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ABSTRACT
Eric Voegelin’s intellectual project has typically been described as involved in the rehabilitation of classical political philosophy and in the diagnosis of Gnostic tendencies in modernity. In his work, however, he repeatedly points to the late-medieval/early modern concept of toleration as a necessary addition to the Platonic-Aristotelian legacy he was concerned with retrieving. This article explores Voegelin’s understanding of toleration, and especially its Bodinian origins. As the article demonstrates, his understanding of toleration is deeply intertwined with a Bodinian understanding of religion, and as such it may be more difficult to integrate with other elements of Voegelin’s thought than he himself believed.
Notes
1. For a survey that considers Voegelin, Strauss, and Arendt in this context, see Volpi, “Rehabilitation of Practical Philosophy.” I must obviously add that more modern elements—for instance, Kantian ones—are present in the work of Arendt.
2. Arendt, The Human Condition, 23–71.
3. Strauss, “The Three Waves of Modernity,” 91.
4. While some authors use “tolerance” to refer to the personal virtue and reserve “toleration” for the political practice, here both terms will be used interchangeably. After all, not all who distinguish them do it in the same way, nor is such a terminological distinction available in all languages.
5. If the work of Alasdair MacIntyre is taken to represent a later version of the same impulse, his reflections on tolerance can exemplify at least one of the possible forms such an attempt can take. See MacIntyre, “Toleration and the Goods of Conflict.”
6. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 6.
7. For a discussion of this approach, see Canovan, “Friendship, Truth, and Politics.”
8. Theses for the American Political Science Association December 28, 1946, in Voegelin, Selected Correspondence, Citation1924–Citation1949, Collected Works, 29:487. Hereafter references to Voeglin’s Collected Works cite just the volume and page numbers.
9. Since the object of this article is to explore Voegelin’s approach to toleration, questions about the adequacy of his interpretation of Jean Bodin, and questions of Bodinian scholarship more broadly, are left aside. Here I am only concerned with the effects of his reading of Bodin on Voegelin himself. For Bodin’s own mysticism, see the discussion of the literature in Cooper, Eric Voegelin, 239–24.
10. Voegelin, “Equivalences of Experience,” 118.
11. Voegelin to Eduard Baumgarten, June 23, 1931, in Selected Correspondence,Citation1924–Citation1949, 29:82.
12. Voegelin to Eduard Baumgarten, November 28, 1932, in ibid., 29:105.
13. Voegelin to Manfred Henningsen, May 17, 1969, in Selected Correspondence, Citation1950–Citation1984, 30:598.
14. For this concern, see, above all, the preface to Voegelin, The Political Religions, 23–25.
15. See, e.g., the contemporary application in Corey, “Dogmatomachy: Ideological Warfare.”
16. Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, vol. 4 of Order and History, 17:96.
17. Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, 5:132.
18. Ibid., 5:134.
19. Ibid., 5:210.
20. Ibid., 5:204.
21. Ibid., 5:205. Twenty years earlier, he had already put forward similar arguments in defense of an authoritarian government for Austria as the only possible defense against the pressure of Fascists from the south and of National Socialists from the north. In his Autobiographical Reflections Voegelin does not refer to Popper, but to Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson’s Citation1949 affirmation that democracy is “not a suicide pact.” Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections, 69.
22. Popper, The Open Society, 581 n.4.
23. The contrast can be extended to other issues as well. In a contemporary letter, Voegelin writes that “I have just published an article on ‘The Origins of Scientism’ which in its tendency is the exact opposite of Popper’s approach.” Voegelin to William C. Havard. January 1, Citation1949, in Selected Correspondence, Citation1924–Citation1949, 29:591.
24. When Voegelin writes of “the parlor game, so much beloved among liberals, of panning Plato and Aristotle as fascists,” hardly any other work is as plausible a target as Popper’s. Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, 5:226.
25. Voegelin to Leo Strauss, April 18, Citation1950, in Selected Correspondence, Citation1950–Citation1984, 30:53.
26. Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, 5:136. Voegelin also refers to Bergson in his letter to Strauss cited in the previous note.
27. Gontier, “Voegelin as Reader of Bergson.”
28. Voegelin, Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, 5:308–13.
29. Voegelin, Selected Correspondence, Citation1924–Citation1949, 29:487.
30. Voegelin, Selected Correspondence, Citation1950–Citation1984, 30:71.
31. For some of these revisionary studies, see Nederman, Worlds of Difference; Murphy, Conscience and Community; Bowlin, “Tolerance Among the Fathers.”
32. For his discussion of Cusanus, see Voegelin, The Later Middle Ages, 21:256–66. Voegelin’s admiration of Cusanus among his contemporaries can easily be placed alongside his admiration for Bodin. Nicholas of Cusa has remained a focus of contemporary research into the history of toleration. See, e.g., Solari, “Contornos de la tolerancia medieval.”
33. Voegelin, The Later Middle Ages, 21:257.
34. For a synthesis and defense, see Horton, “Traditional Conception.”
35. Remer, Humanism and the Rhetoric of Toleration. An earlier work covering that literature which was known to Voegelin is Joseph Lecler’s history of toleration in the Reformation. See Voegelin, “Liberalism and Its History,” 84.
36. Voegelin, Selected Correspondence, Citation1950–Citation1984, 30:71 (my italics).
37. Ibid., 30:88.
38. Voegelin to Eduard Baumgarten, August 19, 1931, in Selected Correspondence, Citation1924–Citation1949, 29:86–87.
39. Voegelin to Eduard Baumgarten, August 25, 1936, in ibid., 29:134.
40. Voegelin, Religion and Modernity, 23:180; almost the same words are used in Voegelin, Renaissance and Reformation, 22:217.
41. Cooper, Eric Voegelin, 226–46.
42. Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections, 138–39.
43. Voegelin to Friedrich Engel-Janosi, March 31, 1943, in Selected Correspondence, Citation1924–Citation1949, 29:357.
44. Voegelin, Religion and Modernity, 23:23.
45. Ibid., 23:240. See the discussion of this concept in Cooper, Eric Voegelin, 238–44.
46. Voegelin, Religion and Modernity, 23:207.
47. Ibid., 23:184.
48. Ibid., 23:205.
49. Ibid., 23:218.
50. Voegelin to Carl Schmitt, May 8, 1951, in Selected Correspondence, Citation1950–Citation1984, 30:89; In print he would also state that “Averroës had a point.” Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, 5:204.
51. Voegelin, Religion and Modernity, 23:68; See, in the same volume, 108–33, his discussion of Vitoria, and the discussion of Thomas More in Voegelin, Renaissance and Reformation, 22:109–30. On Voegelin’s reading of the Reformation, see Stevenson, “An Agnostic View of Voegelin’s Gnostic Calvin.”
52. See Voegelin, Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, 5:261–71.
53. Voegelin, Religion and Modernity, 23:218. The rationale for prohibition is also explicitly stated on page 215.
54. Ibid., 23:211.
55. Ibid., 23:213.
56. Voegelin, Renaissance and Reformation, 22:98.
57. Ibid., 22:115.
58. Voegelin to Carl Joachim Friedrich, April 12, Citation1959, in Selected Correspondence, Citation1950–Citation1984, 30:386.
59. Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections, 74.
60. Voegelin, “On Debate and Existence,” 44.
61. Voegelin, Israel and Revelation, 41.
62. Ibid., 45.
63. For the discussion of the dissolution, see ibid., 45–50.
64. Voegelin, “Equivalences of Experience,” 117.
65. Ibid.
66. Voegelin, “Immortality,” 54.
67. Voegelin, “Equivalences of Experience,” 118.
68. Voegelin, New Science of Politics, 5:139–40.
69. Voegeiln to Alfred Schütz, July 1, Citation1953, in Selected Correspondence, Citation1950–Citation1984, 30:129.
70. Ibid., 30:130.
71. Habermas and Ratzinger, Dialectics of Secularization, 35.
72. Corey, “Dogmatomachy: Ideological Warfare,” 61–62.
73. For a general introduction to this topic, see Duraj, “Role of Metaxy in the Political Philosophy of Eric Voegelin.”
74. Voegelin, “Equivalences of Experience,” 119.
75. See the discussion in ibid., 119–20; and Voegelin, Israel and Revelation, 39–41.
76. Forst, Toleration in Conflict, 505–6; King, Toleration, xiii.
77. On that view see the studies collected in Karpov and Svensson, Secularization, Desecularization, and Toleration.
78. Voegelin, “Immortality,” 72–73. For the Augustinian character of this theme, see Azerrad, “Metaxy and the Unrest of Existence.”
79. Voegelin, Religion and Modernity, 23:210.
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Notes on contributors
Manfred Svensson
Manfred Svensson is Professor of Philosophy at the Universidad de los Andes, Chile. His main areas of research are the Protestant reception of Aristotle and the history of the concept of toleration. His latest books are Aquinas Among the Protestants, co-edited with David VanDrunen (Blackwell, 2017), and Secularization, Desecularization, and Toleration: Cross-Disciplinary Challenges to a Modern Myth, co-edited with Vyacheslav Karpov (Palgrave, 2020).