of Gerhart Niemeyer, “he is challenging
    Voegelin on his own terms, contending that Jesus was
    experienced as the ‘only begotten Son’, not as the most
    perfect of many Sons.” James Rhodes, “Voegelin and
    Christian Faith,” Center Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Summer
    1983), 91.

51. Eugene Webb, “Faith, Truth, and Persuasion
    in the Thought of Eric Voegelin,” Voegelin and the
    Theologian, 366.

52. Michael Morrissey, Consciousness and
    Transcendence: The Theology of Eric Voegelin (Notre Dame:
    The University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 249.
    Morrissey’s book contains an excellent analysis of
    Voegelin’s Christology with which I essentially agree,
    although I have serious reservations about his advocacy
    of creating a Voegelinian Christian theology (p. 249)
    because while I agree that “faith is not rooted in assent to
    dogmatic propositions” and that a Voegelinian Christian
    theology might well be in some sense a “more liberating,
    personal, and universal conception” of faith, such a
    theology would not quite be Christianity.

53. Ibid., 242.
54. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity,
    tr. J. R. Foster (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990),
    208. Ratzinger does hold some views about Christ that
    are not far from those of Voegelin, such as “Christian faith
    believes in Jesus as the exemplary man” (which he
    believes is the best way to translate the Pauline concept
    of the “last Adam”). “But precisely because he is the
    exemplary, the authoritative man, he oversteps the
    bounds of humanity; only thus and only thereby is he
    the truly exemplary man,” and “Jesus Christ is…the man
    who has truly come to himself.” “That man is most man,
    indeed the true man, who is most unlimited, who not
    only has contact with the infinite—the infinite being!—
    but is one with him: Jesus Christ. In him ‘hominization’
    has truly reached its goal.” 175-76. Still, Ratzinger insists
    on the traditional doctrine that Jesus Christ is God and
    man, not simply a man filled with divine presence.

55. Thomas F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God, One
    Being, Three Persons (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 1.