Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.)