Immanentizing Arcadia?, a review of [i]Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America[/i] by Ellis Sandoz

Republicanism, Religion, and the Soul of America
by Ellis Sandoz. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006.

Ellis Sandoz’s most recent book is a collection of essays focusing on two subjects which have been at the center of his scholarly work: American political thought during the founding period and the philosophy of Eric Voegelin. The collection coheres, insofar as it does, more because of the consistency of Sandoz’s particular conception of the role and character of philosophy than because of its specific thematic concerns. However, the two broad themes actually are connected in a way that is not immediately apparent. Both are related to the two primary projects of the American conservative intellectual movement as it has developed since 1945.

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, there were many American intellectuals who were dissatisfied with the way things had turned out. Soviet armies had subjugated eastern and central Europe, while a socialist government prevailed in Britain and communist movements threatened in Europe. In the U.S., Mr. Roosevelt’s depression- and war-era consolidation of power was not dismantled but instead augmented. Under these conditions, men like Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley, and Willmoore Kendall, embracing a political identity as conservatives, began a process of diagnosis. They were attempting to answer a looming and fundamental question: What has gone wrong with the West?

Among the many who offered answers was an émigré political philosopher at Louisiana State University named Eric Voegelin. With immense erudition, Voegelin advanced the striking claim that modernity itself was suffering from an intellectual disease which he initially called Gnosticism. Sandoz explains that “the leading attributes of modern Gnosticism are: (1) immanentist programs for the transformation of the world; and (2) atheism and the deification of Man.” In the West, religion and its ultimate promises had been secularized, and subsequently the political life of modern states had been divinized. Modern man had thus “immanentized the eschaton,” as Voegelin so famously put it, and it was this error that had led the West into crisis.

Voegelin’s critique also pointed to the Classical tradition as the great theoretical alternative to the spiritual malaise of modernity. The Greeks, Romans, and Medi-eval Christians understood human nature to be limited, and conceived of true philosophical understanding not as rationalistic system-building, but instead as the openness of human reason to divine transcendence. It was only in this way that philosophy could truly be, as it was meant to be, a “way of life.” In this current collection, Sandoz, one of our foremost expositors of the thought of Voegelin, offers several delightful essays on different aspects of the work of his great teacher, ranging from a cogent discussion of the differences between Voegelin and Leo Strauss to a stimulating account of developments in the later works of Voegelin. For anyone wanting to gain a deeper appreciation for Voegelin’s genius, these essays are indispensable.

Of course, even in the immediate postwar years, it was not readily apparent how Voegelin’s subtle and exceedingly complex philosophical claims related to the practical political situation that conservatives confronted. Indeed, Voegelin’s grand critique of modernity did not seem to offer much of practical value to those who were attempting to answer charges that conservatism, insofar as it was anti-modern, was by that very fact un-American. This charge led to the second line of inquiry which has engaged the attention of American conservative intellectuals for the past half century. Is America, a state founded in the eighteenth century with no landed aristocracy, no established church, and no hereditary monarchy, really a conservative country? This was never simply a historical question, and it has not elicited simply historical responses. Instead, conservative thinkers as diverse as M.E. Bradford and Harry Jaffa have endeavored to craft from the historical record a “usable past” for American conservatives. Such histories are designed to frame and direct current policy discussions; they have little concern for the past in its intrinsic pastness.

Sandoz’s essays on American political thought in the founding period are profound and suggestive contributions to this conservative project. His is an attempt to read the American founding period through the lens of a Voegelinian conception of philosophy. His most controversial claim— though one of considerable merit—is that America’s constitutional order owes its intellectual foundations to a pre-modern conception of political activity and human nature. Modernity is characterized by Sandoz as a radical attempt to create an “an intramundane religion” in which human salvation is achieved as the result of human effort. This sort of neo-Pelagianism is the intellectual basis for the various ideological formations—like socialism in its various forms, and liberalism with its pluralist and agnostic commitments—which inform most contemporary politics.

Sandoz is at his best when rightly insisting on the centrality of a particular type of Protestant Christianity to the way most of the eighteenth-century founders conceived the world. He is reacting against the anachronistic and self-serving claims by modern liberal writers that the founding was the result of the straightforward application of the abstract, rationalist, and agnostic philosophical principles of the Enlightenment to the American colonial situation. In “Republicanism and Religion: Some Contextual Considerations,” for example, Sandoz writes of the American understanding of government that

in varying degrees the [founders] attempt, within limits, to apply Gospel principles to politics: The state was made for man, not men for the state (cf. Mark 2:27). The imperfect, flawed, sinful being Man, for all his inability, paradoxically yet remains capable with the aid of divine grace of self-government—i.e. of living decent lives as individuals; through understanding and free will able to respond to grace and to accept the terms of eternal salvation; and capable, with providential guidance, of self-government in both temporal and spiritual affairs, in regimes based on consent and churches organized congregationally.

Sandoz is claiming that the American founders had a profound understanding of and respect for the transcendent ground of their being. Unlike many of their descendants, the founders understood the limits of political activity. In other words, and to borrow a descriptive phrase from the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott, the American founders engaged in a skeptical style of politics. Ironically, it is those who reject the divine and so must attempt to build a New Jerusalem within time who engage in the politics of faith.

The conception of politics shared by the founders was based upon a philosophical anthropology which understood human beings as created by and sharing in the divine spark of transcendent reality, while at the same time acknowledging the limitations and inherently fallen character of these same human beings. Consequently, the Voegelinian critique of modernity as the divinization of the temporal does not apply to the pre-modern commitments of the founding generation. For Sandoz, George Washington, John Adams, John Dickinson, and Jonathan Edwards (a man of singular wisdom and importance for Sandoz) had more in common with Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas, and Richard Hooker than with such continental contemporaries as Berkeley, Rousseau, Hume, or Kant.

In addition to his insights on the importance of religion to the founders’ worldview, Sandoz also recognizes the other traditions central to the justification of the American Revolution and its consolidation in the decades following. He writes that

the American appeal was grounded in philosophy as expressed in Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas, Harrington, Locke, and Thomas Reid; in Protestant Christianity in the form of political theology that mingled religious revival, keeping the faith and fighting the good fight, providential purpose, and a palpable sense of special favor or choseness; and in a constitutionalism that recapitulated all of the arguments seventeenthcentury Englishmen had thought valid in resisting the tyranny of Stuart kings by invoking common law liberty back to Magna Carta and the ancient constitution.

In essays on American education during the founding period, on the emergence of the American national identity, and on the American understanding of law, Sandoz displays a keen understanding of the complexity of the various intellectual strands which together comprised the American character in its first expression. Unfortunately, it is the strengths of these essays, their meticulous research and theoretical richness, which make them less successful as practical exhortation than the more obvious and less subtle accounts of other conservative luminaries. Sandoz is too good of an intellectual historian to write a truly effective story of the mythical past, and the more historical his essays are, the less “useful” they become.

Nonetheless, these essays still manifest some of the weaknesses of similar attempts to create a practical conservative past. Any such attempt necessarily narrows the range of interest in the past and rules out certain questions in the same way that Sandoz suggests an ideology works. For example, Sandoz rather coyly admits that “an array of…chiliastic and millenarian sentiments was well represented in America during the Revolutionary period”—and then dismisses such movements as untrue to the American spirit. In fact, this “array” constitutes a verysignificant part of the American political tradition, and it suffers from precisely those Gnostic temptations against which Voegelin warned. Sandoz downplays the significance of the Gnostic rhetoric of the Puritans with their “City on a Hill,” but Voegelin himself regarded these prototypical Americans, at least in their Cromwellian manifestation, as exemplary Gnostics. Furthermore, those who, like Jefferson, were indebted to Thomas Paine, did indeed rely upon an appeal to Enlightenment abstractions of a kind similar to those which animated the French Revolution. Jefferson not only supported that particular misadventure, but it was also Jefferson, after all, who believed himself capable of re-writing the Bible to suit a more “rational” age, an example of Gnosticism par excellence.

There is a great temptation among conservatives— though not unique to them— to write a clean and unitary narrative which will guide current political activity. Sandoz avoids this temptation better than most, but his work still reflects the allure of this notion when he writes that “history is surely too important to be left to the historians.” Would he say the same about carpentryand carpenters? dancing and dancers? Christianity and Christians? Succumbing to the temptation to create mythical pasts necessarily entails a rejection of the complexity of the political ideas of the founding and an erasure of those aspects of the founders’ thought that we find currently unacceptable. Sandoz, like so many American conservatives, looks to the founding period as a sort of pre-lapsarian state of perfection which was then ruined by liberalism, post-modernism, historicism, or some other exotic and foreign ideological disease.

This line of argument is no longer politically necessary for conservatives. Instead, conservatives should heed the very different suggestion that Sandoz proffers in his last essay, “Truth and the Experience of Epoch in History.” There he observes that “there can be no permanently valid institutional solutions to the question of the best order for human society”: all we can do is attempt to make the world a place appropriate for human beings while recognizing both that human reason is limited and that the source of truth lies in a transcendent reality which can neither be systematized nor immanentized.