Abiding Elements

Gerhart Niem eyer

Political Religions, by Eric Voegelin, translated and introduced by T. Di Napoli and E. Easterly, Toronto: Edwin Mellen Press, 1986. $49.95; (series $39.95).
NOW, AFTER Eric Voegelins death, one expects a variety of efforts to place before the public all of his work, both the as-yetunpublished parts and the five books he wrote in German before coming to the United States. Here we have a translation of the fifth of these, Die politischen Religionen (1938 in Austria, 1939 in Sweden). It also contains the German original, as well as two introductions, one by Barry Cooper and another one, called Preface, by the translators. Voegelins book is short, only sixty pages in the German text, but meaty and profound. Voegelin himself mentions this book in an often quoted passage of Science, Politics, and Gnosticism (German, 1959; English, 1968):

Europe had no conceptual tools with which to grasp the horror that was upon her. There was a scholarly study of the Christian churches and sects; there was a science o f government, cast in the categories of the sovereign nation-state and its institutions; there were the beginnings of a sociology o f power and political authority;but there was no science o f the non-Christian, nonnational intellectual and mass movements into which the Europe of Christian nationstates was in the process of breaking up. Since in its massiveness this new political phenomenon could not be disregarded, a number of stopgap notions were coined to cope with it. There was talk of neo-pagan movements, of new social and political myths, or of mystiques politiques. I, too, tried one of these ad hoc explanations [ Verlegenheitslosung] in a little book on political religions.

Given this somewhat curt dismissal of the book by the author himself, no criticism at this time is called for. The reader, though, may find it interesting to compare its structure with Voegelins American works. He begins by complaining about the narrowness of the concepts state and religion that were available to him, and devoted two sections to widening these concepts. Then, characteristically, there follows some historical material: Akhnatons short-lived attempt to create a new Egyptian state religion. The analysis of this episode provides Voegelin with a measure of reference. He now can proceed to establish categories for the study of all political religions: hierarch) ekklesiu (in the original Greek meaning of the term), and apocalypse. To these he adds concepts drawn from his analysis of Hobbes: The Leviathan and the inframundane community Hierarchy, ekklesia, and apocalypse no longer govern the works he wrote in America, leading a reader to the question, What took their place? One feature the American reader will have noticed is the increased importance of Christianity in Voegelins analysis. When Alfred Schutz criticized The New Science of Politics for this, Voegelin answered Essentially my concern with Christianity has no religious grounds at all. However, even in 1938, Voegelin knew that it was impossible really to know Fascism, National Socialism, and Communism without analyzing the religious dimension of these movements. And even then he perceived this philosophical necessity in a general awareness of reality: In all directions in which human existence is open to the world, the surrounding Beyond can be sought and found in the body and in the spirit, in the individual
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and in society, in nature and in God (PoliticalReligions, p. 12). There follows a passage in which he identifies rationality with full openness in the sense of the above remark
For some, the doors of ones existence stand wide open for a glimpse beyond the levels of being, from inanimate nature to God. The world unfolds for them; the things of this world enter into an orderly relationship with one another; they combine with each other into an order of Being; they combine with the axiological order of the levels of being into an hierarchical order; and, in answer to the question of the ground of being, into an order of creation. A maxif reality combines mum of an awareness o with a maximum of rationality in ordering and relating [the parts] and is crowned by a well-thought-out dogma of the spiritual experience in an idea of God, such as the West has developed in the analogia entis @. 17 of the German text, p. 12 of the translation which I have here corrected at important points).

poral rule] is largely abandoned. The hierarchy, it is true, still extends to God, and the commonwealth originates in accordance with the will of God, but from God the hierarchy no longer descends to persons incumbent of the ranks, but to the community as a collective person. It goes to the sovereign not as a ruler of subjects, but as the personal embodiment of a collectivity [German text, p. 44; translation-again corrected-pp. 48, 591.

Voegelin would not have put it this way after 1952; yet, all the same, this remained his view of reality to the end of his life. Although Voegelins slighting o f this book bars us from criticizing it now, the reverse does not follow. It seems to me that his treatment of Hobbes, in this early work, is a piece one felt was missing, among the various passages on Hobbes, particularly in The New Science. What is more, these ten pages strike me as an assessment of Hobbes more profound than the almost contemporary Hobbes book by Leo Straws. Hobbes, says the opening sentence, was the great theologian of the particular and immediate-to-God [gottesunrnittelbur] ekklesia. Hobbess essence lies not in his social contract, which is merely a suitable instrument to achieve a natural construction of the state. Rather, his essence must be found in what results from the contract:
The previously formless multitude does not so much elect a ruler for itself, but rather unites its pluralism into the entity of a person. . . . The open structure of the Christian ekklesia [comprising both spiritual and tem-

Hobbess state is the mortal god to whom men are in debt, next to the Immortal God, for peace and security. Thus the commonwealth is closed not only as a unit of political power but also spiritually, because the sovereign, be he monarch or a parliament, has the right to judge which opinions and teachings are appropriate. . . (pp. 45 and 50, respectively). The teachings, of course, must be true, but no conflict can arise, for teachings that disturb the peace of the community are not true (p. 45 of the German text; this sentence is missing in the translation). Saint Thomass high-scholastic construction, with the subordination of the temporal to the spiritual order, complete with organizational distinctness, now breaks apart; the mundane order now is filled with national substance thus turning into a self-impersonated unit. This causes Hobbes to argue vehemently against that remnant which might still claim to represent the whole of Christendom, the Catholic Church. On the basis of his own concepts he concludes that the Church cannot be a commonwealth or have a personality of its own, and also that his new ekklesiu cannot be a part of an all-embracing kingdom of God, but rather must be seen as a particular person, immediately under God (pp. 45ff., 5 1, respectively). Finally, Hobbes supports his structure by references to the Old Testament, so that the religious potency of Jewish theocracy now streams into the world of the English Reformation. The sovereign of the Christian commonwealth resembles Abraham: God speaks only to him; to him alone God reveals himself; he only transmits Gods will to his people.

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This analysis of Hobbes leads Voegelin to the general concept of the intramundane [innerweltlich] community, comprising eight pages outlining the essential features of modernity. Truth is what serves human purposes. Naive intramundane apocalypses, e.g., progressivism, are refuted by radical ones that, however, even claim for themselves the authority of science. One might think that the ingredient of science would cause these radical ideologies to dissolve, in terms of their own presuppositions. What happens, though, is most curious: instead of the radical apocalypses crumbling under the attack of scientific criticism, they continue, while the concept of truth is modified @p. 53 and 62, respectively). The book ends with a quotation from the Theologia Germanica:
If a creature attributes good things to itself, such as essence, life, knowledge, understanding, ability, in short all that which one would have to call good, as if the creature were that or possessed that by itself, it turns away [abkehren]. What else did the devil do? What else was his fall, his turning away

other than that he presumed to be and to have something and some-Who as his own? This presumption and his I, and Me, his For Me, and Mine, this was his turning away and his Fall. And that is still the case [p. 64 of the German text; p. 78 of the corrected translation].

If Voegelin adds no comment of his own at this point, he did write in The New Science of Politics: The insight that man in his mere humanity, without the fides curitute formutu, is demonic nothingness has been brought by Christianity to the ultimate border of clarity which by tradition is called revelation. In the beginning and the end of this little book, and also in the Hobbes analysis, we recognize abiding elements in Voegelins thought. Thus, having the book in translation, side by side with the German original, is a distinct asset to the interested American reader. As suggested by my mention of corrections I had to make, this translation leaves something to be desired. Let the reader beware, but let him not for this reason leave the work unread.

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