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

The 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.

The Subject of History

The problem of identity just adumbrated was never completely thought through during the Ecumenic Age itself. The high point of its penetration was reached by St. Augustine when he discerned the movement of amore Dei as the existential exodus from the pragmatic world of power–incipit exire, qui incipit amare¹–and, consequently, conceived the “intermingling” of the civitas Dei with the civitas terrena as the In-Between reality of history. In the construction of his Civitas Dei, however, he subordinated these great insights to a historiogenetic pattern whose unilinear history came to its meaningful end in the dual ecumenism of the Church and Roman Empire. Beyond the dual ecumenism of his present, history had no meaning but the waiting for the eschatological events. …St. Augustine tried to solve the mystery of meaning by attributing to certain events and societies an eschatological ultimacy beyond the meaning of their existence in the historical metaxy, and this attempt as a type recurs frequently in the construction of identities for the subject of history.

In the long course of Western history since St. Augustine, the problem has changed its appearance but not its structure. The contents of the Augustinian historiogenesis, it is true, have crumbled under the pressure of a vastly enlarged knowledge of history, but the symbolic form itself has survived the demise of its Christian-imperial substance; for the speculative thinkers of the Enlightenment and Romanticism continued to use the form for the construction of unilinear histories that would lead up to the imperial present of their respective choice, i.e., one or the other variety of ideological ecumenism, endowed like the Augustinian dual ecumenism with eschatological ultimacy of meaning. As for the Augustinian insights concerning the historical metaxy, they did not fare too well. Rather than being further developed, they were badly deformed by what Hegel has called the “Protestant Principle” of relocating the world of divine intellect (die Intellektual-Welt) in the mind of man, so that “one can see, know, and feel in one’s own consciousness everything that formerly was beyond.”² That is to say, the historical metaxy was perverted into a dialectical movement in the intellectual’s consciousness. As a consequence of the fate that has befallen the Civitas Dei, we are today still in suspense between the assumption that history must be the history of something–empires, city-states, nation-states, civilizations, or ecumenic mankind–and the uneasy suspicion that the process of history cannot be predicated on societies which appear and disappear in its course. Each of the supposed subjects of the process has become suspect of being an hypostasis. …

The temptation to hypostatize historically passing societies into ultimate subjects of history is strongly motivated. At its core lies the tension, emotionally dificult to bear, between the meaning a society has in its historical existence and the never quite repressible knowledge that all things that come into being will come to an end. …The dreamers of a society that will live happily forever after once it has come into existence are reluctant to face the insight of Anaximander’s dictum (A9; B1): “The origin (arche) of things is the Apeiron… . It is necessary for things to perish into that from which they were born; for they pay one another penalty for their injustice (adikia) according to the ordinance of Time.”

Anaximander’s Truth of the Process

In their exposed position of Hellenic city-states neighboring on Asiatic empires, the Ionians had ample opportunity to experience the violence of the Ecumenic Age. The Anaximandrian fragment happens to be the earliest extant pronouncement by a philosopher on the process of reality and its structure. Moreover, Anaximander’s compact experience and symbolization of the cosmic process has informed the understanding of the process down to Polybius. The fragment, thus, has become the key symbolism for what may be called the tragic experience of history. …

Reality was experienced by Anaximander (fl. 560 B.C.) as a cosmic process in which things emerge from, and disappear into, the non-existence of the Apeiron. Things do not exist out of themselves, all at once and forever; they exist out of the ground to which they return. Hence, to exist means to participate in two modes of reality: (1) In the Apeiron as the timeless arche of things and (2) in the ordered succession of things as the manifestations of the Apeiron in time. This dual participation of things in reality has been expressed by Heraclitus (fl. 500 B.C.) in the terse language of the mysteries (B 62):

Immortals mortals
mortals immortals
live the others’ death
the others’ life die.

Reality in the mode of existence is experienced as immersed in reality in the mode of non-existence and, inversely, non-existence reaches into existence. The process has the character of an In-Between reality, governed by the tension of life and death. …

The Dialogue of Mankind

Herodotus

Conquest is exodus, for one must leave behind what one has in order to conquer; and this expansion of existence beyond the order of existence achieved arouses the envy of the gods. This is the moral of the story. Herodotus, it appears, has shrewdly discerned the problem of a concupiscential exodus from reality under the apparently realistic surface of ecumenic conquest.

Thucydides

In the Histories [of Herodotus], the mystery of the process is eclipsed by the imagery of a power game played by gods and men. Man’s humanity has been contracted to his libidinous self, and the gods have shared his fate. Still, the Herodotean figures are not quite insensitive to the mystery. They know enough about right and wrong to know that something is wrong with the success (eutychia) of expanding power; whatever it is, this wrong attracts the disastrous intervention of the gods. Herodotus, then, has discerned the nature of the wrong as the concupiscential exodus from reality. Of the mystery, thus, at least a shudder is left.

No shudder is left in the Melian dialogue of Thucydides. The eclipsing imagery is elevated to the rank of reality itself (V, 105):

“Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessity of nature they rule wherever they can. We neither made this law nor were the first to act on it; we found it to exist before us and shall leave it to exist forever after us; we only make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, if you were as strong as we are, would act as we do.”

The Anaximandrian process in which the “things” participate has become the law by which the power-self acts. Even more, the process hypostatized into a law is a necessity of nature operative in the very man who commits the hypostasis: a fictitious identity of conquest with reality can be achieved by identifying reality with humanity contracted to its libidinous self. By the game of transforming reality in the image of deformed existence, history has found the subject who can master it – at least until Aegospotami. Those who are not the subject, in this case the Melians, have the choice between submission and massacre.

The games by which the power-self makes itself the fictitious master of history are still played today. The modern parallel of political situations in which the subject of history has identified itself come easily to mind. What needs emphasis is rather the difference of spiritual and intellectual rank. For the Athenian negotiators admit, and even stress, the horror in its starkness; they do not make the slightest attempt at smearing it over with idealisms, ideological verities, or speculative systems. It is true, they have deformed their existence and created an imaginary reality that will allow them “to do their thing,” but in the background of this imaginary reality there still is the tragic consciousness of the process. They have not sunk to the untragic vileness of the ideologist who cannot commit the murder he wants to commit in order to gain an “identity” in place of the self he has lost, without moralistically appealing to a dogma of ultimate truth. …

The modern obsession with deforming reality through the contraction of man’s humanity into the libidinous self, through the murder of God, and through the refusal to participate in the dialogue of mankind in which God in the partner, can hardly be realized in its full violence, unless it is contrasted with the great openness of the classic philosophers. Aristotle, it is true, did not accept the gods of the myth as the arche of things, but from his last years there is extant the fragment of a letter: “The more I am by myself and alone, the more I have come to love myths.” A “modern age” in which the thinkers who ought to be philosophers prefer the role of imperial entrepreneurs will have to go through many convulsions before it has got rid of itself, together with the arrogance of its revolt, and found the way back to the dialogue of mankind with its humility.

Jacob Burckhardt on the Process of History

When the process of reality becomes luminous, a line of meaning appears in history. But no more than that. Noetic consciousness does not stop the process in which it is an event. The process goes on; and the new luminosity, if anything, makes its mystery more tantalizing than ever. Hence, the fire exceeding bright must not be used to obscure the darkness that comprehended it not.

These observations would have appeared all too obvious to the people of the Ecumenic Age, especially to the philosophers who differentiated noetic consciousness. In our time they need emphasis, for the lights of the various speculative systems which dominate the public unconscious are used precisely for the purpose of obscuring the reality of the process and of pretending that it can be stopped. It will be apposite, therefore, to refer to Jacob Burckhardt, one of the rare modern historians who has faced the issue and analyzed it.

In his 1868 lectures On the Study of History, Burckhardt reflected on the conventional judgments that weigh progress in history against the price to be paid for it in human misery. “The greatest example is the Roman Empire … accomplished through the subjection of Orient and Occident with immeasurable rivers of blood. Here we discern, on a large scale, a world-historical purpose, obvious at least to us: The creation of a common world-culture, making possible the expansion of a new world-religion, both to be passed on to the Germanic barbarians as the future cohesive force of a new Europe.” (263). Such weighing, he decides, though suggestive, is not permissible, because it rests on the fallacy that world-history is performed for the benefit of the person who indulges in the weighing. “Everybody considers his own time to be, not one of the many passing waves, but the fulfilment of time… . All things, however, and we are no exception, exist not for their own sake but for the whole and the whole future… . The life of mankind is a whole; its temporal and local vicissitudes appear as an up and down, a fortune and misfortune, only to the weakness of our understanding; in truth they belong to an higher necessity” (159f). The formulation is deceptively mild, but behind it stands Burckhardt’s hard insight into the existential motivations of such weighing: It is “our profound and most ridiculous selfishness” (259). The suffering of the many is treated as a “passing misfortune;” one refers to the undeniable fact that periods of lasting order are, in most cases, the sequel to atrocious struggles for power; and one belongs, by one’s own existence, to an historical present that has been gained from the suffering of others (259). The profound methodological debates about the history that has to be written anew by every generation from the position of its own present, and about the “values” of historians which determine different conceptions of history, are wiped out by Burckhardt’s insight into their existential root in “our most profound and most ridiculous selfishness.” The suffering is real and so are the violators who inflict it on the victims. This violence is evil; and it does not become less evil, if a power situation that has been created by such evil is taken into care by better men, so that in the end mere power “is transformed into order and law.” …

Burckhardt’s uncompromising stance was necessary in opposition to a climate of opinion in which nonsense, both hypocritical and illiterate, on the issue abounded; and today it is even more necessary than it was a hundred years ago. And yet, if this were to be the last word on the matter, it would reduce the mystery of the process to the alternatives of stagnant goodness and criminal progress, something like the Platonic alternatives of a polis for pigs and the feverish polis. Moreover, it would create the illusion of a choice where no choice exists and, thus, foster precisely the vulgarity of moralistic egoism which Burckhardt detested most. Here, one must distinguish with some care between the two lines of thought that in his reflections intersect.

There is, first, the line of attack on the “egoists” who want to appropriate history and its meaning to a situation of their preference. All speculative constructions of “world-history,” whether of St. Augustine, or Hegel, or of the progressivist thinkers, are brushed aside as “impertinent anticipations.” For “Eternal Wisdom” has not informed us about its purposes. The “philosophers of history” which pretend to a knowledge of the “world-plan” are not unprejudiced but “colored by ideas which the philosophers absorbed when they were three or four years old.” (5). …

In his second line of thought Burckhardt is concerned with the reality of the process as it presents itself to the thinker once the deforming constructions of meaning are removed. In his attempt, however, he encounters certain difficulties. For the deformations of reality through speculative “philosophies of history” cannot simply be thrown out. They are also events in the process; and any categorization of historical phenomena will have to be general enough to include the deformations as intelligible events. Burckhardt was aware of this problem; as the passages quoted have shown, he uses the category of “egoism” or “selfishness” to characterize both the violent conqueror and the violent constructor of world-historical meaning. But “egoism” as an existential category, though it carries conviction because of its generally correct intent, does not have sufficient analytical weight as a concept. “Egoism,” like “optimism,” “pessimism,” “nihilism,” “altruism,” and so forth, belongs to the newspeak of the Enlightenment; and while it makes good sense in the self-articulation of a subjectively deformed existence, one hesitates to use it in critical language. To dispose of Napoleon’s conquest and of Hegel’s system as two manifestations of “egoism” is not quite satisfactory, even if the characterization is not all wrong. …

…Conquest is not merely “evil,” is not merely a manifestation of “aggressiveness.” While the most obvious strain in conquering expansion is the “violence” and “selfishness” which Burckhardt stresses, there is also the strain of “boredom” and “discontent” with every achievement and of imaginative enterprise that will assuage the unrest. The release of the tension on the line of ecumenic conquest and mass murder, though it is a derailment from existential order, is still an act of imaginative transcendence. The concupiscential exodus of the conqueror is a deformation of humanity, but it bears the mark of man’s existential tension just as much as the philosopher’s, or the prophet’s, or the saint’s exodus. The structure of the Metaxy reaches, beyond noetic consciousness, down into the concupiscential roots of action.

Notes

1. Ennarrationes in Pslamos 64.2.
2. Hegel, Vorlesungen ueber die Geschichte der Philosophie (Stuttgart, 1965), Vol. 3, (Jubilaeumsausgabe, ed. Hermann Glockner, Vol. 19), 300.