Voegelin on Gnosticism, Modernity, and the Balance of Consciousness

The twentieth century was an era of unprecedented horror.
From the Russian Revolution through the two world wars to
the Chinese “Cultural Revolution” and the Cambodian “killing
fields,” millions upon millions have been oppressed, enslaved, or
slaughtered by revolution, war, and the policy of their own
governments. Although one may hope that the worse excesses of
that age have run their course, the Soviet Union has disintegrated
and Eastern Europe is rising, our time remains characterized by
a pervasive apprehension that something is “out of joint.” Freedom,
justice, peace, prosperity, civilization itself seem far from
secure, even in the Western liberal democracies. The widespread
unease and the unparalleled disorder of our era cry out for
explanation.

The philosophy of Eric Voegelin offers insight into the causes
of the twentieth-century nightmare, causes, he suggests, bound
up with the very nature of “modernity” itself. According to
Voegelin, the great modern ideological movements—communism,
fascism, national socialism—are neither random and inexplicable
outbursts nor solely the products of particular material
and historical conditions. They should be understood instead as
the extreme manifestations of a form of spiritual disorder or
psychic disorientation that springs from certain tensions inherent
in human existence. For Voegelin, the crisis of modernity is in
essence a spiritual crisis rooted in a deformation of the truth of
reality.

The Balance of Consciousness
According to Voegelin, human existence is always and everywhere
“existence-in-tension,” existence in the “in-between” reality that
Plato termed the metaxy and that is constituted by a simultaneous
tension toward both mundane existence and its transcendent
divine ground. Human consciousness in all times and all places
finds itself embedded within a mysterious, participatory reality
“halfway between God and man,”¹ a reality constituted by a
tension toward the existential poles of immanence and transcendence,
the poles of mortality and immortality, ignorance and
knowledge, time and timelessness, imperfection and perfection,
matter and spirit, existence and non-existence, life and death,
truth and its deformation. Reality is a comprehensive whole that
consists of both mundane and transcendent dimensions, of mutual
participation of the human and the divine.

A “healthy,” “balanced,” or “well-ordered” consciousness is
for Voegelin one that accepts the “tensional structure of existence”
² and mediates successfully between its contrary poles.
“Diseased” or “unbalanced” or “disordered” consciousness, on
the other hand, may be defined as a mode of experience wherein
one or the other of the existential poles whose tension constitutes
the “in-between” reality of human existence has been collapsed; it
is existence within a truncated or deformed reality characterized
by the eclipse of one or the other of its inseparable dimensions.
Disordered consciousness may, then, take one of two main forms,
depending upon which existential dimension, the immanent or the
transcendent, recedes from experience. In the case wherein
intense consciousness of transcendent reality serves to eclipse
mundane reality, a condition that Voegelin terms “metastatic
faith,” the belief in the imminent arrival of divine presence on
earth in such a manner that worldly existence is transfigured
prevails. The second possible response to the tension inherent in
human existence and the one more problematic in the modern era
is the eclipse of the transcendent realm by the illegitimate
expansion of immanent to total reality; such, Voegelin maintains,
is the existential response that underlies both the various ideological
constructions and other peculiarly “modern” political and
social movements.

According to Voegelin, the phenomenon of imbalanced consciousness
is intimately bound up with mankind’s spiritual advance
from what he terms the “compact” spiritual experience of
the ancient cosmological empires to the “differentiated” experiences
manifested in classical philosophy and Christianity. The
inhabitants of the cosmological empires (e.g., Egypt, Persia,
Syria) experienced the Divine Source as an intra-cosmic entity;
they dwelled within a divinized “world full of gods.” Their world
was experienced as a microcosm that reflected the divine order of
the cosmos, an order mediated through the political ruler to the
people and the realm. For cosmological man then, the divine and
the immanent were inseparable; he had not yet discovered either
the soul or the transcendent ground of being, experiences that
could dissociate the cosmos and the ground of being into radically
immanent and radically transcendent realms. Although there
undoubtedly existed tension between the “truth of the soul”³ and
the “truth of society”⁴ even in the compact societies, such tension
could not become socially disruptive so long as the cosmological
order was experienced as all-embracing and so long as the
existential reality of the psyche and the transcendent Divine
Source remained undifferentiated.

Thus the problem of unbalanced consciousness, “the problem
of maintaining a balance between openness to transcendent
experience and sober attentiveness to the necessities of mundane
existence,”⁵ is bound up with the “theophanic events” wherein the
transcendent God revealed himself to man; it first appears on the
historical scene with the revelation of the “I Am” to the Hebrews.
Indeed, the prophet Isaiah is for Voegelin the prototypical bearer
of “metastatic faith,” the “faith that the very structure of pragmatic
existence in society and history is soon to undergo a decisive
transformation.”⁶ Isaiah, of course, counseled the king to lay
down his arms and trust that God would defeat his enemies.
Isaiah’s experience of the transcendent God was so intense as to
eclipse the reality of political existence in time; he became
convinced that divine intervention would transform the very
structure of mundane reality in such a way as to insure the victory
of the Chosen People over their worldly enemies. The point is that
Isaiah’s experience of participation in divine transcendent reality
was so strong that he “tried the impossible: to make the ‘leap in
being’ a leap out of existence into a divinely transfigured world
beyond the laws of mundane existence.”⁷ According to Voegelin,
this “prophetic conception of a change in the constitution of
being,”⁸ bound up as it with the existential discovery of the “truth
of transfigured reality,”⁹ lies at the root of the ideological consciousness
which he identifies as one of the main sources of
disorder in the modern era.

The classical philosophers also struggled with the problem of
existential balance deriving from the discovery of spiritual order.
The discoveries they made, of the transcendent nature of the
Divine Source (the Platonic epekeina or beyond) and of the
psyche, the “human spiritual soul” that is the “sensorium of
transcendence,” were epochal events in mankind’s advancement
from spiritual dimness to spiritual clarity. For Plato discovered
that the openness of the psyche toward divine reality may permit
certain transcendent experiences that shape the order of soul and
society; he discovered the transcendent ground of being which is
the source of personal, social, and historical order. Plato, however,
unlike Isaiah, managed to maintain the balance of consciousness
in the face of the theophanic event; he did not permit
his transcendent experiences to disturb his awareness of the
autonomous structure of mundane reality, of the enduring reality
of existence in the cosmos of begetting and perishing. Although he
glimpsed a realm of enduring perfection, he remained lucidly
aware of the “improbability”¹⁰ of its establishment in time as well
as of the inevitable decline of such a perfect order if it were
somehow to come into being. Platonic philosophy represents for
Voegelin a model of “noetic control,” of healthy, balanced existence
within the enduring tensions of the metaxy.

Although the Platonic discovery was an advance from compactness
to differentiation, it was, according to Voegelin, but a
step on the spiritual path that found its end in the epiphany of
Christ. Christianity, for Voegelin, represents the “maximal differentiation”
of the relation between God and man; the “leap in
being” that accompanied the epiphany of Christ fully differentiated
the radically transcendent nature of the Divine Source and
the truth of transfigured reality. The effect was not only to
heighten the tension of existence in the metaxy but potentially to
“destabilize” the balance of consciousness. It is perhaps difficult
for modern man to re-experience the “shock” felt by those who
first experienced the revelation of the transcendent God and the
concomitant “withdrawal of Divinity from the world.” The newly
de-divinized cosmos must have “seemed to be left an empty shell,
void of meaning, [indeed,] void of reality.”¹¹ Moreover, and most
importantly, Christianity permanently “reordered human existence
in society . . . through the experience of man’s destination,
by the grace of the world-transcendent god, towards eternal life
in beatific vision.”¹² Such an experience threatened to diminish
the value of mundane existence (what is the meaning and significance
of that existence in light of man’s ultimate transfiguration
in God out of time?). For various reasons then, the Christian
revelation would challenge the existential balance of consciousness.
Thus it is not surprising that the modern ideological movements,
which Voegelin regards as manifestations of existential
imbalance and disorientation, should prove to be intimately
bound up with the Christian experience.

Gnosticism and Modernity
From the seventh century B.C. onward the ancient Near East was
wracked by a series of military conquests that profoundly disoriented
the inhabitants of the various cosmological empires. A
widespread sense of meaningless and psychic disorientation was
engendered by the slaughter, the enslavements, the forced intermingling
of peoples and cultures, phenomena which inevitably
undermined faith in the traditional cosmological order. Various
responses arose in the attempt to comprehend the meaning of
existence within such a troubled world, among the more important
of which were stoicism, Christianity, and gnosticism.

To gnostic man, the world appeared neither as the “wellordered,”
the cosmos of the Greeks, nor as the Judeo-Christian
world that God created and “found good.” On the gnostic view, by
contrast, the world appeared as a “prison from which [man must]
escape, . . . as an alien place into which man has strayed and from
which he must find his way back home to the other world of his
origins.”¹³ The fundamental experience of the ancient gnostics
was of an alien, disorganized, chaotic, and meaningless world.
They experienced God as an absolutely transcendent entity utterly
divorced from mundane existence, the existing world as
false, as devoid of reality, as “existent nothingness.” Not surprisingly,
the central theme of the diverse gnostic thinkers was the
“destruction of [such an abhorrent] old world and the passage to
[a] new.”¹⁴ A new world that offers salvation from an old world felt
to be wrong in its very constitution could, they taught, be gained
through personal effort and a privileged gnosis of the means of
escape.

According to Voegelin, the ancient gnostic speculations engendered
in response to the disorder of the “ecumenic age” are of
significance because the experiences and beliefs they symbolize
have re-emerged in modern times with such force as to have
decisively shaped the character of that era. The history of
“modernity” is for him the history of a struggle between different
representations of the truth of existence, represented on the one
hand by the truth of the soul and of man’s relationship to God
manifested in classical philosophy and Christianity, and on the
other by the “new truth” propounded by modern “gnostic”¹⁵
thinkers, the truth of the radical immanence of existence and the
promise of a revolutionary transfiguration of man and society in
time. Philosophy, we have seen, discovered the truth of transcendent
divinity, a truth decisively differentiated by the epiphany of
Christ. These events an “uncompromising [and] radical dedivinization
of the world”¹⁶ and a concomitant dissociation of
previously unified spiritual and temporal power. Henceforth
man’s transcendent spiritual destiny was to be existentially represented
by the Church, the de-divinized temporal sphere of
political power by the Empire, a “double representation of man
in society”¹⁷ that endured through the Middle Ages.

Voegelin maintains that this truth of man in society was
challenged during the late Middle Ages by the rise of various
“gnostic” spiritual movements which would prove to be the
seedbeds of modern ideological consciousness and which ultimately
effected the “re-divinization” of political society in the
name of a new truth of existence. Such movements were an
outgrowth of a “fissure”¹⁸ within the early Christian community
that stemmed from varying interpretations of the Revelation of
St. John. The Revelation had aroused chialiastic expectations in
certain early Christians, and they impatiently awaited Christ’s
imminent second coming. Augustine sought to dash such expectations
by re-interpreting John: Christ’s thousand-year reign on
earth, he declared, had already begun with the Incarnation; thus
“there would be no divinization of society beyond the pneumatic
presence of Christ and his Church.”¹⁹ According to the Augustinian
philosophy of history, the period following the epiphany of
Christ was the last of six historical phases, the saeculum senescens,
a time of waiting for the end of history to be brought about
through eschatological events. Augustine, moreover, had drawn
a further distinction between profane and sacred history, which
was, in turn, embedded in a transcendental history of the civitas
dei. Only transcendental history, including the sacred history of
the epiphany of Christ and the establishment of the Church, had
direction toward eschatological fulfillment. Profane history had
no such direction, or indeed, meaning of any sort; it was merely
a waiting for the end in a radically “de-divinized” world.

The End of History
The twelfth century was a time of civilizational expansion and
growth; population was increasing, trade and settlement expanding,
urban culture and intellectual life flourishing. Augustine’s
notion of a “senile” age was incongruous in the midst of such
expansive vitality. At this critical juncture, a new construction of
history emerged to challenge the Augustinian construction. The
Calabrian monk Joachim of Flora created a speculative history
that satisfied the desire to endow mundane human existence with
a meaning which Christianity, and especially the Augustinian
conception of history, had denied it; and he did so by relocating
the end of transcendental history, the Christian eschaton, the
ultimate transfiguration in God out of time within historical
existence. Joachim’s project, according to Voegelin, was the “first
Western attempt at an immanentization of the meaning of history.”
²⁰ What begins with Joachim is a conception of “Western
society as a civilizational course that comes into view as a whole
because it is moving intelligibly toward an end.”²¹ Thus begins the
modern attempt to find a Final End of mundane history that
would substitute for the end of history in the transcendent
Christian sense.

Joachim modeled his new conception of history on the
Trinity; he divided history into three ages, the Age of the Father,
the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Age of the Father spanned the
beginning of creation to the time of Christ; the Age of the Son
began with Christ and ended in Joachim’s time; the Age of the
Holy Spirit was about to dawn (Joachim predicted it would begin
in 1260) and would last indefinitely. According to Voegelin,
Joachim’s construction is of significance because the three-age
symbolism he created rules not only the modern ideological
constructions of history, but the “self-interpretation of modern
[Western] society” and thus the structure of its politics to this day.

In Joachitic history, which let immanent history end with the
end of sacred history, transfiguration in God was “fallacious, but
not un-Christian.”²² In the several centuries following Joachim’s
construction, the new historical expectations he created remained
more or less within the Christian orbit; it was thought that
an increase of fulfillment in history would come about through a
new eruption of transcendent spirit. Over time, however, the
process of “fallacious immanentization” begun by Joachim became
more and more radical and the relation to transcendence
ever more tenuous. By the eighteenth century, the increase of
meaning in history would be conceived as a radically intramundane
phenomenon; the transcendent pole that sustains the balance of
existential consciousness collapsed. The result, according to
Voegelin, is the spiritual and temporal disorder and disorientation
of the “modern age.”²³

What unites the various manifestations of this spiritual disorder—
positivism, progressivism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, liberalism,
fascism, National Socialism—is the radical “will to
immanentization,” the closure toward the transcendent dimension
of human experience, that underlies their construction.
Indeed, the most extreme modern ideologies go a step further;
their proponents not only reject the transcendent ground but seek
to “abolish the constitution of being, with its origin in divine,
transcendent being, and to replace it with a world-immanent
order of being.” They aim to bring about the transfiguration of
human nature through human action in history and to build a
terrestrial paradise endowed with the meaning and salvational
qualities of the Christian eschaton. In short, the ideological
constructions embody, in Voegelin’s famous terminology, a radical
and “fallacious immanentization of the Christian eschaton.”²⁴
The Christian conception of man’s ultimate transfiguration in
God was brought “down to earth,” transformed into the notion of
human transfiguration in time, to be accomplished through
strictly human and immanent action; the transcendent Christian
end of history was transformed into a mundane “End of History”
to be realized in the immanent future. The ideologists carried the
process begun by Joachim to its limit; the transcendent dimension
of reality was fully absorbed into mundane existence.

Gnostic Experience and Symbolism
As we have said, Voegelin contends that the modern ideological
constructions are the productions of “speculative gnostics” who
share the basic existential motivations and aims of their ancient
forebears. These include:

1. Dissatisfaction with present existence.

2. The belief that this dissatisfaction results from the intrinsically
poor organization of the world. If something is not right, the
reason is to be found in the evil of the world.

3. The belief that salvation from the wickedness of the world is
possible.

4. The belief that the order of being will be changed in an
historical solution, that a good world will evolve historically.
5. The belief that a change in the order of being can be realized
through human action, that “self-salvation” is possible through
man’s own effort.

6. The construction of a “formula” for self- and world-salvation
based upon knowledge of how to alter being. The gnostic
thinker typically presents himself as a prophet proclaiming
knowledge about the salvation of mankind.

The ancient and modern gnostics differ in that the moderns
assume an aggressive, activist stance toward the “evil” of existent
reality, while the ancients were relatively quietistic. Nevertheless,
according to Voegelin, their experiential motivations as well as
their aims are of a piece. All gnostics experience the world “as a
place of total chaos which would be transformed into a world of
perfected, durable order by divine or human intervention.”²⁵ All
gnostics aim to alter the constitution of being through human
effort in order to escape a world experienced as alien and evil, and
they aim to do so through applying their special gnosis to that task.
All of them have falsely extrapolated their experience of the
“beyond” to the “beginning,” claiming knowledge of the nature
and meaning of human existence and of history as a whole that
they do not and can not actually possess.

The modern ideological “gnostics” also differ from their
ancient counterparts in that the modern “revolt against reality” is
directed against a world shaped by the Christian differentiation of
spiritual truth; their constructions must be understood in light of
the Christian background against which they rose in rebellion.
Indeed, the modern ideologies may be said to “derive” from
Christianity in that they represent radically immanentized transformations
of Christian experience and symbolism, a derivation
evinced in their structural congruence with Christian doctrine.

First, all the modern ideologists adopted and transformed the
Christian idea of perfection. For the Christian, life on earth is
shaped by the expectation and aim of realizing a “supernatural
[fulfillment] through grace in death.”²⁶ The Christian idea of
supernatural perfection thus consists of two components: a
teleological movement toward a final axiological goal, the state of
ultimate perfection or “highest value.” As we have said, all the
ideological movements immanentize the Christian eschaton by
aiming to produce a final state of perfection within historical
existence, a perfect society that is to be created through implementation
of the ideologists’ program or system. The ideological
constructions differ, however, according to whether they emphasize
either the teleological or axiological element of the Christian
conception from which they derive. Accordingly, the various
immanentist constructions may be classified into several types:

1. Teleological immanentization. When the teleological component
of the idea of perfection is immanentized, the main
emphasis of the system lies on the forward movement toward the
goal of perfection in this world. According to Voegelin, the
eighteenth century ideal of “progress” is of this type as is liberal
progressivism in general. The emphasis is on movement; typically
there is little clarity about the final state to be realized.

2. Axiological immanentization. Here the emphasis is placed on
the state of perfection in the world. Generally the thinker paints
a detailed picture of the proposed perfect society while giving
short shrift to the means by which it is to be realized. All
formulations of “ideal societies” fall into this category; Thomas
More’s Utopia is a classic example.

3. Activist mysticism. In this form of immanentization, the
teleological and axiological types are combined. Here the thinker
typically provides a more or less clear picture of the final state to
be achieved as well as “knowledge” of the means by which it is
to be brought into existence. Auguste Comte’s final state of
industrial society under rule of the managers and positivists is
one example; Karl Marx’s communist society to be ushered in by
the proletarian revolution is another.

The second set of Christian symbols transformed by the
modern ideological speculators derive from the Joachitic conception
of history we have previously discussed. Joachim created and
bequeathed to modern man a complex of four symbols.²⁷ The first
is that of the “Third Realm,” the third “world-historical phase that
is at the same time the last, the age of fulfillment.” Such symbolism
reappears at a later date as the now familiar distinction between
ancient, medieval, and modern historical periods; in the Comtean
periodization of history into the theological, metaphysical, and
positivist ages of man; in Marx’s division of history into primitive
communism, bourgeois class society, and the final realm of the
classless Communist paradise; in the “Third Reich” symbolism
adopted by the Nazis; and so forth.

The second symbol derived from the Joachitic trinitarian
eschatology was the symbol of the leader, the dux, who “appears
at the beginning of each new era and establishes it through his
appearance.” This symbol reemerges in various guises throughout
the ensuing centuries: in the belief that St. Francis of Assisi would
usher in the new Age of the Holy Spirit; in the paracletes imbued
with the spirit of God who led the various sectarian movements of
the Renaissance and Reformation; in Machiavelli’s Prince; in the
charismatic leaders of the national-socialist and fascist movements.

The third symbol created by Joachim and adopted by the
ideological thinkers was that of the prophet, the precursor of each
of the three ages. This symbol was transformed over time from the
still-Christian conception of Joachim’s era into the secular intellectual
who knows the program for salvation from the evils of the
world, who can predict the future course of world history, and
who knows the meaning of that history (Hegel, Marx, Comte).

The final symbol bequeathed by Joachim to the modern world
was that of the “community of spiritually autonomous persons.”
Joachim believed that the Age of the Holy Spirit would be one
wherein highly spiritualized individuals would exist in community
without the mediation and support of institutions and organizations.
Joachim had the monks in mind. This notion reappears in
later times as, for instance, the Marxian and anarchist notion of
the withering away of the state and as the radical-democratic
conception of a society of autonomous men.

“The substance of history,” Voegelin insists, “is to be found on
the level of experiences, not on the level of ideas.”²⁸ In order to
understand the logic of modern political developments and the
rise of the ideological mass movements, then, we must examine
them in light of the existential consciousness that engendered
them, trace them to their source in the experiences and motivations
of their founders and followers. More particularly, we must
understand them as impelled by an intense “will to
immanentization” which is in turn related to a desire to assuage
the tensions of existence in the metaxy by eliminating one of its
sources, man’s experience of the transcendent.

We recall that for Voegelin human existence is existence-intension
within the participatory reality constituted by simultaneous
tension toward both mundane existence and its transcendent
divine ground. By definition, a healthy or well-ordered
consciousness is one that successfully mediates between the
existential poles of immanence and transcendence; a disordered
consciousness does not so succeed. Because all ideological consciousness
entails a rejection of the transcendent dimension of
reality, a closure toward the divine ground, it may be regarded as
a form of imbalanced or disordered consciousness in the
Voegelinian sense. What accounts for this disturbed relation to
reality? Although there is no one “cause,” the following elements
enter into Voegelin’s analysis of the existential roots of
“pneumopathological,” or spiritually disordered, consciousness.

In all cases of ideological consciousness, the will to power of
the thinker “has triumphed over the humility of subordination to
the constitution of being.” We recall that the principal aim of the
ideological thinkers is to “destroy the order of being, which is
experienced as defective and unjust and through man’s creative
power to replace it with a perfect and just order.” In order to
destroy such a “defective” order, it must be conceived as susceptible
of human intervention; it can not be the created order of the
Christian God which is, of course, impervious to human manipulation.
Because the order of being must be conceived as under
man’s control, then, its “givenness . . . must be obliterated.”²⁹ This
requires the “retroactive” destruction of the God whose existence
would prevent man from fashioning the order of being to his
liking.

Consequently, the first and most important task of the
ideological thinker is, as Nietzsche succinctly put it, to “murder
God.” What underlies the “will to immanentization” and the
passion to abolish transcendent reality is an unbounded desire for
power over being, the pneumapathological wish and need to be
God. According to the “logic” of the disordered soul, such a wish
can be realized by destroying God, for, magically, he “who
murders god will himself become god.” Thus, the “murder of God
is of the very essence of the gnostic recreation of the order of
being.”³⁰ What, one may ask, engenders such a seemingly insane
aspiration? “Beyond the psychology of the will to power we are
confronted with the inscrutable fact that grace is granted or
denied.”³¹ On Voegelin’s view, our search for an ultimate explanation
for the emergence of so many would-be modern gods
founders on the ultimate mystery of man’s relation to God.

Existential Resistance
Voegelin wishes to emphasize that the ideological thinkers do not
deny the truth of reality (they may in fact be spiritually sensitive
persons with an acute sense of transcendence), they resist it. The
gnostic resisters who created the ideological systems, like the
philosophers and prophets who created the philosophical and
Christian symbolism, experience a reality that has eschatological
direction, that is moving beyond its present structure. Moreover,
they know reality moves not only into an historical future but
toward a transcendent Beyond; notions such as “transcendence
into the future” clearly point to the distinction they intend to
obscure (an existence that “comes to an end in time without coming
to [a] final End out-of-time”³²). Why do the resisters resist a truth
which with they do not disagree? And what are the experiential
sources that have made such resistance a recurring force in history?

The existential resisters are dissatisfied with the lack of order
they experience in personal and social existence. Such dissatisfaction
is itself understandable, for human existence is afflicted with
many miseries—hunger, hard work, disease, early death, injustice—
and painfully disoriented by rapid change (such as that
engendered by the modern scientific and industrial revolutions).
Ideological resisters, like many others, suffer from present disorder,
but, more importantly, they suffer from the discrepancy
between that disorder and the higher, truer order which they also
apprehend yet which seems to lie beyond the possibility of
realization. They are “disappointed with the slowness of the
[transfiguring] movement in reality toward the order they experience
as the true order demanded by the Beyond”; they are morally
outraged by the misery entailed by this “slowness.” Such experiences
can lead to the conviction that something is “fundamentally
wrong with reality itself.” At such a point, the resister to disorder
becomes a revolutionary who seeks to overturn the very structure
of reality itself. The tension of existence in the metaxy dissolves;
the “Beyond is no longer experienced as an effective ordering
force.”³³ The ideologist constructs a system that will replace the
defective force.

There is, however, an even deeper stratum of resistance, one
originating from the structure of consciousness itself and especially from its imaginative capacity. Imagination for Voegelin is
the capacity that permits man to symbolize, to articulate and
express, his participatory experience within the “metaxy of divinehuman
movements and countermovements,” the capacity that
makes him a “creative partner in the movement of reality toward
its truth.”³⁴ This creative imaginative force can go awry, however,
if the creative partner forgets he is a partner and begins to regard
himself as “the sole creator of truth.” It is such an “imaginative
expansion of participatory into sole power”³⁵ that underlies the
ideologist’s illusory belief that he can create a new reality through
creating a new image. Because of his imaginative capacity, man
can confuse his image of reality with reality itself.³⁶

Ideology and the Drive for Certainty
We have seen that the ideological thinker aims to abolish existential
reality and the constitution of being in order to deliver man
from various perceived evils. But the control of being does not of
course actually lie within his grasp; reality is not susceptible of
human manipulation. Accordingly, “nonrecognition of reality is
the first principle”³⁷ of the ideological constructions. In order to
make his pathological constructions seem plausible, the thinker
must imaginatively construct what Voegelin, following Robert
Musil, calls a “Second Reality,” a transfigured “dream world” that
replaces the First Reality he finds so unsatisfactory. The various
Second Realities³⁸ resemble the First Reality in many respects
(otherwise they would be too patently absurd), yet the ideological
constructor necessarily eliminates certain inconvenient features
of reality from his model. The ideologists vary in regard to which
element of reality they omit; it may be the primary experience of
the cosmos (the begetting and perishing of all existent forms), as
in all constructions which anticipate the “End of History”; the
need for institutional constraints and incentives as in Marx; the
summum bonum as in Hobbes; the human penchant for possession,
as in More’s Utopia, and so on. The point is that every
ideological thinker constructs an imaginary reality that eliminates
essential elements of reality as we know it.

As we said, the construction of ideological systems or programs
does not of course permit actual control over being or
reality. According to Voegelin, what the ideological constructors
gain is the “fantasy satisfaction” of certain psychic needs, more
particularly, of the need for “a stronger certainty about the
meaning of human existence.”³⁹ Ideologues and their followers
are comforted by the sense of increased certainty that accompanies
their new-found knowledge, and the pretense of knowing the
future course of events provides a firmer, if illusory, basis for
action. For Voegelin, then, it is the inherent uncertainty of human
existence, the tension of existing in a world whose only assurance
of meaning and purpose is to be found through faith-engendered
experiences, that impels the ideological thinkers into their Second
Realities and to the construction of philosophies of history that
envision an everlasting realm of bliss in time.

As we suggested earlier, Voegelin maintains that the heightened
spiritual tension engendered by the Christian differentiation
is bound up with the rise of the modern ideological movements.
Christianity, in further differentiating the truth of the soul and
clarifying man’s relation to a radically transcendent God, exacerbated
the existential uncertainty the ideological constructions
serve to assuage.

The Christian faith, as Voegelin understands it, requires great
spiritual strength; it provides no assurance of the meaning or
value of personal existence other than that gained by faith itself.
It does not generate certain knowledge of the nature of being, of
God, or of the meaning of mundane events; it reveals, on the
contrary, the hard truth that the “order of reality is essentially
mysterious.”⁴⁰ A faith whose very “essence is uncertainty,”⁴¹
Voegelin suggests, may generate an intolerable anxiety among
those who long for greater assurance. The fact that the Christian
differentiation of the truth of the soul is “more accurate” may
provide scant consolation to those who crave a more certain
guarantee of meaning and purpose.

Voegelin contends that Christianity’s widespread social success
brought many people into the Christian orbit who did not
have the spiritual stamina to endure the strains of existence
demanded by Christian faith at the same time further differentiation
revealed the uncertainty that is its essence. The result was
that “great masses of Christianized men who were not strong
enough for the heroic adventure of faith became susceptible to
ideas that could give them a greater degree of certainty about the
meaning of their existence than Christian faith.” Because the
reality of being as it is known by Christianity is difficult to bear,
he maintains, many persons took flight into alternative spiritual
constructs that permitted a seemingly “firmer grip on God”⁴² than
that afforded by Christian faith alone.

This was not, Voegelin tells us, an entirely novel historical
phenomenon, but one that appeared wherever the truth of the
transcendent God had been differentiated; the “temptation to fall
from spiritual height that brings uncertainty into final clarity
down to a more solid certainty of world-immanent, sensible,
fulfillment seems to be a general human problem.”⁴³ The Israelitic
differentiation of the transcendent God had engendered a similar
response; those who could not endure the demands placed upon
the Chosen People fell back upon the still culturally viable
polytheism of the surrounding society. In the late Middle Ages,
the socially available spiritual alternative to a difficult Christianity
was the “living culture” of the various underground gnostic
movements, which provided “experiential alternatives sufficiently
close to the experience of faith but far enough from it to remedy
the uncertainty of strict faith.”⁴⁴

More particularly, the “experiential alternatives” offered by
the gnostic spiritual movements (the cradle of the modern ideological
movements) consisted of various attempts to “expand the
soul to the point where god is drawn into the existence of man,”⁴⁵
of attempts to “divinize [the person who undergoes the experience]
by substituting more massive modes of participation in
divinity for faith in the Christian sense.”⁴⁶ Such experiences are of
three kinds: intellectual, emotional, and volitional. The intellectual
variant typically takes the form of a “speculative penetration”
of the mystery of creation and existence; the Hegelian system is
a good example. The emotional variant assumes the form of an
“indwelling of divine substance in the human soul,” as in the
experiences of the paracletic sectarian leaders. The third type, the
volitional, manifests itself as an “activist redemption of man and
society,” best illustrated by Comte and Marx. According to
Voegelin, it is this existential self-divinization that constitutes the
“active core” of the immanentist eschatology that has impelled the
modern re-divinization of society “from medieval immanentism
through humanism, enlightenment, progressivism, liberalism,
positivism, and Marxism.”⁴⁷

Marx provides a clear example of the existential dynamics
involved in the process of self-divinization/secularization. Marx,
following Feuerbach, insisted that God was a “projection” of
man’s highest and best qualities into some illusory beyond. Thus
man’s task is to draw his projection of God back into himself; in
so doing, man becomes conscious that he himself is god; he is
transfigured into “superman.” According to Voegelin, however,
this Marxian transfiguration represents the extreme form of a
“less radical medieval experience, which drew the spirit of God
into man, while leaving God himself in his transcendence”; the
modern “superman” of Comte, Marx, and Nietzsche is the end of
the road to radical secularization marked by such figures as the
paracletic sectarian leader, the “godded man” of the English
Reformation mystics,”⁴⁸ and so on. “Modern secularism should
be understood as the radicalization of . . . earlier forms of
[medieval and] paracletic immanentism, because the experiential
divinization of man is more radical in the secularist case.”⁴⁹ All of
this highlights the historical continuity between earlier and later
gnostic movements and the experiential dynamics involved in the
growth of the gnostic consciousness that has gradually transformed
man’s self-understanding over the course of centuries.

We have seen that the ideologists’ aim is to abolish the
tensions of historical existence by freezing history into an everlasting
final realm on earth. To eliminate such tensions, they must
abolish one of its sources, the truth of the open soul in tension
toward the divine, as well as its symbolic manifestations, philosophy and Christianity. Thus the marked hostility to both philosophy
and Christianity that characterizes the peculiarly “modern”
strains of Western civilization. On Voegelin’s view, however,
Christianity is not blameless in this regard, for over time it came
to embrace an excessive doctrinization and dogmatism which
served to eclipse the experiential foundation of Christian truth.
The ossification of that truth in formalistic and literalistic theological
and metaphysical doctrine caused the Christian symbols
to become opaque; the existential truth they were meant to
express became increasingly obscure. It was this erosion of the
existential meaning behind the Christian symbols which “permitted
gnostic symbols of reality to take over the representational
function among the nation states of the Western world.”⁵⁰

Indeed, the rise of gnostic consciousness led to a gradual
transformation of the meaning of the main symbols by which
Western civilization had ordered itself for a millennium. “Man”
became merely a world-immanent being who governs the universe
through intellect and will, through science and pragmatic action.
The highest-order goods in the Western tradition, the life of
contemplative reason expressed in philosophy and the life of the
spirit symbolized by the Church, were attacked as “false and
anachronistic.” Under the influence of the scientistic and positivistic
“science” that stems from gnostic consciousness, the “real”
was contracted to only that which is immanent and “objective”;
man’s spiritual needs were no longer regarded as grounded in the
truth of being. The resulting experiential impoverishment partially
accounts for the mass appeal of the modern “political religions.”

Men can allow the world to so expand that the world and the God
behind it disappear. But they cannot thereby solve the problem
of their existence, for it endures in every soul. Thus when the
God behind the world is unseen, the contents of the world
emerge as new gods.⁵¹

The most devastating result of the gnostic victory, however,
was the “radical expurgation of a whole range of experiences
previously open to man,” the symbolic experiences of transcendence
through which man gains his sense of order, meaning, and
immortality. Indeed, the loss of such experiences was both cause
and effect of the rise of revolutionary gnostic consciousness. As
we have said, the ossification of existential truth into dogma
served to eclipse the living truth such dogma was meant to
protect; it created an existential void to be filled by the gnostic
promise. The radical immanentization that ensued served further
to suppress those intimations of order and meaning rooted in
participation in the divine ground; indeed, it created a closed
world deprived of any relation to transcendent being. The resulting
sense of confinement fanned the flames of revolt against the
limits of such an existence; it fueled the various revolutionary
attempts to realize the “impossible goal of intramundane perfection.”
⁵² The nightmare of our century was created by disoriented
souls railing against the confines of a closed reality.

As we observed at the outset, the twentieth century has been
an era of “unprecedented destructiveness” and remains pervaded
by a diffuse sense of unease, dissatisfaction, and even alienation.
At the same time, however, it has witnessed significant achievement:
the growth in population accompanied by advances in
material well-being, longevity, and literacy, much of which is
made possible by the remarkable development of science and
technology. Our time represents the curious phenomenon of a
civilization that is “declining” and “advancing” at the same time.

Voegelin’s analysis of modernity suggests that the simultaneous
material growth and spiritual decline of Western civilization
is related to the process of radical immanentization or
“secularization” we have discussed. “Gnostic speculation overcame
the uncertainty of faith by receding from transcendence
and endowing man and his intramundane range of action with the
meaning of eschatological fulfillment; . . . as this immanentization
progressed experientially, civilizational activity became a mystical
work of self-salvation.”⁵³ This ‘recession from transcendence’
permitted the release of tremendous spiritual energy for the
pursuit of worldly achievement; in building civilization, man was
earning salvation itself. Insofar as civilizational pursuits became a
diversion from or substitute for genuine spirituality, however, the
true life of the spirit was vitiated. Insofar as intramundane activity
“absorbed into itself the eternal destiny of man,” the transcendent
experiences which are the source of both personal and social order
tended to disappear or become unintelligible. “The price of
progress,” Voegelin observes, “is the death of the spirit.”⁵⁴

The absurd and even demonic consequences of the modern
drive to immanentization are dramatically illustrated by the
example of Auguste Comte, the founder of the “religion of
humanity.” Comte was moved to proclaim himself the new
Christ, the “world-immanent last judge of mankind, deciding on
immortality or annihilation for every human being.”⁵⁵ The memory
of those who had made significant intramundane contributions
would, he declared, be preserved forever in the annals of mankind;
indeed, the especially illustrious would earn a spot on the
positivist “calendar of saints.” Those who failed to make an
enduring contribution to immanentist human welfare were, on
the other hand, to be consigned to social oblivion; their memories
would simply be erased from the records of human existence.

Comte’s ideas were taken seriously by many eminent persons,
John Stuart Mill among them. How could this be? Voegelin’s
answer is that Comtean messianism is not all that far removed
from the ethos of secular liberal progressivism and its ideal of
ever-advancing immanentist progress. Progressivism, like its
ideological brethren, is a manifestation of existential imbalance;
it too relegates the transcendent to oblivion. Thus, from the
Voegelinian perspective, liberal progressivism appears as far less
benign than its proponents believe. Not only does it impoverish
human existence by identifying “progress” with material advance,
but, in relegating the spiritual life to the private sphere, it created
a spiritual vacuum in the “public square” into which the messianic
ideologues with their promise of ultimate fulfillment on earth
eagerly rushed. The end of a radically immanentist “progressivism”
is not, Voegelin warns, the emergence of positivist supermen
or a realm of earthly paradise, but the gulag and the concentration
camp. As he starkly put it, the “progressivist symbolism of contributions,
commemorations, and oblivion [characteristic not only of
Comte but of liberal-progressivism in general] draws the contours
of those ‘holes of oblivion’ into which the divine redeemers of the
gnostic empires drop their victims with a bullet in the neck.”⁵⁶

Despite all of this, however, there is ground for hope, for
human nature does not change. “The closure of the soul in modern
gnosticism can repress the truth of the soul,

but it can not remove the soul and its transcendence from the
structure of reality.” The flight from reality can not last forever.
Moreover, the eschatological interpretation of history results in
a false picture of reality (the order of concrete human societies is
not in fact an eschaton); and errors with regard to the structure
of reality have practical consequences. Surely the recent collapse
of the former Soviet Union should give pause to even the most
zealous ideologues.

Voegelin’s work constitutes a major contribution to the investigation
of personal and social disorder from an ontological
perspective; his insights into the respective orders of being and
politics remind us that the nature of being cannot be ignored in an
examination of political (or indeed any other) phenomena. Although
these are thorny and difficult, if not “impenetrable,”
matters, the participatory exploration of the nature of reality as
practiced by Voegelin is surely the sine qua non for the advance of
knowledge in this area; surely he is correct to suggest that the path
toward personal and social order must begin with the existential
recovery of its transcendent source. Voegelin lovingly probed the
beyond in search of truth. The tragedy of our time should impel
each of us to undertake a similar exploration. For we have learned
that existence divorced from the comprehensive reality which
sustains and nourishes it is a wasteland indeed.

Linda C. Raeder
Palm Beach Atlantic College

NOTES

1. Plato, cited in Eric Voegelin, “Reason: the Classic Experience,”
   in Anamnesis, trans. and ed. Gerhart Niemeyer (Columbia,
   MO: University of Missouri Press, 1978), 103.
2. Voegelin, “Reason,” 100.
3. That is, universal humanity’s existence under God, the
   discovery that the human psyche immediately participates in the
   Divine Source of order.
4. The conventional self-interpretation of a society as it
   regards its existential role as representative of a higher truth.
5. Michael Franz, Eric Voegelin and the Politics of Spiritual
   Revolt: The Roots of Modern Ideology (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
   State University Press, 1992), 30.
6. Ibid., 32.
7. Ibid., 34.
8. Ibid.
9. Thomas J. J. Altizer, “A New History and a New but Ancient
   God,” in Eric Voegelin’s Thought: A Critical Approach, Ellis
   Sandoz, ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1982), 184.
10. Ibid., 51.
11. William C. Havard, “Voegelin’s Diagnosis of the Western
    Crisis,” Denver Quarterly X (1975), 129–30.
12. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction
    (University of Chicago Press, 1952), 107.
13. Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics, and Gnosticism (Chicago:
    Henry Regnery Company, 19678), 9.
14. Ibid., 10.
15. Voegelin uses the term “gnosticism” in an unconventional
    and very broad sense. It is his term for certain disorders of the
    spirit arising from “pneumapathological” or imbalanced consciousness.
    It is more or less synonymous with other terms
    Voegelin employs to symbolize the phenomenon of spiritual
    disorder: “activist dreaming, egophantic revolt, metastatic faith,
    activist mysticism, demonic mendacity, Prometheanism,
    parousiasm, political religion, social Satanism, magic pneumatism,
    and eristics” (Franz, 17).
16. Voegelin, New Science, 100.
17. Gregor Sebba, “History, Modernity, and Gnosticism,” in
    Peter J. Opitz and Gregor Sebba, eds., The Philosophy of Order:
    Essays on History, Consciousness and Politics (Stuttgart: Ernst
    Klett, 1981), 231.
18. Sebba, 231.
19. Ibid.
20. Voegelin, New Science, 119.
21. Ibid., 128.
22. Havard, “Diagnosis,” 131.
23. Indeed, Voegelin maintains that the symbol of a “modern
    age” was created precisely to denote the “epoch marked by the
    decisive victory of the gnostics over the forces of Western
    tradition in the struggle for existential representation” (New
    Science, 134).
24. Voegelin, New Science, 121.
25. William C. Harvard, “Notes on Voegelin’s Contributions
    to Political Theory,” in Ellis Sandoz, ed., Eric Voegelin’s Thought:
    A Critical Appraisal (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1982),
    97–98.
26. Voegelin, New Science., 105.
27. Ibid., 111–13.
28. Ibid., 125.
29. Voegelin, Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, 107, 53.
30. Ibid., 55.
31. Ibid., 31.
32. Eric Voegelin, Order and History, Vol. 5, In Search of
    Order (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 34.
33. Ibid., 36–37.
34. Ibid., 26, 37.
35. Ibid., 38.
36. This “imaginative perversion of participatory imagination
    into an autonomously creative power has been a constant in
    history,” recognized and expressed in such terms as hybris,
    pleonexia, superbia vitae, libido dominandi, will to power, in the
    romantic notion that “the world, it was not before I created it”
    (Ibid.) Nevertheless, Voegelin observes, the identification of this
    perverted imaginative force has not and will not eliminate it from
    human experience. For such deformation is not a mistake that can
    be corrected, but a permanent potential in human existence that
    arises from the paradoxic structure of consciousness-reality and
    from the “paradoxic play of forces in reality as it moves toward its
    truth” (Ibid.). In other words, the thinker who is engaged in the
    quest for truth is also a human being who, like his resisting
    counterpart, is troubled by the forces of self-assertion, while the
    resisters to the truth of reality are, like the questers, troubled by
    the awareness of that truth.
    Moreover, Voegelin suggests that the deformative potential
    inherent in the structure of reality and consciousness may be
    indispensable to the emergence of truth. For the movement
    toward truth always originates as a resistance to untruth; every
    thinker who is engaged in the quest for truth resists a received
    symbolism he considers inadequate to express truly the reality of
    his own experience.
37. Voegelin, New Science, 169.
38. For instance, Marx’s communist paradise; Comte’s positivist
    industrial society; the thousand-year rule of the Aryan
    masters, the eternally peaceful order of liberal constitutionalism,
    and so forth.
39. Voegelin, New Science, 107.
40. Ibid., 68.
41. Ibid., 122–23.
42. Ibid., 124.
43. Voegelin, Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, 114.
44. Voegelin, New Science, 124.
45. Ibid., 124.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid., 126.
49. Ibid.
50. Harvard, “Notes,” 98.
51. Eric Voegelin, Political Religions, trans. T. J. DiNapoli and
    E. S. Easterly III (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1986),
    50–51.
52. Havard, “Diagnosis,” 131.
53. Ibid., 129.
54. Ibid., 131.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid.