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Political Theory
A Critical Analysis
Richard Bishirjian
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The Development
of
Political Theory
A Critical Analysis
Richard Bishirjian

The Society For The Study Of

Traditional Culture

Dallas, Texas
Copyright © 1978 by The Society for the Study of Traditional
Culture

This book made possible by a grant from the

Robert L. Roberts Foundation
 PREFACE

Our assumption throughout this investigation of

the development otf political theory is that politics is
neither solely governed by economic interests, nor
shaped entirely by historical causes beyond the con-
trol of participants in political life. The political ideas
and opinions held by citizens actively shape a socie-
ty’s consciousness of what its economic interests
are, and what forces may be beyond its control. Our
ideas determine what we believe to be significant,
possible, and right in politics. Students of political
science properly hunger, therefore, for comprehen-
Sive approaches to political theory which place in
theoretical perspective the major ideas which govern
the world today.
Fifteen years ago this desire was largely filled by
the undergraduate liberal arts curriculum which gave
to students a grounding in intellectual and cultural
history. But today a college education no longer
provides grounding in history or philosophy. The
educational ‘‘reforms’’ of the past decade have cre-
ated an intellectual elite which is ignorant of most of
what previously was the mark of an educated man. It
is especially worrisome that at a time when politics
has become more important in our daily lives, we are
less knowledgeable of the ideas which give it
direction and shape. This work, written in response
to what in effect is an intellectual vacuum, attempts
to provide the essential background necessary for an
intelligent view of contemporary intellectual culture.
As such, however, we have felt it necessary to reject
some assumptions traditionally held by authors of
political theory texts.
Since the end of World War II, for example, several
great scholars in Egyptology, Comparative |
Reiigions, and Old Testament studies have given
political theorists an expanded and substantively
improved understanding of the context within which
political theory originated. A study of the develop-
ment of political theory today, therefore, cannot
simply begin with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
Political theory, Eric Voegelin and others have
argued, emerged in reaction against a more ancient
mythic perspective of order which was prevalent
throughout the ancient world. The nature of that
revolution in thought must be comprehended if polit-
ical theory itself is to be understood. For that reason,
Chapter One begins with analysis of ancient, mythic
concepts of political order.
More importantly, most traditional political theory
texts are afflicted by the ‘“‘historicist’’ approach of
their authors. ‘*Historicism’’ assumes that political
ideas have validity only for the historical moment in
which those ideas were created and that political
theory does not have universal value, only individual
psychological value for the creators of those ideas
and those persons and communities which accept or
live by them. A view such as this, of course, negates
the critique of moral relativism in which political
theory originated as the science of valid knowledge of
political order. Works on political theory as they are
written traditionally, with the exception of Eric
Voegelin and to a lesser degree Leo Strauss and his
students, do not philosophically distinguish between
higher and lower modes of theoretical discourse. We
believe, on the contrary, that the history of political
theory reveals a hierarchy of concepts of political
order, some higher, others lower.
Following the work of Eric Voegelin, examined in
Part Four, we attempt to show how political theory
originates in, and is an expression of, experience of
reality. As a consequence, we _ reject the
conventional assumption that political theory is an
endeavor by which the philosopher expresses his
private ‘‘vision’’ and attempts to prove it. Political
theory is not the making of logical fancies. In its
original meaning it is the reflective act by which
representative men articulate their experience of the
constitution of being from the perspective of the
participation of their souls, understood as a
constituent aspect of reality. The political
philosopher is therefore open to the reality of being
of which he is a part and political theory is the act by
which theorists give meaning to political reality from
within. The ‘‘ideas”’ ofa political theorist are, more
accurately, ‘“‘symbols’’ by which they articulate a
common experience of reality. Formalistic
presentations of the ‘‘doctrines’’ of such
ontologically oriented political theorists, therefore,
distort our understanding of the activity of political
theory. The political philosophy of Plato cannot be
explained, for example, by reference to his
‘‘doctrines,’’ but can be understood by coming to
know the philosophic mode by which he sought the
truth. That is the purpose of our examination, in
Chapter Two, of Plato’s symbols of political
dialogue. |
In Part Two, we attempt to show how the radical
scepticism of Modern political theory led to the
development of political doctrines from which the

ii.
theological truths of Classical-Christian political
theory have been eliminated. We view this as a quali-
tative decline in the development of political theory,
and suggest the grounds on which this judgment can >
be substantiated. The concepts of the modern politi-
cal theorists, to be sure, are continuations of the
Western tradition of political theory, but they also
represent a repudiation of the ontological orientation
of their philosophic predecessors who created this
discipline. By an examination of the consequences of
this development, we show how modern political
theorists reconstituted political order on new,
desacralized, and thus secular ground. The con-
scious attempt by Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, and
Rousseau to replace the civil theology of the
Christian West with a new view of order manifest in
civil religions of their own creation, and composed of
instruments expressive of a view of order autono-
mous of any higher order or sanction, is a principal
aspect of this development. And the political and
social consequences of this shift in orientation can be
seen in these uniquely modern aspects of
contemporary life: the decline of authority; the
concentration of power in a_ centralized,
bureaucratically administered state; the experience
of alienation and anomie, of rootlessness; and the
decline of intermediate’ institutions which
traditionally serve to retard the power of the state.
Lastly, in Part Three, we examine in detail the
concepts and materials by which specialists in
modern ideologies have argued that many modern
political movements are uniquely religious. So far as
we can determine, this is the first political theory text
which incorporates this development in modern
political science. The critical distinctions between
political theory and political religions which we
attempt to make in this section, and also our assess-
ment that Modern political theory represents a
decline in the development of political theory in the
West, specify the meaning of the concept ‘‘critical’’
in the title of this study.
In order to maintain the scale of this study within
restricted space, it was necessary to omit discussion
of many political theorists covered in works three or
four times the size of this. This limitation, however,
is not without advantages. At the cost of omitting
some individual political theorists, we have been
forced to concentrate upon the unity of
Classical-Christian political theory, the
development of modern political religions, the
nature of the conflict between cosmological myth
and political theory, and the crisis of behaviorism,
themes not treated in the standard histories of
political theory.
This book was designed to supplement the under-
graduate student’s readings in the works of primary
authors. It will be especially helpful to the graduate
student in political theory or philosophy who wishes
to supplement his readings by reference to a political
theory ‘‘primer’’ inthe best sense of the term: that is,
a ‘‘primer’’ which deals with beginnings, the begin-
nings or elements of political theory .Our judgments
about what these beginnings or elements may have
been, however, are not intended to supplant the ideas
of the student. They are made to assist and supple-
ment his understanding. The conscientious student
will always read the primary sources before reading
the secondary ones. At the conclusion of each
chapter a number of readings are suggested for those
who wish to read further. Thus this work was con-
ceived and wnitten not for the lazy or unconscien- ’
tious, but for those students and teachers alike who
want to compare notes with someone who is travel-
ling the same arduous but thoroughly enjoyable road.
With few exceptions, no claim to originality in the
following pages can be made. Instead, an immense
debt must be acknowledged to those masters of
political theory, living and dead, who make it possi-
ble for us to engage in political philosophy, admitted-
ly, like pygmies on the shoulders of giants. It was my
good fortune to have known and worked with two of
these masters personally, my teacher at the Universi-
ty of Notre Dame, Gerhart Niemeyer, and Eric
Voegelin, whose courses I attended as a student.

vis
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This study of the development of political theory

was made possible through a Fellowship Research
Grant from the Earhart Foundation and a grant from
the College of New Rochelle Secretarial Assistance
Fund. I am grateful to both the Earhart Foundation
and the College of New Rochelle for their support. I
am also indebted to the Society for the Study of
Traditional Culture for making it possible to publish
this work.
Portions of this study were read by Gerhart
Niemeyer, James Wiser, J. W. Corrington, Jene
Porter, Alexander Landi, and Ralph MclInerny. I
wish to acknowledge their many suggestions and
assistance. I especially wish to thank Angelo
Codevilla for his substantive and _ stylistic
Suggestions for improving the entire manuscript.
Though I am thankful for the assistance of all the
above, I must take full responsibility for the
completed work.
Thomas Moore and Robert Gilliam of the library of
the College of New Rochelle were of great assistance
in providing me with books and copies of articles not
in Our permanent collection. I wish also to thank the
Faculty Secretary, Mrs. Ruth Keeshan, and Ms.
Barbara Albanese for typing early drafts of this
manuscript, and Mrs. Frances Miceli for typing the
final draft.
Lastly, I must express my thanks to Linda, Philip,
and Maria for their long endurance of this and other
projects. This study is dedicated to them.

vil.
 CONTENTS

Preface
Acknowledgments
Contents

Part One:
CLASSICAL-CHRISTIAN
POLITICAL THEORY

Chapter I COSMOLOGICAL MYTH AND ORIGINS

OF POLITICAL SCIENCE
Creation Myths and Political Order
Reaction Against the Myth: Plato’s Euthyphro
Socrates: Daimonic Man

Chapter Il PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY VERSUS

SOPHISTIC RHETORIC
Political Philosophy and Statesmanship
The Awake and Those Asleep
Persuasion
Logos
Dialectic
Episteme
The Political

Chapter III ARISTOTLE’S DEFINITION OF

POLITICAL SCIENCE
Friendship i
The Science of Human Action
Phronesis and Right By Nature

Chapter IV PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY AND

CHRISTIAN POLITICAL THEORY
Historical Consciousness of Israel
Philosophy cf History
The Community of Mankind
St. Augustine’s Critique of the City of Man

vill.
 Part Two:
MODERN POLITICAL THEORY

Chapter V MACHIAVELLI
Is Machiavelli Modern?
Rules of the Political Process
Realist or Secular Chiliast?

Chapter VI HOBBES’ SCIENCE OF POLITICS

**Knowledge Is Power’’
Political Science and Power
Is Power Enough?

Chapter VII LOCKE’S VIEW OF LIMITED

GOVERNMENT
Attack on Innate Ideas
Origin and Nature of Human Knowledge
The Law of Nature
Locke’s Political Philosophy
The State of Nature

Chapter VII1_ THE POLITICS OF REVOLUTION:

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
The State of Nature >
The Social Contract
The General Will
The Legislator
Civil Religion and the Death of Political
Philosophy

Part Three:
‘“SECOND REALITIES”

Chapter IX MODERN POLITICAL RELIGIONS

Ancient Gnosticism
Renaissance Hermetism
Idealist Humanism

Ds
 The Idealist View of Man as God
Atheist Humanism
Ludwig Feuerbach
Karl Marx

Chapter X APOCALYPSE, HISTORY, AND POLITICS

Scriptural Sources
Isaiah
Daniel
Revelation
Millenarianism
Joachim of Flora
Savonarola
Modern Millennialism
Universal History

Part Four:
BEYOND BEHAVIORISM

Chapter XI THE RECOVERY OF CLASSICAL-

CHRISTIAN POLITICAL THEORY
Positivist Rejection of Prescientific Knowledge
Ethical Neutrality
Environmentalism
Systems Theory
Is Behaviorism **Scientific’’?
Behaviorism’s Claim to Objectivity
Science and Personal Knowledge:
Michael Polanyi
Science and Art
An Ontology of Knowing
Personal Knowledge and Classical
Philosophy
The Philosophical Anthropology of
Eric Voegelin
Philosophy of History
**Noetic’? and **Pneumatic”’ Theophany
** Leap-in-Being”’
Deformation of the Open Soul
 PART ONE:
CLASSICAL-CHRISTIAN
POLITICAL THEORY
 CHAPTER I
COSMOLOGICAL MYTH
AND ORIGINS OF
POLITICAL SCIENCE
Myths were the common symbolic language of the
members of ancient communities. They were not
merely tales, but served ancient men as tools by
which they interpreted the order they perceived in
the cosmos and their lives. The myths were
imitations of archetypes or paradigms of reality that
Overarch human affairs, of which the highest
paradigm evoked was the sacredness of the gods.
Their action and their sacredness gave meaning to the
world of man. By means of myths about the gods
ancient men expressed their consciousness of their
participation in a sacred reality greater than
themselves. Thus they also expressed consciousness
of the fact that as creatures, they were dependent on
the gods. Political order and social order, which they
did not distinguish, were perceived as part of a larger
cosmos permeated by intracosmic gods. The cosmos
of ancient man was “‘alive’’ in that it actively
revealed to him powers personified in gods. One
scholar has characterized mythic experience as that
of an ‘‘I-and-Thou relationship,’’! not.as a relation-
ship of person versus inanimate object. Ancient man
did not see the world around him as a universe of dif-
ferentiated objects, but as a cosmos composed of
other beings whose living presence was manifest in
the progress of daily life. The natural phenomena of a
thunderstorm were not perceived, for example, as
differentiated ‘‘natural’’ phenomena, but as a
compact ‘‘storm god.’’ The cosmos itself, the earth,
the sea, the heavens, winds, rivers, were gods. -
Everywhere ancient man tumed, he encountered the
gods and interpreted his own actions by reference to
their decisions. Political order was also understood
as standing in direct relationship with the gods. It was
not an order which was autonomous or independent
of an order higher than itself. Rather it was perceiv-
ed as an extension of cosmic order. Political com-
munity was experienced as a smaller portion ofa larg-
er sacred order or cosmos. As such, Eric Voegelin
has called this view microcosmic and the form in
which it was expressed, the “‘cosmological myth.’’2
The makers of myths attempted, therefore, to depict
as best they could the relationship of man himself to
the sacred cosmos, its origins, and the relationship of
this original creation to political community. Cosmo-
logical creation myths explained not only the origin
of the cosmos, but also the ongin of political order.

CREATION MYTHS AND POLITICAL ORDER

A creation myth from India dating from the ninth

century, B.C., called Purusha Sukta or ‘‘Hymn of
Man,”’ is representative. It tells the story of the crea-
tion by the gods of the animate world, man and socie-
ty, by means of the primeval sacrifice of Purusha.

The sacrificial victim, namely Purusha, born at the very

beginning, they sprinkled with sacred water upon the
sacrificial grass. With him as oblation the gods performed
the sacrifice, and also the Sadhyas (aclass of semidivine
beings) and the rishis (ancient seers).
 From that wholly offered sacrificial oblation were born
the verses and the sacred chants; from it were born the
meters; the sacrificial formula was born from it.

From it horses were born and also those animals who

have double rows of teeth; cows were born from it,
from it were born goats and sheep.

When they divided Purusha, in how many different

portions did they arrange him? What became of his
mouth, what of his two arms? What were his two thighs
and his two feet called?

His mouth became the brahman [priests]; his two arms

were made into the rajanya [warriors]; his two thighs the
vaishyas [workers]; from his two feet the shudra [slaves]
were born.

The moon was born from the mind, from the eye the sun
was born; from the mouth, Indra and Agni, from the
breath the wind was born.

From the navel was the atmosphere created, from the

head the heaven issued forth; from the two feet was
born the earth and the quarters (the cardinal directions)
from the ear. Thus did they fashion the worlds.3

The myth expresses ancient man’s experience of

the consubstantiality of his own order with the order
of nature by describing that order as derivative of
the same originative substance, Purusha, as the hea-
venly bodies and the earth. The Purusha Sukta,
therefore, does not merely explain how things came
into being. It also indicates how society is a small part
of a larger cosmic order, and specifies why society is
an ordered hierarchy of priests, warriors, workers,
and slaves. The important ritual slaughter of Purusha
by priests in ancient Indian society stemmed from
their ritual recreation of this original act of creation.
By mythically recreating the sacrifice of Purusha, In-
dian priests consciously participated in the act of cre-
ation of the world and society. In this way they con-
served the sacredness of social order, and thus con-
tinued its existence.4 The order of society ritually
and actually depended on their continued sacrifices
because order meant the maintenance of cosmic
order. Mircea Eliade has called this phenomenon the
**myth of the eternal return.” Creation myths, what
specialists call ‘“‘cosmogonies,’’ were the means by
which ancient man regenerated cosmic life by return-
ing to that past moment in sacred time when the cos-
mos was created.
In ancient Egypt, this role of continuing the conso-
nance of social with cosmic order was performed by
the king, the Pharaoh, who was the divine mediator
through whom cosmic order was extended to the peo-
ple. The Egyptians believed that without Pharaoh the
country would fall into disorder. This idea was ex-
pressed most emphatically by the Egyptian political
institution of divine kingship. When a king was alive,
he was called “‘Horus,’’ the falcon god whose eyes
were the sun and the moon. His hegemony and power
Over social order were symbolized by the flight of a
cosmic falcon, one of whose eyes is always visible in
the heavens. When the king died, however, he as-
cended to the heavens and became the god Osiris.
The power of Osiris in Egypt was manifest in the
Nile, whose powerful contribution to the con-
tinuance of life was visual proof of Osiris’ power.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the Egyptians in-
cluded Osiris among the first nine (Ennead) gods of
their religion. In this way, they expressed the unity of
social with cosmic divine order. Just as Osiris was
present among the Ennead at the beginning of crea-
tion, so also was present the Egyptian social order,
the stability of which was attributed to its cosmic ori-
gins. Not only the kingdom, but individual cities of
ancient Egypt, as well, understood their own politi-
cal existence in terms of their relationship to this
Original creation of the world. ‘“‘The Creation by
Atum,’’ a myth of the reign of the Sixth Dynasty
(2180 B.C.) king, Pepi II (Nefer-ka-re), whose city
was Heliopolis, speaks of the sun god (Atum) as the
first of the gods because he arises from the original
hill or site of creation.» The pyramids in which this
text was inscribed were images of that primeval hill-
ock and thus symbols of creation of the cosmos. In
this way, cosmic order was symbolically interlocked
with the political because the hillock originated on
the site of the city of Heliopolis and it was there that
the creation by Atum of the air (Shu), moisture
(Tefnut), and the other gods of the Ennead took
place. Pepi II, King of Heliopolis, was understood to
be the ruler of a political community which could
trace its existence back to the onginal creation.
This belief lent legitimacy and stability to the reign
of the Pharaoh, of course, but it also contributed to
the static character of Egyptian society. The
Egyptians, and for that matter all cultures formed by
‘*cosmological’’ myths, valued the unchanging, what
we would call the eternal. Henri Frankfort has de-
scribed this regard for immutability by observing that
‘*for the Egyptians the past was normative.’’® These
societies sought their norms in the myths of original
creative acts of gods in the past, norms which were
their standards of action in the present. It is of great
significance that before political theory could
develop, before the transition in consciousness from
compact myth to fully differentiated philosophic con-
sciousness could proceed, a successful framework
for the criticism of myths had to be established.

REACTION AGAINST THE MYTH:

PLATO’S EUTH YPHRO
The self-conscious study of politics, with claims to
valid knowledge about political reality, in part devel-
Oped in reaction against the *“‘cosmological’’ symbols
of order of the ancient myths. That reaction was not
without problems, as the death of Socrates suggests.
The conflict between myth and philosophy was his-
torically the product of what in Greece was the disin-
tegration of mythic consciousness as a continuing
force in private and public order. In his dialogue
Euthyphro, Plato attempted a statement about this
conflict which shows why a person such as Socrates
was so much needed in Athens. The title character of
the dialogue is representative of the public confusion
concerning the basic questions of how one can live a
virtuous life and what the standards are by which one
is to live the life of a good citizen. The scene of the
Euthyphro is depicted against a canvas of social and
personal disorder.
Socrates meets Euthyphro in the Lyceum, a place
in Athens near the temple of Apollo designated for le-
gal transactions. Socrates is there to prepare for his
own criminal prosecution ona charge that he has cor-
rupted the youth, introduced new gods, and in gener-
al threatened the stability of the political community
 by acts of impiety. Euthyphro, on the other hand, is
not there to be prosecuted, but to prosecute his
father. An employee of the family estate became
drunk and murdered one of the servants. Euthy-
phro’s father captured him, bound him, and threw
him into a ditch, while he sent a servant toAthens to
find a priest to advise him what to do. Before the ser-
vant could return with the information, however, the
man died of exposure. Traditional Greek worship,
-we assume, had calcified into ritual practices which
led to personal tragedies such as the death of the em-
ployee. / It had ceased to express a living experience
of order. Plato was sensitive to this corruption of tra-
ditional myths and used the example as an indictment
of their failure to effect right action in the lives of
those who adhered to them. Euthyphro himself was
not only corrupt, to the extent that he was fanatically
devoted to the belief that he was acting out of great
holiness in prosecuting his father; but also arrogant,
in feeling that he was above the common sort of men
because he believed he knew with. certainty what the
gods required. Though it is Euthyphro’s ignorance
which is the overarching issue of discussion, in the
background of the dialogue lurks the fact that Socra-
tes will soon be the victim of an upside-down society,
a society in which the most devout prosecute their
fathers for murder, whose fathers, in turn, neglect
persons in their charge while they await information
from oracles—a society which kills its most pious cit-
izen on acharge of impiety.

SOCRATES: DAIMONIC MAN

Socrates is representative of that type of ‘‘re-

ligious’’8 or daimonic man (daimonios aner)? who
criticized the ‘cosmological’? myths from the per-
spective of a higher consciousness of divine reali- —
ty. Within Hellenic culture he was preceded by
the sixth century Ionian mystic philosophers who
sought a first principle (arche) which expressed
experience of the sacred in terms that were, by
varying degrees, not mythic. It.is a testament to
Socrates’ genius that all these are generally referred
to as the Presocratics.!9 Political philosophy was the
necessary outcome of their philosophic critique of
the public myths, because ritual participation in
cosmological order could not be sustained among
men who had rejected the myths. The philosophers
hoped that reason (/ogos), aS Opposed to mythic
speculation, could be fashioned into a modus to fulfill
the public needs ofa culture now stripped of socially
viable myths. We trace the origin of political
philosophy to Socrates because he attempted to fill
the vacuum of public order in Hellas with a new mode
of public symbolization of order. Political
philosophy, as Socrates lived it, and as Plato would
develop it further, was the new mode of
existenc e-in-tru th, perform ing the role of statesm an
for a cosmological society that had dried up spiritual-
ly and intellectually. !|
The experience of the sacred which was at the root
of mythic symbolizations of cosmic order was not re-
jected by the early Greek philosophers. But these
mystic philosophers or daimonic men did seek a first
principle which expressed the sacred arche in terms
that were, by varying degrees, nonmythic. Still very
close to the myth, Thales suggested that the origin of
the process of coming into being, growth, and death

10.
was water, a symbol of generation in all mythic cul-
tures. Anaximenes, perhaps more revolutionary,
said that it was air; and Anaximander made the com-
plete break with the formulation that the arche was
infinite (to apeiron) and that the infinite arche of
being was divine (to theion), which symbol, itself,
was a philosophic revolution. No longer from that
point could the question of the beginnings be
answered in terms of a mythic god. Anaximander had
abstracted the essence of the genderless divine
(theion) reality from the mythic gods and chose the
neuter article (to) to express that absence of myth.
The arche of nature is not a god (theos), he said, it is
the divine (to theion) reality. !2 Socrates stood in this
constructive tradition of criticism of myth, founded
upon a new concept of the divine reality
differentiated ie Use arly from the previous
mythical forms.
Nevertheless, because Socrates had become the
chief representative of the movement of philosophy
in Greece, he found himself caught between this new
consciousness of order and the old traditional cosmo-
logical view. Socrates was aware of the tension
created by the opposition of these views and at his
trial even suggested that he was unable to reconcile
the conflict between human and political virtue in
which he found himself. He inquired of one of the
judges, Callias, who it was that had knowledge of hu-
man and political virtue and could teach it to the
young?!3{n asking the question, Socrates posed the
dilemma ofhis own life: how to walk the line between
fulfilling oneself by being virtuous, and also meet the
standards of citizenship in such a way that they do
not conflict. Since one of the accepted ends of
government was to reconcile any conflict between
good citizenship and virtue, Socrates himself was on
trial, charged with impiety. When Callias -
replied, therefore, that certainly he knew of
someone, Evenus, a Parian, and what price he
charged for the lessons, Socrates remarked that such
a person was indeed blessed and admitted that he
himself had no such knowledge. Socrates could not
account for the Parian’s art, unless it was, he said, a
wisdom more than human. Because Socrates had de-
voted himself to the pursuit of human wisdom and
was unable to resolve the conflict in his own life, he
implied that Evenus must have plumbed some other
source of information.
Socrates was making a telling statement because
he was known for his discovery of the principle that
knowledge is virtue. And, yet, his inability to act ina
way consistent with public virtue, as defined by his
judges, did not imply a lack of knowledge (virtue) on
his part, because the knowledge claimed by Evenus
was simply not human and therefore could not be a
virtue. Evenus was ignorant of the dilemma, or he
would not have claimed to possess the requisite
wisdom. The secret knowledge, which his earlier ac-
cusers had imputed to Socrates, was no secret so far
as Socrates was concerned. He lay claim only to a
certain type of human wisdom, in pursuit of which he
came into conflict with traditional Greek society.
The men of the ancient world, who looked upon
their society as a microcosmos, experienced
themselves as dependent upon the gods. Political or-
der, represented as an extension or analogue of cos-
mic order, was understood to be dependent on acon-
tinued right public relationship toward the gods, who
were the source of public order. Nor was social order
independent of nature. All aspects of existence were
participants in a greater cosmic drama. Political com-
munity, therefore, was a partnership in the greater
cosmos which included the gods, society, man, and
nature. It is interesting that Plato’s description of So-
crates evokes a concept of community and political
obligation implicit in the formulations of these
ancient cosmological myths. In the Gorgias, for ex-
ample, Socrates says that heaven, theearth, gods and
men are a cosmos held together by community,
friendship, orderliness, temperance, and justice.
This ordered cosmos, he said, is ruptured by men
who seek their own self-interest or pleasure, with the
result that they are incapable of friendship or com-
munity with others or God.!4The concept Socrates
has presented, like the view of order of the cosmolog-
ical myths, is not that of man as an autonomous actor,
but as a creaturely participant in a community which
contains all that is.
‘All the same, Socrates experienced political
obligation which was philosophical, not cosmologi-
cal. Though the concept of obligation implicit in the
cosmological myths could exist side by side in
Socrates’ analysis of his dilemma, the nature of the
conflict had been altered substantially. The intra-
cosmic gods were not responsible for his tragedy, nor
were they the holders of his fate. Socrates himself
would act and choose justice or injustice and thus
was conscious that man himself in openness to the
transcendent and not the intracosmic gods was the
source of public order and disorder. He was in that
sense free, and, as a result, was himself responsible
for his actions. Socrates’ decision was his own, not

[3:
an extension in the world of man of an arbitrary act of
the gods. In the person of Socrates, political com-
munity was perceived no longer as a ‘‘micro-
cosmos,’’ but as a ‘‘macroanthropos.”’ 15
To appreciate the power of this insight, which we
perhaps take for granted today, we need only reflect
that one of its consequences was the death of the man
who was its chief representative. From the perspec-
tive of traditional cosmological culture, a man such
as Socrates who would argue an anthropological per-
spective which placed man at the center of the uni-
verse, rather than focus on the gods of the cosmos
who mediated the fortunes of man, was considered
impious and a source of corruption in the community.
Yet we have seen that the origin of the political
anthropology of Socrates was not an impious
atheism; it was the attempt of the philosophers to ar-
ticulate their experience of the divine in non-mythic
terms. For political philosophy to discover the hu-
man psyche as the locus of order and disorder in soci-
ety, it had first to discover the divine arche beyond
the process of physical genesis, growth and decay,
and the substance of order as a right relationship of
the psyche to the divine, !©This discovery in turn de-
veloped into philosophical! inquiry as the act of indi-
vidual and community reordering.
 SUGGESTED READINGS

Eliade, Mircea. Patterns in Comparative Religion,

Rosemary Sheed, trans. Cleveland: Meridian
Books, World Publishing Co., 1966.
Frankfort, Henri. The Birth of Civilization in the
Near East. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday &
Co., 1956.
. Kingship and the Gods: A Study of Ancient
Near Eastern Religion as the Integration of Soci-
ety and Nature. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1948.
Frankfort, Henn and H.A., et al. Before Philo-
sophy. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1966.
Jaeger, Werner. The Theology of Early Greek Philo-
sophers. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1964.
Pritchard, James B., ed. Ancient Near Eastern Texts
Relating to the Old Testament. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1969.
Snell, Bruno. The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek
Origins of European Thought, T.G. Rosenmeyer,
trans. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers,
Torchbooks, Academy Library, 1960.
Voegelin, Eric. Order and History, Vol. 1, Israel and
Revelation. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univer-
sity Press, 1956.
. Order and History, Vol. Il, The World of
the Polis. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univer-
SILVAETESS.. §95.
Wilson, John A. The Culture of Ancient Egypt.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Phoenix
Books, 1951.
 NOTES

IHenri and H.A. Frankfort, et al., Before Philo-

sophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man,
an Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near
Fast (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1966), 13.‘*The man
of the societies in which myth is a living thing lives in
a World that, though ‘in cipher’ and mysterious, is
‘open.’ The World ‘speaks’ to man, and to under-
stand its language he needs only to know the myths
and decipher the symbols. Through the myths and
symbols of the Moon man grasps the mysterious
solidarity among temporality, birth, death, and resur-
rection, sexuality, fertility, rain, vegetation, and so
on. The World is no longer an opaque mass of objects
arbitrarily thrown together, it is a living Cosmos,
articulated and meaningful. In the last analysis, The
World reveals itself as language. It speaks to man
through its structure and rhythms.’ Mircea Eliade,
Myth and Reality, Willard R. Trask, trans. (New
York: Harper and Row, Harper Torchbooks, 1968),
141.
2Eric Voegelin, Order and History, Vol. 1, Israel
and Revelation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1956), 1-11.
3This text is found in Ainslie T. Embree, ed., The
Hindu Tradition (New York: Vintage Books,
Random House, 1972), 25-26. Bracketed information
is added here.
4Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth
of the Eternal Return, Willard R. Trask, trans. (New
York: Harper Torchbooks, Harper and Brothers,
Publishers, 1959), 81.
SJames B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern
Texts Relating to the Old Testament (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1969), 3. This text is the
single best cumulative source of original documents
of the ancient Near East in English.
6Henri Frankfort, Before Philosophy, 35.
7*The primitive who sees his field laid waste by
drought, his cattle decimated by disease, his child ill,
himself attacked by fever or too frequently unlucky
as a hunter, knows that all these contingencies are
not due to chance but to certain magical or demonic
influences, against which the priest or sorcerer
possesses weapons. Hence he does as the com-
munity does in the case of catastrophe: he turns to the
sorcerer to do away with the magical effect, or to the
priest to make the gods favorable to him.’’ Mircea
Eliade, Cosmos and History, 96-97.
8The concept ‘‘religious man”’ is used frequently
by Mircea Eliade, in opposition to ‘‘ profane man,”’ as
a type who is open to experience of the sacred. See
Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The
Nature of Religion, Willard R. Trask, trans. (New
York: Harper and Row, Publishers, The Cloister
Library, Harper Torchbooks, 1961). For a discus-
sion of criticism of myth, see Eliade, Myth and
Reality, 111.
9Voegelin discusses the implicit significance of
the symbol daimonios aner as follows: *‘When the
soul discovers existence to have meaning as a
movement toward noetic consciousness, it discovers
the discovery to have meaning as an event in history.
‘‘Plato recognizes the historical field constituted
by the event, and he articulated its structural points
through symbols. In the Symposium, the philosopher

je
who moves in the realm of the spirit (pan to
daimonion) receives the name of a daimonios aner,
for the man who lives in the older, more compact -
form of the myth he reserves the thnetos, the mortal
of the epics; and the man who has become familiar
with the new insight but resists it, he simply calls an
amathes, an ignorant man. Though the term thnetos
and amathes were previously in use, they now ac-
quire a new meaning through the relation of the exis-
tential types they denote to the historically new type
of the daimonios uner. A new field of meaning thus e-
merges, when the older or resistant types are made
intelligible as compact or deformed in the light of
noetic consciousness.’ Eric Voegelin, Order and
History, Vol. 1V, The Ecumenic Age (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1974), 187.
10G.S. Kirk and J.E. Raven, The Presocratic
Philosophers: A Critical History With a Selection of
Texts (Cambridge: At The University Press, 1964);
Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic
Philosophers (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1966).
1lWe borrow the concept “‘existence-in-truth’’ to
express the nature of Classical philosophy from
James Wiser’s ‘‘Political Theory, Personal
Knowledge, and Public Truth,’’ The Journal of
Politics (1974) 36:661-674. For an analysis of the
educational function of Platonic philosophy in Greek
culture see Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of
Greek Culture, Vol. Il, In Search of the Divine
Centre, Gilbert Highet, trans. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1963).
l2 Aristotle, Physics, 203b7, in Kirk and Raven,
The Presocratic Philosophers, No. 110. For an
authoritative discussion of the importance of
Anaximander’s discovery, see Werner Jaeger, ‘“The
Theology of the Milesian Naturalists,’’ in The Theo-
logy of the Early Greek Philosophers (Oxford: At The
Clarendon Press, 1964), 24-37. Especially note on 31,
‘‘As far as I have been able to discover from the
remaining evidence, the concept of the Divine as
such does not appear before Anaximander.
I3Plato, Apology, 20a-b.
14Pjato, Gorgias, 507e.
ISEric Voegelin, Israel and Revelation, 5.
16See Bruno Snell, ‘‘Homer’s View of Man,”’ in
The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of
European Thought, T.G. Rosenmeyer, trans. (New
York: Harper and Row, Publishers, Torchbooks,
The Academy Library, 1960), 1-22. Snell shows how
Heraclitus’ discovery of the psyche transformed the
previously dominant Homeric vocabulary of man
and in turn altered the Greek depiction of man in the
plastic arts.

ig:
 CHAPTER Il
PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY
VERSUS
SOPHISTIC RHETORIC
Plato’s philosophy took its original shape from the
interaction of Socrates with his students. Socrates
himself engaged in a continual process of discovery
through questioning and answering, following the
argument wherever it led. Socrates’ method,
therefore, is to be distinguished in form and sub-
stance from rhetoric, the mode of education of the
Sophists. These were itinerant educators who trav-
elled from city to city, teaching the basic skills for po-
litical success, chiefofwhich was the ability to speak
well.! But, as their critics observed, they had no civic
responsibility of their own. To be sure, the Sophists
of the fifth century B,. C. performed a necessary func-
tion as educators of the wealthy, providing a political
(rhetorical) education.2 By the end of the century,
however, the Sophistic movement had declined to
the point that it was rightly attacked by the philoso-
phers as the chief corrupting influence in Hellas.
With the impact of Sophistic moral relativism upon
Hellenic culture, Plato grappled. Platonic
philosophy, therefore, was only one alternative to
the question ‘‘What is the best way to live in the
polis?”’
The Sophists answered this question with the argu-
ment that the best way to live is the life of the success-
fully unjust man. In The Republic, for example,
Thrasymachus represents the Sophistic position

20.
when he argues that perfect injustice is more profit-
able than perfect justice and that the profitability of
injustice determined whether or not it is a virtue.3
From this perspective injustice is good counsel
(eubolian),4 while its opposite, justice, is high-mind-
ed innocence. Good and prudent men are those ‘‘who
can do injustice perfectly. . .and are able to subju-
gate cities and tribes of men to themselves.’’>
This peculiar inversion is of particular interest to
political science for its inversion of the symbol ‘‘na-
ture.’’ The Sophists believed that nature (physis) and
law (nomos) were opposed. In the Gorgias, Callicles
disputes that what is right is by nature. What men call
‘‘right,’’ he said, is simply a matter of convention,
custom, the will of the multitude, or, rather, of those
who can sway it. Nature is the might of the stronger,
and the law operates against the hegemony of the
strong. Nature and law are opposed, not consubstan-
tial. It is right by nature that all should be subject to
the strong.®
Plato met the challenge posed by the intellectual
malaise of Sophism and the cultural decrepitude of
traditional myth by means of dialogue inspired by So-
crates. So persuaded was Plato that Socrates’ teach-
ings were integrally intertwined with his character
that he found it impossible to pursue the truth except
through dialogue which imitated the master, not only
in matching the wits of the discussants but also in par-
adigmatically testing their character. We may
observe this form in his Gorgias, where at issue is the
social function of rhetoric as the medium by which
men are persuaded to act nghtly. The Sophist
Gorgias defines rhetoric as the art by which men are
persuaded in the law courts and in public gatherings

a1.
and which in general has something to do with what is
just and unjust. Even though knowledge ofjustice is
an important aspect of his definition of rhetoric,
Gorgias is unwilling to admit that the rhetorician
must know what really is the good or bad, noble or
base, just or unjust. Socrates interprets Gorgias’ hes-
itancy on this point as a sign that in fact he has no un-
derstanding whatsoever of justice. He shows that
without understanding of justice rhetoric is a skill by
which one can pass himself off to the unwitting as one
who knows what he does not know, namely, what is
just. In this context Socrates reveals his opinion
of rhetoric: the only rhetoric worth learning and
worthy of the name of ‘‘art’’ is a rhetoric concerned
with persuading men of the truth regarding the
way they should live. As rhetoric is actually prac-
ticed, it is only a shadow of the art of politics and a
form of flattery. Politics, he says, is an art which has
to do with the soul and is consciously directed to-
wards the realization of order in the soul. Politics is
concerned with the causes of order and disorder,
while rhetoric seeks only to flatter the listeners of the
rhetoricians and is of worth only to those who seek
power for its own sake. But such power is worthless,
Socrates says, because it is used without reference to
the highest goods, the goods of the soul.
Socrates relates a myth about the souls which are
in Hades. Those who were licentious in life have
souls in the afterlife which are like sieves. In life they
were unable to contain true knowledge because they
were unknowing and forgetful. Similarly, the lives of
the licentious and of the men whose souls are
well-ordered can be compared to two men, each of
whom had a number ofjars. The one man’s vessels
are sound and filled with various precious fluids. This
man draws from the vessels only what he needs and is
content with what remains. The other man has
unsound vessels, which continuously need
replenishing. Who, Socrates asks, is happier? In life
the man whose life is regular and ordered has a lawful
and orderly existence manifest in his life in just and
temperate acts. This is a good life because the virtue
of each thing is a matter of regular and orderly ar-
rangement. Such a man is orderly. A man who is dis-
orderly, akosmian, is the seed of disorder in political
community. Because he is concerned about the
source of order and disorder in political community,
and is one of the few in Athens so concerned, Socra-
tes calls himself the only true statesman.
The picture of a person such as Socrates, whose
only authority was moral suasion and who was un-
willing even to seek power, least of all to seize it un-
justly, may cause students today to reject the con-
cept of politics he offered as hopelessly unrealistic.
But to do so ignores the nature of Plato’s and Socra-
tes’ view of political science. Their statesmanship
was paradigmatic, larger in extent, not lesser. Found
not in the ever-changing balance of power in a city,
nation, or a world community, their statesmanship is
found in the paradigms of order which philosophy e-
vokes in the consciousness of men disposed to under-
stand. As such, one political theorist has written re-
cently that philosophy is ‘‘the highest form of politi-
cal action itself.’’8

23.
 POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
AND STATESMANSHIP

Political philosophy as a type of paradigmatic

statesmanship opposed to Sophistic rhetoric may be
seen in outline in the following symbois of
philosophic dialogue:
The Awake and Those Asleep: The symbol of the
man who is asleep was created by Heraclitus to ex-
press his experience of the cosmos as an ordered real-
ity. From the perspective of the new consciousness
of the psyche as the measure by which to discover the
truth, Heraclitus fashioned the image of the sleep
walkers, those who when awake are as ignorant of
what they are doing as when they are asleep. Though
reality is an ordered process steered by an overarch-
ing logos, men are uncomprehending, he said. ‘Just
as they forget what they do when asleep,”’ the men
ignorant of the Jogos ‘‘fail to notice what they do after
they wake up.’’7 All men have reason (logos), but
‘the many live as though they had a private under-
standing.’’!0 Those who are asleep to the reality of
being are “‘the many,”’ that is, the common sort who
areuneducated to reality. Their souls are “‘moist’’ like
the soul of the drunken. ‘‘A man when he is drunk is
led by an unfledged boy, stumbling and not knowing
Where he goes, having his soul moist.’?!!The ‘‘un-
fledged boy”’ is a symbol for the soul which lacks ed-
ucation (paideia) to the logos. When truly educated
the soul is ‘‘dry.’’ Heraclitus observed that ‘‘a dry
soul is wisest and best.’!2
Plato utilizes this symbol in his Republic (Book V)
when he observes that, on the one hand, those who
admit that things are beautiful, but not that there is
beauty per se, are living in a dream. On the other
hand, there are men who are awake to the reality that
those things in the world which are beautiful partici-
pate in beauty itself and do not mix up the two. India-
logue, therefore, the discussants must be awake to
the truth that this world is not autonomous but parti-
Cipates in a greater reality beyond the world of per-
ishable, existent things. The object of dialogue is to
educate the soul to this greater reality.

Persuasion: If men are to be educated by dialogue

to existence-in-truth, they must be persuaded, not
compelled,to make the journey. Persuasion implies,
therefore, an active and a passive agent. The active
agent is the questioner, who, in this higher sense,
‘““acts’’ upon the one who is questioned, in an attempt
to persuade. But, for action to evoke a response, it is
necessary that his fellow discussant be open to per-
suasion, that is, trusting in his attitude. A common
ground is required for dialogue to commence,
namely, that the discussant want to know the truth,
to admit not only his existential condition of psychic
ignorance but also his dependence on those who
know. For philosophy to succeed, the psyche must
be searching for existence-in-truth in opposition to
sleep-walking. The Platonic dialogues contain nu-
merous instances (for example, Callicles [Gorgias]
and Thrasymachus [Republic]) of men unable to en-
gage in dialogue because this common basis is absent
in them.

Logos: The discussants of dialogue must have

something in common if dialogue is to succeed. So-
crates in the Crito calls himself a man who follows

25.
nothing but the Jogos. A common basis of dialogue,
therefore, is the substratum of logos which all men
possess by virtue of their humanity, but which only a ~
few, those who are awake, utilize. Among its several
definitions, logos, of course means ‘‘word’’ and
‘‘reason.’’ The mode of questioning which is
dialogue is limited by the very material of which it is
constructed, words. However, the questions, though
composed of words, do not seek the words of which
the answer is composed. Words (logoi) are the
linguistic manifestations of reason in man and of his
capacity to know reality. Philosophic dialogue seeks
existence-in-truth. This can be known to man be-
cause reality is rational. Plato accordingly gives a dif-
ferent name (eristic) to discussions which use names
without fully realizing that words are symbols, not
substitutes for reality. In The Republic, for example,
when he attempts to differentiate aspects of reality,
Socrates goes to the trouble of saying, ‘‘It appears to
me that just as two different names are used, war and
faction, so two things also exist and the names apply
to differences in these two.”*!3 By naming a reality,
the philosopher brings it into human consciousness
where it can be discussed, clarified, and differenti-
ated from other existent things. Human intellect in-
terprets existence through conscious intellection. In-
tellect is a part of human existence as well as the
means or instrument of interpreting it. ‘‘In the exege-
sis of existence,’’ Eric Voegelin writes, ‘‘intellect
discovers itself in the structure of existence; ontolog-
ically speaking, human existence has noetic struc-
ture. The intellect discovers itself, furthermore, as a
force transcending its own existence; by virtue of the
intellect, existence is not opaque, but actually

26.
reaches out beyond itself in various directions in
search of knowledge.’’!4 Human existence
**transcends’’ the intellect by coming into conscious-
ness as an entity differentiated by the intellect which
seeks it out. This transcending of intellect by the on-
tologically oriented act of questioning on the part of
two persons makes dialogue possible.

Dialectic: The highest form of intellection for Plato

is that which activates the highest part of the soul,
What Plato called the nous, meaning mind or
reason. The activity of nous is noesis. Thus we have
the derivative term “‘noetic”’ to express this level of
rationality. In The Republic (Book VII) dialectic is
described as a journey in which the faculty employed
is noesis, and the realm of existence it illuminates is
the noeton, the intelligible. The man who engages in
such activity is called the dialectical man. The dialek-
tikos is the man who is “‘awake”’ and thus for whom
reality is perceived as it truly is.
Underlying Plato’s proposal in The Republic of a
political community which is absolutely just is an
ontology of knowing. The order of being which man
is capable of knowing, Plato writes in his Republic, is
like the capacity to see. In order to see, man needs
light, and that light is caused by the sun. Like the eye,
however, limited as it is by the darkness of the night,
the soul, when it apprehends things which are not
eternal or unchanging, perceives only in a limited
way. Before we can truly know, we must have
experienced the Good. But the Good which gives
knowledge to the soul, unike the sun, is beyond
(epekeina) existence and essence:!5 that is, it is a
transcendent Good, not one of the many goods which

fe
can be found within the cosmos. Therefore it cannot
be experienced by just anyone. We must be educated
in such a way that our highest noetic faculty is ~
exercised in turning towards the Good. The
dialectical man is such an educated person, whose
soul has been led upwards until he can contemplate
the Good itself, 16 Turning towards the truth is, as
Plato describes it in The Republic, a personal
conversion (periagoge) from lesser forms of
reality, the perishable everchanging world of
sense-experience, towards a life of existence-in-
truth.

Episteme: For Plato, science (episteme) meant

knowledge. As such it did not have connotations, as
it does for us, of a natural science which has as its ob-
ject physical phenomena knowable by means of im-
personal experimental methods. To Plato the most
intelligible reality was not the material, changing phe-
nomena of the visible world, but the intelligent, ra-
tional (noetic) field of being. The more rational the
phenomena, the more scientifically knowable they
are. Plato would not hesitate, therefore, to discuss
the dilemma ofwhat is the best way to live and expect
a ‘‘scientific’’ solution. The distinction between that
which is and that which ought to be, by which con-
temporary positivists mean that we can know only
‘‘facts’’ scientifically, not “‘‘values,’’ was not a
problem for Plato or for the other followers of
Socrates. The knowledge (episteme) of right action
was distinguished by Plato from opinion (doxa), and
the lover of truth (philosophos) from the lover of
opinion. Those whose souls were turned towards
existence-in-truth were conscious of their participa-

28.
tion in true being and therefore had reliable knowl-
edge of right action. Their souls had been shaped by
experience of the transcendent Good and thus they
were attuned to being. The lovers of opinion were
living in untruth and lacked the essential science
(episteme).
This concept of right action as preeminently know-
able first entered Western philosophic consciousness
in the mystic thought of Parmenides. In his poem,
**The Way of Truth,” he describes a journey in the
chariot of the daughters of the Sun along the path of
persuasion. The path, he said, “‘is.’’ Its opposite was
a path which is not, and is unthinkable. By. identify-
ing the way which is as the way of truth,
Parmenides signified that what we ought to do is the
knowable way. From this distinction followed
Plato’s use of the critical term “‘science’’ (episteme)
in reference to the capacity to know night action. We
find this insight also in the tragedy of The Suppliant
Maidens by Aeschylus. Pelasgus, when faced with
the dilemma of granting asylum to his suppliant kin or
turning them over to the Aegyptians, confronts the is-
sue thusly:
Without
Harm I cannot aid you: nor is it
sensible to despise these your earnest
prayers. I am ata loss, and fearful is
my heart. To act or not to act and choose
success.

To act, however, is not merely to behave; it is to

act rightly. And of this truth the tragedian pointedly
informs his audience. Only right action is required of
Pelasgus. ‘‘We need profound, preserving care, that

29.
plunges like a diver deep into troubled seas,’’ he
says. 18 The symbol of the diver’s plunge into the
depths evoked in the philosophers the experience of -
their encounter with the transcendent divine reality
beyond the world of existent things. In the depths of
their souls they discovered participation in true be-
ing, and thus were conscious that in so far as they
were formed by that experience, their judgment of
what action is right was true.
Plato’s concept of scientific judgment contradicts,
therefore, the contemporary notion that information
is scientific because it is impersonal and discovered
by a scientist detached from his subject. Platonic
episteme is above all the personal judgment of the
philosopher who is capable of distinguishing between
true knowledge (episteme) and mere opinion. Its em-
phasis is on the character of the man who has made
the judgment and on the personal skill with which he
has pursued the problem to its conclusion.
Moreover, even the best of men will be limited by the
subject which he must judge. When the guardians in
The Republic attempt to ascertain the right time
for sexual intercourse in their best polis, they some-
times err and thus set into motion the forces that will
lead even the best polis into moral decay. Human
scientific knowledge is limited.

The Political: Contemporary philosophy, for rea-

sons too numerous to discuss here, is radically alien-
ated from what we would call the ‘‘political.’’ Col-
lege students compelled to take philosophy courses
would perhaps even go as far as to say that the philos-
ophy they were taught is remote from reality. In the
context of fourth-century Athens, however, the Pla-

30.
tonic philosophers engaged in dialogue in orderto an-
Swer questions which arose from within the political
community. Their philosophic discussion occurred
in reference to problems of political order, arose in
response to the political and moral decay of
Greek culture, and was in that sense ‘‘political.’’ We
should also recall Socrates’ claim to paradigmatic
Statesmanship and Plato’s ‘‘Philosopher-King.”’
‘‘Unless the philosophers rule as kings,’’ Socrates
says in The Republic, ‘‘or those now called kings and
chiefs genuinely and adequately philosophize, and
political power and philosophy coincide in the same
place. . .there is no rest from ills for the cities. . .nor
I think for human kind. . . .”"!9 Plato was aware of
the difficulties thus presented. In the ‘‘Myth of the
Cave’’20 the man who is turned around (periagoge),
like the philosopher educated by philosophy to ex-
perience the Good, makes the journey back into the
cave (political community) to inform his former fel-
lows of their ignorance. But those he attempts to re-
lease reply by trying to kill him. Nevertheless, Plato
the philosopher returned to the cave, since it was his
political obligation to bring the science of politics he
possessed to those who sought also to know.

a1.
 SUGGESTED READINGS

Of Platonic dialogues, the beginning student —

should read the Apology, Crito, Gorgias, Republic.
More advanced students should read the Statesman,
Timaeus, and Laws. The most convenient and
inexpensive edition of Plato’s works is Edith Hamil-
ton and Huntington Cairns, editors, The Collected
Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters (New
York: Pantheon Books, Random House, 1964).
There is no insufficiency of secondary books on
Plato. Students of political science should see Eric
Voegelin, Order and History, Vol. Ill, Plato and
Aristotle (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1957). The section on Plato from this work is
available in an inexpensive paper edition. For an al-
ternative interpretation of Plato, see Sheldon S.
Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innova-
tion in Western Political Thought, Chapter Two,
‘‘Plato: Political Philosophy versus Politics’’
(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1960); and the
‘‘Interpretive Essay”’ in Allan Bloom’s The Republic
of Plato (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1968).
Students interested in an overview should look at the
work of the nineteenth century philosopher, Eduard
Zeller, Outlines of the History of Greek Philosophy,
13th ed., rev., L.R. Palmer, trans., (Cleveland:
World Publishing Co., Meridian Books, 1964).

Be
 NOTES

lWerner Jaeger, Paideia, Vol. I, Archaic Greece,

The Mind of Athens, Gilbert Highet, trans. 2nd ed.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1945), 293.
2Jaeger informs us that in classical Greek rhetor
means political orator or politician. Jaeger, Paideia,
[:291

trans. (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1968), 348d.

All quotations are from the Bloom translation of The
Republic.
6482¢-483a.
7508a.
8James L. Wiser, ‘‘Philosophy as Political
Action: A Reading of the Gorgias,’ American
Journal of Political Science (May, 1975), 316.
9Kirk and Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers,
No. 197.
10jbid., No. 198.
'l[bid., No. 234.
12Ibid., No. 233. A dry soul is one that can be ig-
nited by the flame of the experience of the divine.
13Plato, The Republic of Plato, 470b.
I4Fric Voegelin, ‘‘On Debate and Existence,”’ In-
tercollegiate Review, Ul (1967), 147.
15509b-c.
l6See 515c.
I7Aeschylus, The Suppliant Maidens, Seth G.
Benardete, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1957), 376-380.
I8bid., 408.

33.
I9Plato, The Republic of Plato, 473c-d.
20 Ibid., 514a-518c.

34.
 CHAPTER III
ARISTOTLE’S DEFINITION OF
POLITICAL SCIENCE

Aristotle (385-322 B.C.) writes in the WNico-

machean Ethics that the end of politics is to en-
gender ‘‘a certain character in the citizens and to
make them good and disposed to perform noble ac-
tions.’’! For that reason, statesmen must have some
knowledge of the human psyche.2 If Aristotle’s
observation means something more than that
politicians should have a good grasp of human
nature, then what are the dimensions of this
knowledge?
We saw in Chapter One that differentiated human
psychological consciousness is not something that
men have always had. Rather, this was the unique
result of the discovery in Hellas of philosophy as a
mode of consciousness of existence-in-truth, of
openness to transcendent divine reality. That this
differentiation should be a principal discovery of a
theological revolution, however, is somewhat per-
plexing. Yet, if we observe that the men of these
ancient cultures came to know themselves only by
reference to acts of the gods or by acts of men who
were both mortal and immortal, once the hegemony
of the intracosmic gods was broken the differentiated
consciousness of man was a logical development.
Prephilosophic ancient man could not see or
understand himself as uniquely human as long as the
only ones with individuality were gods or men who
were nearly gods. The newly differentiated

32)
consciousness of the divine reality as transcendent,
not intracosmic, had the effect, therefore, of pushing
the human psyche into the forefront of human
consciousness because now man was understood to
be the source of order and disorder. Eric Voegelin
writes that ‘“Through the opening of the soul the phil-
osopher finds himself in a new relation with God; he
not only discovers his own psyche as an instrument
for experiencing transcendence but at the same time
discovers the divinity in its radically nonhuman
transcendence. Hence, the differentiation of the
psyche Is inseparable from a new truth about God.”’3
We find this “‘new truth about God’’ manifest in
Aristotle’s discussion of intelligence (nous) and of
the contemplative life (bios theoretikos) as the maxi-
mal actualization of human happiness. Aristotle
taught that human action is oriented towards ends
hierarchically ordered and intellected by the soul,
which is itself hierarchically ordered into higher (ra-
tional) and lower (appetitive and vegetative) aspects.
The soul’s life in accordance with virtue is true happi-
ness, which in the sphere of human action is the cause
(aition) and arche of all that men do. In human af-
fairs, true happiness is analogous to the divine arche
in the field of physis.4
Nous, as tne highest capacity of the rational part of
the soul, deals with “the highest objects of knowl-
edge.”’> Atits highest level, noetic contemplation of
the divine reality, Aristotle calls it the striving to be
deathless or immortal since, he says, nous is either -
‘divine or the most divine thing in us.’"® How is this
““immortalizing’’ aspect of Aristotle’s philosophy
crucial to understanding his definition of political
science? It is crucial because noetic consciousness of

36.
transcendent divine reality articulated in Greek phi-
losophy, the philosophic insight that the arche of all
that is was not a cosmic god but a divine principle
(arche) beyond the cosmos that man could contem-
plate with his reason (logos) and not merely honor by
ritual sacrifices, broke the hegemony of the myth and
opened the way for a ‘‘science’”’ of politics.
Political science, as Aristotle developed it, there-
fore, is the science (episteme) or knowledge of hu-
man action within a field of ends reaching from the
highest (the divine reality) to the lowest existent
things in the order of being. Human action at its high-
est level is the immortalizing act of human contem-
plation (theoretike) of the divine nous. With this as
his standard, Aristotle saw that the rationality of hu-
man action on even the lowest level logically depends
upon an ultimate end.’ That is the context in which
Aristotle comments in the second chapter of the first
book of the Nicomachean Ethics that our desire
would be empty and vain if there were no highest
good which gives meaning to all our other desires and
upon whichall others depend.8 The symbol that Aris-
totle uses to describe this dependence is ‘‘participa-
tion’ (metalepsis).? We participate with our human
nous in the divine reality (ho nous theion) through no-
etic activity. Aristotle is saying that human action
cannot be understood apart from consciousness of
the divine without serious consequences not only in
philosophy, the life of a single man, but also in the life
of an entire community.

FRIENDSHIP

Aristotle’s concept of friendship is illustrative. It

37.
may seem unusual to us that one of the founders of
Western political science should focus upon friend-
ship as the principal good of political life. Our con-
temporary concept of political community seems to
be based on the compromise of our desires or inter-
ests in a quite tawdry clash of competing claims for
governmental action. James Madison in The Federal-
ist, Number 10, delights in the notion that the Amen-
can democratic republic is based on the competition
between factions, which in an extended territory
lends stability to the regime. Aristotle believed, how-
ever, that political community was held together by
something greater than the mechanical resolution of
particular private interests. He said that friendship
(philia) seems to hold together the polis, because
Statesmen are naturally more concerned about philia
than they are about justice. !9 Hence to promote con-
cord (homonoia) concerning the most important
things is the statesman’s chief goal. One cannot, of
course, dismiss concern forjustice. An unjust politi-
cal regime will inevitably have recourse to greater
and greater injustices, if it is to survive. But friend-
ship leads to concord, which seems to be a synonym
for “‘order’’ for Aristotle; and without order, we may
infer, there can be nojustice. Aristotle even says that
community (Avinonia) is friendship. |! Where com-
munity is, there is some friendship, just as sharing
mutual experiences leads to an experience of a
mutual bond.
Aristotle also uses philia in differentiating between
types of political constitutions. The friendship of a
king, he says, is similar to the friendship of a father to
his child. Friendship between a husband and wife is
the same as betweenrulers and subjects in an aristoc-

38.
racy. Friendship between brothers is equivalent to
the relationship of citizens in a timocracy, whichisa
political community oriented towards martial ends,
Or a warrior society. 12 By the same token, friendship
gives Aristotle a standard by which to denote tyranny
as a political constitution which is a perversion of the
good. There is no friendship in a tyranny. Friendship
depends on having something in common, some prin-
ciple of equality. All the same, there are higher and
lower types of friendship. Aristotle distinguishes be-
tween friendship and the object of one’s love. There
is friendship between those who love the good and
those who love what is pleasant and useful. !3 Obvi-
ously, the friendships based on things pleasurable
and useful will break easily when conditions change.
The most durable is friendship among men who love
the good. Thus the social bond, in so far as that is a
type of friendship, is not only an exterior community
but also a vital reflection of an interior community.
Statesmen must have some insight into this relation-
ship if they are to be successful in encouraging
concord.
In the feelings of a good man towards himself, Aris-
totle finds the highest type of friendship. This
self-love reflects the class of theological experience
which underlies Aristotle’s political science. Today
to argue that the best men love themselves, of Course,
would be perceived as eccentric. The oft-expressed
ideal of modernity, if not the reality, is for men to help
their fellow men and thus to avoid an excessive con-
cern for themslves. But the self-love in which Aris-
totle is convinced the highest type of friendship is em-
bodied refers neither to egoism nor altruism. The
man who loves himself, Aristotle says, loves that in

39.
him which is most noble, good. Thus he tries to make
that dominant in himself. He obeys his nous, which
Aristotle says, always chooses what is best. 14 Aris-
totle calls the good man spoudaios, !5 sometimes
translated as ‘‘virtuous’’ or ‘‘mature.”’ The relation-
ship of the spoudaios with himself is the standard by
which to judge friendship. We recall that Aristotle
considered the nous to be the most divine part of
man, or divine itself, and it is the act of nous which
shapes the lover of himself into the good man. By
loving his nous, the spoudaios opens himself to the
divine nous and by that means becomes virtuous.
This was the nucleus of Aristotle’s concept of politi-
cal science as a science of human action.

THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN ACTION

The concept of action, as Aristotle understood it,

includes both what men do and what they ought to
do. Today we can distinguish between ‘‘behavior’’
and “‘‘action.’’ Behavior is something man has in
common with animals. Cows, chickens, and human
beings have in common certain biological functions
which evoke no moral valuation. They eat, grow,
age, sleep, defecate; in short, they ‘‘behave.’’ But
‘‘to act’’ implies something which is unique to human
beings: man’s consciousness of his action as morally
right or wrong. As we have seen, for Aristotle an act
is moral insofar as it fulfills man’s unique nature. To
the extent that man can fulfill his humanity, or de-
Stroy it, it is said that he ‘‘acts.’’ This consciousness
is the meaning of human action which Aristotle be-
lieved we could know scientifically. Moreover he
thought that such knowledge (episteme) is the neces-

40.
Sary prerequisite for politics because politics has as
its end the making of virtuous citizens.
For Aristotle, the science of politics was the archi-
tectonic science, the master science, because its end,
the good for man, is employed in directing political
affairs and is ultimately directed at the education of
citizens. To be sure, without political order, the most
basic and immediate end of politics, there would be
no other human affairs, knowledge, or skills. Political
order makes possible all these human concerns. Nev-
ertheless, it is not sufficient merely to live. Man must
live well, that is, live as a human moral agent. As the
science of human action, political science enables
man to fulfill this aspiration.
To act, Aristotle thought, is to act in reference to a
good. Human action is teleological. Manis conscious
of this hierarchy of goods the moment that he recog-
nizes that anything is higher or lower than another.
The universality of this recognition is manifest in
common speech when we refer to particularly base
acts as ‘‘animal.’’ The cosmos, too, reveals a
hierarchy in which divine reality is the highest order,
man the next highest, then the animal, vegetable, and
inorganic orders. So we implicitly admit that there is
an ultimate good, if we observe that one thing is
higher than something else. Aristotle thus rightly
distinguished between higher and lower types of
political constitutions, higher and lower aspects of
the soul, and between higher and lower orders of
being. There must be an end, Aristotle observed,
which we desire for its own sake, because if we live in
ignorance of that ultimate end which governs or
places limits upon our individual actions, our lives
will be governed by an infinite series of desires, and

41.
not by the good which is best for man. Knowledge of
this ultimate end, therefore, is, he says, ‘“‘important
to our lives.’’16
We have already discussed Aristotle’s concept of
the contemplative life as the good for man. Inasmuch
as the highest form of human action is that by which
man experiences his participation in the divine nous,
we can see that the basis of Aristotle’s science of hu-
man action, the knowledge of the virtues by which
men actualize their capacity to be human, is the new
theological experience of the transcendent divine re-
ality. Human action is rational in the substantive
sense of the term only in so far as it aims at its proper
ultimate end. In the Metaphysics Aristotle says:

Further, the final cause is an end, and that sort of end

which is not for the sake of something else, but for
whose sake everything else is; so that if there is to be a
last term of this sort, the process will not be infinite; but
if there is no such term, there will be no final cause, but
those who maintain ‘the infinite series eliminate the
Good without knowing it (yet no one would try to do
anything if he were not going to come to a limit); nor
would there be reason in the world; the reasonable man;
at least, always acts for a purpose, and this is a limit; for
the end is a limit.!7

Aristotle articulates in the above passage the basis of

his concept of political science as a science of human
action. We perhaps have difficulty making sense of it
because the cultural basis of a discussion of action
with reference to a ‘“‘final cause’’ has been eclipsed
by new concepts of physics. Yet if we penetrate to
the experience which is the nucleus of Aristotle’s
concept of rational discourse about human conduct,
we perceive he is saying that without the transcend-

42.
ent Good, human action lacks the limits upon which
the rationality of human action depends. The reason-
able man, the man of nous, knows these limitations
and always acts for some purpose. One might say that
his actions are ordered, not random.
Hence limitations on political action will, in the Ar-
istotelian sense, be based on the limitations of
human, that is, rational, moral action. Moral limits to
political ends come from man’s nature as a moral, po-
litical being. Aristotle, unlike the Christian political
philosophers, does not find the end for man in a life
after death and thus does not see political action
limited by the other-worldly perspective of the Chris-
tian expectation of life in the city of God. Rather, he
saw human action limited by the end-oriented ration-
ality of action in this life.

PHRONESIS AND RIGHT BY NATURE

Political science in one sense is the science of hu-

man action, but Aristotle also defined it as the pru-
dential giving of laws which aim to make citizens vir-
tuous. Such a goal requires that statesmen them-
selves be virtuous, and they are to the degree that
they are prudent, since prudence is a virtue. The re-
quisite virtue of statesmen according to this model is
practical wisdom (phronesis), sometimes translated
as prudence. 183 How is Phronesis related to politics?
Perhaps by taking note of that aspect of the soul
where phronesis is manifest, we will find the answer.
Phronests pertains to the calculative part of the soul,
the /ogistikon, that aspect of the soul that is obedient
to reason, while the scientific part, the epistemoni-
kon, is reason itself. !9 The logistikoncalculatesthings

43.
that vary and to that degree, we may observe, isales-
ser form of reason. Yet for the statesman, it is suffi-
cient. Politics is continually subject to change. Aris- ~
totle observes also that phronesis is the part of the
soul that forms opinions,29 and from out of opinions
One can refine the truth. Even the unproved asser-
tions of the spoudaios, he says, are as deserving of as
much attention as those statements he makes whose
truth he demonstrates.2! Aristotle also tells us that
Phronesis issues commands; that is, its end is an
authoritative statement of what we ought to do or not
do.22
The political implications of Aristotle’s concept of
paradigmatic law-giving as the virtue of phronesis are
brought out in his consideration ofjustice.23 Were we
to attempt to find another topic which has had a
greater influence on political thought in the West, we
would have great difficulty. Aristotle, like Plato,
grappled with the Sophistic argument that nature and
law are opposed, that there are no absolute standards
of justice except the ability of the strong to subdue
the weak. Both Plato and Aristotle believed that na-
ture and law are not opposed, that they are intimately
related, and that the Sophistic argument should not
be allowed to stand unchallenged. An equivalent ar-
gument is the view commonly held today that whatis
‘‘right’’ depends on the “‘values”’ of the particular in-
dividual who makes the valuation. According to this
view, nothing is right or wrong absolutely because
everyone is different. The sincerity of a person’s val-
uation determines the justice of an ethical judgment,
not the nature of justice.
It is interesting that ‘‘nature’’ was chosen by Plato
and Aristotle to delineate the concept of objective
justice by which they refuted the Sophistic position.
They were in search of a term that suggested a con-
cept of that which is, of reality. And, even today, we
speak of ‘‘human nature’’ or of ‘‘nature’s course,’’
and we mean something that is structured, settled,
and independent of the will of man. Yet Aristotle’s
discussion of right by nature, what came in the Latin
world to be called Jex naturalis and jus naturale
(‘natural law’’ and “natural right’’), suggests that
this understanding is incomplete. It was another as-
pect of the meaning of nature (physis) that led Aris-
totle to choose this term.
What is ‘‘right by nature,’’24 Aristotle says, does
not exist by people thinking it to be so, but every-
where it must have the same force. However, some
people note that what is recognized as just is different
and changeable and thus assume that all justice is
merely conventional. Aristotle agrees that all justice
is changeable but shows it does not follow that all jus-
tice is conventional. He says there is justice by na-
ture and not by convention. But justice by nature is
also changeable. Moreover, Aristotle tells us thatitis
evident which sort of justice is by nature and whichis
merely legal and conventional.
We might say, Well, what is evident to Aristotle is
not evident to us. And we might ask, Who knows?
and What is right by nature? Moreover, since it is
changeable, how can it be everywhere forcefully ex-
istent? How can it be true, if it changes? In order
to answer these questions we must refer to what Aris-
totle says about precision. The degree of precision in
the matter of what is right by nature is necessarily a
function of finding the measure. We could not be very
precise about the weight of an elephant if the measure

45.
we used was that commonly used for liquid quanti-
ties. The fragile character of right by nature also re-
quires a suitable measure: and that, he says, is the
just man, the spoudaios.
Two passages in the Nicomachean Ethics define
the spoudaios:
Thus, what is good and pleasant differs with different
characteristics or conditions, and perhaps the chief dis-
tinction of a man of high moral standards is his ability to
see the truth in each particular moral question, since he
is, aS it were, the standard and measure for such
questions.25

But in all matters of this sort we consider that to be real

and true which appears so to a good man. Ifthis is night,
as it seems to be, and if virtue or excellence and the
good man, insofar as he is good, are the measure of
each thing, then what seem to him to be pleasures are
pleasures and what he enjoys is pleasant.26

In its realization, or actualization, right by nature is

changeable, diverse; yet at the same time, it is un-
changeable and everywhere the same, in the sense
that what is right in the specific instance of concrete
human action will always be seen to be so by the
spoudaios. The circumstances in which we make eth-
ical judgments are always changing, but what is right
will always be judged correctly by the good man. He
possesses the virtue of phronesis.
There is a passage in the Eudemian Ethics which
perhaps explains Aristotle’s reasoning. Aristotle
asks, ‘‘What is the commencement of movement in
the soul? The answer is clear, as in the universe, so in
the soul, God moves everything.’’2/ In this reflection
we may perhaps understand his use of the symbol

46.
‘‘nature’’ as a concept applicable to human action,
ethics. There is a connection between ethics and on-
tology, and the ontological symbol of physis best re-
flects that connection. Where is the connection? The
above-mentioned passage gives us a clue. Nature,
physis, was theophanous, evoking in the Greek phi-
losophers an experience of the divine reality which is
its origin. From the unmoved mover, the first cause
of being, the movement of being flows into the range
of human action. Similarly, Plato spoke of the phro-
nimos as the man who experienced the Agathon, and
acts with phronesis. These concepts express the con-
nection between the movement of being and the field
of ethics, human action. The spoudaios is permeable,
open, to the movement of being and is the judge in the
changing instances of human action of what is right
by nature.
This formulation should be contrasted with the
modern notion of *‘natural rights,’’ with which Aris-
totle’s concept of ‘‘right by nature’’ conflicts in sev-
eral particulars. What is “‘nght by nature’’ is not
knowable by everyone: it is known only by the ma-
ture man. Some men, we infer, will never know what
is right by nature, because they themselves live lives
closed to the divine, that is, fundamentally unjust
lives. Aristotle also emphasizes a consciousness of
what is right, not the possession ofa right. It is con-
ceivable, therefore, that the exercise of a ‘‘natural
right’’ could conflict with what is right. For Aristotle,
however, right and justice were synonymous. The
modern view to the contrary seeks preservation of
rights ‘‘by any means necessary,”’ that is, evento the
exclusion of justice. Thus the end of government is
seen to be the preservation of rights as opposed to

47.
justice, order, or the common good. Furthermore,
Aristotle’s concept of right was linked to his concept
of nature, thus giving an ontological association to a
basically political concept. Because nature (physis)
for the Greek philosophers from Thales to Aristotle
was theophanous, Aristotle used it in this context to
evoke an experience of the relationship, the consub-
Sstantiality of law, justice, order, and community with
the divine. Natural right, however, is above politics,
fundamentally unlimited, autonomous, both of the
political community and of justice. Whereas nght by
nature in Greek philosophy and its Latin formulation,
natural law, were limitations on the state, natural
right has become a chief means by which modern po-
litical theorists justify the extension of state power in-
to areas hitherto considered private.

48.
 SUGGESTED READINGS

Beginning students should read Aristotle’s

Nicomachean Ethics and Politics; advanced stu-
dents, his Metaphysics and Physics. The above
works are available in an inexpensive edition of the
important works edited by Richard McKeon, The
Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Random
House, 1968).
Valuable secondary sources are Eric Voegelin,
Order and History, Plato and Aristotle, Vol. Ill (of
which the section on Aristotle is available
separately in paper); Werner Jaeger, Aristotle,
Fundamentals of the History of His Development,
Richard Robinson, trans. 2nd ed. (London: Oxford
University Press, 1962); Sir David Ross, Aristotle,
Ist ed., rev. (London and New York: Methuen,
Barnes and Noble, University Paperbacks, 1966);
Leo Strauss, The City and Mah (Chicago: Rand
McNally and Co., 1964).

49.
 NOTES

lAristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, Martin

Ostwald, trans. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co.,
Inc., Library of Liberal Arts, 1962), 1099b30. All
translations from the Nicomachean Ethics quoted
here are by Martin Ostwald.
2N.E., 1102a18.
3Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics.
An Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1952), 67.
4*‘And the source and cause of all good things
we consider as something worthy of honor and as
divine.’”’ N.E., 1102a2-S.
IN.E., 1177a21.
ON.E., 1177al6.
7**Further, the final cause is an end, and that
sort of end which is not for the sake of something
else, but for whose sake everything else is; so that
if there is to be a last term of this sort, the process
will not be infinite; but if there is no such term,
there will be no final cause, but those who maintain
the infinite series eliminate the Good without
knowing it (yet no one would try to do anything if
he were not going to come to a limit); nor would
there be reason in the world; the reasonable man,
at least, always acts for a purpose, and this is a
limit; for the end is a limit.’’ Aristotle, The Works
of Aristotle, W. D. Ross, trans., Metaphysica, Vol.
VIII, 994b8-16. All translations from the
Metaphysica quoted here are by W. D. Ross.
8**Now, if there exists an end in the realm of
action which we desire for its own sake, an end

50.
which determines all our other desires; if, in other
words, we do not make all our choices for the sake
of something else — for in this way the process will
go On infinitely so that our desire would be futile
and pointless — then obviously this end will be the
good, that is, the highest good. Will not the
knowledge of this good, consequently, be very
important to our lives? Would it not better equip
us, like archers, who have a target to aim at, to hit the
proper mark? If so, we must try to comprehend in
Outline at least what this good is and to which branch
ot knowledge or to which capacity it belongs.’’ N.E.,
10944 19-26.
9**And thought thinks on itself because it shares
(metalepsin) the nature of the object of thought; for
it becomes an object of thought in coming into
contact with and thinking its objects, so that
thought and object of thought are the same.’’ Aris-
totle, Metaphysica, 1072b19f.
1ON.E., 1155a20f.
INE, 1159b32.
12N_E., 1160b24f.
I3N.E., 1156a6f.
14nE., 1169a12f.
ISN.E., 1166a14.
l6N.E., 1094a23f.
I7 Aristotle, Metaphysica, 994b8-16. My analysis
of this passage is based on the interpretation of
Eric Voegelin, ‘“‘On Debate and Existence,”’
Intercollegiate Review, II (1967), 143-152.
18For a fuller discussion of phronesis on which
my interpretation is based, see Eric Voegelin, **‘Das
Rechte von Natur,’’ in Anamnesis. Zur Theorie Der

DA;
Geschichte Und Politik (Munchen: R. Piper & Co.
Verlag, 1966), 124-133.
lON_E., 1139a5f; 1140a24f.
20N.E., 1140b25f.
21N.E., 1143b10f.
22N.E., 1143a77f.
-?Aristotle’s discussion of justice is found in Book
V. Nicomachean Ethics.
24N.E., 1134b16-1135a5.
25N.E., 1113a30f.
26N.E., 1176a15.
27 Aristotle, The Works of Aristotle, Vol. IX,
Ethica Eudemia, J. Solomon, trans. (London:
Oxford University Press, 1963), 1248a25.

52e
 CHAPTER IV
PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
AND CHRISTIAN
POLITICAL THEORY
HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS OF ISRAEL

The Book of Exodus reports that in the third month

of the exodus of the Hebrew clans from Egypt, they
came to the desert of Sinai (19:1). While the tribes
were encamped, Moses ascended the holy mountain
of Sinai and experienced the presence of God. The
importance of this theophany parallels the theophany
which occurred many hundreds of years previously
when Abram had been victorious in battle with Che-
dorlaomer. The king of Sodom whose kingdom had
been saved by Abram offered to reward him for his
victory. Abram replied that he had sworn to Yahweh
that he would not take even the smallest token of re-
ward for the victory. If he did, the king of Sodom
would take credit for the good fortune of Abram
when in truth Yahweh was responsible. Genesis 15
reports as follows: ‘‘Some time after these events,
this word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision:
‘Fear not, Abram! I am your shield; I will make your
reward very great!’ ’’! (15:1). A theophany of Yah-
weh, which comforted Abram in a moment of great
political danger, also shaped the political existence of
the Hebrew clans after their escape from Egypt. Ona
holy mountain, Moses experienced the voice of Yah-
weh which told him: *‘If you hearken to my voice and
keep my covenant, you shall be my special posses-

53,
sion, dearer to me than all other people, though all the
earth is mine. You shall be to me a kingdom of
priests, a holy nation’’ (Exodus 19:5-6).
The encounters of Abram and Moses with the dom-
inant political units of the ancient Near East were
caused by theophanies which were interpreted as
promises: to Abram, that his ‘‘reward’’ will be
‘*sreat’’ and to Moses, the conditional promise that
‘*7f you hearken to my voice and keep my covenant,
you shall be my special possession. ...’” The promise
to Moses is a covenant with a community which is a
‘*possession’’ of God by virtue of its possession of a
new truth about God. To be sure, others in the an-
cient Near East claimed to be the recipient of favors
of a god. The Babylonian Nabonidus, for example,
had a stela inscribed commemorating his ascendance
to power as the reward of the moon-god, Sin. *‘At
midnight he (Sin) made me have a dream and said (in
the dream) as follows: ‘Rebuild speedily Ehulhul, the
temple of Sin in Harran, and I will hand over to you
all the countries.’ ’’2 But the theophany of Sin with
Nabonidus is distinguishable from the covenant of
Yahweh with Abram and Moses because Nabonidus’
god, Sin, was a cosmological divinity, and the mode
of cosmological kingship characteristic of the ancient
Near East, remained intact. The Israelite theophany,
however, created a new political consciousness.
Through their response to the revelation of Yahweh,
the Hebrew clans become anew people in history, a
theopolity ordered under fundamental rules emana-
ting from a transcendent, not cosmological, Yahweh.
In Exodus 3, Moses encounters the presence of
Yahweh, not as an intracosmic divinity, but as tran-
scendent divine reality. From the burning bush Yah-

54.
weh reveals his name, ‘‘I am who I am,”’ a concept
which breaks the cosmological association of the
gods with the cosmos. In Judges 5, also, Yahweh is
described not in the mode of an intracosmic divinity,
but as divine reality whose presence is manifest in
natural phenomena: ‘‘O Lord, when you went out
from Seir, when you marched from the land of Edom,
the earth quaked and the heavens were shaken, while
the clouds sent down showers. Mountains trembled
in the presence of the Lord, the One of Sinai, in the
presence of the Lord, the God of Israel’? (Judges
5:4-5). Through their response to this revelation, the
Hebrew clans who concluded the covenant with
Yahweh became a new people in history. The people
of Israel were conscious of their “‘history’’ as the re-
cord of those moments in which the God of Israel re-
vealed Himselfto them by his creative acts.
Ask now of the days of old, before your time, ever since
God created man upon the earth; ask from one end of
the sky to the other: Did anything so great ever happen
before? Was it ever heard of? Did a people ever hear the
voice of God speaking from the midst of a fire, as you
did and live? Or did any god venture to go and take a
nation for himself from the midst of another nation, by
testing, by signs and wonders, by war, with his strong
hand and outstretched arm, and by great terrors, all of
which the Lord, your God, did for Egypt before your
very eyes? (Deut. 4:32-34).

But, how can divine reality be manifest fully in one

historical culture? Is there not a tension in the cove-
nant formula between pragmatic political existence
and political existence transformed by nght relation-
ship to God? Throughout the early history of Israel,
its consciousness of itself as the people of God, as

a.
long as they hearken to God, runs counter to the
necessities of pragmatic political existence. The need
to go to war in order to free themselves from servi-
tude to the Canaanites, reported in Judges 5, for ex-
ample, becomes, later in the imperial history of Isra-
el, the need to go to war, not for the compelling rea-
sons of a holy war, but because in spring all kings
commence their campaigns (2 Sam. 11:1). How can
the theopolity of God, the substance of a city of God,
be confined within the pragmatic history of the
Hebrew clans, or any other worldly community?
Clearly it cannot. The fact that Israel defected from
the covenant time and again, either in pursuit of
worldly power or by return to the compact symbols
of the intracosmic divinities of surrounding cosmo-
logical cultures, answers the question. But on the lev-
el of symbols, the historical consciousness of Israel,
expanded by the Christian experience, was
preserved by Christian political theory, chiefly
visible in St. Augustine’s The City of God.

PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

The movement of the soul from out of the city of

man is aconcept which saturates St. Augustine’s The
City of God. Life, St. Augustine thought, was a pilgri-
mage, a trial we endure in the hope of attaining the ul-
timate goal beyond life. The soul moves along an as-
cending line, upward to a point beyond history, thus
his linear conception of history. History is linear, not
cyclical because the Incarnation for St. Augustine
was the greatest of all historical events, so great that it
gave meaning to all previous and subsequent events.
For Augustine, then, history is not to be measured by

30;
victories or military battles or the conquests of great
empire. The criterion by which history is made
meaningful is the history of faith in Christ.
Faith manifests itself in community, a city of God,
which has a history. On one level, that history can be
seen in Scripture. Cain, the first-born of Adam and
Eve, was of the earthly city; and Abel, his brother,
belonged to the city of God. And when Cain built a
city, Able, ‘“‘being a sojourner, built none.’’3 Abra-
ham and Sarah in old age ‘‘symbolized the nature of
the human race vitiated by sin and by just conse-
quence condemned.’’4 Their nature denied them
children. But Sarah conceived, and her son Isaac,
‘the child of promise,’’ typifies the ‘‘children of
grace, the citizens of the free city.’’> Jerusalem,
writes Augustine, prefigured the celestial city;® and
David, its king, parallels Christ, the king of the city of
God. On another level, however, the history of the
city of God is visible on the level of the souls of the
faithful, the peregrination of the soul of the individual
towards God. By living in constant attunement to
God through faith, the Christian progresses towards
Him and gives meaning to history, ““by going forward
in the living God, by the steps of faith, which worketh
by love.’’/ The drama of faith struck Augustine
strongly. “‘How shall we dare to say that we are
safe?’’ he asks. The soul is less subjected to God as it
is less occupied with the thought of God. And the
flesh less subjected to the spirit as it lusts against the
spirit. Life for the godly, therefore, is a pilgrimage, a
living in tension between ‘“‘the persecutions of the
world and the consolations of God.® The citizen ot
the city of God, though he cannot banish vice which
lusts against the spirit, can, with God’s help, pre-

57.
 serve the soul from succumbing and yielding to the
flesh. All people of Christ, therefore, whatever their
station in life, are enjoined to endure this earthly re- |
public, wicked and dissolute as it is, that so they may
by this endurance win for themselves an eminent
place in that most holy and august assembly of angels
and republic of heaven, in which the will of God is the
law.’’7 The peregrinatio of the soul as it lives in time
gives meaning to history. The standard is not the rise
or fall of nations, the vagaries of power, but our pro-
gress towards God.
In order to interpret St. Augustine’s view of his-
tory more fully, we now referto Eric Voegelin’s con-
cept of the “historical present.”’

When the order of the soul and society is oriented to-

ward the will of God and consequently the actions of
the society and its members are experienced as fulfill-
ment or defection, a historical present is created, radia-
ling its form over a past that was not consciously
historical in its own present. !0

The pneumatic events which shaped the political con-

sciousness of Israel, the promise to Abraham, the
Exodus, the Covenant and Decalogue, constituted an
**historical present’’ from which the life of Israel was
seen to extend into a past that included the creation of
the world and the lives of the patriarchs, a present un-
der God and a future governed by the promise of Yah-
weh. For St. Augustine, history consisted of the
‘*historical present”’ oflife in Christ; a past extending
over the long history ofthe city of God seen as a nar-
rative of the fulfillment of God’s promise and, on the
individual level, the memory in time of the indi-
vidual; and a future which holds the hope of eternal

58.
life.
With an eye upon the Revelation of St. John, Chap-
ter 19, St. Augustine formulated a periodization of
history which avoided the politicization of the history
of salvation. John sees heaven open and a white
horse ridden by one who is called Faithful and True.
The armies in heaven follow him, and the nations of
the earth are destroyed. The Devil is sealed in hell for
a thousand years, during which time the righteous
reign with Christ. At the end of this period there
follows the resurrection of the dead and the Last
Judgment. Augustine suggests that the reign of one
thousand years may be interpreted to mean ‘‘an e-
quivalent for the whole duration of this world.”’!!
and rebukes the Millenarians who maintain that the
thousand years of the prophecy must be interpreted as
meaning a worldly enjoyment of luxury on earth en-
during for a thousand years. To Augustine the ages of
history extend from Adam to the deluge, from the
deluge to Abraham, from Abraham to David, from
David to the captivity, from the captivity to the birth
of Christ. ‘‘The sixth is now passing,’’ he writes,
‘‘and cannot be measured by any number of genera-
tions... .”"!2 The millennium began with Christ’s
birth and will continue in time until God in his wis-
dom calls a close to the trials of this world.
St. Augustine’s view of history is at odds not only
with the Millenarian tendency to find salvation
through political action in this world but also with the
Stoic concept of eternal cycles. The cyclical concept
of history is incorrect because Christ died once, fora
Specific reason, to redeem man of his sins; and He
will come again, not to die once more, but to judge.
lhe philosophy of history of St. Augustine remains in

59.
Western culture today, perhaps not in its full intergri-
ty, but in bits and pieces unconsciously present in the
historical consciousness of Western man. A view of -
history, seeing reality from the perspective oftime, is
a distinguishing mark of Western culture. To be sure,
Western historical consciousness has been stripped
of its Christian nature, but contemporary Western
historical consciousness inhabits the outline of what
is fundamentally a Christian phenomenon. The linear
design remains, with no conclusive reasoning to veri-
fy it, as does the conception of history’s progressive
movement towards an end of time; but modern
eschatology sees that end in this world, notin the next.
This latter phenomenon is a principal aspect of
modern political religions.

THE COMMUNITY OF MANKIND

Henri Bergson argues in his Two Sources of Moral-

ity and Religion that. there are two communities con-
substantial with man: the open society and the
closed. All classical society was closed to conscious-
ness of the universality of mankind, except for those
few moments when great thinkers pointed the way to
the open society. Before mankind could be conscious
of itself as a part of acommunity made up of all peo-
ple—an open society which included both the pro-
phets of Israel and the philosophers of Hellas—
the perspective of men who remained in the closed
society had to be restructured. Only in the Christian
experience, however, was a complete break made.
St. Augustine’s The City of God is based on the
perspective of this universal community. The symbol
of the city of God represented St. Augustine’s own

60.
experience of the reality of a community inclusive of
all mankind. At its center, both in the political sense
und in the lives of its citizens, was the ‘‘unchangeable
God,”’ the highest good, summum bonum.|3 Towards
God, all Christians direct their actions and their wills,
and by their love for Him they are known as citizens
of His city. Likewise they love their fellow men be-
cause their consciousness of Him is what constitutes
the common element in their humanity. St. Augus-
tine’s alterhative symbol, that of the city of man, is
symbolic of both pragmatic existence and the para-
digmatic community of men who give themselves
over only to love of themselves.
St. Augustine is saying that the inclinations of our
souls identify us as types of men. The city of closed
souls is a community of people whose souls incline
toward love of themselves (amor sui). But the com-
munity of God consists of souls open to God, of men
who love God (amor Dei). In history the two cities
are intermingled, each pursuing its separate course.
By their very nature we cannot expect them to be-
come actual in political reality. St. Augustine does
not suggest that the Church is the city of God. There
are many reprobates in the Church, he remarks.

ST. AUGUSTINE’S CRITIQUE

OF THE CITY OF MAN

In 410 A.D., Rome had been invaded by the Goths.

The pagan citizens of Rome blamed the Christians for
the fall of Rome, and in reply to this slander, Augus-
tine wrote The City of God. His immediate purpose
was to defend the Christian religion from an unjust
charge, and this he accomplished with great skill. By

61.
identifying Christianity with the city of God he rhe-
torically analyzed the complete bankruptcy of classi-
cal culture as the city of man. St. Augustine had shift- —
ed the critics of Christianity on to indefensible
ground.
St. Augustine’s concept of the city of man was
not, as the title of his work suggests, his chief focus,
rather, it was a necessity of the inner logic of his de-
fense: ‘‘. . . as the plan of this work we have under-
taken requires, and as occasion offers, we must
speak also ofthe earthly city.’’ !4Nevertheless, asur-
vey of Augustine’s investigation of the concepts of
peace, happiness, and virtue will serve to show the
depth of his critique of the pagans and the conse-
quences of that critique for politics in the West.
The peace which the city of man ‘‘desires cannot
justly be said to be evil, for it is itself, in its own kind,
better than all other human good.’’!5 It desires this
peace “‘for the sake of enjoying earthly goods.”’ 16 [ft
has existence, and though it is perverted it ‘‘must of
necessity be in harmony with, and in dependence on,
and in some part of the order of things.’’!7 That the
peace of the earthly city is perverted, however, and
cannot “‘be called peace in comparison with the
peace of the just,”’ 18 seems obvious to Augustine who
refers to this earthly peace as having ‘‘vied with war
in cruelty and surpassed it: for while war overthrew
armed hosts, peace slew the defenseless.”’ 19 “Even
the heavenly city,’’ nevertheless, ‘‘while in its state
of pilgrimage, avails itself of the peace of the earth,
and, so far as it can without injuring faith and godli-
ness, desires and maintains a common agreement a-
mong men regarding the acquisition of the necessar-
ies of life?’29°‘ The heavenly city, or rather the part of

62.
it which sojourns on earth and live by faith, makes
use of [the peace of the earthly city] only because it
must.’’2! The peace of the earthly city is maintained
by *‘manners, laws, and institutions,’’22 while the
heavenly city, in its pilgrim state, possessed peace by
‘‘faith.’’23 The end of the earthly peace is ‘‘the com-
bination of men’s wills to attain the thigs which are
helpful to this life.’’24 The peace of theheavenly city,
the only peace which can truly be called peace and es-
teemed by “‘reasonable creatures,’’ consists ‘‘in the
perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God
and of one another in God?’2> This peace is attained
only in death, implies Augustine. ‘‘When we shall
have reached that peace, this mortal life shall give
place to one that is eternal, and our body shall be no
more this animal body which by its corruption weighs
down the soul, but a spiritual body feeling no want,
and in all its members subjected to the will.’’26 In
such a view of life, peace on earth can be only ‘‘the
sOlace of our misery’”’ rather than ‘‘the positive enjoy-
ment of felicity.”’27
The joy of the members of the city of man, Augus-
tine compares to ‘“‘glass in its fragile splendor, of
which one is horribly afraid lest it should be suddenly
broken in pieces.’’28 The happiness of the citizens of
the city of God is contentment, Augustine implies:
‘*For who does not know that the wicked exult with
joy? Yet ‘there is no contentment for the wicked,
saith the Lord.’ And how so, unless because content-
ment, when the word is used in its proper and distinc-
tive significance, means something different from
joy?”’2 The distinction between joy and content-
ment is an important one, and may be made clear by
applying the ‘‘test of tranquility.’’30 Augustine ap-

63.
plies his test to two hypothetical men. The one is rich,
but is burdened by fears, discontent, and enemies,
while the other, a man of ‘‘middling circumstances’’
is the possessor of ‘‘real felicity,’’ while the other
possesses only the ‘‘mere show of happiness.’’3!
The wisdom of the philosophers, he writes, is a de-
ceitful and proud virtue upon which they attempt to
construct happiness in this life.32 The city of God,
however, and the felicity which is the portion of its
members, is not based on wisdom, but on godliness.
True happiness is to be found in the knowledge of e-
ternal life which is an ‘‘endlessly happy life.’’33 And
this hope of eternal life directs the Christian’s actions
towards “‘piety and probity’’ which ‘‘suffice to give
them true felicity, enabling them to live well the life
that now is.’’?34
True virtue “‘makes a right use of the advantages’’
provided by times of peace and ‘‘makes a good use
even of the evils a man suffers.’’35 This virtue re-
fers all actions, regardless of the conditions under
which they are made, ‘‘to that end in which we shall
enjoy the best and greatest peace possible?’3® Augus-
tine is saying here that for actions to be virtuous they
must be made in light of the supreme good of the
city of God. ‘‘For there is no true virtue,’’ he writes,
“‘except that which is directed towards that end in
which is the highest and ultimate good of man.’’37
The virtue which makes the good life has its throne in
the soul.
Plato and Aristotle formulated a view of politics
which sought to give direction to political community
by delineating its proper ends, identifying the forms
of right government, and the moral limits upon
government. These limits were found in a critical de-
finition of human action which saw the nature of man
in its openness to transcendent divine reality. These
insights were absorbed by Christianity, and through
the Christian synthesis of noetic and pneumatic the-
ophany, became principal aspects in the Western
concept of order. To this edifice, St. Augustine add-
ed something not present in Plato and Aristotle, a to-
tal critique of worldly existence. Plato and Aristotle
essentially found the world comfortable. St. Augus-
tine did not. Through his critique of the city of man,
therefore, he limited our perspective of what could
and could not be accomplished in political existence.
The soul of man remained the locus of right order, but
its guardian became the Church, not the state. To the
state was consigned an important, but limited role.
This view of an essentially limited state, the product
of his critique of the city of man, became in turn a
basic Western political attitude.
In Part Two, we will examine the development of
Modern political theory commencing with Machia-
velli, a process which culminates in the ascendancy
of the modern state. The state now, contrary to the
Christian concept, becomes omnicompetent, not
merely the guardian of political order but responsi-
ble, Rousseau asserted, for the development of
human nature itself. The rejection of the theological
truths of Classical-Christian political theory, which
was an intellectual prerequisite of this development,
is first seen in the Renaissance skepticism of
Machiavelli and later in the atheism of Hobbes.
Locke and Rousseau represent later developments
and refinements of this rejection, though both
displayed nuances and peculiarities of their own,
reflecting the troubled perceptions and conditions of

GD.
modern intellectual life. All four can be seen to reject
Classical-Christian concepts of the sacrality of
political life and to be striving to reconstitute political —
order on new, desacralized, and thus secular ground.
Though the contemporary world would not be the
Same without their contributions to intellectual
discourse, since the course of Western intellectual
development is never straight, remnants of the
Classical-Christian tradition endure, leaving
Western political theorists often divided in their
perceptions. The origins of this troubling division in
our political consciousness can be discovered in the
study of Modern political theory.

66.
 SUGGESTED READINGS

In addition to The City of God, students of political

science will find St. Augustine’s Confessions a valu-
able insight into his political philosophy. Valuable
secondary readings are Eric Voegelin, Israel and
Revelation and the substantial commentary on that
work by Bernhard W. Anderson, *‘Politics and the
Transcendent: Eric Voegelin’s Philosophical and
Theological Analysis of the Old Testament in the
Context of the Ancient Near East,”’ The Political Sci-
ence Reviewer, I (Fall, 1971), 1-29. A most valuable
secondary work on St. Augustine is Herbert Deane,
Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1963).

67.
 NOTES

lAll Biblical quotations are taken from the New

American Bible (New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons,
1970).
2James B. Pritchard, ed. Ancient Near Eastern
Texts Relating to the Old :Testament (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1969), 562.
3Saint Augustine, The City of God, Marcus
Dods, George Wilson, J. J. Smith, trans. (New
York: Random House, Modern Library, 1950),
XV.1.479.
4XV 3.481.
J Ibid.
6XV.2.480.
7XVIII.18.623.
8X VIII.51.663.
11.19.59.
lOEric Voegelin, Order and History, Vol. I,
Israel and Revelation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1956), 128.
LX 7720.
12XXI1.30.867.
13X 1.303.
141 Preface.3.
ISXV.4.481.
16 /bid.
17X1X.12.689.
18 7bid.
1971T.28.105.
20XTX. 17.696.
21X1X.17.695.
22X1X.17.696.

68.
23X1X. 17.697.
24X1X.17.695.
25X1X.17.696-697.
26 Ibid.
27X1X.27.707-708.
281V 3.111.
29XIV.8.451.
SOS S112)
31 fbid.
32X1X.4.680.
33VI.12.205.
SATV 3) 1127
35X1X.10.686.
36 Ibid.
SING Ie

69.
 PART TWO:
MODERN POLITICAL THEORY
 CHAPTER V
MACHIAVELLI
IS MACHIAVELLI MODERN?

Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) is generally reck-

oned to be the first truly modern political theorist.
With this generalization, however, there are certain
qualifications that one should keep in mind. Machia-
velli lived in an era conscious of itself as different in
attitude and character from the ‘‘Medieval’’ era. But
the origin of that consciousness, important though it
was for the further growth and development of the
Renaissance, preceded Machiavelli’s own work by
more than one hundred fifty years. In order to identi-
fy the modern characteristic of Machiavelli’s
political theory, something must be briefly said about
the uniquely modern characteristics of the Renais-
sance itself.
Ephraim Emerton defined the Renaissance as “‘the
new birth throughout the regions of Latin civilization
of an interest in classical study, no longer merely as a
means to the end of a better understanding of the
Christian writers or as a preparation to become acler-
gyinan but as a means of personal culture.’’! Con-
veyed in this definition is a sense of curiosity, of indi-
vidual self-assertion, in opposition to the medieval
virtues of self-denial and renunciation of the world.
In literature this is visible in the new use of the ver-
nacular for the expression of personal and national
feeling, whereas the common tongue had previously
been discredited as a medium for the expression of
serious ideas. Though the creators of Gothic archi-

ape
tecture are anonymous, Petrarch (1304-1374) de-
clared fame to be the proper object of human desire2
and revised the traditional Christian valuation of his-
tory. Where heretofore Christ was the focus of his-
tory, now Petrarch saw the conversion of Rome to
Christianity as the dark age and the period of
pre-Christian Rome as an age of light and glory.> At
the same time, vows which Christian nobles were in-
clined to make, imposing onerous tasks upon them-
selves and their clients for the glory of God, faded
from the scene.4 Literary reflections on death, which
previously had singularly pious functions, now came
to express a secular emotion only.> In addition, the
rise of numerology, magic and astrology, pseudo-sci-
ences which promised knowledge and control of
divine forces, tended to replace religions piety.6 The
Renaissance also represented major changes in peo-
ple’s moral and worldly attitudes. “‘By the mid-fif-
teenth century the family man, the magistrate, the
soldier, might hold up his head. The monk no longer
monopolized virtue. The stock sermon topic, wheth-
er amerchant ora soldier was more certain of damna-
tion, lost its sting, though it continued to be
preached.’’7 Along with the elevation of secular pur-
Suits, there occurred a change in the nature of docu-
mentation. Thus, writes Denys Hay, ‘‘after the early
years of the fifteenth century the monastic chronicle
dried up, even in France and England; elsewhere it
had become parochial long before.’”’8 In place of
chronicles, the historical record is to be found in the
writings of lay administrators and the records of dip-
lomatic agents. In turn, the nobility developed what
in effect was its own civil service composed of lay, as
opposed to clerical, secretaries.?

Hie:
 While all these currents in the Latin world as a
whole must be accounted for in any consideration of
the historical context within which Machiavelli lived
and worked, the Italian background itself must be
considered. Machiavelli’s Prince (1512-13), his Dis-
courses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius
(1516-17) and his History of Florence (1520-25) did
not merely crop us as singular and unique *‘modern’’
political works. The idea of a political commentary
based on a commentary of Livy’s History of Rome
from its Foundations was itself characteristic of the
historiography then current. Renaissance humanists
habitually used Livy as their model, a choice in keep-
ing with the general identification of the Renaissance
as a revival of classical writings. In turn, this focus-
sing of Italian historiography on the history of Rome
had the effect of removing uniquely Christian ele-
ments from considerations ofItalian culture. The rig-
idly secular character of Machiavelli’s works is part-
ly in keeping with the Renaissance imitation of the
Roman model!0An example of this secularization is
Coluccio Salutati’s dispassionate discussion of tyr-
anny in his De Tyranno (1400). Salutati (1331-1406)
begins with a definition of a tyrant as one who does
not rule according to law; proceeds to a considera-
tion of the justification of tyrannicide in which he ar-
gues that examples of tyrannicide do not prove that it
is right, only that it is frequent;!! and concludes, after
an assessment of wholly pragmatic considerations,
that no one ought to rise up against his lord ‘‘even
though the lord be acting as a tyrant!’’!2 Salutati’s
discourse is replete with illustrations from Roman
history, but he focusses chiefly on the murder of Cae-
sar. He favors Caesar, holding that he was not a tyrant

73:
and that all who fought in the civil war were at heart
seeking to destroy the Republic because it had lived
beyond its historical usefulness. Salutati concluded -
that ‘‘the murderers of Caesar slew, not a tyrant but
the father of his country.’ !3 Writing a generation be-
fore Salutati, Bartolus of Sassoferrato (d. 1357),
author of ‘‘Tractatus De Turannia,’’ similarly re-
flects the realistic mode in observing that it is not
possible for a government to be devoted wholly to the
common good. !4
To answer the question we posed above, in the
light of the historical background, we should admit
that Machiavelli was ‘‘modern,”’ but so also were his
predecessors of more than one hundred fifty years.
Herbert Buttetfield concluded, ‘‘His mentality is es-
sentially that of his time and circle. . . .”"!15 We shall
attempt to specify further the modernity of Machia-
velli’s thought in order to assess the validity of this
judgment.

RULES OF THE POLITICAL PROCESS

Coluccio Salutati’s ‘‘Letters in Defence of Liberal

Studies’’ contain a poignant passage in which he at-
tempts to justify the reading of Virgil. While admit-
ting that truth may be more readily obtained in Scrip-
ture, nevertheless he argues, one can find examples
of ‘‘virtuous and honorable conduct’’ in the ancient
writings. !6 The acquisition of useful knowledge by a
reading of the history of the past was a chief justifica-
tion for a classical education, which in turn deeply af-
fected Renaissance culture. The give and take of con-
temporary argument, for example, was often illustra-
ted, if not illuminated by classical examples. After

74.
the arrest of Savonarola it Was debated whether he
should be forced to reveal the names of his fellow
conspirators. One person present warned against
such a move because ‘‘Caesar, after his victory over
Pompey, had refused to look at Pompey’s corres-
pondence.’’!7 Machiavelli followed this historical
method, but withan added zest that caused Francesco
Guicciardini (1483-1540) to question its validity.
Guicciardini wrote in number six of his Ricordi:

It is a great mistake to speak of the affairs of the

world without distinction and absolutely, and, soto say,
by rule, as every case is different and exceptional be-
cause of the variety of circumstances which cannot be
judged by the same measure. Such distinctions and ex-
ceptions are not written in books but must be revealed
by discernment.!8

Not unlike the modern political behaviorists’

search for the ‘‘homologous processes’’ of ‘‘sys-
tems,’’ Machiavelli fastened upon rules of the politi-
cal process which he offered for the perusal of both
the practitioner and student of politics. These rules
were arrived at inductively from a collation ofhistori-
cal examples taken from Greek, Roman, and recent
Italian history. A few rules were what could be called
regime rules, that is, rules of behavior for specific
types of regimes. He declares:

A republic should take good care not to give any ad-

ministrative post of importance to anyone to whom
some notable wrong had been done. !9

Three ways of retaining possession of acquired states

include:

vo
 . . demolish them;. . .go there in person to live;. . .let
them live by their own laws.20

Again, for republics, he stipulates:

A well-ordered republic. . .should. . .make it open to

anyone to gain favour by his services to the public, but
should prevent him from gaining it by his services to pri-
vate individuals.2!

But for the most part, Machiavelli attempted to for-

mulate laws of the political process or, when directed
to the political participant, rules of political behavior.
We use the term ‘‘behavior’’ and not the term
‘*action’’ because the rules Machiavelli recommend-
ed were limited not byjustice and right, but by the re-
quirements for acquiring and retaining power. The
following rules are representative:

. .never should one risk the whole of one’s fortune on the

success of but a part of one’s forces.22

. .one should not declare one’s intentions, but should seek

to get what one desires anyhow.23

. .where the gentry are numerous, no one who pro-

poses to set up a republic can succeed unless he first gets rid
of the lot. . . .24

. .a prince who wishes to do great things must learn to

practice deceit.25

A prince. . .who wants to guard against conspiracies, should

fear those on whom he had conferred excessive favours more
than those to whom he has done excessive injury.2©

76.
 . . .the masses ought never to be allowed to take up arms
except under definite instructions and conditions.27

Machiavelli believed these rules to be true and tested

guides of political behavior for all time, not merely
prudential maxims ever-changing with circum-
stances. That is not to say that the prince should be
oblivious to changing events. ‘‘Prudence,’’ Machia-
velli wrote, ‘‘consists in knowing how to recognize
the nature of the difficulties and how to choose the
least bad as good.’’28 His purpose seems to have been
to recommend prudence while ever-cautious of that
substrate of pursuit of power within the flux of events
which for him constituted political reality. The
pursuit of power was to be guided by the rules of the
process cut off from questions of right action.
This definition of prudence reveals much about the
nature of Machiavelli’s political science. It is not con-
cerned with making citizens virtuous, but in main-
taining or acquiring power. Nor does it seek to dis-
cover standards of right action, but rather the rules
by which the pursuit and maintenance of power are
regulated. A uniquely modern aspect of Machiavel-
li’s thought lies in his expressed belief that such rules
could be discerned. Rules of the political process,
once discovered, can displace the Classical emphasis
on prudence as a principal political virtue. The per-
sonal knowledge of action within moral limits of the
prudent man is rejected by Machiavelli and replaced
by the man whose virtue is not the moral virtue of
prudence, but the skill of the politician disposed to
act in accord with impersonal laws of power politics.
In this context, a famous passage from Book Three
of the Discourses can be understood.

Ns
 Prudent men are wont to say—and this not rashly or
without good ground—that he who would foresee what
has to be, should reflect on what has been, for every-
thing that happens in the world at any time has a genu-
ine resemblance to what happened in ancient times.
This is due to the fact that the agents who bring such
things about are men, and that men have, and always
have had, the same passions, whence it necessarily
comes about that the same efforts are produced.29

For Machiavelli, political affairs were predictable

since the human condition remained constant in time.
**Men are born and live and die in an order which re-
mains ever the same.’’39 But from Machiavelli’s per-
spective, men are chiefly ruled by their passions, the
chief of which is ambition; therefore, a good law is
one which does not seek to make men virtuous, but
which keeps ambition in check.3! As a rule, he writes,
only necessity drives men to the good.32 Whereas the
Classical view of the end for government was to make
people virtuous, to adjust the laws so that the conflict
between political and human virtue is resolved which
is to seek the common good, Machiavelli saw that the
essence of government ‘‘consists in nothing else but
so controlling subjects that they shall neither be able
to, nor have cause to, do you harm. . . .”°33
Political science conceved on this lower appeti-
tive level brought within the purview of the study of
politics subjects which previously would have been
condemned as unsuitable. Machiavelli, of course,
was aware of the moral unsuitability, by convention-
al standards, of many of the things which he advised
political practitioners to do. But that was not the
issue. At issue was what was required by the im-
personal rules of the political process, even if they

Thek
required acts of injustice, violence, cruelty, and
deceit. A prince, Machiavelli wrote, ‘‘must not sepa-
rate himself from the good, if he is able, but he must know
to take up evil, should it become necessary.’’34
Machiavelli expressed this conflict by reference to
the fox and the lion, metaphors for the bestial aspect
of man, the appetites which are ruled only by force.
The force alone of the lion is not enough, but must be
guided by the cleverness of the fox.

And so, a wise ruler cannot, nor should he, keep his
word when doing so would be to his disadvantage and
when the reasons that led him to make promises no
longer exist. And if all men were good, this principle
would not be good; but since men are a contemptible
lot, and would not keep their promises to you, you too
need not keep yours to them.35

The only limit he placed upon the use of violence

was whether it was used well or badly. Machiavelli,
for example, recommended violence if done all at
once, and not strung out over a long period of time. If
strung Out, Opposition would build up which would
weaken one’s power.36 He condoned violence if used
either to preserve the state or to found one,>/ and he
attempted to establish his argument by observing,
‘‘He who reads the Bible with discernment will see
that, in order that Moses might set about making laws
and institutions, he had to kill a very great number of
men who, out of envy and nothing else, were opposed
to his plans.’’38
Advocating such political behavior, Machiavelli
does not surprise us by acknowledging something
good in civil discord. Out of this seeming paradox, he

iy
was to formulate a notion which increasingly has be-
come accepted as the epitome of modern political sci-
ence. James Madison in The Federalist, Number 10,
argued a view quite similar to Machiavelli’s when he
said that an extended republic will survive because of
faction and not despite it. The benefits of discord or
faction were first appreciated by Machiavelli. The
disturbances between the rich and poor, the patri-
cians and plebeians in ancient Rome, he said, were
actually of benefit to the republic since they led to
legislation conducive to liberty.39 The public riots
which marked the risings of the plebs against the
Senate expressed the lively ambitions of the Roman
people, released energy which could have been de-
structive, and which was soon channeled into the
conquest of the Empire.

REALIST OR SECULAR CHILIAST?

The picture which Machiavelli had of himself, that

of the supreme realist, one who single-mindedly ex-
trudes ‘‘illusions’’ from politics and seeks to acquire
the rules by which politics is actually practiced,
would not have been acceptable to his contemporary,
Francesco Guicciardini, who criticized Machiavelli’s
tendency to employ violent remedies. *‘For violent
remedies, though they make one safe from one as-
pect, yet from another, particularly in the case of a
prince who is not relying on his own forces, involve
all kinds uf weaknesses.’’49 In short, Machiavelli’s
advice was not practicable. The authority of Guic-
Ciardini is not as sure a test of his lack of realism,
however, as Machiavelli’s call for a prince to unify

80.
Italy. This theme was not originated by Machiavelli,
nor was it uniformly the aspiration of Italians of his
educational level, for the simple reason that it was
not a feasible possibility. The Church and the Euro-
pean national monarchies stood in the way of its
realization. But to Machiavelli the unification of Italy
was a possible reality. In the important ‘*Exhorta-
tion’”’ of The Prince (Chap. 26), Machiavelli observes
that “*so many things are concurring to favor a new
prince that I know of no other time more appropriate
than this.’’4! {t is crucial for anassessment of Machia-
velli that we note his choice of the words ‘‘redeemer’’
and ‘‘redemption’’ to express this judgment. ‘‘This
opportunity, then, must not be allowed to pass by, in
order that Italy, after so long a time, may behold its
redeemer.”’ ‘‘Look how she prays God that He may
send someone to redeem her from these barbarous
cruelties and outrages; look at her ever ready and
willing to follow a banner, if only there were some
person to raise it. There is no one in sight, at present,
in whom she can have more hope than in your illustri-
ous house, that with its fortune and ingenuity, favor-
ed by God and by the Church, of which it is now
prince, could make itself head of this redemption.’’42
‘‘Redemption’’ and ‘‘redeemer’’ are, of course, reli-
gious terms, and in Catholic theology express the sal-
vation.of man by God, salvation which is not in this
world, but with God after death. Clearly, Machiavel-
li’s choice indicates a view of salvation which is in
this world. Not without some merit, perhaps, J.R.
Hale has observed that Machiavelli was ‘‘nearer in
temperament to Savonarola. . .,’’43 whose predic-
tions of the liberation of Florence and the imminence

81.
of the millennium were heard by Machiavelli, then a
resident of Florence. Machiavelli’s exhortation for a_
redeemer to unify Italy is structurally similar to
Savonarola’s prophecies with the exception that the
salvation which Machiavelli seeks is completely
secular.44
Throughout the Discourses and The Prince, Mach-
iavelli discussed the problems of founding a regime.
The act of founding a regime requires the action of
one person+ simply because the deed to be done is
momentous and requires the artistry of a single man,
rather than the confusion of a committee. Such per-
sons who found states are admirable men who by a-
nalogy perform works which are not unlike that of
Moses, who founded Israel at the command of God.
Cyrus too was such a founder, leaving the reader of
The Prince with the inference that the unifier of Italy
must be a new Cyrus and a new Moses.46 Perhaps
Machiavelli intended to harness the chiliastic expec-
tations of the followers of Savonarola who also saw
the imminence of a ‘‘new Cyrus.”’ In this respect, it
should be noted that when the Florentine republic
was restored in 1527, the restoration was accom-
plished by a coalition of practitioners of power poli-
tics and followers of Savonarola. Those who saw
only God’s divine will at work in the affairs of man,
thus rejecting reason, forged a political alliance with
those who also rejected reason, seeing only force in
politics.47 Writing fourteen years earlier, Machiavelli
fortuitously saw the possibility of such a coalition,
expanded its objectives, and provided a political the-
ory for its realization. In the Discourses he observes:

Nor in fact was there ever a legislator who, in intro-

82.
 ducing extraordinary laws to a people, did not have re-
course to God, for otherwise they would not have been
accepted, since many benefits of which a prudent man
is aware, are not so evident to reason that he can con-
vince others of them. Hence wise men, in order to es-
cape this difficulty, have recourse to God.48

This passage explains, we believe, his discussion, in

the Discourses and The Prince, of the consequences
when fortune or virtu predominate. An aspiring
prince must have one or the other, if not fortune, then
the virtu to wait for the moment to act and best utilize
the advantages of the moment; if not virtu, and only
fortune, nothing can prevail against him. Signifi-
cantly, the unifier of Italy has both fortune and virtu.
For that reason, Machiavelli’s little book Life of
Castruccio Castracani (1520) in which the conjunc-
tion of fortune and virtu is fully embodied and elabo-
rated, has interpretive value. Machiavelli writes,
**No one was bolder in facing danger, none more pru-
dent in extricating himself. He was accustomed to
say that men ought to attempt everything and fear
nothing; that God is a lover of strong men, because
one gaye sees that the weak are chastised by the
strong.”’ 9
Chastisement in the eyes of the prophets is per-
ceived as the will of God, who has sent punishment to
men for their sins. These Scriptural allusions are sus-
tained by Machiavelli in the ‘‘Exhortation”’ of the
Prince:

.. .we have witnessed extraordinary happenings with-

Out precedent brought about by God: the sea has open-
ed; a cloud has cleared your path; the rock has poured
water; it has rained manna here; everything has run in

83.
 favor of your greatness. The rest you must do your-
self. God does not want to do everything, so as not to
take from us our free will and a part of that glory that
belongs to us.0

Several commentators have remarked upon these

grandiose proportions of Machiavelli’s law-giver.
Bernard Crick saw his conception of the man of virtu
to be actually a “*demi-god.”’ ! Felix Gilbert observed
that Machiavelli **endowed the lawgiver with powers
more divine than human.’’52 How should we take
this new conception of the political leader?
With the differentiation of physis by Ionian nat-
ural philosophers, the experience of transcendent di-
vine reality, beyond nature, not intracosmic, led to
the creation of the science of the life of the ordered
soul of Classical political science. With Machiavellia
similar revolution occurs. The immanentization of
Christian salvation in metastatic faith, leads to the
creation of modern political theory as the science of
the bestial in man. This revolution excluded the pos-
sibility of a politics of action within moral limits and
thus released the impetus in Western man to save
himself in this life, limited only by a limitless libido.
As we Shall see in Chapter Nine, this spirit is also visi-
ble in the view of man the ‘‘operator’’ of Machia-
velli’s contemporaries, the Renaissance Herme-
tists. He also advocated a type of political magic, if
by magic we mean the willingness of the magician
to believe that his illusions are real. In this sense
the political magician attempts to manipulate reality
and to subjugate it to the pretensions of his specula-
tive consciousness. We believe that Machiavelli’s
expectation of the imminent unification of Italy un-

84.
der the banner of a strongman, perhaps even him-
self, is a corollary of his view of the political man
who realized himself by acting within a world absent
of ethical limitations. Both aspirations are illusions
sustainable only by the will of a magician disposed
to believe that the knowledge of moral limitations
upon human actions can be excluded from the field of
political action. That Machiavelli possessed such a
magician’s will is clear from much of his political
writings.
To answer the question, therefore, with which we
began our considerations, ‘‘Is Machiavelli modern?”’
we conclude that the most modern aspect of his
thought is the secularization of the millennial chili-
asm of Savonarola, with these ensuing conse-
quences: the social action of the strong leader is
construed as the work of God; the millennium is now
the unified national state of Italy; the Christian virtue
of humility is replaced by the strength of the military
leader; the prophets by Machiavelli; and salvation is
entirely encompassed in the terrestrial success of the
new elect of God, the Italian people.

85.
 SUGGESTED READINGS

For the student of political science, the following |

works of Machiavelli are highly recommended: The
Discourses, trans. Leslie J. Walker, S.J., Bernard
Crick, ed. (London: Penguin Books, 1974) The
Prince: A Bilingual Edition, trans. and ed., Mark
Musa (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964); and The
Art of War in Machiavelli: The Chief Works and
Others, Allan Gilbert, trans., 3 vols. (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1965).

SELECTED SECONDARY WORKS

Butterfield, Herbert. The Statecraft of Machiavelli.

New York: Macmillan Co., 1956.
Germino, Dante. ‘‘Second Thoughts on Leo
Strauss’ Machiavelli,’ Journal of Politics, Vol.
28 (1966), 794-817.
Niemeyer, Gerhart. ‘“‘Humanism, Positivism, Im-
morality,’ The Political Science Reviewer, Vol. |
(Fall, 1971), 277-294.
Pocock, J.G.A. The Machiavellian Moment: Floren-
tine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican
Tradition. Princeton and London: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1975.
Strauss, Leo. Thoughts on Machiavelli. Seattle and
London: University of Washington Press, 1969.
Voegelin, Eric. ‘‘Machiavelli’s Prince: Background
and Formation,’ Keview of Politics, Vol. 13, No.2
(Aprils 1951). 1422 les:

86.
 NOTES

lEphraim Emerton, The Beginnings of Modern

Europe, 1250-1450 (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1917), 464.
2 Ibid., 480.
Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences
in Western Art (New York: Harper & Row, Publish-
ers, Icon Editions, 1972), 10.
af Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages:
A Study of the Thought and Art in France and the
Netherlands in the XIVth and XVth Centuries
(London: Edward Amold & Co., 1937), 80.
Sbid., 128-129.
6Ibid., 188-190.
7Denys Hay, The Italian Renaissance in its His-
torical Background (Cambridge: At The University
Press 196) a126:
8Denys Hay, Europe in the Fourteenth and Fif-
teenth Centuries (New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, Inc., 1966), 3.
IIbid., 7.
10Eric Voegelin, ‘“‘Machiavelli’s Prince: Back-
ground and Formation,”’ The Review of Politics, Vol.
13, No. 2 (April, 1951), 142-168.
11For an examination of these aspects of Salu-
tati’s De Tyranno, see Ephraim Emerton, Humanism
and Tyranny: Studies in the Italian Trecento (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1925), 78, 90.
I2Tbid., 93.
13 /bid., 110. The significance ofhis objectivity lies
in the fact that Salutati~was himselfa firm republican
who had repudiated Caesarian propaganda of other
imperially oriented Italian cities.

87.
 l47bid., 153.
I5Herbert Butterfield, The Statecraft of Machia-
velli(New York: Macmillan Co., 1956), 9.
l6Emerton, Humanism and Tyranny, 295.
17Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciaraini:
Politics and History in Sixteenth Century Florence
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 39.
18Cecil Grayson, ed., Francesco Guicciardini:
Selected Writings, Margaret Grayson, trans. (Lon-
don: Oxford University Press, 1965), 7.
19Niccolo Machiavelli, The Discourses, Bernard
Crick, ed., Leslie J. Walker, S.J., trans. (Baltimore:
Penguin Books, 1974), III.17.454.
20Niccolo Machiavelli, Machiavelli's The Prince:
A Bilingual Edition, Mark Musa, trans. (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, Inc., 1964), V.37.
21Machiavelli, Discourses, I1.28.482.
22 [bid., 1.22.170.
23 [bid., 1.44.220.
24 Tbid., 1.55.247.
25 [bid., 11.13.310.
26[bid., 111.6.404.
27 Ibid., 111.30.487.
28Machiavelli, The Prince, XX1.191.
29Machiavelli, Discourses, I11.43.517.
307 bid. , 1.11.142.
31 bid. ,11.1.387.
32 Ibid. ,1.3.112.
33 Ibid, 11.23.347.
34Machiavelli, The Prince, XVIII.149. Also,
‘*And here it should be noted that hate may be
acquired by way of good deeds as by bad ones: and
so, as I said above, if a prince wishes to hold onto the

88.
State, he is often forced into not being good; for,
whenever that group which you think you need to
Sustain is corrupt, whether it be the people or the
soldiers or the nobles, it is to your advantage to
adopt their disposition in order to satisfy them; and
then good deeds are your enemies.’’ Jbid., XIX.161.
35 [bid., XVIUI.145.
36[bid., VI.73.
37Ibid., XVI¥I.137; Machiavelli, Discourses,
1.9.132; 11.23.349. |
38 Ibid., III.30.486. Also, ‘‘All things considered,
therefore, I conclude that it is necessary to be the
sole authority if one is to organize a state, and that
Romulus’ action in regard to the death of Remus and
Titus Tatius is excusable, not blameworthy.’’ Ibid.,
1.9.134.
39 Tbid., 1.4.113.
40Grayson, Francesco Guicciardini, 92.
41Machiavelli, The Prince, XXVI.217.
42 Ibid., XXVI.223. See also XXVI.217-218. Em-
phasis is added.
437. Hale, Machiavelli and Renaissance Italy
(New York: Macmillan Co., 1960), 179.
44In this context consider Felix Gilbert’s con-
clusion that ‘‘Machiavelli was the creator of an uto-
pia; with his image ofRomanpolitics he made his con-
tribution to the body of literature in which perfect
societies are constructed.’’ Gilbert, Machiavelli and
Guicctardini, 192.
45 Machiavelli, Discourses, 1.9.132.
46Machiaveli, The Prince, V1.43.
47Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, 150.
48Machiavelli, Discourses, I.11.141.

89.
 49Niccolo Machiavelli, The Life of Castruccio
Castracani of Lucca, W.K. Marriott, trans., in
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince (London and New
York: J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1958), 199-200.
SUMachiavelli, The Prince, XXVI1.219.
5|Machiavelli, Discourses, 57.
S2Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, 184.
 CHAPTER VI
HOBBES’ SCIENCE OF
POLITICS
‘*“KNOWLEDGE IS POWER’”’

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) writes in his De

Corpore (1655) that *‘the end of knowledge is power;
and the use of theorems (which among geometri-
cians, serve for the finding out of properties) is for the
construction of problems; and lastly, the scope of all
speculation is the performing of some action, or thing
to be done.! The view of man expressed in this quo-
tation, that of man the ‘‘operator’’ as opposed to con-
templator of nature, is a view which Hobbes shared
with the Renaissance Hermetists, with Machiavelli,
and with the new physical.scientists of the modern
era. Francis Bacon (1561-1626), in his ‘“Great Instau-
ration,’ expressed in a similar fashion the need to act
on or operate upon the world, rather than to be content
with contemplation of its grandeur.

For the end which this science of mind proposes is the

invention not of arguments but of arts; not of things in
accordance with principles, but of principles them-
selves; not of probable reasons, but of designations and
directions for works. And as the intention is different,
so, accordingly, is the effect; the effect of the one being
to Overcome an Opponent in argument, of the other to
command nature in action.

By advocating a new science which would displace

the Scholastic method, Bacon expressed an antago-

Ot
nism, shared by virtually every modern thinker, to
the method of the Medieval schools, which had domi-
nated education from the thirteenth century. The
effect of Scholasticism upon students played no small
role in the intellectual revolution of the seventeenth
century. The mechanistic models of modern science
seemed like a breath of fresh air to these students
faced with continual drilling in what had certainly
become third-rate handbooks. Rene Descartes (1596-
1650) succinctly described this antagonism when he
wrote in his ‘Discourse on Method’’ that Scholastic
philosophy

is most convenient for those who have only very medi-

ocre minds; for the obscurity of the distinctions and
principles which they use enables them to speak about
all things as boldly as if they really knew them, and to
maintain everything they say against the subtlest and
most skillful, without anyone being able to convince
them of their error.3

In this spirit of utter rejection of Medieval philosophy

both Bacon and Descartes constructed new intellec-
tual methods. Thomas Hobbes’ political science is
the full outgrowth of these new scientific inquiries.4
This revolution in thought made possible great
technological advances. But the revolution also made
it possible for Hobbes to describe politics in terms
of bodies (matter) in motion according to mechan-
istic models of causality. Modern scientific mechan-
ization of nature led to Hobbes’ mechanization of
man and politics.» Nowadays we have begun to re-
sent the ‘*dehumanization”’ of man by social science.
But to the seventeenth-century mind, the clarity
and certainty provided by the mechanization of

DZ.
nature far outweighed the evils, such as the
mechanization of man and philosophical mater-
ialism. But the clarity of the natural sciences
simply cannot be attained in philosophical discourse
without distorting the nature of philosophy, or
rejecting it out of hand. Descartes, in his ‘‘rules for
the Direction of the Mind,’’ for example, argued that
the study of dialectic should be transferred from
philosophy to rhetoric and that we should investigate
only those subjects about which we can arrive at
certainty equivalent to the demonstrations of
mathematics.© Similarly Bacon sought a method
which led to ‘‘an inevitable conclusion,’’” as op-
posed to the insufficiently definite and vague notions
of Scholasticism and to transpose the dialectical
method of the Schoolmen with a new method which
would overcome the failings of human reasoning.
The inductive method of Bacon attempted to arrive at
general axioms only upon extensive and orderly
consideration of the particulars of the subject at
hand. Significantly, Bacon identified the impedi-
ments which stood in the way of methodical investi-
gation as the ‘‘Idols’’ of the ‘‘Tribe,’’ ‘‘Cave,’’ ‘‘Mar-
ket Place,’’ and ‘**Theater.’’ When he wrote in the
‘‘New Organon’ that “It is idle to expect any
great advancement in science from the superinducing
and engrafting of new things upon old,’’ he meant
that the new science should proceed by rejecting the
substance of Western intellectual culture. The Idols
of the Tribe to be rejected were the tendency of men
to rely on their personal perceptions, rather than the
‘‘measure of the universe.’’ The Idols of the Cave
were the personal experiences of individual men
which stand in the way of their discovering truth. The

93.
Idols of the Market Place are the words given in daily
intercourse with other men in the community, words
whose meanings are imprecise and thus tend to con- ©
fuse our understanding. Lastly, he wrote, the Idols of
the Theater were the idols of philosophy, which, be-
cause they are wholly founded upon the imagination,
are like theatrical performances.®
In this vein Descartes sought to deduce the entire
universe with the aid of his own philosophic method
which, casting off the irrelevancies of received
knowledge, presumed the existence of aphilosopher
living in isolation from the world.

I shall now close my eyes, stop up my ears, turn away

from all my sense, even efface from my thought all
images of corporeal things, or at least, because this can
hardly be done, I shall consider them as being vain and
false; and thus communing only with myself, and exam-
ining my inner self, I shall try to make myself, little by
little, better known and more familiar to myself.?

It is true that philosophy is never without the

means or method by which to seek truth, and Bacon
and Descartes were obliged to adopt a philosophic
method by which to proceed in their investigations.
For Plato and Aristotle, philosophy and its methods
were the means by which the philosopher journeyed
away from untruth into truth, but the soul which
made the search did not exist ina vacuum. Classical-
Christian philosophy affirmed that knowledge occurs
as an act of personal judgment. Man’s being-in-the-
world is the given from which to proceed towards an
understanding of reality. This attitude of wonder and
openness toward existence stands at the opposite
pole from Descartes’ prescription that the

94.
appropriate attitude of the philosopher is doubt, and
in that condition offered the proposition, ‘‘I think,
therefore Iam.’’!9 St. Augustine offered the alterna-
tive which places being-in-the-world as_ the
presupposition of philosophy: I am, and therefore I
know and delight in my existence.

POLITICAL SCIENCE AND POWER

The problem with which Hobbes was concerned in

his Leviathan (1651) was the problem of political
order. What are the origins of order, of peace? This
was not a simple problem, because Hobbes lived
during the period of the Puritan Revolution. His
answer to the disorder of his day was to develop sys-
tematically a concept of order by completely
removing the religious element from the picture and
treating the ‘‘true’’ reality which motivates political
action, power. As such, Hobbes’ Leviathan is a
masterpiece of political thought. His analysis of the
demonic element in man and its consequences for
politics flnds a comparison only in the work of St.
Augustine. !2
St. Augustine, too, wrote in a time of crisis. Rome
was invaded by the Goths, the Empire was
destroyed, and the Christians were blamed for the de-
feat. In order to act forcefully against this slander, St.
Augustine sought to show how pagan existence and
view of the world were totally bankrupt. From the ex-
perience of his own conversion, he effectively
removed the pagan gods from the world. Hobbes,
too, seeing that political order was being destroyed
by Puritan fanatics and the defenders of the mon-
archy, sought to expel completely the Christian God

95)
from politics. Both Hobbes and St. Augustine dedivi-
nized the world. St. Augustine dedivinized the pagan
world, Hobbes the Christian world of seventeenth-
century England. St. Augustine sought to build politi-
cal order anew, without the demons of the cosmolo-
gical myths, Hobbes to base political order on the
only ‘‘reality,’’ power, and expel the ‘‘spooks.”’
Even their concepts, St. Augustine’s “‘City of Man”’
and Hobbes’ view ofpolitical community, are identi-
cal. For Hobbes, life is a state of war, and men are
ordered in political communities only by their fear of
violent death and lust for power. The only order in
society is the random order of disordered men. St.
Augustine’s view of the city of man is not dissimilar,
with the exception that for St. Augustine the city of
man was not all of reality, only part of reality. And
that is the problem.
Hobbes was unable or unwilling to deal with politi-
cal order in such a way as to include a consideration
of the best political community. Like Machiavelli,
Hobbes was interested only in political order based
on the passions. For that reason, the new methods
of the natural sciences were exactly the guides which:
Hobbes could use unhindered by problems of ethics
and theology. This view, of course, is quite the op-
posite of Classical philosophy. For Hobbes, the sub-
ject matter of philosophy is bodies in motion. The ob-
ject of political science, too, is a type of bodies. In
that sense, Hobbes’ Leviathan deals quite literally
with the ‘‘body’’ politic. Though Hobbes was truly
concerned with physical bodies in motion, both
natural bodies and political bodies, what really in-
terested him was the ideas of bodies. These ideas
originate in our senses. Upon this fundamental formu-

96.
lation Hobbes built his entire political edifice. The
knowledge which man has of reality originates in the
senses. But what is primary, what we really know are
the ideas in our mind, the concepts we formulate by
reasoning to order our senses. All that we know is in
the names we use; so Hobbes begins with the defini-
tion of the names he will use in the construction of his
geometrical edifice of political order and builds his
own made-to-order reality.
Man is not social, Hobbes tells us. He is asocial
and acquisitive. The most basic emotion which com-
pels him to act, the ordering force in his makeup, is
the fear of violent death. Thus Hobbes denies that
there is a highest good, summum bonum,!3 which
connotes rationality to human action, but does admit
into his system an utmost evil, summum malum, the
fear of death. It is the fear of death which brings and
holds men together, however precariously, in politi-
cal community. The political community, as Hobbes
sees it, is conceived in fear, born out of lust, and
maintained by a common power which is imposed on
the men who make up the commonwealth. To the
question, Is political community natural?, Hobbes
replies in the negative. The commonwealth is the arti-
fice of man’s reason, formulated by attention to the
‘‘laws of nature.”’
By ‘“‘nature,’’ Hobbes means reason, and by rea-
son he means specifically discursive reason, or logic,
the ability to put two and two together, to compute. !4
Specifically, reason is the ability to compute one’s
advantages. It is this deductive process which leads
to the human discovery of *‘laws of nature,’’ theo-
rems which Hobbes cautiously deduced from the
careful and systematic definition of names which oc-

97.
cupies him in the first part of the Leviathan. Man
seeks peace; man gives up his natural right or license
for the sake of peace; and man makes covenants to
live under a common power which he is bound to o-
bey as just. This science of the laws of nature, he
said, is the true moral philosophy. The science of hu-
man action of Classical philosophy was based on the
hopes and fancies, while the science of human behav-
ior dealt with the real laws of nature, the inexorable,
supreme law of the passions.

IS POWER ENOUGH?

According to Hobbes, no effective government, no

matter how tyrannical, may be called illegitimate.
This caused Hobbes no discomfort since he reasoned
that what the Classical philosophers called tyrannical
regimes are really only “titles given by those who
were either displeased with that present government,
or those that bare rule.’’!5 Hobbes suffered during
perhaps the worst political crisis in the history of
England, a time when horrible deeds were committed
in the name of religion, when politics had ceased, and
civil war wracked the country. The theory of political
order he formulated struck at what appeared to be the
main cause of these disorders by excluding religious
claims to higher authority than the sovereign. But it
also excluded the standards by which philosophy lim-
its government. In his Leviathan Hobbes advocates
absolutely unlimited government, checked only by
the principle that a government cannot legitimately
ask us to allow ourselves to be killed or put in a posi-
tion where that is likely. What might have been util-
ized to check its omnipotence, Hobbes discards:

98.
right by nature, the best regime, justice, a view of life
after death which limits temporal power. Each of
these alternatives represents the conceptual means
Classical-Christian political theorists have used to
place limits on political power; yet Hobbes rejected
them or gave them new meaning.
By making method supreme over substance, by ex-
tending the methods of the mathematical and natural
sciences to an inquiry into political order, and by ana-
lyzing man on the level of his passions alone, he justi-
fies the order of the animal community and assumes
that that order is the order of man. Hobbes limited his
field of inquiry to the world of bodies extended in
space, limited his concept of order to the physical,
material aspirations of men, and excluded the spiritu-
al. Assuming that we know only names, and not the
reality of the subjects we name, Hobbes effectively
severed himself from the Classical philosophic tradi-
tion and deformed the nature of political science. For
that reason, perhaps, many of our contemporaries
are actually attracted to Hobbes, though what he
says about man is a deformation of the fullness of
human nature. Just as men today complain of the lack
of community, of the atomistic existence we live,
Hobbes’ analysis of apolitical man as an asocial atom
cast into the desert of life, an analysis which cannot
be separated from the life of Hobbes himself, is a
forerunner of the modern intellectual who rejects
political community, tradition, political authority.

99.
 SUGGESTED READINGS

Recommended readings include three works by

Descartes: Rules for the Direction of the Mind,
Discourses, and Meditations; Bacon’s The New
Organon; and Hobbes’ Leviathan and De Corpore.
Secondary works of particular value are Leslie
Stephen, Hobbes (New York: Macmillan Co., 1904);
Michael Oakeshott, ‘‘Introduction to Leviathan,’
Hobbes on Civil Association (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1975) 1-74;
and Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes:
Its Basis and Its Genesis (Chicago: University of
Chicago press, 1952).

100.
 NOTES

IThomas Hobbes, English Works of Thomas

Hobbes, Molesworth, ed., XI Vols. (London: John
Bohn, 1839), De Corpore, 1.1.6.
Francis Bacon, The New Organon and Related
Writings, Fulton H. Anderson, ed. (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc., A Liberal Arts Press Book,
1960), 19.
3Rene Descartes, Descartes. Discourse on
Method and Other Writings, E.E. Sutcliffe, trans.
(Baltimore, Penguin Books, (1968), ‘‘Discourse on
the Method of Property Conducting One’s Reason
and of Seeking the Truth in the Sciences,” 85. Fora
full examination of the rejection of dogmatic phil-
osophy, see Basil Willey, The Seventeenth Century
Background: Studies in the Thought of the Age in
Relation to Poetry and Religion, reprint of 1934 ed.
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1962), 1-23.
. 4This interpretationis disputed by Leo Strauss,
who taught that the real basis of Hobbes’ political
philosophy is not modern science but his
perception of ‘‘human life.’’ See Leo Strauss, The
Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its
Genesis, Elsa M. Sinclair, trans. (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, Phoenix Books, 1963). The
more traditional view is expressed by Michael
Oakeshott in ‘Introduction to Leviathan,’’ Hobbes
on Civil Association (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1975), 1-74.
5Compare the following passage of Bacon’s New
Organon with Hobbes’ elaborate simile of the politi-
cal community as a machine in Leviathan, **The In-

Helen-Jean Moore Library

Point Park College re
101.
troduction.’’**. . .the making of clocks (for instance)
is certainly a subtle and exact work: their wheels
seem to imitate the celestial orbs, and their alter- |
nating and orderly motion, the pulse of animals; and
yet all this depends on one or two axioms of
nature.’’ Bacon, New Organon, 82.
6Rene Descartes, Rules for the Direction of the
Mind, trans. E.S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross, in Vol.
31, Great Books of the Western World, R.M.
Hutchins, ed. (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica,
Inc., 1952), Rule X; Rule II.
7Bacon, New Organon, *“‘The Great Instaura-
tion,’’ 20.
8Bacon, New Organon, 48-49.
2Descartes, Descartes, Discourse on Method and
Other Writings, ‘‘Meditations on the First Philosophy
in which the Existence of God and the Real Dis-
tinction between the Soul and the Body of Man are
Demonstrated,”’ 113.
lOfbid., 54.
I1St. Augustine, The City of God, X1.26.370.
12This comparison was first suggested to the
author by Fr. Stanley Parry, C.S.C.
13Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan or the Matter,
Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesias-
ticall and Civil, Michael Oakeshott, ed. (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1960),*Pt. I, Chapter 11.63.
l4The issue of whether the laws of nature are
simply the dictates of reason is more clearly stated in
Hobbes, De Cive or The Citizen, Sterling P.
Lamprecht, ed. (New York: Appleton-Century-
Crofts, 1949): ‘*. . .forasmuch as the laws of nature
are nought else but the dictates of reason... .”’

102.
ISIbid., 87.

103;
 CHAPTER VII
LOCKE’S VIEW OF
LIMITED GOVERNMENT
The authoritarian political philosophy of Thomas
Hobbes shocked the sentiment of English society;
and, as a result, Hobbes never had widespread ac-
ceptance. Such was not the case with John Locke
(1634-1704), who, after the ‘‘Glorious Revolution”’ of
1688, was extremely popular. This general approval
came in part because Locke developed a view of gov-
ernment based on the concept of popular consent as
opposed to both divine right and Hobbes’ ideas. The
weaknesses and the strengths of his formulation can
be found in two works, his Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690) and his Second Treatise on
Civil Government (1676-1682).

ATTACK ON INNATE IDEAS

The philosophical movement which began with

Descartes reached its full development in Locke’s
Essay. Locke begins the Essay Concerning Human
Understanding by attacking the opinion that we have
innate ideas, ‘‘characters, as it were stamped upon
the mind of man; which the soul receives in its very
first being, and brings into the world with it.’’! Locke
is commonly believed to be aiming his criticism at
Descartes, who wrote in his Meditations that we
have three types of ideas: innate ideas (the existence
of which Locke is disputing), adventitious ideas,
(1.e., those which come from outside ourselves), and
ideas that we manufacture. An example of such

104,
koinai ennoiai,2 the Stoic concept Locke uses to i-
dentify what he means by innate ideas, is the idea that
God exists. For Descartes this was one of the two ele-
ments in his argument that God really does exist. The
Other is the idea that Descartes himself exists. As-
sured of his own existence, and wishing to account
for his consciousness of God’s existence, Descartes
explains that the idea of God was placed in his mind at
his birth. Locke rejects the concept of innate ideas
entirely, arguing that certainty may be obtained with-
Out recourse to innate ideas. Note that Locke is
merely attempting to replace one kind of certainty,
the certainty of innate ideas in which he cannot be-
lieve, with another kind of certainty, a certainty of-
fended by the theological assumptions which under-
lie the concept of innate ideas.
In Book I, Chapter 2 of the Essay, Locke argues
that even if there were certain speculative and practi-
cal principles to which all men assent, that in itself
would not prove they are innate. In fact, Locke says,
there is no universal consent among men. This argu-
ment tends to prove that there are no innate princi-
ples. He takes the following as his example of innate
ideas: ‘*Whatsoever is, is; and ‘‘It is impossible for
the same thing to be and not to be.’’3 These are not in-
nate ideas or principles, Locke says, because chil-
dren and idiots do not know them. Locke notes that
the supporters of the concept of innate ideas retort
that men may discover these principles by using their
reason. But, he asks, how can this be? Reason ‘‘is
nothing else but the faculty of deducing unknown
truths from principles or propositions that are al-
ready known.’’4 Why, if some ideas are innate, do we
need reason to discover them?

105.
 The argument is crucial for our understanding of
Locke’s political theory. The decline of Classical-
Christian political theory, one political theorist has —
pointed out, ‘‘is attributable not to any particular
poverty within the tradition itself but rather to mod-
ern man’s decision to withdraw his accreditation
from the underlying form of cognition which the dis-
cipline had earlier presupposed.’’> Descartes’ con-
cept of commonly shared innate ideas can be seen in
this context as the last remaining thread by which
philosophic accreditation could be given in the
modern era to the theological truths of Classical phil-
osophic discourse. Yet even this concept, weak
though it may appear when compared to Plato’s
differentiation of philosophy from opinion and aris-
totle’s articulation of right by nature, was rejected by
John Locke.

ORIGIN AND NATURE

OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE

If there are no innate ideas, how do men come by

the ideas they have, and what are the consequences?
Locke asks us to suppose that the mind is blank pa-
per, void of all characters and ideas. How, then, does
the mind come to be furnished? Sensation is one
source of most of the ideas we have. The senses con-
vey to the mind the impression produced on them by
external objects. The other source of ideas is reflec-
tion, Locke says, the perception of the operations of
our Own mind.
Is there some connection between the ideas in our
mind and reality? Do ideas represent only the imagi-
nations of man, or do they represent things as they

106.
really are? Locke tells us that to use works to signify
anything other than those ideas we have in our minds
leads to confusion.© The words we use signify the
ideas in our mind. But the relation between ideas and
reality is not a direct one. Locke distinguishes be-
tween an ‘‘abstract idea to which the name is an-
nexed,’’—a definition of what he calls a ‘‘nominal es-
sence’’—and the ‘‘real constitution of substances.’’/
Locke explains, for example, how it is our custom
merely to suppose that whatever ideas we have con-
form to some real entities, which we call ‘‘sub-
stance.’’ Locke is not saying that there is substance,
for example, ‘‘man,’’ by which we may know men.
He is only saying that our complex idea of man,
though made up of simple ideas which we obtain by
sensation and reflection, is mixed up with the con-
fused idea of something to which man belongs. We
only suppose then that these qualities of the sub-
Stance we call man exist in some common object
which supports these simple ideas of sensible
qualities.
The mind contemplates its own ideas, and that is
the uncertain connection between the world of exten-
sion and the world of spirit or mind. Our substantive
knowledge then consists in the perception of the
connection and agreement or disagreement between
any of our ideas. Where this perception is, there is
knowledge. But certainly such knowledge is too
limited to be of any value. What of the great moral
categories of good and evil? What does Locke say
about this difficulty?
Locke’s complete reply, one derived from his
Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and
his early Essays on the Law of Nature (1660) is three-

107.
fold: good and evil are functions of pleasure or pain;
that moral good and evil, justice and injustice, are de-
termined by law or some rule enforced by a common
sovereign; and that there are universal laws of nature
which govern the behavior of men, but these laws are
discovered in sense-experience.
The famous passage in which Locke reduces good
and evil to sense experience states:

Things then are good or evil, only in reference to

pleasure or pain. That we call good, which is apt to
cause or increase pleasure, or diminish pain in us; or
else to procure or preserve us the possession of any
other good or absence of evil. And, on the contrary, we
name that evil, which is apt to produce or increase any
pain, or diminish any pleasure in us: or else to procure
us any evil, or deprive us of any good.8

Locke alternatively defines moral good and evil, as

does Hobbes, as ‘*. . .the conformity or disagree-
ment men’s voluntary actions have to arule to which
they are referred, and by which they arejudged....’’"?

Moral good and evil, then, is only the conformity or

disagreement of our voluntary actions to some law,
whereby good or evil is drawn on us, from the will and
power of the law-maker; which good and evil, pleasure
Or pain, attending our observance or breach of the law
by the decree of the law-maker, is that we call reward
and punishment. 10

There are three sorts of moral rules or laws with

three different enforcements, oras Locke would term
them, ‘‘rewards’’ and ‘‘punishments’’: the divine
law, civil law, and law of opinion or reputation.
Locke tells us that the divine law is ‘‘that law which

108.
God has set to the actions of men, whether pro-
mulgated to them by the light of nature, or the voice
of revelation.’’!1 The civil law, as we may anticipate,
is “‘the rule set by the commonwealth to the‘actions
of those who belong to it....’”!2 The law of opinion is
‘the approbation or dislike, praise or blame, which,
by a secret and tacit consent, establishes itselfin the
several societies, tribes, and clubs of men in the
world....’’13 Locke implies, therefore, that there is
no justice by nature, in the sense in which Aristotle
Saw it. ‘Virtue and vice are names pretended and
supposed everywhere to stand for actions in their
own nature right andwrong.’’!4 It isobvious toLocke
that virtue and vice are ‘‘attributed only to such
actions as in each country and society are in
reputation and discredit,’’!5 i.e., right and wrong are
what the dominant powers say they are.
Beyond knowledge is faith or opinion. Yet, Locke
does not believe that the world of human knowledge
he has developed is so limited. We have the idea of a
Supreme Being, he says, and the idea of ourselves as
understanding rational beings. This foundation may
be sufficient in order to be able to ‘‘place morality
amongst the sciences capable of demonstration.” 16

‘Where there is no property there is no injustice,’ is a

proposition as certain as any demonstration in Euclid:
for the idea to which the name ‘injustice’ is given, being
the invasion or violation of that right, it is evident, that
these ideas, being thus established, and these names an-
nexed to them, I can as certainly know this proposition
to be true, as that a triangle has three angles equal to
two right ones. 17

Locke argued that underlying civil law and custom

109.
is only the supposition, not certain knowledge, that
what in fact is declared unjust really is wrong. Yet, |
peculiarly, Locke was certain that an ethics based on
analysis of sense experience and reflection was as se-
cure a moral philosophy as we could desire. Locke
thought that ethics was a subject capable of as much
demonstration and clarity as geometry. Of course,
Locke says, there is the problem that moral ideas are
more complex than those ofthe figures used in math-
emantics. But this complexity can be overcome by
‘‘definitions, setting down that collection of simple
ideas, which every term shall stand for; and then
using the terms steadily and constantly for the pre-
cise collection.” 18
THE LAW OF NATURE

Definitions of moral ideas when traced ultimately

to pleasure and pain do not convey the sense of uni-
versal moral obligation which is the chief strength of
natural law. Perhaps sensing this rhetorical weakness
in his construction, Locke developed his concept of
the laws of nature. He deduced that there are laws of
nature from the fact that people contend so much
about the problem of what is right universally. He
maintained that even those who live by breaking the
law judge themselves by a standard of right manifest
in their conscience. Moreover, by looking at the well-
regulated operation of the natural world, one should
infer that man, too, was designed by the ‘‘Creator’’ to
‘““work’’ according to some design. Locke also ar-
gued that the law of nature exists because it is funda-
mental to the preservation of human laws. The law of
nature buttresses the obligation people have to the

110.
positive law. Without the law of nature, without an
absolute ‘‘eternal’’ principle of moral good, ‘‘every-
thing would have to depend on human will... .””!9
That there is a law of nature, Locke was convinced.
What, however, are the ways by which the law of
nature can be known? Locke rejected the idea of
moral reason that is inborn or innate in man. Reason,
for Locke is not a higher noesis. It is man’s calcula-
tive ability, his discursive reason which requires
something which to calculate. ‘‘Nothing indeed is
achieved by reason, that powerful faculty of argu-
ing, unless there is first something posited and taken
for granted.’’20 Locke is thus forced back onto
**sense-experience’’ as the teacher of what the law of
nature is. Perhaps for this reason Locke calls it the
‘‘law of nature’’ as opposed to ‘‘natural law.’’ If
sense-experence is defined as perception by the
senses of ‘‘natural’’ phenomena, it would seem that
the order of our sense experience conveys some or-
der of nature and thus the ‘‘law of nature.’’ But ‘‘na-
ture’’ in this limited sense refers to physical nature
first, and only by inference to the ‘*Creator’’ of na-
ture. The presence of the transcendent God in the
‘‘law of nature’’ is attested by a deductive, second-
hand fashion. Also, since the ability to calculate by
reference to our senses is the capacity of all men who
have attained the age of reason, Locke’s law of na-
ture will be known to anyone. In this regard, the *‘law
of nature’’ lacks the personal quality of Aristotle’s
‘‘right by nature’’ possessed only by men formed by
nous. Within this philosophically limited perspec-
tive, Locke argues that since our senses indicate
God’s existence, so it must follow that the world has
some purpose. ‘“‘God intends man to do some-

111.
thing. . .”’21 And we are morally bound by that in-
tention ofGod to certain classes of action. We are
bound not to do those things which are completely
forbidden, we are bound to ‘‘maintain certain senti-
ments, such as reverence and fear of the Deity,’’22
and we are bound to acts of charity and prudence.

LOCKE'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Locke’s Second Treatise, written between 1676

and 1682,23 also presents grave difficuties. It lacks
rigorous argument and does not defend the assump-
tions and concepts upon which it is based, concepts
such as the law of nature, state of nature, and the so-
cial contract.
Locke argues that man and the world he inhabits
are the work of an infinite maker who is God.24 Man
has reason which was given to him in order that he
might use it to his advantge and convenience.25 By
use of his reason man candiscover his private advan-
tage; and this private advantage, wondrously, due to
God’s design, is conducive to public order, the com-
mon good. Perhaps because Locke’s analysis of hu-
man nature and community is restricted to the pas-
sionate level where man seeks advantage and con-
venience, he defines the best ruler as the prince who
aids the acquisition of property and its right use. Such
a prince, Locke says, is ‘‘godlike,’’26 by which he
probably means that by protecting property and its
right use the prince is following God’s design for
man. God intended for men to seek their own advan-
tage, their happiness, in conditions and circum-
stances conducive to that pursuit. If this design is
followed and these circumstances of order are se-

Pins
cured, all will be well.
This emphasis on private advantage presents prob-
lems for an interpretation of the meaning of Locke’s
‘law of nature’”’ since earlier in his life he had reject-
ed the idea that a person’s private interest is the basis
of the law of nature.27 Locke did not think that the
law of nature was simply a question of utility. On the
other hand, he argued that there was something more
than private interest to be found in the pursuit of
one’s private good since the protection of private
property is the law of nature.28 This unique property
ethic permeates the Second Treatise.
Property was broadly defined by Locke to include
life, liberty, and estate. As such, it conveys a sense of
the purposes of life, as Locke saw them. The law of
nature was the rational rule by which man lived out
his life within these overarching acquisitive pur-
poses. The law of nature “obliges every one: And
Reason, which is that Law, teaches all Mankind, who
will but consult it, that being all equal and independ-
ent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health,
Liberty, or Possessions.’’2? The origin of property is
in labor, and this labor by which something external
is taken and made one’s ownis a law ofnature.39 The
law of nature favors men who are acquisitive, ration-
al, and industrious creatures, just as God prefers men
such as these over those who are quarrelsome and
contentious.
Men of Locke’s generation believed that they
could attain certain knowledge about how men
should behave. They posited that man ineluctably
seeks his advantage, and his advantage is to be found
in property; thus, they concluded, a government
which protects property is the best government. The

Liss
preservation of property is the common good. This
particular view of the common good, however, limits —
what is common in community to the aggregate ofin-
dividual private goods; individual appetites. Locke
ignored the insight of Classical philosophy that the
common good is knowable only to the good man,
whose judgment is the standard and measure of what
is right by nature for himself and for the community
of men. Because Locke has no equivalent view of the
best man, except the ‘‘godlike’’ prince, he is reduced
to perceiving justice and the common good in terms
of property and of the property owner who is a good
citizen because he rationally calculates his private
pleasure and pain.

THE STATE OF NATURE

Like Hobbes, Locke insisted on thinking about

politics from the perspective of the prepolitical state
of nature. Why talk about the state of nature? Is it not
a fantasy, and a fiction, a crutch which was fashion-
able among early modern political thinkers for whom
nature had ceased to be a subject of wonder and had
become a source of power? The answer, perhaps, is
that Locke was unable to explain political order with-
out it. It does tend to supplement his concept of the
law of nature by explaining what standards restrict
government. Locke’s concept of the ‘‘law of nature’”’
was too circumscribed and vague to limit government
effectively.
In the state of nature, man is a social creature, but
not a political creature. Locke restricted the use of
the term “political’’ to human eaistence in society
ruled by a common power. Like all Social Contract

114.
thinkers, John Locke was persuaded that ‘‘the politi-
cal’’ was not an essential attribute of man. The politi-
cal is an accident, an artifice. This meant, among
other things, that Locke and the Social Contract
thinkers abandoned the Classical philosophic inquiry
into the political order which is best by nature. No
political rule can be best by nature, because nature is
prepolitical. What this meant in practical, civiliza-
tional terms was, “‘Rulers, kings, aristocrats, watch
out!’ If political existence is the. artifice of those
ruled, and not the dominion of the annointed of God,
then government originates in the very ones who are
ruled. If the limits they set for government are bro-
ken, then they may just take that dominion away and
give it to another, someone who will follow their dic-
tates.
Locke needed the ‘‘state of nature’’ as a rhetorical
aid. For that reason, perhaps, Locke is somewhat im-
patient with those who belligerently ask, Why talk a-
bout the state of nature if there is no proof that there
ever was such a state? Locke replies that if we reject
belief in the state of nature, we may as well disbelieve
that men whose histories as adults are recorded, but
not their childhood, ever had a childhood. Every-
thing in existence has a beginning, and the state of na-
ture, he argues, is the beginning of men before they
entered into civil society. If one has any doubts, he
says, look at America and the Indians there who live
in the state of nature.3!
The state of nature, Locke tells us, is a condition of
perfect freedom.32 Men are free to do whatever they
wish to do and are limited only by the law of nature.33
The law of nature governs not only the state of na-
ture, but also civil society. However, civil society is

tS.
different from the state of nature because in the state
of nature every man is the executor ofthe law of na-
ture. Thus everyone may punish transgressors ofthat
law. In civil society punishment is meted out by the
government. The state of nature for Locke is not ali-
centious condition because most men follow their
reason, which is the law of nature, and are its execu-
tors upon those who donot. The law of nature, which
governs the state of nature, creates, we infer, obliga-
tions to one another because breaches of the law of
nature would ultimately, if permitted to continue,
lead to our own destruction, which is against the law
of nature. Life for Locke, we infer, was pleasurable
and thus good.
Locke argued that while the state of nature lasted,
life was fairly good. There were natural boundaries in
it which tended to confine human appetite. Man’s
property was limited by what he could use. Since his
right to anything to which he put his labor was
shielded by convenience and utility, he would not
take more than was necessary to survive. But, the
State of nature was inconvenient. It lacked a neutral
judge to execute the law of naure, and private execu-
tion tended to err, or not be executed at all. More-
Over, Someone invented money one day and that in-
vention allowed the ‘‘natural’’ limits upon property
to disintegrate.34 No longer were spoilage and utility
hindrances upon man’s acquisitive instinct. Thus
property became large and extensive. Men came to
hold lands which they could not work. And lands
which they could not work were insecure lands, the
title to that property no longer being their own labor.
By corrupt and vicious men, furthermore, the condi-
tion of man in the state of nature soon degenerated.

116.
Out of this story Locke concocted his chief standard
for limiting government: property. The reason we left
the state of nature and compacted to forma civil soci-
ety, Locke writes, is that we wanted our property
protected.35 When government breaks that original
agreement to protect our property, therefore, we
have a right to revolution.
The state of nature, understood as an imaginary
prepolitical condition, not only performed useful
functions in the speculative systems of such thinkers
as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, it also embodied
the methodical attempt of modern philosophy to
overcome the ‘‘Idols’’ of Classical political philoso-
phy. The state of nature allowed Locke to ignore all
previous history and philosophy and inthis sense was
an analogue of his conception of the mind as a blank
tablet. It also provided him an opportunity to skirt the
reality of evil with anew myth of the Fall. The origin
of the Fall in money which commences the disinte-
gration of man’s prepolitical condition provides its
Own Savior in newly constituted civil society based
on the consent of acquisitive men. Guided by an un-
limited quest for worldly goods, Locke visualized a
type of man, becoming dominant in the late seven-
teenth century, who would give up his quest of hea-
ven in exchange fora heavenly world. Ifthe full range
of political community is not really symbolized in
Locke’s concept of the pursuit of pn vate ends by pni-
vate, economic men, it is at leasta semblance of com-
munity, in contrast preferable to the disorder of Eng-
land wracked by religious wars. England at the time
Locke wrote his Second Treatise was much like a
smaii town after a revival meeting. Exhausted from
excesses of the spirit, the visions.
of the New Jerusa-
lem now past, the citizens are ready to settle down to

Lay:
the less spiritually tiring, and perhaps more pleasura-
ble fare of business as usual. Locke’s Second Trea- _
tise captured this exhaustion of the soul in English
culture and gave it a political credo by which to live.

118.
 SUGGESTED READINGS

Students of political science should be familiar

with three works of John Locke: Two Treatises of
Government, preferably in the Laslett edition
(Cambridge: At The University Press, 1963); Locke’s
letters on Toleration; and his Essay Concerning
Human Understanding.
Valuable secondary works are: Ellis Sandoz,
“The Civil Theology of Liberal Democracy: Locke
and His Predecessors,”’ Journal of Politics, Vol. 34,
(1972), 2-36; J.G.A. Pocock, The Ancient Consti-
tution and the Feudal Law: English Historical
Thought in the Seventeenth Century (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1967); Willmoore Kendall, “John
Locke Revisited,’’ Intercollegiate Review, Vol. 2,
No. 4 (January-February, 1966), 217-234; Leo
Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, Phoenix Books, 1965),
202-251; Thomas Hill Green, Hume and Locke (New
York: Thmas Y. Crowell Co., 1968).

119.
 NOTES

lJohn Locke, An Essay Concerning Human

Understanding, Alexander Fraser, ed., 2 vols.
(New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1959), I.1.1.
(Hereafter cited as Essay).
2For a discussion of Locke’s attack on innate
ideas, see Ellis Sandoz, ‘‘The Civil Theology of
Liberal Democracy: Locke and His Predecessors,”’
Journal of Politics, Vol. 34 (1972), 14-17.
3 Essay, 1.1.4.
4 Ibid., 1.1.9.
SJames L. Wiser, ‘‘Political Theory, Personal
Knowledge, and Public Truth,’’ Journal of Politics,
Vol. 36 (1974), 668.
6Essay, HI.2.5.
7 [bid., 11.6.2.
8 fbid., 11.20.2
9 Ibid., 11.28.4.
lOfbid., 1.28.5.
I fbid., (1.28.8.
12Tbid., 1.28.9.
13 7bid., 11.28.10.
14 7b id.
ID bid.
l6/bid., 1V.3.18.
17 [hid.
I87bid., 1V.3.25.
19john Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature, W.
von Leyden, ed. (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press,
1954), 115-121.
20 Ibid., 125.
21 fbid.
 22 Ibid., 195.
23For a discussion of the date of composition of
Locke’s Two Treatises, see Peter Laslett, John
Locke. Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: At
The University Press, 1963), Chapter 3, ‘* ‘Two Trea-
tises of Government’ and the Revolution of 1688,”’
45-66.
24Pagination by paragraph from the Laslett edi-
tion of John Locke, Two Treatises of Government,
‘*The Second Treatise of Government,”’ /bid., 6.
25 [bid., 26.
26Ibid., 42.
27John Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature, 205.
28 bid, 207.
29John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 6.
30/bid., 30; 31.
31 [bid., 49.
32 [bid., 4.
33 fbid., 6.
34 ]bid., 48.
2 pid 123,

jai
 CHAPTER VIII
THE POLITICS OF
REVOLUTION:
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

The influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-

1778) upon the great political events of the eighteenth
century, especially the American and French Revo-
lutions, should not be underestimated. His concepts
inspired such democratic activists as James
Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Robespierre, and
Saint-Just. Nevertheless, there is cause to consider
carefully what Rousseau has to say, independent of
his direct historical influence, because Rousseau
presents problems of interpretation which political
theorists have yet to resolve. He should be
appreciated for his originality, and especially for his
ability to persuade his listener. What is this new
element?
The purpose of the Social Contract (1762) is stated
in the first paragraph of Chapter One.

Man was born free, but is everywhere in bondage.

This or that man believes himself the master of his fel-
low men, but is nevertheless more of a slave than they.
How did this change from freedom into bondage come
about? I do not know. Under what conditions can it be
renderedlegitimate? This problem I believe I cansolve. !

In this passage, Rousseau is speaking about political

order, having in mind certain criteria by which that
order may be considered legitimate or illegitimate.
Hejudges that present political order of all nations is

122%
illegitimate because man, though originally born free,
is everywhere enslaved. This is a tremendous indict-
ment of political order. It conveys a spirit which char-
acterizes the moderh world, the spirit of resentment,
of injury, and rebellion. For that reason, perhaps,
much of what Rousseau says is readily accepted by
the modern ear. But recall that the circumstances in
which he observed that man is in bondage were not
the circumstances of the contemporary world. His
world was the world of benevolent despotism, of aris-
tocratic society, where monarchy was the dominant
political institution. Against this set and ordered
world, Rousseau flung the charge that society so con-
stituted had robbed man of his original, native free-
dom. Rousseau says, ‘‘Man was born free, but is
everywhere in bondage.’’ What, then, is Rousseau
really trying to say?
If we reflect upon the human condition, we see that
Rousseau was exaggerating. Man is not born free; he
is born helpless and requires the constant attention of
his parents and the constant order of society in gener-
al if he is to survive beyond those first struggling mo-
ments of life.
Rowsseau’s observation is obviously metaphorical
and suggestive of that prepolitical condition of man
which political theorists for at least one hundred
years had come to recognize as the state of nature.
There man was free. Rousseau seems to be saying
that the freedom which characterized man in the state
of nature is something which can and must be re-
covered even in political society. That, of course, is
the important point. Rousseau wishes to recover
what was lost and restore it anew, not in the condi-
tions in which it originally was found, but in fully de-

123.
veloped civil society. Only if this restoration is ac-
complished, he thought, will political order be legi-
timate.
If we reflect on this statement, we perceive that the
chief difference between Rousseau and the other
Social Contract theorists is that Rousseau is no less
than a great revolutionary thinker. Underlying his
democratic ideas is the will to reconstitute society
anew, arevolutionary will, which he indicates is mo-
tivated by a desire for freedom which will not hesitate
to force men to be free.
To this extent Rousseau is unlike his predecessors
Hobbes and Locke. To be sure, the formulations of
Hobbes and Locke were uniquely modern and revo-
lutionary in the sense of their radical reformulation of
the problems of political order in the new terms of
modern science. But apart from that, one would be
hard put to find passages in their works which con-
note a will to radical revolution.
That excepted, however, we must note a few
things that all three thinkers, Hobbes, Locke and
Rousseau, have in common. They all talk about polit-
ical order as if it were unnatural. They all speak of the
state of nature. Each finds the problems of political
order and their resolution in the procedures of gov-
ernment. Confronted with the substantive problems
of political order, in the case of Hobbes and Locke,
the English civil wars of the seventeenth century, and
in Rousseau’s case his resentment that so few should
have so much political power, they all proposed the
procedural remedy of the social contract. But is the
substance of order really a procedural problem, one
which only a rearrangement, however radical, of ex-
terior political relations will solve? None of these

124.
great modern political thinkers addressed himself to
the origin of political disorder and corruption in the
human spirit and the inaccessibility of that spirit to
therapy by purely political means. Ignoring the les-
sons of Classical and Christian political theory,
Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau propase a solution
which emphasizes procedural means to alleviating
political problems.
What is Rousseau’s prescription? An examination
of four of his concepts will give us some insight.

THE STATE OF NATURE

Rousseau writes in the preface to his Second Dis-

course, (1756), the ‘‘Discourse on the Origin and
Foundation of Inequality among Men,”’ that it is diffi-
cult ‘“‘to know correctly a state which no longer ex-
ists, which perhaps never existed, which probably
never will exist, and about which it is nevertheless
necessary to have precise notions in order to judge
Our present state correctly. 2 Here Rousseau is can-
didly indicating that what he will say about the state
of nature is a necessary, hypothetical, but historical-
ly inaccurate means by which he will proceed. In
short, Rousseau is saying that it is impossible to
speak of political order without reference to nature,
but that the state of nature is essentially an illusion.
Rousseau writes further in the Second Discourse, for
example, ‘‘Let us therefore begin by setting all the
facts aside, for they do not affect the question. The
researches which can be undertaken concerning this
subject must not be taken for historical truths, but on-
ly for hypothetical and conditional reasonings better
suited to clarify the nature of things than to show
their true origin, like those our physicists make every

125.
day concerning the formation of the world.’’3 The
state of nature, therefore, is merely a device by
means of which he can engage in a critique of civil
society. What is this device? What is its content?
In the First Discourse (1750), Rousseau’s *‘Dis-
course On Science and Arts,”’ he says that the primor-
dial condition of man is a “‘lovely shore, adorned by
the hands of nature alone....’’4 We could let this im-
age pass without comment, but it is too representa-
tive of its time. Nature, for Rousseau and the entire
eighteenth century, was an object to which was attn-
buted original initiative. It had ceased to be an onto-
logical symbol transparent to the divine, as it was for
Aristotle, and had become an object possessing attn-
butes, much like our concept of ‘‘Mother Nature.’’
When Rousseau speculated upon man in the state
of nature, he saw him stripped bare of all social con-
ventions. Man is taught industry by the animals
which he observes and is quick to learn that he is su-
perior to the animals and must not fear them. By be-
coming sociable, however, man, like the animals
which are domesticated, became weak, fearful, and
servile. There was no communication among men.
rheir only language was the cry of nature. Man was
not a miserable creature in the state of nature, so
what could have brought about his departure from it?
In the Social Contract, Rousseau is quite clear. In
the state of nature a point is reached at which the
primitive condition cannot continue, there being
obstacles to the preservation of the life of each indi-
vidual. If men did not change their way of life,
mankind would perish. To survive, they must work
together.
In his earlier discourses, however, Rousseau had
painted a different picture of the transition from the
State of nature to civil society. The origin of civil so-
ciety, he says, is in the invention of property. The
first founder of civil society is the land owner. To be
Sure, there were lesser associations in the state of
nature; man united with man, but he did so only for
self-interest. With the invention of property, how-
ever, the larger association of civil society was firmly
established. When goods were stored up in abun-
dance and property was introduced, when through
agriculture fields were to be tended and through
metallurgy iron was utilized, slavery and misery
grew. Through the recognition of private property,
justice was established by law. By labor, man
acquired a nght to what he produced. The rich, there-
fore, devised means by which to preserve what was
uniquely their property. From this formulation of one
civil society, all others followed, and thus also grew
up that inequality which characterizes man’s exist-
ence in Civil society.
Rousseau speculated that inequality progressed
through stages: the first stage was the establishment
of law and the night to property; the second stage was
the establishment of the magistracy, and the third
was the changing of legitimate power into arbitrary
power. In each of these stages of the development of
inequality there were corresponding social relations.
The relationships consecutively established were
those of the rich and poor, powerful and weak, and
lastly, master and slave. This last stage, we must
assume, was the stage in which Rousseau believed he
himself existed, and the stage of inequality in which
his audience lived was a new state of nature where all
are equals for all are nothing.
How then do we overcome the condition of

be
slavery, of bondage into which we have fallen quite
accidentally? Rousseau answered by turning to the
social contract.

THE SOCIAL CONTRACT

Man in the state of nature was neither good nor

evil. There existed neither moral relationships, nor
any known duties. In place of laws, morals, or virtue,
there was only commiseration or pity. But, by com-
ing together in a collective association and compact-
ing to create a greater community, a collective moral
body is created which ‘‘will defend and protect with
all the collective might, the person and property of
each associate, and in virtue of which each associate,
though he becomes a member ofthe group, neverthe-
less obeys only himself, and remains as free as be-
fore.’’5
But man does not really remain as free as before
because he is now obliged to other men who are his
fellow citizens, and to the sovereign, the General
Will. Moreover, man’s freedom has changed qualita-
tively. Man’s actions now have a moral significance.
This is a particularly important concept. All of us
are moral agents, not by virtue of our having created
Or given consent to the laws by which we are organ-
ized in civil society, but because our acts are intrinsi-
cally rational, that is moral acts. In this sense, a mor-
ally rational act is one which is limited not merely by
Our Own consent, but by justice. What limits our acts
and thus gives them rationality is this unchangeable
ontological relationship of our acts to justice. Rous-
seau, however, is saying that only we ourselves de-
termine the morality and rationality, the limitations

128.
of our own acts, by consenting to the laws which bind
us in civil society. If we do not have that opportunity,
then we are not men, really, because for Rousseau, to
be human means to be participants in the social con-
tract. To be morally meaningful, our actions must be
preceded by a conscious act of assent to the laws
which bind us in civil society. We must really in a
sense be participants in civil society. Our contempo-
rary notion of participatory democracy connotes
some of the sense of Rousseau’s argument in the
Social Contract. However, we must argue in contrast
to Rousseau that we are always men, regardless of
the degree to which we participate in political affairs,
or regardless of the perversions inflicted upon us by a
political system. Rousseau, on the contrary, is inter-
ested in making a case for the belief that unless we
give our consent to the institutions by which we are
governed, we are subhuman.
Rousseau’s political system places no limitations
upon the sovereign, so long as the sovereign can be
understood to have been created by the willful act of
the citizens and serves as the representative of the
General! Will. The obedience to self-imposed law,
without which Rousseau is persuaded there is no
morality is astep, he thinks, away from our condition
of natural liberty. But has he not in fact removed the
great limitations imposed upon government by the
Western philosophical tradition? Has not Rous-
seau indirectly, by attempting to elevate man,
created what Hobbes directly sought, a political
Leviathan?

129.
 THE GENERAL WILL

At this point we must interject that Rousseau

would never personally argue that the enslavement of
a people was in accord with the General, the
sovereign. Yet why is it that he addresses himself to
those recalcitrant few who may not wish to be free in
the sense in which he has defined freedom?
Whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be
constrained to do so by the entire body politic, which is
only another way of saying that his fellows shall force
him to be free.6

Because of such passages, and the general structure

of his political system, Rousseau has been called a
‘‘totalitarian democrat.’’/ The name is paradoxical
because a democrat is supposed to honor freedom,
while a totalitarian honors it not at all. Is it fair to in-
terpret Rousseau in this way? A tentative answer is,
perhaps, visible in the outline of his concept of the
General Will.
Rousseau does not tell us directly what constitutes
the General Will. He indicates that the social bond is
created by the overlap among different interests. But
he warns us not to conclude that the General Will is
the harmony ofthe disparate individual interests.
Rousseau specifically tells us that no particular in-
terest, however many may share it, can be a general
interest. The will of the individual **tends by its very
nature toward partiality’’® whereas the General Will
tends toward equality. ‘*A given will is either general
or it is not.’’? Is the General Will the will of the whole
people? Yes, Rousseau would answer, but only so
long as the will of the whole people is general. His ar-

130.
gument is this: A) The General Will is always well-in-
tentioned; B) the people’s deliberations, however,
are not always what they ought to be; C) ‘‘the will of
everybody”’ is different from the General Will;
!9 D)
‘The people is never corrupted, but is frequently
misinformed.’’!! E) A will need not be unanimous in
order for it to be general; what is necessary is that
every voice be taken into account.
This interesting substance which Rousseau calls
the General Will is sometimes unenlightened. When
it takes a particular object, for example, it ceases to
be the General Wiil. It is but a product of the people,
and the people are often misinformed. The General
Will must be brought to see things as they are, for
though it wills the right road, it must be shown the
way. There emerges, then, the need for a legislator.
As the above summary suggests, problems con-
front anyone attempting to understand what Rous-
seau means by the General Will. The first of these
is whether or not there is such a General Will. The
second, how it can be actualized, is addressed by
Rousseau himself in his discussion of the Legislator.
Whether or not there is such a substance as the
General Will is not a simple question. To ask whether
the General Will is connotes that it possibly is not,
that it is only the figment of Rousseau’s ever-bounti-
ful imagination. Here the problem becomes complex
because some Rousseau scholars associate the Gen-
eral will with the discussion of the Good or of divine
nous in Classical Greek philosophy. !2But there is no
ground for such confusion. Reality for the Greek po-
litical philosophers was a hierarchy of goods which
proceeded from the ultimate divine good which is be-
yond being. Noetic experience ofthis divine nous or-

131.
dered man’s understanding of what is good action
and became socially effective through the influence
of men recognized for their noetic faculties. A consti--
tution was better or worse to the degree that its laws
manifested nous. Rousseau, however, sees “*will’’ as
the factor which legitimizes public order. Whereas
what is good is a matter of rational public debate by
men who have nous, Rousseau’s concept of the Gen-
eral Will thrusts public debate along the lines of a
search for the generality of will, which because it
lacks specificity would likewise preclude the search
for the good. The more removed from the specific,
the historical, the concrete, the more general or ab-
stract it becomes, the less claim to rightness does any
moral judgment have. And yet it is the moral legiti-
macy of a community which actualizes the General
Will that gives it importance for Rousseau. Clearly
we are dealing in Rousseau with a new type of politi-
cal theory, not a mere adjustment of Classical-Chris-
tian concepts to the problems of the modern era.
In his Social Contract Rousseau sets forth a totally
new view of political order which rejects Classical-
Christian political theory. We have already seen in-
dications of a revolutionary political potential in his
thought, what could be called the experience of re-
volt, of a new view of human nature which sees man
as making his own moral nature by collective action,
and a new emphasis on procedures and participation
in government as the means by which to resolve sub-
stantive problems of political order. But in the con-
cept of General Will we see a displacement of an on-
tologically oriented view of order which judges pub-
lic policy on the basis of whether or not it serves a
knowable common good or interest. Public policy a-

1822
nalysis in the Classical-Christian tradition, which is
nothing more than an ethical analysis of public
action, assumes the need for governors who seek the
good in community life. Political community is some-
thing natural. It exists not by the will of human beings
but because human beings experience it as existing in
tension or openness to a good beyond itself. Rous-
seau, however, has argued that a community is
defined only by its own self-willing. The limits upon
political community are immanent in the community.
Like Augustine’s concept of the city of man, guided
only by immanent, this-worldly ends, Rousseau’s
civil society is a wholly self-contained polity guided
by immanent ends which are discoverable in the Gen-
eral Will, not in the structure of being, of nature, and
community. We have then a dynamic, aggressive,
constantly self-aggrandizing sense of political com-
munity, the proto-type of the ‘‘Great Society,’’ but
there is very little in his concept which would yield a
view of the ‘‘Good Society”’ or the ‘‘best’’ political
community by nature. For that reason, life in sucha
community is to be lived, not according to delibera-
tion concerning what is right by nature, but by the
will ofa legislator.

THE LEGISLATOR

Rousseau argued that a mind of the highest order

(much like his own, we could observe) was required
to discover the best laws for each nation. This mind,
he said, must have an insight into every human pas-
sion, but not be affected by any. He is obviously
thinking of asuperhuman mind and he says as much.
The Legislator must feel within himself the capacity

133:
to change human nature. ‘‘He must, in a word, ini-
tially strip each man of the resources that are his and
his alone, in order to give him new resources that are
foreign to his nature, and that he can utilize only with
the help of others.’’!3 The making of man into asocial
creature by legislation implies that man is not a politi-
cal creature by nature. This assumption, of course, is
the hallmark of Social Contract speculation. The en-
trance into political community by the device of a so-
cial contract is meaningful only if man is not by na-
ture a political animal. For Rousseau, nature, which
had ceased to convey any political and ethical over-
tones, was something wholly material. As a result,
the Classical-Christian emphasis upon actualizing
One’s nature or potential as a man by right action gave
place to aneed for a legislator who would impose that
‘nature,’ now conceived as arbitrarily chosen pat-
terns of behavior, on unwilling men.
In intellectual history, as we shall see in Part
Three, Rousseau’s view of the legislator is a step ina
general development which begins in Renaissance
Hermetism, leads through Kant and Hegel, and cul-
minates in Nietzsche’s concept of the superman.
Rousseau’s legislator is not really a man. Rousseau is
not speaking here of the common practice of attri-
buting fanciful dimensions to founders or great politi-
cal leaders. Rousseau is actually arguing that at those
great moments when political communities are
formed and dynasties are created, it is not men who
are necessary for the task, but god-men. Who else
can strip man of his resources and give him new
ones? The problem with this view is that man, even
the Legislator, is not God. And when men aspire to
be gods, they destroy their humanity. In politics, the

134.
general political consequence of the aspiration to be
God is totalitarianism, because this aspiration implies
the total removal of all limits to politics and the un-
limited, total use of political power for the accom-
plishment of ends which cannot be achieved on this
earth. Yet this logical inference from Rousseau’s sys-
tem is in keeping with his thought. If man has no a-
biding nature, then man’s nature can be made in con-
formance with governmental standards.
For those reasons, we include Rousseau in the de-
velopment of those political-religious movements in
intellectual culture, each historically receiving added
inspiration from the thought of Jean-Jacques Rous-
seau. Together they did more to undermine political
order in the West and create the conditions for the
growth of totalitarian regimes than any other. From
Rousseau’s spirit of rebellion there radiated not only
the impetus to destroy God in order to emphasize the
real power of man, the movement sometimes called
political atheism or atheist humanism, but also the
impetus to reject man’s humanity in ecstasy Over an
alleged divinity of man. We call this movement
‘‘Idealist Humanism.’’ The nature of these move-
ments is discussed in Chapter Nine.

CIVIL RELIGION AND THE DEATH

OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau advo-

cated the necessity of a civil religion. Their reasons
were not exactly similar, but together they constitute
a formidable assessment of the fragility of modern
communal existence and the need for the state as the
singlemost powerful means by which the political

1335:
body coheres. How cana community of wholly appe-
titive, economic men hold together, if no common
bond except the social contract or passion connects »
them in political community? If men can no longer
depend upon sacred traditions to ameliorate the con-
tradictions of communal existence, then these sacred
traditions must be fabricated anew. The civil religion
of Numa, Machiavelli said, was a principal cause for
the early success of the Roman republic. Hobbes,
writing when the chiliasm of the Puritans was de-
stroying England, saw hope for peace only in an om-
nipotent sovereign who himself stated the terms by
which all citizens are to worship and beyond whose
sovereignty no appeal to a higher power is allowed.
Locke created a civil religion for back-sliding Puri-
tans composed of a primordial state of nature (Eden),
disrupted by the invention of money (Satan), which
compelled men to leave the state of nature (the Fall)
and to find a living by the acquisition of private prop-
erty (Salvation), protected by a government (Church)
based on consent (Grace), and Scripture (Locke’s
Second Treatise).
Rousseau, more original than Machiavelli, who
saw the Church as the cause for the absence of a uni-
fied Italian state, blamed Jesus for creating those in-
ternal religious divisions which undermine the unity
of the state.!4 Christ’s assertion of a kingdom of hea-
ven was actually a clever device, he said, by which to
assemble a spiritual kingdom here and now, thus
forcing a wedge between religious and political
authority. Against this disunity, Rousseau asserted
the primacy of civil religion.
Civil religion is efficacious, he argued, because it
sees no disjunction between positive and divine law:

136.
**. . .it makes the fatherland the object of the citi-
zens’ adoration, and so teaches them that service to
the state and service to the state’s tutelary deity are
one and the same thing.’’!5 For Rousseau, the sover-
eign establishes the dogmas of civil religion.

These would not be, strictly speaking, dogmas of a reli-

gious character, but rather sentiments. . .for partici-
pation in society—i.e., sentiments without which no
man can be either a good citizen or a loyal subject. !6

Those who do not believe in this dogma can be banish-

ed on the grounds of a basic lack of sociability.
The primacy of unity in Rousseau’s assessment
displaces the primacy of truth. The truth of the laws,
their justice, is not a consideration. What is of value
is its ability to contribute to social unity. Rousseau’s
civil religion, therefore, brings to the fore a central
disagreement between modern and Classical-Chris-
tian political theory. The latter values political order,
but only that order attuned to existence-in-truth. To
that degree, we can say that the central focus of
Classical-Christian political theory is on the identifi-
cation of those goods which hold men together in po-
litical community, among which are the commonly
shared experiences of justice, night, and the common
good, experiences which shape community in rela-
tionship to a higher order. Modern political theory,
however, unable to accept the reality of the relation-
ship of community to transcendent order, is never-
theless compelled to assert the primacy of autono-
mous unity made possible by civil religion trans-
parent only to the immediate needs of maintaining the
communal bond. We call such a conception of politi-
cal community the assertion of political existence-

i.
in-untruth. Modern political theory, seeking the im-
mediate benefits of autonomous community, whether
a unified Italian state, the secularized and thus.
peaceful England of Hobbes and Locke, or the par-
ticipatory democracy of Rousseau, has consciously
reyected the search for political order attuned to the
order of being. For that reason, Modern political
theory itself has been a principal contributor to the
decline of political philosophy.
Political theory, in the strict sense as symboliza-
tion of existence-in-truth, is inclusive ofall aspects of
existence. Society is not autonomous, self-willed,
nor composed of wholly autonomous men. It exists in
relation to higher order and is better or worse to the
degree that citizens and laws are attuned to tran-
scendent reality. The creators of modern civil reli-
gion, however, unable dr unwilling to give credence
to the experience of order as the mode of openness to
divine reality, substitute the symbols of philosophic
Openness with instruments wholly immanent in ori-
entation. Natural law becomes law of nature; right by
nature becomes natural right; history becomes his-
toricism; action, behavior; sacred tradition becomes
civil religion; and the common good becomes the
General Will. The decline of political philosophy is an
aspect of this transposition of philosophic symbols
and secular ones.

138.
 SUGGESTED READINGS

Of the works of Rousseau, students of political

science should read The Social Contract, the First
and Second Discourses, and his Confessions.
Rousseau has given rise to a variety of interpre-
tations, each of which brings to the fore aspects of
his thought which others place in the background,
which is to say that there is no definitive interpre-
tation of Rousseau. The following are valuable con-
tributions to our understanding.

Bosanquet, Bernard. The Philosophical Theory of

the State. London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1965.
Green, Thomas Hill. Lectures on the Principles of
Political Obligation. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, Ann Arbor Paperbacks, 1967.
Kendall, Willmoore. “‘Introduction. How to read
Rousseau‘'s Government of Poland,’ Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, The Government of Poland,
Willmoore Kendall, trans. Indianapolis: Bobbs-
Merrill Co., Inc., Library of Liberal Arts, 1972.
Masters, Roger D., The Political Philosophy of
Rousseau. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1968.
Nisbet, Robert A., The Quest for Community. A
Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1953, Chapter
Seven, ‘‘The Political Community,’’ 153-188.
Shklar, Judith N. Men and Citizens. A Study of
Rousseau’s Social Theory. Cambridge: At The
University Press, 1969.

139.
 NOTES

l Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract,

Willmoore Kendall, trans. (Chicago: Henry
Regnery Co., Gateway Edition, 1954), 2. This par-
ticular translation is one of several available in inex-
pensive paperback editions.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The First and Second
Discourses, Roger D. Masters, ed., and trans. with
Judith R. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1964), 93.
3Tbid., 103.
4 Ibid. ,54.
SRousseau, The Social Contract, 18.
Olbid., 25.
/The best study of the origins of totalitarianism
in democratic theory is J.L. Talmon, The Origins
Of Totalitarian Democracy (New York: Frederick
A. Praeger, 1960).
8Rousseau, The Social Contract, 34.
Ibid, 35.
lOybid., 38.
I bid.
12See Thomas Hill Green, Lectures on the Prin-
ciples of Political Obligation (Ann Arbor: Univer-
sity of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor Paperbacks,
1967), par. 68.
l3Rousseau, The Social Contract, 58.
l4 Tbid., 208.
IS bid. 213.
l6/bid., 220.

140.
PART THREE:
*“SECOND REALITIES”’
 CHAPTER IX
MODERN POLITICAL
RELIGIONS
The term ‘‘modern political religions’’ might strike
some as unacceptable. On the one hand, those who
piously affirm the tenets of orthodox spiritual tradi-
tions and attest to the reality of their faith may resent
the suggestion that modern intellectual and mass
movements can be analyzed on the level of religious
experience. On the other hand, ideologists whose
claims appear in the guise of “‘scientific’”’ judgments
will reject the suggestion that their political views are
religious in nature. They distinguish between their
own “‘rational’’ principles and the “‘irrational’’ be-
liefs of those who proclaim the truth of religion. Even
adherents of some churches maintain that their
creeds are not rational, but are wholly based on sup-
rarational ‘‘religious’’ truth. We must add that there
are ‘‘religions’’ other than those which articulate a
belief in God.
There is no lack of scholarship which has identified
the religious character of certain political move-
ments. Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millen-
nium (1957), an analysis of medieval European reli-
gious movements which is perhaps best known,
shows the similarity of these movements to the mod-
ern political phenomena of German National Social-
ism and Communism. These contemporary political
ideologies, Cohn shows, are similar in structure
to—and in some instances take inspiration
from—what we today would call the fanatical, if not
irrational, medieval phenomena. J. L. Talmon’s The

142.
Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1960) indicates
the similarity of the secular apocalyptic strain in
eighteenth century French philosophy to the chilias-
tic medieval phenomena. He also traces the revolu-
tionary consequences of this political Messianism in
eighteenth century France. Albert Camus’ The Rebel
(1951) analyzes the variants of rebellion in modern
speculation and the spiritual character of revolt.
Robert Tucker’s Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx
(1961) persuasively shows the origins of the thought
of Karl Marx in the revolution in religioninstituted by
Idealist philosophy’s creation of an image of man as
God. But perhaps most important for analysis of the
nature of modern political religions are the works of
Eric Voegelin in which he argues that these political
movements are essentially Gnostic. These works
principally are The New Science of Politics (1952)
and Science, Politics and Gnosticism (1959)! More
recently, Daniel P. Walker and Frances Yates, fol-
lowing the work of Paul Kristeller, have shown the
influence of Renaissance Hermetism in the formation
of modern political thought. Utilizing the insights of
these studies, especially those dealing with the Gnos-
tic phenomenon, we shall attempt to place in theo-
retical context the roles of ancient Gnosticism and
Renaissance Hermetism in shaping the modern
‘‘Second Realities’’3 of Idealist and atheist human-
ism.
By ‘‘Idealist Humanism,’’ we mean the intellectu-
al movement of philosophic Idealism which domina-
ted European intellectual culture from the publica-
tion of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
(1781) through the first half of the nineteenth century.
By ‘‘atheist humanism’? we mean the ideolog-
ical moyement created by Ludwig Feuerbach

143.
(1804-1872), which culminates in the work of Karl
Marx (1818-1883). Though Idealist and atheist hu-
manism are mutually antagonistic movements, we
hope to show by analysis of the ‘‘religious’’ experi-
ence which engendered them that they have similar
historical roots, equivalent experiential origins, and
that they can be analyzed by reference to their simi-
larity to one anotheras ‘‘Second Realities.’’ The con-
cept ‘‘Second Reality’? was applied by Eric Voege-
lin, following Robert Musil, to the ideological at-
tempts to replace reality with another, more accepta-
ble reality originating in the mind of modern
ideologists.
ANCIENT GNOSTICISM

Historians dispute the origins of ancient Gnosti-

cism, though it first occurred sometime during the
two hundred year period from the first century B.C.
to the first century A.D. It is not known whether it is
pre-Christian, Jewish, or Christian in origin. That in
itself is significant because of the condition into
which, at that time, the ancient world had fallen. Po-
litical disruptions, social upheavals, and military
clashes of expanding empires were the normal dis-
ruptive conditions for the peoples who, since the ex-
pansion of the Persian empire, lived during this period
of civilizational unsettlement. As a result of these
disorders, traditional religious myths which
performed public functions in the maintenance of or-
der of cosmological civilizations lost their social va-
lidity and were cast adrift, sometimes to be lost for-
ever or to be adopted in part by conquering cultures.
Sometimes the old myths were co-opted by the Gnos-
tic sects, plucked from their original symbolic and

144.
cultural context and recast into anew form with new
meaning. This profusion of symbols has tended to
create problems for the scholars in this field, who find
it difficult to distinguish between types of
Gnosticism.
The word gnosis is a Greek word meaning
‘*knowledge.”’ It is different from the word episteme,
which means science in the sense of human
knowledge and the philosophical inquiry into first
things. Perhaps with the advent of Gnosticism the
word gnosis came to mean exclusively religious
knowledge, more specifically, secret knowledge of
the hidden or alien God.
Hans Jonas writes in The Gnostic Religion that the
gnosis of the Gnostics is truth received through “‘se-
cret lore or through inner illumination.’’4 As such,
gnosis is knowledge about the god whom mancannot
know with his human reason. Gnosis was also con-
sidered to be an event in the mind of God. Simulta-
neously with the possession of gnosis by the Gnostic,
a disruption or existential condition of ignorance in
the godhead was resolved. In attempting to define
gnosis, the Colloquium on the origin of Gnosticism
held in Messina in 1966 defined gnosis bv reference to
this ontological function.

Not every gnosis is Gnosticism, but only that which in-

volves in this perspective the idea ofthe divine consub-
Stantiality of the spark that is in need of being awakened
and reintegrated. This gnosis of Gnosticism involves
the divine identity of the knower (the Gnostic), the
known (the divine substance of one’s transcendent
self), and the means by which one knows (gnosis as an
implicitly divine faculty is to be awakened and ac-
tualized. . . .P

145.
The saving character of the possession of gnosis is
derived from the belief that the disruption in being |
which obsessed all Gnostics is not permanent, butisa
condition which will pass. They believed that the di-
vine captured in the world and the godhead itself are
becoming in a process which will lead to the return
of the forces in god to a condition of unity. Gnosti-
cism, therefore, was a prophecy that the contradic-
tions of existence, infinitely radicalized by the Gnos-
tic’s rejection of the material world as demonic,
would be overcome in a supra-mundane pneumatic
process of purification. In a sense, this prophecy of
divine unity was self-confirming. The truth of the
apocalypse of Gnosticism is known to the Gnostic
because he himself is both savior and saved. If the
Gnostic’s true self were not really divine, he would
have remained ignorant; thus the possession of
gnosis became proof of the revelation. The
possession of gnosis was also an indication of the
superiority of the Gnostic’s apocalypse over the
revelations of other religions. Mani, for example, the
founder of Manichaeanism, claimed to be the fourth
and last prophet, the others being Buddha,
Zoroaster, and Christ. Gnosticism ‘‘transvalued’’
the values of these earlier theophanies and es-
tablished with unshakeable certainty the Gnostic’s
absolute identification of man with God.
We will term this revolutionary attitude, manifest
in the identification of gnosis with the divine, the sy n-
cretism of Gnostic myths, the certainty of their apoc-
alyptic eschatology, and their radical dualism, the
‘‘transvaluation of values.’’ The term was coined by
Nietzsche, who chose it to express the theme of a
projected work, of which only the Preface and the
first part, Der Antichrist, were completed.®

146.
Nietzsche sought to reverse the transvaluation of
pagan values which Christianity accomplished by
turning the instrument of transvaluation upon
Christianity itself. As we use the term, however, we
see the instrument as the symbolic form of the type of
religious experience characteristic of Gnostic
religion. The transvaluation of values signifies, there-
fore, the reversal and thus implicitly the rejection
oftraditional valuations of reality. Gnosticism, in this
sense, iS a radical assertion that what traditional
societies have considered true is both untrue and the
very essence of evil. This revolutionary significance
of Gnostic transvaluation of values is both a major
aspect of analysis of Gnosticism and a means of its
identification. Gilles Quispel writes in this vein:

What then is revolutionary in ancient Gnosis? This,

that a new outline of the relationship of man to the
world and to God is present. The qualitative difference
between man and the world is revealed. Man is indeed
in the world, however he is not of the world. He is
even more than the planet gods which are a cipher, an
ideogram of the universe. The world loses its trans-
parency to the divine and becomes daemonic. Plotinus
is amazed to discern that the Gnostics ‘‘despised the
beauty of the world,’’ scmething unprecedented for
a Greek. . . .Manand the world are incommensurable.
Man is other than the world and the same as God.7

Our discussion of representative Gnostic transvalu-

ations will include their view of matter, cosmos, and
man.
In the system of Mani, revulsion against matter (a
standard theme in Gnosticism, the rejection of physi-
cal nature) is explained by means of an elaborate
myth in which matter is formed from the carcasses of

147.
evil Archons. The plants and the animals which live
in the world are the creatures of the evil principle, of
Darkness, the result of the lust of evil for light. The
system of Valentinus depicts a similar view of matter.
The origin of matter is in the emotions of the lowest
emanation of the godhead, the Lower Sophia. In one
account described by Jonas, these emotions, fear,
bewilderment, ignorance, are changed into corporeal
form by ‘‘Jesus,’’ a saving emanation, sent to the
Lowest Sophia by the ‘‘Aeons’’ of the godhead.8
They are negative and constitute the bad substance,
matter. Material existence, for the Gnostics, was not
a good, but the epitome of evil.
In ancient philosophy, the concept cosmos sym-
bolizes the experience of order common to man, the
order of his soul and of nature (physis); all are ex-
pressed in the symbol of the order of the cosmos.
Cosmos was also a concept that reflected the totality
of order, and the inter-relatedness of order, its com-
monality, which included in its range the divine, soci-
ety, nature, and man. Like the symbol of physis,
which preceded it as the first discovery of philoso-
phy, cosmos is a symbol which included not only the
order of the cosmos but the origin of order in the di-
vine.? In Gnosticism the goodness and transparency
of cosmic order to the divine is transvalued. The
word ceases to convey the meaning ‘‘good order,”’
but now conveys the presence of ‘‘evil order.’’ The
order of the cosmos to the Gnostics was demonic, the
creation of an evil demiurge. The true God, the alien
God, is impenetrably beyond the cosmos. Yet it is to
Him that the pneumatic essence trapped in the world
must return. Hans Jonas writes of the religious atti-
tude fundamental to this view of cosmos:

148.
 We can imagine with what feelings gnostic men must
have looked up to the starry sky. How evil its bril-
liance must have looked to them, how alarming its
vastness and the rigid immutability of its courses, how
cruel its muteness! The music of the spheres was no
longer heard, and the admiration for the perfect spheri-
cal form gave place to the terror of so much per-
fection directed at the enslavement of man. The pious
- wonderment with which earlier man had looked up to
the higher regions of the universe became a feeling of
oppression by the iron vault which keeps man exiled
from his home beyond. But it is this ‘‘beyond’’ which
really qualifies the new conception of the physical uni-
verse and of man’s position in it. Without it, we should
have nothing but a hopeless worldly pessimism. Its
transcending presence limits the inclusiveness of the
cosmos to the status of only a part of reality, and thus of
something from which there is an escape. |

What is the psychological center of Gnostic

systems? Quispel suggests that it is the condition,
existence, and salvation of the trapped spark of the
divine.
Gnosis, in the final sense, is anthropology; man stands
in the center of the interests of the Gnostics. Their
myths and doctrines represent the origin of man and his
being, so that he knows which way to go, namely,
the way to the self, the way to salvation. 1]

In the strict meaning of the concept ‘‘man’’ as hu-

man, not divine, however, they have no interest.
What is to be saved is the emanation of the divine
trapped in the body. The central theme in Valentinian
speculation is the rescue of Adam, the pneuma en-
closed in matter by the Archons. In the system of
Mani, the principle of evil, Darkness, fashions Adam
and Eve from the sight of an emanation of the princi-

149.
ple of God. into these figures he pours the captive
Light of God. the creation of man thus becomes a
strategy in the offensive against Good. We are deal- ~
ing then with a religion in which the word ‘‘man”’ has
two meanings. On the one hand there is the ‘‘man”’
which is their chief concern and interest. But he is not
‘*man’’ in the sense that the word implies a theoreti-
cal distinction between man and the divine. This
‘‘man’’ is distinctly not human; he is a divine emana-
tion of the godhead. In the Hermetic Poimandres this
‘*man’’ is Primal Man, an emanation of the ‘“‘Abso-
lute Power,”’ the image ofthe ‘‘Father.””!2 But he as-
pires to the “‘power of him who rules over the fire.”’ 13
He is received by the “lower Nature’’ and this re-
ception explains why ‘‘man’’ is ‘‘twofold, mortal
through the body, immortal through the essential
Man.’’!4 In nature ‘‘man’”’ is a slave to heimarmene,
fate, and is ignorant of the Father. Through know-
ledge ‘‘that the Father of all things consists of Light
and Life, therefore likewise the Primal Man issued
from him, and by this he knows himself to be of Light
and Life’’ he will return to Life and be saved. !5 There
are the knowing ones, and the unknowing ones. The
unknowing ones are left to be devoured by passions
which are evil. Hans Jonas sees in the Hermetic
Poimandres

not just a rejection of the physical universe in the light

of pessimism, but the assertion of an entirely new idea
of human freedom, very different from the moral con-
ception of it which the Greek philosophers had develop-
ed. However profoundly man is determined by nature,
of which he is part and parcel. . .there still remains an
innermost center which is not of nature’s realm and by
which he is above all its promptings and necessities. 16

150.
 The transvaluation of values of the Gnostics
presents substantial problems of theoretical interpre-
tation. Let us compare it to Aristotle’s definition of
man’s humanity. Taking the good man or spoudaios
as representative man, Aristotle showed the
consubstantiality of human nous with the divine nous
and the actualization of man’s humanity in the
immortalizing act of noetic contemplation of the
divine. This consciousness of the opening of the soul
to transcendent nous in Greek philosophy is an event
in history which offsets or differentiates our
creaturely experience of participation in an
unchangeable relationship with the divine from the
compact experience of being within the medium of
the cosmological myths. The new consciousness of
transcendence of the divine beyond existence and
essence, followed by the discovery of the depth of the
human psyche, which led in turn to the crucial
development of the science of the order of the soul
attuned to the divine arche of its order, was
experienced as an historical development.
This insight into the histoncal dimension of exist-
ence as a process in time was first formulated by
Anaximander, who said: ‘‘The ongin (arche) of
things is the Apeiron. . . . Itis necessary for things
to perish into that from which they were born; for
they pay one another penalty for their injustice
(adikia) according to the ordinance of Time.’’!7
Anaximander experienced existence as a creaturely
process which is perishable but nevertheless consub-
stantial with the timeless A peiron, which is the origin
of the process of existence. Thus Anaximander ob-
serves, ‘‘it is necessary for things to perish,’’ an
acknowledgment, on the one hand, of the reality of

151:
death, and, and on the other, of the reality of immor-
tality since what exists will “‘perish into that from |
which they were born,”’ which is to say that they will
return to the divine arche of being. Eric Voegelin
writes of this fragment of Anaximander:
Reality was experienced by Anaximander. . .as a cos-
mic process in which things emerge from, and disappear
into, the nonexistence of the Apeiron. Things do not
exist out of themselves, all at once and forever; they ex-
ist out of the ground to which they return. Hence, to
exist means to participate in two modes of reality: (1) In
the Apeiron as the timeless arche of things and (2) In
the ordered succession of things as the manifestation of
the Apeiron in time.!8

The mystery of reality as a process of participation in

the divine origin of being was experienced by the
Classical-Christian philosophers as a process point-
ing ultimately towards transfiguration of reality.
Plato’s concept of the turning around of the psyche
towards the transcendent Good beyond existence
and essence in his Republic and St. Augustine’s con-
cept of the peregrination of the city of God and the
souls of men towards Christ articulate this experi-
ence. The ascent (epanodos)!9 of the soul to the Aga-
thon in Platonic philosophy, just as the conversion of
the soul to God of the Christian experience, articu-
lates a transformation of the soul. Yet this experience
did not occlude the simultaneous creaturely
experience of the psyche in the world. Body which is
en-souled is also psyche which is embodied. Physi-
cal, creaturely existence is reality.
In the Gnostic movement of antiquity in which the
scattered diffusion of the divine spark ends ina pneu-
matic process of running back to the godhead, how-
ever, this “balance of consciousness,”’ to use Eric
Voegelin’s concept, is lost. The creaturely world is
rejected as is the humanity of man. Experience of
existence as a mode of participation is occluded by
absolute identification with the divine. The Gnostic
experience of the divine, hidden God, from which the
Gnostic adept was an emanation, left no room for the
noctic experience of the participative nature of hu-
man consciousness, of the goodness of the cosmos
and of material existence. It left only the transfigur-
ing experience of grwsis.
In 1952, Eric Voegelin, attracted by the similarity
of ancient Gnostician to modern political religions,
extended the typology of ancient Gnosticism to an
analysis of contemporary political ideologies in order
to delimit the religious experience which engendered
them. Modern Gnosticism, he found,
may be primarily miciiectual and assume the form of
speculative pencisaiion A the mystery of creation and
existence, as, for instance, in the contemplative gnosis
& Hegd or Schelling. Or 1 may be primarily emotional
and assume the human soul, as. for instance, in para-
cise sectasion leaders. Or & may be primarily volition-
Al and aseume the form of activist redemption of man
and socsiy. 2s in the instance of revolutwomary acti
visis Ikke Comte, Marx, or Hitler. These Gnostic ex-
pesiences. in the amplitude of them wasicty. are the core
of the sedsvimization of society. for the men who fal)
mio these CLIC divinize themscives by subsit-
iuling more massive modes of participation in divinity
for faith in the Christian sense.

This modem Gnostic *redivinization of society” is

itself a transvaluation of the Christian “*dedivini-
zation” of the temporal sphere which was the
outcome of the clash between Christianity and

153.
pagan culture and its gods. Christian apologists
‘*dedivinized’’ man and society by expelling the gods
from the world. They thus reordered the Western in-
terpretation of man’s existence ‘‘through the experi-
ence of man’s destination, by the grace of the
world-transcendent God, toward etemal life in beati-
fic vision.’’2! This ‘‘dedivinization’’ could not have
occurred without the experiental atrophy of polythe-
ism and its challenge in the form of the Chnistian ex-
perience. Thus the contemporary ‘‘redivinization”’
of modern Gnosticism presupposes the atrophy of
the Christian experience in intellectual culture and its
replacement by a religious experience which is im-
patient with the uncertainties and anxieties, the in-
security, which accompanies a world without gods.
...When the world is de-divinized, communication with
the world-transcendent God is reduced to the tenuous
bond of faith, in the sense of Heb. 11:1, as the sub-
stance of things hoped for and the proof of things un-
seen. Ontologically, the substance of things hoped for
is. nowhere to be found but in faith itself; and, epistem-
ologically, there is no proof for things unseen but a-
gain this very faith. The bond is tenuous, indeed, and
it may snap easily. The life of the soul in openness
toward God, the waiting, the periods of aridity and dull-
ness, guilt and despondency, contrition and repentance,
forsakenness and hope against hope, the silent stirrings
of love and grace, trembling on the verge of a cer-
tainty which if gained is loss—the very lightness ofthis
fabric may prove too heavy a burden for men who lust
for massively possessive experience.22

Voegelin’s experiential analysis of the Gnostic

character of political ideologies was based on several
generations of scholarship, commencing with the
nineteenth century student of Gnosticism, Ferdinand

154.
Christian Baur, Professor of Theology at the Univer-
sity of Tubingen, who devoted Part Four of his work
Die Christliche Gnosis, oder die Religionsphiloso-
phie in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung23 to acom-
parison of ancient Gnosticism with the theosophy of
Boehme, Schelling’s philosophy of nature, Schleier-
macher’s doctrine of faith, and Hegel’s philosophy of
religion.
Since 1952, however, more recent research has
persuaded Voegelin that analysis of modern political
religion under the generic term ‘‘gnosticism’’ tends
to obscure the historical complexity of this phenome-
non. Other streams of religious thought, particularly
including Hermetism, ‘‘demonic magic’’ and Neo-
Platonism, Kabbalah, and Alchemy, were impotant
contributors to the development of modern intellec-
tual consciousness.
Our purpose in what remains ofthis chapter will be
to show how two aspects of the Gnostic derailment,
occlusion of creaturely existence and absolute identi-
fication of ‘‘man’’ with God by the Gnostics, became
formative elements in the shaping of modern political
religion. For this reason we will examine the phe-
nomenon of Renaissance Hermetism by which, in
part, the Gnostic deification of man was transmitted
to the modern world. We will attempt to differentiate
the Gnostic elements in Hermetism from the non-
Gnostic and then try to show how these two move-
ments were important contributory elements in the
development of philosophic Idealism.

RENAISSANCE HERMETISM

The revival of the thought of Hermes Trismegistus

155:
by the Renaissance Neo-Platonists was not as
strange a renascence as one might think. The Ren-
aissance itself is noted for its high valuation of the
past, and the thought of Hermes Trismegistus was
believed to constitute an ancient revelation predating
the revelation of Moses and the philosophy of the
Greeks. By reviving the prisca theologia (antique
theology) of Hermes, early Renaissance Neo-Plato-
nists like Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) attempted to re-
vive a true ancient theology and reconcile it with
Christianity. That later, persons like Giordano Bruno
would abandon this Christian interpretation and
simply assert the truth of Hermetism was the natural
outgrowth of a radical antiphilosophical testament.
When in 1614 Isaac Casaubon demonstrated by
textual analysis that the Hermetic writings were in
fact post-Christian in origin, fanatic devotees of Her-
metism rejected the evidence. Committed to the re-
form of religion by an infusion of the thought of Her-
mes, the new Renaissance messiahs were not de-
flected from their redemptive paths by a scholarly ar-
gument that the documents on which their new reli-
gion was based were not what they believed them to
De,
The central focus of the Gnostic aspects of ancient
Hermetism was the deification of man. In the
Poimandres of Hermes Trismegistus, an account of a
mystic vision in which the mind of God, identified as
Poimandres, speaks directly to Hermes, the trans-
mission of divine gnosis is made possible because
that which Hermes is able to see and hear the di-
vine nous is itself divine.2> Those who attain to this
knowledge are saved by becoming God. In Hermetic
thought, man has two souls: ‘‘the one is from the

156.
First Mind and also shares in the power of the Demi-
urge, the other has been put in from the revolution of
the heavens, and into this the God-seeing soul en-
ters.’’26 Thus the lower soul embodies the higher or
**God-seeing soul,’’ and the function of gnosis is to
release the higher from the lower. Ontologically, that
which is saved by gnosis is the god which saves. Em-
bodied in this deification of man is a radically new
idea of the freedom of man. If in the philosophic
sense freedom is action within certain moral limits,
the essence of freedom in the Hermetic sense is the
Overcoming of limits.
The core of Renaissance Hermetism as in ancient
Gnosticism was a radical deification of man, with
similar anthropological consequences. The ideas
which Marsilio Ficino used to express this were sev-
eral. In its most general form, he used the concept of
the circle: the beginning and end of which is God, the
middle, human intellect.27 Alternatively he wrote of
the existence of the “‘divine mind’’ in men, living,
shining, and reflecting itself there.28 This concept of
the dwelling of the divine mind in man may simply be
a way of expressing the idea that all that is exists in
God. But Ficino wrote further that man is the image
of God in the sense that his true being is a reflection of
the ‘‘divine face’’ or divine goodness. God, he wrote,
in willing himself, ‘‘wills all other things which are
God Himself as being in God, and as flowing out of
God are images of the divine face and have as their
end the task of reproducing and confirming the divine
goodness.’’2? The symbol of the ‘‘flowing out’’ or
emanation of existent things in God tends to break the
distinction of kind between creaturely existence and
the divine and alter it to a difference of degree. Con-

[57
sequently, Ficino could write that if God is goodness,
then the soul becomes God by love of goodness.39
‘‘Just as, not he who sees the good, but he who wills it
becomes good, so the Soul becomes divine, not from
considering God, but from loving Him.’’3! Ficino
writes also, ‘‘The entire effort of our Soul is to be-
come God. This effort is as natural to man as that of
flying is to birds. For it is inherent in all men, every-
where and always; therefore it does not follow the in-
cidental quality of some man, but the nature of the
species itself.’’32
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola also expressed
these ideas, though more compactly and allegori-
cally, in his ‘‘Oration on the Dignity of Man.” Writ-
ten as a preface or introductory speech to the publica-
tion of his nine hundred theses, this short oration is a
virtual compendium of the Hermetic deification of
man.323 Unfortunately, the disputation which was to
occur in Rome in January, 1487, never took place be-
cause an alert Pope Innocent VIII, suspecting the he-
retical cast of some of Giovanni Pico’s theses, pro-
hibited the disputation and ordered an investiga-
tion.
The somewhat restricted Christian Hermetism of
Ficino and Giovanni Pico gave place in the late six-
teenth century to the aggressive revival of Hermetic
prisca theologia by Giordano Bruno. Bruno was ac-
cused of saying that he intended to ‘‘found a new sect
under the name of philosophy,’’ a form of competi-
tion frowned upon by the Inquisitors who burned him
at the stake in 1600. Bruno viewed himselfas a Messi-
ah come to save the world through a renaissance of
Hermetic magic. In his Spaccio della bestia trion-
fante (1584), Bruno openly advocates the making of

158.
‘familiar, affable anddomestic gods,’’34 as the means
of world renewal. In that work, Jupiter admonishes
the other gods to reform themselves, promising that
*‘if we thus renew our heaven, the constellations and
influences shall be new, the impressions and fortunes
shall be new, for all things depend on this upper
world. . . .”35 The magician participates in this ce-
lestial renewal by divinations which evoke the good
traits of the gods and thus simultaneously reduce the
influence of their bad traits.36 This attitude conflicts
with the ancient Gnostic antipathy to the material
world, but the Hermetic corpus also contained the
basically non-Gnostic religious view of the world asa
manifestation of God. It was this acceptance of the
world in a transfigured state, but not in its present
reality, which, we believe, was a principal formative
element in the view of nature of Idealist Humanism.
In one aspect of the Corpus Hermeticum, for exam-
ple, the world is viewed as transparent to a world
spirit or God which itself images forth the “greater
god.’’37 All beings in the world are by that token in
God. In the ‘‘Lament’’ of the Hermetic Asclepius,
the view of imminent decline is coupled with the view
of world reform. In the old age of the world, evil, as
opposed to good, will prevail, the gods will depart
from man, and the order of nature will collapse. But
this condition is not final. At some point in this de-
cline, God will intervene by means of a flood or con-
suming fire that will destroy evil, and the world will
be returned to its original beauty. ‘“That is what the
rebirth of the world will be; a renewal of all good
things, a holy and most solemn restoration of Nature
herself, imposed by force in the course of
time. . .by the will of God.’’38 Perhaps persuaded

159.
that culture was undergoing a process of renewal, the
Renaissance Magus found this Hermetic view quite
appealing since he viewed his own action to be some-
how participating in a greater process of world re-
newal. Underlying Rennaissance Hermetism is a
subtle change from the Medieval understanding of
man, the seeds of which were sown in Hellenistic
Hermetism.

What has changed is Man, now no longer only the pious

spectator of God’s wonders in the creation, and wor-
shipper of God himself above the creation, but Man the
operator, Man who seeks to draw power from the di-
vine and natural order.3?

Frances Yates and Paul Kristeller see the immedi-

ate influence of the Hermetism of Ficino and Bruno
in “‘Galileo’s claim that man’s knowledge of mathe-
matics is different in quantity but not in kind from
that of God Himself;’’ in the natural magic of Shake-
speare’s plays; the political theory and action of
Campanella; the growth of Rosicrucianism and per-
haps Freemasonry; Sir Thomas Moore’s critique of
Cartesian naturalism; and Francis Bacon’s New At-
lantis.49 Theinfluence of Hermetic gnosticism did not
terminate in the early seventeenth century, however.
We hope to show certain similarities between Renais-
sance Hermetism and philosophic Idealism.

IDEALIST HUMANISM

The origin of Idealist Humanism as an identifiable

ideological movement may be found, Robert Tucker
indicates, in Immanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) *‘expres-

160.
sion of a compulsion in man to achieve absolute
moral self-perfection.’’4!As we have seen, however,
there are traces of such a deification of man in Rous-
seau’s Legislator, and even earlier in Machiavelli’s
Prince. Thus we believe that Tucker’s placement of
the origins of Idealist Humanism in Immanuel Kant is
much too late. The origins of Idealist Humanism, we
believe, lie in the Renaissance revival of the Gnosti-
cism and pantheism of Hermes Trismegistus. Never-
theless, Tucker is correct in seeing Kant as an advo-
cate of a view of manas godlike. Adopting Kant’s dis-
tinctions between ‘‘noumenon,”’ a thing not an object
of sense experience, and ‘‘phenomena,’’ objects of
sense experience as they appear in consciousness,
Tucker attributes to Kant a view of manasa ‘“‘divided
being a dual personality: homo noumenon and homo
phenomenon.’’42 Homonoumenon is man’s real self,
of which homo phenomenon is only an appearance.
Man is thus torn between what he really is, and what
he appears to be, but really is not completely. Kant,
Tucker writes,

portrays man in a posture of anguished striving to ac-

tualize an image of himself as divinely virtuous. He
writes that there would be no need for morality at all, no
obligation or *‘moral compulsion,”’ if man were in ac-
tual fact a ‘*holy being.’’ This is a manner of suggesting
that morality is the compulsion to become such a holy
being in actual act. It is a compulsion to become
godlike.43

Other passages in Kant’s works support such an in-

terpretation. In the Critique of Practical Reason, for
example, Kant writes that moral law leads us to reli-
gion because religion recognizes duties as divine

161.
commands. Our own moral action, then, must be
conceived as an attempt to harmonize our own will
with that of God’s, even though such harmony can- |
not be attained by finite beings.44 Kant writes in the
Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals that our
ideal will which makes universal laws is the proper
object of reverence.45 Kant also saw man’s will as
his ‘‘proper’’ or real self, and this he called the *‘di-
vine man within us.’’46
One of the political consequences of an anthro-
pology such as Kant’s is to make ‘‘autonomy’’4/ the
essential end of politics.

A good man is an autonomous man, and for him to

realize his autonomy, he must be free. Self-determina-
tion thus becomes the supreme political good. For its
sake Kant is prepared to accept brutality; to it he sub-
ordinates all the other benefits of social life; self-gov-
ernment, as a well-known slogan was later to put it, is
better than a good government.48

A basic timorousness or scepticism in his work, how-

ever, limited what otherwise would have been a ten-
dency towards dogmatic political action in Kant him-
self. His dictum that the ‘‘thing-in-itself’’ cannot be
known had first to be overcome if a radical political
doctrine was to be formulated on Kantian territory.
This breakthrough was, of course, not long in
coming. Though Kant would argue that of*‘things-in-
themselves’? we can know only their appearances,
the limitations thus imposed on critical philosophy
were too restrictive to satisfy the intellectual
appetites of Georg Wilhelm Hegel (1770-1831). The
Kantian categories of pure reason, Hegel argued, are
unfit for speculative thought, which must of

162.
necessity ascend to the Absolute.49 Of Kant’s
admonition against attempting to know things-in-
themselves, Hegel writes, ‘‘On the contrary, there is
nothing we can know so easily.”59 ‘‘Absolute
idealism,’ he thought, went far beyond the
‘*subjective idealism’ of Kant because it allows us to
know the identity of the Absolute, to know the
‘‘thing-in-itself,’’ to know the nature of God.>! This
assertion creates problems. For if ultimately the
object of science is to know God as He knows
himself, then the one who knows is required to
become like God. For the enterprise to succeed, the
distinction between man and God and must be cast
aside and replaced with a man-god.
THE IDEALIST VIEW OF MAN AS GOD

Like the Renaissance Hermetists and ancient

Gnostics, Hegel was persuaded that man was essen-
tially divine and consequently was troubled by the ef-
fect upon what he viewed as the Christian religion “‘if
human nature is absolutely severed from the divine,
if no mediation between the two is conceded except
in One isolated individual, if all man’s consciousness
of the good and the divine is degraded to the dull and
killing belief in a superior Being altogether alien to
man.’’>2 Apparently the divinity of Christ, if that ex-
cluded the divinity of all men and gave to Christ alone
the role of mediator between God and man, was too
much for the young Hegel, who could not accept that
man and God were different in kind. On this same
subject he wrote:

The hill and the eye which sees it are object and sub-

163.
 ject, but between man and God, between spirit and
spirit, there is no such cleft of objectivity and subjectiv-
ity; one is to the other an other only in that one recog-
nizes the other; both are one.>3

What motivates such a formulation? It was in his

Lectures on the History of Philosophy that Hegel said
his only desire was to know the nature of God.*4 Yet
if man himself is divine, is that not an aspiration to
know oneself? Hegel’s discussion of the story of
Adam in the Encyclopaedia in which he touches
upon the role philosophy must play in a world com-
posed of essentially divine men, is suggestive of such
an aspiration:

We are further told, God said, ‘‘Behold Adam is be-

come as one of us, to know good and evil.’’ Knowledge
is now spoken of as divine (das Gottliche) and not, as
before, as something wrong and forbidden. Such words
contain a confutation of the idle talk that philosophy
pertains only to the finitude of the mind. Philosophy is
knowledge, and it is through knowledge that man first
realizes his original vocation, to be the image of God
(ein Ebenbild Gottes zu sein).55

Hegel is clearly saying that philosophy is not the

means by which we manifest our love of truth. It is
the vehicle of our libido to become ‘‘the image of
God.’’ Man, of course, is not ‘‘the image of God,”’ in
the sense in which Hegel intends it as the exact image
(Ebenbild), unless Hegel was referring to an account
other than that in Genesis which speaks of the Elo-
him having decided to make man ‘‘in our image.”’
The crucial difference between Genesis 1:26 and
Hegel’s formulation is the difference between the
Hermetic-Gnostic view, which identifies man with

164.
God absolutely (that is, sees him as divine), and the
Classical-Christian view, which sees him as a spiri-
tual but imperfect human being.
Hegel’s interpretation of the account of Christ’s
transfiguration is also of interest because its focus is
not on Christ or the amazement of his witnesses, but
rather on its ramifications for Peter’s vocation as a
type of clairvoyance.

After Peter had recognized Jesus as divine in nature and

thereby proved that he had a sense of the whole depth
of man because he had been able to take a man as a son
of God, Jesus gave over to him the power ofthe keys of
the Kingdom of Heaven. What he bound was to be
bound in Heaven, what he loosed was to be loosed in
Heaven also. Since Peter had become conscious of a
God in one man, he must also have been able to recog-
nize in anyone else the divinity or non-divinity of his
being, or to recognize it in a third party (in einem
Dritten) as that party’s sensing of divinity or non-
divinity, i.e., as the strength of that party’s belief or
disbelief. . . 756
Peter’s clairvoyance pertains to his ability to see God
in other men who had faith. But faith in what? The
passage suggests that Peter’s faith was in himself
and, to the degree that he too was divine, in himself
as God.
Hegel shared this view of man with Johann Fichte
(1762-1814), who, especially in his later popular
works, extended his inquiry beyond the critical de-
velopment of problems in Idealism to exhortative ex-
positions of the ‘‘self’ as identical with the divine
and thus made the “‘self’’ the foundation of Idealist
speculation. Yet even in his earlier work, the Wissen-
schaftslehre (1794), it is clear that Fichte’s concept of

165.
the ‘‘self,’’ the ‘‘Jch,’’ is not restricted to the con-
scious intellect. Fichte saw a fundamental duality in
the self, between the self which posits itself and the |
self which is posited. His identification of self-posit-
ing with reflection, which he called the act of the in-
finite self, restricted the understanding ofIdealist Hu-
manists of philosophical consciousness to conscious-
ness of an infinite self which is the creator of the finite
self. Fichte collapsed the distinction in reality be-
tween existence and being, immanence and tran-
scendence, by including within one concept, the self,
all reality. ‘‘The self demands that it encompass all
reality and exhaust the infinite. This demand of
necessity rests on the idea of the absolutely posited,
infinite self; and this is the absolute self, of which we
have been talking.5/
Fichte’s concept ofa self which has burst the limi-
tations of human consciousness and become infinite
led Emile Brehier in his essay on Fichte in The Nine-
teenth Century: Period of Systems, 1800-1850 to sug-
gest that Fichte’s concept of the self can be under-
stood as **a kind of metaphysical Manicheism.”’58 By
this Brehier meant that the pre-existent opposition
between light and darkness, good and evil, which is
the chief characteristic of Manichaean systems, is
conceptually equivalent to Fichte’s exposition of the
interplay between infinite and finite self. As in the
system of Mani, he argued, the focus of Fichte’s
thought lies in the ultimate triumphal resolution of
hostile forces in the absolute ego.
These sentiments with their peculiar Gnostic cast
ultimately cropped up in the work of the early Eng-
lish interpreter of German Idealism, Thomas Carlyle
(1795-1881), who wrote in one of his essays:
 ‘Neither say thou that proper Realities are wanting: for
Man’s Life, now, as of old, is the genuine work of God;
wherever there is a Man, a God also is revealed, and all
that is Godlike: a whole epitome ofthe Infinite, with its
meanings, lies enfolded in the Life of every Man. Only,
alas, that the Seer to discern this same Godlike, and
with fit utterance unfold it for us, is wanting, and may
long be wanting.’>9

This passage, like that of Hegel, intentionally mixes

the Genesis account of man as made (‘‘ ‘the genuine
work of God’ ’’) in the image of God, with the
Hermetic-Gnostic idea that man is literally God
(‘‘ ‘wherever there is a Man, a God also is re-
vealed’ ’’). In Heroes and Hero-Worship Carlyle re-
called Novalis’ assertion, ‘‘ ‘There is but one Temple
in the Universe. . .and that is the Body of Man.’ ’69
This quotation is paralleled in the same passage by a
fragment attributed to St. John Chrysostom, *‘The
True Shekinah is Man!’ In non-Kabbalistic Jewish
tradition the Shekhinah means God himself. Inter-
preting the above sentence in this sense, we read,
‘“The true God is Man,’’ a statement clearly un-
acceptable to orthodox Judaism, but consistent with
the Gnosticism of the Kabbalah.®!

ATHEIST HUMANISM

Just as the ancient Gnostics, Renaissance Hermet-

ists and Idealist Humanists rejected man’s humanity
in the assertion of his divinity, atheist humanism de-
stroyed God in order to emphasize the ‘‘true’’ power
of man. The former movements asserted man’s radi-
cal divinity, the latter that man himself was God,
which, in terms diametrically opposed, is the same

167.
‘‘truth.’’ Atheist humanism is the mirror-like op-
posite reflection of Idealist Humanism.
This relationship is due in part, perhaps, to the na-
ture of philosophical revolutions which tend to assert
a position at the opposite extreme from the presently
dominant school. But it may also be due, we suggest,
to the presence of an equivalent engendering experi-
ence. Ancient Gnosticism sought escape from a con-
dition of unacceptable existence by the return of the
divine spark to a radically hidden god. From the
Gnostic perspective of a demonic world, both the
world and man are rejected in the total absorption of
consciousness in a hidden divine reality. The equilib-
rium of Classical philosophy in which man came to
know his creaturely place in being by noetic experi-
ence of his participation in the divine nous is replaced
with the Gnostic’s consuming experience of identifi-
cation with a radically transcendent god. Alternative-
ly, the modern movements of Renaissance Hermet-
ism, Idealist Humanism, and atheist humanism pro-
ject the unity of divine completeness into this world
in a vision of a world free of contradictions. Both
worids of the Gnostics and of the modern political re-
ligions are, of course, ‘‘Second Realities,’’ for man
and the world are not demonic, but are consubstan-
tial with the divine. Nor is the world wholly divine or
capable of becoming divine in some process of world-
immanent renovation. These modern movements,
however, represent a revolt against reality which
they construe as defective, with the distinction that in
atheist humanism this revolt has reached its fullest
historical development, not in the spiritual terms of
the preceding movements, but ina radically desacral-
ized mode. Atheist humanism is the secularization of

168.
the vision of Renaissance Hermetism and philosoph-
ic Idealism of a totally spiritualized world. What is
imminent in history, the atheist humanist believes, is
a brave new exclusively material, though reconsti-
tuted, existence.
Fr. Henri DeLubac, S.J., coined the term ‘‘atheist
humanism’’62 to classify the disparate thought of
those intellectuals who represented the new develop-
ment of a type of humanism based upon the view that
man is an autonomous being, independent of any ob-
ligation to a higher order because man is self-
creating, that is, his own creator. Like Albert Camus,
who observed that ‘‘to become God is to accept
crime,’’®3 Lubac criticized atheist humanism for
having led to the actual annihilation of human beings.
An intellectual movement which began by displacing
God led not to the actualization of man’s humanity,
but to the release of men from the limits which would
have restrained them from murdering their fellow
human beings in the name of humanity. Below the
atheist humanist’s reduction of all reality to the
material and the rejection of the spiritual aspects of
man’s humanity, lay an engendering impulse to
possess totally or master reality perceived as alien.
This libido dominandi, this lust for power, Lubac
argued, was essentially religious. Though atheist
humanists were anti-religious, they were so in a
furiously religious way which tended to obscure a
deeper moral or spiritual choice to live ina cosmos in
which the only god is man. In Idealist Humanism man
is believed to be actually divine; in the world of
atheist humanism, absent of divine reality, man
becomes god by default.

169.
 Ludwig Feuerbach: Idealist Humanism began as a
movement with Renaissance Hermetism and passed
through Kant, Schiller, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel. .
With Hegel’s death in 1831, it ceased to develop fur-
ther in the reflective channels in which it formerly
flowed. The peculiar mixture of philosophy and the-
ology in Idealist Humanism which constituted a revo-
lution in religion led to a religion of revolution. The
man whose works marks this transition in modern po-
litical religions was Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), a
student of Hegel.
Feuerbach felt that the moment in which he lived
was a new epoch, the ‘‘epoch of the downfall of
Christianity.
’’64
The place of belief has been taken by unbelief and that
of the Bible by reason. Similarly, religion and the
Church have been replaced by politics, the heaven by
the earth, prayer by work, hell by material need, and
the Christian by man.

Given this fact of Western culture, Feuerbach advo-

cated that the epoch of the downfall of Christianity be
brought to its completion by placing man in the posi-
tion formerly occupied by God.

Only thus can we free ourselves from the contradiction

that is at present poisoning our innermost being—the
contradiction between our life and thought on one
hand, and a religion that is fundamentally opposed to
them on the other. For religious we must once again be-
come if politics is to become our religion.&

The new god of the religion of politics, of an orienta-

tion utterly this-worldly, could only be man.
Throughout Feuerbach’s works, this atheist insight is

170.
Stated, restated, expounded, elaborated upon, and
further developed. Perhaps because this was the idee
fixe of his intellection, if not his psychological obses-
sion, no scholar has argued that Feuerbach stands in
the first rank of nineteenth century philosophy. Karl
Barth, in his *‘Introductory Essay”’ to a new edition
of Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, calls this
principal thesis ‘talmost nauseatingly, trivial.’’©7 All
the same, Feuerbach’s impact on the group of radical
Hegelians, which included Karl Marx, was striking.
This influence was due to both the new atheist hu-
manism of Feuerbach and to its corollary, his critique
of philosophic Idealism.
In his essay, *‘Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Phil-
osophy,’’ Feuerbach argued that Hegel had impris-
oned the intellect ina system of reason,®8 which was
not immediate intellection, the ‘‘intellect within us,”’
but abstract reason, a lifeless fabrication of reason in
its concrete form. Similarly in his ‘*Preliminary
Theses on the Reform of Philosophy,’’ Feuerbach ar-
gued that Hegelian philosophy had ‘‘alienated man
from himself’ Be positing *‘the essence of man out-
side of man.’’®?Karl Marx, following Feuerbach,
wrote:

Free yourselves from the concepts and prepossessions

of existing speculative philosophy if you want to get at
things differently, as they are, that is to say, if you want
to arrive at the truth. And there is no other road for you
to truth and freedom except that leading through the
stream of fire. Feuerbach is the purgatory of the pre-
sent times.70

What are the characteristics of Feuerbach’s atheist

humanism? Feuerbach thought that every being is in-

L/4.
finite.’! In ‘‘Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philoso-
phy,’’ he wrote, ‘“The being of man is no longer a par-
ticular and subjective, but a universal being, for man —
has the whole universe as the object of his drive for
knowledge.’’/2 Man lusts to know, he actualizes
himself in his drive to know the universe, and this ac-
tuality for Feuerbach is the sign that man is not limited.
‘‘Reason is existence objective to itself as its own
end; the ultimate tendency of things. That which is an
object to itself is the highest, the final being; that
which has the power over itselfis almighty.’’ 73 In cri-
ticism, Karl Barth wrote that Feuerbach ignored two
important realities in this assertion: man will die, and
man is evil. That Feuerbach ignored such basic reali-
ties ‘accounts for the shallowness of his explanation
of religion.’’/4 Nevertheless, this drive for know-
ledge was the foundation of Feuerbach’s political
thought. Christianity, by displacing man’s true hu-
manity in a transcendent God, gave Christians an
other-worldly orientation. Their ‘‘republic’’ was in
heaven, thus they did not need one here in this world.
With the abolition of Christianity, man coukd now
find paradise in this world. That shift would require a
philosophy which had transvalued the summum bon-
um of Christian philosophy. In the new epoch which
is to replace the Christian, we will have ‘‘the right to
constitute a republican state.”’7> For speculative
thought, man, Feuerbach wrote, is the summum
bonum./6 This anthropological view he called ‘‘an-
thropotheism,’’”/ aphilosophy which sees manas the
ground of being. In the age given to atheist human-
ism, therefore, the state will perform the role in.the
development of mankind as an ‘‘infinite being.’’78
The role was equivalent to providence, he thought,

172.
creating a context of universality for men who see
themselves as the ultimate reality.
It is therefore this practical atheism that provides the
states with what holds them together; human beings
come together in the state because here they are with-
out God, because the state is their god, which is why it
can suitably claim for itself the divine predicate of
*majesty.’’7

With acute psychological insight, Feuerbach saw

that politics would become a type of religion for men
who rejected Christianity because it stifled their lust
to actualize their “true” nature in political action.
Karl Marx (1818-1883): The new religion of atheist
humanism was adopted by Karl Marx, who followed
Feuerbach in his rejection of Christianity. Yet Marx
would go further than Feuerbach, whom he criticized
for his ‘‘idealism,’’89 because he had not completely
shaken himself free from Hegel’s yoke. Feuerbach
spoke of man, but did not realize, Marx said, that
man is a ‘‘social product.’ °81 There was much good in
Feuerbach, of course, but Marx was critical because,
he said, Feuerbach never went beyond “‘isolated sur-
mises.’’82 Nevertheless, Marx concurred in Feuer-
bach’s criticism of theology. In notes to his doctoral
dissertation Marx argued that ontological proofs of
the existence of God are merely proofs of the exist-
ence of ‘‘human self-consciousness.’’83 In his ‘‘Eco-
nomic and Philosophic Manuscripts”’ he wrote that
gods are only the effect of ‘‘an aberration of the hu-
man muind.’’84 Yet he wasperplexed by theetiological
question of origins first asked by the Greek natural
philosophers to the extent that he refused to grapple
with the philosophic problems it proposed. We must
expel the notion of creation of the world, he said.

173.
Man is his own self creator. If we do not, then we
must logically admit that man is not autonomous.
Marx was spiritually unprepared to accept what he
could not honestly deny: that man could not have cre-
ated himself. So he called the philosophic question of
the arche of being an ‘‘abstraction.’ ’85 Abstractions,
such as the question of genesis, says Marx, have be-
come impossible for ‘‘socialist man.’’ Socialist man
‘‘has evident and incontrovertible proof of his self-
creation, his own formation process.’’86 The willful
assertion of a new type of man who turns his back on
philosophy in the knowledge that he creates himself
is the basis of Marx’s humanism and his ‘‘commu-
nism.”’
Marx wanted to go beyond the critique of religion
to engage in actual revolution. In the “‘Theses on
Feuerbach’’ he wrote, ‘‘The philosophers have
only interpreted the world in various ways; the point
is, to change it.’’87 Like many of his generation for
whom a scholarly career was not the traditional
means by which to master an intellectual discipline
and impart it to the next generation, Marx instead
wanted to change the world by radically revolution-
ary means. The basis of his concept of revolution was
his anthropology. ‘‘Man,’’ he wrote, ‘‘lives by na-
ture,’ in the sense that nature was an autonomous
realm, independent of any higher order. Thus to live
by nature, ‘‘means that nature is his body with which
he must remain in perpetual process in order not to
die. That the physical and spiritual life of man is tied
up with nature is another way of saying that natureis
linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.’’88 As a
‘“species-being’’ man’s labor is an end in itself, by
which Marx meant that man’s relationship to nature

174.
produces man as an “‘active species-life.’’89 The ob-
ject of labor is thus the objectification of man’s
species-life: he produces himself not only intellectu-
ally, as in consciousness, but also actively in a real
sense and sees himself in a world he made.’’90 Be-
cause in bourgeois society man is alienated from his
labor by capital and private property, man lives ina
condition of alienation. This analysis of estrange-
ment formed the basis of Marx’s call for a revolution
which would liberate man as a species from the de-
struction he experiences in presently constituted
society.
Marx develops his theory of revolution in The Ger-
man Ideology (1845-46). Because ‘‘communism’’ is
the restoration of man, he writes, ‘“Communism is
for us not a state of affairs still to be established, not
an ideal to which reality (will) have to adjust. We call
communism the real movement which abolishes the
present state of affairs.’’91 By abolishing private prop-
erty, ‘‘the liberation of each single individual will be
accomplished to the extent that history becomes
world history.’’92 The class that will carry out this
liberation is the class, which, in the pronounced de-
gradation of man by the development of the produc-
tive forces that subjugate it, develops ‘“‘communist
consciousness.’’ Such a practical revolutionary con-
sciousness, not criticism, is ‘‘the driving force of
history.’’93

This communism as completed naturalism is human-

ism, as completed humanism it is naturalism. It is the
genuine resolution of the antagonism between man and
nature and between man and man; it is the true resolu-
tion of the conflict between existence and essence,
objectification and _ self-affirmation, freedom and

bi
 necessity, individual and species. It is the riddle of
history solved and knows itself as this solution.94

Marx has created a political religion based on the

metastatic expectation that a violent revolution will
overcome the contradictions of human existence. As
such, there are difficulties with his formula. Marx
claimed his ‘‘communism”’ was ‘‘scientific.’’ In the
‘‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’ he
based -his conclusions on what he believed were
economic analyses of political economy; but, as we
have suggested, they are actually the conclusions ap-
propriate to a radical atheist anthropology. More-
over, from what source does Marx obtain informa-
tion about the ultimate goal of history? Who gave
Marx the secret to the “‘riddle’’? With respect to the
promised benefits of communism, are they worth the
price in murder and human sacrifice that must be
paid? If we search in the writings of Marx for reflec-
tion on these problems, we find only the imperative
that we stop our questioning, for our questions are
‘‘abstractions.”’
This occlusion of questions which might forestall
the atheist humanist’s desire to destroy the world so
that he can build it anew in his own image is equiva-
lent to the magical occlusion of man’s creaturely sta-
tus by the Gnostics and Renaissance Hermetists. All
allowed a vision of transfigured reality to block out
the reality of creaturely being. Because of the depth
of this disease of the spirit, it presents to public order
in the modern world the supreme challenge of disease
of the soul impermeable to rational argument.

176.
 SUGGESTED READINGS

Camus, Albert. The Rebel, Anthony Bower, trans.

New York: Random House, Vintage Books,
1961.
De Lubac, Henri. The Drama of Atheist Human-
ism, Edith M. Riley, trans. Cleveland: World Pub-
lishing Co., Meridian Books, 1965.
Jonas, Hans. The Gnostic Religion, 2nd ed. rev.
Boston: Beacon Press, 1963. .
Kedourie, Elie. Nationalism, 3rd ed. London:
Hutchinson University Library, 1974.
Scholem, Gershom G. On the Kabbalah and Its
Symbolism. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.
Talmon, J.L. The Origins of Totalitarian Demo-
cracy. New York: W.W. Norton, 1970.
Tucker, Robert. Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx.
Cambridge: At The University Press, 1965.
Voegelin, Eric. The New Science of Politics. An
Introduction. Chicago: University of Chicago
PIESs. 1952
Yates, Frances. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic
Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1964.
—. The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. London and
Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972.

B7T.
 NOTES

lOriginally published as Wissenschaft, Politik |

und Gnosis (Munich: Kosel-Verlag, 1959), English
edition, William J. Fitzpatrick, trans. Science, Poli-
tics and Gnosticism. Two Essays. Chicago: Henry
Regnery Co., Gateway Edition, 1968).
The utility of Gnosticism in analysis of modern
thought is examined in Hans Jonas, ‘‘Epilogue:
Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism,’’ in The
Gnostic Religion. The Message of the Alien God and
the Beginnings of Christianity, 2nd ed., rev. (Bos-
ton: Beacon Press, 1963), 320-340. Other examina-
tions include: John William Corrington, *‘‘Charles
Reich and the Gnostic Vision,’’ New Orleans Re-
view, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1976), 3-11; Richard J. Bishirjian,
‘*Carlyle’s Political Religion,’’ Journal of Politics,
Vol. 38 (1976), 95-113; M.E. Bradford, ‘‘A Writ of
Fire and Sword: The Politics of Oliver Cromwell,”’
Occasional Review, Issue 3 (Summer, 1975), 61-80.
3Eric Voegelin, ‘““On Debate and Existence,’’
Intercollegiate Review, III (1967), 143-152.
4 Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 35.
Ugo Bianchi, ed., Le Origini Dello Gnosticismo
(Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1967), xxvii.
6Walter Kaufmann, The Portable Neitzsche, 29th
ed. (New York: Viking Press, 1970), 568.
7Gilles Quispel, Gnosis Als Weltreligion (Zurich:
Origo Verlag, 1951), 31.
Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 187-188.
9See Eric Voegelin, The World of the Polis, 229-
240, for an interpretation of the fragments of Hera-
clitus relating to the symbol cosmos.
10Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 261.

178.
 I1Quispel, Gnosis Als Weltreligion, 29.
12See Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 148-153, for an
examination of Hermetic Gnosticism.
13 bid., 150.
14Ibid., 151.
IS Tbid., 152.
l6[bid., 160.
17Quoted in Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 174.
18 [bid. Throughout this section our interpretation
has relied on Voegelin’s analysis of what he calls the
‘*Balance of Consciousness,’ The Ecumenic Age,
Chapter Four, Section 3, 227-238.
l lato, The Republic, 529c.
20Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 124.
21fbid., 107.
22Ibid., 122.
23(Tubingen, 1835).
24See Eric Voegelin, ‘‘On Hegel—A Study in
Sorcery,’ Studium Generale, 24 (1971), 335-368;
**On Debate and Existence,’ Intercollegiate Review,
II (1967) 143-152; idem, ‘‘The Eclipse of Reality,”’ in
Maurice Natanson, ed., Phenomenology and Social
Reality: Essays in Memory of Alfred Schutz (The
Hague, Martinus Nihoff, 1970), 185-194. Also in this
line of redefinition is Part Two of Thomas Molnar,
God and the Knowledge of Reality (New Y ork: Basic
Books, Publishers, 1973), 73-143.
25 Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 149.
26/[bid., 160.
27Paul Oskar Kristeller, The Philosophy of Mar-
silio Ficino, Virginia Conant, trans. (reprint of 1943
ed.; Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1964), 100.
28Ibid., 79.

Lo.
 29 Ibid., 145.
30]bid., 264.
31 fbid., 269.
32 bid. ,337.
33 translation of Giovanni Pico’s ‘‘Oration’’ is
available in E. Cassirer, P.O. Kristeller, J.H. Ran-
dall, Jr., eds. The Renaissance Philosophy of Man
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 223-
254.
34Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Her-
metic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1964), 212. For an examination of demonic
magic in Renaissance Hermetism, see also D.P.
Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to
Campanella (London: Warburg Institute, Univer-
hy of London, 1958).
SYates, Giordano Bruno, 218.
36 Jbid., 221-222.
37Ibid., 33.
38 Ibid., 39-40.
39Ibid., 144.
40paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Concepts of
Man and Other Essays (New York: Harper Torch-
books, Harper and Row, Publishers, 1972), 20;
Yates, Giordano Bruno, 357; 360-397; 413; 274; 427;
450.
41Robert Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl
Marx (Cambridge: At The University Press 1965), 33.
42 Ibid., 34.
43 Ibid., 33.
441mmanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason,
Lewis White Beck, trans. (Indianapolis, Bobbs-
Merrill Co., Library of Liberal Arts, 1956), 33.
45{mmanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic

180.
of Morals, H.J. Paton, trans. (New York: Harper
and Row, Publishers, Harper Torchbooks, The
Academy Library, 1964), 105.
46 Ibid., 126; idem, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of
Pure Reason, Norman Kemp Smith, trans. (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), 486. In Kant’s
posthumously published notes he wrote, ‘‘God must
be represented not as a substance outside me, but as
the highest moral principle inme. . . .The ideaof that
which human reason itself makes out of the World-
All is the active representation of God. Not as a
special personality, substance outside me, but as a
thought in me.’’ Quoted in Thomas Molnar, God and
the Knowledge of Reality (New York: Basic Books,
Inc., Publishers, 1973), 166.
47 lie Kedourie, Nationalism, 3rd ed. (London:
Hutchinson University Library, 1974), 29.
48Ibid., 29-30.
49G .W. Hegel, The Logic of Hegel Translated
from the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sci-
ences, William Wallace, trans., 2nd ed. rev.
(London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 91 (here-
after cited as Hegel, Encyclopaedia).
SOJbid., 92.
Sl ybid., 93; idem, Hegel’s Lectures on the His-
tory of Philosophy, E.S. Haldane, trans., 3 vols.
(New York: Humanities Press, Inc., 1955), 1:71.
52G.W. Hegel, On Christianity: Early Theological
Writings, T.M. Knox, trans. (New York: Harper and
Brothers, Harper Torchbooks, Cloister Library,
1961), 176.
S3Ibid., 265.
S4Hegel, Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Phil-
osophy, 1:71.

181.
 SSHegel, Encyclopaedia, 56. Emphasis is added.
S6Hegel, On Christianity: Early Theological
Writings, 242.
57Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Science of Knowledge,
Peter Heath and John Lachs, trans. (New York:
le eae hI 1970), 244,
8Emile Brehier, The Nineteenth Century: Period
of Systems, 1800-1850, Wade Baskin, trans. (Chi-
oe University of Chicago press, 1968), 122.
Thomas Carlyle, The Works of Thomas Carlyle
in Thirty Volumes, H.D. Traill, ed., Centenary Edi-
tion (London: Chapman and Hall, Ltd., 1896-1899),
XXVIII, 52. For an assessment of the gnosticism of
English Idealism, see Richard J. Bishirjian, ‘“Thomas
Hill Green’s Political Philosophy,”’ Political Science
Reviewer, Vol. IV (Fall, 1974), 29-53. Also see idem,
**Carlyle’s Political Religion,’’ Vol. 38, Journal of
Politics, V, 10.
60Carlyle, Works, V, 10.
6lOur understanding of the Gnosticism of the
Kabbalah is derived from Gershom G. Scholem, On
The Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (New York:
Schocken Books, 1969), 104-105.
62Henri De Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Hu- ©
manism, Edith M. Riley, trans. (Cleveland: World
Publishing Co., Meridian Books, 1965).
63 Albert Camus, The Rebel, Anthony Bower,
trans. (New York: Random House, Vintage Books,
1961), 59.
641 udwig Feuerbach, **The Necessity of a Re-
form Philosophy,’’ The Fiery Brook: Selected
Writings of Ludwig Feuerbach, Zawar Hanfi, trans.
(Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, Double-
day and Co., Inc., 1972), 147.

182.
 6) [bid., 148-149.
66[bid., 149. Emphasis is added.
67Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christian-
ity, George Eliot, trans. (New York: Harper and
Row, Publishers, Harper Torchbooks, The Cloister
Library, 1957), xix.
68Feuerbach, The Fiery Brook, 68.
69 [bid., 157.
70Quoted in David McLellan, Marx Before Marx-
ism (New York: Harper Torchbooks, Harper and
Row, Publishers, 1971), 108.
71Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 38.
72Feuerbach, ‘‘Towards a Critique of Hegel’s
Philosophy,’’ The Fiery Brook, 93.
73 Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 43.
74 Ibid., xxviii.
7>Feuerbach, ‘‘The Necessity of a Reform of
Philosophy,’’ The Fiery Brook, 152.
76*‘Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy,”’
Ibid., 93.
77**Preliminary Theses on the Reform of Philo-
sophy,’’ Ibid., 166.
8‘The Necessity of a Reform of Philosophy,”’
Tbid., 150.
79 Ibid.
80For the sake of economy, we restrict our
references here to the period of the “‘Young
Marx,’ which covers the years from 1838-1846.
Karl Marx, The German Ideology, in Writings of
the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, Loyd
D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat, trans. and eds.
(Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, Double-
day & Company, Inc., 1967), 419.
81**Theses on Feuerbach,” Ibid., 402.

183.
 82The German Ideology, Ibid., 416.
83 bid., 65.
84Ibid., 298.
85 Ibid., 313.
86/bid., 314.
87 Ibid., 402.
8**Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts,”’
Ibid., 293.
89 [bid., 295.
A Tbid.
91 Ibid., 426.
22 Ibid., 429.
93 Ibid., 432.
4**Fconomic and Philosophic Manuscripts,”’
Ibid., 304.
 CHAPTER X
APOCALYPSE, HISTORY,
AND POLITICS

The apocalyptic role of the Hermetic Magi in has-

tening the reconstitution of nature was not an isolated
development. Apocalyptic prophets who at-
tempted to make this world into the kingdom of God
and assumed that God had appointed or elected them
for the deeds which they believed were necessary to
save the world were a common feature of the Chris-
tian world. In part for that reason, perhaps, St. Au-
gustine rejected the prophecy of the imminence of an
actual period of one thousand years in which the
Saints would rule the kingdoms of this world with
Christ. The affairs of the city of man were not work-
ing toward any intramundane conclusion; the rise
and fall of nations and empires flowed along no mean-
ingful course, had no history in the theological or
philosophical sense; and St. Augustine was no doubt
aware of the spiritual consequences for true faith if
Christians gave themselves up to the expectation
of salvation in this life. If salvation is thought to be
intramundane, political life takes on new historical
importance as it becomes enveloped in the history of
salvation; and politics becomes the field of prophecy.
Historically, the expectation that reality will be
transformed in time is an aspect of the history of
prophecy.

185.
 SCRIPTURAL SOURCES

ISAIAH: The prophet Isaiah advised King Ahaz, |

then engaged in preparations for an encounter with
Syria, not to rely on the army, but on the spirit of
Yahweh (Isaiah 31:1-3). When King Ahaz declined
the advice offered by Isaiah at the call of Yahweh,
and furthermore declined the offer of a sign from Isa-
iah, Yahweh himself gave Ahaz a sign: the coming of
a child, born of a virgin, who would name him Im-
manuel, and whose coming would be prefaced by the
destruction of the country, brought about by the re-
fusal of the king to reject evil. In Isaiah 11:1-9 another
ruler is promised, one who has the spirit of God.
‘‘Not by appearance shall he judge, nor by hearsay
shall he decide, But he shall judge the poor with jus-
tice, and decide aright for the land’s afflicted’’ (Il:
3-4). ‘‘Then the wolf shall be a guest of the lamb, and
the leopard shall lie down with the kid;. . .for the
earth shall be filled with knowledge of the Lord, as
water covers the sea’”’ (11:6-9). The vision of trans-
figured political life and nature is coupled in Isaiah
2:4 with the prophecy of world peace: ‘‘They shall
beat their swords into plowshares and their spears in-
to pruning hooks; One nation shall not raise the
sword against another, nor shall they train for war a-
gain.’” Passages of similar intensity may be found in
the writings of the prophet Jeremiah.!

DANIEL: In the Old Testament Book of Daniel, a

dream is reported in which a succession of four em-
pires is followed by a fifth which terminates history.
The fifth kingdom lasts forever, and governs the en-
tire world. The kingdoms preceding the establish-

186.
ment of the last which is ushered in by ‘‘One like a
son of man”’ (7:13) are each governed by beasts. The
fourth in the series of beasts wages war against God’s
chosen people, *‘the holy ones’’ (7:21), whom he van-
quishes. But God intercedes on the side of the good,
and the “‘holy ones’’ take dominion (7:22).

Then the kingship and dominion and majesty

of all the kingdoms under the heavens
shall be given to the holy people of the Most High,
Whose kingdom shall be everlasting: all dominions
shall serve and obey him (7:27).

The Daniel Apocalypse was written about 165 B.C.,

when the Jews in Palestine had come under the Seleu-
cid empire. All Jewish religious observances were
forbidden, and this suppression in turn led to the
Maccabaean revolt. The four beasts referred to the
empires of the Babylonians, the Medes, the Persians,
and the Greeks. Subsequent generations would asso-
ciate the four beasts with their own political enemies,
whose destruction became a sign of the coming of a
new kingdom in which they would reign.
During the Puritan Revolution in England a group
of radical Puritans were known as the Fifth Monar-
chy Men because they expected the imminent re-
placement of the present regime with a fifth and final
one prophesied in the Book of Daniel. In 1653, John
Rogers predicted that the Fifth Monarchy would rule
the world in the year 1666. Though early Fifth Mon-
archy Men identified the fourth beast with the reign
of Charles I, after Charles’ execution when the victo-
rious Puritans under Oliver Cromwell failed to trans-
form existing political and ecclesiastical institutions
according to their own principles, Cromwell himself

187.
became the ‘‘beast.’’ The battle was clear, English-
men must choose between Christ or Cromwell.2
Though Cromwell met several times with deputa-
tions of Fifth Monarchy Men in order to dispute their
interpretations, his appeal to Scripture and political
practicality could not dissuade them from opposi-
tion, which later became a revolt.

REVELATION: The Book of Revelation also pro-

vided a welter of symbols which were to become im-
portant aspects of metastatic self-interpretation.3 In
John’s vision of ‘‘new heavens and a new earth”’
(21:1), the world is transformed and he sees a ‘‘new
Jerusalem’”’ which descends from heaven. The ‘‘new
Jerusalem’’ is the place where God dwells among
men and governs them directly without the mediation
of worldly government. In chapter nineteen is de-
scribed a vision of the champion of God, riding a
white horse. His unswerving standard is justice.

He wore a cloak that had been dipped in blood, and his

name was the Word of God. The armies of heaven were
behind him riding white horses and dressed in fine
linen, pure and white. Out of his mouth came a sharp
sword for striking down the nations. He will shepherd
them with an iron rod; it is he who will tread out in the
winepress the blazing wrath of God the Almighty (19:
13-15).

The coming of this heavenly warrior is the beginning

of the destruction of the chief representative of evil,
which is completed by the binding of Satan for a peri-
od of a thousand years (20:2). During this period the
saints reign for a millennium in the world with Christ
at their head. At the conclusion of the millennium Sa-

188.
tan is released to do damage for a short time; then the
last judgment occurs and a New Jerusalem is
established.

MILLENARIANISM

The socio-religious movements which grew up a-

round the expection of a this-worldly millennium
are sometimes called ‘‘Millenarian.’’ Though in its
specific sense this term refers to that period one thou-
sand years in advance of the final judgment of man
when the saints rule with Christ in a kingdom estab-
lished in this world, the term is often more broadly
construed to define the historical movements which
we have called ‘‘chiliastic.’’ A specific definition of
these movements was made by Norman Cohn, who
defines *‘Millenarian’’ as referring to movements
seeking salvation which is:

_(a)collective, in the sense that it is to be enjoyed by the

faithful as a group; (b)terrestrial, in the sense that it is
to be realised on this earth and not in some other-
worldly heaven; (c)imminent, in the sense that it is to
come both soon and suddenly; (d)total, in the sense
that it is utterly to transform life on earth, so that the
new dispensation will be no mere improvement on the
present but perfection itself; (e)accomplished by a-
gencies which are consciously regarded as super-
natural.4

Representative of these ‘‘Millenarian’’ movements

are a variety of ecstatic sectaries such as the
pauperes of the first Crusade, who saw the rescue of
Jerusalem as the culmination of the eschatological
movement which would result in the establishment of

189.
the ‘‘New Jerusalem’’ of the Book of Revelation; the
Flagellants, who indulged in self-mutilation which
they believed would hasten the establishment of the
millennium; and the radical Taborites.

JOACHIM OF FLORA: One representative of in-

tellectual ‘‘Millenarianism”’
was the Calabrian Ab-
bot, Joachim of Flora (c. 1135-1202).> Though the
prophecy of Joachim was based on Scriptural inter-
pretation rather than direct revelation, the revelation
of the meaning of history he was to articulate based
on the text of Revelation 5 would carry the same au-
thority as more direct prophecies. The meaning of
history he discovered was identified in Joachim’s
mind with the ‘‘ever-lasting gospel’’ which in Revela-
tion 14:6-7 is carried by an angel who announces the
imminence of the Last Judgment. History, Joachim
believed, was based on the Trinity. There were three
ages, each of which is preceded by a period of slow
development culminating in a champion who arises
to usher in the new age. The leader of the first age, the
Age of the Father, was Abraham. The leader of the
second, the Age of the Son, was Christ. The third
age, the Age of the Spirit, was yet to come, though
Joachim had narrowed down his coming to the year
1260. The leader of the third age would deliver
mankind out of Babylon into a condition of spiritual
envelopment of the world and mankind. The third age
would see the culmination of world history, a time
when God would be known directly by all men with-
out the previously necessary mediation of the
Church. Men would possess only spiritual bodies and
would not require the presence of political institu-
tions. But especially significant was his claim that in
the third age the ‘‘everlasting gospel’’ would replace
the Old and New Testaments. His prophecies re-
ceived the early sponsorship of the Church, only to
be condemned by the Council of Arles in 1263.

SAVONAROLA.: It is impossible here to trace the

long history of ecstatic ‘‘Millenarianism’’ which en-
livens both Medieval and Renaissance history.
Nevertheless, one political-religious chiliast should
be noted, Fra Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498). Sav-
onarola’s political activity influenced the life of the
first Modern political theorist, Niccolo Machiavelli
(1469-1527), the Florentine politician and theorist
whose own political career began with Savonarola’s
fall. His teachings were a vital aspect of the life of
Florence. His prophecy of a new Cyrus who would
lead Florence and all Italy to a condition of unity was
met with special acclaim in the city which tradition-
ally believed itself destined to play a special role in
history.
Fra Girolamo Savonarola was not a radical hermit
but the premier preacher in Renaissance Florence.
The men who came to hear his sermons constituted
the elite of civic life. Yet he was instrumental in
bringing popular government to the city which, by
1494, had been ruled for two generations by the
Medici family. Savonarola was brought to Florence
at the suggestion of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola,
and Savonarola himself saw in this appointment the
will of God, who would use him as the means by
which to warn all Italy to prepare themselves for the
significant events of the immediate future. Savona-
rola’s prophecies of the future contained the typical-
ly chiliastic mixture of the promise of spiritual fulfill-

he
ment and worldly enrichment. Before this condition
of reconstituted existence would come about, he pre-
dicted that all Italy would first be destroyed.© These
predictions of doom were not isolated prophecies,
but bore the colorings of apocalyptic prophecies with
which his hearers would have been abundantly famil-
iar. In Savonarola’s ‘‘Renovation Sermon”’ he re-
veals the contents ofa vision he experienced on Good
Friday. Over the city of Rome he saw a black cross on
which were written the words ‘‘Crux irae Dei,” ‘*The
cross of the wrath of God.”’ The air was filled with tu-
mult, and a battle involving all the peoples of the
earth ensued. Then there appeared a golden cross a-
bove Jerusalem, so large and bright that it enveloped
the entire world with joy and flowers. On this cross
was inscribed, ‘“‘Crux misericordiae Dei,’ *“The
cross of the mercy of God.” ‘‘Quickly all the nations
of the earth, men and women, gathered there to adore
and to embrace it.’’7 The two crosses would signify
perhaps the battle with the forces of ‘‘Gog and Ma-
gog’’ (Rev. 20:7-9), in which the powers of evil are
destroyed before the coming of the New Jerusalem.
Savonarola lived in expectation of the Last Days and
was troubled by the slowness of God’s Coming. He
wrote:

I think, O heavenly king, that your delay,

Foretells a still worse scourge for her great sin;
Even perhaps that the time begins
Which makes Hell tremble—the Final Day. . . .8

When Savonarola was delegated to treat with the in-

vading King of France in 1494 for acceptable political
conditions, he was successful to the extent that
Charles VIII withdrew from Florence. His sermon
after the French withdrawal spoke of Florence as the
place chosen by God to illuminate the world with his
presence, and he identified himself as the chosen one
of God who would lead Florence and ali Italy from
their fallen condition. Savonarola preached that Flor-
ence was soon to become the new Jerusalem? and
would become rich both in spirit and in the riches of
the world. !9 Her role in the world was to give leader-
ship to Italy and to renovate religion throughout the
world.!1In these later sermons he emphasized the
imminence of a new golden age, and not the tribula-
tions of the Last Days. ‘‘His earlier exhortations to
reject the world had given way to the conviction that
the world could be—indeed, would be—transformed,
with the regeneration not only of the individual peni-
tent but of society itself.”’!2
Characteristic of all apocalyptic chiliasts, Savona-
rola relied upon his own inspiration, his own reading
of God’s purposes in the world as he saw them in
Scripture or in the events of the day. With great inten-
sity and absolute sincerity, Savonarola exhorted his
listeners to apocalyptic action. Partly as a
consequence of his coming too close to a rejection of
the existing ecclesiastical powers in his calls for re-
form (he identified the pope as Antichrist), Savona-
rola was excommunicated in 1497, and in 1498 was
hanged and burned, after conviction by secular and
ecclesiastical tribunals.

MODERN MILLENNIALISM: The metastatic

notion that Florence was chosen as the place where
God’s redemption of the world would commence, an
expectation that troubled the political waters of Italy

193:
in the late fifteenth century, gave place to the more
successful chiliastic expectations of the Puritans of
England, who for almost one hundred years from the
accession of Queen Elizabeth I in 1558 to the execu-
tion of Charles I in 1649 agitated first for reform and
ultimately for political dominance. In America, mil-
lennial chiliasts saw divine significance in the
American Revolution and the American Civil War,
out of which would be forged an America committed
to the redemption of the world. The epitome of these
hopes for America is condensed in Julia Ward
Howe’s ‘‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic,’’ pub-
lished in February, 1862. It is a poetic, though secu-
larized rendition of the millennial passages of the
Book of Revelation: the ‘‘glory of the coming of the
Lord;’’ the “‘trampling out the vintage where the
grapes of wrath are stored ”’ (which in the manuscript
version more closely approximates the scriptural lan-
guage, “*He is trampling out the wine press. . . .’’),
the personal testimony of the chiliast who attests that
she has *‘seen Him”’ in the bloody events of the
American Civil War and who announces that she can
‘‘read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel.”’
Here is a manifestation of the transformation of
Christ’s redemptive mission into the social activism
of the Anti-Slavery movement: ‘*With a glory in his
bosom that transfigures you and me: As he died to
make men holy, let us die to make men free. . . .””!3
Similarly, redemption in the mind of President
Woodrow Wilson was the democratic reform of the
world. ‘‘America,’’ Woodrow Wilson said, ‘‘had the
infinite privilege of fulfilling her destiny and saving
the world.’!4

194.
 UNIVERSAL HISTORY

When the Idealist Humanists of the eighteenth cen-

tury turned their secular energies to the subject of u-
niversal history, therefore, they did so with the
knowledge of more than two thousand years of
historical apocalypse. History was an ideal field for
speculation, because it gave them a grip not only on
the past which they could reconstitute however they
wanted, but also because speculation about history
gave them the future as an open field for Idealist
speculation about the god-man in history. Fnedrich
von Schiller (1759-1805), in his lectures at Jena in May
1789, ‘“The Nature and Value of Universal History,”’
outlined what ultimately became the speculative core
of Idealist Humanism’s view of history. History, he
argued, is a science, but only to the degree that the
philosophical understanding recreates the materials
of history and reconstitutes them into a scientific
whole which he called ‘‘universal history.’’ What
now is, is the result of all preceding events, each of
which constitutes a link in the chain of cause and
effect which makes up universal world history.
Obviously all! that was before is not known to us; so it
is necessary that the philosophical understanding
inject into the mass of available data ultimate
meaning and harmony, in other words, create
universal meaning ex nihilo. This act of historical
creation will, he said, ‘‘conceal the limits of birth and
death’’; that is, it will transcend our human
creaturely limitations, and thus, like an “‘optical
illusion’’ unfold our existence into infinity. !5
Unlike St. Augustine, for whom human progress is
measured by the criterion of Christ, the Lord of

195:
history, in the light of whom the rise and fall of
nations is superseded by the higher historical
progress of the two cities and the souls of their
inhabitants, Schiller raised the standard of the
‘‘philosophical’’ mind that rejects its creatureliness
and by that means is capable of a creation which
hitherto had defied human capacity. Historical
narrative is transposed into the ‘‘optical illusion”’ of
universal history. Anew modus of immortalization is
consciously created by which the act of
contemplative participation of homo philosophicus
of Classical philosophy ceases to exist and is
replaced by homo historicus, overarching the flux
of events in time by an illusion. Attempting to
stand above history, Schiller seeks to escape
the perishability of historical existence by seek-
ing to possess the immortality of divine reality.
Rather than let the experience of the divine shape
their humanity, Schiller developed the field of uni-
versal history for those, like himself, who wished
to be immortal like the gods. This solipsistic
Orientation is present also in Fichte, who creates in
his Vocation of Man a view of a future world,
resolved of its contradictions and alienation, in which
he has absolute certainty. Because he has resolved
that such will be the future of man, so it will be. He
writes, *‘But it is my will alone which is this source of
true life and of eternity:—only by recognizing this
will as the true seat of moral goodness, and by
actually raising it thereto, do I obtain the assur-
ance and the possession of that supersensual
world.’’ 16 Logically Fichte is persuaded of the
position he has taken because in his Idealist
Humanist’s view of man as divine, the power to

196.
change or overcome defective reality is within the
power of human action rightly willed. Moreover, this
future world was not in the distant future. Friedrich
Schelling (1775-1854) wrote in his lectures On
University Studies that ‘‘An epoch such as our own is
surely bound to give birth to anew world. Those who
do not actively contribute to its emergence will
inevitably be forgotten.”?!7 We see in Hegel too an
emphasis on the role of a divinized man in what he
called the reconciliation of the contradictions of
‘‘morality and objective nature,’’ and ‘‘moral-
ity and will.”? !8 Mankind would participate in this di-
vine self-development through the leadership of
those in whom spint is manifest, which for Hegel
was ‘‘the Teutonic world.’’!9 Unfortunately, if man
does not choose to be reconciled to God by the Teu-
tons, he has no choice: ‘‘the return of the Godhead
whence man is born, closes the circle of man’s devel-
opment.”’
Since World War II many scholars have attempted
to demonstrate how these ideas were fused into the
formidable forces of totalitarianism in the modern
world.2! The Providential views of history were re-
placed by those who focused on the willful asser-
tions of men disposed to believe that a world resolved
of contradictions could be brought into existence by
their own action. In place of manas actor before God,
the Idealist Humanists asserted that man was himself
divine, acting in the world as a manifestation of God.
The limitations of human nature and ethics which
hitherto were the framework within which traditional
politics was practiced were revalued in a view of his-
tory which can overcome these former realities.
Where justice and order had been prime political val-

197.
ues, NOW autonomy, personal emancipation and egal-
itarlan democracy prevailed. Statesmanship and
Statecraft gave place to the willful imposition of a
‘Final Solution” on a refractory reality by leaders
disposed to believe that their will was final.

198.
 SUGGESTED READINGS

For an analysis of the medieval and modern mil-

lennial movements two works are especially
valuable: Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millen-
nium, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper Torchbooks,
Academy Library, 1961); and Ernest Lee Tuveson,
Redeemer Nation. The Idea of America’s Millennial
Role (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).
The two following books are recommended for
analysis of the revolutionary impetus in modern
millennialism: Gerhart Niemeyer, Between Nothing-
ness and Paradise (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1971); and Eric Voegelin, From
Enlightenment to Revolution, John H. Hallowell, ed.
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1975).

£,
 NOTES

ICompare the passages from Isaiah with the fol-

lowing passage from Jeremiah 31:33-34: *‘But this
is the covenant which I will make with the house
of Israel after those days, says the Lord. I will place
my law within them, and write it upon their hearts;
I will be their God and they shall be my people. No
longer will they have need to teach their friends and
kinsmen how to know the Lord. All, from the least
to greatest, shall know me, says the Lord, for I will
forgive their evildoing and remember their sin no
more.’’ Fora commentary on the apocalyptic expec-
tations of the Israelite prophets Hosea and Jeremiah,
see Voegelin, /srael and Revelation, 455-458.
2P.G. Rogers, The Fifth Monarchy Men (London:
Oxford University Press, 1966), 41.
3The concept ‘‘metastasis’’ and its adjectival
derivative ‘‘metastatic’’ were coined by Enic
Voegelin to express the nature of the expectation of
a radical change in the constitution of being.
Voegelin writes, ‘‘The constitution of being is what it
is, and cannot be affected by human fancies. Hence,
the metastatic denial of the order of mundane exis-
tence is neither a true proposition in philosophy, nor
a program of action that could be executed. The will
to transform realityinto something which by essence
it is not is the rebellion against the nature of things
as ordained by God.’’ Eric Voegelin, Israel and
Revelation, 453.
4Norman Cohn, ‘Medieval Millenarism: Its
Bearing on the Comparative Study of Millenarian
Movements,”’ in Sylvia L. Thrupp, ed., Millennial
Dreams in Action (New York: Schocken Books,

200.
1970), 31.
SEnglish sources on Joachim of Flora include:
Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the
Later Middle Ages. A Study in Joachimism (Oxford:
At The Clarendon Press, 1969); Karl Loewith, Mean-
ing in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1949), 145-149; 208-213; Eric Voegelin, The New
Science of Politics. An Introduction (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1952), 110-117; Norman
Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, 99-103; Morton
Bloomfield, ‘‘Joachim of Flora: A Critical Survey,”’
XIII, Traditio (1957), 249-311. Bloomfield suggests
the influence of Joachim on Dante, Mussolini, Hit-
ler, Hegel, and Schelling. Loewith sees the pattern
of Joachim’s ideas in Lessing, Saint-Simon, Comte,
Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Nietzsche.
6Donald Weinstein, Savonarola and Florence.
Prophecy and Patriotism in the Renaissance (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 72.
7Ibid., 73.
8Ibid., 79.
Ibid., 142.
10Jbid., 143.
11 fbid.
I27bid., 145. A recent manifestation of Millenaria-
nism can be found in the Unification Church of the
Rev. Sun Myung Moon. “According to ‘Divine Prin-
ciple,’ Moon’s book of revelations, God intended
Adam and Eve to marry and have perfect children,
thereby establishing the Kingdom of Heaven on
Earth. .. .The time has now come for a Second Christ
who will finally fulfill God’s original plan.’’ Berkeley
Rice, ‘“‘The Pull of Sun Myung Moon,”’ The New
York Times Magazine (May 30, 1976), 19.

201.
 l3—Emest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation. The
Idea of America’s Millennial Role (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1968), 197-198.
147bid., 212.
ISThe text of Schiller here summarized, ‘‘Was
heisst und zu welchem Ende studiert man Univer-
salgeschichte,’’ is found in Friedrich Schiller, Saemt-
liche Werke, 5 vols. (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag,
1958), IV: 749-767. An English translation has been
published in History and Theory, No. 3, 1972, 11:
321-334.
l6Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Popular Works of
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, William Smith, trans., 4th
ed., 2 vols. (London: Trubner and Co., 1889), I:
448.
17Friedrich W.J. von Schelling, On University
Studies, E.S. Morgan trans., Norbert Guterman, ed.
(Athens: Ohio University Press, 1966), 7.
18G.w. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, J.B.
Baillie, trans., 2nd ed. rev. (London: George Allen
and Unwin, Ltd., 1955), 620.
19G.w. Hegel, Hegel’s Lectures on the History of
Philosophy, E.S. Haldane, trans., 3 vols. (New
York: Humanities Press, Inc., 1955), I:105.
20G.W. Hegel, On Christianity: Early Theological
Writings, T.M. Knox, trans. (New York: Harper
and Brothers, Harper Torchbooks, The Cloister
Library, 1961), 273.
21 William M. McGovern, From Luther to Hitler.
The History of Fascist-Nazi Political Philosophy
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1941); J.L. Talmon,
The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1970); J.L. Talmon, Political Mes-
sianism: the Romantic Phase (New York: Praeger,

202,
1961); Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitari-
anism (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., Meridian
Books, 1958); Elie Kedourie, Nationalism, 3rd ed.
(London: Hutchinson University Library, 1974);
Gerhart Niemeyer, Between Nothingness and Para-
dise (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University
Press, 1971).

203.
 PART FOUR:
BEYOND BEHAVIORISM
 CHAPTER XI
THE RECOVERY OF
CLASSICAL-CHRISTIAN
POLITICAL THEORY
POSITIVIST REJECTION OF
PRESCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE

Auguste Comte, the founder of modern

sociology, argued that history shows a progressive
development of man’s consciousness through three
phases: the theological, the metaphysical, and
finally, the positive. In the light of the latter he
deems the earlier phases inferior. The theological
Stage, which Comte described as the ‘‘fictitious
state,’ lincluded the intellectual product of the
entire ancient world. The second, metaphysical
stage, during which men viewed the world philo-
sophically, was itself the necessary stage in the de-
velopment of the positive (scientific) stage, in which
men perceive the universe as having only a natural,
not a supernatural origin. This particular “‘scientific”’
bias has the defect of assuming that all knowledge
which does not substantively or procedurally ap-
proximate the knowledge of the natural sciences is
irrational, or mere unverified information. In his in-
fluential book, The Political System, David Easton,
the contemporary American political behaviorist,
writes in a vein similar to Auguste Comte’s,
that causal theory ‘‘is an index of the stage of de-
velopment of any science, social or physical, to-
wards the attainment of reliable knowledge. 2

205.
By ‘“‘reliable knowledge’? Easton means em-
pirically verified predictions of events based
on causal hypotheses. ‘‘Causal theory’’ for
Easton is truly ‘‘scientific’’ because it emulates the
method of the natural sciences, studies only
empirical phenomena, aspires to prediction of
political behavior and emphasizes a_ personal
detachment of the scientist from his subject matter.
For ‘‘positive’3 theorists like Easton, the
understanding of order, of myth, and of political
philosophy is of historical, but not of scientific
interest. Ideas, they believe, have no universal or
ontological validity, only psychological value as the
personal opinions of those who hold them. Science
can only catalogue opinions and measure the
thought of those who hold them.
Because contemporary political science, viewed
in terms of sheer numbers of political scientists, is
positivist, a statement about the recovery of
Classical-Christian political theory must begin with
analysis of positivistic ‘‘behavioral theory.’’ We
place the term in quotations because ‘‘behavioral
theory’’ bears no likeness to Hellenic theory
(theoria), science (episteme), or philosophy
(philosophia), as those terms were used by
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle as synonyms to
express the symbolization of human experience of
reality as the mode of personal and _ social
existence-in-truth.4By way of contrasting modern
behavioral theory with Classical-Christian
political theory, we will discuss the thought of two
behavioral social scientists whose works are
representative of contemporary social science:
David Easton (b. 1917), past president of the

206.
American Political Science Association (1968-1969),
Professor of Political Science at the University of
Chicago, and author of the influential theoretical
trilogy The Political System (1953), A Framework
for Political Analysis (1965), and A Systems
Analysis of Political Life (1965); and B.F. Skinner
(b. 1904), Professor of Psychology at Harvard
University, author of the behaviorist novel, Walden
Two (1948), Science and Human Behavior (1953),
Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), About
Behaviorism (1974), and numerous other books and
articles.

ETHICAL NEUTRALITY

Skinner argues in Science and Human Behavior

that ‘‘ethics is usually concerned with justifying
controlling practices rather than with merely
describing them.’> As such, he reasons that
behaviorism as a ‘‘science’’ must avoid concerns
about absolute questions of good and bad and deal
instead with what is positively or negatively
reinforcing. He identifies his own work with the
‘modern view’’® which accepts that law is only a
function of epoch or culture and thus is not
informative about whether the law is morally right
or wrong. For that reason, Skinner can observe
that the power of a government to punish Is
equivalent to the techniques of control of the bully
or gangster. / Positive theory does not introduce
ethical judgments into analyses of human
perceptions of right and wrong because it supposes
human behavior, like animal behavior, is a function
of aversive and positive stimulation.8 Positive
theory does not say that human feelings should be
ignored, only that attitudes towards what is right or
wrong are only feelings, basically irrational
consequences of environmental conditioning.
David Easton, for example, deals with the
problem presented by the behavioral claim of
ethical neutrality by distinguishing between
‘‘causal’’ and ‘‘value’’ theory.!0 Though causal
analysis necessarily implies some valuation, that is,
some implicit distinctions pre-exist in the mind of
the behavioral theorist about the validity or value of
some phenomena over others, its commitment to
ethical neutrality necessitates the distinction be-
tween behaviorism and traditional philosophy of
politics, what Easton calls, ‘“‘value theory.’’ Any
cauSal theory of a political system must account for
political values or beliefs, but for Easton these are
only indices of psychological orientation and may
have social, but not real ontological validity. To
that extent, values insofar as they are acceptably
accounted for by positive theorists are understood
as psychologically grounded, or irrational beliefs.
Easton writes in The Political System:

. .although in practice no one proposition need ex-

press either a pure fact or a pure value, facts and
values are logically heterogeneous. The factual aspect
of a proposition refers to a part of reality; hence it can
be tested by reference to the facts. In this way we check
its truth. The moral aspect ofa proposition, however,
expresses only the emotional response of an individual
to a state of real or presumed facts. 11

Yet, though behaviorists can claim to be ethically

neutral because behavioral science is designed in

208.
such a manner as to avoid the intrusion of
personal emotions, one emotion which cannot be
extruded from behavioral analysis tends to dispute
their claim. Behaviorists value survival. To B.F.
Skinner, survival is an end in itself, and as such is
the ultimate value.!2Though this may be an ac-
ceptable ethical commitment for the behavioral
psychologist, it creates difficulties for the behavioral
political scientist. Easton’s own theoretical ap-
paratus emphasizes the importance of the process by
which regimes ‘‘persist’’ or survive.!3 Because he
claims as his province all political reality, including
such regimes as tyranny and totalitarianism, how-
ever, behaviorists of Easton’s stamp are criticized
for being amoral. The charge of amorality stems from
their application of persistence theories to tyrannical
and totalitarian systems. Why, their critics ask,
should they want to create a theoretical system
which, because it is ethically neutral, can be used to
preserve regimes of this type?14

ENVIRONMENTALISM

Behavioral Science assumes that behavior is a

function of the empirical environment, that a be-
havioral ‘“‘organism”’ or ‘“‘system’”’ is reducible ul-
timately to observable phenomena. Skinner adopts
this position in Opposition to the concept that be-
havior is representative of human intention, con-
sciousness, or what he calls the “*states of mind’’ of
‘‘autonomous men.’’!5For that reason, control of
behavior cannot be attained by altering a person’s
sense of ‘‘responsibility,’’ or other **states of mind.”’
Because behavior is a function of environmental in-

209.
fluences, he argues, the environment must be
changed. ‘‘A person does not act for the good of
others because of a feeling of belongingness or re-
fuse to act because of feelings of alienation. His be-
havior depends upon the control exerted by the so-
cial environment.’’!6 A goal of behaviorism, ac-
cording to Skinner, is to change our cultural orienta-
tion of referring to ‘‘autonomous man”’ as a causal
agent. The individual is not autonomous, thus
theories of human behavior must discount his
pseudo-autonomy. Nevertheless, we continue to ex-
plain seemingly unknown aspects of behavior to an
‘‘inner man.’’ To the criticism that Skinner wishes to
abolish man himself, he replies:

His abolition has long been overdue. Autonomous man

is a device used to explain what we cannot explain in
any other way. He has been construed from our ig-
norance, and as our understanding increases, the very
stuff of which he is composed vanishes. Science does
not dehumanize man, it de-homunculizes him, and it
must do so if it is to prevent the abolition of the hu-
man species. To man qua man we readily say good rid-
dance. Only by dispossessing him can we turn to the
real causes of human behavior. Only then can we turn
from the inferred to the observed, from the miraculous
to the natural, from the inaccessible to the manipu-
lable. 17

SYSTEMS THEORY

Easton has written that historicism has ‘‘managed

to crush the life out of value theory.’’!8 By this he
means that the historicists postulate that political
theory is relative to historical conditions, and that,
according to this approach, ‘‘there can be no uni-

210.
versal truths except perhaps the one truth that all
ideas are a product of a historical period and cannot
transcend it.’’19 This, he says, has reduced ‘‘value
theory”’ to a mere historical record. Easton implies
that his own ‘‘causal theory’’ manages to transcend
historicism because its claim to objective knowledge
is justified. Causal theory can escape the fate of value
theory, and validly claim the discovery of objective
knowledge because it approximates the validity of
the physical sciences. Just as physical science can ar-
rive at valid conclusions, so may behavioral causal
theory. Causal theory, he claims, is descriptive and is
based on ‘‘units of analysis that have the degree of
Stability and definiteness or lack of ambiguity in
their boundaries necessary for the kind of proposi-
tions expected of an exact science.’’20 Easton’s own
exposition of causal theory, however, is highly ab-
stract and often ambiguous. It seeks as its founda-
tion an equivalent to the concept of ‘‘mass’’ in
physics, and “‘particles of matter’’ in the physical
sciences.2! Thatequivalentconcept is the ‘‘system.”’
By analyzing the political community as a ‘‘system,”’
Easton believes he has overcome the relativism of
value theory. Easton’s basic concept, the ‘‘system,”’
however, is an abstraction of the broadest sort, in-
tended to be the basic building block of a ‘‘general
theory’’ of not merely political behavior, but system-
ic behavior in general. This abstract ideal is formu-
lated deductively, not inductively.

In its ideal and most powerful form, a general theory

achieves maximal value when it constitutes a deductive
system of thought so that from a limited number of
postulates, assumptions and axioms, a whole body of
empirically valid generalizations might be deduced in

24a).
 descending order of specificity.22

As its long range purpose, Easton’s systems

theory seeks to establish general conceptual cate-
gories within which present and future empirical re-
search can work and the differentiation of the ‘‘fun-
damental processes or activities without which no
political life in society could continue.’’23 Easton
coins the term ‘‘macroscopic’’24 to describe the
perspective by which he views the political sys-
tem.

Ecological
system
The The
political
Biological intra~
societal system
system
environment

Personality
systems
Information
feedback
Social
(ote waa ~
systems Demands rd =

Inputs
Authorities
International
total
The political
environment
systems Information
feedback

International
ecological
systems
extra-
societal
International environment
social
systems

Feedback loop

DIAGRAM | A DYNAMIC RESPONSE MODEL OF A

POLITICAL SYSTEM.2>

The above outline illustrates the total system as it

functions in a manner analogous to the operation of
a machine. A simpler model of the political system

a2
is given below.
Easton reflects that his own approach is based on
his “‘hope that, ultimately, some common variables
may be discovered, variables of a kind that will stand
at the core of a theory useful for the better under-
standing of human behavior in all fields.’’26 Easton
also hopes that ‘‘analogous if not homologous pro-
cesses”’ will be found which govern the behavior of
other systems, including biological, psychological,
and international systems.2/7 Is it ‘Shope’? which
motivates Easton and Skinner to construct a positive
theory on the ‘‘basic assumptions of scientific
method?’’28 [Is behavioral ‘tmethodology’’ truly
‘““scientific’’ when it applies the methods of the
natural sciences to a study of human political exis-
tence?

IS BEHAVIORISM SCIENTIFIC?

The political system, for Easton, is the process in

which ‘‘biological’’29 persons behave as members
of a common system. Like Skinner who consis-
tently refers to human beings as ‘‘organisms,’’39
Easton is interested in those mechanistic character-
istics of a ‘‘biological’’ person’s behavior ina system
based on mechanical analogies.
But the analogy is false. Floyd Matson has called
this common conception of man of behavioral sci-
ence the ‘‘broken image.’’3! By reducing man to a
biological organism, behavioral theory breaks the
‘‘image’’ of the whole man as a composite of ma-
terial and spiritual elements. If behavioral theory
leaves Out an entire aspect of human personality,
how can its descriptions of human political institu-

yies
tions be adequate? Perhaps most damaging to the be-
havioral position, however, is Matson’s observation
that behavioral theory is based on a model of science
which natural scientists do not accept.

\s
ew Wy,
« “On
a. Sng

Demands

aed #
2 The Decisions
&
=
poiticas
system ag
d actions fo}

Es \5
Winn _®
"1M RY
np es

DIAGRAM 2 A SIMPLIFIED MODEL OF A POLITICAL

SYSTEM.22

Physical phenomena are no longer analyzed along

classical Newtonian lines of causality, thus,

As the mechanistic viewpoint has been found to be

inadequate for the full comprehension of inorganic
matter and natural events, it is a fortiori inadequate
for the understanding of human nature and human
events; and. . .the assumption of objective predeter-
mination upon which all consistent causal analysis

214.
 (with its corollaries of exact prediction and control)
must finally depend is, in simple fact, without confirma-
tion in the new physics of possibility .33

Easton’s search for an equivalent in social science

for the concept ‘‘mass’’ in physics suggests a re-
sistance to the findings of nuclear physics that the
laws of causality do not apply to a whole range of
atomic and sub-atomic processes. The scientific
claims of behavioral social scientists, then, are based
more on models of seventeenth century science, than
On twentieth century ones.

BEHAVIORISM’S CLAIM TO OBJECTIVITY

An important element in the appeal of behavioral

theory is its claim to objectivity. It claims
definitive, accurate and objective knowledge on
the basis of the methods of the natural sciences, un-
fettered by concerns about good and evil. Objecti-
vily 1S guaranteed, it is believed, by the impersonal
character of the methods by which the behavioral
information is attained. For example, David Easton’s
model of the political system is characterized by
its abstract, almost aloof detachment from political
life as it is lived and perceived by historical, as op-
posed to hypothetical ‘‘biological’’ beings. The pro-
cesses which Easton identifies as basic to all political
systems are generalizations of political activity ab-
sent of all human consciousness, of intention. Simi-
larly, Skinner focuses upon the inadequacy of per-
sonal experience for dealing with the social problems
of the contemporary world and holds out the hope of
a behavioral science from which all personal, that is,

ZS,
nonscientific dependencies, have been extruded.34
Behavioral theory has popular appeal because it
presents its case in the technological idiom of the
modern world, a world which implicitly assumes that
all problems can be resolved by procedural, tech-
nical refinements, rather than substantive changes in
human character. Skinner offers us knowledge of the
‘‘laws of science,’’35 and suggests that we ignore
them at our own peril.

SCIENCE AND PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE:

MICHAEL POLANYI

The work of Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) is a

powerful antidote to the ‘‘scientific’’ rhetoric of be-
havioral theory. In a series of books commencing
with Science, Faith and Society (1946), and including
his Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical
Philosophy (1958), The Studyof Man (1959), Beyond
Nihilism (1960), The Tacit Dimension (1966), and in
numerous lectures and essays,36 Michael Polanyi
has attempted to formulate a view of science which
overcomes the conventional notion of science as
supremely objective, impersonal, and detached. The
purpose of his study Personal Knowledge is, he
writes, ““to re-equip men with the faculties which
centuries of critical thought have taught them to dis-
trust.’’37 The challenge Polanyi sets for himself then,
could be seen as a direct response to the explicit ad-
vice of Skinner, and the implicit intention of Easton,
that we should replace ‘‘traditional prescientific
views’’ with scientific ones.38

216.
 SCIENCE AND ART

Polanyi begins his argument with rejection of the

spurious ideal of scientific detachment.3? Scientific
reasoning is human reasoning and should never
claim absolute objectivity, absent of the scientist's
‘‘passionate impulse.’’40 Scientific discourse must
maintain its human perspective.

. .aS human beings, we must inevitably see the uni-

verse from a centre lying within ourselves and speak
about it in terms of a human language shaped by the
exigencies of human intercourse. Any attempt rigor-
ously to eliminate our human perspective from our
picture of the world must lead to absurdity.4!

The notion of political life in political community,

we may infer, is somehow lost in its translation into
reified, ‘“‘objective’’ language used by David Easton
which reduces all that is human to ‘‘processes”’ of
a “‘system’’ analogous to a ‘‘factory’’ or airport
‘‘traffic control center.’’42 The behaviorist’s pursuit
of objective knowledge, which in Easton’s approach
means the search for causal hypotheses of behavior
ultimately verifiable empirically, creates a disjunc-
tion between subjectivity and objectivity which
Polanyi rejects because it does not adequately reflect
the personal character of human knowledge. An ele-
ment of personal skill is involved in even the most
mechanistic of scientific measurements. As such,
scientific research can be viewed as an art which is
largely communicated by cultural traditions and at-
titudes. Though science as substantive knowledge
can be readily transmitted from one person to an-
other person, from one civilization to another, the

Dale
art of scientific research is less easily conveyed.

The regions of Europe in which the scientific method

first originated 400 years ago are scientifically still
more fruitful today, in spite of their impoverishment,
than several overseas areas where much money is a-
vailable for scientific research. Without the oppor-
tunity offered to young scientists to serve an appren-
ticeship in Europe, and without the migration of Euro-
pean scientists to the new countries, research centres
overseas could hardly ever have made much head-
way.43

The instruments of science, moreover, are exten-

sions of our persons; they are not external objects,
objective devices, the consequences of which are
equally objective. We ‘“‘pour ourselves out into’’ our
tools, he writes, ‘‘and assimilate them as parts of our
Own existence. We accept them existentially by
dwelling in them.’’44

AN ONTOLOGY OF KNOWING

We participate in that which we come to know.

What we discover, for example, is often the out-
growth of along period of incubation. Knowledge has
a latent characteristic by which we continue to en-
gage in the resolution of problems even though we
make no conscious effort to resolve them. An un-
finished task preoccupies us, and we exist in relation-
ship to the resolution of the problem, to the conclu-
sion of the task. We strive to express something
which will satisfy our craving for resolution or solu-
tion. Thus we progress in our knowledge by premoni-
tion, intimation, commitment, and trust in some-

218.
thing which is not a physical object, ‘‘an idea never
yet conceived,’’ which ‘‘emerges in response to our
search for something we believe to be there.’’ When
we have found it, it conveys to us the ‘‘conviction of
its being true. It arrives accredited in advance by the
heuristic cravings which evoked it.’’45 ‘‘The effort
of knowing,’’ Polanyi writes, ‘‘is thus guided by a
sense of obligation towards the truth: by an effort to
submit to reality.’’46 It seems an obvious statement
that we ‘‘submit to reality,’ but in the climate of
contemporary politics, the more successful enter-
prises of which seem to owe their success to irra-
tional evasion of personal reality, the observation of
Polanyi must be given prominent place. A scientific
enterprise is necessarily a dialogue between reality
and a psyche which at the same time participates in
reality. Because whatever aspects of reality we dis-
cover are necessarily the declaration of a personal
discovery, our search, our valuations, and discover-
ies will contain some emotional content. But this is
a necessary part of the scientific method, not the un-
wanted accretion of unprofessional dabblers. Our
differentiation of phenomena according to the more
or less important depends on what Polanyi calls an
intellectual passion or emotion, ‘‘on a sense ofintel-
lectual beauty; that it is an emotional response which
can never be dispassionately defined, any more than
we can dispassionately define the beauty of awork of
art or the excellence ofa noble action.’’47 The author
or founder ofscience as **a heuristic Communion with
reality. . ..°48 was St. Augustine, Polanyi writes.
‘‘He taught that all knowledge was a gift of grace,
for which we must strive under the guidance of ante-
cedent belief: nisi credideritis, non intelligitis.’°49

249;
The discovery of truth or reality is based upon faith,
not doubt. Modern philosophical method, however,
beginning with Descartes and including behaviorism
as its most recent manifestation, has emphasized
doubt and distrust of the personal act by which know-
ledge is affirmed.

PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE
AND CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY

The alternatives developed by Polanyi recall the

ontologically oriented methods of Classical-Chris-
tian political theory in which the philosopher was not
everyman, but the lover of truth whose soul was
structured by the experience of reality manifest to the
divine. His cognitive faculties were perceived as par-
ticipating in the full compass of reality. Not cut off
from transcendent being, but sharing or participating
in the divine, the lover of truth came to a fuller ap-
preciation of his nature as man. Existence and know-
ledge were intwined in a personal process of aware-
ness of the depth of the soul and its place in being.
Knowing and being were in communion at the site of
personal consciousness of the tensions of human
place and commitment. The philosophic symbols
which the philosophers created to express this per-
spective were expressive of personal experience ofa
common reality which could be transmitted to a-
nother person, trusting in the universality of that ex-
perience and the capacity of the other person’s par-
ticipation in a common reality. The appeal of phil-
osophy was necessarily an appeal to a common hu-
manity, not to an abstract ahistorical method manip-
ulable by men committed to autonomous, ‘‘objec-

220.
tive’’ truth. Were truth autonomous of human ex-
perience then it would lose its luminosity to being and
become a method open only to its own processes.
Whereas Classical-Christian political theory ex-
plored the dimensions of ontologically oriented hu-
man consciousness, modern political theory went the
way of autonomous method. In contemporary poli-
tical theory this latter movement leads to behavioral
theory. The former, Classical-Christian approach,
leads to philosophical anthropology.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

OF ERIC VOEGELIN

The political theory of Eric Voegelin (b. 1901) is

called a “‘philosophical anthropology’’ because it is
based on analysis of the experience of the ‘‘open
soul.’’ The term ‘‘open soul’’ was coined by Henri
Bergson whose Two Sources of Morality and
Religion is an examination of the soul which is
‘‘open,’’ not self-centered, transparent to the divine
in its unwilled erotic movement away from self-
love. Men who drew the multitude of mankind after
them by their pursuasive examples (one thinks of
Moses, the Prophets, Socrates, Jesus of Nazareth)
are representative. Voegelin’s philosophical anthro-
plogy, then, is an examination ofthe historical event
of the opening of the soul in representative men and
the consequences of that movement for our under-
standing of the order of history as it is revealed in the
history of order. By “history of order’? Voegelin
means the symbolizations of order which can be
found in the historical record of human society.
Voegelin’s examination ofthe history of order in his

O21.
multi-volume work, Order and History, shows that
man’s consciousness oforder is not static, but moves
toward differentiated insight. As a result, Voegelin’s
philosophical anthropology at its core is not ex-
clusively a political theory, but a philosophy of his-
tory, ‘‘history understood as the symbolic form by
which man is conscious of the movement of reality in
the direction of emerging truth.”’

PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Voegelin’s concept of history has changed over

the years. In The New Science of Politics (1952),
written as the sum of his research preliminary to
embarking on his Order and History, he anticipated
that the history of order was manifest in three
‘*types of truth’’: cosmological, anthropological, and
soteriological.59 The first type, ‘‘cosmological
truth,’’ is manifest in the historical record of ancient
Near Eastern civilizations whose basic conceptual
form was the ‘‘cosmological myth.’’ The ‘‘cosmo-
logical myths’’ expressed a concept of political order
as a small cosmos or “‘microcosmos’’ formed by the
presence of intracosmic gods in every facet oflife of
ancient man. ‘Anthropological truth’’ represents
the progress from the compact cosmological form of
symbolization into the differentiated concept of
representative men attuned to transcendent divine
reality. The symbol of order as *‘macroanthropos,”’
the concept of order as man writ large of the Greek
philosophers, however, emphasized the psyche of
man as the actor in the drama of man’s participa-
tion of being. ‘*Soteriological truth’’ of the Christian
epoch represented a further differentiation.

222.
 The impossibility of philia between God and man may
be considered typical for the whole range of anthropo-
logical truth. The experiences that were explicated into
a theory of man by the mystic philosophers had in
common the accent on the human side of the orienta-
tion of the soul toward divinity. The soul orients itself
toward a God who rests in his immovable transcen-
dence; it reaches out toward divine reality, but it does
not meet an answering movement from beyond. The
Christian bending of God in grace toward the soul does
not come within the range of these experiences. .. .The
experience of mutuality in the relation with God, ofthe
amicitia in the Thomistic sense, of the grace which im-
poses a Supernatural form on the nature of man, is the
specific difference of Christian truth.5!

This early formulation implied a view of history as a

linear progress towards the fully differentiated con-
sciousness of Christianity, and Voegelin argued that
the cosmological mode knew only a cyclic concept
of history.
In volume one of Order and History, Voegelin de-
veloped the concept of the ‘cosmological myth’’ by
an examination of the myths of the ancient Near
East and attempted to explain Israel’s view of his-
tory, which had broken with thecyclical view of order
of the cosmological myth. Volumes two and three
dealt with the origins of philosophy in Hellas as a
leap into an order of consciousness formed by the
mystic philosophers. Volume four was to have been
titled ‘“‘Empire and Chrisianity,’’ and to have dealt
with the merger of historical consciousness of Israel
and anthropological truth of Hellas in Christian so-
teriological truth. Volumes five and six, ‘“The Protes-
tant Centuries’’ and *‘The Crisis of Western Civiliza-
tion’’ respectively, were to deal with the break with

223.
the Classical-Christian concepts of order in the
modern epoch, and the ensuing crisis. When he fi-
nally published volume four in 1974, however,
Voegelin revealed that he had changed his mind. He
came to realize that the concept ‘‘cosmological
myth’’ was too narrow to encompass the varieties
of myth he had uncovered: the myths of a different
structure and a less compact mode, in the ancient
Near East and also the cosmogonic myth of Genesis
and of Plato’s Timaeus. Hence, though in its broad
outlines the concept of ‘‘cosmological myth’’ was
still valid, he was now forced to restructure his study
of order and history to the extent that his theoretical
formulation had ignored the consciousness of his-
tory within the *‘cosmological’’ myth. Voegelin com-
menced Order and History with the view that his
study would reveal a concept of linear history made
conscious by the revelatory events of Israel and the
Gospels. But, he writes, ‘‘This conventional belief
had to be abandoned when I discovered the unilinear
construction of history, from a divine-cosmic origin
of order to the author’s present, to be a symbolic
form developed by the end of the third millennium
B.C. in the empires of the Ancient Near East.’’52
Nevertheless, Voegelin did not repudiate the in-
sight that anthropological and soteriological truth
were differentiations of compact truth. He retained
his concept that history is a process of differentiated
consciousness and reaffirmed that a study of order
and history needs to consider the problem of de-
formed modes of experience.

““NOETIC”’ AND ‘‘PNEUMATIC’’ THEOPH-

ANY: In the ‘‘Preface’’ to the first volume of Order

224.
and History, Voegelin writes that ‘‘The order of his-
tory emerges from the history of order.’’53 The con-
cept of history contained in this sentence informs his
philosophical anthropology with its chief focus, his
choice of materials, and controls the development of
his multi-volume study. What ‘‘history’’ is cannot
be answered without reference to Voegelin’s dif-
ferentiation of types of consciousness in which his-
tory becomes known.The consciousness of the open
soul is structured by noetic and pneumatic theopha-
nies, experiences of divine reality, which ‘‘do not oc-
cur in history; the constitute history together with its
meaning.’’54 To understand the meaning of history,
One must know the “‘history of theophany.’’55 Voe-
gelin’s discussion of ‘‘noetic’’ theopany in Order and
History explores the development of the symbols of
philosophic consciousness in Hellas. The discovery
of the order of the soul in openness to transcendent
divine reality by the Greek philosophers is simul-
taneously the discovery of the soul’s movement
towards’ differentiated noetic consciousness.
Reality, as the philosophers became conscious of it,
therefore, ‘‘is not a static order of things given to a
human observer once for all; it is moving, indeed, in
the direction of emergent truth.’’56 The ‘‘truth’’ of
the philosophers is not a fixed piece of information,
‘but the event in which the process of reality be-
comes luminous to itself.’’57 This ‘‘event’’ is histor-
ical in the sense that consciousness of history is a
process shaped by theophanies. History ‘is the In-
Between where man responds to the divine presence
and divine presence evokes the response of man’’>8
The noetic and pneumatic opening of the soul re-
veals the divine reality from the direction ofthe **Be-

ype
ginning’’ and from the ‘“‘Beyond.”’ The ‘*Beyond”’
refers to Plato’s symbol of experience of the tran-
scendent Good beyond existence and essence, which
moves the soul away from the world of shadows and
ignorance. The experience of divine reality in the
‘*Beginning’’ is symbolized in the language of cos-
mogonies which extend in their historical range from
the cosmogonic myths of Egypt and Mesopotamia, to
the account of creation in Genesis and the formula-
tion of the Gospel of John that *‘In the beginning was
the Word.’’ The ‘‘Beyond”’ is a symbol which articu-
lates the experience of divine reality beyond the
world of immanent existence. Thus, in the Christian
experience of the Gospel of John, the ‘‘Word’’ of the
‘*Beginning”’ is identified with the Word of Christ
who manifests the movement of the word from the
Beyond.59 In this manner, Voegelin identifies the
equivalence of the reality experienced in philosophy
with the reality experienced in the Gospels and does
not accept the conventional opposition between
reason and revelation. Analyzed on the level of ex-
perience, noetic theophany articulates an aspect of
the same divine reality expressed in the pneumatic
symbols of Moses, the Prophets, and the Gospels.60
Accordingly, Voegelin emphasizes the compati-
bility of historical consciousness in the noetic the-
ophany of Plato with the pneumatic theophany of St.
Paul. In the Christian epoch pneumatic theophany is
marked by a further differentiation of the directional
movement of history in the eschatological view of the
immortality of man. ‘‘Faith in Christ means respon-
Sive participation in the same divine pneuma that was
active in the Jesus who appeared in the vision [of
St. Paul] as the Resurrected.’’61

226.
 ‘‘LEAP-IN-BEING:’’ Bergson observed that the
passage from the closed to the open soul is not an ad-
vance of degrees, but a ‘‘sudden leap’’ into a dif-
ferent order of consciousness.62 In Order and His-
tory, Voegelin has called this phenomenon the “‘leap-
in-being:”’ those historical moments when a new
truth about God and, in consequence, a fuller under-
standing of man and history is discovered. When a
*‘leap-in-being”’ occurs,
Not only will the unseemly symbols be rejected, but
man will turn away from the world and society as the
source of misleading analogy. He willexperience aturn-
ing around, the Platonic periagoge, aninversion orcon-
version toward the true source of order. And this
turning around, this conversion, results in more than an
increase in knowledge concerning the order of being; it
is a change in the order itself. For the participation in
being changes its structure when it becomes em-
phatically a partnership with God, while the partici-
pation in mundane being recedes to second rank. The
more perfect attunement to being through conversion
is not an increase on the same scale but a qualitative
leap. And when this conversion befalls a society, the
converted community will experience itself as qualita-
tively different from all other societies that have not
taken the leap.63
Such a qualitative spiritual irruption occurred when
Israel discovered itself as a community of chosen
people of God, living in the historical present under
God. The Israelites were conscious of themselves
as having been taken up from among the other cul-
tures whose symbols were expressive of a compact
consciousness of participation in being, and made
God’s special people. In this sense, they constituted
a theopolity, or city of God, whose historical tradi-

La
tions began with a revelation of a transcendent God
whose love for Israel as a people is visible in the his-
tory of Israel. The historical consciousness of Israel
did not remain static, but became a stratum of his-
torical consciousness which lay in the background of
further development. In the Christian epoch,

When the distinctions are more fully developed, as they

were by St. Augustine, the history of Israel will then
become a phase in the historia sacra, in church history,
as distinguished from the profane history in which
empires rise and fall. Hence, the emphatic partnership
with God removes a society from the rank of profane
existence and constitutes it as the representative of the
civitas Dei in historical existence .64

Voegelin calls this process of movement, from com-

pact to generalized insight, the process of ‘‘differ-
entiation.”
Voegelin’s philosophy of history distinguishes
between incomplete and complete breakthroughs or
leaps-in-being. In Israel and Hellas, the breaks
from the cosmological form were radical and com-
plete, developing in their wake ‘‘pneumatic’’ and
‘*noetic’’ symbols respectively, which express the
character of the theophanies which constituted the
‘‘leap.’’ Other societies such as China reveal only a
partial or ‘‘tentative’’ breakthrough.65 The concept
of society as ‘*macroanthropos’”’ occurs in China by a
‘‘leap-in-being”’ of the Confucian and Taoist sages, he
writes, but the leap ‘‘was not radical enough to break
the cosmological order completely.’’66 Voegelin’s
philosophical anthropology goes beyond the tradi-
tional limits of political theory, therefore, because
political science itself is the outgrowth of a radical

228.
‘‘leap-in-being,’’ not a tentative one.

DEFORMATION OF THE OPEN SOUL: The

history of order does not reveal an unremitting up-
ward movement towards greater consciousness of
being. The experience of the open soul is some-
times deformed. The general term which Voegelin
gives to the eclipse of experiential symbols is ‘‘de-
railment.’’ Derailment can occur to any symbolism,
in any experiential mode. The cosmological symbol
of political rule over the ‘‘four quarters of the
world,’’ analogous to the North-South axis of the
cosmos, can become a program for imperial expan-
sion. The Christian differentiation of a ‘‘universal
mankind under God’’ can be hypostatized into a
quest for world empire. Voegelin writes that ‘‘The
possibility of making immanentist nonsense of sym-
bols which express the experience of divine presence
in the order of man’s existence in society and his-
tory is always present.’’67 Derailment can take
several forms. In the period of transition of Classical
philosophy to the speculation of the Stoics, philos-
ophy was deformed into ‘‘doctrine.’’ The hiero-
phanous symbols which Plato and Anistotle created
to articulate their experience of reality evoked ori-
ginal experience of the sacred. But once philosophy
ceases to be a medium of experience, Voegelin
writes, “‘A new intellectual game with imaginary
realities in an imaginary realm of thought, the game
of propositional metaphysics, has been opened with
world-historic consequences that reach into our own
present.’’68 The Stoic dogmatization of philosophy,
though destructive in its ultimate consequences, had
the immediate effect of preserving the insight of Clas-

229:
sical philosophy against the inevitable defect that
philosophy requires ‘‘philosophers”’ if it is to be pre-
served. In the absence of persons of the rank of Soc-
rates, Plato, and Aristotle to continue the search for
truth, and of circumstances conducive to the
contemplative life, the dogmatization of philosophy
at least preserved the symbols of philosophy. But
the ravages of dogmatism can be contained only so
long before they take pernicious forms. For
Voegelin, the concept ‘‘ideology’’ represents the
final turn in the decline of philosophy when the sym-
bols no longer articulate original experience of the-
ophany, but become the means by which theophany
is eradicated from public and personal conscious-
ness. Because the creation of ideologies historically
occurs later, their construction includes a large ar-
senal of deformed symbols. For the symbol of the
open soul, there is the symbol of the soul closed to
divine reality. Voegelin calls this phenomenon ‘‘ego-
phany,”’ the creation of a system symbolic of the will
of the system builder to explain reality as a function
of his own will. History, the experience of movement
of the soul towards the divine, becomes in the work
of modern ‘“‘philosophes of history’’ the egophanous
assertion that history culminates in one’s own
thought. The Christian mystery of the Second Com-
ing is deformed into egophanous certainty of a sec-
ular faith in the this-worldly success of the ideolo-
gist’s own project for reconstituting reality. The
political ideologies of the modern era are formidable
not the least because they are deformations of on-
tologically oriented philosophic symbols of order. In
this context, the attempt at recovering Classical-
Christian political theory is a necessary first step in

230.
the recovery of personal and social order in the
modern world.

pisy'e
 SUGGESTED READINGS

Crick, Bernard. The American Science of Politics.

Its Origins and Conditions. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1959.
Germino, Dante. Beyond Ideology. The Revival of
Political Theory. New York: Harper and Row,
Publishers, 1967.
Matson, Floyd. The Broken Image. Man, Science
and Society. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books,
Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1966.
Polanyi, Michael. Personal Knowledge. Towards a
Post-Critical Philosophy. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1958.
Voegelin Eric. Order and History, 4 vols. Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1956-74.

m2.
 NOTES

1 Auguste Comte, ‘‘Plan of the Scientific Opera-

tions Necessary for Reorganizing Society,’ Auguste
Comte and Positivism. The Essential Writings,
Gertrud Lenzer, ed. (New York: Harper & Row,
Publisher, Harper Torchbooks, 1975), 29.
2David Easton, The Political System: An Inquiry
into the State of Political Science, 2nd ed. (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 53.
3We use the terms ‘‘positive’’ and ‘‘positivist’”’ to
express the roots of contemporary behaviorism in
the attempt of Auguste Comte to make the social sci-
ences ‘“‘scientific.””
4Political philosophy was the necessary outcome
of the philosophic critique of the public myths, be-
Cause ritual participation in the order they symbol-
ized could not be recreated among men who had re-
jected the myths. Thus the philosophers hoped that
thought or reason, as opposed to mythic speculation,
could be fashioned into a cultural mode which would
fulfill the public needs of a culture now stripped of
its symbols of order. In this context, political phil-
osophy was understood to be a new mode of exis-
tence-in-truth, performing the role of statesman for a
society that had dried up spintually. See Plato, Ger-
gias, for an analysis of the political role of philos-
ophy. For a valuable commentary on this aspect of
the Gorgias, see James L. Wiser, ‘‘Philosophy as
Political Action: A Reading of the Gorgias.’’ Ameri-
can Journal of Political Science, X1X, 2 (May, 1975),
313-321.
SB.F. Skinner, Science and Human Behavior
(New York: Free Press, 1965), 328.

233%
 6Ibid., 341.
7*‘We have no reason to be disturbed by the fact
that the basic practice through which an efficient ©
government ‘keeps the peace’ is exemplified under
far less admirable circumstances in the use which
the bully or gangster makes of his power to punish.
It is not the technique of control but the ultimate
effect upon the group which leads us to approve or
disapprove of any practice.” ’Ibid., 350.
‘*’ | .one may avoid the aversive stimulation
generated by ‘not doing one’s duty’ by simply
doing one’s duty. No moral or ethical problem is
necessarily involved: a draft horse is kept moving
according to the same formula.”’ [bid., 190.
9B.F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity
(New York: Bantam Books, Inc, 1972), 97.
10Kaston, The Political System., 52-53.
I fbid., 221.
12**Our culture has produced the science and
technology it needs to save itself. It has the wealth
needed for effective action. It has, to a considerable
extent, a concern for its own future. But if it con-
tinues to take freedom or dignity, rather than its own
survival, as its principal value, then it is possible that
some other culture will make a greater contribution
to the future.’’ Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dig-
nity, 173. Also, ‘‘The technology of behavior which
emerges is ethically neutral, but when applied to the
design of a culture, the survival of the culture func-
tions as a value.’’ Ibid., 174.
I3David Easton, A Framework for Political
Analysis (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,
Inc., 1965), 88. For example, in A Systems Analysis
of Political Life (New York: John Wiley & Sons,

234.
Inc., 1967), 25, Easton says that ‘‘. . .the special ob-
jective and merit of a systems analysis of political
life is that it permits us to interpret the behavior of
the members in a system in the light of the conse-
quences it has for alleviating or aggravating stress
upon the essential variables.’ And on p. 28 of the
same work, he writes: ‘‘. . .there is a feedback loop
the identification of which will help us to explain the
processes through which the authorities may cope
with stress.”’
14 close examination of this problem in Easton’s
thought m2y be found in Eugene F. Miller, ‘‘ David
Easton’s Political Theory,’ Political Science Re-
viewer, | (Fall, 1971), 215-217. David Easton replies
to this criticism by arguing that his use of the concept
‘persistence’ is heuristic, to identify ‘‘a central
problem for theory development’’ and not as “‘the ex-
pression of a preference or the description of a sys-
tem goal.’’ David Easton, *‘Systems Analysis and its
Classical Critics,’ Political Science Reviewer, III
(Fall, 1973), 282.
15Skinner’s adoption of the concept ‘‘autonomous
man’’ to identify the Classical definition of man as a
free personal agent confuses the issue. In the Classi-
cal-Christian sense, man is not autonomous, but de-
pendent by nature on the divine in which he partici-
pates, but does not possess. Man is mortal yet con-
scious of his immortality. This view of man has been
successfully contrasted with the modern notion of
man as autonomous, responsible for his own creation
and nature. See Gerhart Niemeyer, “*The *Autono-
mous’ Man,”’ Intercollegiate Review, IX, No. 3
(Summer, 1974), 131-137.
16Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, 105.

Zan
 I7fbid., 191.
I8Easton, The Political System, 235.
19 Tbid.
20Faston, A Systems Analysis of Political Life, 11.
2lEaston, A Framework for Political Analysis, 34;
13. To my knowledge, nowhere does Easton question
whether politicl community is analogous to ‘‘mass’”’
in physics. This seems, for behaviorists, to be a for-
bidden question. For the significance of forbidden
questions, see Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics and
Gnosticism (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., Gateway
Edition, 1968), 22-34.
22Easton, A Systems Analysis of Political Life, 9.
23 [bid., 13.
24Easton, A Framework for Political Analysis,
111.
25Easton, AS ystems Analysis of Political Life, 30.
26Easton, A Framework for Political Analysis, 16.
27Ibid., 16.
28Ibid., 18.
29Ibid., 42, 43, 47.
30Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, 22, 27;
Skinner, Science and Human Behavior, 35, 100, 163,
248.
31Floyd W. Matson, The Broken Image. Man,
Science and Society (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor
Books, Doubleday & Co., Inc. 1966).
32Easton, A Systems Analysis of Political Life, 32.
33Matson, The Broken Image, 139. For an ex-
amination of these modern developments see Max
Planck, ‘‘The Concept of Causality in Physics,”’ in
Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers, Frank
Gaynor, trans. (New York: Greenwood Press, Pub-
lishers, 1968), 121-150; Sir James Jeans, Physics and

236.
Philosophy (Cambridge: University Press, 1948).
‘It is not enough to ‘use technology with a
deeper understanding of human issues,’ . . . .These
[expressions] have been available for centuries, and
all we have to show for them is the state of the world
today. What we need is a technology of behavior.”’
Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, 2-3.
35 Ibid., 180.
36Two collections of his essays and lectures are
Michael Polanyi, Knowing and Being, Marjorie
Grene, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1969); Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch, Meaning
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975). A bib-
ligraphy of Polanyi’s social writings is available in
Intellect and Hope. Essays in the Thought of Michael
Polanyi, Thomas A. Langford and William H. Po-
teat, eds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1968),
432-446.
37Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge. Towards
a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1958), 381. An examination of the
political implications of the thought of Michael
Polanyi is made by James L. Wiser’s ‘‘Political
Theory, Personal Knowledge, and Public Truth,”’
Journal of Politics, Vol. 36 (1974), 661-674; and
idem, **Michael Polanyi: Personal Knowledge and
the Promise of Autonomy,”’ Political Theory (Feb-
ruary, 1974), 77-87.
38Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, 22.
39Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, Vii.
40 [bid., 256.
41Thid., 3.
42Easton, A Systems Analysis of Political Life,
72; 66.

237,
 43Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 53.
44Tbid., 59.
45 Ibid., 130.
46Ibid., 63.
47 Ibid., 135.
48 Ibid., 396.
49 Ibid., 266.
SOEric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics. An
Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1952), 76-77. Valuable commentaries on the thought
of Eric Voegelin include: John W. Corrington, J.M.
Porter, William C. Harvard, James L. Wiser, “‘A
Symposium on Eric Voegelin,’’ Denver Quarterly,
Vol 10, No. 3 (Autumn, 1975), 93-138; Gerhart Nie-
meyer, ‘‘Eric Voegelin’s Philosopy and the Drama of
Mankind,’’ Modern Age, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Winter,
1976), 28-39; Ellis Sandoz, ‘‘The Foundations of
Voegelin’s Political Theory,’ Political Science
Reviewer, | (Fall, 1971), 30-73.
51 Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, 71-78.
S2Eric Voegelin, Order and History, Vol. 1V, The
Ecumenic Age (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Uni-
versity Press, 1974), 7.
53Eric Voegelin, Order and History, Vol. I, Israel
and Revelation (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Uni-
versity Press, 1956), ix.
54Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 252.
SS Ibid.
56 [bid., 217.
57Tbid., 186.
8Ibid., 242.
S9Ibid., 16.
60This aspect of Voegelin’s thought should be con-
trasted with the political theory of Leo Strauss.

238.
‘Strauss found that the harmony of reason and
revelation was Maimonides’ and Farabi’s public
teaching while the private teaching was that there is a
radical and irreducible tension between them; he
found that the teachings of reason are wholly dif-
ferent from and incompatible with those of revela-
tion and that neither side could completely refute
the claims of the other but that a choice had to be
made. This is, according to these teachers, the most
important issue facing man.’’ Allan Bloom, ‘*Leo
Strauss,”’ Political Theory, Il, No. 4 (November,
1974), 381. Emma Brossard has pointed out that
Strauss wrote that God ‘‘is genuinely known through
present experience which every human can have if he
does not refuse himselfto it.”” Emma Brossard, **Leo
Strauss: Philosopher and Teacher, Par Excellance,”’
Academic Reviewer (Fall-Winter, 1974), 2.
61 Voegelin, The Ecumenic age, 242.
62 Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality
and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudes-
ley Brereton, 1935 reprint (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday and Co., Anchor Books, n.d.), 73.
63Voegelin, Israel and Revelation, 10.
64Ibid.
65Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 285.
66/bid., 299.
67Ibid., 148.
68 /bid., 43.

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