Platonska idéer som Guds krafter och attribut

Trots tonvikten på Filons omtolkning av platonismens idéer som skapade förnekar Wolfson inte att idéer av ett annat slag eller i en annan mening återfinns i Guds eget tänkande på det icke-skapade planet. Allt blir extra oklart genom den nu, vid mötet mellan den den grekiska filosofin och den bibliska religionen, ständigt alltmer närvarande, mer strikt teistisk-personliga läran om τέχνη-skapelsen, nu entydigt förstådd som en skapelse av Gud som identisk med den högsta verkligheten och – i jämförelse med demiurgen, som det synes – strikt transcendent i förhållande till allt skapat.

Filon tycks vackla mellan den bibliska läran om skapelse ur intet, som alltså anses kunna förstås bokstavligt och filosofiskt, och den filosofiska läran om manifestation ur Guds väsen. Idéerna som skapade är för honom verkliga väsen på ett annat sätt än idéerna som blott tankar i Guds sinne – tankar och sinne som, såsom varande i Gud förstådd som skild från den absoluta helheten, också måste vara oskapade och transcendenta i förhållande till det skapade. Det är för Filon till att börja med självklart att idéerna finns också som Guds tankar, eftersom Gud alltid är medveten om det han skapar och alltid tänkande. Men de tankar som skapats som självständiga idéer utom Guds tänkande och som utgör mönstren för den materiella skapelsens ting är blott en liten del av den oändliga mångfald av idéer som evigt existerar i Guds tänkande och som endast utgör möjliga skapade idévärldar och efter dessa skapade fysiska världar. [Philo (1948), I, 208-10.] För idéerna som Guds tankar använder Filon emellertid inte termen idéer utan termen “krafter” (δυνάμεις).

Filon associerar även de skapade idéerna med de gammaltestamentliga uttrycken för den Guds makt och härlighet som i olika former s.a.s. omger Gud. I Septuaginta förekommer uttryck som κύριος σαβαώθ, κύριος τῶν δυνάμεων och κύριος παντοκράτωρ som olika översättningar av samma hebreiska uttryck. [Ibid. 218-21.] Men modifierande sin i övrigt dominerande apofatiska och abstrakta betoning av Guds kunskapsmässigt oåtkomliga transcendens, tolkar Filon härligheten, krafterna och härskarorna också som Gudsattribut och Gudsegenskaper, identiska med Gud själv. Guddiludd. Och därvid sammanförs de med idébegreppet som Guds med Gud själv identiska, eviga, oändligt mångfaldiga tankar, de oskapade idéerna i Guds sinne. [Ibid. 221-3; jfr Charles Bigg, The Christian Platonists of Alexandria (1886 (1970)), 13 f.] Även frågan om idéernas/krafternas eventuella personifikation hos Filon diskuteras av Wolfson. [Den diskuteras även av Bigg.]

Idébegreppet associeras hos Filon också med Guds allmakt. En skillnad finns mellan begreppet παντοκράτωρ (allhärskare) i sig och begreppet allmakt definierat som “allsmäktighet”, men Septuagintas term παντοκράτωρ används för vad som med tiden utbildades till den klassiska bibliska teismens uppfattning av Gud som allsmäktig. Det är i betydelsen allsmäktighet som den i allmänhet kommit att förstås och översättas. Det är väsentliga här är dock att det för Filon är idén (ἰδέα), som en kraft (δύναμις), som är det väsentliga uttrycket för den Guds egenskap som senare uppfattats som Guds – personliga – allsmäktighet. Strikt historiskt uttrycker denna Filons uppfattning av idén på detta plan åtminstone Guds personliga härskardöme över alltet.

Med Wolfsons tolkning skulle vi hos Filon här kunna säga oss finna dels element i Gudsuppfattningen som balanserar via negativa och den abstrakta och därmed snarast opersonliga transcendensen, dels en Gud som inte är begränsad heller av den ideella ordningen. Samtidigt som Bibelns Gud blivit rationaliserad och avpersonaliserad, skulle vi även i Filons av den grekiska idealistiska filosofins kategorier formade uttryck för hans lära finna åtminstone vissa drag av en Gud som är mer personlig än denna filosofis. Och det är detta som är den här mest centrala konsekvensen av det nya mötet mellan Grekland och Israel, av införandet av vad som kanske kan kallas den senares uppenbarelseteism i den förras rationella idealism.

Stanlis och naturrätten

Stanlis visade i Edmund Burke and the Natural Law (1954) att Burkes historicism, tvärtemot vad såväl Strauss som de moderna “positivistiska” uttolkarna från var sin utgångspunkt gjorde gällande, var förenlig med den klassisk och kristna naturrättsliga objektivismen, med natural law. Boken utkom strax efter Strauss’ verk och tillämpade delvis dennes grundläggande distinktion på frågan om Burke. Det var nu inte längre möjligt att hävda att Burke helt enkelt var motståndare till naturrätten, ty Strauss hade övertygande visat att det fanns två (med en grov indelning som dock klargör det väsentliga för mitt resonemang här – naturligtvis finns, som Stanlis också framhåller, underavdelningar av båda) distinkta och åtminstone i vissa avseenden vitt skilda typer av naturrätt.

Det blev nu tydligare att Burke kunde vända sig inte bara mot den abstrakta, spekulativa universalism som enligt honom urskillningslöst våldförde sig på organiskt framvuxna historiska förhållanden, utan också mot den moraliska och värdemässiga relativism som följer ur en konsekvent historicism. Stanlis menar att Burke således lyckas väga samman en förståelse för värdena i det organiskt och historiskt specifika med erkännandet av en objektiv moralisk och värdemässig ordning som är av ett radikalt annorlunda slag än den upplysningstänkarna ville konstruera. Den klassisk-kristna naturrätten, sådan Strauss presenterar den och sådan Burke enligt Stanlis uppfattar den, är en objektiv moralisk ordning, oberoende av människans vilja och spekulativa bemödanden, en i förhållande till den positiva mänskliga rättsordningen transcendent norm.

Emellertid är gränslinjen mellan de olika typerna av naturrätt inte alltid helt klar, beroende på de ofta subtila begreppsliga förskjutningarna och förändringarna under upplysningen, som på ett sätt som inte alltid var omedelbart uppenbart gav gamla termer en ny innebörd – och inte minst termerna natur och naturlig. I synnerhet i mer retoriska framställningar som Burkes kan kontinuiteten därför ibland synas större än den i själva verket är. Ibland är det också fråga om tyngdpunktsförskjutningar snarare än filosofiskt grundade, mer helhetliga omdefinitioner, i synnerhet i England där de nya idéerna ibland på inte helt självklart sätt förenas med den äldre traditionen som där förblev levande inte bara i common law-traditionen som sådan utan också hos rättsfilosofer som sökte tona ned den borgerliga revolutionens radikalitet och föra vidare det klassiska och kristna arvet på detta område.

Stanlis sammanfattar hursomhelst inledningsvis de mest allmänna kännetecknen hos uppfattningen om natural law: “[T]here is evident throughout the various Natural Law traditions a hard core of fundamental ethical, legal, and political beliefs. These constantly recurring cardinal principles are so deeply ingrained in human thought that, however much they may be ignored or obscured, they have successfully resisted every effort to destroy them, and are as alive in the twentieth century as they were in the fourth century B.C.” [Op.cit. 6.] De djupaste och mest omfattande formuleringarna av den klassiska och kristna naturrätten finner han hos Cicero respektive Thomas av Aquino:

”Cicero supplied the touchstone for the classical conception of Natural Law; St. Thomas supplied it for the Scholastics. The Roman Stoic thought Natural Law stemmed from God, its ’author’ and ’interpreter’, whereas the Christian saint believed that man, as a rational creature created in the spiritual image of God, was capable of fulfilling his moral nature by participating in God’s reason and will through the Natural Law.” [Ibid. 7.]

Här aktualiseras naturligtvis frågan om Ciceros Gudsuppfattning, hans version av ”filosofernas Gud”, i förhållande till Thomas’. Ciceros filosofiske Gud kunde också framställas som ägande personliga drag eller i personaliserad form. Men vi måste också komma ihåg hur Thomas’ och skolastikens Gudsuppfattning också i hög grad blivit filosofisk, hur kristendomen i stor utsträckning kommit att överta filosofernas Gud, något som ju bidrar till att förklara kontinuiteten också mellan de klassiska och kristna naturrätten.

Denna kontinuitet bestod, betonar Stanlis, ända fram till Hobbes. Skillnader och variationer fanns förvisso: ”Not all adherents of Natural Law believed the same principles, and what was stressed by one writer was often minimized by another.” Men natural law antogs nästan alltid vara en emanation ur Guds förnuft och, i synnerhet naturligtvis i den kristna tolkningen, vilja; ”the most common principle of Natural Law was that God ruled the universe through an eternal and universal law”. [Ibid.] Stanlis sammanfattar de gemensamma, allmänna och grundläggande principerna:

”Natural Law was an emanation of God’s reason and will, revealed to all mankind. Since fundamental moral laws were self-evident, all normal men were capable through unaided ‘right reason’ of perceiving the difference between moral right and wrong. The Natural Law was an eternal, unchangeable, and universal ethical norm or standard, whose validity was independent of man’s will; therefore, at all times, in all circumstances and everywhere it bound all individuals, races, nations, and governments. True happiness for man consisted in living according to the Natural Law. Whereas Natural Law came from God and bound all men, various positive laws and customs were the product of man’s reason and will and applied only to embers of particular political communities. This was the distinction between Natural Law and civil laws. Finally, no positive law or social convention was morally valid if it violated the Natural Law; moral sovereignty and justice, therefore, were intrinsic, and not the product of power exercised by kings or popular legislatures.” [Ibid.]

Inte bara den kristna utan också den klassiska versionen av den traditionella naturrättsuppfattningen i väst är alltså i åtminstone viss mening teistisk. Den moraliska och på en allmän nivå rättsliga ordning det är fråga om härrör ut den metafysiska verklighet som är Guds förnuft och vilja. Begreppet natur har alltså många olika betydelser. Naturrätten är s.a.s. inte något vi nödvändigtvis hittar om vi går ut i skogen. Den ordning det här är fråga om transcenderar naturen i denna mening, även om naturligtvis också denna enligt den klassisk-kristna traditionen på olika sätt härrör ur samma metafysiska verklighet och alltid är direkt förenad med den, som emanation, eller som skapelse. Det är detta förhållande som förklarar hur naturrätten kan verka och upprätthållas också på den mänskliga nivån.

Classical Idealism

In his doctoral thesis from 1937, Humanism and Naturalism: A Comparative Study of Ernest Seillière, Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, written under the direction of Ernst Cassirer at Gothenburg University, Claes Ryn’s teacher Folke Leander gives an account of Seillière’s view of what I call classical idealism as a mysticisme d’alliance, and also of John Dewey’s similar description of it.

This view is part of Seillière’s analysis of human ”imperialism”, which, in turn, is related to his own partial utilitatianism. Despite the similarities in their analyses of romanticism, this utilitarianism, as Leander clearly shows, distinguished him from Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More. These positions need not concern us here.

What is interesting is rather the account of classical idealism as such. For even as understood in terms of a mysticisme d’alliance, a striving for protective and strengthening connection with higher powers against the dangers and uncertainties of life, both Seillière and Dewey manage to give a correct description of it, with reference to which Leander defends at least some of the positions of this idealism.

Babbitt chose to dwell mainly on the humanistic level of ethical ”mediation”, not on the metaphysical and mystical level of ”meditation”. He also rejected, in the spirit of Burke, what he perceived as a ”static absolute”, and focused on the inner check, the higher will, and the moral imagination as the path towards reality. And Leander follows him in this.

Yet at the same time, Babbitt did not deny the existence of the higher level of meditation and mysticism. And Leander too clearly affirms some aspects of classical idealism as described in the accounts he cites. He rejects the alliance part that has to do with Seillière’s ”imperialism” and utilitarianism, but affirms what he summarizes as the ”realism of universals”, although he goes on to agree with Babbit on how precisely the universals are in reality apprehended. This makes it possible to get a clear view of how the value-centered historicism, as developed by Leander and Ryn, regards the relation between the levels of mediation and meditation and also how, more precisely, it understands the latter. It also, in fact, affords us an opportunity to affirm, with reference to Leander’s own formulations and those he cites, the validity of those positions of idealism that go beyond their own.

Seillière shares the common, broadly progressivist view of the development of human thought which in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was far from being embraced only by positivists. Classical idealism, or the realism of universals, is therefore accounted for in its characteristic, genealogical terms. For Seillière, this idealism or realism is a development of certain elements of the worldview of primitive man, his experience of the power and mana in nature and in the spirit-world that was compactly non-differentiated from nature, although in a different sense and to a greater extent than in the ”cosmological” civilizations which Voegelin analyses in terms of compactness and differentiation. Leander summarizes:

”Man tries to ally himself to the God-Universals, or God-Being, and expects some kind of happiness in return. The realm of Change and Not-Being is the source of misery and pain, and therefore, it is held, one should seek the realm of Being, the source of peace and happiness. The universals are the divine element in the world, the mana, and what partakes of them has mana. The philosopher who communes with God-Being in a mystical contemplation, stands above his fellow-men in dignity, just as the saint does in Christianity and Buddhism, and the inspired genius in aesthetic mysticism. They are all looked upon as having mana. They are the prophets of their divinities, and their favoured children.”

In primitive societies, the social hierarchy is, in general, ”reflected in the distribution of mana or, if one prefers, the participation in the divine”. Leander speaks of a ”homoiosis theou of primitive man”. But here it is important first of all to say something about the worldview of the primitive peoples. For instance, it must be observed that according to the traditionalist school started by René Guénon, the peoples perceived as primitive by modern Western scholars are in reality to be understood as degenerate: their worldview is a reflection or residue on a low or non-civilizational level of conceptions properly belonging to the metaphysical tradition that is also expressed in the early high civilizations.

Whether or not this is so is something I cannot discuss here. A structural similarity, with underlying, recognizably identical broader features variously expressed on different levels of civilization, reflection, conceptualization, and corresponding cultural expressions and practices, does not, however, seem to be an overly speculative understanding. Such phenomenological unity is clearly often discernible. Quite regardless of the question of chronology, history and development, it can of course be accounted for simply by reference to a common, underlying unity of experience and to a shared objective reality. To the truth, quite simply, with its various degrees of apprehension.

Leander quotes Seillière on the development from the primitive worldview to the metaphysical and idealistic: ”’Totemism…gives birth to metaphysical notions which have expanded later into the notion of ”Ideas” in the Platonic sense, and of the archetype, and into the so-called ”realistic” (in reality essentially mystical) conceptions of the philosophy of the Middle Ages.’” This developmental analysis is of course shared by Dewey, who takes what Leander points out is a purely anthropological view of Greek philosophy. The philosophies of Plato and Aristotle were, in Dewey’s own words, ”systematizations in rational form of the content of Greek religious and artistic beliefs.” And again, for Dewey too, religion and idealism are a mysticisme d’alliance: this is ”the Leitmotiv of Dewey’s critiqe of religion, primitive and refined, as well as of the various philosophies clustering around it or absorbing and supplanting it”.

But Leander objects that it is ”by no means clear” that the anthropologist’s point of view, which ”coincides with the realism of ’facts’, or positivism”, is ”the only one”, and goes on to cite Maritain with approval. He thus makes clear that he does not share Dewey’s understanding when he proceeds to cite his characterization of classical idealism.

But some things he has already said about this idealism by way of his summary of Seillière’s view. Even as rendering Seillière’s interpretation of the classical idealist phase in the light of the primitive understood as its origin and a preceding stage in its development, the summary accurately described some elements of classical idealism in a broad sense. And if we regard the relation between the primitive and the classical as at least also one of between different modalities, levels or degrees of apprehension of the same reality,  we can bracket the issue of the progressivist and positivist claim with regard to their connection in terms of causality and sequence.

The first thing that was said about classical idealism is that ”Man tries to ally himself to the God-Universals, or God-Being, and expects some kind of happiness in return.” Here we are immediately introduced to a central ambiguity: ”the God-Universals, or God-Being”. This is a legitimate formulation in this connection, but it is also vague. The question of what, more precisely, universals are, of course immediately takes us far into Plato’s various exposition of the theory of forms, into conceptual realism as worked out in the Aristotelian tradition, and, in this connection, into value-centered historicism. I discuss all of this in other posts, but it is of course to some extent unavoidable in connection with this direct discussion on the part of Leander of classical idealism.

Here I want to focus primarily on ”God-Being”, however. One aspect of the vagueness of the formulation is that although in classical idealism the ”God-Universals” are certainly Being, and indeed, as God-Universals, even God-Being, ”the divine element in the world”, it is not obvious that God-Universals and God-Being are synonymous terms, as the ”or” indicates. It would seem that the God-Universals may not exhaust God-Being, that God-Being, in addition to being the God-Universals, is also something more.

This too would take us into areas which cannot be adequately covered in this post, including as they do the vast subject of the Greek concept of Being. Apart from Heidegger’s thinking on this subject, many readers of the passage will certainly remember how Plato considers the form or idea of the Good ultimately to rise in its dignity above Being itself, perhaps in a particular Greek sense. This fact is especially important in connection with the traditionalist school which often stresses this, not least in the work of Tage Lindbom, in separating Being, as an immanent sphere, from transcendence.    

I have doubts regarding the terminological consequence of this distinction however, and have no problem with the tem God-Being if, when necessary, it is distinguished from Being that is not God-Being and a proper conception of transcendence (which does not imply radical dualism) is maintained. Leander does not do precisely this in his summary, but instead distinguishes God-Being from ”Not-Being”, ”the realm of change and Not-Being”. This too I find uncontroversial, inasmuch as God-Being must be accepted as true Being and the Being that is not God-Being as less Being, as it were, than God-Being. This is all classical Platonism of course – the whole tradition of Platonism.

What is important is that these very first sentences in this characterization of classical idealism express, quite apart from Seillière’s own intentions, such a basic and central truth. ”The realm of Change and Not-Being is the source of misery and pain, and therefore, it is held, one should seek the realm of Being, the source of peace and happiness.”

Given only a few further definitions of each of the terms, this, I contend, is an absolute truth. In itself, it explains the whole need to ever return to classical idealism, the Western philosophy that gave expression to this truth, or rather, expressed it in terms of the new Western phenomenon of philosophy. I would even suggest that those who do not accept this truth are not true philosophers in a proper, strict sense, inasmuch as they are neither wise nor lovers of wisdom. For we must keep in mind here that philosophy in antiquity, while forming a unity in its speculative aspect with emergent science, also had a different aspect of spiritual practice of the kind stressed by Pierre Hadot, often in conjunction with the elements of traditional (in Guénon’s sense) metaphysical substance beyond the reach of the new speculative enterprise, as well as with those elements as rationally reconstituted and adjusted to philosophy in the way we find them to be in the Platonic tradition. This central and constitutive aspect of philosophy as practical spiritual exercise, which, in its universality converged in its intrinsic universality – beyond the separative results of the larger process of differentiation described by Voegelin – with metaphysical or spiritual traditionalism, was largely lost with the realliance with science during the Renaissance or the early modern period. Although some forms of modern idealism began to shown the way, philosophy has yet to reconnect to and revive this aspect, something which is indeed tantamount to reconstituting itself as philosophy proper or philosophy in the full sense as understood in antiquity.

While Western modernity especially needs to return to the truths of classical idealism, having so long drifted into onesided Becoming and thus Not-Being or Non-Being, this is not incompatible with a simultaneous affirmation of the more or less relative values of the phenomenal sphere of Change and the partial truths of the kind of alternative modernity I have tried to defend. And the general truths on the humanistic level described by Babbitt in his centrally important synthesis of the classical tradition of philosophy in the original, broad sense on the one hand and some of those partial truths of modernity of the other, his version of ethical mediation in terms of the higher will and creative imagination, truths on the humanistic level, of course provide a supporting structure of moral and aesthetic values, of character-formation and general humanistic wisdom that is also always needed. Despite his doubts about idealism and the absolute, as he saw them defended by some philosophers, these truths and values were not incompatible with what he called the level of meditation. Babbitt in his own way – and to a still higher degree, More – affirmed the fundamental truth we are talking about here.

In itself, once fully grasped and experienced, this truth about God-Being is however unambiguously superior to the truths on the other levels, and indeed overwhelming, definitive, uncontradictable. To a very considerable extent, discussion ends here. Sat sapienti. From this point, a non-superficial soul engages in the pursuit of God-Being. Other issues – the rest of the history of philosophy, for instance – can attract his attention only as related to and congruent with this pursuit.

All philosophies that propose to reject it are, in the very nature of things, refuted in advance, as it were. The realm of Change and Not-Being is the phenomenal realm of shifting experiences of what is perceived as outer, ”material”, sensual reality, in which all endeavours are not only always inseparable from ”misery and pain”, but are also ultimately futile if disconnected from ”the peace and happiness of the realm of Being”. Nothing in the the relative, phenomenal sphere can ever change and remedy this.

A spiritually advanced Westerner who contemplates this truth in terms of Greek idealism will today naturally continue along the same line directly to the deepened insight that is found in the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita – now that these truths have long been authentically represented and communicated also in the West. This, with or without classical idealism, is where one has to go if one really wants to ”seek the realm of Being”, or rather, if one really wants to find it in the sense of attaining it. Classical idealism speaks of God-Universals, including Truth, Goodness and Beauty of course, and of God-Being. Vedanta speaks – and in the kataphatic schools this is only a preliminary utterance – of sat (being, eternity), cit (consciousness, knowledge), and ananda (bliss) as the nature of atman-brahman.

The world is awash in ignorance and illusion, in maya. It is lost in the transience of Non-Being and thus in suffering, or rather, in passing pleasure and enjoyment inevitably mixed with suffering. The classical idealist philosopher is the result of a particular, in a certain sense non-traditional development in the West and of the particular nature of the Western process of differentiation. Yet against the sophists’ challenge, he restores and renews traditional wisdom within the new framework of philosophy, and gives it a new theoretical and conceptual expression. He too, at least to some extent, indeed ”communes with God-Being in a mystical contemplation”, and to the extent that he does so, he, like the vedantist, the yogi, the guru, calls the world back to the higher life, to brahman, to God-Being, in which ultimate perfection and fulfillment is alone achieved, and through the enlightenment in and through which even the realm of Change and Not-Being, or phenomenal experience, is in a certain way partly transformed.

Here is indeed a direct continuity between India and Greece, and of course another plain similarity, or rather, on this general level, an identity, accountable for by the apprehension of a single reality even without the consideration of direct or indirect historical contact and influence. It points to the limitations which I have briefly indicated in Voegelin’s analysis of differentiation.   

The truth we are talking about that was once naturally stated in terms of philosophy has, because of the latter’s development, tended to be removed to the sphere of mysticism and esotericism. There is nothing wrong with the traditions of mysticism and often not of esotericism either, especially inasmuch as they often seek to add the dimension of philosophical and spiritual practice which modern philosophy had lost, to compensate partly for what was, before the new East-West bridgebuilding of the last few centuries, the absence in the modern West of a widely accepted and in its own way institutionalized spiritual practice corresponding to what without it remained only a theoretical truth. A counterpart and equivalent of Yoga, which always complemented the theoretical disciplines of Samkhya and Vedanta (although they too are forms of spiritual practice). A practice of meditation, beyond the New Humanist practice of ethical mediation, and resuming and sometimes deepening the exercises spirituels of classical philosophy so well described by Pierre Hadot. Indeed, in the Abrahamitic traditions, it is only their mystic and esoteric strands which at all communicate the whole of the truth of God-Being, and that only in some cases.

But it is unfortunate and wholly unnecessary that this truth is no longer or so very rarely expressed conceptually in philosophy as such to the extent that it acutally could be, and thus as central to philosophy. Even modern idealism has tended to occlude it for various reasons which it is of the greatest importance to understand and to the understanding of which not just the traditionalist school but also the New Humanists made considerable contributions.

Although I certainly add some distinctive elements of modern idealism, what I mean when I speak about and defend idealism – as I do when I speak in terms of Western philosophy, trying to remedy the lametable situation – is also an idealism of this original, metaphysical, spiritual and, as it were, uncompromising variety. An idealism that is defined by the affirmation of this absolute truth about God-Being stated by Leander in his account of Seillìère, and, it seems, even believed in by him at least to a greater extent than by Seillière.

The Concept of Differentiation

Voegelin’s concept of differentiation is a difficult one, comprising not only the meaning of a separation of elements that were previously present only in unseparated, unanalysed, or, as Voegelin prefers to put it, compact form, but also, and primarily, that of the deepening and transformation of spiritual experience and philosophical insight which produced these results.

I will only partly use Voegelin’s own concept of differentiation. But I will use the term in a broader and comparatively loose sense without reference to the details of Voegelin’s analysis of either the spiritual experiences or the historical development, a sense which is not only proportioned to the somewhat generalizing synopticity of this series of posts, but which actually comprises more of what could in fact legitimately be described by the term in the development of the civilization of classical antiquity and, mutatis mutandis, of the Middle Ages and modern Europe.

The cosmological, mythological civilizations were, according to Voegelin, compact in the sense that they had not yet fully undergone or passed through the decisive spiritual and moral experiences through which Greek and Israelite culture, society and history gradually came to assume new and different characteristics and meanings. In the process of these experiences, things subsequently fundamental to Western civilization were differentiated, and in a broader sense than Voegelin’s own.

Again, I point out that we are not talking here about India or the Far East in general, both because, as Voegelin himself seems to have become increasingly aware, the analysis is in important respects simply not valid with regard to their civilizations, and because the differentiational experience did not take place in contrast to those civilizations but only to those of the Near East. But it must be said that due to some particular limitations of his perspective, Voegelin overlooks the significance of the partial continuity with the Far East which I have pointed to in Greek thought. And that those civilizations, and in particular the spiritual legacy of India, has long been of great importance in the modern West, a fact which is of importance also in connection with Voegelin’s analyses both of the foundational, differentiational origins and of what could perhaps be called the post-differentiational and neo-compact modern West.

What for Voegelin primarily defined the differentiational shift was the experience of transcendence, in the two different forms in which it occurred: the philosophical form of the Greeks and the religious form of the Israelites. With differentiation in the sense of this deepening of spiritual consciousness there followed a new and clearer separation not only of transcendence and immanence, but also of related things such as eternity and time and spirit and nature. Voegelin’s account of his own concept of differentiation is in some respects reminiscent of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century descriptions, within the limitations of the same civilizational references, by various progressivist historians (not only positivists) of one stage of the transition from primitive religion to developed, higher religion and then from higher religion to metaphysics. But what sets Voegelin apart from them, or at least the positivists, is of course that he accepts the reality of the deepened experience of transcendence as the cause of the transformation.

Voegelin is well aware of the transitional forms of culture and society in the Near Eastern empires, and thus of the partial differentiational experiences that are found there too. And recent scholarship will certainly have further complicated the picture in this regard. Yet the radicality of the new Greek and Israelite experiences still make Voegelin’s historical argument with regard to their relation to those ”compact”, ”cosmological” civilizations plausible at least to a degree that warrants the use of the contrast as a typological one in the historiographical reconstruction of relevant aspects and dimensions of the emergence of the consciousness of personality.