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108 Dionysus versus the Crucified Nietzsche and Voegelin and the Search for a Truthful Order Rouven J. Steeves 5 Eric Voegelin’s Nietzsche is a complex figure, at once revealing and explicating aspects touching upon the very spiritual marrow of the Dionysian demoniac , yet, despite this depth of explication, never quite allowing himself or his reader to vicariously experience the struggle of a spiritual wanderer for whom the dark night of the soul never leads to a heavenly, grace-infused dawn. In his December 17, 1944, letter to Karl Löwith, Voegelin recounts the “phases of his dealings with Nietzsche” to date. Voegelin candidly states, “You see that Nietzsche does not stand in the center of my philosophic interests; and I must add that my very intensive engagement with Nietzsche in the last years has hardly brought him closer to the center.” Nevertheless, Voegelin continues,“Nietzsche as a spiritual phenomenon forces me into respect; I believe I also understand wherein consists his unsettling influence on many individuals; I also believe I understand the meaning of him as the most formidable symptom of the crisis of the age; I can feel the educational effects of his truthfulness and implacability on me; I can have sympathy and almost something like compassion for him.”1 Voegelin’s penetration into the “problem of Nietzsche” is undeniable. With a measure of playful irony, it even extends to what Nietzsche most detests: “sympathy and almost something like compassion.”2 Indeed, the question of compassion intimates the nexus of issues that strike at the very heart of the existential disagreement between Nietzsche and Voegelin regarding the way unto life. In the dark night of the soul when the seeker despairs of finding and waits to be found, what (or who) shall he encounter? For Voegelin, it is the God of Order shedding his salvific light of grace into the heart of the seeker, who has sought with all his heart and mind after truth and righteousness. For Nietzsche, no such Light illuminates his darkness. God remains hidden. Through his spir- Dionysus versus the Crucified 109 itual struggles as a young man, Nietzsche is seeking but not finding the God above. For Nietzsche, the problem of the Deus absconditus takes on existential depths heretofore uncharted by a philosopher or theologian. What is man to do when alone in the darkness he finds only the abyss looking into his soul? Nietzsche would have the existential truthfulness of his life and his teachings illuminate the horrifying beauty of unadorned reality.Yet for Voegelin, Nietzsche’s existential depths—which claim to reveal the truthfulness of the world— remain, if not hidden, then unapproachable, and this is so because Voegelin, unlike Nietzsche, has been gifted to experience the divine periagoge—the turning from darkness unto Light. In addition to such an existentially informed relegation of the “spiritual phenomenon” of Nietzsche, there also resides the far more prosaic reason that Voegelin’s methodology of discerning order through the experiential unfolding of history—understood first and foremost as the history of the individual and, second, as the collective history of mankind—forces him to confront a staggering amount of material. The very breadth and depth of his project of reconstituting order demand a judicious selection of paradigmatic souls, whose corpora can be employed to marshal the forces of order. If Voegelin deems a thinker closed to the possibility of divine irruption, yet this closed soul nevertheless constructs a cosmic system for the ordering of man and his microcosm, or professes to offer a way to save man, he must be deluded or delusional, suffering from flights of fancy or propelled by a Gnostic will. In this light, Nietzsche ’s divine foreclosure is interpreted as an insurmountable burden arising out of such an act of demonic rebellion. It is precisely this foreclosure that causes Voegelin to see Nietzsche as“the most formidable symptom of the crisis of the age” and leads Voegelin to lodge Nietzsche in the pit of magicians, fantasists , and Gnostics.3 Voegelin is thus free to manipulate the“spiritual phenomenon” of Nietzsche as another foil—however exceptional—to illuminate the righteous search for order without ever following Nietzsche into his abyss. As Voegelin states in his letter to Löwith at the end of the previously cited ruminations, “But nothing in me is more deeply touched or even shaken that has not been nurtured more deeply and more completely from other sources.”4 As a result, Voegelin’s often sensitive readings of...

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