Order and History (Volume 4): The Ecumenic Age (Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 17) [Hardcover]

Eric Voegelin (Author), Michael Franz (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0826213014 | ISBN-13: 978-0826213013 | Publication Date: December 1, 2000

Order and History, Eric Voegelin's five-volume study of how human and divine order are intertwined and manifested in history, has been widely acclaimed as one of the great intellectual achievements of our age.

In the fourth volume, The Ecumenic Age, Voegelin breaks with the course he originally charted for the series, in which human existence in society and the corresponding symbolism of order were to be presented in historical succession. The analyses in the three previous volumes remain valid as far as they go, Voegelin explains, but the original conception proved "untenable because it had not taken proper account of the important lines of meaning in history that did not run along lines of time."

The Ecumenic Age treats history not as a stream of human beings and their actions in time, but as the process of man's participation in a flux of divine presence that has eschatological direction. "The process of history, and such order as can be discerned in it," Voegelin writes, "is not a story to be told from the beginning to its happy, or unhappy, end; it is a mystery in process of revelation."

In the present volume, Voegelin applies his revised conception of historical analysis to the "Ecumenic Age," a pivotal period that extends roughly from the rise of the Persian Empire to the fall of the Roman. The age is marked by the advent of a new type of political unit—the ecumenic empire—achieved at the cost of unprecedented destruction. Yet the pragmatic destructiveness of the age is paralleled by equally unprecedented spiritual creativity, born from the need to make sense of existence in the wake of imperial conquest. These spiritual outbursts gave rise to the great ecumenic religions and raised fundamental questions for human self- understanding that extend into our historical present.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

About the Author

Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) was one of the most original and influential philosophers of our time. Born in Cologne, Germany, he studied at the University of Vienna, where he became a professor of political science in the Faculty of Law. In 1938, he and his wife, fleeing Hitler, immigrated to the United States. They became American citizens in 1944. Voegelin spent much of his career at Louisiana State University, the University of Munich, and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. During his lifetime he published many books and more than one hundred articles. The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin will make available in a uniform edition all of Voegelin's major writings.

About the Editor

Michael Franz is Associate Professor of Political Science at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland. In addition to numerous scholarly articles, he is the author of Eric Voegelin and the Politics of Spiritual Revolt: The Roots of Modern Ideology.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 456 pages
• Publisher: University of Missouri (December 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0826213014
• ISBN-13: 978-0826213013
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.5 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,651,717 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars THE REDIRECTION OF AN INFLUENTIAL (BUT UNFINISHED) PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY, October 14, 2009

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Steven H. Propp (Sacramento, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Order and History (Volume 4): The Ecumenic Age (Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 17) (Hardcover)

Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) is one of the most well-known of modern political philosophers and theorists, but his massive five-volume series "Order and History," as well as the posthumously published eight-volume History of Political Ideas (Volume 8): Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man (Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 26), put forward a coherent and somewhat influential philosophy of history. In the Preface to Volume II, Voegelin says, "Order and History is a philosophical inquiry concerning the principal types of order of human existence in society and history as well as the corresponding symbolic forms."

This volume (published in 1974, after a 17-year gap from volume III) represents a complete reordering of Voegelin's project. In the "Introduction," Voegelin explains, "The present volume ... breaks with the program I have developed for `Order and History' in the Preface to Volume I of the series. I shall, therefore, recall the program and indicate both the nature and the cause of the break... History was conceived as a process of increasingly differentiated insight into the order of being in which man participates by his existence. Such order as can be discerned in the process, including digressions and regressions from the increasing differentiation, would emerge, if the principal types of man's existence in society, as well as the corresponding symbolisms of order, were presented in their historical succession... The study could not be brought to the projected conclusion. As the work on the second sequence of volumes progressed, the structures that emerged from the historical orders and their symbolization proved more complicated than I had anticipated. They were so refractory indeed that the projected volumes could not accommodate the results of analysis as they accumulated... What ultimately broke the project, however, was the impossibility of aligning the empirical types in any time sequence at all that would permit the structures actually found to emerge from a history conceived as a `course.' ... Still, the conception was untenable because it had not taken proper account of the important lines of meaning in history that did not run along lines of time."

He concludes that "The present volume ... presents the genesis of the ecumenic problem and its complications. The next and last volume ... will study the contemporary problems which have motivated the search for order in history."

Here are some representative quotations from the fourth volume:

"The question is rather what causes Gnosticism to appear, and to become influential, precisely at the time when the consciousness of a pneumatic Beyond becomes intensely luminous in the various movements radiating from the epiphany of Christ, as well as in such manifestations of a pagan Gnosis as the Poimandres."
"I am inclined to recognize in the epiphany of Christ the great catalyst that made eschatological consciousness an historical force, both in forming and deforming humanity."
"Gnosticism, whether ancient or modern, is a dead end."
"The relation between the concupiscential and the spiritual exodus is the great issue of the Ecumenic Age."
"There are indeed two ecumenic ages, a Western and a Far Eastern, both unfolding parallel in time. From the fact the ecumenic ages occur in the plural, there arises the question whether there are two mankinds, each having a history of its own and each developing an Ecumenic Age."
"the Ecumenic Age is the time in which the symbolisms of the `eras' and `periods' were created. When history comes into view as universally human, it is discovered to be characterized by epochal advances of insight into its structure."
"History, it appears, has a long breath."

(Read my reviews of Voegelin's other volumes.)