Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America by Ellis Sandoz

Author:Ellis Sandoz
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: University of Missouri Press

5

Carrying Coals to Newcastle

VOEGELIN AND CHRISTIANITY

The question is about Eric Voegelin's relationship to Christianity. Was Voegelin a Christian? Is his philosophy a Christian philosophy? The personal and scholarly issues must be divided and subdivided for my few hints on these complicated subjects.

From the time I first heard him lecture, when I was a young undergraduate student in 1949, I never doubted that Voegelin was profoundly Christian, whatever the ambiguities of his formal church affiliation. It never dawned on me at the time to think otherwise, since the whole of his discourse was luminous with devotion to the truth of divine reality that plainly formed the horizon of his analytical expositions in class and of his scholarly writings as well, as I later found out. Voegelin made existential faith intellectually respectable, to put it bluntly—not something scientifically untenable and living off of obscurantism and polemical rearguard actions. That youthful judgment was valid then and, with appropriate qualification, remains so long years later.

His faith formed the bedrock of his personal resistance to National Socialism and strengthened his interpretation of philosophy as itself an act of resistance (from Socrates onward) against debilitating untruth. The signals are clear enough. Beginning each in a cold fury masked by matter-of-fact rhetorical understatement, in the 1933 race books Voegelin juxtaposed Max Scheler's personalistic philosophical anthropology, and then Thomas a Kempis's evocation of imago dei with Christ the exemplar of everyone's true humanity, to the Nazis' corrupt pseudo-scientific reductionist account. This he acidly derided as a “system of scientific superstition” that had brought the “knowledge of man to grief.” He ended Political Religions in 1938 (whose epigraph was Dante's incantation of hell: “Through me the way is to the City of Woe”) with a grim, benedictory condemnation of fatuous superbia in words from the anonymous fourteenth-century mystic called the Frankfurter. Many years later, after returning to Europe, he assumed the mantle of charismatic authority in concluding his lecture on the Nazis and the German university with an electrifying evocation of Ezekiel's Watchman. The grounding of this early and persistent perspective in Augustinian mysticism is persuasively suggested by his previously unpublished meditations on Saint Augustine and on T. S. Eliot from the early 1930s and 1940s.1 It vivified his early and persistent insight that the individual man is the intersection of time and eternity2 and that human nature is a process-structure that is distinctively spiritual, as he stressed more than three decades later: “Through spirit man actualizes his potential to partake of the divine. He rises thereby to the imago Dei which it is his destiny to be.”3 The integrity of the individual human person thus conceived and affirmed, with its reflective consciousness, is the spring of resistance to evil and the responsive source of the love of truth—the very core of participatory (metaxy or In-Between) reality, never to be sacrificed to any collectivity of any kind whatever.4 At the concrete level of political action, Voegelin's “identification of the Nazis as a satanic force for evil was sufficiently unambiguous

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