Voegelin's Debt to Augustine: The Mortgage of the City of God

Abstract

Eric Voegelin has been called “one of the representatives of Augustinianism in our time” (Shadia Drury, “Augustinian Radical Transcendence: Source of Political Excess” in Humanitas, 12, 2, p. 28). Such an assertion is not unfounded. His theoretical work on transcendent and immanent order positing Christianity as the greatest differentiation of order is indeed indebted to Augustine’s ground-breaking work on the two cities. Indeed, Voegelin’s collected works frequently reference and comment on Augustine. He is seemingly never far from Voegelin’s mind and Voegelin even goes as far as to point to a formulation of Augustine as “philosophically perfect.” Yet for all this it remains difficult to say what Voegelin truly thinks of the great Church Father. The works of Voegelin published during his lifetime have little prolonged treatment of Augustine, and his section on the saint in his History of Political Ideas is not nearly as original and provocative as many of his other sections. One is left wondering what precisely is the correspondence and difference between these two great thinkers regarding their philosophies of existence, and what debt does Voegelin owe to Augustine. Moreover, what is the import of the answers to these questions as we wander through this world, wrestling with the question so poignantly formulated by Francis Schaeffer, “How should we then live?” We already recognize that the answer will reverberate not only in our private lives but also in our civil-political relations, guiding us as we attempt to promote an order that at once understands what is and is not possible.Voegelin’s essential debt to Augustine is his existentially vivid explication of grace, which creates and sustains man’s existence within the metaxy. Along with Voegelin, Augustine understands that man lives within the tension of the metaxy, but he also understands that man likewise lives between God and the Devil. Understanding the need for grace to engender and guide experience is critical for the statesman and citizen who live in “the tension between the unseen measure and the necessity of incarnating it in…society,” and who will not be to find this “invisible harmony” at all “unless the soul be animated by an anticipating urge in the right direction” (Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. 68). Without grace, what hope does the political theorist have for the “imaginative re-enactment of the experiences of which theory is an explication” (ibid. p. 64)?This paper will explore the relationship between Voegelin’s non-dogmatic, experiential quest for order and Augustine’s quest for experiential illumination through grace. Whereas Voegelin formulates a philosophy of existence rooted in lived experience, Augustine’s experiences and reflection only find fulfillment in grace. In light of the eventual differences that must arise between two such approaches, the paper will outline the critique Augustine offers Voegelin. We will examine how Augustine’s doctrine of grace supplements Voegelin’s theoretical analysis and removes the ambiguity of Voegelin’s vague spirituality. Augustine offers a needed corrective to Voegelin through the appropriation of grace in politics and a defense of the civilizational worth of dogma.