Germino Primacy of Politics

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ThePrimacy of Politics in the

Understanding of “Modernity”Dante Germno

IN HIS UNPUBLISHED History Of Po/iticaiIdeas, the late Eric Voegelin (1901-1985)observes that the problem of when to date

the beginning of modernity is of principalimportance for its proper understanding.Rather than marking this beginning withthe artistic Renaissance, writing in the ver-nacular, the recovery of Roman law, orthe discovery of America, Voegelin con-tends that the beginnings of modernity ex-tend as far back as the twelfth century,when the anonymous author of the YorkTracts evoked an ethos of innerworldli-

ness in opposition to the prevailingAugustinian, Carolingian, and Gregorianinterpretation o Christianity.

I am convinced that Voegelin’s thesis iscorrect and that one can fully understandmodernity’s origin and nature only bycentering one’s attention on the change inpolitical sentiments occurring over severalcenturies. By “politics” and the political Irefer to Aristotle’s understanding of thepolitical as that which concerns thehighest good in human affairs and not totoday’s shrunken notion of politics as thestudy of who gets what, when, and how(to recall Harold Lasswell’s words). In thislarger view of politics, man is engaged“with the whole of his personality”(Voegelin).

Politically speaking, modernity “begins”with a revolution in religion and “ends”with a religion of revolution. (I put

“begins” and “ends” in quotation marksbecause there are many beginnings overseveral centuries and because we are stillin the midst of its endings.) Politics has afaith dimension as well asa power dimen-sion; or rather at the center of politics isa

faith with power as its protective shell.The faith that we call modernity origi-

nated at least as early as the twelfth cen-

tury as a reaction against the civil theologydominant in the Christian West. The veryidea of a “civil” theology had been re-jected by Augustine as a pagan concoctionunsuitable for Christianity. Only decadesafter Augustine’s death, however, PopeGelasius I began to construct such a Chris-tian civil theology. Popes Nicolas 1 in theninth and Gregory VI1 in the eleventh cen-turies completed Gelasius’s work.

The ninth-century Carolingian civiltheology likened human society to themystical body o Christ (Corinthians 12:“all are members of one body”). Withinthe one social body of Christ, the Pope andthe Holy Roman Emperor occupied placesof distinction at the head of two “orders”of the same body politic. The Pope repre-sented Christ’s priestly person and theEmperor Christ’s kingly person.

Among the implications of the medievalWestern Christian civil theology were thefollowing tenets:

1. Every Christian was amember of theuniversal Holy Roman Empire jointlyheaded by Pope and Emperor.

2.The priestly person of Christ washigher in dignity than the kingly person,so that as a last resort popes could deposeemperors and princes.

3.The visible Catholic clerical order (the

sacerdotium or priesthood) was hierar-chical in nature, with the Pope, assisted bycouncils of the cardinals and bishops, hav-ing the last word in scriptural interpreta-tion.

4. Although by baptism every member

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of the corpus mysticism,whether priest orlayman, was a new person, reborn inChrist, the clergy ranked higher in thesight of God.

5.The purpose of worldly existence wasto prepare for eschatological perfectionthrough God’s grace beyond time and theworld. T he world as such had no structureor dignity.

Every one of these tenets was denied bythe modern faith. The York Tracts (1102)marked the first systematic revolt againstthe Carolingian-Gregorian civil theologyof which we have records. The anony-mous author-a publicist for the EnglishK ing Henry I in his struggle against Arch-bishop Anselm o Canterbury over lay in-vestiture-contended that Christ’s kinglyfunction was higher than his priestly role,that a mature, educated Christian-layman or priest-can interpret scripturefor himself, that priests and laymen areequal in dignity in God’s sight, and thatworldly existence has a structure of itsown. (God willed lifeto be lived fully here

and now in this world.) A lthough the YorkTracts do not directly attack the existenceof a single Holy Roman Empire, the effectof accepting their propositions would be todestroy it.

Voegelin has given the name “intramun-dane ethos” to that current of attitudes,sentiments, and ideas that culminated inthe modern faith. Many figures little notedtoday were harbingers of modernity.

A lthough the term “the modern age” orig-inates in the fifteenth century with theFlorentine historian Flavio Biondo, theconstellation of attitudes and sentimentsundergirding modernity goes back manycenturies. Before one studies the acknowl-edged masters of early modern politicalthought-M achiavelli and Bodin-oneneeds to be aware of the contributions ofvarious earlier writers including J oachimo Fiore, Dante, and Marsilius of Padua tothe emergence of that new constellation.

J oachim of Fiore originated the modernconvention of dividing history into threeages. In his case these ages were namedafter the persons of the Christian trinity:the age of the Father (A braham to the

birth of Christ); the age of the Son (thebirth of Christ to the Apocalypse, atwhichtime Christ returns to judge the world);and the age of the Holy Ghost, or the rule

o Christ with his saints on earth as pre-dicted in the book of Revelation.D ante A li ghieri fused J oachitic

apocalyptic prophecies, Franciscan inner-worldly spirituality, and DominicanThomistic-A ristotelian rationality into anoriginal vision of the world. To say that heis a transitional figure between themedieval and the modern periods is banal.Dante issui generis.Nonetheless there canbe no doubt that he contributed in a majorway to the change in the constellation osentiments leading to modernity.

From his first work, the Vita Nuoua, tothe last line of the Diuina CornmediaDante sounds the note of rebirth, of rinas-cimento. The Franciscan theme of spirit-ually purifying the Church is taken overby Dante to apply to all of society. Dante,“a party unto himself,” seeks to bringabout renewal through argument and

through poetry. His words summon theueltro and the dux of the new Italo-German empire. The center of Europe isto be restored on a new basis, that of anEmperor who effectively keeps the peaceand of a Pope who preaches instead oclutching for land and power. The neworder will witness a rebirth of reason onthe basis of a recovered Aristotelianscience made more profound and accessi-

ble to all mankind through the commen-tary of the great Muslim philosopher Aver-roes. An intellectual aristocracy of freeand independent minds, liberated fromdomination by a corrupt clergy, will gracethis new springtime of the human race.The new Holy Roman Empire will bringanend to faction and division. A true unityof mankind having been restored, peacewill prevail. Y et the object of the newRome will not be to parcel out humanity inbits but to bring out the unity of human-kind underneath its diversity. Humanityfor Dante has a will, and the Emperorrepresents that will. Universal peace andconcord will result in its operation.

Dante’sDe Monarchia poses three ques-

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tions: (1) whether the office of Emperor isnecessary to the well-being o the world;(2) whether the Roman people acquiredthe Empire by right or by force; and (3)

whether the Emperor’s authority came di-rectly from God or indirectly through thePope. Dante answered all of the questionsin favor of the Emperor but not in such away as to preclude altogether a role forthe papacy. “Caesar,” the last lines of theDe Monarchia read, “should observe thatreverence to Peter which a first-born sonshould observe to a father, so that illu-mined by the light of paternal grace he[the Emperor] may with greater power ir-radiate the world, over which he is set byHim alone who rules all things spiritualand temporal.”

Alois Dempf has suggested that theueltro (greyhound) in the Diuina Com-media represents a reformed papacy-an“angelic pope”-while the dux symbolizestheemperor with the sword. Far from be-ing a revolutionary, Dante was a “conser-vative,” Dempf claims. Surely Dante

defies categorization: he was conservativeand revolutionary at once, and his visionof Europe sought to combine universalismand nationalism, spirit and power, author-ity and consent, in a new equation.

As Dempf suggests, in the Diuina Com-media Beatrice, the symbol of Dante’squest for a new life on earth, in paradisebecomes the symbol for an “unpoliticalchurch.” Dante’s passionate hatred of the

“political” popes, Innocent IV andBoniface VIII, knows no bounds. “Y ouhave usurped in place, my place, myplace,” Christ intones to Boniface VIII,forever immured in the depths of hell. It isa new worldly idealism, a new spiritualityderived from St. Francis, that Dante in-vokes to lighten a world dominated bymonsters who guard the hill of earthlyhappiness.

In the dedicatory letter to Can GrandeDella Scalla, Dante urges that his greatpoem be treated as an allegory for attain-ing happiness in this life. Whether Dantesevered Aquinas’s two ends, earthly andheavenly, as Gilson suggests, is debatable,but more probably Dante does not so

much betray Aquinas as develop him. Hedevelops all the potentiality of Catholicspirituality for reformation of the humanorder in the world and in doing so an-

ticipates the debate over liberationtheology. A domesticated interworldlyapocalypticism is the result, or shall wesay that Dante passionately believed thatinstitutions need not automatically freezeinto power-hungry bureaucracies? Hepas-sionately denied the J oachitic claim that inthe “old” world the law of entropy sets inat the moment of institutionalization, andhe would have found Marsilius of Padua’spositivism dreary and contentious. Everthe opponent of crackpot realism, Dantesings to us today in our myopia and con-formism, calling us to be committed to in-nerworldly renewal but also to forswear apseudo-revolutionary throwing out the(traditional) baby with the bath.

Not Dante but Marsilius of Padua wasthe principal architect of the modern ideaof politics, however. Not one mankind butmany closed national communities; not

one religion but many churches controlledby their congregations; not one law butmany national systems of legislation; notone history but many histories-these aresome of Marsilius’ legacies. T he contro-versy over the meaning of the phraseualentior pars may indicate an ambiguityin the mind of its author. The earliestmanuscripts o the Defensor facis (1324)contained the words in qualitate et quan-

titate after ualentior pars, thereby in-dicating a possible interest in anumericalmajority as well as predominant socio-economic power as sources of law in thecommunity. In any event, with Marsiliusthe accent has definitely shifted from“descending” to “ascending” theories ofauthority, to use Walter Ullmann’s termi-nology.

Marsilius’ theory of man postulatesbiological drives for survival and power asthe sources of politics; theoretically soci-ety could do without any religion at all.Whether Marsilius wanted to reformCatholic Christianity for spiritual reasonsor whether he regarded all religion as anopiate for the people cannot be ascer-

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tained. One possibility is that as an Aver-roistic A ristotelian he may have thoughtin terms of a “double truth”-one for themasses and the other for the philosophers.

In any event in the Defensor Pacis Mar-silius was concerned about the utility ofreligion rather than about its truth. Heregarded the papacy’s exercise of tem-poral power to be a major cause ofpolitical unrest.

In his F oundations of Modern PoliticalThought, Quentin Skinner concludes thatthere are four “preconditions” for theemergence of “the modern idea of the

State.” These preconditions are as follows:politics “should be envisaged as a distinctbranch of moral philosophy, a branch con-cerned with the art of government”; “theindependence of each regnum or civitasfrom an external and [allegedly] superiorpower should be vindicated and assured”;“the supreme authority within which eachindependent regnum should be recog-nized as having no rivals‘within its ownterritories as a law-making power and an

object of allegiance”; and “political societyis held to exist solely for political pur-poses,” its aim being the promotion of civilpeace rather than the upholding of “truereligion” (11, pp. 349-352).

What Skinner calls “preconditions” forthe development of the modern statecould as well be termed “characteristics”of the same. AI1 of them are fully presentin the thought of Marsilius (d. 1342).

Skinner accepts the modern notion of“that which is political”-as distinct from“that which is religious”-as definitive,and in sodoing shows himself to be utterlycaptive to the modern ethos itself. Myassumption, on the other hand, is that ascritical thinkers we have come neither tobury modernity nor to praise it. Our task isto understand it.

What is born (or reborn) over the cen-turies from the York Tracts to Machiavelli

is not politics but the modern idea ofpolitics. To equate politics with modernpolitics itself as Bernard Crick, Skinner,and countless others have done amountsto dehumanizing all premodern peoples,since politics is quintessentially the activ-

ity in which man publicly affirms themeaning o his existence. Thus there is apolitics of ancient Israel, or of medievalChristendom, and of Islam even though

none of these political styles conformswith that o modernity. There is also apolitics of Aristotle that is quite differentfrom the politics of Marsilius’ “redis-covered” Aristotle.

A lthough modern politics is“secular”-meaning that it is independent of anyrevealed religion-it is nonethelessnourished by a faith-a faith that candegenerate into fanaticism just as easily as

can the faith of the revealed religions.M ichael Oakeshott describes the modernfaith as Machiavelli expressed it:

He assumed a human being to be an in-telligent agent seeking the satisfaction of hiswants in self-chosen actions and utterancescalling for response in others, each guidedby la sua fantasia (his understanding ofhimself). He believed that there were occultforces (necessitct and fortuna) of whichaccountmust betaken [OnHuman Conduct,

p. 2441.

What distinguishes the modern faithfrom that which ispremodern is the lossofa common center in the psyche. The em-phasis upon the autonomous individual,engaged in “selfchosen actions” andguided by his fantasia (which word hasmore the flavor of imagination thanunderstanding), leads inevitably to the

fragmentation of what once had been acommon culture. The “secular” statewhich claims merely to be independent ofrevealed religion in fact becomes hostileto the same, in that innerworldly achieve-ment and the production and consumptionof material goods become the summumbonum of society. What had been con-demned as avarice now becomes cele-brated as virtue. In the Florentinerenaissance, Pic0 della Mirandola, Alberti,

and others gave primacy to the activeover the contemplative life. These“secular” intellectuals were actually in-volved in constructing a new innerworldlyreligious faith in opposition to the Augus-tinian interpretation of Christianity. The

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early Florentine humanists celebrated thevir oirtutis(or “manly man”) and exhortedintellectuals to “stand up and act” ratherthan “wasting” their days in idleness dis-

puting about philosophical questions.Petrarch commended the pursuit of thelaurel wreath. Although Skinner may gotoo far in suggesting that the work ethicbegan with fifteenth-century Italianhumanism rather than with seventeenth-century Calvinism, one cannot deny a cer-tain affinity (Skinner, I , pp. 98-99).

There were, of course, accomplishmentsof modernity worthy to be praised. As

Benjamin Constant notes in his essay com-paring the “freedom of the moderns” withthat of “the ancients,” those fortunateenough to live in a modern Europeanstate, at least on paper, enjoy

. .. the right to be subject only to the laws,[and] the assurance o being neither ar-rested, nor detained, nor put to death, nor inany way mistreated, by an arbitrary act ofwill by some individual or many. It is foreach the right to express his opinion, to

choose his occupation and ply it in peace; todispose of his property, be it abusively, tocome, to go, without any permission andwithout rendering an accounto his motivesor his steps. It isfor each the right to assem-ble with other individuals, either to conferwith them upon common interests, or topractise the religion of his choice, or merelyto use his leisure conformable to his indica-tions or indeed his fancy [Quoted in M ichaelOakeshott, On Human Conduct, p. 246,

Oakeshott’s translation].Constant’s catalogue of rights promised

the individual citizen by the modern faithis instructive for its lack of a center. In-deed, a catalogue by definition has nocenter: it is a list in no particular order ofvalue. A lthough the list contains “the rightto practice the religion of [one’s] choice,”that right has no priority in the order ofthings over the right “merely to use [one’s]

leisure conformable to. ..his fancy.”In his book Der Verlust der Mitte

(1947) Hans Sedlmayr explains mod-ern art and architecture in terms ofthe “lossof the center.” He contends thatmodern art is the expressionof individualswho experience reality as an infinitely ex-

panding horizontal field of forces. By con-trast, premodern cultures reflect an ex-perience of order irradiating from a com-mon center, whether it be the omphalos

(or “navel” of the world) in ancient mythsor the theophanic event wherein the tran-scendent divine ground unveils itself as inthe Mosaic experience of the BurningBush in Exodus or the Pauline experienceof the Resurrected or the Platonic vision(opsis)of the agathon reported in the caveparable. Premodern man had a center ofgravity for his psyche.

Sedlmayr’s interpretations o particular

artists or architects are inevitably open toquestion, but I think his general thesis iscorrect. The symbol of the omphalos ofthe cosmos is ubiquitous in early cultureswhether they are located in Sardinia, In-donesia, A frica, or North A merica. Eachlocal community appears to have thoughtof itself as the center of the cosmos, thefocal point for the emergence of divineordering forces. The fact that forty milesaway or so another local communitymade the same claim did not appear todisturb the first community’s tranquility atall.

The difference between modern andpremodern culture is not the differencebetween noble and ignoble human beings,of course. Human beings remain thesame, and the “counterpull” of the ap-petites for wealth, fame, glory, and sen-sual gratification operates against the

“pull” toward fulfillment in opennesstoward divine being in the psyche of bothpremodern and modern man. Whatchanges is the support given the “pull” (touse Plato’s language in the myth of thegold and iron cords) in the symbolism ofpremodern culture. When I asked my classin political theory recently whether con-temporary society had a center, one an-swered “money” and another “the shop-

ping center.” From the Acropolis or theCovenant at Sinai to the shopping center isan experiential fall of considerable dimen-sions. Even the shopping center isa centerin name only, of course, for there are somany of them that our cities typically lackan architectual focus.

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With the movement from “compact” to“differentiated” symbolic language inGreek philosophy and Israelite revelation,the center of order was experienced in the

open psyche’s relationship to the extra-cosmic divine ground of being. (See HenriBergson, Two Sources o f Morality andReligion.) Although the experience oforder occurred in the psyche of each in-dividual, that experience was taken to becommon to everyone. Israel related toY ahweh as one people, not as a collectionof individuals, each with idiosyncraticperceptions of reality. The “private” ex-

perienceof

Moses and the Burning Bushled inexorably to the “public” experiencesof the Red Sea crossing, survival in thedesert, the Covenant at Sinai, and thepenetration of the Promised Land. Theprophets arose to call the people back tothe community’s founding experiences.The prophets were hardly modern “in-dividuals.” Their whole reason for beingwas to serve the community under God.

Similarly, in breaking with the intra-

cosmic myth of the people, the Greekphilosophers (A naximander, Heraclitus,Parmenides, and others) did not claim toreplace the common world of the gods tothe cosmos with their own esoteric cogita-tions. The whole purpose of philosophywas to arouse in its followers a more ade-quate experience of the common worldand its center than that afforded by the an-thropomorphic stories of the gods. Bruno

Snell even went so far as to say that thepre-Socratic philosophers “discovered”the human psyche in its openness to thedivine intellect. Plato built on theirdiscovery to provide what Voegelin hascalled the macro-anthropological principleas the basis for ordering society. Whereasthe myths had been based on the “micro-cosmological principle” (society is thecosmos writ small), Greek political philos-

ophy spoke the new truth that society wasthe psyche writ large. When Plato says“the psyche” he means not just anypsyche but the philosopher’s psyche.

Both Plato and Aristotle assumed that itwas possible to rank character types interms of their agreement with or diver-

gence from the life of “reason.” Thus inthe Republic the life of reason is thehighest life, followed by those based onspiritedness, wealth, the pleasures of the

body, and the lust for power in that order.Other Platonic dialogues have other rank-ings, but the philosopher who takes tran-scendent divine Being for his measure re-mains the model for the rest of the popula-tion. Aristotle calls the model human typethe spoudaios (“mature” person). Thepoint is that Plato and Aristotle held thatthe non-metric reality in which human be-ings participate has a center present in the

psyche of the lover of wisdom. Becausethe philosopher judges everything in thelight of his experience of the Good, hissymbolic language is authoritative andthrough use of that language anyone whoso desires can re-enact in himself themeditative experiences giving rise to thelanguage itself. In the cave parable Plato’sSocrates compares the non-metricagathon experienced in the depth of thepsyche to the sun, center of the visible

world. A lthough the Greek sophists ap-pear to have questioned whether therewas a single human reality with a singlecenter, Plato and Aristotle were alike ada-mant in rejecting the sophistic account. Tothe Sophistic admiration of “much-knowing” Plato juxtaposed the philo-sophic ideal of “deep-knowing.’’In a recent book the cultural anthropol-

ogist Clifford Ceertz has declared that the

“hallmark of modern consciousness is itsenormous multiplicity. For our time andforward the image of a general orienta-tion, perspective, Weltanschauung... s achimera” (emphasis added). Our problemtoday, Geertz insists, is how to make itpossible for “people inhabiting differentworlds to have a genuine and reciprocalimpact upon one another.”

Geertz’s image of “people inhabiting

different worlds” vividly confirms Sedl-mayr’s thesis that the modern world notonly lacks an intellectual and spiritualcenter but is in principle opposed to theidea of such a center. The word “world”originally meant “human existence.” Us-

ing this definition, to inhabit different

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worlds can mean only the disappearanceof a shared human community. Geertzhimself does not find this situationdesperate or impossible, arguing that

“we” [scholars in the humanities] have to“learn what it is like, these days, to live alife centered around [!I, or realizedthrough, a particular sort o scholarly, orpedagogical, or creative activity.” Weneed, Geertz continues, “to constructsome sort of vocabulary. . . n whicheconometricians, epigraphers, cytochem-ists, and iconologists can give a credibleaccount of themselves to one other”(Local Knowledge, p. 163).

Geertz’s insouciance over the loss of acenter leaves oneabit puzzled. He tries toreassure his readers that a “general con-sciousness” can still develop out of “the in-terplay of a disorderly crowd of notwholly commensurable visions.” Howsuch a consciousness is to emerge fromlives “centered around” epigraphy orcytochemistry is not made clear. Presum-ably we shall somehow muddle through

and construct “some sort o vocabulary”through which super-specialized activitiescan give “credible” accounts toeach otherif to no one else.

In Local Knowledge Professor Geertzdoes not address or even seem preoccu-pied by what happens to the non-epigraphers and non-cytochemists inmodern society. Presumably the searchfor unlocal knowledge of any kind is a

poor substitute for whatever fragment onehas in one’s hand or brain. Indeed, he con-cludes that the idea of a“new humanism,”forged out o “the best that is being taughtand said” is at once “implausible,” “uto-pian,” and “possibly ...a bit worrisome.”(All quotations are from Geertz’s essay“The Way We Think Now: Ethnography ofModern Thought.”)

My purpose in citing Geertz at somelength is to illustrate how the fragmentari-ness of the modern consciousness weighseven upon many sensitive contemporaryattempts to transcend that fragmentari-ness. Geertz says in effect that we havelost the center forever: “Not only is theclass basis for such a unitary ‘humanism’

completely absent.. .but even more im-portant the agreement on the foundationsof scholarly authority, old books and oldermanners, has disappeared.”

To suggest that a future culture mightovercome modernity’s loss o the centergoes against the basic postulates of moder-nity itself. With Voegelin’s help, however,we have discovered that modernity restson a faith. What has been produced by arevolution of sentiments may be undoneby another revolution of sentiments, andthat revolution may be as unlike moder-nity as modernity was unlike the MiddleAges.

One scenario for a postmodern age wassupplied by Antonio Gramsci, martyr inthe struggle against fascism and founderof the present-day Italian CommunistParty. Gramsci dealt with the problem ofthe loss of the center by abolishing theperiphery, so that in the future communistsociety everyone would be included in thecenter. He rejected in principle a politicsbased on prestige and power. By mobiliz-

ing the groups hitherto at the margins ofsociety and history, the communist partycould lead those groups to establish the“regulated society” wherein the modernstate would disappear, Gramsci con-tended. “Civil society” would absorb“political society.” A new order based onconsent rather than force would prevail.Gramsci’s centerless society would requirethe leadership of a political party to get

under way. In his Prison Notebooks hecalled this party “the modern Prince”afterMachiavelli’s famous treatise. It would ap-pear that the overcoming of modernitywould require modern means, and, asMarx wrote, the new society would bearthe birthmarks of the old.

Although Gramsci’s theory of a newpolitics based on including all socialgroups formerly pushed to the margins ofsociety may fall upon disconfirming prac-tical realities, it does indicate the reasonwhy the old politics of the center is un-likely to be reborn. The premodern sym-bolism of the center was invariablyassociated with what Ullmann called“descending” theories of authority. Such

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theories were used to support a societybased on caste and class. One excellentreason for not returning to a center sym-bolism based on caste and class is that if

modernity replaced such a symbolismonce, it could do soagain if the old orderwere re-established. T here is presumablysomething experientially deficient in thetraditional version of the center sym-bolism.

Should a new experience o a spiritualcenter well up from below, however, theexperiential deficiency referred to abovecould be remedied. An “ascending”

theory of the center devoted to overcom-ing the fragmentariness of modernitywould promote new forms of communitybased on a postmodern faith.

In his Technological Society J acquesEllul argues that modernity’s unprece-dented reliance on technology hasbrought matters to the point of no return.Barring a miracle, technology’s domina-tion over man cannot be reversed. From atool in the service of man, technology hasbecome an end in itself. Its power overman increases geometrically as each newmachine calls forth new artificial “needs”calling for ever newer, more efficientmachines to meet them.

Ellul has spoken accurately. As the cur-rent “Star Wars” discussion illustrates,man’s capacity to think critically about theimplications of the technological revolu-tion seems almost to have vanished. The

individual’s critical capacity is dulled bythe manipulators of a consumer society,who themselves are unconsciously manip-ulated by the imperatives of the modernfaith: human lifeis to produce, expand, ac-quire, dominate, etc.

Ellul overlooks one important point,however: the modern faith itself couldnever have been predicted by anyone liv-ing in the eleventh century, just as Chris-

tianity’s victory over pagan Rome couldnever have been predicted duringHadrian’s reign.

In considering what produces a changeof sentiments, the historian may listvarious factors from population migra-tions to technological discoveries to

linguistic innovations to new literaryforms. Such a list remains a merecatalogue without the essential ingredient,the catalyst: human beings possess a con-

sciousness out of whose depth emerge thesentiments whose existence we are askedto explain. In principle it seems impossiblefully to understand what produces achange of consciousness from one age toanother, because there is no way for anyof us to get outside of the process andobserve it from all sides, as it were. Onehypothesis for explaining the rise of apostmodern faith should it occur,

however, is that a widespread revulsionamong all strataof the population againstthe Faustian drive to “torture nature”(Diderot) may trigger amoral and aesthet-ic revolt against the dominance of tech-nical, instrumental rationality. If the for-mation of the modern consciousness tookcenturies to solidify, there is no reason toexpect its dissolution and replacement totake place overnight, assuming, as wemust, that there will be mankind left to en-joy a new age. The idea that there will beno new age-that we are consigned tomodern fragmentariness “for our time andforward” as Clifford Ceertz declares-is atenet of the modern faith. The frequencyof its reiteration today is an indicator ofthe continued strength of that faith. Suchreiteration should not be mistaken for adescription of political and social reality assuch; instead it isaresponse to that reality

from aperspective which denies the real-ity of an existential center of the psycheand society, Le., from the modern perspec-tive. Geertz’s essay is not a critiqueleading to an understanding of modernity,but an illustration of the very phenom-enon in need of critical understanding.

TO SUMMARIZE: Eric V oegelin, to whosememory I dedicate this paper, has argued

convincingly that intelligible periods ofhistory represent changeso “sentiments”that in turn “evolve” new symbols inspir-ing human beings to create new politicalinstitutions and cultural forms. WhatVoegelin calls the “political cosmion” isthe sphere in which the change of senti-

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ments originates. Other activities-literary, philosophic, and artistic-takeplace within the political cosmion andtake upon themselves its hue. T he basis

for Voegelin’s claim for the primacy of thepolitical in understanding historicalperiods in general and modernity in par-ticular is that only in the political cosmiondoes man participate with his whole per-sonality, which means with the coreof hisbeing-his psyche.

The primary obstacle to our recognitionof the primacy of the political in historicalchange is, o course, the influenceo frag-mentary modern culture on each inves-tigator. To the extent that we are modernhuman beings we resent any orderings ofpriorities in terms of a “center.” Ouracademic specialties encourage us toview modernity in pieces rather than tosee it steady and see it whole. Is it not thecase, however, that our being has acore,or center, and that center is our psyche?This question cannot be answered byargument. I t can be answered only by ex-

perience. Thus, to the many questions onemust consider in discussing modernity,there must be added the question o whythe truth that our being is centered in apsyche open to the world-transcendentground of being is not evident to every

sincere investigator of the problem.One conclusion is clear from the fore-

going analysis, however: if the politicaldimension is primary in understanding

modernity, one can hope to change themodern world by challenging the con-stellation of sentiments on which it isbased. At present what may loosely becalled a movement in political and socialthought calling for such change exists,comprising such diverse names asVoegelin, Sergio Cotta, J acques Ellul, Nor-man 0. Brown, Mircea Eliade, and manyothers. The movement is neither revolu-tionary nor reactionary. A lmost every dayone discovers a new name to add to thelist. My most recent discovery is WendellBerry, the K entucky farmer-poet (or poet-farmer) whose collection of essays, Stund-ing By Words, is a critique of the modernfaith. I conclude with two quotations, onefrom Berry’s book and the other fromHans Sedlmayr’s work:

The modern world is not necessarily thereal world, and there is no vir tue in being up

to date in it [Berry].

The lost center of man is simply God, andthe innermost core of his disease is the lossof his relationship with Him [Sedlmayr].

Germino Primacy of Politics

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