Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America

8. The Spirit of Voegelin’s Late Work

155 8 The Spirit of Voegelin’s Late Work The principal work by Voegelin written in the final years of his life and published posthumously includes the final volume of Order and History, entitled In Search of Order, his deathbed meditation dictated to Paul Caringella, “Quod Deus Dicitur,” and the unfinished Aquinas Lecture titled “The Beginning and the Beyond: A Meditation on Truth.”1 While a great deal need not be made of the patently incomplete character of each of these documents, construing the silence of omissions has led to various interpretive debates in the secondary literature about the possibly “changed” views of the “late” Voegelin on crucial matters. The principal issues raised deserve brief mention and clarification from my perspective at the outset of this discussion.§1. In particular, there have been questions raised about the triumph of his “scientific” side over his “spiritual” side in the final writings—a false dichotomy, in my view. There was a hinted emergence of two “schools” of interpretation pitting a German against an alleged American interpretation of the master’s thought. Such an odd outbreak of nationalism aside, the emergence of an interpretive divergence of some sort seems undeniable. But its depth and justifiability when measured against Voegelin’s texts themselves are questions that are more opaque and probably must remain so as largely accounted for by the predispositions 1. OH, vol. V, In Search of Order (CW 18); “Quod Deus Dicitur,” chap. 14 in CW 12:376–94; and “The Beginning and the Beyond: A Meditation on Truth,” chap. 5 in CW 28:173–232. 156 REPUBLICANISM, RELIGION, AND THE SOUL OF AMERICA of the interpreters and not merely or even primarily by complexities in the work being interpreted.2 To put matters simply: Was Eric Voegelin a scientist to the marrow of his bones? Yes. Was he a mystic-philosopher in all of his work from the 1920s until the very end of his life? Yes—by express self-declaration so from the 1960s. Can one be both mysticphilosopher and political scientist in the philosophical sense established in classical antiquity by Plato and Aristotle? Yes—and that was Voegelin’s position as I read it, as I think he himself intended it, and as I have tried to portray it in my own studies of him. I do not see a change of heart in the late Voegelin on these basic issues. The silences in his late writings on the specific subject of Christianity cannot be construed as evidence of a change of heart. To argue otherwise involves something akin to reading tea leaves. The subject matter of Christianity lay ahead in In Search of Order, as he plainly indicates, and time ran out before he ever got to it. Shall we then fault Voegelin for an untimely death? He did all he could. Moreover, the experience of transcendent divine Reality is obviously and profoundly the subject of “Quod Deus Dicitur,” evidently the latest of all the late writings. There is a different tone in the last volume of Order and History to which we must be attentive , to be sure. In “Quod Deus Dicitur,” however, the tone is familiar, and one hears a mystic-philosopher speaking until he can speak no more—and quoting in the process from a document that contains (so far as I know) one of the most direct statements of his abiding devotion to Christianity ever reduced to the printed page,3 as well as from the final part of In Search of Order. 2. The gist of the debate among conscientious students of Voegelin’s work can best be gauged from a representative published exchange: Jürgen Gebhardt, “The Vocation of the Scholar,” and its answer by Frederick G. Lawrence, “The Problem of Eric Voegelin, Mystic Philosopher and Scientist,” in International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Eric Voegelin, ed. Stephen A. McKnight and Geoffrey L. Price (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 10–58. Lawrence relies in part upon Paul Caringella’s unpublished paper “Voegelin’s Order and History,” quoted in extenso by Lawrence ibid., 36–42; more fully see Paul Caringella, “Eric Voegelin: Philosopher of Divine Presence,” in Eric Voegelin’s Significance for the Modern Mind, ed. Ellis Sandoz (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), 174–205. I do not mean to suggest that this is the only debate over the meaning of Voegelin’s work, of course. 3. Of Voegelin’s last days Paul Caringella, who sat by his bedside, gives this...