Eric Voegelin (14)

A guarded optimism

In his essay "Immortality: Experience and Symbol" Voegelin sketches what he regards as the decline of the West since the High Middle Ages—when religious doctrine separated from experience—through a series of "ever lower levels of spiritual and intellectual order" punctuated by wars and revolutionary chaos, ending in a contemporary "global madhouse". But he also descries a recent "progress of a sort" in the intellectual sphere, a development which ought to "become a living force, sooner or later, in the actual restoration of order."

Early figures in the necessary gargantuan effort to regain "contact with reality", Voegelin writes, were Descartes and Hegel. In the twentieth century, the "great landmarks" in this enterprise were the work of William James and Henri Bergson.

In order to establish the criteria by which progress in this matter is to be gauged, I shall advert to a classic document of openness toward experiences of nonexistent [i.e. transcendent] reality, to William James's Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). If you examine the index of the book, you will find no reference to the most important literary texts that articulate such experiences and elaborate with care on the question of immortality. In vain will you look for the names of Plato and Aristotle; Christ is not mentioned [!]; and the two references to St. Paul refer to passages in which he is quoted by other authors. These observations are not meant to criticize James; they rather want to characterize the situation of science at the beginning of the century, when the fundamental texts were so far below the threshold of general debate that even the catholicity of a James could not become aware of their relevance to his purpose. On immortality in particular, he has no more than a brief page, urbane in form but grumpy in mood—an understandable mood, as immortality presented itself to him in popular imaginings of the kind that were spoofed about the same time by E.M. Forster in his satirical short stories. The turn of the century, one must remember, was a difficult time for men of a philosophical bent, so bad a time indeed that a Wilhelm Dilthey refrained for a decade from publishing because he deemed the effort useless.

Since the beginning of the century, the situation has changed substantially. On the one hand, the spiritual disease has manifested itself massively in bouts of global war and revolution; on the other hand, the experiences of transcendence are being recaptured in a peculiarly backhanded manner. For the experiences which had been reduced to shadows by dogmatic incrustations, and seemed to be removed from the realm of the living by the successive attacks of antitheologism and antimetaphysicism, have returned from limbo by the back door of historical knowledge. To a field that apparently had been cleared of them so they would not disturb the futuristic dreams of paradis artificiels, they are being reintroduced as "facts of history"—through the exploration of myth, of the Old and New Testament, of apocalyptic and Gnostic movements, through comparative religion, Assyriology, Egyptology, classical philosophy, and so forth. This renewed knowledge about experiences on which depends the order in personal and social existence makes itself felt even now in an increasingly accurate diagnosis of the contemporary disorder and its causes; and it would be surprising if did not become a living force, sooner or later, in the actual restoration of order.

(From "Immortality: Experience and Symbol", in Faith and Political Philosophy: The Correspondence Between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934–1964, eds. Peter Emberley and Barry Cooper, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.)