Current Seminar:
• Voegelin's History of Political Ideas
8/12/2006
Lecture on Lonergan and Voegelin
Dr. David J. Walsh, Professor of Politics, Catholic University of America
Summary by Joanne Tetlow
David Walsh, who has edited volumes in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin and has written several
substantive books on political theory using Voegelin’s insight, method, and analysis as a framework, gave a wonderful
lecture to the Voegelin seminar participants about the connection between Lonergan and Voegelin. Having written
his M.A. thesis on a comparison of these two thinkers, Walsh briefly highlighted some of the distinct differences between them,
and then expanded on his understanding of Voegelin’s philosophy of consciousness.
Walsh explained that it was actually a footnote in Lonergan’s Method and Theology that led him to
Voegelin. He believes Lonergan did not carry forward the relation between religious experience and symbols; that Lonergan
left unresolved the relation between epistemology and experience; and that Voegelin offered a richer approach
to texts by emphasizing the experience of being in reality which underpinned the meaning of texts. For Walsh, Lonergan’s
scientific method moving to theological method was problematic. Lonergan did not acknowledge the radical
distinction between two kinds of knowing: (1) objects of inquiry as in science (intentionality), and (2) the reality in
which we participate (luminosity). Voegelin did.
Both “intentionality” and “luminosity” are the fundamental modes of experience and knowledge for Voegelin. What Voegelin
added was the crucial concept of “luminosity” in stating that knowledge is not merely a subject-object relation, but also
recognition that we are part of the reality we know and it is only from within that reality we can know anything. Voegelin expresses
this type of knowledge in the symbols of myth, philosophy, and revelation, and in his later work Ecumenic Age, volume IV of
Order and History, philosophy is absorbed into revelation leaving two fundamental modes of knowledge: myth and revelation. When
reality becomes luminous it is a revelatory event that is beyond concepts and words; what is known is that in the search for the good,
the ground of being itself is not part of that same reality. Voegelin’s theory of transcendence accounts for divine transcendence
as a ground beyond any knowing revelation.
Thus, the myth acts as a way to
explain immediately from a symbol a reality not directly experienced, e.g., creation and eschatological myths are examples of
furnishing knowledge about a revelatory order of which the myth itself is not a part. No person was there at
the beginning of the world and no person has seen the eschaton—the myths function as revelatory knowledge to connect our
participation in reality with a transcendence that is beyond.
Walsh noted how Voegelin changed course after 1974 moving towards a philosophy of consciousness which was in
tension with his earlier sweeping History of Political Ideas. Voegelin came to believe that “there was no such thing as a
history of political ideas.” His triad of “reality—experience—symbol” constituted the order of being and the context for meaning.
Ideas could not capture the reality and order of being. This is why Voegelin, unlike Lonergan, had problems with dogma,
which become literalized vitiating the underlying experience creating such truths and which inevitably led to a crisis of meaning.
Walsh clarified that Voegelin is not taking ideas out of experience, but rather raising experience to the level of consciousness.
The problem with Lonergan’s account of religious experience, for example, is that he explained it as a form of knowledge,
whereas, for Voegelin it is the “fact of revelation” which is its content. In short, it is the formation of the soul during the
experience of being in the revelatory event which is critical, not the content of knowledge itself.
This rich lecture by David Walsh merely set the stage for much more research, study, and discussion. To be sure,
there is much scholarship to do in the area of a Lonergan-Voegelin comparison. Walsh provided a general framework to help us get
started on our own luminosity of these great thinkers, and to set a comparative background for us as we pursue Lonergan’s book
Insight.
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