Eschaton Redux.(Eric Voegelin: The Restoration of Order)

Eric Voegelin: The Restoration of Order, by Michael P. Federici (ISI, 250 pp., $24.95)

Today's challenge: Try, nonchalantly, to work into an everyday conversation the phrase "immanentization of the eschaton." Obscure to the point of pedantry yet luminous in its wisdom, the phrase bears the marks of its creator, Eric Voegelin, the 20th-century German emigre and political philosopher. In Jewish and Christian religion, the "eschaton" is the end time, when God will make heaven out of earth. Immanentization of the eschaton is thus a baroque term for "utopianism," which Voegelin regarded as the central error of modern times.

There is more to it than that, of course. Any free-market economist can warn you of the dangers of utopianism. Voegelin's formulation does not merely restate conservative chestnuts about human nature or the inefficacy of state planning, but suggests a far more peculiar, if not counterintuitive, conclusion: The crisis of the West is at root spiritual and is precipitated by the misappropriation of its religious symbols. To be more exact, our political problems are in fact problems within our souls, which have lost their capacity to experience the divine.

To explicate these and other difficult ideas, Voegelin canvassed several times over the whole of Western intellectual history in a series of multi-volume works, and developed a technical vocabulary all his own. To grasp even a part of Voegelin's system is beyond the stamina and ken of most professors, to say nothing of most laymen. The world should thus render thanks to Michael P. Federici for having produced this book -- a small miracle of clarity and concision. Federici introduces the major phases of Voegelin's thought, explains key concepts, and even provides thoughtful responses to some of Voegelin's critics. Perhaps most helpful of all, Federici appends a glossary of over 100 Voegelinian terms of art. (After "immanentization of the eschaton," bonus points can be awarded for "theogonic process" and "metastatic apocalypse.")

Born in Germany in 1901 and raised in Vienna, Voegelin shares not a few traits with that other giant of American political philosophy, Leo Strauss. Both fled the Nazi regime to assume academic posts in America, both argued that "premodern" philosophy could remedy contemporary ills, and both found votaries primarily on the American right. Most importantly, both belonged to the post-war generation of right-wing "gloominaries" -- who feared that the liberal West did not have the moral fortitude to resist the totalitarian threat. As Whittaker Chambers said of abandoning Communism, "I know that I am leaving the winning side for the losing side."

Whereas Strauss continues to inspire new generations of epigones, however, Voegelin remains admired but largely ignored. One reason is the comparative difficulty of Voegelin's work; another is that his ideas do not lend themselves very well to an ideological movement. Few young men and women can forget the frisson they felt when they read Strauss for the first time and suddenly became initiated in the secret history of Western thought; what Ayn Rand is to the 14-year-old, Leo Strauss, it seems, is to the 19-year-old. Voegelin, by contrast, requires the patience of middle age and does not provide the same sort of fearless delight.

Ironically for a political philosopher, Voegelin downplayed the importance of politics, arguing instead that problems generally viewed as political could be rectified by a recovery of religious experience. Voegelin was not quite as gloomy as his fellow gloominaries; although Federici devotes one of his seven chapters to Voegelin's account of the "crisis of the West," he is at pains to insist that Voegelin did not regard the crisis as permanent. Eventually, according to Voegelin, reality will reassert itself, and the pinched ideologies -- Marxism, secularism, progressivism -- that seek to cut us off from the experience of the divine will subside.