Escolar Documentos
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187198, 2007
JOHN BUSSANICH
ABSTRACT Eric Voegelins Philosophy of Myth is an introduction to the eminent political philosophers
theory of the nature and function of myth in pre-modern cultures, particularly in ancient Greece and
Mesopotamia. For Voegelin archaic myths and symbols provide grounds or foundations for a broad range of
phenomena, from individual objects and events to the entire cosmos. They convey a sense of wholeness and
interconnectedness through a type of analogical thinking. The concepts of compactness and differentiation are
essential components in his overall theory. The former designates the unity of the symbol and the symbolized,
the latter their separation into immanent and transcendent poles in the reflections of Greek philosophers and of
Jewish and Christian thinkers. Both compact and differentiated accounts employ the symbols of the Beginning
and Beyond, viz. the originating source of all things and their transcendent goal. Voegelins treatment of the
mythical and philosophical styles of truth is not limited to the distant past. Throughout history individual myths
or symbols lose their transformative power, but, he asserts, they are regenerated or replaced by new ones
discovered by great souls who have experiential access to the underlying realities.
Myths are stories about the nature of reality and our quest for wholeness, and they have
been a pervasive feature of human culture for millennia. Even now, in an age dominated
by technology, scientism, and global capitalism, myth has not released its hold on the
human imagination. For many observers, scientific rationality long ago replaced myth
and religion as the arbiter of truth, but this progressivist picture is itself a product of
the mythical imagination, albeit a deformed one. Making sense of myth past and
present depends on how one approaches this challenge: reality always outruns our cognitive grasp and all our representations, which are inevitably partial and inadequate.
We can limit our perspective to domains over which scientific rationality exercises its
limited authority. Or, in the face of lifes intractable puzzles and mysteries, we can enlist
critical rationality to explore the myths and symbols which our deepest longings always
call forth.
If one accepts that the psycho-empirical ego and conscious awareness comprise but a
narrow peninsula which juts out precariously into the vast sea of the unconscious and
the supra-conscious and that myths and symbols are some of the best maps of voyages
into the great unknown, Eric Voegelins historically sophisticated and philosophically
subtle account of archaic myth will be of great interest. Unlike post-Enlightenment
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These modes represent phases in Voegelins schema for a history of symbolization, which
he conceives as a progression from compact to differentiated experiences and symbols
(14.1.43).
The second symbol or formsociety as macroanthropostends to appear when
cosmologically symbolized empires break down and in their disaster engulf the trust in
cosmic order . . . . At this juncture symbolization tends to shift toward what is more
lasting than the visibly existing worldi.e. toward the invisibly existing being [which]
can be experienced only as a movement in the soul of man; and hence the soul, when
ordered by attunement to the unseen god, becomes the model of order that will
furnish symbols for ordering society analogically in its image (14.1.44).
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Another example is the Babylonian New Year festival in which the king performs a
ritual combat that symbolizes the victory of the god over the forces of chaos while
the priests recite Marduks victory over Tiamat in the Enuma Elish (28.86). What
distinguishes Voegelin from other theorists is his more precise use of the insight that
cosmogonic ritual works together with primordial story to renew order and his avoidance
of scientistic and psychologistic reductionism. Indeed, his evocation of the experiential
dimension of mythic narratives is so vivid that modern readers may feel as if they have
travelled to the distant past via a time machine and are witnessing primordial events!
Notwithstanding the risk of anachronistically projecting into ancient texts meanings that
they cannot bear, Voegelins speculation on myth comprises a valiant effort to penetrate
to the experiences behind the symbols, which, he argues, must ineluctably remain a
dead truth, a broken image, unless the acts of articulation are re-enacted by the reader or
hearer of their original accounts. No more than the truth of myth can the truth of
reason be conveyed by information; it must be acquired by an act of meditative
articulation (28.91).
Voegelins own meditations on the wellsprings of myth suggest that,
a myth is a technique of imputing a ground to an object of experience. That is, if I have
experience of man, of the gods, of a piece of landscape, of a temple, or a custom, or an
institutionthen I want to know, Where does it come from? Then I tell a story of
where it comes from, and that where-it-comes-from is now the ground of it, the aition
[cause or explanatory factor] in that sense. That is not an answer. Everything comes
ultimately from a transcendent groundfor instance, a Creator-God, or, in a
philosophical sense, the nous [mind]. But in myth it comes from very specific things: a
god has created it, a demi-god has created it, an institution has invented it, or a dynasty
has a god for its ancestor . . . . This type of imputation of a groundimputation of
existence and manner of existence of a groundone can now more closely formulate
as: imputation towards another intracosmic object or action. There is a general
experience of the cosmos; everything is within the cosmos, including the gods, and if
you want to explain anything in the cosmos you can explain it only by telling a story:
how it originated from something else in the same cosmos. That is what we might call
intracosmic relating of things to their ground, to other things or actions within the
cosmos; there is nothing outside the cosmos. Thus myth can be definedI think fairly
exactly: there are no exceptions to itas imputation to other intracosmic things as to a
ground. It is myth when you tell a story of an intracosmic ground.5
Thus, not only do myths comprise stories that explain why things are as they are and
thereby imbue human existence with meaning and purpose, they also for Voegelin offer
powerful formulations of and responses to perennial philosophical questions: why is there
something rather than nothing? whence and how does reality arise? In this deeper sense
a mythical symbol is a finite symbol supposed to provide transparence for a transfinite
process.6 Especially in Voegelins later thought, the ultimate referents of myth are the
great symbols of the Beginning and the Beyond.7 Theorizing about myth by means
of such grand abstractions may seem wildly speculative to those who conceive of myth as
primitive story-telling. For Voegelin myth represents a more basic, a simplerthough
no less meaningful or profoundmode of inspiring and describing contact with
transcendent realities than is available in philosophy or in scriptural revelation. In a very
deep sense mythical symbols are unavoidable for humans because reality transcends all
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types of representation and because our formulations cannot dispense completely with
concrete phenomena: The reality of things, it appears, cannot be fully understood in
terms of the world and its time; for the things are circumfused by an ambience of mystery
that can be understood only in terms of the Myth (28.175). Although over time
particular symbols and myths may become referentially opaque, the realities symbolized
do not cease to exist, which is evidenced by the fact that invalidated myths and symbols
are replaced by new or revitalized ones. Voegelin rejects the inevitability of modern
disenchantment with the world, for even though we should have to reject all traditional
symbolizations of cosmic reality as incompatible with our present mode of experience,
we still are living in the reality of the cosmos and not in the universe of physics, the
brainwashing propaganda of our scientistic ideologues notwithstanding (12.9394).
There is an appeal to the poetic spirit in all of us in Voegelins theorizing about myth.
Regarding the origin of the universe, for example, I suspect that for Voegelin the Big
Bang theory is most true in its mythic (and non-empirical) capacity to engage all aspects
of the human imagination in reflecting on the Beginning. In cosmogonic myth the
Beginning appears in the analogical time of a creation story, that is, in the Time of the
Tale (28.74). For Voegelin this is not a literary motif or a piece of structuralist theory
which can be detached from either humans or the reality we symbolize: the adequacy of
the symbolism to the experience points to the miracle of a mythical imagination that can
produce the adequate Tale. We are touching on the problem . . . of an imagination and
a language that is itself perhaps not altogether of this world (28.175). That is to say,
the human urge to conceive and represent ultimate states of affairs, such as the Beginning
and the Beyond, always involves mythical symbols whether in the compact style of
cosmological civilizations or in more differentiated tales like the pneumatic cosmogony of
the Book of Genesis or the philosophical myth of Platos Timaeus. The persistence of myth
throughout history is hardly Voegelins discovery, but his meditations on the great
perennial symbols of Beginning and Beyond, cosmos, and time and eternity reveal the
deep affinity between the earliest forms of symbolizationfor example in Paleolithic
cave-paintingsand the persistent longing for meaning and transcendence. I turn now to
his account of how this capacity for myth-making expresses itself when combined with
critical philosophical insight or individuated religious experiences.
It is a commonplace in the philosophy of history that a break with archaic myth
occurred in many civilizations in the first millennium B.C.E. Karl Jaspers famously coined
the phrase the axial age, the period from 800 B.C.E. to 200 B.C.E., which was
dominated by world-historic figures like the Presocratics, Socrates, Plato, the authors of
the Upanishads, Lao-Tzu, and the Buddha. Voegelins take on this momentous transition
eschews the oversimplified binary oppositions of myth vs. reason, polytheism vs.
monotheism, and reason vs. revelation. His analysis of the modes of symbolization in
terms of compactness and differentiation and of the mythical, anthropological, and
pneumatic styles of truth, which combine in multifaceted ways, is far suppler than most
interpretive schemes for construing the diversity of the historical record. To his credit
Voegelin avoids the endemic progressivism of Western thought evident, for example,
in Hegels philosophy of history and in postmodernist announcements of the death of
philosophy, which, motivated by a shudder at the richness of the spirit as it reveals itself
all over the earth in a multitude of hierophanies succumb to a monomaniacal desire
to force the operations of the spirit in history on the one line that will unequivocally
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lead into the speculators present. The speculators, he observes, juggle facts and
chronology with such insouciance, if not impertinence, that sometimes there seems to be
no limit to the game (17.4.4748). The speculatorsfrom the sophisticated
constructions of Hegel to New Age fabulists, who trace back human culture to Earthvisits by stellar astronautsderail, in Voegelins view, because they treat hierophantic
events on the level of phenomena in time, not letting their argument reach into the
structure of experiencing consciousness (17.4.49). It is this existential approach to the
origin of symbols and myths which motivates Voegelins idea of spiritual outbursts, which
occur in many cultures at disparate times, whereby individual sages, prophets, and
philosophers experience a tension towards the divine reality beyond the cosmos. The
central concept employed to indicate the break with the myth is the leap in being,
which occurred most distinctly, he asserts, in Greece and in Israel, giving rise there to the
symbolisms of Philosophy and Revelation, and also in Egypt, China, and India.
The truth of revelation and philosophy has become fatal to the intracosmic gods; and
the removal of the gods from the cosmos has set a dedivinized nature free to be
explored by science . . . . The new truth can affect the belief in intracosmic divinities as
the most adequate symbolization of cosmic-divine reality, but it cannot affect the
experience of divine reality as the creative and ordering force in the cosmos (17.4.53).
Despite the advance in truth, human nature is constant in spite of its unfolding, in the
history of mankind, from compact to differentiated order (15.2.71). The ways the leaps
in being develop new symbols to replace or incorporate earlier symbols require attention
to the specific context:
The Hidden or Unknown God who reveals himself in the movements of the soul will
be identified with the creator-god, while all other gods become false gods, as in Israel,
or he will be identified with the creator-high-god, as a summus deus in relation to all
other gods, as in the Egyptian Amon Hymns; or he will be permitted to coexist with
the intracosmic divinities, as in Hinduism; or he will be discerned as the truly highest
god above the Olympians, and even above the divinities of the philosophers myths, as
with Plato or Plotinus. But he also can become the good god to whom the spark of the
divine pneuma returns when man has escaped in death from the prison of the cosmos,
created by an evil god for the purpose of entrapping the spark, as in certain Gnostic
movements (17.5354).
There is only space to sample Voegelins analyses of the leaps in being. I shall discuss
the paradigmatic Old Testament revelation briefly and then, in greater detail, the
differentiation achieved by the Greek philosophers. The cosmogony of Genesis breaks
with the compact symbolism of the intracosmic gods, characteristic of its Egyptian
predecessors, and identifies the creator-god of the Beginning with the Unknown God of
the Beyond whose presence is experienced in the theophanies of Moses and the prophets.
It is a cosmogonic myth, affected in its structure by the pneumatic differentiations of
consciousness (17.77). Despite differences between the pneumatic myth of Genesis and
Platos noetic myth in the Timaeus, both types of the leap in being share certain features.
(1) Insofar as they extrapolate the genesis of things to an absolute ground (12.75),
they differentiate a transcendent Beyondwhat Voegelin also calls the non-existent
groundand identify it with the Beginning. (2) These spiritual outbursts fracture the
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compact experience of time: the hierophantic event leaves in its wake a Before and an
After (17.50). (3) Theophanies and spiritual outbursts generate new symbols and practices
through the play of the mythopoeic imagination. (4) The Greek and Israelite symbols,
when hardened in the form of philosophical doctrine and scriptural dogma, respectively,
preserved some of the truth at the cost of obscuring the originating experiences. For those
not able to reactivate the engendering experience fully, the surviving truth of the
language can acquire a status independent of the originating reality. The truth of reality
living in the symbols can be deformed into a doctrinal truth about reality (17.87).8
The complexities of the leap in being in archaic Greece are explored in Voegelins
analysis of Hesiod, who begins to break with the myth but whose resymbolization
preserves elements of the older form. In the Theogony Hesiod develops the opposition
between true and false symbols (ll. 2728) and invokes the Muses, the daughters of
Memory, as the sources of his knowledge (ll. 36104). Voegelin construes this as a kind of
revelatory event within the medium of the myth rather than merely as a traditional
literary device. The poets recollection of primordial events like the cosmogony is
mediated by the divine Muses, who provide glimpses of the Beginning beyond the
intracosmic gods in the form of the primordial triad Chaos, Gaia, and Eros: the Muses
have to use Hesiods language of compact divinity, i.e., a language of the gods that
has not yet sufficiently differentiated the tensions of Beginning-Beyond and ParousiaBeyond.9
The Hesiodian speculation, however, does not belong to the same type as the
Egyptian, for the Olympian myth of Homer, to which it applied, was no longer
cosmological. The decisive step toward the creation of the historical form had been
taken by Homer when he transfigured the Achaean fall into the past of Hellenic
society. Unlike the Egyptian speculation, which remained an event within the medium
of the cosmological form, the Hesiodian work has its sequel in philosophy because it
moves within the mnemosynic form of the singer . . . [S]ince the compact symbols of
the myth comprehend shades of experience that escape the differentiated concepts of
metaphysics, while the language of metaphysics lends precision to meanings that
remain inarticulate in the myth, the units of meaning cannot be amply paired off
against each other. Nevertheless, the transition is an intelligible process, because the
experiential substratum provided by Homer remains recognizable in its sameness
through the change of symbolic forms; and this sameness is most clearly recognizable in
the Hesiodian beginnings of the process, when, in faltering and stumbling speculation,
the symbols of the myth point searchingly toward meanings for which later generations
of philosophers will develop a technical vocabulary. The Theogony represents such an
incipient penetration of the Olympian myth with a speculative intention (15.19697).
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thaumasia of the myth, has a thaumasion in the divine nous (Met. 1072b26). This
association is based in part on Aristotles first-person report: The more I am by
myself and alone, the more I have come to love myths (Fr. 668) (16.3.246). Voegelins
point is not that Hesiod and Aristotle apprehend the same truths or express them in
the same manner. Indeed, since Aristotle rejects anthropo- and therio-morphism
(Met. 1074b115), he eliminates the thaumasia of the polytheistic myth but retains
the knowledge of the philomythoi about the divinity of the ground.11 The analogy
between poet and philosopher reflects similarity of experience in spite of differences in
formal expression.
The differentiation and leap in being, which characterize the transition from the
mythical to the philosophical styles of truth, are accompanied by the philosophers
critique of anthropomorphism. Voegelins account of this critique is far richer than the
standard rationalistic approach.
Is it not probable, we may ask, that human qualities are transferred to gods only as long
as the spheres of the divine and human are not quite clearly set off against each
other? . . . That anthropomorphism is possible only as long as the idea of man is not
too clearly differentiated? That anthropomorphism occurs only when it cannot occur
at all because an idea of man that could be transferred to the gods has not yet
developed? And that it tends to disappear precisely when a transferable idea of man has
been formed at last? . . . Anthropomorphism appears in retrospect as a symbolization of
gods that corresponds to a past phase in the self-understanding of man . . .. Behind the
term anthropomorphism, which has become a scientistic cliche, hides the process
in which the idea of man differentiates and correlatively with it the symbolization
of transcendence (15.24445).
So far as the Greek gods are concerned there is no anthropomorphic representation of
the divine, but rather a theomorphic symbolization of the contents of the human
soul.12
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the city you described to us in mythical fashion yesterday to the realm of fact, and place it
before us as though it is ancient Athens itself (Tim. 26c7d1). Timaeus recounts how
hearing Socrates mythic account the day before awakened the memory of the story he
had heard from Solon in his youth about prehistoric Athens. As he remembered that tale,
he tells Socrates, I was quite amazed as I realized how by some supernatural (daimonios)
chance your ideas are on the mark, in substantial agreement with what Solon said (25e).
Socrates states that its no made-up story but a true account (26e). Voegelin notes that
the act of recollection by which the elderly Critias retrieved the story awakens his
youthful exposure to it, which in turn evokes the prehistoric youth of the cosmos
(15.230). But since the tale is non-historical, Plato finds Atlantis through anamnesis in
the collective unconsciousness that is living in him (15.232), the cosmic omphalos of
the soul in the depth of the unconscious (15.238). Clearly, Voegelins Platonic
conception of the unconscious is more capacious than Freuds or even Jungs. Following
Heraclitus he argues that the psyche is unbounded in its depth:
The omphalos, through which the cosmic forces stream into the soul, has a twofold
function in the formation of the myth. It is first the source of the forces, of the
sentiments, anxieties, apprehensions, yearnings, which surge up from the depth and
roam in the unconscious, urging toward assuaging expression in the imaginative order
of mythical symbols. The fact of this openness toward the cosmos in the depth of the
soul is, second, the subject matter of the myth, broken by the finiteness of human
existence into the spectrum of birth and death, of return to the origins and rebirth,
of individualization and depersonalization, of union or re-union with transcendent
reality, . . . of suffering through temporal existence in separation from the ground and
of redemption through return into eternal communion with the ground. The myth
itself authenticates its truth because the forces that animate its imagery are at the same
time its subject matter. A myth can never be untrue because it would not exist unless
it had its experiential basis in the movements of the soul that it symbolizes (15.23839).
In Platos myths the psyche has reached the critical consciousness of the methods by
which it symbolizes its own experiences (15.237). With existential openness and
interpretive sensitivity, Voegelin urges, we can probe beneath what appears to be Platos
rejection of archaic mythology and literary appropriation of mythical motifs in order to
discover that, although mythical symbols inevitably become historically untrue, their
truth is preserved and consciously resymbolized through Platos imaginative play. Only
in the shelter of the myth can the sectors of the personality that are closer to the waking
consciousness unfold their potentiality; and without the ordering of the whole personality
by the truth of the myth the secondary intellectual and moral powers would lose their
direction (15.240). What distinguishes archaic from philosophical myth, therefore, is the
latters more careful rendering of the movements of the unconscious (15.246). The
constant factors, then, are the forces emerging from the unconscious and the capacity to
shape them into symbols which connect the conscious subject to the depths of psyche and
cosmos. The movements of the depth reverberate in the conscious subject without
becoming objects for it. Hence, the symbols of the myth, in which the reverberations are
expressed, can be defined as the refraction of the unconscious in the medium of
objectifying consciousness. What enters the area of consciousness has to assume the form
of object even if it is not object . . . . The freedom of the play is possible only as long as
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the creator of a myth remains aware of the character of the symbols as a nonobjective
reality in objective form (15.246).
Regarding the Timaeus itself, Voegelins analysis reveals that its great symbols of the
Demiurge, the Receptacle, world-soul, and the cosmos emerge from the unconscious
and connect the finite human mind to the truth via the eikos mythos (29bc, 30b), the
likely story of the cosmos as a living, ordered, intelligent creature which is continually
fashioned out of chaos and necessity. This is a non-empirical truth: it is neither falsifiable
nor apprehensible by discursive reason alone. Myth is not a primitive symbolic form,
peculiar to early societies and progressively to be overcome by positive science, but the
language in which the experiences of human-divine participation in the In-Between
become articulate (12.188). For those resistant to the idea that myth has been totally
eclipsed by the physical and social sciences, Voegelins transcendent philosophy of myth
presents a compelling intellectual and existential challenge in a time dominated by the
technological domination of nature, deculturation, and disenchantment with the world.
If it is to tap the sources of the deepest truths, philosophy must root itself again in the
aspirations which speak the language of myth and symbol:
A descent into the depth will be indicated when the light of truth has dimmed and its
symbols are losing their credibility; when the night is sinking on the symbols that have
had their day, one must return to the night of the depth that is luminous with truth
to the man who is willing to seek for it. The depth is fascinating as a threat and a
charmas the abyss into which man falls when the truth of the depth has drained from
the symbols by which he orients his life, and as the source from which a new life of the
truth and a new orientation can be drawn (12.125).
NOTES
1. CW 14 Maurie P. Hogan, ed., The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 14: Order and
History, Vol. 1, Israel and Revelation (Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 2001). CW
15 Athanasios Moulakis, ed., The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 15: Order and
History, Vol. 2, The World of the Polis (Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 2000). CW 16 Dante
Germino, ed., The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 16: Order and History, Vol. 3, Plato and
Aristotle (Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 2000). CW 17 Michael Franz, ed., The Collected
Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 17: Order and History, Vol. 4, The Ecumenic Age (Baton Rouge, LA:
LSU Press, 2000). Hereafter references to the Collected Works are cited parenthetically in
the text.
2. Lucien Levy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, trans. Lilian A. Clare (1926; New York: Washington
Square Press, 1966); Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans. Ralph Manheim,
vol. 2, Mythical Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955); Henri Frankfort,
H. A. Frankfort, John A. Wilson, Thorkild Jacobsen, and William A. Irwin, The Intellectual
Adventure of Ancient Man: An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1946), paperback edition retitled Before Philosophy: The Intellectual
Adventure of Ancient Man: An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East
(Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1949); Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, trans. Willard R.
Trask (1963; New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1968), and The Sacred and the Profane, trans.
Willard R. Trask (1959; New York: Harvest Books, 1968).
3. Thomas A. Hollweck and Paul Caringella, eds., The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 28:
What Is History? And Other Late Unpublished Writings (Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 1990), 63.
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4. Ellis Sandoz, ed., The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 12: Published Essays, 19661985
(Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 1990), 132.
5. R. Eric OConnor, ed., Conversations with Eric Voegelin, Thomas More Institutional Papers 76
(Montreal: Perry Printing Ltd., 1980), 1112.
6. Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis, trans. and ed. Gerhart Niemeyer (South Bend: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1978), 21.
7. See the seminal essay The Beginning and the Beyond: A Meditation on Truth, in Collected
Works 28.173232.
8. On the benefits and dangers of doctrine, see 96106.
9. Ellis Sandoz, ed., The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 18:Order and History, Vol. 5, In
Search of Order (Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 2000), 90. For a more detailed comparison of
Hesiods Chaos and the Platonic cosmogony in the Timaeus, which applies some of Voegelins
insights, cf. John Bussanich, A Theoretical Interpretation of Hesiods Chaos, Classical
Philology 78 (1983): 21219.
10. Voegelin, Anamnesis, 157.
11. Voegelin, Anamnesis, 158.
12. Peter Emberley and Barry Cooper, trans. and eds., Faith and Political Philosophy: The
Correspondence between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 19341964 (University Park, PA:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 82.
13. Voegelin, Anamnesis, 79.