Eric Voegelin, in his essay The Gospel and Culture , (Vol. 12, CW) explained that classical philosophy and Christianity share the same “noetic core.” Voegelin explicates the noetic core as the experience of the push-pull of the “golden cord” wherein life is gained, and awareness of existence in the “In-between of human-divine participation,” and the understanding of divine reality inherent in the tension defined as question and answer (the philosopher’s quest).
Voegelin goes on to describe the noetic component of these movements as “ . . . a dynamic of existential knowledge which Aristotle compressed in the formula that human thought (nous) in search of the divine ground of being is moved (kineitai) by the divine Nous who is the object of thought (noeton) of the human nous (Metaphysics 1072a3of.).”
Voegelin also makes two interesting statements: (1) “ To follow Christ means to continue the event of divine presence in the society and history ,” and (2) “ And, finally, since there is no doctrine to be taught but only the story to be told of God’s pull becoming effective in the world through Christ, the Saving Tale that answers the question of life and death can be reduced to the brief statement:
And this is life eternal:
To know you, the only true God,
and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. (John: 17:3)”
We are just now coming out of an age of doctrinization that has had the deleterious effect of obscuring the truth inherent in experiential reality and a secular age that has sought to destroy the transcendent pole of a reality defined as nonexistent. Consequently, we are seeking to recapture those symbols whose truth belongs to nonexistent realities and this presents a problem because in an age dominated by empiricism, “rationalism,”and technology it is difficult for us, culturally, to recognize the meditative components of the “engendering reality.” Yet, these truths, Voegelin tells us, found in the symbols act as the “source of right order in human existence.”
T he ground of being is revealed in the metaleptic relationship where the divine and being dwell together in the tension of existence is Voegelin’s response to the questions of existence and being found in the philosophy of consciousness. His answer, however, opened his analysis to the problem of subjectivism.
In his paper, Voegelin and Schelling on Freedom and the Order of Existence , Dr. Steven F. McGuire argues that Friedrich W.J. Von Schelling solves Voegelin’s dilemma by showing that “..a philosophy of order cannot be a philosophy of consciousness only: it must be a metaphysicis of the existence that contains consciousness, which means, for Schelling, that it must be a philosophy of freedom.”
Schelling’s insight revealed that (1) “being is prior to thinking,” and (2) “ . . . the Absolute is what makes consciousness possible and therefore can never be contained within it.”
The answer to John’s questions is provided by McGuire when he writes, “ Our very existence is constituted by truth,” and in explicating that ” Schelling develops this insight in his identity philosophy by arguing for the Absolute as the unity that must necessarily precede the subject-object dichotomy of the finite world.”
On the question of the means of experiencing that truth, Dr. McGuire writes, “ Schelling now thinks of freedom as both that which makes existence possible and the principle by which we recognize the order of that which we live within.”
