Our Western Predicament, Voegelin Perspective on Modernity

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Our Western PredicamentA Voegelinian Perspective on Modernity

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Our Western Predicament

A Voegelinian Perspective on Modernity

By Ellis Sandoz

http://phillysoc.org/sandoz99.htm

Moyse Distinguished Professor Political Science & Director, Eric Voegelin Institute, Louisiana State University

Prepared for Delivery at the Annual Meeting of the Philadelphia Society, April 24, 1999, Philadelphia,

Pennsylvania

Introduction

The "iron curtain of the future" (as Arnold J. Toynbee called it) that absolutely bars specific understanding of

the human future blocks any attempt to forecast the twenty-first century. In fact, one of the principles of Eric

Voegelin's thought, and distinguishing marks of a philosophy of history and politics-as opposed to an

ideological deformation of historical reality-, is a recognition of the deepening mystery of human existence as

it opens toward the horizon of the unknown and unknowable future. Not only don't we know what mayhappen in the next hundred years, we don't even know what may happen next week or this afternoon.

Moreover, to ask a philosopher's appraisal of a question is to risk transformation of the debate.

Thus, to declare (or to pretend to know) what the future holds is a speculative derailment into ideology or

modern gnosticism--the very Gnosis itself. The sole exception is genuine eschatological visions of the eternal

human destiny known in faith, hope, and love, and imparted through revelatory experiences, a destiny to be

achieved in a transcendental beyond of present existence. The attempt to effectuate fulfillment in the here

and now of history, through the transformation of man and the world in time, lies at the very heart of radical

modern rebellion, deformation of reality, and our Western predicament-and not the West's only!

On the other hand, as some of you may remember since he participated in Philadelphia Society meetings

himself on at least three occasions and wrote widely on the subject, much of Voegelin's work as a

philosopher and political scientist addressed the plight of contemporary mankind. Thus, his analysis of the

present predicament of Western civilization and of humanity more generally may shed its flickering light on

the future. A great part of this work of decades revolved around Voegelin's attempt (a) to understand the

present crisis of the West, (b) to diagnose its most virulent aspects, and (c) to find remedies for present

conditions before the rampant epidemic of radical modernity and social amnesia proved lethal for civilization.

I shall limit my remarks this morning mainly to these themes, then conclude with some comments on the

human prospect. In general, I should say that Voegelin's outlook is often rather like that of physician facing a

gravely ill patient, one whose chances of full recovery are dim at best. I, of course, want to be more hopeful

and so remind you that it was a famous economist (representative of the dismal science) who remarked that

in the long run we're all dead! More than once, Voegelin explicitly called for personal resistance to presentevils, and he sounded the alarm with life and death urgency that action based on understanding is needed if

catastrophe is to be averted. On one occasion, he went so far as to evoke the words of the Watchman in

Ezekiel in giving warning of impending disaster. Thus, while the situation is dire, our human liberty is

meaningful and the propaganda of historical determinism is just that and is flatly to be rejected.


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I. Advancing and Declining at the Same Time: the Modern Crisis

In his best known book, The New Science of Politics (1952), Voegelin ponders the question of how it is

possible for society to advance and decline at one and the same time. The experience of progress is all

around us, yet there is the pervasive sense that all is not well: why? His answer is to notice that humanreality is not monolithic but highly complex and, like the single human personality, a mixed bag-a stratified

reality that ranges from the material, sentient, and biological through a consciousness that is uniquely

intellectual and spiritual. Somewhat like the stereotypical football player who is a physical specimen of

breathtaking perfection but can't read, modern society excels in science, technology, and the abundant life

but has allowed its philosophical and spiritual life to atrophy. The nub of the disorder is a crisis of the mind

and spirit. Its cardinal attribute is a closure against the divine ground of being, a forgetfulness of the God of

our fathers, one assuaged only by the hollow men who cry up Autonomous Man and beckon us to bow down

before this Golden Calf of radical modernity. This set of circumstances Voegelin analyzes with an array of

terms as a affliction of the soul, or pneumopathology, that includes spiritual amnesia, intramundane

religiousness, diseased metastatic faith (magic)-thus as a cancer in the souls of contemporary human beings

and our deculturated societies. While far from being some kind of monistic explanation of the crisis in which

we live, the despiritualization of existence on one side-- and the dogmatomachy or warfare amongcontending dogmatic religions and ideologies on the other side-are leading symptoms of the present crisis. It

so disorients and degrades the splendor of civilizational achievement by natural science as to make, not the

conquest of nature through human ingenuity for the good of all, but the enormity of the Gulag and of

Auschwitz the great monument of our epoch.

II. Stages in Disintegration of the West: Virulent Modernity

How did all of this come about, one may ask? Voegelin always stresses that the radical epidemic of

ideological or Gnostic modernity is a growth within modern human existence and not by any means the

whole of it; that there are reserves of opposition and resistance to the ideological perversion of reality that

continue in train with the foundations of our civilization in the homonoia or like-mindedness of the biblical

faith institutionalized in the Mediterranean world of Judaism, Christianity, Greek philosophy, Roman law, and

nurtured in the great medieval synthesis. These civilizing forces were brought together as a triumph of mind

and spirit that glorified the truth of being enduringly institutionalized as a community of church and empire

before forces of dissolution powerfully emerged, and it began to unravel. To be sure, the unraveling remains

a work in progress, one incomplete to this day. Voegelin identifies the principal historical stages of crisis in

terms of the Reformation, the French Revolution, and the radical third wave of especially the German (Nazi),

Russian (Bolshevik), and Italian (fascist) revolutions of this century. Islands of opposition to nihilism and

virulent destructiveness persist and continue to exert influence into the present-the Philadelphia Society

among them-and especially the British and American institutional orders, founded in comparatively sound

philosophical ground and traditionally ingrained political habits, are identified as stabilizing forces in modern

existence. One is reminded of Edmund Burke's observation in surveying the French Revolution that twothings are essential for a politics of moderation: religion and gentlemen.

What of the forces of virulent modernity? Even the most effective agents of destruction ape the truth and

forms of sound existence. Thus, everyone will remember the catchy cry "Don't let them immanentize the

Eschaton!" Some of you may still own campaign buttons and sweatshirts with this defiant slogan emblemized

thereon. The eschaton (meaning the end of the world) designates the congeries of Christian faith symbols of

final things such as Christ's Second Coming, Last Judgment, Eternal salvation or Beatitude and punishment,

end of the age, and the Millennium. Behind the slogan lies Voegelin's argument that the various ideologies


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(or Gnostic variants, in his words) are ersatz religions for persons too weak for faith. Such dogmatic creeds

seize upon one or another aspect of the Christian eschatological faith symbolism and apply it to the desired

goal of revolutionary transformation of the world so as to achieve, in one form or another, perfection in the

here and now. They run the gamut from the fairly benign secularism of the liberals to the radical

immanentism of Marx. The life of faith-experienced in loving response to divine grace, as the pilgrim's

progress toward beatitude, union with God, and the hope for fulfillment of life in the bliss of eternalsalvation-, is replaced by the ideologue's desire for worldly fulfillment in some sort of heaven on earth: the

transformation of men and the world through revolutionary action is embraced and assumed to lie within the

scope of human control. Voegelin identifies progressivism, utopianism, and revolutionary activism as the

three basic types: the first stresses the movement toward perfection without clarity about the goal itself; the

second stresses the goal without a clear notion of how it might be attained; and the third (as in Marxism)

combines both the teleological and axiological elements into a comprehensive assault on reality that evokes

the superman and so-called Realm of Freedom. (NSP, 119-21) As Ludwig Feuerbach had exclaimed, the

highest being for man is Man himself; to which Marx himself added, all I need is new men! Henri de Lubac

wrote of this in terms of "the drama of atheist humanism."

At the end of the Gnostic-ideological century one would suppose human beings would by now have had quite

enough of this sort of thing. After all, Voegelin gave the detailed diagnosis nearly a half-century ago, and

even Time magazine was sufficiently impressed as to devote its thirtieth anniversary issue to it in an essay

by Max Ways entitled "Journalism and Joachim's Children." Since then the powerful voices of Aleksandr

Solzhenitsyn and Vclav Havel have reiterated and elaborated in their inimitable ways much the same

diagnosis of the age Voegelin had presented philosophically. Truth derails into the Lie systematically

elaborated: philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to change it (Marx)!

The one true reality is deformed into Second Realities of dreamworld fascination, and the dream becomes

reality by definition through psychological mass management and socially enforced coercion of the

comprehensive kind we call totalitarian. The great historical theophanies are eclipsed by the egophany of the

libidinous self. Mein Kampf supplants the Bible on the altar, the Word of Marx and of Lenin forms the new

Koran of the party faithful, and the spiritually hungry file endlessly past the mummified remains of the great

vozhd Lenin. I use the present tense. To the warfare or dogmatomachy among partisans of contendingideologies must be added the ancient but persistent old-style fundamentalist dogmatomachy of ethnic-

religious fanatics that continues as a curse to day to day existence in the Middle East, Balkans, Northern

Ireland, China, Africa, and India.

Spiritual and intellectual disintegration proceeds not only through the destruction of transcendentalism in

religion but also through the destruction of philosophy, in a process Voegelin sees beginning as early as the

generation after Aristotle. To be succinct and mindful of recent times, Voegelin argues that all good

philosophy is based on common sense: Aristotle is a good philosopher and Hegel is not, and one must be

very highly educated indeed to misunderstand (and deform) reality as thoroughly as did Marx and Nietzsche.

Ideology (modern gnosticism in its several variants) operates with the truncated "reason" of the

Enlightenment, rather than with the differentiated Nous of Plato and Aristotle. It is intrinsically irrationalbecause of that: as Alfred North Whitehead remarked the philosophes were not philosophers! Philosophers

start from common sense and seek to illuminate reality through noetic inquiry into the truth of being, unto

its origins in the eminent Being of the divine Ground. The philosophes (and their soul-mates: the sophists in

antiquity, the ideologues today) so deploy instrumental reason as to obscure rather than illuminate reality

and ruthlessly decapitate eminent Being, in intentional closure against truth. Only the outlines can be

sketched.


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Closure is effected by several means, including: (1) the reduction of "reason" to analysis or its instrumental,

calculative aspect thereby leaving out as irrational the decisive noetic (intuitive) aspect through which first

principles are grasped; (2) the procedure or trick of philosophizing in closed "systems" where the errors can

be concealed in premises that routinely go unexamined as postulates or assumptions; and (3) in expressly or

implicitly prohibiting the asking of questions. The system blinds the mind to any inquiry into the truth of

reality not analytically comprehended in the premises of the system itself; and the prohibition against askingpertinent questions about these basic premises (regarding the nature of man and source of being itself, for

instance) slams the door shut: Denke nicht frage mich nicht! Marx's formulation can hardly be improved

upon: Don't think, don't ask me! If you insist on questioning anyway, bad things may happen to you-

especially if you should live in some politically correct paradise.

I hope my drift at least is clear. Suppression is ongoing and did not die out with Nazi Germany or Soviet

Russia. This "cold war" seems to be very far from over. One particularly poignant trait of ideological

deformation of reality is this: at least the leading protagonists know that and why their systems are flawed-

but they stick to their positions anyway. Voegelin oddly argues that a person of common sense would say

that if a doctrine is false (say Marx's account of the human condition, or Auguste Comte's of history-this is a

multicultural enterprise), if it purposely and systematically falsifies the facts as experienced and truth of

reality, and if the advocate of such a false doctrine knows this-then anybody with common sense would

suspect that the advocate is a fraud. But common sense is not the hallmark of the academy nor of our age, it

seems. Marx wrote: "Don't think, don't ask me!... A rational man does not ask such questions!" How does

Voegelin respond to these statements by this famous mover and shaker of the modern world? He writes:

[Marx's] prohibition now induces us to ask, Was Marx an intellectual swindler? Such a question will perhaps

give rise to objections. Can one seriously entertain the idea that the lifework of a thinker of considerable

rank is based on an intellectual swindle? Could it have attracted a mass following and become a political

world power if it rested on a swindle? But we today are inured to such scruples: we have seen too many

improbable and incredible things that were nonetheless real. Therefore, we hesitate neither to ask the

question that the evidence presses upon us, nor to answer [it:] Yes, Marx was an intellectual swindler. (SPG,

19)

And why ever might any man, even a Marx, do such a thing? The answer is found in Nietzsche: because of

his lust for power-libido dominandi-, the will to secure and maintain domination whatever the cost.

III. Therapy? Is there a Jonas Salk in the house?

Marx is a representative case, especially if the academy is considered, and will serve our purposes of

illustrative analysis of the wider problem. Solzhenitsyn's earthy, commonsensical, comment at Harvard

comes to mind: Western intellectuals believe Marx to be a living lion (the Soviets just didn't do it right!), but

we know he is a dead dog! The ideological perversion of philosophizing is not merely a question of "ideas"

but of actions with lethal consequences. Thus, in the same lecture where he pronounced Marx to be a

swindler, to the accompaniment of gasps from the audience and headlines in the newspapers the next day,

Voegelin provoked further indignation by drawing a further comparison. He said:

Whoever asks questions about the nature, calling, and destiny of man may be temporarily ignored; later,

after the system of positivism has prevailed in society, such persons will have to be silenced by appropriate

measures [Comte]. And the prohibition of questions is not harmless, for it has attained great social


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If I say to the wicked, O wicked man, you shall surely die; and you do not speak to warn the wicked to turn

from his way, that wicked man shall die in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at your hand.

But if you warn the wicked to turn from his way, and he does not turn from his way; he shall die in his

iniquity, but you will have saved your soul. (CW12, 35)

Epilogue

If one inquires about Voegelin's more explicit understanding of the Western predicament and human

prospect, then something like the following might be added to the foregoing comments.

1. Western civilization is in the late stages of disintegration. It reached a climax in the thirteenth

century and has endured a series of increasingly damaging blows against its spiritual order and institutional

cohesion in the seven hundred years since the great efflorescence in the Christian philosophy of man and

society of Thomas Aquinas. This began already with the authoritarian derailment of the church at the hands

of Boniface VIII a bare generation later, compounded in the next century by the nominalist-fideist split inphilosophy and religion; it was further exacerbated by the "civilizational disaster" of the Reformation, and by

the waves of rebellion and onslaught against the spiritual integrity of the West effected in complex ways

already mentioned since the sixteenth century. The rise of natural science in the seventeenth century

imbalanced the understanding of reality through a tilt and eventual radical closure against the divine Ground

of being. Science became the seed bed, not only of great intellectual achievements, but also for destructive

scientism, phenomenalism, positivism, gnosticism, magic, alchemy, Heremeticism, and other esoteric

movements. These and other manifestations of reductionist egophany have so deformed and afflicted the life

of the mind and spirit as to leave contemporaries with little more than a "hopeless hope" for some renewal

and revival that alone promises to stem the slid of civilizational decline. A hopeful precedent is the Second

Reformation of John and Charles Wesley and the accompanying Great Awakening that revitalized Britain for a

time and laid the groundwork for the American founding in the eighteenth century. To this otherwise stark

appraisal we may attach the question: Is any comparable renaissance presently underway?

2. The notion of the West facing other civilizations in a shootout at the OK Corral for ecumenic

hegemony is simplistic and overlooks the factual situation.

(a) The West has significantly disintegrated already and (unless it again recaptures its vitality through

spiritual renewal) may cease to be a major player in world affairs in the next millennium. Ever the spiritual

realist, Voegelin observes, invoking the Kohelet and Anaximander, that: "What comes into being will have an

end, and the mystery of this stream of being is impenetrable." (NSP, 167; EA, 174; Ecclesiastes. 3:1-11)

(b) The disintegration of the West has been accompanied by a process of "westernization" of the rest of the

world to such a degree that all other extant civilizational societies have absorbed through their dominant

elites many of the nonessential ideological and technological attributes of the disintegrating West itself: one

thinks of a Marxist-Leninist quasi-Christian Orthodox Russia and a Marxist-Leninist quasi-Confucian and

Buddhist China as prominent illustrations, with the several Islamic, Hindu, and other Buddhist societies yet to

be accounted for at the level of hegemonic power. Toynbee dealt with the generally subversive

communication of western influence in terms of "radiation" and the "law of trivia," and Voegelin thought his

account meritorious.


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(c) Thus, as the West abandons its own distinctive intellectual and spiritual identity to become more

thoroughly relativistic and amorphous at its core, it finds treacherous common ground with other progressive

societies in scorched earth positivism, scientism, antiphilosophical and antireligious phenomenalism and

nihilism. The Western dissolution radiates a spiritual and intellectual epidemic infecting contemporary

mankind.

3. Voegelin ultimately rejects, however, Toynbee's dissolution of the history of mankind into the

rise and fall of civilizations as empirically false; and he also rejects the notion (one that Toynbee

also abandoned) that a civilization is an intelligible unit or field of historical study.

(a) Civilizational societies are no more than secondary or tertiary phenomena. They are products of religions

(not religions of civilizations) or more adequately of "spiritual outbursts," and of libidinous power drives

resulting in imperial conquests that tend to capture such events so as to legitimize what otherwise would be

naked exercises of power. Religions, moreover, tend not only to constitute but to spill over multiple

civilizations; and empires, too, are often multi-civilizational. In addition to the spiritual visions and

concupiscential drives that culminate in conquests in the creative process of societal formation, Voegelin

finds that a third factor of philosophical-theological historiography typically emerges to evoke the raisond'tre of empires as political constellations organized for action in world affairs. Thus, a triadic structure

appears to be characteristic, if the ecumenic empires are taken as paradigms.

(b) There still remains the spectacle of a universal mankind--strewn from distant antiquity and, even,

archeological prehistory down to the present--whose commonality of shared humanity reaches beyond the

unique peculiarities of a pluralistic ethnic, cultural, or power field of any particular civilization or any discrete

religious entity. How explain the apparent fact that underlying all the differences is a palpable unity of

mankind, past, present, and future? We readily acknowledge that the ancient Egyptian, and less ancient

Athenian, share common ground as human beings with a contemporary American. This commonality is

expressed philosophically (Aristotle) in terms of a synthetic or composite nature potentially present in every

human being that is, thereby, the epitome of being, crowned with what the old Greeks called Nous that isparadoxically both essential nature and tensional participation in the divine Nous experienced as Ground. The

commonality is expressed pneumatically (Genesis) by characterizing the human being as imago Dei, the

Christ in every man. After diligent search of what is universal about mankind, Voegelin states that "mankind

is not constituted through a survey of phenomena by even the most erudite historian, but through the

experience of order in the present under God." (WP, 16) Later on he adds:

Universal mankind is not a society existing in the world, but a symbol which indicates man's consciousness of

participating, in his earthly existence, in the mystery of a reality that moves toward its transfiguration.

Universal mankind is an eschatological index. (EA, 305)

4. If we recur to Western categories to express ourselves it is because, Voegelin argues, the

differentiation of truth through faith and reason achieved a reflective depth or differentiation not

matched elsewhere in history: if the language of philosophy were to be abandoned, there would no other

language of reflective discursive rationality that could take its place. (WP, 22) The universal becomes

articulate only in the concrete divine-human events that occur as experiences in the concrete consciousness

of some particular person at some specific time and place. All such experiences are inevitably conditioned by

a particular language and ethnic culture. "Man" or "human being" is strictly speaking no where to be found

except in specific individual human persons. Yet one reality and one mankind are affirmed amidst these

particularities; they are discernible in equivalent symbolizations of man's participation in divine-human


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reality throughout history; and they are convincingly traceable in an evidentiary trail of equivalent symbols

back to the stone age. Thus, Voegelin observes, what is true for one man also is true for all men.

Behind every equivalent symbol in the historical field stands the man who has engendered it in the course of

his search as a representative of a truth that is more than equivalent. The search that renders no more than

equivalent truth rests ultimately on the faith that, by engaging in it, man participates representatively in thedivine drama of truth becoming luminous. (CW12, 132-33)

A further consequence is that faith and reason are not the opposites generally assumed but equivalent

symbolisms reflecting the truth of being arising in the participatory experiences of spiritually sensitive men

lodged in the different ethnic horizons of Israel (prophets) and Hellas (philosophers): Reason (as divine

Nous, Plato's third God in the Laws 713c-714b; EA, 227) is every bit as much a revelation as is the

encounter with Yahweh in faith by the prophets of Israel. There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as merely

"natural" Reason-contrary to the Scholastics and their continuators.

Such reflections inform Voegelin's admiration of Jean Bodin's bold meditative resolution in Colloquium

heptaplomeres (1588-?) of the murderous religious strife of France in favor of peace through the mystic's

plea for toleration grounded in awareness of the essential sameness of God experienced, whatever the

creedal differences. The same truth is expressed in different languages and symbols-each word, syllable, and

gesture of which may be precious to votaries of the respective creed, nevertheless-the differences among

them are not worth the life of a single human being. The divine reality (the theotes of Col. 2:9) beyond all

dogmatic formulation is experienced as the universally true common transcendent Ground nurturing by the

divine-human encounter of the In-Between (metaxy) the essential humanity of every person. It is above all

else this that is the source of our sense of universal mankind, arising as it does out of the paradox of

participation in the ineffable that becomes effable in divine-human experiences in myriad modes, in all times,

and places. (OH5, 103) In Voegelin's words:

The truth of existence...does not emerge from one single spiritual event...but assumes the historical form of

a plurality of movements springing up in Persia and India, in Israel and Hellas. The differentiation of the one

truth of existence, thus, is broken in a spectrum of spiritual eruptions each bearing the mark of the ethnic

culture in which it occurs....The human responses to the divine irruptions rather tend to accentuate different

aspects of the one truth of man's existence under God, such as the Greek noetic or the Israelite-Jewish

pneumatic revelations of divine reality.

This is "history" as it was experienced by the more sensitive participants in the process down to the time of

Paul. (EA, 301)

It is, after all, right that we should end on a hopeful note regarding the Western predicament and the humanprospect, even if it may not be exactly the note we anticipated hearing when we first set out on our

discussion. It is also right to give Voegelin a last summarizing say in order to put his great work into the

Christian perspective he steadfastly claimed for it, despite his sometimes intemperate and self-righteous

critics. He reminded one of these of the following:

There were always Christian thinkers who recognized the difference between experiences of divine reality

and the transformation of the insights engendered by the insights into doctrinal propositions. The tension

between theologica mystica and theologica dogmatica goes as far back as the patres. It dominates the work


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of Origen; and its dynamics is the living force in such noteworthy successors as Augustine, Pseudo-

Dionysius, Scotus Erigena, Anselm of Canterbury, and the mystics of the fourteen century....I am equally

conscious of not going beyond the orbit of Christianity when I prefer the experiential symbol divine reality to

the God of the Creed, for divine reality translates the theotes of Colossians 2:9. The theotes, a neologism of

the time, is a symbol arising from experiential exegesis; its degree of generality is so high that it can be

applied, not only to the specific experience of divine reality becoming incarnate in Christ and the Christianbelievers (the experiences analyzed in Colossians 2), but to every instance of theotes experienced as present

in man and forming his insight into his nature and its relation to the divine ground of his existence.

Moreover, I am very much aware that my inquiry into the history of experience and symbolization

generalizes the Anselmian fides quaerens intellectum so as to include every fides, not only the Christian, in

the quest for understanding by reason. Even this expansion of the fides, however, to all the experiences of

divine reality in which history constitutes itself, cannot be said to go beyond "Christianity." For it is the Christ

of the Gospel of John who says of himself: "Before Abraham was, I am" (8:58); and it is Thomas Aquinas

who considered the Christ to be the head of the corpus mysticum that embraces, not only Christians, but all

mankind from the creation of the world to its end. In practice this means 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.

... It is the guilt of Christian thinkers and church leaders of having allowed the dogma to separate in the

public consciousness of Western civilization from the experience of "the mystery" on which its truth depends.

The dogma develops as a socially and culturally necessary protection of insights experientially gained against

false propositions; its development is secondary to the truth of experience. If its truth [pretends] to be

autonomous, its validity will come under attack in any situation of social crisis, when alienation becomes a

mass phenomenon; the dogma will then be misunderstood as an "opinion" which one can believe or not, and

it will be opposed by counter opinions which dogmatize the experience of alienated existence. The

development [in the fourteenth century] of a nominalist and fideist conception of Christianity is the cultural

disaster, with its origins in the late Middle Ages, that provokes the reaction of alienated existence in the

dogmatic form of the ideologies, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The result is the state of

deculturation with which we are all too familiar from our daily talks with students who are caught in theintellectual confusion of a debate that proceeds, not by recourse to experience, but by position and counter

position of opinion. Once truth has degenerated to the level of true doctrine, the return from orthodoxy to

"the mystery" is a process that appears to require as many centuries of effort as have gone into the

destruction of intellectual and spiritual culture....

...[Complaint is heard] that I neglect the thought and science of the twentieth century.... I consider

representative, by the side of the work in theoretical physics, the magnificent work of the historians. They

have brought to light the background of modernity in gnosticism, hermeticism, alchemy, and magic; they

have restored our knowledge of ancient and medieval philosophy; they have provided a solid basis for our

understanding of the Israelite-Judaic-Christian experiences; they have extended our knowledge of the

Indian, Chinese, pre-Columbian, and African societies; and they have expanded our historical horizon by theprehistoric millennia. [The cumulative effect is to demonstrate the pitiful inadequacy of] the ideological

systems of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, nothing to say of their epigonal aftermath [as] obsolete

interpretations of reality, for reasons both empirical and theoretical. [However, this] marvelous advance of

science which characterizes the twentieth century has not yet affected the notorious "climate of opinion"

which [still today] dominates the public debate. But I do not believe the end of the world has come, if it does

not come to the end the ideologists have projected for it. The world will go on, and the restoration of the

intellectual and spiritual culture in the sciences will ultimately affect an ideological climate that by now has


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become a reactionary force. To assist in this process in one of the motives of my work. (CW12, 294-95, 302-

303)

Abbreviations of Voegelin Sources Referenced

CW12 The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 12, Published Essays 1966-85, ed. Ellis Sandoz (1990;

available Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999)

EA Order and History, vol. 4, The Ecumenic Age (1974; available Columbia: University of Missouri Press,

1999)

NSP The New Science of Politics: An Introduction, foreword by Dante Germino (1952; Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1987)

OH5 Order and History, vol. 5, The Search for Order, foreword by Lissy Voegelin, intro. by Ellis Sandoz,

epilogue by Jrgen Gebhardt (1987; available Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999)

SPG Science, Politics and Gnosticism, trans. William J. Fitzpatrick, intro. Ellis Sandoz (1958; Eng. 1968; rpr.

& re-paged, Washington, D. C.: Regnery Publishing, Inc., Gateway Editions, 1997)

WP Order and History, vol. 3, World of the Polis (1957; available Columbia: University of Missouri Press,

1999)

Our Western Predicament, Voegelin Perspective on Modernity

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