The Abandonment of Truth and the Fall of Civilization

Exactly when Medieval times or the Middle Ages ended and the Modern Age began has long been a subject of discussion and debate.   It will continue to be so, since the transition was not instantaneous but took place over an extended period that included any number of events which, depending the criteria being taken into consideration, could be identified as the turning point.   The question must, therefore, remain open, and for several decades now has taken the backseat to the questions of whether the Modern Age has ended, if so when, and what comes next.      Despite the temptation created by so many of the events of the current year having been presented to us in an apocalyptic framework, it is not my intention to address the latter set of questions here, other than to refer my readers to the interesting and persuasive discussion of such matters by the late John Lukacs in The Passing of the Modern Age (1970), The End of the Twentieth Century and the End of the Modern Age (1993), and At The End of an Age (2002).    It is the transformation of Christendom into Western Civilization, a matter that touches on the questions pertaining to both the beginning and the end of the Modern Age that I shall be talking about here.    Or, to be more precise, I shall be discussing one aspect of that transformation.

 

Was the transformation of Christendom into Western Civilization the start of the Modern Age (one of the possible answers to the first question), the end of the Modern Age in both the sense of the purpose towards which that Age was directed and moving and in the sense that when it was accomplished the Age came to an end (if so this touches on the answer to all of the questions pertaining to the end of the Age), or was it simply one and the same with the Modern Age?

 

Christendom is a word that can be used in a narrower or a wider sense.   Let us take it here in its fullest sense of civilization that takes the Christian faith as its foundation and organizational principle.   It is essentially the generic version of what American Russian Orthodox hieromonk, Fr. Seraphim Rose, described in its Eastern Orthodox form when he wrote “that the principal form government took in union with Christian Truth was the Orthodox Christian Empire, wherein sovereignty was vested in a Monarch, and authority proceeded from him downwards through a hierarchical social structure” (Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age, 1994, 2018, p. 28).    Obviously, by the end of the Second World War, one of the time-markers for possible ends of the Modern Age, this had been replaced by liberal, secular, democratic, Western Civilization, in all but the most outward, nominal, sense.   At the deepest level, of course, the transformation had been accomplished much earlier than this.

 

What this suggests, of course, is that, paradoxically, all three options in the complex question in our second paragraph can be answered in the affirmative.

 

While the question of when exactly the transformation of Christendom into Western Civilization began must remain open, like the related question of when the transition into the Modern Age began, it is certain that the radical epistemic revolution belongs to the earliest stages of the transformation.   By radical epistemic revolution, I mean the fundamental shift in how we conceive of what we know and how we know it that involved a repudiation of both tradition and divine revelation as evidentiary paths to knowledge and which introduced so drastic a change in the meaning of both reason and science as to constitute a break from what these things had been since classical antiquity.     The consequence of this revolution for Christian Truth was that it was removed from the realm of knowledge and reassigned to the realm of a “faith” which had itself been radically redefined so as to bear no resemblance to St. Paul’s “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1) but to be almost the very opposite of this.   Clearly this was a most significant event in the breaking of the union between civilization and Christian Truth.

 

In my last essay, in which I talked about the increasing confusion with regards to basic logical concepts that has occurred in a period that has also seen dogmatic authority increasingly assigned to “science” despite this contradicting the non-authoritarian nature of science in both pre-Modern and Modern meanings, I mentioned the paradox of the fact that the removal of tradition and divine revelation from the realm of evidence which thus emptied that realm of all but the kind of evidence which historians and courts rely upon and the kind which scientists rely upon should have tipped the balance in favour of reason in the ancient debate about the priority of reason versus evidence but has seemingly had the opposite effect of elevating one particular form of evidence over reason and the other remaining form of evidence.   It also needs to be observed, with regards to the dogmatic, authoritative, voice now ascribed to “science”, that in the most obvious cases of this, actual empirical evidence has itself been trumped by something else.   In the anthropogenic global warming/climate change “crisis” of recent decades and the Wuhan bat flu “crisis” of this year, in both of which we have been told that we must accept a drastic reduction in human freedom and submit to totalitarian measures and group-think in order to avert a catastrophe, dissenters have been told to “shut up and listen to the science”, but the “science” in question has largely consisted of computer model projections, which have been granted a bizarre precedence not only over reason, such as the questioning which provokes the “shut up and listen to the science” response, and non-empirical evidence, such as the historical record on the world’s ever-changing climate which directly contradicts the entire alarmist narrative on this subject, but even empirical evidence as this has until recently been understood, observations and measurements made in either the real world or the laboratory.   Since plenty of this sort of empirical evidence joins non-empirical evidence in supporting reason against these narratives, we are in effect being told that we must set both reason and evidence aside and mindlessly obey orders backed only by the fictional speculations of an artificial “intelligence”.   Anyone still open to the evidence of tradition and divine revelation, will find in Scriptural descriptions of the effects of idolatry upon the minds of those who practice it, an ample explanation of this phenomenon.

 

That tradition and divine revelation became vulnerable to being forced out of the realm of evidence can in part by attributed to their having been set against each other in the period that produced the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.   Both sides share the blame here.   The papacy and its adherents at their worst placed such an emphasis on tradition that they sometimes gave the impression that they had elevated it over divine revelation and thus were inviting a response similar to that given to the scribes and Pharisees by the Lord in Matthew 15:1-2, emphasis on verses three and six, whereas the more radical elements of the Protestant Reformation went so far in the opposite direction as to contradict such New Testament affirmations of tradition as I Corinthians 11:2 and II Thessalonians 2:15 and 3:16.   It is beyond the scope of this essay, of course, to offer a full resolution of this conflict.   I shall simply point out that by divine revelation I mean what theologians call “special revelation”, which is distinct from “general revelation” such as that described by St. Paul in Romans  1:19-20.   General revelation or natural revelation, is God’s revelation of Himself in the natural order of His Creation, and is the source of such truth as can be found in all human tradition.   Special revelation, is God’s salvific revelation of Himself in His Covenants, His written Word, and ultimately in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ.   When Christianity makes claims of exclusivity, such as “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, no man cometh to the Father but through Me”, these rest upon special revelation.   When Christianity acknowledges truth in other religions, this is on the basis of the general revelation that informs all traditions.    See the essays by C. S. Lewis in the first section of God in the Dock (1970), and the book Christianity and Pluralism (1998, 2019), by Ron Dart and J. I. Packer for a more extended discussion of these matters.   Special revelation, because of its role in the ordu salutis, comes with promises of divine protection against corruption (Matthew 5:17-18, for example) that are obviously not extended to general revelation (see the larger context of the Romans passage cited above), which would seem obviously to place the primacy on special divine revelation, without eliminating the epistemic value of either human tradition in general or the particular Apostolic tradition affirmed in Scripture in the aforementioned Pauline references.

 

The turning of divine (special) revelation and tradition against each other facilitated the rise of rationalism which attacked their now divided house and excluded them both from the realm of reason, evidence, and knowledge.   That this having ultimately led to evidence taking primacy over reason in an ongoing discussion/debate which began prior to Socrates seems counterintuitive is due to the reasons mentioned above, however, it seems more inevitable when we consider what is asserted about Jesus Christ in the first verse of the Gospel according to St. John.   “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”    The word rendered Word in the English of this verse is Logos, the word from which logic is derived.   It does indeed mean “word” in the sense of the unit of speech that is the basic building block of sentences, although it can also mean “sentence” in certain contexts, or even “speech” in general.   It also, however, can mean thought, in the sense of calculation, judgement, evaluation, and basically everything suggested by the word “reason”.   This personification of reason and ascription to it of divine status would have been familiar territory to the Greek thinkers of the day, as just such a thought had long been a dominant theme in Greek philosophy.   

 

Heraclitus of Ephesus, who is otherwise best known for his view that constant change is the defining characteristic of the world – “you never step in the same river twice” – introduced the concept of the Logos into Greek thought.  Logos, to Heraclitus, was a divine, rational principle that governs the world of flux and brings order and meaning to what otherwise would be chaos. In the first century, the Hellenizing Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria, had famously equated the Logos of Greek thought with the personified Wisdom in Jewish Wisdom literature. The eighth chapter of the Book of Proverbs in the Old Testament is the canonical example of this personification of Wisdom, and the Wisdom of Solomon, one of the disputed books of the Septuagint, is a book long example of the same, possibly originally written as expansion of or commentary on the chapter in Proverbs.  Even prior to Philo there had been a tradition in Jewish thought somewhat parallel to the Greek Logos, represented primarily in the Targum (a translation, or more accurately number of translations, of the Old Testament into Aramaic, along with midrash or exegetical commentary on the same, also in Aramaic), in which the personified Memra acts as the messenger or agent of God.   

 

There was one huge difference between Philo’s synthesis of Greek and Hebrew thought on this matter and St. John’s.   For Philo the Logos was not God, per se, but a divine intermediary between God and Creation, roughly the equivalent of the Demiurge, albeit the benevolent Demiurge of Plato’s Timaeus not the malevolent Demiurge of the Gnostic heretics.   For St. John, the Logos was both with God, and was identical to God.    The lack of a definite article preceding Theos in the final clause of the first verse of the Gospel does not mean that a diminutive or lesser divinity is intended.   Since the clause joins two nouns of the same case (nominative) with the copula, and Theos is the noun that precedes the copula, its anarthrous condition indicates that it functions grammatically as the predicate rather than the subject (E. C. Colwell, “A Definite Rule for the Use of the Article in the Greek New Testament”, Journal of Biblical Literature 52, 1933).   Even if this were not a recognized grammatical rule, St. John’s intention could hardly be clearer, as his Logos, identified in the fourteenth verse as Jesus Christ, repeatedly makes statements employing the Greek equivalent of YHWH in such a way as to unmistakably identify Himself as God.   Indeed, this makes St. John’s use of the Greek philosophical term for the divine principle of reason that makes reality orderly in a way that evokes the first chapter of Genesis with its repeated “and God said…and it was so”, transforming what had been “without form and void” into that which “was very good”, a much more powerful embrace of reason than Philo’s.    See Calvinist philosopher Gordon H. Clark’s The Johannine Logos (1972) for a fuller discussion of this.  This is why the rejection of Christian epistemology, which affirms both special revelation and tradition, and embrace of a rationalist epistemology that removes both from the realm of evidence – although done in the name of reason and hence the term “rationalist” – must inevitably assign reason a much lower place than it had occupied in a worldview that acknowledges the Divine Logos.

 

The elevation of empirical evidence over historical evidence was also an inevitable consequence of the same epistemological revolution.   The reason for this is that the special revelation and tradition which were banished from the realm of evidence, each have a unique relationship with one of the two evidences allowed to remain.   When special revelation and tradition were sent into exile, the hierarchical relationship between the two was also rejected, leading to the inversion of this hierarchy for the corresponding two evidences.

 

Empirical evidence or science – real empirical evidence, mind you, not the computer generated, pseudoscientific, fiction masquerading under its name today – corresponds with tradition.   Here, I mean tradition in the generic sense of “that which has been passed down” (tradition comes from the passive perfect participle of the Latin trado, the verb for handing over or passing on) rather than the content of any particular tradition.   Tradition’s chief epistemic value is that it is the means whereby that which has been observed, deduced, and otherwise learned and known in the past is made available to those living in the present so that each generation does not have to re-invent the wheel so to speak and discover everything afresh for itself.   Apart from this, human knowledge could not significantly accumulate and grow.   As mentioned briefly above, with regards to Romans 1, the truths of general or natural revelation which are passed down in tradition are susceptible to corruption, but it is also the case that living traditions are flexible and self-correcting.   That this, and not the rigid inflexibility that rationalists falsely attribute to it, is the nature of tradition, was an insight that was well articulated by Michael Oakeshott (see the title essay and “The Tower of Babel”, in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, 1962).    While true science’s value is primarily utilitarian rather than epistemic – “science is always false, but it is often useful” as Gordon H. Clark put it – the merits of tradition as described in this paragraph overlap to a large degree those which scientists would ascribe to their vocation and methodology.   In the best sense of the word, science is itself a particular tradition, which has been accumulating natural knowledge and correcting itself since Thales of Miletus.

 

Special revelation, on the other hand, is connected to historical evidence.    This can clearly be seen in both Testaments.   The Old Testament is primarily the record of God’s revelation of Himself through a Covenant relationship established with a particular people, Israel, in a particular place, the Promised Land, over a specific era of time stretching from the period of the Patriarchs, from whom the people were descended, to the partial return from their exile in Babylon at the beginning of the Second Temple period.   Even the portions of it which are not strictly historical narrative in literary genre fit in to that history.   This is most obviously the case with the prophetic writings, which contain divine warnings given to Israel and sometimes the surrounding nations, in connection with events described in the historical record, but even in the case of the Psalms of David, many of these can be tied to specific events in that historical king’s life, as they collectively are tied to his life as a whole.

 

This is all the more the case with the New Testament.   The New Testament presents us with God’s ultimate revelation of Himself, both to the people with whom He had established the Old Covenant and promised a New, and to all the peoples of the world, in the Incarnation of His Son “and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us”.    The story of God’s Incarnational revelation is told in the form of history – events about specific people, in identifiable places, at identifiable times, attested to by witnesses.   We are told that the Virgin Birth, the event shortly to be commemorated at Christmas, occurred in the reign of Augustus Caesar, when Herod the Great was king of Judea, and Cyrenius was governor of Syria, and that it took place in the city of David, Bethlehem.    The baptism of Jesus by His cousin John the Baptist is the event that signaled the beginning of His public ministry.   We are told that John the Baptist’s own ministry began in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judeau, Herod Antipas was tetrarch of Galilee, and Annas and Caiaphas were high priests.   The locations of Jesus' most significant miracles are identified, and the events of the final week of His public ministry are related in great historical detail – His dramatic entry into Jerusalem, His teaching in the Second Temple, His betrayal by Judas for thirty pieces of silver, His Last Passover Supper with His Apostles, His arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane, His first, illegal, trial before the aforementioned high priests and the Sanhedrin, His second, official, trial before the aforementioned Roman governor, the mob turning against Him, His torture by the Roman soldiers, His crucifixion between two thieves at the hill of Calvary, and His burial in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea.    Real places, real people, real events.   As St. Paul would say to Festus a few years later, “the king (Agrippa) knoweth of these things, before whom also I speak freely, for I am persuaded that none of these things are hidden from him; for this thing was not done in a corner.”   The same St. Paul, writing to the Corinthians, would set forth the evidence for the crowning event of God’s Incarnational revelation of Himself in history, the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, citing eyewitness after eyewitness.    The Resurrection is not something to which evidence of the empirical sort can speak, but the historical evidence for it is overwhelming. (1)  

 

In the Christian epistemic hierarchy special revelation which takes place in and through history ranks higher than tradition of which science at its best is a particular example.   The abandonment of Christian epistemology early in the transformation of Christendom into Western Civilization involved a repudiation of both special revelation and tradition as well as the ranking between the two.  Even though considered in themselves, a strong case could be made for the superiority of historical evidence over empirical evidence – the latter consists of observations made in artificially controlled situations to test hypotheses and so cannot be counted upon to have epistemic value, to speak truth about reality, things as they are in themselves, even when they have the utilitarian value of helping us to manipulate things to our own use, and so when it comes to determining truth about reality, the empirical must count as merely one form of testimony among the many that make up historical/legal evidence, as it is in standard courtroom practice, and is therefore logically subordinate to the larger whole of which it is a part – this has resulted in science being elevated over other forms of evidence, over tradition of which it is a particular example and thus logically subordinate to the general form, and over reason.    Science, which belongs at the bottom of the epistemic totem pole and is essentially magic that works (see C. S. Lewis’ “The Abolition of Man”, the third lecture/essay in the book of the same title), has been raised to the very top of the pole.  

 

This elevation of science over all other evidence, all other traditions, and reason itself goes a long way to explaining how people who are scientists only in the sense that they speak the technical language of some branch of science or another have managed to substitute baseless predictions spat out by some machine for actual empirical evidence and ascribe to these the kind of authority that properly belongs to special revelation.   They have put this false science to the use of frightening people into giving up their basic rights and freedoms in exchange for protection against one Bogeyman or another and are thus laying waste to what little remains of the civilization that was once Christendom.    This demonstrates just how fundamental to civilization is its account of reality and truth.

(1)  In his essay “Myth Became Fact”, C. S. Lewis spoke of this historicity of the Christian story as the distinguishing point between it and pagan myths with similar elements, and thus described the significance of the Incarnation in this way: 

 

Now as myth transcends thought, incarnation transcends myth. The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the dying god, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens ‐ at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle. I suspect that men have sometimes derived more spiritual sustenance from myths they did not believe than from the religion they professed. To be truly Christian we must both assent to the historical fact and also receive the myth (fact though it has become) with the same imaginative embrace which we accord to all myths. The one is hardly more necessary than the other.

 

It was precisely this consideration, that the Christian message was a “true myth”, as put to him by J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson, which had brought Lewis to Christian faith.  His interpretation here, of the Incarnation transcending myth by presenting us with a “myth which is also a fact” comes after, of course, his explanation of the meaning and value of myth qua myth, for which explanation I refer you to the essay as a whole which can be found in God in the Dock.

The Other War On Christmas

The war on Christmas, as that expression is usually understood, denotes the recent North American phenomenon in which progressive forces, in the name of diversity, tolerance, multiculturalism and all those other words which serve little other purpose than to hide the spirit of Stalinist totalitarianism behind a smiley face, have sought to re-brand Christmas into a generic “holiday season”. This war is conducted on many fronts and with varying degrees of intensity, ranging from the replacement of the traditional “Merry Christmas” greeting with “Happy Holidays” or something similar to the more heavy-handed attempts by lobby groups and civil liberties organizations to drive nativity scenes and any other Christmas imagery that has a direct and obvious connection to Christianity from the public square. Back in the 1990s, Peter Brimelow and John O’Sullivan began a war against Christmas contest in National Review, to see who could find the most outrageous example of an attempt to suppress the Feast of the Nativity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and put a cheap generic imitation in its place and Brimelow has continued this tradition on his immigration reform website VDare. VDare has done an excellent job of documenting this sort of thing and so we will here turn to look at the other war on Christmas, i.e., that conducted by those who consider themselves to be the faithful, against Christmas, in the name of what they consider to be a sound interpretation of the Bible.



The roots of this other war on Christmas go back to the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. The Reformation began as a response to corruption in the Roman Catholic Church. Pope Leo X had authorized a campaign in which indulgences would be offered in return for funds that would go to the reconstruction of St. Peter’s Basilica. This crass effort to sell the grace of God, offended Dr. Martin Luther of the University of Wittenberg, who challenged not only the vulgar indulgence peddling of Johann Tetzel, but the theology that lay behind the very idea of indulgences, on the grounds of the Pauline doctrine of justification by grace through faith, and, when summoned by the Church to defend himself against charges of heresy, insisted that it is to the Holy Scriptures, as the written Word of God, that the teachings and traditions of the Church must be held accountable.



Dr. Luther had nothing against Christmas, or against most of the traditions of the Church for that matter, but the ball he started rolling picked up momentum which carried it much further than he had ever intended. The Reformation divided Western Europe, in which nation-states had begun to develop in the earlier Renaissance period. Of these, for the most part those with a Latin-based language, like French, Italian, and Spanish, remained Roman Catholic while the national churches in the northern states, with German-based languages, tended to follow one or the other of the Protestant Reformers. There were Protestants, however, who were convinced that Luther, Calvin, and even Zwingle had not gone far enough, who condemned Christendom and its traditions and institutions as hopelessly corrupt, denouncing both the Roman Catholic and the Protestant national churches and who formed sects in which only those whom they considered to be pure in doctrine and lifestyle were welcome, regarding their own sects as God’s elect remnant, and everyone else as being corrupt.



Protestant sectarianism continued to develop further and further away from the mainstream of Christian tradition and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, radical Protestant sects developed, like the Rutherfordian Russellites and the Armstrongists which went so far as to reject Nicene Trinitarian orthodoxy itself, generally reviving one or another of the ancient heresies in the process. Both the Russellites and the Armstrongists condemned Christmas as a pagan invention of the “Catholic Church” which in their view was a counterfeit church created by Emperor Constantine in the fourth century.



This same anti-Christmas view had developed in radical Protestantism much earlier than this, however, by individuals who did not go so far as to reject the Trinity. In the sixteenth century, many of the English Protestants who had introduced moderate reforms in the Church of England during the reign of Edward VI, fled to Switzerland during the reign of the Catholic Mary, and there became much more radical in their Calvinism. When these returned to England, during the reign of Elizabeth I, who had restored the Edwardian reforms, they found these did not go far enough to please them. They demanded that every practice and institution from the pre-Reformation tradition of the Church for which they could not find a text in the Holy Scriptures commanding or authorizing its use be removed from the Church as superstition and popery. Against these fanatics, who came to be known as Puritans, the theologian Richard Hooker, defended the Elizabethan Church of England in his eight volume Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity, arguing that the Church was at liberty to retain whatever traditional practices and institutions were not explicitly forbidden or condemned in the Holy Scriptures, a view far more compatible with the Pauline doctrine of Christian liberty than that of the Puritans, although the latter liked to think of themselves as the champions of Christian liberty against a “legalistic” Church. When neither Elizabeth I, nor her Stuart successors James I and Charles I, were willing to give in to their demands, they became increasingly seditious and in the 1640s their rebellion against King Charles I broke out into the English Civil War. They captured the king, had him put on trial before a Parliament from which all but their own supporters had been removed by military force, and executed him. They installed their general, Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector of Britain, whose tyrannical regime lasted until his death in 1658, shortly after which the crown was restored to Charles II.


During his mercifully brief dictatorship, Cromwell sought to remove everything that brought the slightest amount of colour, light, and earthly happiness into people's lives. He banned games and amusements on Sundays - the only day of the week people were not working from dawn to dusk, stripped the churches of ornamentation and beautiful organ music, forcing everyone to listen to horrible extra long sermons all Sunday morning, shut down theatres, and outlawed Christmas as pagan.

What was Cromwell's problem? Dr. Seuss once speculated concerning a fictional character who bore a remarkable resemblance to Cromwell "It could be, perhaps, that his shoes were too tight. It could be his head wasn't screwed on just right. But I think that the most likely reason of all may have been that his heart was two sizes too small." In the case of the real-life, seventeenth century Grinch, Cromwell, whatever role his head and shoes might have played, the problem was that his heart, soul, and spirit had been shrunk, frozen, and killed by a form of extreme Calvinism that combined a Pharisaical spirit regarding religion with a philistine attitude to culture in what was the most repulsive and vile, hell-spawned theology to claim the name of Christianity in vain, until theological modernism began to be spewed forth from the German schools of higher criticism and the North American "social gospel" movement in the nineteenth century.


Unfortunately, the spirit of Cromwellian Puritanism has survived in the misguided zealots who come out every year at this time to inform us that the first five verses of Jeremiah 10 condemn Christmas trees, even though anyone with an IQ over thirty can see that the reference to removing a tree from the forest and decking it with silver and gold is describing the construction of an idol, not something that is purely celebratory and decorative in purpose and function. They also like to remind us that December 25th was the day in which the Romans celebrated the birth of Sol Invictus at the conclusion of the pagan festival of lights, Saturnalia, concluding through some leap of reasoning that it was therefore pagan and idolatrous for the Church to have set the feast day celebrating the birth of the Son of the Living God on this same day. This sort of reasoning, however, would also condemn St. John the Apostle for introducing Jesus as the "Logos" in his Gospel. The idea of the Logos, the Divine Word or Reason, comes right out of pagan Greek philosophy. As the Hellenized first century Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria pointed out, there was a parallel concept in the "memra", the personalized Word or Wisdom of God of the Targum, the Aramaic rabbinic commentary on the Hebrew Scriptures, and it is quite in keeping with the New Testament concept that Christ abolished the division between Jews and Gentiles in establishing His Covenant and His Church, to understand the Logos of the Gospel to draw from both the Greek and Jewish antecedents. Interestingly, the Jews then, as now, also celebrated a "Festival of Lights", around the winter solstice, commemorating the rededication of the Temple, after its desecration by Antiochus Epiphanes and the Maccabean revolt that ensued. Jesus, according to the tenth chapter of the Gospel of John, went to Jerusalem for this festival, also called the Feast of the Dedication or Hanukkah, even though this feast would be regarded as extra-scriptural by Puritan theology which does not accept the First and Second books of Maccabees as Holy Scriptures. If there is nothing wrong with St. John synthesizing the Greek logos and the Jewish memra in his doctrine of the pre-incarnate Christ as the Word Who was in the beginning with God, and Who was God, and through Whom all things were made, then there is nothing wrong with the Church deciding to celebrate the birth of God's Son, at a time of year which coincides with both the Roman and the Jewish festivals of lights. Indeed, it seems most appropriate.

There is a connection between the two wars on Christmas in that Puritanism, as Eric Voegelin pointed out, was an early stage of the modern revival of Gnosticism, of which the progressive liberalism of the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries are later stages. You can read all about that in Voegelin's The New Science of Politics. The original Gnostics, I would note, were the anti-Christs that St. John referred to in his epistles, who denied the doctrine of Christ, specifically the Incarnation, which, of course, is the theological event commemorated in Christmas. The war on Christmas, in its Puritan and progressive liberal forms, is ultimately a war on the Apostolic doctrine of Christ as defended and articulated by the orthodox in the Trinitarian confession of the Council of Nicaea.

So, let me conclude by wishing you all a very Merry Christmas in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

How the Gnostics Destroyed Civilization

The New Science of Politics: An Introduction by Eric Voegelin, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1952, 1987, 193 pp.


Eric Voegelin was born in Germany and educated in Austria where he began his career as a university professor. After the Anschluss of 1938, in which the Third Reich annexed Austria, he fled the Nazis and ended up in the United States where he continued to teach political science. Unlike many refugees of that era, his experiences with Nazism did not make him sympathetic to Marx and Communism. Throughout his career he condemned both movements and was highly critical of his academic colleagues whose liberal and progressive views seemed to blind them to the evils of Communism. What all of these ideologies – Nazism, Communism, liberalism – have in common is their modernity and Voegelin became an able and outspoken critic of modernity.

Voegelin was a prolific author. His most laborious literary project, was his Order and History, a multi-volume work in which he traced the development of civil order throughout Western history. He is more widely remembered, however, for a small book which began as a series of six lectures sponsored by the Charles R. Walgreen Foundation, which he gave at the University of Chicago in 1951. The transcriptions of these lectures, with a new introduction, were published by the university a year later, under the title The New Science of Politics.

The New Science of Politics was a very influential book among English-speaking conservatives in the second half of the Twentieth Century. One of the slogans William F. Buckley Jr. made popular among young American conservatives in the 1960s and 1970s was “don’t immanentize the eschaton”. This slogan, which means “don’t try to create Paradise on earth”, is an allusion to a passage in Voegelin’s book. While Buckley was disseminating Voegelin’s terminology, the ideas in The New Science of Politics influenced such conservative thinkers as Russell Kirk in the United States, and George Grant in Canada. British conservative Michael Oakeshott, in his review of The New Science of Politics for the Times Literary Supplement, described it as “one of the most enlightening essays on the character of European politics that has appeared in half a century” and said that it was a book “powerful and vivid enough to make agreement or disagreement with even its main thesis relatively unimportant”.(1)

So what is this important book actually about?

If you are already familiar with what we usually refer to when we talk about “political science” then the title may mislead you. (2) It is not about comparing, contrasting and categorizing different systems of political organization. Right at the beginning of his introduction Voegelin made it clear that he considers this kind of political science to be a “degradation of political science to a handmaid of the powers that be.” (p.2) This is the kind of political theorizing, he said, that takes place in periods of stability. True political science, “the science of human existence in society and history”, he claimed, is developed in a period of crisis. “In an hour of crisis, when the order of a society flounders and disintegrates, the fundamental problems of political existence in history are more apt to come into view than in periods of comparative stability.” (pp. 1-2) He identified three major crises - the Hellenic, Roman/Christian, and Western - and the major political philosophers these crises produced – Plato/Aristotle, St. Augustine, and Hegel, respectively. Here, the theme of this book crosses over with that of his Order and History, the first volumes of which were released a few years after The New Science of Politics and which he was obviously working on at the time he gave these lectures and wrote the introduction.

The title of the book, therefore, refers to a restoration of political theory, which he was quick to tell us means “a return to the consciousness of principles, not perhaps a return to the specific content of an earlier attempt.” In other words, adopting the specific formulas of Plato, St. Augustine, and Hegel is not the answer, the principles embodied in such theories need to be reformulated to be accessible to us today. Why did he think this was the case?

Much can be learned, to be sure, from the earlier philosophers concerning the range of problems, as well as concerning their theoretical treatment; but the very historicity of human existence, that is, the unfolding of the typical, in meaningful concreteness, precludes a valid reformulation of principles through return to a former concreteness. (p. 2)

The above quote raises the interesting question of the similarities and differences between the thought of Voegelin and Leo Strauss. Voegelin and Strauss were both émigrés, who fled from German speaking areas of Europe during the Nazi era, to pursue academic careers in political science in the United States. Both were fierce critics of modernity who drew heavily upon classical antiquity and particularly the thought of Plato. Strauss, however, in his criticism of modernity, focused upon the problem of relativism which he believed to be the fruit of historicism. Historicism is the idea, associated especially with Hegel, that historical context is of foremost importance for the understanding of people, their civilizations, and their ideas. In Voegelin’s critique of modernity, however, a very different problem than relativism and historicism takes centre place, that of Gnosticism. We will shortly look at what Voegelin meant by Gnosticism, for it is a major theme of the book we are considering. As for historicism, Voegelin’s idea that the historical nature of human existence makes it necessary for the principles of political order to be reformulated for the present era bears a certain resemblance to it. Although it would be a digression to pursue the matter much further here, historicism is a subject of debate which keeps popping up in discussions of Voegelin’s thought, and he has been interpreted both as an historicist and as a Straussian anti-historicist (3).

Voegelin said that this reformulation of political principles had been underway for about a half a century in several different disciplines. This book was not an attempt to undertake that reformulation but to introduce it. Voegelin devoted the introduction to his book to an explanation of why such a reformulation was necessary. This explanation is as interesting as the main discussion of his book. “A restoration of political science to its principles implies that the restorative work is necessary because the consciousness of principles is lost.” (pp. 3-4). This consciousness was lost, he argued, because of positivism, by which he means not “the doctrine of this or that outstanding positivist thinker” – such as Comte – but “the intention of making the social sciences ‘scientific’ through the use of methods which as closely as possible resemble the methods employed in sciences of the external world.” (p. 8). The centuries in which positivism developed were centuries of tremendous discovery and achievement in the physical sciences. The positivists, perhaps understandably, concluded that the methodology which produced such impressive results in the physical sciences would have similar results in other branches of knowledge as well. Voegelin traced the development of this idea through three stages. In the first stage, positivism’s elevation of method over theory brought about an accumulation of facts regardless of their relevance. In the second stage, even relevant facts were interpreted in a perverse manner because positivism’s dismissal of theory eliminated the foundational principles for a sound interpretation and thus they were replaced with “the Zeitgeist, political preferences, or personal idiosyncrasies”. (pp. 9-10) He gave as examples of this, works by men who insisted upon reading modern political movements and phenomena into thinkers and events of the ancient past. In the third stage, the positivists began to speak of “value-judgement” and “value-free” science. This terminology came from the positivist belief that only facts about “the phenomenal world” could be discussed objectively, a belief which dismissed the “classic and Christian science of man” as a subjective collection of “value-judgments”. Classical and Christian ethics and politics were nothing of the sort, Voegelin objected, and while the goal of a “value-free” science was useful against the intrusion of personal preferences into science, when it was used against classic and Christian metaphysics it was destructive of science itself, and led only to relativism.

Voegelin began the first lecture by pointing out that while political science studies man in his historical societies, human society does not wait for political science to tell it how to understand itself. Human societies interpret themselves by means of symbols, and these symbols are an integral part of those societies. The political scientist must therefore deal with two sets of symbols – the symbols whereby the societies he studies interpret themselves, and the symbols of political science. The two sets of symbols are not identical but there is a large amount of overlap and part of the process of developing political theory is clarifying the meaning of the symbols a society uses to understand itself.

One of those symbols is that of “representation”. Western countries have representative governments and when most people are asked what this means point to those governments being elected to represent the people. Some details, such as whether the chief executive is directly elected or elected by the parliament, whether election is territorial or proportional, and the presence or absence of a non-elected constitutional monarch, do not affect a Western government’s being considered representative.

The meaning of “representation” becomes cloudier, however, when the example of the Soviet Union is considered. The political institutions of the USSR were defined in the Soviet constitution as representative institutions similar to their Western counterparts. Yet the USSR was not regarded as being a legitimate representative government by Western democrats because its people had no “genuine choice”. The Communist response was that only a Communist Party monopoly could truly represent the people because all other parties represented special interests.

Rather than deciding which of these viewpoints is correct, Voegelin summarized the points on which there is general agreement – that representation means that government is in some way responsible to the popular will, that true representation does not automatically exist just because government institutions are representative in design, and that parties have something to do with government being more or less representative.

He then moved on to point out that if the government of the USSR was not truly representative in this sense, it was undoubtedly representative in another sense. Governments represent their societies by acting on their behalf, both internally in passing laws which receive general obedience and externally through their military actions. All governments, even the Soviet government, are representative governments in the sense that they act for their societies on the historical stage. Political societies come into being, Voegelin said, through a process he calls articulation, in which rulers become the representatives of the society who are constitutionally empowered to act for the society in the sense of making decisions on its behalf. This kind of representation, he called existential representation to distinguish it from the earlier kind of representation which he called elemental representation. It is existential representation that is of use to the theorists of political science. Voegelin concluded the lecture with the observation that if a government which is representative in the elemental sense fails to be representative in the existential sense it will soon be replaced by a government that is representative in the existential sense.

In his second lecture, “Representation and Truth”, Voegelin introduced two other kinds of representation. In existential representation governments represent their societies by acting for them in history, but societies can also be regarded as themselves representing an order which transcends themselves. In this kind of representation, societies regard themselves as being small-scale representations of the cosmic order. Voegelin demonstrated how cosmological representation dates back to the earliest human empires and how the rulers of these societies, as the existential representatives of societies that themselves represent the cosmological order, were regarded as representatives of truth and their enemies are regarded as representatives of falsehood.

Just as there are different kinds of representation, however, so there are different kinds of truth, and in the period between 800 and 300 BC a new truth in rivalry to the cosmological truth represented by the empires broke out across the ancient world, whose representative was the theorist. This was the period which saw Confucius in China, the Buddha in India, the prophets in Israel, and the tragedians and philosophers in Greece. The “dynamic core” of this new truth, Voegelin said, could be found in Plato’s statement from The Republic that “the polis is man written large”. Voegelin called this the anthropological principle, that a political society “should be not only a microcosmos but also a macroanthropos”. (p. 61) There are two sides to this principle, first that a society will reflect the kind of men who comprise it, and second, that a society ought to represent the true order of the soul. It is the mature man’s experiences with the transcendental, with God, in his psyche, that produces this order within the soul, and so the anthropological principle is supplemented by the theological principle. The theorist clarifies and explains these experiences.

There are different kinds of truth then, the cosmological truth represented by the ancient empires, and the anthropological truth represented by the tragedians and theorists. There is also, Voegelin added at the beginning of the third lecture, soteriological truth, represented by Christianity. In the metaphysics of the Greek theorists, man through his psyche reaches towards God. In Christianity, God, in the incarnation of the Logos, reaches towards man. Voegelin explained how the implications of this truth unfolded in the history of Rome. The Roman republican constitution provided insufficient representation as Rome became a vast empire covering the Mediterranean world. Therefore a new office had to develop to represent the entire earthly world ruled by Rome. In the Roman republic, wealthy and influential patrons conferred favours on clients in return for loyalty. Out of the most powerful patrons, came the princeps who sometimes formed alliances with each other and other times feuded with each other. Out of the princeps arose the triumvirates, then the rivalry of Octavian and Anthony, and finally the triumph of Octavian left him as Augustus, the emperor, who would represent in himself all the peoples of the empire. The oaths of loyalty, which patrons demanded of their clientele, were now demanded of the entire empire, at first upon the installation of a new empire, then, in the reign of Caligula, annually. Reforms were made to the civil religion to place the standing of the emperor on a firmer representative foundation – he was declared to be the earthly representative of the highest god. But who was the highest god? This was a period of synergism, in which the religions of the various peoples controlled by Rome were mixing. Philo, the Jewish philosopher, borrowed the metaphysical concept of the one supreme God, who governed the world through lesser deities the way the Great King of Persia ruled his empire through his satraps, and applied it to the God of the Jews. Eusebius, then borrowed Philo’s arguments and incorporated them into Christianity, pointed to the fact that the Incarnation had occurred during the reign of Augustus, who had established the Pax Romana which facilitated the spread of the Gospel throughout the world. Constantine, Eusebius argued, had brought what Augustus had begun to its final fulfillment by converting to Christianity, and so becoming the representative of the true God. For a time in the fourth Century, the Empire believed Christianity to be the solution to its existential problem, but the alliance was precarious and doomed to fail once the orthodox Church developed the symbols of trinitarianism. When Rome was sacked by Alaric in the early fifth century, pagans blamed Christianity for the fall of Rome. St. Augustine, in refuting their arguments in the Civitas Dei, clarified the Christian view, that there are two spheres of representation, the empire and the church, and that only the latter represents God and His transcendent order, that the empire being merely the representative of temporal man.

This idea, that the empire is the representative of temporal man, while the church is the earthly representative of the eternal, was the orthodox Christian view that prevailed for centuries following the fall of Rome. Voegelin dubbed the process whereby this viewpoint was achieved de-divinization which he defined as:

The historical process in which the culture of polytheism died from experiential atrophy, and human existence in society became reordered through the experience of man’s destination, by the grace of the world-transcendent God, toward eternal life beatific vision. (p. 107)

The subject of his last three lectures, was the modern crisis of representation brought about by the re-divinization of political society. Re-divinization did not mean a return to pagan polytheism, however. Its source lay within Christianity itself, in ideas that the orthodox church had condemned as heretical.

There was tension in the early church, due to Christianity’s origins in Jewish messianism, between the expectation of the Parousia (Second Coming of Christ) to establish the Kingdom of God on earth and the idea of the church as the ongoing earthly representation of Christ. The eschatology – vision of final perfection – of early Christianity evolved from an “eschatology of the realm in history”, in which final perfection would be achieved on earth, in history to an “eschatology of transhistorical, supernatural perfection”, in which final perfection awaited the believer in the beatific vision, in a supernatural realm, outside of history. The earlier eschatology would pop up periodically in response to persecutions but the latter eschatology became the orthodox view because it was more compatible with the idea of the church as the earthly representative of the Kingdom of God. Despite this, the church included the Revelation of St. John within the canon, but St. Augustine in the Civitas Dei was able to reconcile the two by interpreting the millennial reign described in Revelation as the reign of Christ in the church.

Then, in the twelfth century, came Joachim of Flora. Joachim used the symbols of the Trinity to develop an idea of history. It consisted of three ages, the Age of the Father beginning with Abraham and the Age of the Son beginning with Christ would be followed by an Age of the Spirit upon the appearance of a new leader who Joachim believed would appear around 1260 AD. In the Age of the Spirit, Joachim believed, there would no longer be a need for the church as the earthly representative of Christ because everything necessary for spiritual perfection would come to each person directly without sacramental mediation.

This idea became the foundation of modernity. It was reinterpreted in several different ways – as the humanist division of history into ancient, medieval, and modern, the positivist idea of the scientific succeeding the theological and metaphysical, the Marxist view of history progressing from primitive to final perfect Communism through the class society, and the National Socialist concept of the Third Reich.

The Joachitic/modern eschatology has to be understood in contrast with the traditional, Augustinian, Christian orthodox view. In the latter, there are two histories, the profane history of political societies and the sacred history in which Christ came and established His church. The latter is part of transcendental history, which includes events in the supernatural realm. Transcendental history, including sacred history, moves towards the telos of final perfection. Profane history does not, it merely awaits its end. Joachim, therefore, in his conception of a third age in which perfection would be achieved on earth, assigned to profane, earthly history a meaning which belongs to transcendental history, and so created the fallacy that history has an eidos – a form that gives meaning. In other words he “immanentized” – brought into the earthly realm, “the eschaton” – the final perfection of the supernatural realm. This is what Voegelin meant by the technical phrase for which he is most remembered.

This fallacy, although seemingly elemental, cannot be explained by stupidity or dishonesty. It comes, Voegelin said, from the drive for certainty about the meaning of history and one’s own existence. Orthodox Christianity assigns this meaning to the transcendent God and calls upon people to exercise faith. When faith breaks down, men cannot fall back upon the pre-Christian pagan culture which is no longer around. Instead they fall back upon an alternative experience to faith which provides them with certainty. This alternative experience is gnosis – the experience claimed by the chief rivals of orthodoxy since the beginning of Christianity. Modern Gnostic experience takes several forms – Voegelin gives examples of intellectual, emotional, and volitional varieties – and these experiences “are the core of the redivinization of society, for the men who fall into these experiences divinize themselves by substituting more massive modes of participation in divinity for faith in the Christian sense.” (p. 124) Joachim’s view of history arose through a combination of the Gnostic drive for certainty with a search for meaning in the growth of Western civilization. The “growth of gnosticism” is the “essence of modernity”, and the immanentization of the eschaton into the meaning of history as movement towards a teleological end – whether that end is specified as in utopianism or not – is the progressive interpretation of history. Since this idea makes salvation itself something to be achieved by men within the temporal sphere it is not surprising that it results in impressive accomplishments – but “the death of the spirit is the price of progress” which is what Nietzsche meant when he declared God to have been murdered. (p. 131)

In the penultimate lecture, Voegelin discussed how Gnosticism, which had been slowly growing throughout the Middle Ages, burst on the scene around the time of the Reformation, and he gives the Puritans in England as a case example of this revolutionary aspect of Gnosticism. He begins by referring to the analysis of Puritanism found in the first book of Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity where Hooker describes the methodology by which the Puritans developed a popular following through condemnations of the upper classes and established order, which caused these to be identified with evil and falsehood, and the Puritans themselves with virtue and truth, among their hearers, and how they gave this following a sense that they as an elect remnant, were the sole possessors of the truth. The Puritans claimed Scriptural authority, but their use of the Scriptures consisted of quoting select verses out of context and ignoring the interpretive rules developed over a millennium and a half of Christianity. They claimed to believe in freedom of interpretation, but actual freedom of interpretation would have led to chaos if practiced and would have undermined their arguments against church tradition, because it too is an interpretation of Scripture. To prevent critical challenges to their doctrine they developed certain devices. The first was an authoritative interpretive tool which would preclude the need to refer to the interpretive tradition (Calvin’s Institutes). The second was a taboo on the “instruments of critique”, which at the time meant classic philosophy and scholastic theology, a taboo which was devastating to Western intellectual culture to the extent that it was followed.

Voegelin then turned from Hooker’s analysis of Puritanism, to Puritan literature itself and demonstrated a number of parallels between Puritanism and the primary Gnostic revolutionary movement of his own day, Marxist-Leninism. Both movements used apocalyptic terminology to describe themselves as a kingdom of light engaged in battle with a kingdom of darkness, over which their victory was assured. The new age would be brought about with the help of God – or the dialectics of history – but not without armed revolt on the part of the forces of light. The details of the new order to come are vague, but it will be universal in extent. In each case “the revolution of the Gnostics has for its aim the monopoly of existential representation” which will not be accepted until after a war between “two universal armed camps engaged in a death struggle with each other.” (p. 151) In this “Gnostic mysticism of the two worlds”, Voegelin detected “the pattern of the universal wars that has come to dominate the twentieth century.”

The Puritan revolution in England demonstrated the threat Gnostic revolutionaries pose to the public order, and therefore revealed a need for the a theoretical restatement of that order. Thomas Hobbes developed such a restatement in his Leviathan, the “great and permanent achievement” of which was to have clarified that “public order was impossible without a civil theology beyond debate” (p. 159) but Hobbes himself fell into the Gnostic trap by asserting that through the spread of a new truth, a constitution could be made eternal, “abolishing the tensions of history” (p. 160).

In the final lecture, Voegelin examined the implications of Hobbes’ insight into the necessity of a civil theology. He first recapped the history covered in the preceding lectures. Christianity could function as the civil theology of Western civilization as long as the church was the predominant civilizing factor – since that ceased to be the case, Gnosticism, at first using Christian terminology then later explicitly anti-Christian, has rushed to take its place. This has brought Western civilization to a point of crisis. The totalitarian movements of the twentieth century are the final destination towards which Gnosticism as a civil theology is headed. There is reason, however, to hope that its influence will soon be broken. The traditions of classic philosophy and orthodox Christianity are still alive, and in the dangers posed by Gnosticism as a civil theology, its self-defeating nature can be seen. By immanentizing the eschaton, Gnosticism has confused the real world with the dream world, which causes it to make mistakes in action. It responds to threats in the real world with magic operations that work only in the dream world:

[D]isapproval, moral condemnation, declarations of intention, resolutions, appeals to the opinion of mankind, branding of enemies as aggressors, outlawing of war, propaganda for world peace and world government, etc.(p. 170)

The end result of all of this nonsense will be that either Gnosticism will bring about the physical destruction of Western civilization through a series of wars and revolutions, or reality will shatter the Gnostic dream.

Voegelin next briefly discussed the varieties of Gnosticism, two of which were “antagonists in battle on the world scene” (p. 174) at the time he was writing, and diagnosed the threat to the West in that conflict (the Cold War) as coming not from the military strength of the Communists but from the “paralysis and self-destructive politics” (p. 175) of the Gnostic dream. He then analysed Hobbes’ response to the manifestation of Gnostic revolution in Puritanism. If the Puritans immanentized the eschaton, Hobbes’ solution was to do the exact opposite, to make the existential order the society into the truth which it represented. For all its genius, this too is inadequate and Voegelin concluded his analysis of Hobbes’ symbols, by pointing out that Leviathan “adumbrates a component in totalitarianism which comes to the fore when a group of Gnostic activists actually achieves the monopoly of existential representation in a historical society” so that, ironically, “the Leviathan is the symbol of the fate that actually will befall the Gnostic activists when in their dream they believe they realize the realm of freedom.” (pp. 186, 187). He then concluded the lecture, and the book by pointing out that the symbol of Leviathan had arisen in English society in response to Puritanism, and that England and America were the societies which were most resistant to Gnostic totalitarianism because they experienced Gnosticism when it was at an early stage and were thus able to preserve as national institutions “the institutional culture of aristocratic parliamentism as well as the mores of a Christian commonwealth” (p. 188), providing them with a “glimmer of hope” in the present crisis.

So, after this extensive summary of Voegelin’s book, what can be said in response to it?

While there are obviously elements which are out of date, such as the references to the particular circumstances of the Cold War, it is remarkable how much of this book is still relevant today. Perhaps this should not be surprising considering the nature of its subject matter, fundamental political theory rather than political issues, and the author’s rejection of the positivist’s elevation of method over relevance. The Gnosticism that Voegelin wrote about is still with us today and the “end of the Gnostic dream” which he suggested was “perhaps closer at hand than one ordinarily would assume” (p. 173) is nowhere in sight, but his prediction that Gnosticism’s confusion of dream and reality would result in constant wars accompanied by constant talk of peace has been born out. At the end of his first lecture, after making the point that existential representation in which a government acts as decision-making representative of its society on the stage of history is more fundamentally important than elemental representation (a democratic constitution) Voegelin said:

Our own foreign policy was a factor in aggravating international disorder through its sincere but naïve endeavour of curing the evils of the world by spreading representative institutions in the elemental sense to areas where the existential conditions for their functioning were not given. (p. 51)

Following the end in 1989-1991 of the conflict between the USA and the Soviet Union which was the original historical backdrop to these lectures, the USA announced, during her first war with Iraq, the dawn of a “New World Order” in which a coalition of free countries, led by the United States, would police the world against “aggressors” like Saddam Hussein (remember what Voegelin had to say about the magic operations Gnostics who had lost the distinction between the real and dream world engaged in). Following the events of September 11, 2001, the USA renewed its commitment to the Wilsonian policy of spreading democracy with a vengeance. She entered into two major wars and several smaller conflicts with the goal of democratizing the Middle East. At the cost of billions of dollars and countless lives, America brought herself to the brink of bankruptcy, only to watch these countries use the democracy she had brought them to vote in jihadist and Islamic theocratic governments. Voegelin’s observation seems more timely today than in the day he first made it.

Interesting, Wiliam F. Buckley Jr. was an enthusiastic supporter of both American wars on Iraq, although he later admitted the second one to be a mistake. Perhaps if he had absorbed more of Voegelin’s theory in addition to his lingo he would not have made this mistake.

Voegelin’s lectures, however, were not intended as a guide to practical political decision making but as an introduction to political theory and the idea of representation. Perhaps, the most important things to glean from this introduction, are not lessons but questions. If modernity is derived from an ultimately Gnostic view of a third realm or age in history, what then is the significance of the fact that the Modern Age is now widely believed to be over? What is the relationship between the relativism and nihilism of the “post-modern” era and the Gnosticism of the Modern Age? If the various movements of Gnosticism each sought the “monopoly of existential representation in a historical society” what does the post-modern rejection of all meta-narrative mean for the future of representation? If the classic philosophers were correct in believing that the political society represents first the order of the cosmos and then the order of the soul in man and if Christian theologians were correct in believing that the transcendent order of God to be represented on earth by the church, while the political society represents the temporal order of man, what form will these truths take in a world that has passed through Gnosticism and the nihilism of post-modernism?

(1) The review, entitled “The Character of European Politics”, which appeared in the August 7, 1953 issue, was originally published anonymously, but Oakeshott is identified as the reviewer in the online historical archives of the Times Literary Supplement, http://www.tlsarchive.com

(2) Dante Germino, in the foreword to the 1987 edition, tells us that the original title of the lectures was “Truth and Representation”.

(3) The correspondence between the two political philosophers was translated and edited by Peter Emberley and Barry Cooper and published by the University of Missouri Press in 1993 and 2004 under the title Faith and Political Philosophy: The Correspondence Between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934-1964.