Voegelin’s Soteriology and Ours

Every religious tradition offers asoteriology – its own version ofsalvation called by whatever name – perhaps spiritual liberation as in the Hindu moksha or enlightenment as in the Buddhist samadhi. It claims tohave exclusive possession of the onetrue “solution” to the human predicament, with the implicitpremise that there is a single fundamental problem, such as sin orthe wheel of karma or suffering. The remedies offered by other traditions are seen asexamples of the problem – the sin of idolatry, the illusion of being a person apart from theBrahman, and so forth. According to the Buddhists, if there are gods, they too need toseek enlightenment.

Philosophies often make the same sorts of claims, sometimes explicitly – witness theStoics and the Cynics, Spinoza and Sartre – sometimes implicitly – witness Marx, Freud,B. F. Skinner, and Richard Rorty. The result is, of course, unresolved and probablyunresolvable conflict between competing single-problem single-solution viewpoints – thesort of debate in which, as Jean Bodin had noted, “all refute each.” Eric Voegelin agreeswith Bodin, and offers what might be called a “meta-soteriology” that overarches thisdebate and provides a framework for evaluating any comprehensive orientation. Worldviews are assessed by the extent to which they open human life to truth or distract itinto the “second realities” of untruth.[1] This approach rises above the shadow-boxing of contending religions and ideologies.

In spite of this overarching standpoint, Voegelin rejects the Kantian and Husserlian ideathat an adequate philosophy can be based on the transcendental conditions of allexperience or the eidetic structures of consciousness uberhaupt. All experience ispersonal – the experience of a single individual – and so the philosopher must begin withhis own experience – with “I, Eric Voegelin . . .” This discovery led to what he called“anamnesis,” the recovery of his own earliest memories of pregnant (in the sense ofworld-shaping) experiences.[2] Voegelin’s insight is useful for soteriology as well. The human predicament is not merely generic. In the life of a particular individual, there is nosingle human predicament and hence no single solution. Each of us has his or her ownpilgrim’s progress. This is clearest perhaps in novels.

In Tolstoy’s War and Peace, hyper-competent Andre, lethargic Pierre, pious Marie,irresponsible Nikolai, and jeune-fille Natasha have quite different challenges. And as doGeorge Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, who is in quest of his origins, the self-centeredGwendolen, and Deronda’s long-lost mother. To cloak all these characters in sin andsalvation, or ignorance and liberation, or samsara and enlightenment is to read withoutnuance. And, if we do that to our own lives, we live without nuance. Nuance, in thiscontext, requires paying attention to the details, the contours, the lights and shadows ofour lives. The crucial task becomes spiritual discernment, which involves living in truth inone’s own life. It is easy to say that the drunk needs to become sober or the embezzlerneeds to come clean. But it is not so easy to trace our own right spiritual path, which maynot have to do with solving any particular problem at all, but be more a matter of what weare called to do. This takes nuance as well, because we have to learn to hear the divinewhisper, sense the inner prompting, and read signs written in invisible ink.

Let me follow Voegelin’s example and start with “I, Jerry Martin . . .” and speak from my own experience. As a life long agnostic, I spent decades developing a philosophy that wasessentially naturalistic. However, when I had the surprising experience of hearing a Voice that announced itself as divine, it seemed better to let my experience, fallible though itmight be, trump my theory, which was also fallible. If one studies the record of people whohave heard a credible divine voice – Socrates, George Fox, Joan of Arc, Ramakrishna,St. Paul, Moses, to name a few – it is striking that they did not all receive the samemessage. They were given remarkably diverse tasks. I asked in prayer whether I should become a Christian or perhaps a Jew, but was not guided to affiliate in any way. I was ledinstead to read the foundational scriptures of diverse traditions and to ask about them inprayer. When I received answers in words, I recorded them.[3]

When I turned to India, I read the Rig Veda and the Upanishads and was guided to readthe Mahabharata – the epic of the Great Bharata War – as well, surpringly so, since it is atext on the third tier of the Hindu canon, barely scripture at all.[4] The epic tells of adynastic struggle between the rightful king, Yudhisthira, and his wicked cousin. As thekingdom teeters, Yudi (as I call him) loves spending his days conversing with holy men.He is chided by Krishna, who reminds him that his job is to be a king, not a saint. When Iprayed about this, I was told:

“The point of life . . . is to ‘engage the demons’ – to confront the real challenge of ‘sin,’adverse forces, material difficulties, mortality, suffering, and so forth – not escape(through yoga) or conventional conformism (dharma). These can be elements of aspiritually fulfilled life, but are not the whole story” (Words in parentheses indicate mysense at the time of what was being referred to).

There is a dramatic moment in the epic when the war of good against evil is almost lost. An apparently invincible warrior on the enemy side can only be defeated by a lie. He mustbe deprived of the will to fight by being told falsely that his son, fighting on a distant partof the battlefield, has been killed. But he will not believe it unless he hears it from the always-truthful Yudi. But the lofty Yudi refuses to lie. It is Krishna himself who mustpersuade him that, in this case, lying is necessary. Finally, Yudi gives in, tells the lie, andsaves the day. About this passage, I was told:

“Yudi has to deal with people who are themselves embodiments of particular desires.Among these desires are evil purposes. And they can be defeated only by using their setof embodied beliefs and desires. This is what Yudi does. It is the only way to prevent evilin this case. So what is morally imperfect is morally required.”

There is, however, a cost. Before the lie, Yudi’s chariot glides over the earth, its wheelsnever quite touching. Now they sink to the ground. I was told:

“When you commit a moral imperfection, it is important that you know it. You are leftsomewhat compromised, and it is important to know that also. But you also need tounderstand the necessity of this morally imperfect act.”

The threat to divine truth in India, I was told, was “the loss of grip on reality,” and that theMahabharata is “a corrective to the high-flying tendencies of Hindu thought, the tendencyto lose contact with the ground through yoga or asceticism or various doctrines (such asmonistic idealism). The discovery of the Atman and the Brahman … was so heady thatwas natural of them to skip a beat and try to leap right into (the) Brahman. But, while thediscoveries of (the) Atman (and the) Brahman are valid, that escape is not the purpose oflife.”

I was also guided to read the Gathas of Zoroaster, revelations that go back to theprecosmogonic beginning.[5] It is written: “Truly there are two primal Spirits, twins, AhuraMazda (literally, the Lord Wisdom) and Angra Mainyu (the Hostile Spirit), renowned to bein conflict. In thought and word and act they are two, the good and the bad,”righteousness and falsehood. There was not yet a world, just an ideal realm that lackedfull reality. The Lord Wisdom foresaw that, if he were to create the world, the Hostile Spiritwould attack it precisely because it was good, and the world would become abattleground. And so it came to pass. As soon as the world was created, the Hostile Spiritprepared to attack. The Lord Wisdom offered an era of peace, but the evil one respondedwith defiance: “I shall destroy you and persuade all your creatures to hate you and to loveme.” At that, “he crawled back to darkness” and recruited Daevas, devils, “frightful andputrid and evil,” to fight on his side. And, having rallied the Daevas, he “rose for battle.”

The Lord Wisdom sees what is to come. The strife created by the Hostile Spirit will createa new era, called “a state of Mixture.” He foresees that, “in the Mixture, [the Hostile Spirit]will be able to lead my creatures astray and make them his own.” So he consults withhuman beings or, more precisely, with their fravahrs, their souls. He shows them what isto come, gives them a preview of the war of good against evil, and then asks them todecide. They can continue an ideal non-material existence or enter the world, risking all inorder to defeat evil. They understand what is at stake. They choose to fight. And, as it iswritten, “we too must choose sides.”

The Hebrew Testament can be read as one record of the progress of that fight. InCreation and the Persistence of Evil, Jewish scholar Jon Levenson gives an arrestingaccount of a central theme in the Hebrew Testament that one does not readily notice: theongoing struggle for order to triumph over chaos.[6] By separating the waters from theearth in Genesis 1, God confines disorder but does not eliminate it.

As Levenson puts it, “the survival of ordered reality hangs only upon God’s vigilance inensuring that those cosmic dikes do not fail.” “Life,” he writes, “is a continual war againstthe Evil Impulse” – the unruly erotic, darker, aggressive side of our nature – “a war thatdoes not see a definitive victory in present reality, but in which battles can be won.” Thereis both an “optimistic element in this theology,” says Levenson, “which is the faith of God’sultimate triumph,” and a “pessimistic element, which is the tacit acknowledgement thatGod is not yet God.” “God,” he says, “will not be truly one until the great victory.”Nevertheless, God’s ultimate triumph is in some ways “present today.” As I was told inprayer, “Oddly enough, the victory is now and the struggle is now, and yet the victorydepends on the ‘outcome’ of the struggle.”

What is the victory? The trajectory of Hebrew thought reaches succinct expression in theopening lines of the Lord’s Prayer: “Hallowed be thy name; Thy kingdom come.” AsCatholic scholar John P. Meyer explains, in the Hebrew Testament, while thesanctification of God’s name sometimes refers to our trusting and praising God and livingby his commands, more frequently, it is God who “sanctifies himself or his name” by“manifesting” himself “in the blazing light of a theophany.”[7] In the ancient Jewish prayerknown as the Qaddish, “hallowed be his great name” is a way of asking God “to manifesthimself in all his world-creating … power ….” About this section, I was told in prayer, “Myloving presence is authoritative.” If so, “Thy kingdom come” refers to the reign, the activepresence, of God’s authoritative love.

When then is the victory? Right now. God is actively present, manifesting himself, rightnow. When Jesus says “the kingdom of God has drawn near” (Mark 1:15), he uses theperfect tense. It is like saying, “The train is arriving.” What does this mean for us now?Meyer puts it well: according to Jesus, human beings are “not basically neutral territories.”Rather, “human existence [is] a battlefield dominated by one or the other … force, God orSatan.” A person will live in such a way that one or the other “field of force” will dominatehis or her life. No one can choose to be exempt.

There is something puzzling here. These texts suggest epic, eschatological struggles.The soteriological implication is for us to join the right side in that great division of forces.But most of our lives do not resemble dramatic conflict. In War and Peace, Pierre’smistake is to seek great causes – Masonic secrets, social reform, numerological destiny,the assassination of Napoleon – as his “salvation.” Other characters seek heroic levels ofpiety or military success or romantic fascination.

What they find is not what they were seeking. The homely Princess Marie, walled up inher piety, encounters a dashing cavalry officer who is dazzled by the loving kindness inher luminous eyes. Nicholai breaks with the pattern of profligate living and spends years redeeming his and his family’s honor. Natasha learns to give up girlish delight in theattention of handsome suitors. Pierre, in his desire to be at the center of the great battle,finds daily life with the soldiers a source of insight into life’s non-heroic meanings. Afterwell over a thousand pages, Tolstoy fast forwards several years and what do we see? Ordinary marital life – wives, kids, middle-aged girth, and occasional spats – and so lifegoes on.[8]

Daniel Deronda learns his destiny from the dying Morcedai and his Jewish origins fromhis long-lost mother, whom he meets in Genoa. Deronda’s destiny is to embrace hisJewish mission. Hers was to escape its confines. Instead of her father’s “endlessdiscoursing about Our People,” she says, “I cared for the wide world . . .” “. . . you cannever imagine what it is to have a man’s force of genius in you and yet to suffer theslavery of being a girl. To have a pattern cut out – ‘this is the Jewish woman; this is whatyou must be . . . a woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must bepressed small, like Chinese feet . . .” Meanwhile, Deronda himself is the better angel ofGwendolen’s nature. His example raised in her “a self-discontent which could be satisfiedonly by genuine change.” “. . . she had learned to see all her acts through the impressionthey would make on Deronda.” “She had a root of conscience in her, and the process ofpurgatory has begun for her on the green earth . . .” However, as the novelist explains,“Our consciences are not all of the same pattern, an inner deliverance of fixed laws; theyare the voice of sensibilities as various as our memories. . . .”[9] Each of these characters,and each of us, has different “human predicaments” and opportunities and callings.

Put in simple terms that reflect my own experience, the challenge of existentialsoteriology is to do whatever it is that life requires of you, to heed the divine call whichmay come simply as the voice of conscience or an impulse from our inner ground or signsput in our path or the sense that, as my wife once put it, “this fight has my name on it.”This involves not just a single divine call such as one may have in becoming a priest orminister but the daily, minute-by-minute promptings that may tell you sometimes to stepup and sometimes to stand down, sometimes to attend to your work or sometimes to takeyour wife on a date, sometimes to watch your kids play or, as an old-timer once told me,“sometimes I sits and thinks, sometimes I jes sits.” When I am frustrated by my lack ofprogress in one project or another, I am told in prayer, “Remember that your only job is todo each day what I tell you, even if it is to just sit there.”

At the beginning of Plato’s Euthydemus, Socrates relates to his friend Crito whathappened the previous day at the Lyceum: “It was according to some god that I chancedto be sitting alone there. I had intended to get up, but as I was getting up, the usual signcame to me, the divine sign. And so I sat down again.” He just sits there. After a while,young Clinias comes in, pursued by two sophists who, Socrates fears, “might destroy andruin him,” and the argument begins. Socrates was modeling, you might say, existential soteriology.

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