Quotes from Eric Voegelin

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

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

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.

The death of the spirit is the price of progress.

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

This system of chain wars can end only in two ways: either it will result in horrible physical destructions and concomitant revolutionary changes of social order beyond reasonable guesses; or, with the natural change of generations, it will lead to the abandoning of Gnostic dreaming before the worst has happened.

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.

The public interest has shifted from the nature of man to the nature of nature and to the prospects of domination its exploration opened; and the loss of interest even turned to hatred when the nature of man proved to be resistant to the changes dreamed up by intellectuals who want to add the lordship of society and history to the mastery of nature.

When God is invisible behind the world, the contents of the world will become new gods; when the symbols of transcendent religiosity are banned, new symbols develop from the inner-worldly language of science to take their place. Like the Christian ecclesia, the inner-worldly community has its apocalypse too; yet the new apocalyptics insist that the symbols they create are scientific judgements.

Our own foreign policy was a factor in aggravating international disorder through its sincere but naive endeavor of curing the evils of the world by spreading representative institutions in the elemental sense to areas where the existential conditions for their functioning were not given.

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 feature is the quantifiable expense that has gone into their production.

The general deculturation of the academic and intellectual world in Western civilization furnishes the background for the social dominance of opinions that would have been laughed out of court in the late Middle Ages or the Renaissance.

The nature of a thing cannot be changed; whoever tries to "alter" its nature destroys the thing. Man cannot transform himself into a superman; the attempt to create a superman is an attempt to murder man. Historically, the murder of God is not followed by the superman, but by the murder of man: the deicide of the gnostic theoreticians is followed by the homicide of the revolutionary practitioners.

The factor Hegel excludes is the mystery of a history that wends its way into the future without our knowing its end. History as a whole is essentially not an object of cognition; the meaning of the whole is not discernible.

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

Platonic-Aristotelian analysis does in fact operate on the assumption that there is an order of being accessible to a science beyond opinion.

The first principle of Gnosticism is the nonrecognition of reality.

The world is experiencing a serious crisis, is undergoing a process of withering, which has its origins in the secularization of the soul and in the ensuing severance of a consequently purely secular soul from its roots in religiousness.

No one is obliged to take part in the spiritual crisis of a society; on the contrary, everyone is obliged to avoid this folly and live his life in order.

The spirit as system requires the murder of God; and, conversely, in order to commit the murder of God the system is fashioned.

Men can let the contents of the world grow to such an extent that the world and God disappear behind them, but they cannot annul the human condition itself. This remains alive in each individual soul; and when God is invisible behind the world, the contents of the world will become new gods; when the symbols of transcendent religiosity are banned, new symbols develop from the inner-worldly language of science to take their place.

A las religiones espirituales que encuentran su ens realissimum en la causa u origen del mundo [Weltgrund], las denominaremos religiones supramundanas. En cambio, a aquellas otras que descubren lo divino en contenidos que son parte del propio mundo, las denominaremos religiones intramundanas.

Coining a new language, either by giving new meanings to familiar terms or by inventing new technical terms, is one of the most effective devices for eclipsing reality.

The empty field of Nothing results from the eclipse of reality; Jean Paul has recognized its imaginary character. No projection of a man-god can overcome the Nothing, for the Nothing has been projected, by the man who deforms himself, for the very purpose of indulging in the projection of the man-god. Man can eclipse the reality of God by imagining a Nothing, but he cannot overcome the imagined Nothing by filling it with imagined somethings.