Voegelin and Dogmatism:
The Case of Natural Law
David A. Nordquest
C o N s m m c NATURAL LAW a conventional
topic rather than part of the philosophy
of order, Eric Voegelin never wrote sys-
tematically on the subject. However, his
studies on the right by nature and on the
nature of nature pose a radical challenge
to the project of natural law. This chal-
lenge is clarified by several of his other
writings, including the important, post-
humously published Nature of the Law.’
These studies reveal the thoroughgoing
character of Voegelin’s search for an
undoctrinaire, experiential account of
personal and social order, and should
be of interest to those seeking a more
supple natural right.
Voegelin’s suspicions of natural law
stem from his understanding of its ori-
gins. As he sees it, the Stoics made a
dogma of natural law by mishandling
symbols such as the “right by nature,”
which Aristotle, in particular, had devel-
oped to capture and to communicate his
experience of fitting participation in real-
ity. Failure to grasp the essential link
between experience and symbol led the
Stoics to give the symbols a misplaced
concreteness, to manipulate them as if
they intended objects rather than exis-
tential experiences, and to try to derive a
~
DAVID A. NORDQUEST is Adjunct Professor of
Political Science and Liberal Studies at Cannon
University.
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body of eternally valid norms from them.
Voegelin does not trace the details of this
alleged derailment, but he does discuss
the general character of the Stoics’ “de-
formation of symbols,” a process whose
effects he thinks are still being felt.
Their chief error, as he sees it, was
“the abolition of Plato’s critical distinc-
tion between the dialectical movement
of thought in t h e Metaxy and t h e
mythopoetic symbolization of the divine
a m b i e n ~ e . ”In~ other words, they forgot
that our partly immanent, partly tran-
scendent life involves experiences of the
divine that can only be conveyed in allu-
sive speech, such as that used in myth.
When we adopt the more direct speech
of objective propositions to refer to such
experiences, we may succeed in con-
vincing ourselves that we are dealing
with things or objects. However, in the
process, we will lose a sense of the living
relationship with the divine which is the
ultimate source of order. The ability of
allusive speech to preserve a fuller open-
ness toward God causes Voegelin to call
myth “an indispensable forming element
ofthe social ~ r d e r .The ” ~ Stoics, unaware
of the problem, treated symbols of our
participation in a wider reality, such as
nous, or reason, “asif they were concepts
referring to objects on which the phi-
losopher has to advance proposition^."^
In Voegelin’s view, they materialized the
Winter 1999
divine-human encounter and reduced it
to a tonos, or tension conceived of as “the
property of a material object called the
psyche.”6 That made our relation with
the divine appear static, which allowed a
fixed natural law to seem plausible.
For a better alternative, Voegelin turns
to what he thinks the Stoics corrupted,
to Aristotle’s more existential symbol-
ism of the “right by nature.” H e finds
such an inquiry necessary because “the
revived debate about natural law unfor-
tunately still suffers from the topical char-
acter of its object, separated as it is from
the experience containing its meaning.”7
Voegelin returns to Aristotle rather
than tracing the development of natural
law ideas, because he denies that ideas
or concepts are meaningful apart from
their connection to our experience. This
view, that symbols and ideas are not
entities in history, was the defining in-
sight of Voegelin’s career, the one that
led him to abandon the manuscript of a
monumental multi-volume history of
political ideas and to write Order and
History instead.8 From this perspective,
Voegelin sharply criticizes the philoso-
pher who has “deformed himself by
adopting the belief that the truth of exist-
ence is a set of propositions concerning
the right order of man and society, the
propositions to be demonstrably true
and therefore acceptable to e ~ e r y b o d y . ” ~
This same perspective accounts not only
for Voegelin’s suspicion of natural law,
but also for his critical views of meta-
physics and of propositional revelations
such as the decalogue.I0On the positive
side, it explains his affection for the con-
crete philosophy of Plato and Aristotle
and his high view of myth as avehicle for
conveying experiences of order.”
Guided by this theory of the primacy
of experience over symbol, Voegelin ex-
amines the relevant Aristotelian texts to
determine what experience lay behind
Aristotle’s creation of the symbol of the
right by nature (physei dikaion). He rea-
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sons that, as the first to use the symbol,
he must have had an experiential basis
for articulating it, while later users may
have had the experience in an attenu-
ated form, or, perhaps, not at all. The
problem is that once a symbol becomes
opaque to its experiential source, it tends
to be used mechanically, producing dog-
mas and logicchopping. Leibnitz’s jest
of aproof “in sixty propositions andstate-
ments” of who by nature should be cho-
sen King of the Poles may serve as a
reductio ad absurdum of this style.’*
Just as ideas in general lack an inde-
pendent ontological status, so, Voegelin
thought, does law, including natural law.
In a careful and subtle investigation, he
shows that law can be understood only
as part of a process by which “a society
brings itself into existence and preserves
itself in ordered e ~ i s t e n c e . ”Recourse
’~
to essences, comprehensive aggrega-
tions, and procedural correctness fails
to make the law fully intelligible. We find
its character only when we see it as part
of society’s pursuit of order. That pur-
suit has its source in experiences of a
tension in our lives between the larger
order of being in which we participate
and our own empirical existence. The
“Ought in the ontological sense” is the
term Voegelin uses in The Nature of the
Lawtoindicate this tension-and he finds
law gaining its normativity from it.I4
Although natural law is a response to
this ontological ought, Voegelin thinks
its ideal aim is to resolve the tension for
good, so we may be spared the uncer-
tainties of the Aristotelian right by na-
ture, with its requirement for ever-new
decisions. Thinking a life open to the
divine is the only authentic one, Voegelin
rejects not just this orthat formulationof
natural law, but the entire project of
capturing in a set of rules the require-
ments for personal and social order.
Voegelin would not, of course, deny
us all guidance in making our moral deci-
sions. Forthe purpose, hefindshistotle’s
33
right by nature superior to natural law
because it places a more proper empha-
sis on openness and context. Concerning
context, Voegelin argues that Aristotle
conceived of the right by nature as a p
plying fully only in the setting of the
polis, because the“po1is is the manifesta-
tion of right order.” Because the polis is
an historical and not a universal form of
community, we cannot abstract a law of
nature true always and everywhere from
what is right within it : “Given the domi-
nance of the politikon there can be no
natural law conceived as an eternal, im-
mutable, universally valid normativity
confronting the changeable positive
law.”15Only “resemblances” of the right
by nature are possible in other commu-
nities-and Voegelin argues that these
are understood by Aristotle “inthe modus
deficiens.”16Thepoint of Voegelin’sanaly-
sis is that Aristotle wrote primarily of the
polis, saw justice as more characteristic
of it than of other associations, and con-
ceived of this justice as existential and
embodied, not as a set of rules that could
be applied in all settings.
Voegelin argues, too, that Aristotle
does not see the right by nature “con-
fronting the positive law,” because
Aristotle viewed the embodied rule of
law among free and equal citizens as
identical with the right by nature, a view
that is sometimes termed conservative
or secondary natural law. The actualiza-
tion of the right by nature in the law of the
polis seemed routine to Aristotle since
“thejustice of the polis is not positive law
in the modern sense but rather essential
law,” that is, the part of law in which
questions of right order rather than of
convention are at stake.17Ernest Barker
clarifies this point in arguing that, for
Aristotle, “law is natural because it is
moral.”18In Voegelin’s terms, law is the
fruitof the legislators’ existential struggle
toward the right by nature against arbi-
trary human willing. What is permanent
about the right by nature is not its present
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embodiment in the law of the polis, but
the attunement t o the divine which pro-
duces law, adapts it and, in a true sense,
is the heart of the law.
Arguing against Voegelin’s method-
ological interpretation are passages in
theRhetoricwhere Aristotle distinguishes
particular law, which a community de-
fines for itself, from universal law, which
is based on a notion of right and wrong all
m e n s h a r e . He quotes Sophocles,
Empedocles, and Alcidamus to illustrate
universal law. Voegelin does not treat
this passage, but it appears t o show a
right by nature less closely tied to the
polis, more likely to confront the posi-
tive law, and with a more definite and
lasting content than his interpretation of
the Ethics and Politics passages would
suggest. Consider, for instance,Aristotle’s
claim that everyone apprehends this law
or rule, “even when they have no mutual
intercourse nor any compact,” and also
the quotation from Empedocles making
it “the law for living creatures all.”19
Aristotle later says that such law per-
tains t o “acts such as gratitude t o a bene-
factor, return of generous treatment, and
service t o friends in need,” as well as to
equity.20He refers to such subjects as
cases of “exceptional goodness or bad-
ness.”21 However, “exceptional” here
means not “infrequent,”but “in the high-
est degree.”
Asimilar passage in the Ethics remarks
that some actions and passions have
names implying an unconditional bad-
ness. Thus, in committing adultery, theft,
and murder, “it is not possible ever to be
right.” “Nor does goodness or badness
with regard t o such things depend on
committing adultery with t h e right
woman, at the right time, and in the right
way, but simply to do any of them is to go
wrong.”22This passage, too, seems to
assume universal moral standards.
James Rhodes makes a strong argu-
ment that this apparent endorsement of
permanent rules is not what it seems,
Winter 1999
because Aristotelian morality is a matter
of finding the path between excess and
defect.23In telling us never to consider
committing adultery or murder or theft,
Aristotle is not denying the need to search
our souls before deciding whether to
have sexual relations, to kill, or to take
fromanother. Each oftheseacts is proper
in the proper circumstances, which can-
not be predetermined by rules. Adultery,
murder, and theft, however, arenot kinds
of acts, but counters for excesses in sexual
relations, killing,and taking. Clearly,there
can be no mean in what is already an
excess. It seems, Rhodes argues, that
Aristotle is really saying no more than
this: “Thou shalt not kill, take, o r have
intercourse at wrong times, involving
wrong objects or people, o r with wrong
purposes or methods.”24He argues that
there are not in Aristotle specific criteria
for determining what the right and wrong
persons, objects, purposes, and meth-
ods are. That depends on the choice of
the morally mature person, whose expe-
rience of the divine will make his soul
more sensitive to what is right.
Enlightening as this is, it is not wholly
convincing. Adultery, after all, is not de-
fined simply in relation to a mean com-
pared to which it is excessive. It also
delimits a class of persons whose social
standing in regard to each other makes
sexual relations always improper.
Aristotle does not leave us free to deter-
mine the “wrong persons” on a case-by-
case basis. Rather, he assumes that there
is something inherent in the relation-
ships in question which makes adultery
wrong. In addition, Aristotle’s very down-
to-earth discussion of the virtues sug-
gests he believes the fittingness of hu-
man actions can be considered without
immediate reference to our relationship
to God. Otherwise, one wonders why
references to the divine d o not pervade
the Ethics, as they dovoegelin’s analysis.
Still, it seems to me that Voegelin and
Rhodes, who largely follows him, are
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correct on fundamentals.Voege1inmakes
astrong case that what lies at the heart of
the right by nature is the “divine es-
sence” which “results in a sensitiveness
of the soul for injustice in the concrete
s i t ~ a t i o n . ”Because
~~ ethics is mainly a
matter of being “permeable” to the di-
vine in this way, the spouduios, or mor-
ally mature man, is the “measure” of
things, in the sense that his now sensi-
tive soul will more accurately weigh what
is required by justice. The well-ordered
soul, and not general rules, provides the
spoudaios with the guidance he requires.
Other symbols elaborate this context.
Phronesis, or practical wisdom, which
Aristotle adapted from Plato, is “a knowl-
edge with the help of which man realizes
his eu Zen, the specifically human mode
of permeability for the order of the cos-
mos.” It is the “adjustment of the existen-
tial tension to the ground.” It provides
episfeme,a “kind of knowledge,” though
not a knowledge “of principles and de-
rived propositions.”26Also identified with
political science by Aristotle, it is a “sci-
ence of inferior precision,” but vital for its
concrete search for Voegelin sees
the value of the phronesis symbol par-
ticularly in its ability to convey a delib-
erative openness that avoids dogmatism.
Voegelin’s interpretation is fully in
harmony with Aristotle’s fundamental
insight that concrete actions possess a
“higher degree of truth” than general
principles do. Voegelin gives consider-
able emphasis to this “almost forgotten
knowledge of the philosopher, that eth-
ics is not a matter of moral principles.”28
He does so, it seems clear, because we
must act in a world populated by other
beings, not in a world of propositions.
Only these beings are affected by our
actions, so we must be concerned with
our effects on them and on ourselves,
rather than with whether a description
of our projected action falls within a
description contained in a rule. In any
case, the transcendence which charac-
35
terizes the divine standard of right and
the changing circumstances of our lives
make the mean a moving target.
There is, indeed, a need for an organi-
zation and rationalization of our moral
views. However,Voegelin finds Aristotle’s
project of a model polis a better vehicle
for this purpose than “the later ideas
about natural law as the quintessence of
eternal, immutable rules.”29H e seems to
favor it for pedagogical reasons. Its em-
bodied character makes its illustrative
function clearer, and the fittingness of its
various features to each other teaches
that t h e right must b e viewed in
context.With the model polis, Aristotle
shows us the right by nature as the ongo-
ing construction of both a community
and of political science. Because both
the polis and its study are part of our
striving for right order, the very different
mechanical, external accounts commonly
given of them are inadequate.
The detail of Aristotle’s model does
raise certain questions, though. Some
features are quite remote from any ten-
sion toward the divine-having common
dining tables in guard-houses, for ex-
ample.3oWhile Aristotle does not baldly
prescribe such tables to us, it is not just
prescriptive form which makes a pre-
scription. Voegelin notes elsewhere that
many statutes consist largely of descrip-
tions, which descriptions, however, have
obligatory import.31We may ask, then,
whether aspects of Aristotle’s model do
not function as rules. If they do, the supe-
riorityvoegelin grants to the model polis
over natural law as a body of eternal
norms would be lost.
Fortunately, Voegelin treats the sta-
tus of the model polis at length in The
Nature of the Law. There he remarks on
the seeming oddity of philosophers con-
structing model poleis in societies too
far gone to permit the embodiment of
right order, but h e takes Plato and
Aristotle at their word when they repre-
sent their constructions as part of a
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search for such order. He thinks a good
philosopher constructing a model first
makes a search which “penetrates to the
essence of the Ought in the ontological
sense.” From these insights, he then “tries
to sketch the types of conduct that would
be adequate optimally to translate the
truth about order,”which lives in his own
soul, “into the practice of society.”
Voegelin concludes that “the weight of
the work lies, therefore, in the inquiry
into the nature of true order.” The model
poleis are “more than literary devices,
but have the character of secondary
elaborations.” They must “not be taken
as rules with autonomous validity.”32The
long inquiry which precedes the model,
ten books of the Ethics and six of the
Politics, counts the most. Without it, the
meaning of the model would be obscure.
The models are not “superfluous,”
though. They are an act of judgment on a
society by the philosopher and are “ani-
mated by the claim that the empirical
order should conform more closely to
types that will express adequately the
truth of order.”The models areconnected
t o the empirical society in which the
philosopher writes as “the standards of
its n ~ r m a t i v i t y .In
” ~what
~ was apparently
an earlier passage, Voegelin also refers
to Aristotle’s model as offering “paradig-
matic rules.”34Putting the different for-
mulations together, we find that the model
polis provides no autonomous rules or
rules with autonomous validity, but that
it includes paradigmatic rules and stan-
dards of normativeness for a society.
There may be a change of emphasis, but
there is no real contradiction here. A
particular model feature might very well
fit in the context of the model, which
might itself correct a problem in an exist-
ing society. However, the feature could
be quite inconsistent with conditions in
another community. It would lack au-
tonomous validity. Regarding a paradig-
matic rule, it is surely to be understood
as a model for drafting similar laws rather
Winter 1999
than as a fixed rule of conduct.
From Voegelin’s already quoted char-
acterization ofthephyseidikaion as “what
is right by nature in its tension between
divine immutable essence and human
existentially conditioned mutability,” we
may infer that the nature in Aristotle’s
“right by nature” is t o be regarded not as
an immanent, autonomous order, but as
a realm open to divine order.35Voegelin
seeks the source of closure in the conflict
of two conceptions of nature found in
Empedocles and dealt with by Aristotle.
The first regards nature as a coming-to-
be, the second as form. Voegelin thinks
that the conflict between them is still
unresolved, and attributes the main diffi-
culty to an “emotional b l o c k caused by
the presence of God in our experience of
being.36Elsewhere,h e contends that “the
encounter between God and man ...can
have a dead center of inarticulateness,”
of which Paul’s blindness is the leading
example.37
Whether Voegelin regards the block
in dealing with nature a consequence of
awe or of an understanding of God as the
imposer of form, is not clear from the
context. However, he believes that view-
ing God as the demiurge has the unfortu-
nate consequence of making the formal
element of nature dominant over the
developing part, its coming-to-be. This
neglect of the movement in being is
clearly pronounced in the metaphysics
of Aristotle’s successors. Such neglect
tends to reduce nature and man t o form
and fact and therebythreatens the search
for order: “If man’s existence were not a
movement but a fact, it not only would
have no meaning but the question of
meaning could not even arise.”38
For Voegelin,the context for the prob-
lem of nature is the “primary experience
of the cosmos.” We all share this experi-
ence because “the faculties and experi-
ences of man are always present in their
entirety.”39Thinkers gradually sharpen
their distinctions among the elements of
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this experience, until the contrast be-
tween a transcendent God and an imma-
nent nature is made a gulf. With God and
nature separated and their continuing
relation ignored, nature’s movement or
coming-to-be is obscured. It appears full
of “relatively autonomous things,” stuck
in their own static forms, while a tran-
scendent God keeps to himself.
Voegelin regards this assumption of
an immanent order of things, or an order
of immanent things, as the heart of dog-
matism. Against this view he argues that
all things at every level of being, from
particles of matter to human beings, pos-
sess a transcendence and a “coming-to-
be” which raises them above immanence:
“Things existingin this world, in addition
to the order of their autonomous exist-
ence and that of their relations to each
other, also have a dimension of order in
relation to the divine ground of being.
There are no things that are merely im-
manent.”40Just as modern theoretical
physics has run into trouble by trying to
neglect the transcendence of matter, so
he thinks ethics has failed in its attempts
to find permanent principles in an imma-
nent ~ o r l d .For
~ ’ Voegelin their transcen-
dence puts human beings in continuing
relation to the divine and supports the
existential tension that leads us to seek
attunement. We cannot properly avoid
this tension by making our moral lives a
matter of fitting actions to the formulas
of natural law.
It is true that Voegelin qualifies our
transcendence by holding that nothing
in the world, including man, is “merely
immanent” and that transcendence is
something “in addition to” the order of
our autonomous existence. In an impor-
tant essay on the classical view of rea-
son, he distinguishes seven different lev-
els in the hierarchy of being in which
human beings p a r t i c i ~ a t eIf. ~we
~ are as
immanent a s we are transcendent,
though, one might wonder what is wrong
with a natural law derived from the sta-
37
bilities in nature, from the semi-autono-
mous orders Voegelin admits. It may be
true that Voegelin finds no level of being
completely autonomous, but one might
suppose that to the extent autonomy
exists, to that degree a tentative natural
law might be useful. Voegelin sees in us
that which seeks order as that which is
least immanent. Furthermore, reason, or
nous, does not seek only external goods
or arrangements, but, even more, an or-
der in which it is itself fostered and hon-
ored. The reflexive quality of this search
is probably the main reason forvoegelin’s
rejection of natural law.
From this perspective, the famous
passage in Grotius concerningautonomy
misses the point: “What we have been
saying would have a degree of validity
even if we should concede that which
cannot be conceded without the utmost
wickedness, that there is no God, or that
the affairs of men are of no concern to
Him.”43 Without the tension to the ground,
ethics would simply vanish.
In Order and History,Voegelin writes
approvingly that “the prophets recog-
nized that any letter, as it externalized
the spirit, was in danger of becoming a
dead letter, and that, consequently, the
Covenant written on tablets had to give
way t o the Covenant written in the
heart.”44With natural law, too, as we
have seen, he believes the letter must
give way t o the forming experience of
divine order in the soul. Indeed, the insig-
nificance of the letter causes Voegelin t o
remark in passing, in another context,
that “there is nothing wrong ...with occa-
sional indulgences or excesses.”45
Brief notes on natural law Voegelin
probably wrote about the same time as
this account of the Covenant show a less
radical, more appreciative approach to
natural law and to the “letter” than that
presented in the interpretation exam-
ined above. In these notes Voegelin as-
serts that “natural law has theoretical
justification insofar as it translates the
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insights gained by a theory of the nature
of man into the language of obligatory
purposes.” As an example, he says that
we might translate Aristotle’s insight that
the bios theoretikos represents the “full
unfoldingof human nature” into the moral
rule: “Man should strive to find this ful-
fillment in his personal existence.” We
might similarly derive the rule of justice:
“Society should be organized in such a
manner that the fulfillment of the pur-
pose is possible, at least for those who
wish to attain it.”46That rule might very
well open the way for further, more par-
ticular implementing rules. As we have
seen, Voegelin surely moved beyond this
position, justifiable as it might be, to a
more radical experientialism or a more
consistent mysticism, a movement which
continued throughout his career.
A very different approach to law may
be found in Voegelin’s 1927 article on
Hans Kelsen’s positivistic pure theory of
law. In that very early piece he takes a
view of natural law standards just as
negative as that examined above, but for
the opposite reason: “The content of law
is shown to be what it is: not an eternal,
sacred order, but a compromise of bat-
tling social forces-and this may be
changed every day by the chosen repre-
sentatives of the people according to the
wishes of their constituencies without
fear of endangering divine law.”47Al-
though clearly superseded by his later
writings, it is interesting that here, too,
Voegelin looks upon the legal as a pro-
cess rather than as a set of fixed rules.
H. Richard Niebuhr, in his Responsible
Self, argues that human beings have
thought of the moral life using three
metaphors. The first, or teleological view,
pictures us as makers of ourselves, con-
structing ourselves according to some
pattern. The second sees us as citizens,
living under laws we are obliged to obey-
the deontological view. The third, or
cathekonticview, portrays us as respond-
ers to questions put to us by life. Niebuhr
Winter 1999
thinks that each metaphor is illuminat-
ing and that each emphasizes what is an
important element of the whole. How-
ever, he regards the third as owing the
most to Christian insights.48
Voegelin’s interpretation of Aristotle’s
right by nature, and his hostility to natu-
ral law, suggest something like a
cathekontic ethic. The spouduios, or
morally mature man, deciding how to act
not by rules but by seeing what is re-
quired through openness to the divine,
resembles the Christian who seeks the
correct responses to the questions posed
by life not through the Law but through
grace. It is fascinating that Voegelin finds
evidence for such a view in Aristotle,
generally regarded as the chief architect
of teleological ethics. The similarities
could be taken as evidence Voegelin was
imposing a religious interpretation on a
philosophy. He would argue that he had
simply gotten beyond a dogmatic read-
ing to Aristotle’s experiential meaning.
Although his reading is open t o question,
it has the great merit of clarifying the
1. “What is Political Reality?”and “What is Nature?”
in Anamnesis, trans. and ed. Gerhart Niemeyer
(South Bend, 1978); The Nature of the Law and
Related Legal Writings,in Collected Works, ed. Pas-
cal, Babbington and Corrington (Baton Rouge,
1991). 2. For an overview, see Steven R. McCarl,
“Eric Voegelin’s Theory of Consciousness,” APSR,
W V I , 1, 106-111. 3. Order and History (5 vols.;
Baton Rouge, 1958-1987), IV, 38. 4. Review of The
Myth of the State,Journal ofPolitics,IX, 446.5. Order
and History, IV,38.6. Ibid., 39. 7. Anamnesis, 55. 8.
William C. Havard, “The Changing Pattern of
Voegelin’s Conception of History,” Southern Re-
view, VII, 1, N.S., 62. Voegelin’s own account may be
found in his Autobiographical ReRections, ed. Ellis
Sandoz p a t o n Rouge, 1989). 9. “Equivalences of
Experience and Symbolization in History,” manu-
script copy, 3. 10. “On Debate and Existence,”
Intercollegiate Review, Ill, 45, 143152; Order and
History I, 438-440. 11. Anamnesis, 22. 12. Wilhelm
Windleband, A History o f Philosophy (New York,
1958). 11,397n.13. Nature oftheLaw, 38.14.Ibid.,42-
48. 15. Anamnesis, 58. 16. Ibid., 56-59. 17. Ibid., 59.
See also: Nature of the Law, 81; Heinrich Rommen,
Modern Age
LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG
ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED
ultimate basis of the right by nature.
Once this perspective is gained, the
story of natural law is revealed as a tale
of misplaced concreteness, of how a
reification of our tension toward the di-
vine ground or a prematurely closed
conception of nature, or of our nature,
may lead us into making idols of rules.
Voegelin’s analysis is meant to serve as a
grammar of ascent, showing us how to
speak of the order of being in terms that
will not congeal into dogmas, but retain
their transparency to our continuing
experience of the divine.
To forestall dogmatism, Voegelin is
quite willing to give up a symbolism as
old and influential as natural law. How-
ever, when we have other goals, such as
organizing our moral views or habituat-
ing ourselves to the good conduct which
will help us and our communities to be-
come truly good, it seems that natural
law remains helpful. Having innoculated
ourselves with Voegelin’s analysis, we
can probably be trusted to keep natural
law’s tentativeness firmly in view.
The Natural Law (New York, 1947), 19. 18. Ernest
Barker, The Political Thought ofPluto and Aristotle
(NewYork, 1959), 326.19.Aristotle,Rhetoric,trans.
Lane Cooper (New York, 1960), 1373B (I, 13), 73-74.
20. Ibid., 1374A (I,13), 76. 21. Rhetoric in Basic
Works,ed.RichardMcKeon (NewYork,1941). 1374A
(I,13), 1371. 22. Ibid., 959. 23. “Right By Nature,”
Journal ofPolitics, LIII, 2, 318-338. 24. Ibid., 322. 25.
Nature oftheLaw, 79;Anamnesis,60.26. Ibid.,68-69.
27. Ibid., 62-63. 28. Ibid., 60-61. 29. Ibid., 61. 30.
Politics in Basic Works, 1331 (VII, E), 1293. 31.
Nature o fthe Law, 65.32.Nature ofthe Law,53; Order
andHistory,Ill, 350-354.33.Nature oftheLaw, 54.34.
Ibid., 82. 35. Anamnesis, 60. 36. Ibid., 81. 37. Order
and History, IV, 244.38. “The Gospel and Culture,”
in Jesus and Man’s Hope, I1 (Pittsburgh, 1971), 63.
39. Nature of the Law, 78.40.Anamnesis,77-78.41.
Ibid.,78.42.Ibid., 114.43. The Law ofWarandPeace,
trans. F. W. Kelsey (Indianapolis,n.d.), Prolegomena,
11,13.44.OrderandHistory, I, 440441.45. “Reason:
The Classic Experience,” in Anamnesis, 100. 46.
Nature ofthe Law, 81-82.47. “Kelsen’sPure Theory
of Law,”Political Science Quarterly,XLII, 2,276.48.
New York, 1963.
39