Eric Voegelin: Clearing Up the Mess

{Eric Voegelin did not blame Modernity entirely on Enlightenment thought, on the Reformation, or on medieval Nominalism. For Voegelin, there was plenty of blame to go around, blame stretching back for centuries; but while Enlightenment didn’t start the fire, it added fuel, fanned the flames, and effectively defunded the fire department (Christianity, that is). Although Christianity itself had long since become (in Voegelin’s narrative) part of the problem, to abandon it was in no way a solution. What the solution might be, Voegelin never explained.}

“The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” (William Wordsworth)

It wasn’t that Eric Voegelin disliked any specific aspects of the modern world—noise, light pollution, traffic congestion, the pace of life, fast-food chains, big box stores, manipulative media, the absence of a good five-cent cigar, etc. More than any of that, he loathed the very foundations of Modernity. The question, obviously, is, why—and, for that matter, what did he consider the foundations of Modernity to be?

Enlightenment thinkers, as popularly understood, were self-proclaimed proponents of Reason who followed Kant’s injunction, “Dare to know.” Taking the physical sciences as a model, modern philosophers embarked on a search for Answers to political and social issues. For Eric Voegelin, though, Answers were barriers to thought: “Questioning,” he said, “is the flame to be kept burning by the philosopher.” In his opinion, Modernity represented an abandonment of reason and a surrender to new types of dogmatism; after all, once you find an Answer, you no longer need to search.

Voegelin distrusted ‘totalizing’ systems of thought—e.g., scientism, utopian politics, and dogmatic theologies—and the more absolute and rigid a system, the more resistant to further inquiry, the more he distrusted it. For Voegelin, ideology was the enemy; it represented the imprisonment of thought.

From Voegelin’s perspective, not only has the modern West been locked in various ideological prisons, but, worse, it has also locked itself into the all-encompassing prison of the mundane world. Modernity no longer believes in, much less strives for, transcendence; it insists that this world and this life are all that exists, and it urges us to make the most of it. In rejecting the transcendent realm, according to J. David Franks, man has become “alienated from the divine ground of reality [and] increasingly numb to what reveals itself in the primal experiences of life.” Theophanies—revelations of the divine—have been replaced by what Ellis Sandoz called “egophanies of the libidinous self.”  

Using abstruse philosophical and metaphysical language (including a plethora of neologisms), Voegelin claimed that man without God is no longer truly human; we are deformed, spiritually diseased, and without hope. That deformation has taken centuries to develop, and the course of the disease has only worsened in modern times, as Voegelin explained:

The structure of sentiments which appears in the 18th century can be characterized generally by the term ‘intramundane religiousness’. In the conflict with the Christian tradition the new religiousness expresses itself through the inversion of the direction in which the Reality of existence is to be sought; the orientation toward a summum bonum was replaced by the flight from the summum malum of death in civil war.

Voegelin viewed the “inversion of direction” as an unmitigated disaster:

The inversion of direction became established as the principal instrument for interpreting the internal order of human nature. Whether it be the materialistic, the sensualistic, or the hedonistic variants — the strata of human nature are interpreted as derivatives of a physical or biological substance at the bottom of existence. The internal structure of man is no longer ordered toward a transcendental aim but is to be explained by the operations of physical sensibility or of a pleasure-pain mechanism.

Modern man became the measure of all things, but “all things” had been stripped of their transcendent dimension. The Enlightenment managed simultaneously to elevate man in stature and to diminish him in the process: 

This inversion of direction becomes from now on the symbol of the anti-Christian anthropology in politics— whether it assumes the form of economic materialism, or of biologism, or of psychologism. It is accompanied by the perversion of the idea of order: the disorder of passions is accepted as the normal order of the human soul, and the homo politicus, the man of secular passion, as the normal type of man. The problem is realized in its full importance in the seventeenth century. To the madness of the inflated ego, Hobbes finds the practical answer of the Leviathan crushing the proud, replacing the spiritual process of contrition by submission to governmental power.

It is often difficult to tell whether Voegelin’s primary concern was spiritual or political, and whether he was more troubled by the loss of the soul or by the growth of Leviathan. He seemed to portray modernity’s various deficiencies as aspects of the same singular phenomenon, i.e., man’s loss of the transcendent dimension of existence:

The passions have lost their character as a source of disorder in the soul and have become the fundamental force on which all order in the conduct of man has to rely. The return to the ground of existence and to the experience of creaturely nothingness have lost their function in the order of the soul. ¹

Voegelin’s declinist narrative continued in the same vein. According to him, ‘Natural’ man, severed from any link to (or even belief in) the supernatural, has lost his spiritual and existential balance, has mistaken the resulting unsteadiness as ‘normal,’ and now seeks the help of ‘governmental power’ to save him from himself. As Voegelin explained:

“When the spiritual center of man, through which man is open to the transcendental Reality, is destroyed, then the disorderly aggregate of passions can be used as an instrument by the legislator. Man is no longer an entity that has its existential center within itself; he has become a mechanism of pleasure, pain, and passions which can be harnessed by another man, the “legislator,” for purposes of his own. This was a key point of the anti-Christian attack on the existence of man; man is no end in himself but merely an instrument to be used by the legislator. This is the new basic thesis for collectivism in all its variants, down to the contemporary forms of totalitarianism. ²

Once the disorder of the soul is established as the nature of man, then the growth of the soul through an internal process nourished through communication with transcendental reality is replaced by the formation of conduct through external management. Such managing and organizing interference with the soul of man is, from the position of a spiritual morality, equally reprehensible in all its variants: whether it is the propagandizing formation of conduct and opinion through such political movements as the Communist or National Socialist or an educational process which relies on the psychology of conditioned reflexes and forms patterns of social conformance without raising the question of the morality of the pattern or of the morality of conformance. ³

The modern West, then, suffering as it is from a “disorder of the soul” (which disorder Voegelin dubbed “pneumapathy”), has obscured the transcendent horizon with the ideology of material progress, has substituted abject dependence for individual responsibility, and has replaced God with the State.

To quote Voegelin: “The task of clearing up the anti-noetic mess that has accumulated over the centuries in the contemporary science of man is enormous.”

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¹ The best example of how “the passions” were recast as man’s “fundamental force” was the baptism of “self-interest” (easily conflated with “avarice” and “greed”) by modern economists, who qualified the term as “enlightened self-interest,” as if that made a difference. Voegelin never mentions this; though it would have fit his narrative, economics was too worldly a domain to attract his attention.

² Voegelin acknowledges that Immanuel Kant, surely one of the leading voices of   Enlightenment, had in fact explicitly opposed such instrumentalization: “The Kantian ethical rule was that every man must be considered an end in himself and not an instrument for ulterior purposes.” I am not sure that Enlightenment, let alone Kant, can be held responsible for its inversion.

³ Christian thinkers throughout history have said that man’s fallen nature required the oversight of human institutions—government, for one, and education, for another. Voegelin seemed to suggest that man’s soul should be free from all such interference and left on its own to communicate with the Divine, which strikes me as a recipe for disaster. Nor would the Sisters of Mercy who taught me catechism appreciate being labeled “reprehensible” for their firm tutoring, though they were certainly trying to form in us “patterns of social conformance”.