Introduction

This great vision, so formative of the modern West, this blend of liberal political theory and of foundationalist epistemology – this vision is dying
(1995, p. 250)

Religion has returned as an issue within contemporary philosophy in the West.¹ This is remarkable insofar the latter is heir to a discipline that for some time has taken itself to be above such things (and continues to do so in some quarters). Apparently the oracle must be proven right by the other char­acter in the most recent version of the drama: rather than the gods leaving through the back door, as hy­pothe­sized by mainstream secularization theory in the twentieth century, it is the theory that has had its day. Perhaps this is not so surprising. After all, the gods are used to witness their expul­sion from the cosmos while going about their busi­ness. To the prophet Jeremiah is attributed the observation

that nations in general do not desert their gods, although they are ‘false’; while Israel, who has the ‘true God’, deserts him (E. Voegelin CW 5, p. 311; cf. Jer 2:11).

For various reasons, religion stirs up philosophical disquietude again. One reason is the reappearence of the distinction between the “true God” and the “false gods” in public space where it was thought to have become obsolete, at least in Western Europe. In what terms are we to address this situation and its problems?

In scholarly discussions religion and religious beliefs are often associated with a philosophical frame of mind styled “metaphysics” (cf. Westphal, 2007). The meaning of the term has remained as elusive as has the term “religion”. Still, or perhaps just for this reason, one can observe two reactions at work.

In the first case, the equation of religion and theology with meta­physics appears to be reinvented over and over in order to be symboli­cally expulsed from rational discourse, lock, stock and barrel. The result is a kind of dogmatic anti-dogma­tism. Thus, one can often sense a quite intolerant espousal of (their under­stand­ing of) tolerance precisely among philosophers and scholars who extol the neutrality of reason and “sci­entific” objectivity as our highest ideal. There is logic in this, since (monotheis­tic) religion and its alleged intellectual twin metaphysics are here construed as perhaps the most obnoxious of all sources of social exclusion and intolerance.

The second reaction emphati­cally decouples religious faith from metaphysics and all theoretical investigation of the structures of reality. Religion is then reinvented by concerned intellectuals to fit an “ethical” slot from which it is ex­pected to deploy its benign effects on us. In contrast to the first approach, reminiscent of positivism and scientism, religion is here given a more “pietistic” or Kantian interpretation. Wrested free from the grasp of theoretical speculation, religious faith can perhaps become a liber­ating force again in the struggle against misery and oppression of all sorts.

Sometimes, underneath the hard and fast boundary separating these two approaches, there may be gleaned a common motivating concern. It is the fear of potential con­flict between “open” liberal societies and “closed” tra­di­tional religious or phi­loso­phi­cal world-views. But the invocation of con­flict, whether real or perceived, comes at a cost. It implies that large swaths of the earth’s population are required to exert self-censor­ship proportional to Western expectations of a universal develop­ment to­wards secular life-orientations. But then, of course, it may be that “we secularized Westerners are the freaks, considering the long history of humankind, when we take our secular ethos as self-evident truth of the matter.” (Desmond, 2008, pp. 5-6)

Problems are further ex­acerbated if no convincing accounts are forthcoming that help us separate the blessings of secular society from the secularist ideologies and world-views dominating our intellectual and political past. One may think that if religious life-orientations are to be kept a private affair, a matter of “the heart”, so should non-religious ones like “ex­clusive humanism” (Taylor, 2007) or secular liberalism. Surely it will no longer do to assert that public institutions have a merely instrumental character serving a limited, imma­nent purpose to which no one can rationally object. Such views (choose to) over­look the fact that societal structures are not like stones and sticks, or contracts, that can be wielded to this or that end. Rather, societal structures are held in place by a certain “spirit”, i.e. a net of tacit self-inter­pretations con­joining actors into solidary communal or institutional wholes. What, indeed, is the instrumental or contractual view of society if not a domi­nant modern self-under­standing or “social imaginary” (ibid., pp. 171-176) predetermining its theoretical justification in a specific direction?

Here it is well to remember that the distinction between public and private was to solve the problem of fractured Christendom. Only later was it expanded to make possible the co-existence of all sorts of comprehensive world-views, philosophical doctrines and life-orientations. The historical-particular character of this distinction should make one weary to regard it as some sort of panacea. To make matters worse,

the solution no longer grips the conviction and imagination of Western humanity as a whole. And when that happens, when liberalism becomes no more than one among other communities of conviction, its hegemony becomes oppressive. For those Christians and Jews who all these years strove for wholeness in their existence, it always was oppressive (Wolterstorff, 1995, p. 210).

Arguably, the point applies to members of other traditions, too. Take the case of Islam: is it really self-evident that what Muslims most object to are other religious beliefs rather than the exclusion of religion per se from Euro­pean consciousness? The only way to more just and less homogenizing arrangements seems to lead from liberal to plural. But what kind of pluralism is viable or even desirable? And what kind of societal order is necessary to make it possible?

In this paper I offer a discussion of two philosophical thinkers whose work promises to bring illumination to our situation. The thought of Herman Dooyeweerd (1894-1977) and Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) is of special interest for the robust yet supple frameworks they provide allowing us to track the issues here mentioned to their roots. Moreover, the deep affinity between the two renders their points of disagreement all the more instructive.

Dooyeweerd and Voegelin: two “forgotten” philosophical master-thinkers

Thinking in the shadow of the modern separation of faith and reason

Both Dooyeweerd and Voegelin were thinkers of transcendence. Perhaps the spirit animating their work can be captured in a line taken from the latter’s Auto­bio­graphi­cal Reflections. Here we read that “man does not exist out of himself but out of the divine ground of all reality” (CW 34, p. 76)². Human existence is for our two authors suspended from and directed to the divine ground in a radical and integral sense. It’s not that human beings have two natures, one material called “body” and one spiritual called “mind” or “soul”. The meaning of religious faith as of any other attempt to make sense of our place in the cosmos and history is disclosed and made (in)effective in “secular” reality (is there another one?). That is why the presumed truth of religious beliefs and theological state­ments concern­ing “God and the super­natu­ral” is utterly void if “metaphysically” isolated from every-day human interaction with and cognition of nature and society.

At least in this regard the two thinkers are in seeming agreement with the positivists and empiricists whom they otherwise so sharply criticize for their reduced view of reality (Sandoz, 2000, p. 23). Dragging all human dis­course under the criterion of scientific verification, the positivist dogma couldn’t find any meaning in whatever utterance didn’t fit the pattern of some established physical fact or logical-analytical statement. A procedural view of po­liti­cal society often complemented this theoretical ideal. Substantive views of the human good were deemed to be expressive of values grounded in personal affect-structures and thus untranslatable into inter­subjective argument needed for the rational legitimation of the use of political power.

In more recent times the idea that public reason – as opposed to the realm of private value and mean­ing – is exhausted by the physical and logical-rational aspects of experience has fallen on hard grounds. The idea of different kinds of rationality and an ontologically robust plu­rality of disciplines is in the ascendancy (Dupré, 1993). Interdisciplinarity has won the day in many places. But the new found pluralism opens the door to new worries. What if the boundary between public reason and private faiths were to loose its intellectual hold altogether? How to decide what is in and what is out of the enlarged bounds of reasonable discourse? What about race theory, psychoanalysis, or theology? What are the para­digms of sound inquiry into truth, order and power? The historicism of the nineteenth century, accepting nothing beyond discrete lines of cultural and personal development, seems to be back with a vengeance and almost celebrating its lack of rational orientation. Opposing this tendency, the positivist worry about the unity of reason and rationally ordered society is so much shared by our two thinkers that they could almost pass for their heirs. But here is the twist. True order always marks the irruption of transcendence in a world carried away by the immanentist fantasy of possessing its source of order within itself. From this perspective, Dooyeweerd and Voegelin sought to address the conflict between an allegedly neutral reason, scientific or procedural, and substantive faiths; conflict in which each pole threatens to engulf the other when the victim triumphs over its former oppressor. So they worked for the reorientation of faith and reason towards divine transcen­dence from where may yet emerge the symbols guiding our human search for historical and political order.

Christian philosophy, Platonic theology

Both Dooyeweerd and Voegelin orient their philosophical thought to the irruption of transcendent order and oppose it to the construction of immanent ersatz-order (both under­went unpleasant first-hand experiences with Nazi-ideology and power). The need for attunement to the divine order of creation welling up from the depth of our souls is more than just a recurrent theme in their work. This creates a difficulty for many of us. To alleviate it somewhat, emphasis needs to be placed on the term “irruption”. For it is almost inevitable that the notion of order brings to mind the static vision of a hierarchically organized society patterned on a presumed natural order. Given its long history of use and abuse, the term “creation order” has for many become synonymous with the idea of a cosmic enginery assembling ontological rungs and ontic structures into a single, tyrannical whole called Being (this is what seems to drive a certain understanding of “metaphysics”). In the words of N. Wolterstorff:

God in his heaven, the bishop in his chair, the lord in his castle – to medieval man this was part of the very nature of things […]. Some human beings are born to be kings, they thought, as lions are born to be king of the beasts. And some are born to be commoners. From this perspective, society in all its hierarchical differentiation is seen as something natural, brought about by God, no more the free creation of human beings than is the society of animals a free creation of theirs (1983, pp. 7-8).

Every change in such an order has then to be interpreted as one more step towards secu­larization. What becomes of the picture once God has faded out of it? Not to put too fine a point on the answer: on top of the food chain sits white man lording it over to everybody and everything, perhaps cultivating his bad conscience about the fact. One should take in the irony here. For rather than covering the projection of some contingent social, political and economic order into the realm of eternal ideas, the recourse to transcendence precisely serves in our thinkers to relativize the immanent “-isms” competing for faith. It equally challenges the nihilistic self-atonement consisting in the refusal of all faith. Transcendence for Dooyeweerd and Voegelin is the very opposite of a world closing in on itself. If the place of God is vacant, something else is sure to take it. Only the divine Law can save us from ourselves.

Here then we have a classical philosopher and political scientist³ who is also a Christian believer (Voegelin), and a Christian who is also a philosopher and law-theorist (Dooyeweerd). Both thinkers hold these identities together in rather different ways; not only in comparison with each other but also within their own lives. The resulting tensions can be studied in their work. Indeed, both authors struggled with them to their last. Perhaps the main difference between the two is in their sense of vocation hinted at in the above charac­terization. The pairing suggests that it is the first element taking the lead. Beyond this momentous difference of existential outlook, it is worth mentioning that both thinkers felt committed to engage in philosophy rather than theology. For different reasons, theology as they knew it could not provide the necessary coherence or point of reference to their ambitious projects. And no amount of dialectics would help them sorting out the claims of faith and reason along the conventional boundaries between science (Wissenschaft), philosophy and theology. An experience of periagogē or “conversion” in the quest for greater theoretical insight drove their discontent with the way modern reason had been carved up.

Says Voegelin: “I found out that a political theory, especially when it was to be appli­ca­ble to the analysis of ideologies, had to be based on Classic and Chris­tian phi­losophy.” (CW 34, p. 66) Setting him on a similar yet different track, Dooyeweerd’s moment of reori­entation is worth quoting at length:

Originally I was strongly under the influence first of the Neo-Kantian philosophy, later on of Husserl’s phenomenology. The great turning point in my thought was marked by the discovery of the religious root of thought itself, whereby a new light was shed on the failure of all attempts, including my own, to bring about an inner synthesis between the Christian faith and a philosophy which is rooted in faith in the self-sufficiency of human reason. I came to understand the central significance of the “heart”, repeatedly proclaimed by Holy Scripture to be the religious root of human existence. On the basis of this central Christian point of view I saw the need of a revolution in philosophical thought of a very radical character (NC I, v; italics added).

Unsurprisingly, much of the difficulty in the reception of Dooyeweerd and Voegelin arises from the inability or unwillingness to meet these thinkers on their own terms.⁴ But then, this is far from easy – if doing intellectual justice to a great thinker of the past is to go beyond rather than parroting the master.

The cosmic engine of history: differentiation vs. progress

Meaning disclosure (ontsluiting) as “lawful” process of creation

I now want to outline the philosophical implications resulting from the break with what Voegelin calls “historiogenesis”, the straight-line construction of history as cul­minating in some privileged socio-political order or intellectual “world-system”, whether past, pre­sent or future.⁵ Let us examine the thought of H. Dooyeweerd first. Dooyeweerd’s discovery of the biblical idea of the “heart” as the center of human per­sonality must be seen against the back­ground of a scientific and philosophical culture in which the concrete human self had been divided up into a complex of empiri­cally ab­stracted functions (e.g. biotic, psy­chic, cogni­tive, etc.) held together by some “higher” philosophical abstraction. Hark­ing back to ancient philosophical thought, modern rationalist philosophers had thoroughly identified the human person with what for Dooyeweerd is just one aspect of our experience of the world and ourselves, i.e. the rational-analytical (hypostasized into a substance called “rational soul”). Other aspects were integral to the human self just insofar as reason could form an idea of their unity within itself. Dooyweerd quotes the Kantian-idealist philosopher and educationist Th. Litt: “It [i.e. the concrete ego] has the standpoint of possible self-assurance absolutely beyond itself…” Where? In the Archimedean point of “pure thought” (reines Denken) (cf. Litt, 1933, p. 162. NC I, 78).

True enough, “critical” reason and the “pure” reflection of theoretical thought on its own activ­ity could no longer find expression in the ancient symbolism of microcosm reflecting the divine order of the macrocosm. After the breakdown of the attempted medieval-scholastic synthesis of faith and reason in a double-layered vision binding together the supernatural and natural realms, reason had taken the role of nature’s “lawgiver” upon itself (Kant, 1976 [1783], p. 79, II. § 36). As a consequence, the human person was both subject to the order of reality as well as its origin. This raises a quandary: how can “the law” both bind and arise from autonomous persons without dividing them up? (Skillen, 2003, p. 6) It’s as if a feudal sovereign, originator of law and hence a legibus solutus (released from the laws), had to share the same flesh and bones with his subject.

The basic antinomy of this conception is, following Dooyeweerd, at the root of a century-long dialectical proc­ess. What first appears as emancipation and progress results in spiritual crisis shaking the early twentieth century down to the foundations. In the meantime, however, just about every aspect of our human experience of world and self besides the rational-analytical had been hypostasized and elevated into the position of origin (archē) or “lawgiver”. After rationalism came various irrationalisms followed by new rationalisms. But no single “-ism” – Enlightenment rational­ism absolutizing the analytical aspect, Romantic idealism (psychic and aesthetic aspects), historicism (historical aspect), vitalism (biotic aspect), etc. – has been able to support the divine status of its candidate without provoking some other to assault the Olympian throne.

I cannot pre­tend to approxi­mate the complex­ity and detail of the account given by Dooyeweerd of this process in the first two volumes of his magisterial New Critique of Theoretical Thought. To cut a long story short, the original antinomy at the heart of modernity is even­tually accepted as “given” in some form or other and buried in the very founda­tions of reality from where it exerts its influence on the unsuspecting immanence-philosopher. The consequences are truly deplorable. While philosophical thought officially turns around “autono­mous” reason as its declared center and measure, each school and tradition in fact presup­poses a different meaning of this notion depending on a specific “faith” guiding its overarching view of reality. Philosophical discourse is obstructed by its inability to even ascertain the differ­ent meanings of “autonomous reason” without violating the requirement of autono­mous reason to follow but its own lights (NC I, 36). Having compromised or abrogated the integral idea of creation from its center, modern philosophical thought is tossed to and fro between the deification and utter defamation of human reason.

After his “turning point” Dooyeweerd thus sought to ground his thinking in a bibli­cally inspired idea of creation, according to which everything that exists or claims legitimate validity is subject to God’s laws (nature) and norms (culture, history).⁶ This idea was to be the pre-theoretical measure and starting-point allowing him to reconstruct and assess the fun­da­men­tal differences between philosophical theories of reality, including his own. Assuming that the measure itself cannot be measured, Dooyeweerd challenges his interlocutors to lay their cards on the table and articulate the “faith” orienting their own philosophical thought. Driving all theoretical endeavour is a “ground-motive”(NC I, 57 ff.) or fides quaerens intellectum. In Dooyeweerd’s case, the fides is oriented towards creation as the “meaning-totality” in which each thing points to everything else, and everything points to their common origin in God who revealed himself in Jesus Christ through whom all things are created and made new. Creation is dependent on Christ as the divine “root” both for its unity and diversity-in-coherence. Created reality cannot thus be grasped as a totality or whole, no matter whether this whole be conceived as a meta­physical hypostasis or as the totality of transcendental conditions of the experience of the “outer world” (NC III 629). In this vision, nothing has independ­ent existence or validity (NC III, 69). All of creation is taken up into that “movement from and to the unity of the totality of meaning, which in turn expresses the fullness of the divine origin” (Geertsema, 2000, p. 92). For short, “meaning” is the mode of being of all that is created (NC I, 4). Meaning goes all the way down.⁷

As we will see, this orientation puts Dooyeweerd in close proximity to Voegelin. But it also has irritated critics for the seeming non-realism and expressivism driving it (e.g. Plantinga, 1958; Wolterstorff, n.d.). Can the rejection of mind-inde­pendent substances and laws in creation really preserve the truth that the world is not of our own making? How can God be the creative and sustaining origin of all that is when there is no independ­ent reality to be sustained? Why is this not some other version of the meaning-idealism that Dooyeweerd wants to overcome along with all philosophical reductionisms isolating one aspect of creation and turning it into its inner core and essential being?

For Dooyeweerd creation is indeed oriented towards human subjectivity. This does not imply anthropocentrism or the sense that creation is there just for us. It rather means that the faithful valuation of creation as having an integral, non-arbitrary meaning is a human attitude and task approximating a creational norm of stewardship. Humans are indeed the measure (not masters!) of all things, and God is the measure of humans. In the words of philosopher W. Desmond: “we are sources of origination that instantiate the original power of the ultimate source” (2008, p. 26). If this source is thought thinking itself, so are we. If it is pure will, we too are will (to power). After the ascent to the bright origin of reason as consummate self-determination comes the descent into the dark origin of a blind, insatiable striving (ibid., p. 25). Can we find a way out? Is there a transcendence other than self-transcendence caught in the antinomy of law-giving and the blind submission to fate?

Yes, says Dooyeweerd. It is operative in “the heart” of human beings where the diversity-in-coherence of created reality is (re-)oriented to the unity of the divine ground manifested in Jesus Christ through the Spirit. All of creation participates in the transcendent unity or “root-community” (NC III, 656) of humankind whose “journey into God” gives direction to the unfolding of reality in the first place. Humankind has a god-given mediatorial role in the transfiguring of creation and the shaping of history towards eschatological consummation. Nothing less seems implied in the dogma of the council of Chalcedon (451) stating the indivisible and unconfused union of the divine and human nature in Christ, the “firstborn of all creation” (Col 1:15). While this vision has taken the risk of ideological deformation to hitherto un­imaginable levels, and its perversion goes in fact a long way to explain the apocalyptic furor of nationalist and totalitarian aberrations, it is at the heart of Chris­tian thinking from the earliest centuries onwards. Dooyeweerd was well aware of this. On the other hand, as a philosopher in the Dutch Reformed tradition he took pains to extricate himself from what he perceived to be the Hellenic and thus insufficiently Christian char­ac­ter of patristic thought. Still, or precisely for this reason, his basic philosophical orientation can hardly be grasped apart from the theo-cosmological background provided by Byzantine “orthodox” thinkers among whom Maximus the Confessor (ca. 580-662) has achieved towering status (Dalmais, 1952; Thunberg, 1995).

The theory of modal aspects

As for his great predecessor, anthropology and cosmology are for Dooyeweerd inextricably intertwined. His theory of modal aspects, pivotal to his whole philosophical project, starts from the idea that all cosmic “levels” of creation are re­flected in the human person (he is well aware that the idea of man as microcosmos and the world as macroanthropos or man writ large goes back at least to pre-Socratic times; cf. NC II, 592). Humans appear to be unique among creatures insofar they participate and have “subject-functions” in all the modes or aspects of reality that consti­tute our experiential horizon. What are these aspects of reality? As R. Clouser explains (2005, p. 66 ff.), in our everyday experience of the world there figure not only innumerable different things, events and processes but also different kinds of properties and laws characterizing them. The distinction and theoretical determination of these kinds becomes important when scientists or scholars make use of their capacity for mental abstraction in order to focus, for example, on just the biotic or juridical features of a phenomenon. Dooyeweerd eventually came to distinguish a number of such aspects, from the numerical, spatial, physical, biotic, etc. to the moral and pistic (Gr. pistis, faith), the “higher” ones presupposing the “lower” ones for their existence. The life of human adults exhibits all these kinds.

To wit, other sentient beings have subject-functions⁸ in a range of aspects, too. In some non-human animals like elephants the “higher” functions may indeed not be adequately theorized without analogical terms derived from the juridical, moral and spiritual worlds inhabited by humans (this can only be decided on empirical grounds). Thus the search for defining empirical feature(s) setting apart human from non-human animals may be futile. But then, elephants can only become bearers of legal rights because there are juridical subjects who legally objectify the psychic functions qualifying their elephantine fellow creatures. The moral duty to do so (where it exists) presupposes at least the capacity to frame a juridical interpretation of the relevant phenomena, which is distinct from an aesthetic or economic one, and to make it politically valid and socially effective. Although bearing legal rights, elephants are not juridical subjects or fashioners of law.

It is true that, in Dooyeweerd’s terms, everything in creation “functions” in all aspects, top to bottom. Created reality is a meaning-coherence which may not be theoretically torn apart. But then many living entities have but object-functions in the post-psychic aspects. The distinction is important. If we neglect it and focus on the analogical coherence of modal aspects at the cost of their distinctness we may come to embrace the reductionist view that humans and elephants are “essentially” cousins in a single phylogenetic tree. In the light of Dooyeweerd’s more fine-grained theoretical concep­tuality, elephants, however, would be subjects in the numerical, spatial, etc., up to and including the psychic modes but objects in the “higher” juridical and moral ones. Their nature is “limited” or qualified by the psychic aspect, which in turn allows them to objectify the biotic function of foliage and the physical function of water to sustain their sensory functions.⁹

Humans, perhaps uniquely so among creatures, aren’t qualified by any modal aspect or combination thereof. Humans actively function in all aspects and can mediate between the extremes of creation because they exceed the cosmos in direction of its divine ground.¹⁰ Indeed, the spiritual or pistic aspect opens up human existence in direction of a beyond of the cosmos, a supposed or true archē (origin). Without this “pull” of transcendence, it would not be possible to frame an idea of the cosmos or experienced reality as a limited or immanent “whole” (there could thus be no “purely” natural or immanent explanation of the idea of divine transcendence either). Granted that the cosmos is not an entity among others in the cosmos, it is a “whole” or meaning-totality but in a “radical” (Lat. radix, root) sense, sub specie aeterni. Just what direction the sense of “eternity” or spiritual “rootedness” takes in human life makes the whole difference of who we are and what kind of world we live in. It also co-determines what we will accept as rational in science and philosophy.

If humanity indeed participates in the disclosure of creation’s meaning-potential and is called to bring the divine Wisdom sustaining it to full realization in and through Christ, as envisaged by Eastern traditions of Christianity, it is also clear that in the wake of the “fall into sin” the potential for evil and destruction accompanies all human activity.¹¹ This is why Dooye­weerd is so adamant in the philosophical critique of human attempts at self-deification. Self-deification occurs where a created feature of hu­man experience is abstracted from its position within the tapestry of meaning and made to appear independent and a legibus solutus. It then becomes its own “law” to which eve­ry­thing else has to submit. True, “the process of theoretical disclosure of temporal reality is only possible in the cadre of the Divine world-order” (NC II, 582) and cannot thus alter the fundamental goodness of creation. Yet the wildly divergent directions this process may take depend on the ground-mo­tives by which humans let themselves be governed in their “heart”. The motive of creation in the “radical” or holistic biblical sense makes us realize that the potencies inherent in self and world can only be brought out through the simultaneous realization of modal laws. All asymmetry threatens to turn the process of reality into a zero-sum game in which some functions “develop” but at the cost of others.

Differentiation of consciousness and the search in the In-Between

Let us move on to the other interlocutor. E. Voegelin is the philosopher of “universal history” at a time when philosophical and theological disengagement from history picks up speed and becomes the norm rather than the exception. Yet at the heart of his thought is a vision of Being. “Phi­losophy”, he states, “is the love of being through love of the divine Being as the source of its order. The Logos of being is the object proper of philosophical inquiry.” (CW 14, 24) Since time immemorial, the history of humankind is a drama played out on the stage of being. In this drama, humans are not the only actors. God and humans, world and society together form what Voegelin calls the “primordial community of being” (CW 14, 39). Being is here envisaged in a social metaphor. This is a crucial point, as it is for Dooye­weerd (recall his notion of “root-community”). Negatively, it implies that reality is not an assem­blage of things, forces, processes, social structures and persons dispersed across external time. It is not exhausted by the facts investigated and manipulated by the physical sciences. Nor is it the external world ontically enlarged by thinking substances, perhaps including supernatural entities such as spirits and God(s). And reality is not a world of meaning spreading over the brute facts from an inner realm of consciousness, value or feeling either. Being comprises both “outer” and “inner”, “higher” and “lower” and yet is not ex­hausted by them. Voegelin’s philosophy of being can be read as a persistent attempt to show why the epistemic picture of a fundamental split between inner and outer is part of a stillborn yet persistent myth culminating in the ideological aberrations of modernity. For always the picture betrays the aspiration of one “part” of reality (empire, nation-state, technology, etc.) and its corresponding type of consciousness to the status of a self-regu­lating, autonomous whole. However,

[i]f we let any part of reality drop out of sight by refusing it public status in the world of symbols, it will lead a sort of underground life and make its reality felt in intense moods of alienation, or even in outright mental disturbances (CW 12, 93).

What is it that has been dropped out of sight? That humankind participates in the community of being with which it is “consubstantial”. For Voegelin, existence is participation in being. Speaking of ancient cosmological cultures:

Whatever man may be, he knows himself a part of being. The great stream of being, in which he flows while it flows through him, is the same stream to which belongs everything else that drifts into his perspective. The community of being is experienced with such intimacy that the consubstantiality of the partners will override the sepa­rateness of substances (CW 14, p. 41).

Drawing on wide-ranging historical analyses Voegelin concludes that the “earliest” documents and artefacts left by human civilization unfailingly testify to this sense of participation. This is no philosophical dogmatism hastily promulgated by a lay-historian in the absence of the “latest” evidence available to the specialist. For what counts as a historical docu­ment or artefact is essentially related to what a human being is; and we are not completely other than our predecessors. Thus the hermeneutical circle of (self-)inquiry is firmly restored and empiricist conceptions of history defused. Although ever keeping abreast of the newest scholarship available to him, Voegelin never got trapped by a one-sided he­gemony of the facts over interpretation. In effect, his approach nicely dovetails with Dooyeweerd’s re­jection of mere “external” states-of-affairs that are seemingly independent of one’s (self-)under­standing guided by the light of transcendence and the irruption of divine order.

Yet what is true in the oldest strata of experience is true now: the meaning of the “drama” of being is only partially known, as is therefore our own human nature. Existence is basically a divine mystery in the unfolding. The “essential” unknowability of being and of our own role in it does not, however, preclude the partial symbolic illumination of the mystery in which we move and have our being. We ask: what is a symbol? About anything that assists us in finding direction becomes a symbol. The technical term for such illumination through symbols is differentiation: “[T]he history of symbolization is a progression from compact to dif­ferentiated experiences and symbols.” (CW 14, p. 43) Differentiation is not the one-sided result of a theoretical act culminating in a philosophical system. Nor does it simply proceed with the imposition of new boundaries in the wake of political or economic conquest. Both “pragmatic” reality and “paradigmatic” symbolization interact until a relatively stable and well-defined nucleus of symbols encapsulating the prevalent order is achieved (cf. CW 14, p. 61). But then the order of today is the disorder of tomorrow. Voegelin, more than Dooyeweerd, makes extensive use of the im­agery of flux and movement to denote the “stream” of reality and its quest for his­tori­cal order.

For Voegelin, too, humankind rises beyond the cosmos and is thus engaged in the permanent “struggle to advance the symboliza­tion of existential consciousness” (CW 18, p. 107). Of course, not every individual walking the earth shows awareness of participating in the community of being. And in a sense, all human beings are just individual “of sorts”, not fully awake to their role as partners in the community of being. But, one may ask, what about the great representatives of humanity? Are they not possessed of an individuality evoking sincere admiration and even devotion? Certainly, says Voegelin, yet in the moment a Moses, a Gau­tama Buddha, a Zoroaster, a Socrates, a Jesus Christ, a Mohammed become what they “truly” are, they become living symbols for those who are partially illuminated by and in the “event” (cf. CW 12, pp. 192-93). No doubt, this “event” is no ordinary event in external time. Nor does it simply happen in the eye of the duped beholders. For Voegelin, it rather takes place in the metaxy or In-be­tween of the human-divine encounter.

Plato was so acutely aware of man’s consubstantiality but nonidentity with divine reality that he developed a special symbol for man’s experience of intermediate status between the human and the divine: he called the consciousness of this status the metaxy, the In-Between of existence (CW 12, p. 233).

Here we come across a Platonic term (“symbol”) that is of central importance to Voegelin’s philosophy. The event by which human consciousness becomes (more) luminous to itself takes place in the In-between of existence. This term simply denotes the community of being in which the significance of each “partner” begins to manifest itself. The movement of differentiating consciousness, which has always already begun, is character­ized by increasing or decreasing “ten­sion” between the various spheres of being – divine, cosmic, societal and individual. There is nothing nega­tive or conflictual about this, for it is just to say that the (experience of) cosmos “unfolds” along the axis of immanence-transcendence. Why? There is no prior reason for this to be so; we have reached the bedrock of Voegelinian theorizing, the fides guiding his thought. As pointed out above, Voegelin’s philosophy does not offer a master-narrative (historiogene­sis) purporting to justify some privileged course of historical-civilizational development from the vantage-point of “autonomous” reason. The goal of history is not known to us but remains a mystery. Human symbols of order both illuminate and preserve this mystery, unless they are distorted. If they fail us in one or the other respect, if they fall victim to “literalist degradation” (CW 17, 204), the door is open to all sorts of attempts to translate transcendent-divine order into man-made immanent order. Alas “the possibility of making immanentist nonsense of symbols that express the experience of divine presence in the order of man’s existence in society and history is always present.” (ibid.) The vision of a single “humanity under God” is indeed submerged by the forces of “egophanic revolt” manifest in ideological constructions of history or imperial conquests riding roughshod over historical-political boundaries.

Is there trace in Voegelin’s “metaxological” philosophy of the idea of a divine world-order? In Dooyeweerd’s thought God’s law for creation is the original “boun­dary-line of the temporal order of the creation, which sets an insurmountable limit between the absolute Being of God and His creation, whose meaning is absolutely dependent on Him.” (NC II, 590) The Neo-Calvinist thinker, unlike some of his colleagues and students, does not go as far as to turn this “absolute boundary between God and His creation” (NC I, 507) into a “third” sphere neither divine nor created but partici­pating in both and mediating between them (Morbey, 1979, p. 3). Perhaps we can understand Dooyeweerd to say that the Law or divine order of creation both separates and joins creation and its Creator. While it is not external to and hiding the transcendent origin, it is not identical with it either. In more theological language, it is the revelation of the Father’s creative will embodied in the Son and mediated to us through the Spirit. Thus creation remains distinct from and “prior” to the fall into sin or nothingness. These two “motives” of biblical faith and thought should neither be identified nor taken apart. Dooye­weerd is of course not the first to see this crucial distinction blurred in the Gnostic, Hermetic and Neo-Platonic traditions. For whenever the gradations in created being betoken degrees of separateness from the divine source the radical goodness of creation is obfuscated. Here is not the place to examine this kind of vision or loss of vision. Suffice it to point to the principle that everything is either God or created (pancreationism)¹². This is the ultimate starting-point for Dooyeweerd’s thought.

Voegelin seems to travel in the reverse direction. Rather than taking a theo-centric approach he works his way towards the creation-Creator distinction, so to speak, from bottom up. But he too is at pains to ward off distorting interpretations of the metaxy as a “wall of separation” or empty space between the spheres – a space waiting to be filled up with all sorts of intermediaries and hypostases by those who seek to slacken the “tension” (cf. CW 12, 233). Thus, the event in the metaxy or In-Between closely corresponds to Dooyeweerd’s “concentric direction of theoretical thought to its supra-theoretic pre-supposi­tions.” (NC I, 87) It is the “meeting ground of the human and the divine in a consciousness of their distinc­tion and interpenetration” (CW 12, ibid.). But the “tensional” unity between the spheres of being is at risk. If the ligaments wear out and snap one or the other side is eclipsed or subdued.

From cosmological culture to pneumatic and noetic revelation

The emergence of differentiating consciousness is not a linear process. Human struggle for attunement to divine (“true”) order is both characterized by “leaps in being” as well as lapses and “derailments” (CW 14, pp. 239-40 and passim). Here is an outline of the emergence of historical and noetic (Gr. nous, mind, intelligence) consciousness and its symbolizations of or­der. As explained in the preface to the third volume of Voe­ge­lin’s masterwork, Order & History:

Order and History is a philosophical inquiry concerning the principal types of order of human existence in society and history as well as the symbolic forms. The oldest civilizational societies were the empires of the ancient Near East in the form of the cosmological myth. And from this oldest stratum of order emerged, through the Mosaic and Sinaitic revelations, the Chosen People with its historical form in the present under God… In the Aegean area emerged, from the stratum of order in cosmological form, the Hellenic polis with the symbolic form of philosophy (CW 16, p. 43).

Against the background of cosmological, imperial symbolism there occurred, in­de­pendently of each other, two breakthroughs, “leaps” or “outbursts”: pneumatic revelation in Israel and noetic revelation in Hellas (cf. CW 43, 106).¹³ The account starts with the Ancient Near East comprising the various “cosmological” civilizations and their corresponding mythical symbolizations of order. In ancient imperial contexts the experience of consubstantiality is most conspicuous. “Compactness of experience” dominates human existence.¹⁴ The divine being(s) that order the cosmos are hardly differentiated from (human experience of) order itself. The world is indeed “full of gods”. At the heart of the Mesopotamian symbolic order is the omphalos (navel), the sacral center where heaven and earth meet, and divine being flows into society to periodically regenerate it. Thus, the New Year celebration presided by the more-than-human representative of divine government, the king, marks the annual victory over the forces of chaos. Human government is patterned on divine government.

The God is the owner of a temple, while its priest and ruler is only its tenant farmer; the earthwide rule of Marduk is established in heaven, while the rise to power of the earthly king is only the implementation of the divine appointment; and the geographical order on the earth is the image of the original in the heavens (CW 14, p. 66).

Macrocosm and social microcosm mirror each other, without their existing clear boundaries between the two. This experience of maximal “porosity” between inner and outer, higher and lower, is the antipode of the experience constituting what Taylor has aptly named “the buffered self” of modernity (2007, p. 27). Characteristic of this self is the deeply interiorized possibility of disengagement, of the emancipation from all preconceived or “given” order. Whereas in cosmological contexts human culture is invested with the power of nature, nature here appears as the last realm to be conquered by culture.

After the discussion of Egypt and the rise of monotheism as a transitional case, Voegelin moves to the first “spiritual outburst” which is at the origin of Israel. The discussion of Israel in a modern political philosophy, it may be noted, was something of an anomaly. Here is the rationale for its inclusion: “Revelation creates history as the inner form of human existence in the present under God.” “Israel alone had history as an inner form, while other societies existed in the form of cosmological myth” (CW 14, p. 165). It thus stands for the break with the form of cosmological existence which is “eternal recurrence” (CW 14, p. 168). Anticipating an obvious objection, Voegelin notes that “[t]he trouble originates in the following proposition: Without Israel there would be no history, but only the eternal recurrence of societies in cosmological form.” (CW 14, p. 170) He is clearly aware that the proffered analysis flies in the face of what is conventionally meant by the “historical” truth about X or Y. Don’t the cosmological empires have a history? Yes, of course, but between them and the modern isolation of a pragmatic, immanent and seemingly self-enclosed realm of worldly events without meaning in themselves lies the birth and historiogenetic derailment of historical consciousness. “Mere” events and processes do not amount to history, and neither do the symbols expressive of the historical consciousness first emerging with Israel (cf. Parotto, 2004, 98). Take out one side of the equation and you lose the other. A compilation of mere states-of-affairs, were there such a thing, could never provide an answer as to why these should be worthy of documentation and traditioning. On the other hand, a symbolism has to convey the meaning of something, i.e. the experience of some event or process. How?

For Voegelin, to engage in history – any kind of history – is to account for “prag­matic” reality in critical continuation of the process of symbolization initiated by the complex symbolic form of a “chosen people under God”. There is for him no contradiction in saying that the symbolism must be continued and critically analyzed against the background of its actual unfolding in “pragmatic” reality. The symbolism is no matter of mere religious “belief”. For the loss or abandonment of the symbolism as a living force of consciousness would be the loss of history in a basic sense whether one believes in God or not. The disenchantment of the world, the expulsion of the gods, and the fears of loss or return of the “true” God from or to public space are all implications of this symbolism in shared “pragmatic” history. What history after the loss of history would look like we do not know, and perhaps will never know.

With the “leap” of Israel comes the experience of being suspended from a source of meaning “outside” the community or communities of which one finds oneself to be a part. The mosaic Law is the “call” into a new kind of existence as well as its first pragmatic embodiment. This, of course, is a far cry from the “naked” individual inhabiting a universe of mere facts or events to be imbued with meaning by the faint-hearted but embraced as such by the bold. The experience also needs to be distinguished from the interpretation given to it by St. Augustine, in whose steps Voegelin still walks in his New Science of Politics (cf. Parotto, 2004, chap. 1). In this perspective meaning is concentrated in a “world to come” or transcendent beyond. Profane history is therefore waiting for the gloomy and sometimes appalling spectacle of this saeculum senescens (ageing world) to finish. It’s not as if there are two histories, one sacred – meaning without events – and one profane – events without meaning. But the one historical process is tossed between the two poles of civitas Dei and civitas terrena engaged in spiritual battle.

Historical consciousness is condensed in the paradigmatic figure of Moses who becomes the first to gather a people around him in pragmatic time. The people of Israel is not a tribe or nation that may wax and wane through conquest and loss like the king’s collective body (of course it does not consist of bilateral treaties among equals either). The people of Israel prefigures the mysterious unity of humanity:

History as the form in which a society exists has the tendency to expand its realm of meaning so as to include all mankind – as inevitably it must, if history is the revelation of the way of God with man. History tends to become world history, as it did on this first occasion in the Old Testament, with its magnificent sweep of the historical narrative from the creation of the world to the fall of Jerusalem (CW 14, pp. 169-170).

It is not sufficient to say, with B.W. Anderson, that “God’s revelation to Moses instilled in him a new consciousness of personal identity and vocation” (Anderson, 2000, p. 56). For in an important sense Moses didn’t exist before this revelation. Why, not even the world was there.
[W]orld history is meaningful insofar as it reveals the ordering will of God in every stage of the process, including the creation of the world itself. Beyond the construction of the world history rises […] a vision of the God who by his word called into existence the world and Israel (CW 14, p. 181).

What has become of Voegelin’s “primordial” community of being? It is as if there are now four characters – God, the world, humans and society – in search of each other. Here is the basic difference separating myth and history: the relationship with God is established at a certain point in “paradigmatic” time (the covenant with Moses). The narrative of the founding event, i.e. the original encounter between God and man, expresses a dynamics that bestows each of the partners whatever “historical” identity they may have. True, not all characters are on the same level: three of them exist just insofar as they are attuned to the will of God – while God reveals himself as “the one who I will be”/ “the one who is there (for you)” (Ex. 3:14). Put otherwise, historical consciousness is centered in God’s search for man. In the biblical Scriptures, the cosmos is de-divinized and provides but the necessary background for the drama consisting in the community of recipients enacting its difficult journey into the kingdom of God. Moses, having been found by God, tries to “expand” his response to the people. Drawing wider circles, the historical consciousness of being ushers all past societies into the course of history by retrospective interpretation. Concomitantly, it projects an “open” future that may either witness the attempted return to the Sheol (underworld) of civilization (“Egypt”) or the freedom of the realm of Yahweh. This, Voegelin stresses, is not an “arbitrary” or “subjective” construction. It is rather the discovery of “a process, which, though its goal is unknown to the generations of the past, leads in continuity into the historical present.” (CW 14, p. 170) From the articulate present the inarticulate process of the past can be recognized as truly historical. The process of human history is ontologically real (ibid.).¹⁵

Historical consciousness, symbolized by the figure of Moses, is slow in the emergence in external time. It has many stratifications and may appear much later in the chronological past than one could expect by making the biblical narrative one’s only guide to “historical” reality (CW 14, p. 176). Moreover, the experience of “a people under God”, pressing as it were toward the experience of “one humanity under God”, is never fully there at any given point in time. In other words, the experience has eschatological drive. The troubling possibility thus arises that the true character of God, Moses and Israel become “luminous” within historical consciousness only when hope of a worldly kingdom under God has vanished and moved beyond all territorial ambitions. Voegelin takes this possibility to be the actual telos of Israel beyond all historical goals. It provides the hermeneutical key for his reading of the Old Testament. For him, Israel’s “exodus from itself” (CW 14, p. 567) has indeed been the condition for it to become the vanguard and representative of a new humanity under God.

What emerged from the alembic of the Desert was not a people like the Egyptians or Babylonians, the Canaanites or Philistines, the Hittites or Arameans, but a new genus of society, set off from the civilizations of the age by the divine choice. It was a people that moved on the historical scene while living toward a goal beyond history. This mode of existence was ambiguous and fraught with dangers of derailment, for all too easily the goal beyond history could merge with goals to be attained within history. The derailment, indeed, did occur right in the beginning. It found its expression in the symbol of Canaan, the land of promise. The symbol was ambiguous because, in the spiritual sense, Israel had reached the promised land when it had wandered from the cosmological Sheol to the mamlakah, the royal domain, the Kingdom of God (CW 14, p. 154).

“Canaan is as far away today as it has always been in the past” (CW 14, p. 171).

To conclude this section: “God’s revelation to Moses” is an ongoing event in the metaxy. Even in secular Western culture it continues to make a series of temporally and spatially scattered “history-like” narratives to be of God, Moses and a people called Israel. For Voegelin, the modern quest for the “real” historical Moses is no less parasitic on this event than pre-modern typological, doctrinal or hagiographic accounts. If the event should cease, so will the reconstructed referents “behind” these narratives degenerate into mere “objective” data. For a history-generating symbol to remain alive it needs to be taken up in the life of the mind or nous. Not reducible to its “external” referents, it does not yetbecome a focal point of orientation by dragging our aesthetic or religious imagina­tion either (cf. CW 18, 52). The implications of a symbol may take centuries to unfold, but much less is required for our imagination to get dulled by “vivid” images of “great personalities”. Of course, “imagina­tive vision and noesis are not independent, rival or alternative sources of knowledge and truth but interacting forces in the historical process of an imaginative vision that has noetic structure.” (CW 28, 227).

In the event of the opsis [sc. vision] and its language we reach the limit at which language does not merely refer to reality but is reality emerging as the luminous ‘word’ from the the divine-human encounter. The emerging word is the truth of the reality from which it emerges; it is what we call a ‘symbol’ in the pregnant sense (CW 28, 231).

Religious antithesis vs. differentiation of noetic consciousness

Of ground-motives and motivating centers of experience

I have reserved discussion of Voegelin’s account of the other, Hellenic “spiritual outburst” for the last section in order to directly confront it with Dooyeweerd’s idea of a religious ground-motive. For it is here that real tension between the two thinkers surfaces – with no guarantee of release. Why? Voegelin has no doubts that the two “motivating centers of experience”, Israel and Hellas, ultimately belong to one and the same human consciousness. The divine ground is one, and so is the In-between of the divine-human encounter. The spheres of influence of the two spiritual centers cannot be separated out along the later theological division of reason and revelation. Why, they need not even be made complementary along the same distinction as in the dogma of grace perfecting nature. The symbols discovered in the process of philosophizing always had a double status, human and divine. Voegelin makes no bones about his view of (Western) Christian theology, Catholic or Reformed:

The double status of the symbols which express the movement in the metaxy has been badly obscured in Western history by Christian theologians who have split the two components of symbolic truth, monopolizing, under the title of “revelation”, for Christian symbols the divine component, while assigning, under title of “natural reason”, to philosophical symbols the human component (CW 12, 187).

Strikingly enough, Dooyeweerd, the Christian Reformed philosopher, fully concurs with this assessment. But just because the two spiritual centers, Athens and Jerusalem, are of a religious or ultimate nature they each claim the totality of the In-between or horizon of human experience. The Dutch thinker thus pulls his philosophical weight to demonstrate the ultimate incompatibility and religious anti-thesis between the ancient Greek and biblical ground-motives. It’s either-or. Philosophy has to be reformed as everything else in life. True reformation cannot restrict itself to matters of church and theology while putting the stamp “adiaphoron” (inessential for salvation) on everything else. Theoretical reason which is in the grip of a spirit other than the spirit of the true God cannot be the ancillae theologiae (handmaid of theology). Nor can it be used as mere “instrument” helping to conceptually clarify faith in God and direct church-matters (cf. CW 6, 384). Philosophy is religiously charged from the very beginning (much of the first volume of his New Critique is precisely dedicated to substantiate this claim with regard to Western philosophy; see also Dooyeweerd (2004)). Attempts of religious synthesis inevitably lead to theoretical antinomies conjuring up the nemesis of creation order which does not allow for the deification of anything within creation.

Back to Voegelin: if the “break” with cosmological civilization leads to God’s search for man in Israel, it takes the reverse direction in Hellas. It is here that man is revealed to himself as the being who is in search of the divine ground of being.

The knowledge that human being is not grounded on itself implies the question of its origin, and in this question human being is revealed as a becoming toward what is, albeit not as a becoming in the time of existing things, but a becoming from within the ground of being (CW 6, p. 173).

Philosophy is the name of the mind’s (nous) activity in and through which this search comes to reflective self-awareness in thinkers like Plato and Aristotle.¹⁶

[A]t its core human nature is the openness of questioning knowing and knowing questioning about the ground. Through this openness, beyond any contents, images, and models whatsoever, order flows from the ground of being into the being of man (CW 6, p. 173).

For Voegelin and central to his own philosophy, the Hellenic symbolism par excellence is that of Plato’s zētesis or noetic quest of the divine Beyond. In this quest, old-time religion and myth are not simply abrogated or left behind – as little as Israel is able to simply step out of mythical symbolism. The twin leaps in being, formative of Western civilization, are not leaps out of being. Rather, the Hellenic experience of cosmic order, no less than the biblical experience of universal history, draws all “previous” strata of experience into itself for reconfiguration. Again, symbolization is no linear process culminating in a “we” hold to be unsurpass­able, whether that be the Roman Empire, the Third Rome (Moscow and Russia)¹⁷, or the paradoxical “we” invoked by present-day liberal political philosophers (“we are all individuals”). In our human quest for historical order strata of experience in need of re-symbolization constitute an enduring and recalcitrant reality. In principle, there is no end to this quest.

In Hellas, the “motivating center of experi­ence” that is at the heart of philosophy puts the polis and its traditional gods into second position. Rather than denying them all right of existence, Plato, with the help of many predecessors, makes the gods dependent upon an origin that transcends them. Presumably, the gods don’t accept their demotion just like that (this was before the invention of the golden parachute). Now, Dooyeweerd’s characterization of the Hellenic ground-motive picks up on exactly this point: since Greek thinkers lacked the revelation of the transcendent origin of creation, and thus the idea of (non-demiurgic) creation, they were in principle unable to reconcile the divinized forces of nature (matter) and culture (form) represented by the telluric and Olympian gods.

Stripping the number of gods down to one doesn’t help here. The divine origin of all “coming to be” has still to be envisaged in terms of “being” or in terms of “becoming”, with nothing to mediate between them. Thus, the divine ground lacks radical unity. It is simultaneously torn into the direction of the form-motive expressing itself in the “Olympian religion, the religion of form, measure and harmony, which rested essentially upon the deification of the cultural aspect of Greek society” and into the direction of the matter-motive driving the cults of “mother earth with its ever flowing Stream of life and its threatening anangkē [sc. fate]”(NC I, 62). Heaven and earth are in constant strife. The battle between the Delphic law-giver Apollo and the Dionysian forces of formless becoming and perishing ever goes on and results in a dialectical tension never to be resolved. To the contrary, antinomies get ever more intractable over time. For each pole disguises itself by taking on characteristics of the other, but only to subvert it again.

At the outset, under the primacy of the matter-motive, the law of nature has the juridical sense of justice (dikē): every indivi­dual form must be dissolved into “matter” according to a stan­dard of proportionality. This dikē is conceived of as an Anangkē, an unescapable fate to which the form-things are subjected. Under the primacy of the form-motive of the later culture-religion the concept of the law in its general sense of order assumes a teleological sense in respect to all “natural subjects”. This conception is introduced by Socrates and elaborated in a meta­physical way by Plato and Aristotle. It was opposed to the extreme Sophistic view of the purely conventional character of the nomos in human society and the complete lack of laws in “nature” as a stream of flowing becoming (NC I, 112).

For Dooyeweerd there is nothing in Hellenic philosophy and its later developments warranting our hope to find there an integral, non-dialectical “starting-point” for theoretical and scientific thought. The religious dialectic plays itself out unawares even where denied and shows no respect for the subjective claims to the contrary of a thinker who is in its grips. No amount of re-symbolization or invocation of paradox will help to transform the religious (absolute) tension into a humanly manageable theoretical (relative) dialectic. Therefore, the Hellenic “motivating center of experience” cannot be synthesized with the biblical ground-motive. The symbolisms of God in search of man and man in search of “God” cannot and will not converge but will rather cancel each other out. One should not entrust one’s mind and life to an “apostate” motive producing but counterfeit doubles of the origin(al) even while professing faith in the one God. That comes at a cost.

At this point we see the debate move to the next stage. For now it has become unclear what the disagreement between the two thinkers is. Do they hit the same nail after all? Voegelin uses other words to make us alert of what he perceives to be the upsurge of spiritual or psychopathological “derailment”, long in the preparation throughout Western philosophy. Philosophy, or what passes for it, can do real harm. Dooyeweerd, for his part, does not deny that out of religiously misguided attempts at philosophical synthesis good may come nonetheless. This is because the divine order of creation impinges on all rational and historical developments, irrespective of human motivation. Indeed, God’s law for the cosmos and human life not only makes those attempts, but even distorting positivizations of it possible to begin with. Nevertheless,

[g]enuine Christian philosophy requires a radical rejection of the supra-theoretical pre-suppositions and “axioms” of imma­nence-philosophy in all its forms. It has to seek its own philoso­phic paths... It cannot permit itself to accept within its own cadre of thought problems of immanence-philosophy which originate from the dialectic ground-motives of the latter (I, 114).

It is easy to misread Dooyeweerd if one isolates passages like this. Of course he doesn’t mean to break off philosophical and scientific conversation with unbelievers or those of “unregenerate heart”. And Reformational Philosophy as a whole has not fallen prey to self-insulating tendencies over the years of its existence. For philosophy and intellectual inquiry is the testing and contesting of ideas and theories across boundaries political, national, confessional etc. Theoretical activity, where it deserves that name, is governed by its own integral laws. As all modal laws governing human activity they are ultimately rooted in the divine order of creation, no matter how much the latter may be repressed in and through human consciousness. But we should not commit ourselves to the fiction of a neutral space of autonomous reason, especially if “we” happen to be a cultural and philosophical majority. We should not assume our perspective to be the default position beyond all perspectives. In times witnessing to renewed religious violence and secular fears (or is it the other way around?) it is important to realize that for Dooyeweerd the “anti-thesis” holding between different ground-motives is no socio-psycho­logical category focussing on the communicative attitudes of the participants in some dialogue. Good will, openness and tolerance is required of them all. There is no going back on these virtues, however one might account for their origin and pedigree.

Rightly understood, the anti-thesis is not even the sort of “logical” boundary dividing doctrines, positions or propositional claims to truth (cf. McFarland, 2003, p. 181). It is of a “radical” nature, meaning that it cuts across the self or I of each human being, believers and “other-believers” alike.¹⁸ It undoubtedly manifests itself in the rich tapestry of social interactions, psychic processes and conceptual categories that are part and parcel of human life. But the anti-thesis never manifests itself in univocal fashion. Hence it cannot be mapped to any empirical or logical-concep­tual lines of division without thereby putting into relief the non-ultimate nature of the latter. We may not at present see whether these lines of division can in fact or even should be overcome, but so much may be attributed to our own present limitations.

Policing the boundary

How then do we know that there is such an anti-thesis if we can’t observe it? The answer I want to propose is: we don’t. But unless we assume it to be there we will treat all competing faiths as rationally deficient variants of our own life-orienta­tion. Paradoxically enough, Dooyeweerd’s idea of anti-thesis preserves the integrity of other faiths even while taking an uncompromising stand on the Christian truth as he understands it. Look at it this way: a faith or ethos worthy of its name has the inherent tendency to create its own, encompassing context of rational interpretation within the community of being. It is not a bundle of affect-driven hypotheses waiting to be reconstructed by “critical” thought. Nor is it a self-con­tained practice “other” to all theorizing. So even if we let ourselves be carried away by the expectation of a universal rational “science” of God, world, society and self we inevitably press our shared methods and presuppositions into expressions of our own spiritual roots (or lack thereof).

The objection must be pressed further. Can the ultimate anti-thesis between, say, Athens and Jerusalem, be thought at all? Surely there is no sense in subscribing to a contentless idea directing our lives and minds, be it ever so conducive to peace and mutual understanding. Here is a seeming impasse: unless some ground-motive has specific content ascribed to it we are not even able to know how it differs from another. But if that content is itself non-ultimate because reflecting human discrimination, finite and ever distorted by sin, so is the anti-thesis. In other words, philosophical troubles arise if we want to claim a revealed content for Christian faith that is independent of our human responses, for what they are worth; religious troubles arise if we don’t! It hardly makes sense to invoke the idea that God himself in his “Word-revelation” determines the content of the biblical ground-motive. For then we have an idea that is even “more” ultimate than the ground-motive itself. Dooyeweerd, however, seems to need “an absolute boundary” between divine revelation in our “supra-temporal heart” and our earthly responses showing more or less faithful obedience to the biblical ground-motive in the spheres of existence. Why? Without a philosophical “solution” along these lines, his realist critics, bemoaning the thorough meaning-character of creation stripped of all mind-independent substances, facts or laws, have a point indeed. How is it that grossly inflated human subjectivity doesn’t go all the way, absorbing even its divine measure and point of orientation?

Some hundred years before Dooyeweerd we find Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) struggling with the same question.¹⁹ How is it possible to go beyond a Socratic notion of knowledge as noetic recollection of divine truth available to everyone who is willing to plunge into the depths of his soul? Kierkegaard gives a peculiar answer. To become a Christian is to throw oneself upon the “absolute paradox” that a relationship to the eternal God be built on historical knowledge of an individual called Jesus Christ (the thought-experiment can be modified appropriately by inserting some other contingent event in time). Should it be the case, then, that we who have been born after the fact possess the one, all-decisive advantage? Yet Christianity insists on the relation between the eternal and that birth in “external” time. It sets up the skandalon of particularity just to make sure that faith in God is not conflated with a speculative system of thought.

The “absolute paradox” has the baffling consequence that the sought for difference between Socratic recollection and Christian faith appears to elude all thought. It cannot be stated within a doctrine, perhaps tempting its followers to claim superior knowledge or insight based on “revelation” rather than mere human insight (this is a point close to the heart of Voegelin who felt the repeated desire to chastise “the theologians” in this regard). But whence the unthinkability? The answer is not hard to come by. The difference between the idea of the eternal God entering time and the object of faith proper, the actuality of God entering time, cannot be thought. Unless, of course, one more idea arises in one’s mind to mediate between the two. But this only serves to push the problem one step farther back. The difference between thought and actual existence cannot be determined by thought. Not even that this should be so is in its powers of determination. Indeed, thought has no “outside” eluding its own capacity of self-transcendence. “The only an sich [in itself] that cannot be thought is existing, with which thinking has nothing at all to do” (Kierkegaard, 1992, p. 328). “Existence” as an individual and faith in the “absolute paradox” thus form a perfect match. This is Kierkegaard’s (in)famous answer to Kant’s “solution” of giving both theoretical reason and practical faith their due by drawing a seemingly neat geometrical boundary between the two.

Back to Socrates: who is to say that he couldn’t have framed the idea of the divine ground of being entering time? But even so he couldn’t have become a Christian. Not if that step implies taking up a relation to some “historical” actuality coming to happen after his death. The upshot for our discussion is this. No matter how much exegesis goes into Dooyeweerd’s efforts of showing that Plato did not in fact have the idea of a God who is so transcendent as to be able to freely enter time rather than being included in the cosmos in virtue of his everlasting-tempo­ral nature, it will never be sufficient to show that the prospective Christian is not some sort of inventive Platonist. But then, we must conclude, divine revelation in the biblical sense is not like a message that could be delivered whether its intended recipient receives it or not. It is not like an exterior force working upon our souls while we happen to be absent. Revelation and response belong to one and the same experience. There is no content of revelation that one could happen to stumble upon unless it were there to be recollected, even for a Socrates or Plato, in whatever terms are available. Revelation so understood does not take us outside the Socratic approach. Voegelin puts it thus: “the fact of revelation is its content” (CW 5, 151; 18, 87), and “the experience has no content but itself” (CW 28, 185). Symbols and beliefs resulting from the experience are well needed to identify its linguistic content, but they neither define nor exhaust it.

Where does that leave us with the question of the religious anti-thesis? Dooyeweerd’s intention to differentiate between God’s Word-revelation eliciting our response and the actual response itself is manifest enough. His transcendental argument(s) at the beginning of the New Critique precisely aim to show the necessary directedness of all theoretical thought to some ground-mo­tive, whether biblical or apostate. At the same time, the radical self-insufficiency of theoretical thought had to be brought home to make sure that finite and distorted theoretical thought would not intrude on the sacred precincts of divine revelation directed at the “supra-temporal heart”. But why dress up the whole line of thought as a transcendental argument reminiscent of Kant? Kierkegaard equally wanted to drive the anti-thesis and “absolute boundary” between God and man home to an age dabbling in the “pure thought” of speculation. Eternity and the temporal were apparently collapsed into each other without remainder. Just for this reason the Danish thinker adopted the literary device of pseudonymity and other means of “indirect communication” through which to state what cannot be stated directly. Surely, the act of abstracting from one’s old, hubristic self in trying to think God as the one whose Word of revelation reduces one to mere passivity and listening is one act too many for a passive recipient. Over time, the act becomes a habit making one truly “absent-minded” (Kierkegaard, 1992, p. 121). One becomes blind to acts of theological ventriloquism in which the voice of Scripture, dogmatics, tradition, religious experience or whatnot appears with the blinding authority of a counterfeit Word of God. And that is the precise opposite of what Dooyeweerd wanted to achieve with his notion of an “absolute boundary”. We seemingly cannot get rid so easily of the In-between of the divine-human encounter explored by Voegelin.

Attempts at consigning the Word of God to sheer univocity untainted by our equivocal responses have run rife in modern theology. In the heat of opposing (in)human attempts at self-deification, it has sometimes been neglected that God alone knows the difference between himself and the bearers of his image. Yet God’s agapeic Word creates the conditions for finite human existence by drawing humanity to himself. Reorienting our lives and minds to the “original” plan and order of creation eo ipso means to be elevated above our own nature. Not that we thereby cease to be creatures. The point only goes to show that there is no purely immanent knowledge or fact of the matter constituting who we are. So we cannot recover the creational bounds set to our theoretical or noetic powers without being lifted above them in the process. Human attempts to shield God’s Word-revelation or divine Law from our hubristic grasp and theoretical mastery can hardly accomplish their goal without risking to further aggravate what they seek to avoid. A pious exercise at transcendental-philosophical self-limitation of our theoretical powers may amount to sneaking into a God’s eye point of view – “from behind” as it were – as well as to spotting and averting the temptation to do so. The divine origin is in excess of human powers of conceptual determination and theoretical self-transcen­dence, no doubt. But so it is in excess of these powers even when put to the service of a quasi-Kantian transcendental argument to overcome all types of Kantian transcendental arguments. Rather than the “spirit of geometry” we here need the “spirit of finesse” to guide our powers of spiritual-theoretical discrimination. Lacking that, put somewhat starkly, it may look as if Christ’s injunction to take up one’s cross (Mat 10:38) really means that we should nail ourselves to the cross even before taking it up.

Of course I am not suggesting that Dooyeweerd must be read in this way. Indeed, I am inclined to think that he was pushing ahead in the same direction that I am trying to follow here. Still, from hindsight, one may wish that his thought was more alive to Kierkegaard’s meditations on the “passion to think what cannot be thought” (without necessarily having to go with him all the way).

[T]he demonstrative force of our critique has been negative in character, so far as it, taken strictly, can only demonstrate, that the starting-point of theoretical thought cannot be found in that thought itself, but must be supra-theoretical in character. That it is to be found only in the central religious sphere of conscious­ness, is no longer to be proved theoretically, because this insight belongs to self-knowledge, which as such transcends the theoretical attitude of thought. We can only say, that this self-knowledge is necessary in a critical sense, because without it the true character of the chosen starting-point remains hidden from us. And this would be fatal for the critical insight into its true significance in respect to the inner direction of philosophic thought (NC I, 56-57).

The point towards which Dooyeweerd’s transcendental critique lures the mind strangely hovers between blinding recognition of its immediate dependence on the “true” origin and critical acknowledgement of the prior “choice” to follow some supra-theoretical starting-point, some of them leading into an apostate direction (cf. NC I, 57). How is the point of contact between intuitive self-knowl­edge of the “heart” and theoretical reasoning to be thought? How can one speak of a prior choice without presupposing the actual reorientation of the heart? For whom is the insight into the character of the chosen starting-point a critical necessity?²⁰

At least in this respect Voegelin’s approach is more forthcoming. For him the noetic revelation of tension or paradox at the heart of human consciousness can neither be out-reflected nor out-believed. Plato was aware of the paradoxical status of human beings as both human and divine, neither confounding nor separating the two natures. Only within the orbit of a literalized pneumatic revelation the tension risks to be lost one way or another. Philosophy is the guardian of this tension in the metaxy. It must look to it that religious symbols such as Dooyeweerd’s “absolute boundary” do not turn into doctrines making us forgetful of the “primordial” porosity between the partners of the community of being.

If a man deforms his existence by closing it toward the divine ground, the cognitive core in his experience of reality will change, because he must replace the divine pole of the tension by one or the other world-immanent phenomenon (CW 12, p. 237).

As faithful heirs of both noetic and pneumatic faiths we must keep the tension. If we want to adhere to the latter at the exclusion of the former there will ensue an “orthodox” slackness and lack of theoretical Eros to think what cannot be thought. There arises a forgetfulness breeding an insidious form of suspicion: if the divine Word-revelation is the ultimate answer to our existence, what exactly was the question? Unless the noetic art of questioning is recovered pneumatic faith ossifies into a deposit of unintelligible truths. And without the flux of divine presence undermining the “fideistic separation of God from the world” (cf. CW 33, 341), our theoretical powers of determination, turned back upon themselves, threaten to leave us with a valueless universe of which we must be (unruly) masters. Noetic revelation, on the other hand, if left to its own quest runs the risk of sneering at answers and determinations which are not of its own making and unmaking. It becomes infatuated with the bad infinite of immanent self-tran­scendence.

Voegelin draws the conclusion: the two types of faith and revelation must mutually support and correct each other. They form each other’s normative context of understanding. Only thus is our openness toward the divine ground and the mystery of one humanity under God preserved. Woe to us if they should come apart. Dooyeweerd’s objection that Hellenic thought is caught in dialectic reversals of equivocal matter and univocal form obscuring their common origin and co-equal beginning in God he would not deny.²¹ This sort of criticism, however, proceeds on the axis of intentional consciousness and propositional belief. It concerns the what of the divine ground in relation to the world and human society. Voegelin does detect an insufficient differentiation in the Hellenic ideas of cosmos and God in this respect. Only pneumatic revelation cuts the umbilical cord in direction of a world-transcendent God who is able to freely identify with his people in a history-constituting covenant. The movement towards greater differentiation between the partners of the human-divine encounter is also the movement towards their more intimate relation. For Voegelin, the movement reaches its eschatological climax where the people has become a “suffering servant”, hanging on the cross and deserted by his followers with their deluded messianic expectations of a this-worldly polity of ultimate peace and prosperity. From progress in pragmatic history the way leads to the “pilgrim’s progress toward fulfilment through grace in death” (CW 15, 70); although the shift does not make the question of humankind’s advance in the truth of immanent order obsolete.

But there is also another axis to be reckoned with. It is that of the movement of our questioning selves towards the divine Beyond. In this regard Voegelin finds Athens pressing ahead of Jerusalem. True, “the noetic experience of the Beyond and its Parousia in the soul of man” (CW 28, 232) cannot be identified and understood without the symbols it engenders (for Voegelin the ascertaining of the author’s meaning must come before our use of his text within the context of our own quests). But the experience is not exhausted by the symbols. Symbols such as Plato’s philosophical myth of a world-soul are neither dispensable nor ultimate (and they have become victims of “literalist” deformation just as much as biblical symbols).

In the end we have to ask ourselves the question what to make of the notion of a double revelation. Voegelin supplies the original content of human experience of God, world, man and society without recourse to Jewish or Christian documents. He relies on his own philosophical vocabulary gained from close interaction with Plato and Aristotle. This way of proceeding for Dooyeweerd is not an available option. True faith is response to the Word of God and thus inseparably bound to the Scriptures, even if not exhausted by them. We can only speak of the presence of God’s Spirit in pagan culture and thought as far as analogies are warranted by pagan and biblical witnesses themselves. If there was “another” source of revelation there would be notice in the texts, or at least some scripturally warranted way of interpreting the Bible to make sense of such a notion.

On the face of it, Dooyeweerd’s approach has one “critical” advantage: it does not tear the experience of faith apart from symbol. One may say that if we let the Word-revelation come unstuck from its native, pre-theoretical symbolization, as Voegelin seems to do, we run danger of conflating ourselves with the divine ground. Rather than being “under the law” and judged by it, we judge ourselves. Dooyeweerd insists that religious faith in the biblical sense doesn’t lack anything without Hellenic or modern theoria. Ad firmandum cor sincerum sola fides sufficit.²² Defending the substance of “naïve” faith against intellectualist supersessionism and its claim to “higher” noetic truth has been a strong motive driving Reformational Philosophy and the entire Neo-Calvinist tradition.²³ Faith illuminates and guides the life of the mind precisely by helping us to avoid its propensity for theoretical hybris.

Voegelin, however, would not endorse the identification of theoretical and noetic reason. Heir to quite another tradition of Christian and classical philosophy, nous is for him openness to the divine ground as much as our powers of logical-ana­lytical distinction. The two form an inseparable unity. So much indeed that we can’t even frame a non-distorted explanation of why they have come apart! Immanence-philosophy in Dooyeweerd’s sense is for him as much a spiritual as an intellectual-theoretical derailment. The malaise cannot be understood and much less over­come by (negative) transcendental-theoretical self-policing paving the way for the breakthrough of (positive) divine Word-revelation in the “heart”. This rigid distinction between the human and divine sides of the human-divine encounter in the metaxy is itself the result of noetic failure or “doctrinalization”. Voegelin thus rejects the doctrine of original sin in the sense of a general lapse from God. The experience of disobedience against God expressed by the prophet Jeremiah (Jer. 2:11) and Paul the apostle (Rom. 1:18) is not sufficient to generally exclude a right search for the divine ground.

At bottom, the disagreement seems to turn on the idea of nous and the idea of a personal God who in his Word-revelation makes accessible his saving and judging will to us which we could not otherwise have had recourse to. In contrast to Dooyeweerd, Voegelin has no apparent use for the idea of a God who validates creational decrees and authorizes biblical symbols, although the notion of God’s participation in human suffering plays an important role in his philosophy.

Sources

Dooyeweerd, H. (1997). A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, 4 vols. Lewiston et al.: Mellen.

Dooyeweerd, H. (2004). Reformation and Scholasticism in Philosophy. Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press.

Voegelin, E. (1990-2006). Collected Works, 34 vols. Columbia et al.: University of Missouri Press.

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Endnotes