Eric Voegelin

National Review, Feb 22, 1985 by Gerhart Niemeyer

ON JANUARY 19, 1985, death came to Eric Voegelin, one of the greatest political theorists of all time. Why is it that, compared with the flood of Nobel Prize-crowned natural scientists, few comparable names of political scientists come to mind? Is it because even noted political scientists tell us little more than what we already know? The founders of political science were Plato and Aristotle, his student, philosophers both. In modern times one may think of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Max Weber, although each can be blamed for serious errors of thinking, with disastrous results. Eric Voegelin, like Plato and Aristotle, was a philosopher; unlike Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Weber, he was not given to error; in fact he uncovered and corrected their mistakes. In an age suffering from deep disorders of reason and political practice, he elevated political science to a source of new knowledge that also revived old insights.

Born in Germany, raised and educated in Vienna, he did his real trail-blazing after leaving Europe in 1938 and settling in the United States: first at the University of Alabama, then Louisiana State, after that ten years in Munich, and back to the States, this time at the Hoover Institution, with regular guest semesters at Notre Dame. His The New Science of Politics, the Walgreen Lectures of 1951, hit the community of learning like a bomb-shell. The first three volumes of his Order and History (1956-57) fascinated not only social scientists but theologians, classicists, and historians. His "Immortality: Experience and Symbol" was delivered as the Ingersoll Lecture at Harvard; his Science, Politics, and Gnosticism elaborated his Munich inaugural lecture; his Anamnesis explored the philosophy of consciousness.

How to summarize Voegelin's achievement? Above all, he made possible, again, a true theory of politics by restoring to political thought the measure of "the constitution of being." This implied consideration of "the transcendence," experienced as man's mind overflows both nature and history. The typical transcending experience is man's encounter with God, beyond self and society and human reason. "God is the measure," Socrates insisted. Voegelin, in The New Science, linked representation, a political institution, to truth not as relative to each society but as man's quest for the absolute. With that he broke through the barrier, erected by positivism, between fact and value.

VOEGELIN SOON made it quite clear that this knowledge was not unheard of but had always instructed man's desire for political order, as he demonstrated for Egypt and Israel, in the first volume of Order and History. The second volume pursued the same theme in the Greece of Homer and the tragedians, followed, in the third volume, by a new and stirringly profound reading of Plato and Aristotle. Voegelin the philosopher did not hold, with Milton's Satan, that "the mind is its own place" and thus did not work to establish a "system." Rather, he diligently studied relevant historical materials wherever he might find them.

His central concern was the philosophy of history, an inescapable task if the many historical studies were not to float in mid air, without meaning. Again, he had to fight fatal errors of past thinkers who visualized history as a unilinear upward development, a progressivist ladder, with ourselves at the top, looking disdainfully at the past. Voegelin demonstrated empirically that man's relation to the divinity has always been the axis on which the ordering of human existence has turned, with differing results but a constant concern. History, then, could not be construed as a planned series of successions. Meaning is found in history, a series of similar quests, moments of spiritual response to "the flowing presence" of God. He did distinguish certain "leaps in being," advances in quality and insight: one in Israel, another in the Greece of the mystic philosophers, a third one in the age of the Christian Fathers. He abandoned, however, the notion that these, or similar outbursts in other civilizations, could be arranged in vertical order. Progress there was; regression also occurred. Man, able to orient himself by the experiences of transcendence, also can turn his back on them or, worse still, pervert them in order to deify himself.

The latter led Voegelin to a penetrating analysis of the modern age, the nature of which he identified as "gnosticism." This was the name of an ancient religion believing in a good god totally alien and unknown, and in the wicked creation of the world by a demonic demiurge himself ignorant of god. The resulting total rejection of nature and the things of this world, and the elevation of man as the agent of salvation, with god as the one to be saved, was a pattern one could readily observe in the ideologies of our time: Nazism, Fascism, Communism, also Existentialism and Psychoanalysis. Voegelin's striking analysis enabled students to orient themselves in the midst of today's spiritual and moral confusion. This is the accomplishment for which his name became most widely known, as the term "gnosticism" entered political argument as a synonym for "ideology."