THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU has a new piece at The Brussels Journal about the thinkers Eric Voegelin and René Guénon. In “René Guénon and Eric Voegelin on the Degeneration of Right Order,” he examines their understandings of the post-Alexandrian world, when rival generals sought control of the vast empire. The new empires that emerged became a “graveyard of societies,” wrote Voegelin, destroying concrete and distinct societies. The obliteration of traditional ways parallels that of modernity. Bertonneau writes:

It goes almost without saying that for both Guénon and Voegelin, modernity is a disorderly and corrupt period in which the dominant elites have betrayed the hard-earned wisdom of philosophy and revelation and believe themselves anointed to remake a wicked world into a rational paradise liberated from superstition and bigotry, a project necessarily entailing the destruction of tradition. Modernity is “Gnostic,” in Voegelin’s term. Gnosticism designates a markedly low order of mental activity, in spiteful rebellion against the difficulties entailed by a contrasting openness to and participation in reality.

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Joseph Ebbecke writes:

“The succession of speakers in the lecture-calendar replicates in small the meaningless temporal succession of titled eminences in the ecumene.”

Now THAT’S funny, Dr Bertonneau.

I’ve always been fascinated by the Diadache, that was instructive. Most of what I know about the Seleucids, however, is straight out of First Maccabees.

I ordered Spiritual Authority from Interlibrary loan. My local library, to my amazement, apparently once had a copy, now listed as ‘missing from shelves.’

Voeglin is too rich for summer reading.

I tried to leave a comment at Brussels Journal but it wouldn’t take, so maybe Dr B. will see it here.

Mr. Bertonneau writes:

My thanks go to Mr. Ebbecke. It is always nice to have readers. One little-noticed aspect of Eric Voegelin’s writing is his oblique, ultra-reserved sense of humor, which is generally triggered when his analysis penetrates into the existential absurdity, either of the post-Alexandrian or of the modern period. While I respect Guénon enormously, I must confess not being able to find so much as an atom of humor in his presentation.

By studying Voegelin for three decades I have, perhaps, sharpened my own sense of the absurd. A sense of the absurd becomes ever more necessary in one’s regime of sanity-maintenance.

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