Eric Voegelin
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 123rd anniversary of the birth of Erich Hermann Wilhelm Vögelin (03 January 1901–19 January 1985), who was born in Cologne on this date in 1901.
Voegelin’s demanding thought requires a full measure of effort on the part of the student of Voegelin’s work, who must master his terminology, his references, and his own body of work in order to understand it. Voegelin offers a theologically inspired interpretation of history that is distinct both from traditional providential philosophies of history (Augustine, Bossuet) and more recent efforts such as Toynbee (whose philosophy of history is not providential in the traditional sense, but is shot through with religious references). The usual criticism made of Toynbee is that he imposes too much philosophy and theology on history, but Voegelin’s criticism is that Toynbee fails to complete the project implicit in his work because Toynbee is guilty of, “…a dilettantism with regard to questions of reason and revelation, philosophy and religion, metaphysics and theology, intuition and science.” I agree with Voegelin that Toynbee is a dilettante in philosophy and theology, but I haven’t found anyone else who charges Toynbee with being insufficiently metaphysical.
Nevertheless, his essay on Toynbee is quite helpful in situating Voegelin’s thought among other philosophies of history. If we consider mainstream historians as occupying one spot on the historiographical map — let’s call this the center of the map — Toynbee, too philosophical and theological for most historians, and even for most philosophers of history, is offset from the center occupied by the bulk of historians. Voegelin, however, for whom Toynbee is insufficiently philosophical and theological, occupies a far margin of the map of historiography, beyond Toynbee, in the area marked, “Here Be Monsters.”
One can see the sources of Voegelin’s otherwise respectful appreciation of Toynbee (in his 1961 paper “Toynbee’s History as a Search for Truth”) in Voegelin’s construction of a sequence of kinds of civilizations, which he identifies, in order, as cosmological civilizations, ecumenic civilizations, and orthodox civilizations — a sequence explained and described as forming, “…a meaningful sequence, each presupposing the preceding one, so that the sequence becomes an irreversible whole of experiments with the problem of order,” and this in spite of Voegelin’s assertion in Order and History, Volume 4, The Ecumenic Era, that “…the form that a philosophy of history has to assume… is definitely not a story of meaningful events to be arranged on a time line.” No doubt a Voegelin scholar could effortlessly disambiguate this apparent speaking at cross purposes; Voegelin is, as I noted above, difficult to read and difficult to understand.
In a posthumously published paper from around 1963 (appearing in Volume 28 of his collected work under the title, “What is History?”), he begins with the following sentence: “An inquiry concerning history has predecessors but no traditions.” This is a telling claim, and one with which I agree. An under-theorized body of knowledge has predecessors, insofar as there are those who have gone before, but there is no established tradition of scholarship from which one can take the baton that has been handed forward by past scholars to the next generation. In science, we would say that there is no scientific research program, and we can truly say of history that there is no scientific research program for history. If one approaches history as a science, there are predecessors, but no tradition. Voegelin does, with some regularity, make reference to science in connection with history, but the direction in which he would take a science of history is, as implied by the cartographic simile above, even farther off the map of historiography, deep in uncharted waters, and in this he somewhat resembles Husserl’s late non-naturalistic ideal of science.
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