In my previous Commentary, I quoted Catherine Austin Fitts as saying: “I believe [that] freedom can prevail and there’s many things we can do to help that happen. But ultimately this is a spiritual war and you have to call on God, you have to call on the Divine, and that’s where the battle is ultimately gonna be decided, …” Her words reminded me of what the political philosopher Eric Voegelin wrote in 1938, while he was still teaching in Vienna, and, not insignificantly so, just before he and his wife fled to Switzerland making their way to the United States to escape from the Nazis who had managed to bring Austria “heim ins Reich” during the beginning of that year.
Religious forces
In the Epilogue to his essay The Political Religions, Voegelin then wrote: “The life of people in political community, cannot be defined as a profane realm, in which we are concerned only with legal questions and the organization of power. A community is also a realm of religious order, and the knowledge of a political condition will be incomplete with respect to a decisive point, firstly, if it does not take into account the religious forces inherent in a society and the symbols through which these are expressed or, secondly, if it does include the religious forces but does not recognize them as such and translates them into areligious categories.” Meaning that knowledge of the political condition of a community will only be complete when we take into account the fact that “[h]umans live in political society with all traits of their being, from the physical to the spiritual and religious traits.” (i)
Integrating world and God in human experience
Voegelin had come to the conclusion that “[t]he political community is always integrated in the overall context of human experience of world and God, irrespective of whether the political sphere occupies a subordinate level in the divine order of the hierarchy of being or whether it is deified itself.” This integration of world and God in the human experience makes that “[t]he language of politics is always interspersed with the ecstasies of religiosity and, thus, becomes a symbol in the concise sense by letting experiences concerned with the contents of the world be permeated with transcendental-divine experiences. Elements of the symbolic expressive forms that we have worked out on the basis of the Mediterranean and European examples can be found in all very advanced civilizations: the hierarchy, in which the sacral substance branches out from a transcendent God to the community of creatures; the ecclesia as the sacral communal substance; the apocalypse as the revelation of the empire; the holy kings as God’s mediators and personality carriers of the community.”
The profane realm
Voegelin saw it as his mission to unravel and clarify how the various “modern” forms of human-political organization are integrated in the order of being and what happens when, simply put, this process of integration doesn’t take place in accordance with the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. Now, 87 years after he wrote The political Religions, we may very well conclude that a strictly secular human-political organization is all that’s left of the order of being. What I mean is that, with the almost complete politicization of every aspect of society and the churches and religions under fierce and relentless assault, there seems to be no “order of being” left outside human-political organization. Inside of it, all traces of a “world & God” order of being have been meticulously and effectively erased. We’ve come to live in a profane realm, in which, now that also the Courts and the legal system have been fully integrated into that secular organization of power, we are left with nothing but that organization of power.
The abandonment of God
Surely, the religious forces are still present, but they have been translated into areligious categories. Voegelin defined this phenomenon as “innerworldly religiosity”, which, when it is “experienced by the collective body ‒ be it humanity, the people, the class, the race, or the state ‒ as the realissimum”, as the penultimate reality, comes down to the “abandonment of God”. (emphasis added) Voegelin proffered that “the belief that man is the source of good and of improvement of the world, as it is held by the Enlightenment, and the belief that the collective body is a mysterious, divine substance, which has been spreading since the nineteenth century, is anti-Christian renunciation.” In the context of what Voegelin describes as “the wealth of the stages extending from nature to God”, the inner-worldly religiosity and its areligious symbolism “conceal the most essential parts of reality”. They block “the path to the reality of God” and distort “the circumstances of the levels of being subordinate to God.” Instead they energize utopian activism and the concomitant Will to Power.
The “digital Reich“
Austin Fitts stresses that she is primarily “interested in freedom” and that she believes that “the only way we can be free is through a culture that embraces the divine and build true wealth, enduring wealth and living wealth, not just financial wealth.” To attain true wealth “you need Christianity”. Indeed, it was Jesus Christ Who taught that “true wealth” remains imperfect unless it includes the Divine Oneness between Man and his Creator. Pursuing that Oneness as Man’s ultimate Telos requires first of all the change of mind that He called “Metanoia”. In my book Liberating Liberty, I describe in great detail how the various “murderers of God” sought and, to a large degree, succeeded in obstructing Man’s pursuit of his Divine Telos by redirecting the search from the eternal to the temporal, from God to Man. In our age of technocracy, the redirecting has reached an unprecedented level of efficiency because, technically speaking, it can quite easily be finetuned to misguide, coerce and influence each person who is digitally connected to the “control grid”. In this “digital Reich”, Divine Intelligence was replaced by Artificial Intelligence. Of necessity, it must block the Metanoia that opens the door to what Voegelin called “the reality of God”. If it didn’t, it would self-destruct.
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(i) Epilogue to his essay The Political Religions, published in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin; Volume 5; Modernity without Restraint; University of Missouri Press; 2000.
