Anamnesis by Eric Voegelin (review)

460 BOOK REVIEWS of their quality. Her point is well taken, and the customers get even tougher when one begins to read some of the high quality fiction that appears in such places as the TriQuarterly. In fact, in the same issue of the JAAR in which TeSelle reviews the Mallard volume, David Hesla (" Religion and Literature: The Second Stage," pp. 181-9~) argues that the area of theology and literature (" the first stage ") is increasingly shifting to a " second stage ", that of religion and literature. One characteristic of that shift, Hesla writes, will be a move " from the language of theology to the language of religion " and, in that shift, " We shall increasingly find ourselves using the language of the behavioral and social sciences, of the sociologies of religion and knowledge, of anthropology and psychology, of history and political theory" (p. 190). Hesla's prophecy may or may not be true, but it does reflect a serious concern to chart the course that the field of interdisciplinary studies must take as it confronts the phenomenon of the " post-modern " in literary art. In that sense, I suspect, Hesla would not be about to admit that tbe literature of the future must stay exclusively within the sphere of Christ in order to avoid being aesthetically deficient. The " Postmodern " does present one way in which the art of our culture may be moving, and it is a direction that Mallard does not take seriously enough. The criticism above is not intended to make light of the considerable merit of this work. It is, in fact, a very sophisticated and tightly argued work that reflects the highest standards of care and seriousness. To borrow again a term from Hesla (Mallard's colleague at Emory}, Mallard sets out a full agenda for a " first phase " reflection on theology and literature and completes the agenda with distinction. It just occurs to me that we may now be entering a period in our culture when new approaches are needed. The Florida State University Tallahassee, Florida LAWRENCE s. CUNNINGHAM Anamnesis. By Emc VOEGELIN. Translated and edited by Gerhart Niemeyer . Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, Press, 1978. Pp. xxii + ~17. $11.95. I Eric Voegelin, born in Germany and raised in Austria, came to the United States in 1938 as a political emigre. For American readers this event proved fortuitous indeed, since most of Voegelin's major works, BOOK REVIEWS 461 including the seminal New Science of Politics and the multi-volume Order in History, were thus written in English. One principal exception to this collection of English writings was Anamnesis, a book published in 1966 while Voegelin was Director of the Institute for Political Science at the University of Munich. However, with Gerhart Niemeyer's recent translation, Anamnesis , too, joins the corpus of Voegelin books available to the English reading public. It should be noted, however, that the English version of Anamnesis differs substantially from the German original. Several chapters have been deleted, either because they have since been published elsewhere or because they deal mainly with the analysis of historical material, and two chapters have been added, one written by Voegelin especially for the English edition. Niemeyer explains that the principle of selection was the theme of Voegelin's philosophy of consciousness. Anamnesis is a book about philosophy. To be sure it is a difficult book, perhaps Voegelin's most difficult; nevertheless, it offers a suitable starting-place since it contains all the essentials of Voegelin's provocative conception of philosophy. II For Voegelin the central philosophical question is order: order as it is experienced in personal life; order in society, or political philosophy proper; and order in history. To say that order is a question is somewhat misleading , however, because Voegelin as a philosopher does not entertain the possibility that the world is disordered, that it is at bottom a chaos rather than a cosmos. The dilemma which faced Nietzsche and which Nietzsche predicted would overwhelm Western philosophy, namely that the consoling illusion of an intelligible world order would be shattered by the truth of nihilism-this dilemma does not arise, cannot arise. Philosophy, Voegelin emphatically and repeatedly insists, is...