Eric Voegelin Quotes & Sayings

Don't immanentize the eschaton! — Eric Voegelin

Philosophy springs from the love of being; it is man's loving endeavor to perceive the order of being and attune himself to it. Gnosis desires dominion over being; in order to seize control of being the Gnostic constructs his system. The building of systems is a gnostic form of reasoning, not a philosophical one. — Eric Voegelin

The constancies and equivalences adumbrated work havoc with such settled topical blocks as myth and philosophy, natural reason and revelation, philosophy and religion, or the Orient with its cyclical time and Christianity with its linear history. And what is modem about the modem mind, one may ask, if Hegel, Comte, or Marx, in order to create an image of history that will support their ideological imperialism, still use the same techniques for distorting the reality of history as their Sumerian predecessors? — Eric Voegelin

Gnostic politics is self-defeating in so far as its disregard for the structure of reality leads to continuous warfare. — Eric Voegelin

The use of method as the criterion of science abolishes theoretical relevance. As a consequence, all propositions concerning facts will be promoted to the dignity of science, regardless of their relevance, as long as they result from a correct use of method. Since the ocean of facts is infinite, a prodigious expansion of science in the sociological sense becomes possible, giving employment to scientistic technicians and leading to the fantastic accumulation of irrelevant knowledge through huge "research projects" whose most interesting features is the quantifiable expense that has gone into their production. — Eric Voegelin

The course of history as a whole is no object of experience; history has no edios, because the course of history extends into the unknown future. — Eric Voegelin

[Under Marxism] Christ the Redeemer is replaced by the steam engine as the promise of the realm to come. — Eric Voegelin

The problem of an eidos in history, hence, arises only when a Christian transcendental fulfillment becomes immanentized. Such an immanentist hypostasis of the eschaton, however, is a theoretical fallacy. — Eric Voegelin

Christ is the head of the corpus mysticum, which includes all men from the beginning of the world to its end. He is not the president of a special-interest club. — Eric Voegelin

...the spiritual disorder of our time, the civilizational crisis of which everyone so readily speaks, does not by any means have to be born as an inevitable fate; that, on the contrary, everyone possesses the means of overcoming it in his own life. And our effort should not only indicate the means, but also how to employ them. No one is obliged to take part in the spiritual crises of society; on the contrary, everyone is obliged to avoid the folly and live his life in order. — Eric Voegelin

A further reason for my hatred of ... ideologies is quite a primitive one. I have an aversion to killing people for the fun of it. What the fun is, I did not quite understand at the time, but in the intervening years the ample exploration of revolutionary consciousness has cast some light on this matter. The fun consists in gaining a pseudo-identity through asserting one's power, optimally by killing somebody - a pseudo-identity that serves as a substitute for the human self that has been lost ... A good example of the type of self that has to kill other people in order to regain in an Ersatzform what it has lost is the famous Saint-Juste, who says that Brutus either has to kill other people or kill himself.
... I have no sympathy whatsoever with such characters and have never hesitated to characterize them as murderous swine. — Eric Voegelin

The experience of a cosmos existing in precarious balance on the edge of emergence from nothing and returning to nothing must be acknowledged, therefore, as lying at the center of the primary experience of the cosmos. — Eric Voegelin