the New Pantagruel

Empire and Its Discontents

by Eric Voegelin

Excerpted from chapter 3, “The Process of History,” of Eric Voegelin’s Order and History, vol. 4: “The Ecumenic Age” (Louisiana University Press, 1974).

Order and History, Eric Voegelin’s five-volume study of how human and divine order are intertwined and manifested in history, has been widely acclaimed as one of the great intellectual achievements of our age.

In the fourth volume, The Ecumenic Age, Voegelin breaks with the course he originally charted for the series, in which human existence in society and the corresponding symbolism of order were to be presented in historical succession. The analyses in the three previous volumes remain valid as far as they go, Voegelin explains, but the original conception proved “untenable because it had not taken proper account of the important lines of meaning in history that did not run along lines of time.”

The Ecumenic Age treats history not as a stream of human beings and their actions in time, but as the process of man’s participation in a flux of divine presence that has eschatological direction. “The process of history, and such order as can be discerned in it,” Voegelin writes, “is not a story to be told from the beginning to its happy, or unhappy, end; it is a mystery in process of revelation.”

In the present volume, Voegelin applies his revised conception of historical analysis to the “Ecumenic Age,” a pivotal period that extends roughly from the rise of the Persian Empire to the fall of the Roman. The age is marked by the advent of a new type of political unit–the ecumenic empire–achieved at the cost of unprecedented destruction. Yet the pragmatic destructiveness of the age is paralleled by equally unprecedented spiritual creativity, born from the need to make sense of existence in the wake of imperial conquest. These spiritual outbursts gave rise to the great ecumenic religions and raised fundamental questions for human self-understanding that extend into our historical present.

The men living in the Ecumenic Age were forced by the events into reflections on the meaning of their course. …

The Process of Reality

he issue that appeared to take precedence over all others was the problem of identity. A process has to be the process of something, but the something of which the Ecumenic Age was the process proved elusive. … If the something could not be found, could history possibly be the history of nothing? Could there be such a thing as the historical process of history? … During the Ecumenic Age … the violent diminution, destruction, and disappearance of older societies, as well as the embarrassing search, by the conquering powers, for the identity of their foundations, was the bewildering experience that engendered the “ecumene” as the hitherto unsuspected subject of the historical process.

This new symbol, however, was plagued with ontological difficulties. For the ecumene was not a society in concretely organized existence, but the telos of a conquest to be perpetrated. In the pursuit of the telos, then, the ecumene in the cultural sense turned out to be much larger than expected, and the conquest never reached its goal. Moreover, one could not conquer the nonexistent ecumene without destroying the existent societies, and one could not destroy them without becoming aware that the new imperial society, established by destructive conquest, was just as destructible as the societies now conquered; the whole process seemed devoid of sense. When finally enough contemporarily living humans were coralled into an empire to support the fiction of an ecumene, the collected humanity turned out to be not much of a mankind, unless their universal status as human beings under God was recognized. And when universal humanity was understood as deriving from man’s existence in presence under God, the symbolism of an ecumenic mankind under an imperial government suffered a serious diminution of status. Philosophically, the ecumene was a miserable symbol.

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