The differentiation of authority: the medieval turn toward existence

4. Crisis and Closure 1: The Isolation of the Sovereign Individual

117 4 Crisis and Closure 1 The Isolation of the Sovereign Individual Eric Voegelin has argued that the evocation of a sacrum imperium had the “effect of weakening the sentiment of distinction between the world and the realm of what is not of this world.” He suggests that the eschatological expectation of the temporal world sinking into oblivion, prevalent in the early Christian experience, had receded rapidly in the medieval period because “the sentiment that the structure of the world was part of the Christian realm was growing; the world had entered the realm of God.”1 Christian civil theology was so evocatively successful that even political authority was now conceived to belong to the charismata of the corpus mysticum. That the whole world could now be gathered up into the “realm of God” laid the groundwork for the gnostic derailment . If transcendental reality could be imaginatively transfigured into a structure of immanent reality, then being could be possessed in a variety of ways, including perhaps epistemologically by possession of esoteric knowledge or politically through fully fledged militancy. In either case, the gnostic intent is to immanentize transcendental reality. The 1. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 108–9. 118 The Sovereign Individual problem is one that Voegelin calls metastasis, which he describes as “a vision of the world that will change its nature without ceasing to be the world in which we live ... [a term] signifying a change in the constitution of being.” He adds: “The constitution of being is what it is, and cannot be affected by human fancies. Hence, the metastatic denial of the order of mundane existence is neither a true proposition in philosophy, nor a program of action that could be executed.”2 Metastatic sentiments are at the forefront of Voegelin’s mind when he mentions the growing medieval assumption that the “world had entered the realm of God” because he emphasizes: “The statement may seem sweeping, but it cannot be sweeping enough, for we find heretical sects going to the pantheistic extreme of justifying personal indulgence in passion, lust, and crime as manifestations of the divine will.”3 In an attempt to penetrate to the experiential root of metastatic expectation, Voegelin asks a relevant question about what the thinkers achieved by their metastatic transfiguration. He answers that “they achieved a certainty about the meaning of history, and about their place in it, which otherwise they would not have had.”4 Certainty about man’s place in being substitutes for both anxiety and the tension of “unknowing” in the act of faith. Voegelin continues: “When the world is de-divinized [by Christianity], communication with the world-transcendent God is reduced to the tenuous bond of faith, in the sense of Heb. 11:1, as the substance of things hoped for and the proof of things unseen. Ontologically, the substance of things hoped for is nowhere to be found but in faith itself; and, epistemologically, there is no proof for things unseen but again this very faith.”5 However, this is not to accuse every innovation as a gnosticism and it is important to note that gnosticism as such is not our focus in these chapters. Gnosticism is a generic term for a pattern of thought that has accompanied not just Christianity from the beginning, but also the process of differentiation that Christian revelation set in motion. Obviously there have been a myriad varieties of gnosticism that have appeared 2. Voegelin, Order and History 1, 506. 3. Voegelin, History of Political Ideas 2, 109. 4. Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, 187. 5. Ibid. The Sovereign Individual 119 as distinguishable sects or doctrines, such as Donatists, Nestorians, Arians, or the later Cathars, Florensians, and so forth; however, gnosticism is less obvious as a pattern of thought influencing individuals and groups, their attitudes, assumptions, and programs of action. If gnosticism is a corruption of Christian revelation, then it is also a corruption of Christianity as a personal and community-building substance. The authorities differentiated by Christianity—the spiritual-transcendental, the political-temporal, and the existential—may be subject to corruption by gnostic patterns of thought. If the influence of gnosticism presents a rival narrative of meaning to that of Christianity, then it does so by subtly changing the meaning of individual, sociopolitical, and historical existence as they have emerged in Christianity. This subtlety is belied by the comprehensiveness of the change of meaning: on the...