Philosophical, Theological, and Political
Implications
September
2010
Eric Voegelin on Early Christianity
I) Premises
in Voegelin’s Philosophy of History
One of Eric Voegelin’s most important and
widely regarded studies is about “The Political Religions”; it was written in
1938 and can be considered a document that shows an early gained conviction
which permeates also his later thought. The treatise ends in an epilogue, in
which Voegelin makes the following crucial statement: “The life of people in
political community cannot be defined as a profane realm, in which we are
concerned only with legal questions and the organizations or power. A community
is also a realm of religious order, and the knowledge of a political condition
will be incomplete with respect to a decisive point, firstly, if it does not
take into account the religious forces inherent in a society and the symbols
through which these are expressed or, secondly, if it does include the
religious forces but does not recognize them as such and translates them into
areligious categories. Humans live in political society with all traits of
their being, from the physical to the spiritual and religious traits. […] The
political community is always integrated in the overall context of human experience
of world and God.”[1] With these words Voegelin
expresses at least two insights he gained through his widespread historical
studies: first he maintains that politics never exhausts in issues like power,
leadership, authority, or domination, and second, in connection with this viewpoint,
he states that in order to really penetrate and understand politics the dimensions
of spirit and religion play a decisive role which must be taken into
consideration.
The relationship of politics and religion
is best manifested in Voegelin’s philosophy of history. In his “New Science of
Politics”, published 14 years after “The Political Religions”, Voegelin
elaborates a sketch of the evolution of history. He identifies “a
civilizational cycle of world-historic proportions” which encompasses the pre-Christian
ancient civilizations as well as the Christian and modern civilizations. With
regard to this “civilizational cycle” Voegelin makes an important statement:
“There emerge the contours of a giant cycle, transcending the cycles of the
single civilizations. The acme of this cycle would be marked by the appearance
of Christ; the pre-Christian high civilizations would form its ascending
branch; modern, gnostic civilizations would form its descending branch.” The
connection to the above mentioned spiritual dimension is given in the following
sentence: “The pre-Christian high civilizations advanced from the compactness
of experience to the differentiation of the soul as the sensorium of
transcendence; and in the Mediterranean civilizational area, this evolution
culminated in the maximum of differentiation, through the revelation of the
Logos in history.”[2] The civilizational cycle
that Voegelin designs has its foundation in the fact that in the course of centuries
the human soul gained an increasing openness toward transcendence, and that it
opened itself up through increasing sensitivity and differentiation until
reaching its final culmination in the revelation.
Extensive studies, especially of the
pre-Christian high civilizations, enabled Voegelin to discover that the term
representation can be used not only to designate certain individual politicians
who “re-present” their people, but the concept is primarily to be used to
characterize whole peoples which are themselves representatives of different
types of transcendent truths. In this context Voegelins distinguishes between
three kinds; he writes: “The first of these types is the truth represented by
the early empires; it shall be designated as ‘cosmological truth’. The second
type of truth appears in the political culture of
II) Greek Philosophy and
Christianity: Commonality and Differences
The quotations of Voegelin suggest two
different interpretations: on the one side they make believe that Greek
philosophy and Christianity have so strong and important commonalities that the
differences between them can be neglected; actually, Voegelin speaks of the maximum
of differentiation achieved through “Greek philosophy and Christianity”. On the
other side Voegelin himself distinguishes between the three mentioned “types of
truth” and thereby accentuates the difference between the “anthropological” and
the “soteriological truth”. I, briefly, want to highlight the most fundamental
commonality and then point to some differences between Greek philosophy and
Christianity.
1) Commonality: The most important
commonality between Greek philosophy and Christianity is what Voegelin calls
“the noetic core”. Both share the same conviction that the existence of humans
is characterized by a field of pulls and counterpulls and that human existence
evolves in the realm between a human and superhuman sphere. Voegelin’s
description of the commonality between Greek philosophy and Christianity is as
follows: “There is the same field of pull and counterpull, the same sense of
gaining life through following the pull of the golden cord, the same
consciousness of existence in an In-Between of human-divine participation, and
the same experience of divine reality as the center of action in the movement
from question to answer.”[5]
The central feature of human life consists in its positioning between two
different poles that enable humans to experience their existence as located in
a field of pull and counterpull, as challenged by the question of life and
death, and as penetrated by the tension between human and divine reality.
Voegelin discovers in the thought of Plato a host of hints that proof Plato’s
insight into the core of human existence. Plato, for example, has as one of its
most important linguistic symbols the expressions of “methexis” and
“metalepsis” which designate the mutual participation of human and divine
being; he presents in his “Parable of the Cave” the picture of a man who is
dragged out of the cave to a higher sphere against his own will; and Plato,
finally, develops in his late work on the “Laws” the symbolism of man as a
puppet made by gods which is pulled by various cords towards opposite directions.
Voegelin comments this thought of Plato: “On man it is incumbent always to
follow the golden and sacred cord of judgment […] and not the other cords of
lesser metals.”[6] This
characterization of man given by Plato is recurrent in the thought of the New
Testament. Voegelin refers to the gospel of John, chapter 6, verse 44, where
John cites Jesus with his last public speech; here Jesus says: “And I, when I
am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” Another passage
quoted by Voegelin refers also to the gospel of John, now to Chapter 6, verse
44. Also here the motive of being pulled is very clearly articulated. The
sentence goes like this: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me
draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day.” In both these quotations
Voegelin detects not only the motive of man being pulled by a superior power,
but also that the philosopher Plato and the evangelist John use exactly the
same term to express their insight into one of the most fundamental features of
human existence – the old Greek word “helkein = to draw”. According to Voegelin
classical Greek philosophy, here represented in Plato, and early Christian
thought, here embodied in the figure of the apostle John, have in common the
crucial insight into the existential tension toward the divine ground of being.
Both agree in the core conviction that human life happens and evolves in the
realm of the In-Between of a human and superhuman sphere, of pull and
counterpull, of question and answer; this “noetic insight” into the deep
structure of existence elevates both above the cosmological truth of earlier
centuries and legitimizes their outstanding quality and reputation.
2) Differences: Between Greek
philosophy and Christian thought there is not only fundamental accordance, even
if the commonality of the “noetic core” is a very important one. Voegelin
elaborates a number of differences which elucidate the distance between
philosophy and Christianity. I am going to mention three of them which all
show, beyond the difference, a certain advantage on the side of Christianity.
a) Universality: Voegelin praises
Christianity because it accentuates the universality and transcendence of
divinity. In contrast to the polytheism of the Greek and Roman pre-Christian
world Christianity perceives itself as monotheism, even if it adopted in the
course of the 4th century (325 and 380 AD) the doctrine of Trinity.
A central characteristic of Christian monotheism is its universal spread. In a
letter to his friend Alfred Schuetz from January 1, 1953, Voegelin gives a very
clear account of the universality of the Christian idea of God. He writes:
“This idea of God is radically universal; the mediating function is radically
universal for all men; and its validity is universal for all times. The
experience of divine help, symbolized in all pre-Christian civilizations
polytheistically and in national pluralism, was reduced to its essence and made
humanly universal through Christology. Christ is the god who puts an end to the
gods in history.”[7] In
another letter that Voegelin addressed to Leo Strauss he underscored that the
man of the Platonic-Aristotelian philosophy is “the man of the polis” who is
“tied to the omphalos of
b) Knowledge of God: Christianity is
superior to Greek philosophy also insofar as it “represents a more complete
knowledge of the Unknown God”.[9]
In Plato’s thought God is delineated as a being which plays with man as a
puppet; in the Christian thought God is described as a being that underwent
incarnation. Voegelin: “The God who plays with man as a puppet is not the God
who becomes man to gain his life by suffering his death.”[10]
In the person of Jesus a new level of differentiation is reached that
transcends the insights of Greek philosophers. Voegelin says about this “leap
in being”, realized in the life and thought of Jesus: “This revelation of the
Unknown God through Christ, in conscious continuity with the millennial process
of revelation […], is so much the center of the gospel movement that it may be
called the gospel itself.”[11]
In comparison to the rather complex and undifferentiated image of God in Greek
philosophy Christianity offers through the tale of God’s incarnation, death and
resurrection a narrative which is much richer and more substantial.
c) Relationship between Man and God:
A third aspect which accounts for the superiority of Christianity in Voegelin’s
view concerns the relationship between man and god. In order to qualify this
relationship in Christian thought Voegelin first refers to Greek philosophy. In
the work of Aristotle he detects the thesis that the “philia politike”, the
political friendship, which consists in spiritual agreement between men, is
possible only on the basis that men live in agreement with the nous, the
divinest part in themselves. The vertical relationship to the nous, however,
implies that friendship was impossible between man and god because of their radical
inequality. Voegelin characterizes this impossibility of friendship between man
and God as “typical for the whole range of anthropological truth”. In
Christianity this relationship changes in a fundamental way: In contrast to
Greek thought, where “the soul orients itself toward a God who rests in his
immovable transcendence”, where the soul reaches out toward divine reality
without meeting an answering movement from beyond, the Christian conception is
determined by a God who turns towards man in grace. God communicates himself,
sends and sacrifices his only son in order to redeem man. Voegelin on that
aspect: “The experience of mutuality in the relation with God, of the amicitia in the Thomistic sense, of the
grace that imposes a supernatural form on the nature of man, is the specific
difference of Christian truth.”[12]
The “soteriological truth” that Christianity offers to man constitutes insofar
a higher level than the Greek “anthropological truth” as it regards not
primarily the human search of truth, but also the divine answer and,
furthermore, God’s initiative to get into contact with man.
The relationship between Greek philosophy
and Christian thought manifests commonalities as well as differences. With
regard to the temporal evolution of both Voegelin makes the interesting remark
that each of them was in a certain way dependent upon the other. In the first
century AD Greek philosophy and its culture of reason “had arrived at a state
that was sensed by eager young men as an impasse in which the gospel appeared
to offer the answer to the philosopher’s search for truth.” And on the other
side it is equally true that “if the community of the gospel had not entered
the culture of the time by entering its life of reason, it would have remained
an obscure sect and probably disappeared from history”.[13]
In this respect the pre-Christian high cultures of the
III) The Pillars of Christianity:
Jesus and Paul
In the literature on Voegelin’s
understanding and interpretation of Christianity it is often said that he never
has been nor wanted to be a theologian or even a Bible scholar.[15]
Voegelin was a philosopher who dealt with questions of religion from a
particular point of view. If we take into consideration Voegelin’s description
of the life and teaching of Jesus this is conspicuously confirmed. During the 1940s,
when Voegelin was working on the “History of Political Ideas”, he authored the
most systematic account of Jesus and the rise of Christianity. The portrayal he
gives of Jesus comprises entire 12 pages, and for the chapter on “The Rise of
Christianity”, encompassing the part of “Jesus” as well as “Christianity and
the Nations”, he writes entire 38 pages. These rather short accounts show that
the historical events of the founders of Christianity were not of primary
importance to him. An overview of the most important arguments will elucidate
this.
1) Jesus: Before entering the proper
interpretation of Jesus Voegelin starts his account by hinting at the peculiar
feature of the first century AD. He states that at the time of the public
appearance of Jesus the time was “ripe” for something to happen: On the basis
of his conviction that every power organization needs a corresponding
intellectual and spiritual substance[16]
he observes that exactly this spiritual dimension was lacking the
In his later work Voegelin assumes a
different access to interpreting religious and philosophical phenomena; as
James Rhodes says, “Voegelin’s mature work begins with a decision to elaborate
a ‘process theology’”, which is clearly expressed in Voegelin’s treatise “Anamnesis”.[22]
In the case of Jesus this means a less systematic treatment on the one side,
but a number of highly interesting observations and sometimes surprising
interpretations on the other. In his essay “The Gospel and Culture” Voegelin
highlights a feature of Jesus so far not mentioned; the existence of Jesus,
here, is primarily characterized by “the experience of an extraordinary divine
irruption”[23]. And
this irruption finds its expression in the “Epistle to the Colossians” in the
following words: “For in him the whole fullness of divine reality dwells bodily”
(Col. 2: 9). The divine reality in its whole fullness is present only in Jesus;
all other men can participate in this fullness only by way of accepting the
truth that he embodies. In a tone of appraisal adds Voegelin: “Something about
Jesus must have impressed his contemporaries as an existence in the metaxy of such intensity that his bodily
presence […] appeared to be fully permeated by divine presence.”[24]
His disciples experienced the presence of God in Jesus in such a measure that
they recognized himself as God. In “Order and History IV: The Ecumenic Age”,
Voegelin makes the surprising statement that “the tale of death and resurrection
is a myth”[25].
Despite of this deprecating judgment is Jesus considered the apex of differentiation
because he opened his soul so thoroughly toward divine reality that the whole
fullness of divine reality could permeate him.
2) Paul: To appreciate the
performance of Paul it seems reasonable to briefly remind the reader of the
particular origin and provenience of Christianity. The outstanding historian
Christopher Dawson accentuates this aspect repeatedly in his writings; he
maintains: “Christianity is the one element in Western culture which is
completely non-Western in origin”. It came out of “this unknown oriental world
into the full light of Roman-Hellenistic culture with a new faith and a new
standard of values which aspired to change human life”.[26]
It was the extraordinary performance of Paul to have transplanted and
transported core convictions of this new faith from the
In his treatment of Paul in the “History of
Political Ideas” Voegelin designates the “Sermon on the Mount” the “centrepiece
of the teaching of Jesus”. This doctrine, however, is “an eschatological
doctrine. It demands a change of heart and imposes rules of conduct that have
their meaning for men who live in the daily expectation of the
Voegelin in his later work stresses other
aspects of Paul’s thought. In “The Ecumenic Age” from 1974 Voegelin dedicates
Paul and his “Vision of the Resurrected” one entire chapter (of seven chapters
altogether). With reference to Paul’s “Epistle to the Romans”, where the author
writes that “the creation eagerly waits for the revelation of the sons of God”
(Romans 8: 19) and that “the whole creation groans and suffers together until
now” (Romans 8: 22) Voegelin differentiates the classical “noetic theophany”,
exemplified in Plato and Aristotle, from the “pneumatic theophany”[35],
embodied in the writings of Paul. “The accent”, he says, “has decisively
shifted from the divinely noetic order incarnate in the world to the divinely
pneumatic salvation from its disorder, from the paradox of reality to the
abolition of the paradox, from the experience of the directional movement to
its consummation.” Despite these differences Voegelin emphasizes very important
commonalities between Plato and Paul: Both agree first that “meaning in history
is inseparable from the directional movement in reality”, secondly that
“history is not an empty time-dimension in which things happen at random but
rather a process whose meaning is constituted by theophanic events”, and
thirdly that “the reality of history is metaleptic; it is the In-Between where
man responds to the divine presence and divine presence evokes the response of
man”[36].
Paul was fascinated by the consequences of theophany and gained the conviction
that man is destined to rise to immortality. He was more interested in the
divine “pneuma” than in the philosophical “nous”, a consequence of which is his
concentration on divine irruption and not on the structure of reality. This
different point of view becomes also clear in one of Paul’s sentences of the
“First Epistle to the Corinthians”: “If there is no resurrection of the dead,
then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has
not been raised, then our preaching is futile and your faith is empty” (15:
13-14). According to Voegelin this sentence is the key to the understanding of
Paul’s experience of reality. Voegelin’s critical comment is as follows: “Hope
in this life, in our existence in the Metaxy, not only is not enough, it is
worse than nothing.”[37]
The vision of the Resurrected is, therefore, more than a theophanic event; it
is the beginning of transfiguration itself. Voegelin concludes by saying that
Paul “was obsessed with the expectation that the men living in Christ, himself
included, would not die at all but, in the wake of the Parousia, be
transfigured in their lifetimes”[38].
This immortalizing transfiguration is the “central issue” of the letters of
Paul; he lived, therefore, in a “state of existential unrest” [39].
Since he is convinced of the truth of transfiguration he disposes of a knowledge
of history that was unknown to classical philosophy. With reference to the
important distinction of Karl Loewith on a “meaning in history” (which Voegelin approves of) and a “meaning of history“[40]
(which he firmly rejects) Voegelin delivers a final judgement on Paul: “The
classic meaning in history can be
opposed by Paul with a meaning of
history, because he knows the end of the story in the transfiguration that
begins with the Resurrection.”[41]
Voegelin ascribes to Paul an “obsession” with the transfiguration and,
connected to it, a knowledge of history. Both these reproaches are harsh points
of critique that cause, despite “Voegelin’s fascination for Paul”[42],
a distance between them which is considerable. Paul must therefore be counted
among those who induce the derailment of Christianity from its right course.
IV) Christianity’s Vulnerability
to Gnosticism
Voegelin has the highest appraisal of
Christianity: the appearance of Jesus constitutes the apex of the
“civilizational cycle of world-historic proportions”[43],
Jesus is regarded as entirely permeated by “divine presence”[44],
and Paul had, next to his achievements of spreading Christian thought in
Europe, an “epochal consciousness”[45]
for judging the events of his time. Voegelin, in general, has a positive
attitude towards the Christian faith. In his letter to Alfred Schuetz from
January 1, 1953, he speaks very benevolently of an “essential Christianity”
which has attained “very significant achievements which should not neglected”.
He enumerates first the “Christology”, second the “dogma of the Trinity”,
thirdly the set of “Mariological dogmas”, and thirdly “the critical
understanding of theological speculation and its meaning”, especially the
“analogia entis” by Thomas of Aquinas.[46]
Despite these and many other affirmative
judgments about early Christianity and Christian faith, Voegelin also stresses
the great errors and failures of Christianity. In his essay on “The Spiritual
and Political Order of the Western World” he first states that order in
societies is given when the three institutions of power, philosophy, and
Christianity hold each other in balance. “Order is […] when the three sources
of order counterbalance one another and each is acknowledged by the others in
its relative autonomy. Disorder exists if any one of the three disturbs the
relative autonomy and balance among them.”[47]
On the basis of this statement he asks the question where disorder stems from.
Why do these three institutions not function in this ideal balance? His answer:
“The source of disorder is to be looked for in a place where it is generally
not sought: in the structure of Christianity itself.” Christianity achieved
something that the ancient philosophy was unable to: “a clear separation of
transcendent, godly, being from the temporal realm. Divine being, divinity, is
concentrated in the world transcending ‘Beyond’”[48].
The consequence of this occurrence is enormous: the old notion of a world full
of gods was dissolved. For the people living at the end of antiquity (and later)
there were no more gods in the world; divinity was concentrated in a
world-transcendent sphere, the intracosmic divine order disappeared. Voegelin
concludes: “The de-divinization of the world through Christianity and the
creation of a god-empty world are the prerequisites for Western existence as a
whole.”[49]
In his “New Science of Politics” Voegelin goes one step further; he maintains
that the de-divinization of the temporal sphere of power, which happened approximately
in the first millennium AD, was followed by a process of re-divinization, which
is characteristic of the late Middle Ages and the subsequent modernity[50].
And whereas de-divinization is marked by a process in which the world became a
kind of spiritual vacuum, the process of re-divinization is to be described as
the attempt to fill this vacuum with various worldviews and private or public
ideologies. Gnosticism, according to Voegelin, is the most prominent among
them, laying the basis for the flowering of liberalism, socialism, positivism,
progressivism, totalitarism, etc.
Voegelins accuses Christianity of having
created a “world emptied of gods”; the plurality of gods has been reduced to
just one god, and this god has been transferred from this earthly world to the
beyond. Only the tenuous bond of faith enables man to get into contact with
god. Voegelin therefore denotes “uncertainty” as the very essence of
Christianity.[51] In
his essay on “The Gospel and Culture” Voegelin poses a stronger focus on the
text of the gospel itself and asks whether it contains traits of Gnosticism.
The result of his investigation is that the Gospel itself is not Gnostic. It
promises no heaven on earth, doesn’t maintain to dispose of the relevant
knowledge therefore, and, in general, deals nowhere with questions of how
societies should be established, organized and ordered. Despite this statement
Voegelin points to the possibility of derailment of the gospel into Gnosticism.
His argument is as follows: The premise for an active faith is the relationship
of man to the divine reality. This divine reality is present in the existential
tension of man. This tension exists in all great pre-Christian civilizations.
Voegelin characterizes this process, which spanned several thousand years, as a
movement that had reached its climax in the gospel. The movement of
participation and tension of man in and to the divine ground is interrupted by
the experience of the epiphany of Christ who had been hidden until this time.
And “since the revelation of this extracosmic god is the only truth that
existentially matters, the cosmos, its gods, and its history become a reality
with the index of existential untruth.”[52]
The consequence is that the existential tension, the life in the metaxy,
between the poles of earthly life and divine reality gets lost and makes man
look for new answers to his existential questions. The doctrinalization of
contents of this once lively tension by the Church aggravates the problem. Gnosticism
is one belief system which offers, at all times, attractive answers. Voegelin
points to the fact that the possibility of derailment into Gnosticism has
existed already before the founding of Christianity. But only Christianity developed
– first in the life of Jesus, then in the thought of Paul, finally in the
development of dogmas of the Church – the cultural environment in which
Gnosticism actually came into being and evolved.
[1] Voegelin, Eric: The Political
Religions, in: The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 5, ed. by Manfred Henningsen,
[2] Voegelin, Eric: The New Science of
Politics, in: The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 5, ed. by Manfred
Henningsen,
[3] Ibid., p. 149 f.
[4] Ibid., p. 152
[5] Voegelin, Eric: The Gospel and
Culture, in: The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 12, ed. by. Ellis Sandoz,
[6] Ibid., p. 185
[7] Voegelin, Eric: Letter to Alfred
Schuetz, Jan. 1, 1953, in: The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 30: Selected
Correspondence 1950-1984, ed. by Thomas A. Hollweck,
[8] Voegelin, Eric: Letter to Leo
Strauss, Dec. 9, 1942, in: Faith and Political Philosophy. The Correspondence
between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934-1964, ed. by. Peter Emberley and
Barry Cooper,
[9] Douglass, Bruce: The Gospel and
Political Order: Eric Voegelin on the Political Role of Christianity, in: Journal
of Politics, vol. 38 (1976), pp. 25-45, here p. 33
[10] Voegelin, Eric: The Gospel and
Culture, l.c., p. 189
[11] Ibid., p. 198
[12] Voegelin, Eric: The New Science of
Politics, l.c., p. 150
[13] Voegelin, Eric: The Gospel and
Culture, l.c., 173
[14] Cf. ibid., p. 204
[15] See, for instance, Michael P.
Morrissey in his treatise on ”Eric Voegelin and the New Testament: Developments,
Problems and Challenges”, in: Politics, Order and History. Essays on the Work
of Eric Voegelin, ed. by Glenn Hughes, Stephen A. McKnight, and Geoffrey L.
Price, Sheffield (England): Sheffield Academic Press, 2001, pp. 462-500, here
p. 489
[16] See, for instance, Voegelin’s essay
on “The Spiritual and Political Future of the Western World“, in: The Collected
Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 33: The Drama of Humanity and other Miscellaneous
Papers, 1939-1985, ed. by William Petropulos and Gilbert Weiss, Columbia et
al.: University of Missouri Press, 2004, pp. 67-88
[17] Voegelin, Eric: History of
Political Ideas, vol. 1: Hellenism,
[18] Ibid., p. 152
[19] Ibid., p. 152 f.
[20] Ibid., p. 155
[21] Ibid., p. 162 f.
[22] Cf. Voegelin, Eric: Anamnesis,
where Voegelin utters about his methodological approach in the following way:
“I incline to believe that the process-theological attempt and its expansion
[…] is the only meaningful systematic philosophy.” In: The Collected Works of
Eric Voegelin, vol. 6: Anamnesis. On the Theory of History and Politicy, ed. by
David Walsh, Columbia et al.:
[23] Voegelin, Eric: The Gospel and
Culture, l.c., p. 192
[24] Ibid., p. 193
[25] Voegelin, Eric: Order and History,
vol. 4: The Ecumenic Age,
[26] Dawson, Christopher: Christianity
and European Culture. Selections from the Work of Christopher Dawson, ed. by.
Gerald J. Russello,
[27] Voegelin, Eric: Letter to Alfred
Schuetz, Jan. 1, 1953, l.c., p. 126
[28] Voegelin, Eric: History of
Political Ideas, vol. 1: Hellenism,
[29] Ibid., p. 166
[30] Cf. ibid.
[31] Ibid., p. 168
[32] Ibid., p. 168 f.
[33] Cf. Voegelin, Eric: The New Science
of Politics, l.c., p. 211
[34] Cf. Voegelin, Eric: History of
Political Ideas, vol. 1: Hellenism,
[35] Voegelin, Eric: Order and History,
vol. 4: The Ecumenic Age, l.c., 241
[36] Ibid., p. 242
[37] Ibid., p. 248
[38] Ibid., p. 249
[39] Ibid., p. 256, 258
[40] Loewith, Karl: Meaning in History,
[41] Voegelin, Eric: Order and History,
vol. 4: The Ecumenic Age, l.c., 258
[42] Henningsen, Manfred: Afterword to
the German edition of „The Ecumenic Age“, in: Voegelin, Eric: Ordnung und
Geschichte, vol. 9: Das Ökumenische Zeitalter. Weltherrschaft und Philosophie,
ed. by Manfred Henningsen,
[43] Voegelin, Eric: The New Science of
Politics, l.c., p. 211
[44] Voegelin, Eric: The Gospel and
Culture, l.c., p. 193
[45] Voegelin, Eric: History of
Political Ideas, vol. 1: Hellenism,
[46] Voegelin, Eric: Letter to Alfred
Schuetz, Jan. 1, 1953, l.c., pp. 126-130
[47] Voegelin, Eric: The Spiritual and
Political Future of the Western World, l.c., p. 78
[48] Ibid., p. 79 f.
[49] Ibid., p. 80 f.
[50] Cf. Voegelin, Eric: The New Science
of Politics, l.c., p. 175 ff.
[51] Ibid., p. 187
[52] Voegelin, Eric: The Gospel and
Culture, l.c., p. 210