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Voegelin's Noetic Differentiation: Religious Implications
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
Abstract
For the past sixty years Eric Voegelin has probed the foundations of order and history. After explaining how Voegelin understands “order” and where he places the historical leaps in being that best disclose it, we fix our sights on the noetic differentiation of consciousness—the clarification of human reason launched by classical Greek philosophy. In Part One we expose Voegelin's view of noetic differentiation, beginning with his version of the classical discoveries by Plato and Aristotle. Next we trace the decline that came with the stoics and religion. Finally we conclude with the reality of differentiated reason and what it opens upon. In Part Two we apply this exposition to religion, pursuing the implications of Voegelin's noetic differentiation. The application takes us first to the eros for the divine ground that Voegelin's noesis manifests and the various ways that this eros shows itself in the different religious traditions. Second, the application shows the relevance of noetic differentiation for liberation theology and the theology of revelation.
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References
1 Opitz, Peter J. and Sebba, Gregor, “Preface,” in The Philosophy of Order: Essays on History, Consciousness and Politics, ed. by Opitz, Peter J. and Sebba, Gregor (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981), p. 15.Google Scholar
2 The New Science of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952)Google Scholar; Order and History, I: Israel and Revelation; II: The World of the Polis; III: Plato and Aristotle; IV: The Ecumenic Age (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956, 1957, 1957, 1974)Google Scholar; Anamnesis (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978Google Scholar; original German, 1966).
3 See Anamnesis, p. 149.
4 See Order and History II, Part 2, for a representative and decisive part of the story.
5 All too clearly, Voegelin's work is bound to defeat a brief presentation of any topic so central to it as noetic differentiation. Through the years, he has gone over such a topic again and again, adding new nuances, more historical data, and further reticulations. It would be a useful, though a complicated task to trace the historical differentiation of Voegelin's own thought through the three periods (a) Order and History I-III, (b) Anamnesis, and (c) Order and History IV. However, the more systematic focus of the present essay forces an effort to seize upon his richest presentation of any given topic. In my view, Order and History IV is to date his richest (and so most demanding) production. There the potentially seamless immensity of the “whole” smiles out of sight like a Cheshire cat. Ideally, then, I would urge the reader to take on the whole of Order and History IV. If forced to make a more finite choice among my sources here, I would indicate for part one, on noetic differentiation itself, two essays now available in Anamnesis: “Reason: The Classic Experience” (pp. 89-115) and “What is Political Reality?” (pp. 141-213). For part two, I would indicate two portions of Order and History IV: “Introduction” (pp. 1-58) and chap. 7, “Universal Humanity” (pp. 300-35). Readers interested in further study might begin with these four sources, rather than trying to follow my hopscotch through the notes.
6 Order and History IV, p. 8.
7 Ibid.
8 Order and History I, p. 1.
9 See Griaule, Marcel, Conversations with Ogotemmeli (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965).Google Scholar
10 Order and History IV, pp. 184-87, with special reference to Philebus (16c-17a).
11 Ibid., pp. 174-76.
12 For the characterization of Aristotle given here, see Order and History IV, pp. 188-92.
13 Ibid., p. 189.
14 1072b20; see Order and History IV, pp. 190-91.
15 Order and History IV, p. 190.
16 See Ibid., p. 191.
17 See Anamnesis, pp. 159ff.; Order and History III, pp. 277-79, 364-66.
18 Voegelin suggests that master Aristotle also missed the pneumatic experience, and consequent virtue, of faith. See Order and History III, p. 364. While faith (formed by charity) is no substitute for precisely noetic clarification, it can prop the right spiritual order that noesis luminously realizes. For analogues in the rise of successful natural science (a further refinement or differentiation of noesis), see Jaki, Stanley L., The Road of Science and the Ways of God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), especially chap. 3.Google Scholar Voegelin's intellectual history is weak on modern science (though Order and History V, forthcoming, may hold some surprises), so complementary studies such as Jaki's are especially welcome.
21 Order and History IV, p. 36.
20 Ibid., p. 37.
21 Ibid.,p. 41.
22 Ibid.
23 See below, section II, 2.
24 Order and History IV, pp. 20-27, 43-48, 48-57.
25 Ibid., p. 44.
26 See Voegelin, Eric, From Eniightenment to Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1975), chaps. VI, X, and XI.Google Scholar
27 Voegelin, Eric, Science, Politics and Gnosticism (Chicago: Regnery, 1968).Google Scholar
28 Order and History IV, p. 58.
29 Ibid., pp. 7-11.
30 See Ibid., pp. 57, 260-66. An interesting clash over this interpretation of Hegel occurs in an exchange between Thomas J. J. Altizer and Voegelin. See Journal of the American Academy of Religion 43/4 (December 1975), 762–64, 767–71.Google Scholar
31 From Enlightenment to Revolution, chap. X; Science, Politics and Gnosticism, pp. 23-28. Of course these works characterize other modern thinkers, as does Anamnesis.
32 See Anamnesis, pp. 170-72, 189-90.
33 Ibid., p. 191.
34 Ibid., pp. 191-92.
35 Order and History III, pp. 228-39.
36 Ibid., p. 113; Order and History IV, pp. 228-38, 233, 323.
37 Order and History IV, pp. 233-34.
38 Anamnesis, p. 172.
39 Readers who find the English terms rather opaque may be helped by the German original. See Anamnesis: Zur Theorie der Geschichte und Politik (München: R. Piper Verlag, 1966), p. 313.Google Scholar
40 Aristotle's term would be nous. “Since in his language the terms nous and noein cany a variety of meanings, while the directional factor of knowledge in tension toward the ground is the material structure of consciousness and its order, it is advisable, for the purpose of our essay, to identify this factor and fix it terminologically. I shall, therefore, call the directional factor ratio” (Anamnesis, p. 149).
41 In actu exercito, a scholastic might say.
42 For an appropriation of Aristotle slightly different than Voegelin's, but on this point reinforcing, see Lonergan, Bernard J. F., Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (New York: Philosophical Library, 1958), chap. 11.Google Scholar Voegelin knew of Insight in the mid-sixties, as his reference to skotosis shows (see Anamnesis, p. 201).
43 See Snell, Bruno, The Discovery of Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960).Google Scholar Voegelin refers to Snell in Order and History II and III, the first reference being Order and History II, p. 103, where he cites the German edition of 1946.
44 Carmody, John, “Plato's Religious Horizon,” Philosophy Today, 15 (1971), 52–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
45 See Anamnesis, chap. 7; Order and History IV, chap. 7 (especially pp. 330-35).
46 Anamnesis, p. 163. Voegelin describes Aristotle's ousia as “a matter of reality of ‘things’ that matter-of-factly and convincingly confronts us in the cosmic primary experience.”
47 Anamnesis, German text, p. 305.
48 Anamnesis, p. 164.
49 Ibid., p. 152.
50 Ibid., p. 153.
51 See Order and History I, Introduction and Part 1.
52 See Order and History IV, chap. 1.
53 Anamnesis, p. 114, gives a helpful summary chart. The levels in the hierarchy of being that human consciousness finds are (from top to bottom): the divine Nous, the noetic level of the human psyche, the psyche's passions, animal nature, vegetative nature, inorganic nature, and the apeironic depth. The top layers form the bottom, while the bottom layers found the top. In terms of human existence in its personal, social, and historical zones, the diagram shows that precisely that order (personal, social, historical) is the order of foundation. See also pp. 208ff.
54 Ibid., pp. 175-83, for instance, amplifies the linguistic demands that noetic differentiation makes, while pp. 183-99 develop more fully the tensions that the reality of knowledge carries.
55 Ibid., p. 147.
56 Voegelin takes this term from Bergson. See ibid., pp. 98, 149. In other works (Order and History III, p. 241; From Enlightenment to Revolution, p. 117), the reference is to Les Deux Sources de la Morale et de la Religion.
57 Order and History IV, pp. 83-85, 146-53, 319-22, 272-99, 322-25.
58 Anamnesis, p. 144.
59 For overviews, see respectively Underhill, Ruth, Red Man's Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965)Google Scholar; Ray, Benjamin, African Religions (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1976)Google Scholar; Eliade, Mircea, Australian Religions (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973)Google Scholar; Eliade, Mircea, A History of Religious Ideas, I: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).Google Scholar On the divine pole of human consciousness in comparative religious perspective, see Carmody, John Tully and Carmody, Denise Lardner, Ways to the Center (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1981).Google Scholar
60 A somewhat offbeat example occurs in Voegelin's study of Mongol selfunderstanding. See “Der Befehl Gottes,” Anamnesis (1966), pp. 179–222.Google Scholar
61 The central story-line one finds in Toynbee's “narrative history of the world,” for instance, is a rather dismal tale of disorder; see Toynbee, Arnold, Mankind and Mother Earth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).Google Scholar
62 Voegelin's own use of the term “religio” tends to pejorative overtones, insofar as it becomes effective through Cicero, the Stoics, and patristic Christianity as a form of doctrinization—a form of the fall from the experiential exegesis of order to its overlay with non-experiential reification (see Order and History IV, pp. 43-48). In line with his caveats on the distinction between reason and revelation, Voegelin prefers a simple view of humanity where all persons are “called” largely in terms of their similarly metaxic consciousnesses. I suggest that this ought to incline those of us who are forced to use the received term “religion” to bend its likely etymology (“binding”) in the direction of the core human eros toward the divine ground. That would make it quite akin to philosophy, though less noetic.
63 For some of the process possibilities here, see Ford, Lewis S., The Lure of God (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978).Google Scholar
64 Anamnesis, p. 171.
65 Order and History III, p. 20.
66 Sebba, Gregor, “Prelude and Variations on the Theme of Eric Voegelin,” The Southern Review 13/4 (October 1977), 647.Google Scholar
67 Ibid., p. 665.
68 Orderand History IV, p. 317. I have tried to concretize some of the spiritual disorder that presently distorts American higher education in my The Progressive Pilgrim (Notre Dame, IN: Fides, 1980).Google Scholar See chap. 3, “Education.”
69 Much of this movement centers on The Cloud of Unknowing. See Johnston, William, The Inner Eye of Love (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978).Google Scholar Also Pennington, M. Basilet al., Finding Grace at the Center (Still River, MA: St. Bede Publications, 1978).Google Scholar
70 Egan, Harvey, “Christian Mysticisms,” Theological Studies 39/3 (September 1978), 399–466.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Egan rehabilitates Ignatian spirituality, which in certain wings of the contemplative return becomes the bete noire. See also his Rahnerian interpretation, The Spiritual Exercises and the Ignatian Mystical Horizon (St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1976).Google Scholar An earlier effort in this direction was Peters, William A. M., The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius: Exposition and Interpretation (Jersey City, NJ: The Program to Adapt the Spiritual Exercises, 1968).Google Scholar
71 See Ricoeur, Paul, “Biblical Hermeneutics,” Semeia 4 (1975), 29–148.Google Scholar
72 Kelsey, Morton, Discernment (New York: Paulist, 1978).Google Scholar
73 Order and History IV, chap. 7.
74 Erikson, Erik, Gandhi's Truth (New York: Norton, 1969), pp. 431–34.Google Scholar
75 See Carmody, Denise Lardner, Women and World Religions (Nashville: Abingdon, 1979).Google Scholar I should emphasize that Voegelin himself does not focus on the feminist implications of ecumenic noesis.
76 Consequently, we see the rise of the Great Goddess. See Christ, Carol P., “Why Women Need the Goddess,” in Christ, Carol P. and Plaskow, Judith, (eds., Womanspirit Rising (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), pp. 273–87Google Scholar; Gross, Rita M., “Hindu Female Deities as a Resource for the Contemporary Rediscovery of the Goddess,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 46/3 (September 1978), 269–91.Google Scholar
77 Coleman, John A., “Vision and Praxis in American Theology,” Theological Studies 37/1 (March 1976), 28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
78 Quoted by Coleman, p. 31, from Ryan's, Distributive Justice (New York, 1927), p. 397.Google Scholar
79 In the background here are Bowker's, John rich two volumes, The Sense of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973)Google Scholar and The Religious Imagination and the Sense of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978).Google Scholar
80 E.g., that of Dinnerstein, Dorothy in The Mermaid and the Minotaur (New York: Harper Colophon, 1976).Google Scholar
81 Order and History IV, p. 48.
82 Ibid., pp. 240-60.
83 Two further instances of Voegelin's own sensitivity to symbolic interpretation are his “Immortality: Experience and Symbol,” Harvard Theological Review 60 (1967), 235–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and his “The Gospel and Culture,” in Miller, D. and Hadidian, D., eds., Jesus and Man's Hope, 2 (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, 1971), pp. 59–101.Google Scholar
84 See e.g., Order and History IV, pp. 13-20, 259-60.
85 Voegelin's advantage would appear to be his more mystical and, consequently more richly symbolic exegesis. Lonergan's advantage would appear to derive from his more explicit focus on theology's functional specialties. Lonergan's, Method in Theology (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972)Google Scholar refers to Voegelin on cosmological symbolism (p. 90). The dialectical clarification that these two thinkers might work on “doctrine” and “dogma” is intriguing. Other noteworthy works on theological method that Voegelin might considerably deepen are: Tracy's, DavidBlessed Rage for Order (New York: Seabury, 1975)Google Scholar; Hartt's, JulianTheological Method and Imagination (New York: Seabury, 1977)Google Scholar; and Kaufmann's, GordonAn Essay on Theological Method (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1979).Google Scholar None of them, I believe, refers to Voegelin. I have treated them enroute to the design, based on Voegelin, , of my Theology for the 1980s (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1980).Google Scholar See chap. 1, “Introduction.”
86 See Foundations of Christian Faith (New York: Seabury, 1978), chap. 2.Google Scholar However, Rahner does not evidence Voegelin's ecumenic historical learning.
87 To “the dark abyss of the wilderness we call God.” It is a mystical commonplace, of course, that that darkness is light too bright for us.