1971, The Gospel and Culture (Eric Voegelin)

The Gospel and
Culture (1971)
[“To save the honor of philosophy” Voegelin accepted an invitation

to lecture, as a contemporary philosopher, on “The Gospel and Cul-
ture,” the result being this lengthy essay on the heart of the Chris-
tian message.
From a philosopher’s perspective, he addresses the problem of
“the Word’s difficulty to make itself heard in our time and, if heard
at all, to make itself intelligible to those who are willing to listen.”
In order to place the problem in a historical context, he describes the
problems that affect the human search for the ground of existence
due to the twin processes of deculturation and doctrinalization. He
explains that the Word of the Gospel is not mere “information” to
be considered as if it were a proposition about historical events, but
rather an answering response to the human search about the mean-
ing of life and death, a response arising from “a movement of divine
presence” both in Jesus and in anyone who recognizes this “saving
tale” as speaking to his or her tension of existential seeking.
Finally, he analyzes the “equivalence” of the experiences of the
Unknown God symbolized by the Gospel and its “saving tale”
with the corresponding experiences and symbols of classic philos-
ophy. He emphasizes the “noetic core” that is common to their
experiential “movements of search and discovery,” while also care-
fully delineating their differences—in the end, explaining that the
Unknown God revealed through Christ is the conclusion of a long
“historical drama of revelation” beginning in cosmological cultures
From Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 12: Published Essays, 1966–1985,
ed. Ellis Sandoz (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 172–213.
245
part four | philosophy and the open soul
and radically advanced through the differentiating symbolizations

of classical philosophy.—Eds.]
The Steering Committee has honored me with the invitation to

give a lecture on “The Gospel and Culture.” If I have understood
the intention of the committee correctly, they wanted to hear what
a philosopher has to say about the Word’s difficulty to make itself
heard in our time and, if heard at all, to make itself intelligible to
those who are willing to listen. Why could the gospel be victorious
in the Hellenistic-Roman environment of its origin? Why did it at-
tract an intellectual elite who restated the meaning of the gospel
in terms of philosophy and, by this procedure, created a Christian
doctrine? Why could this doctrine become the state religion of the
Roman Empire? How could the church, having gone through this
process of acculturation, survive the Roman Empire and become
the chrysalis, as Toynbee has called it, of Western civilization?—
And what has blighted this triumphant cultural force, so that today
the churches are on the defensive against the dominant intellectual
movements of the time, and shaken by rising unrest from within?
Quite an order, I must say. Still, I have accepted it—for what
use is philosophy if it has nothing to say about the great questions
which the men of the time rightly may ask of it? But if you consid-
er the magnitude of the challenge, you will understand that I can
promise no more than an humble attempt to justify the commit-
tee’s confidence and to save the honor of philosophy.
I
I have pointed the initial questions toward the issue of gospel and
philosophy, and I shall begin by presenting an early and a recent
instance in which the issue has become thematic.
By absorbing the life of reason in the form of Hellenistic philos-
ophy, the gospel of the early ekklesia tou theou has become the
Christianity of the church. If the community of the gospel had
not entered the culture of the time by entering its life of reason,
it would have remained an obscure sect and probably disappeared
from history; we know the fate of Judaeo-Christianity. The culture
of reason, in its turn, had arrived at a state that was sensed by ea-
ger young men as an impasse in which the gospel appeared to offer
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the gospel and culture
the answer to the philosopher’s search for truth; the introduction

to Justin’s Dialogue documents the situation. In the conception of
Justin the Martyr (d. ca. 165), gospel and philosophy do not face the
thinker with a choice of alternatives, nor are they complementary
aspects of truth which the thinker would have to weld into the
complete truth; in his conception, the Logos of the gospel is rather
the same Word of the same God as the logos spermatikos of philos-
ophy, but at a later state of its manifestation in history. The Logos
has been operative in the world from its creation; all men who have
lived according to reason, whether Greeks (Heraclitus, Socrates,
Plato) or barbarians (Abraham, Elias), have in a sense been Chris-
tians (Apology 1.46). Hence, Christianity is not an alternative to
philosophy, it is philosophy itself in its state of perfection; the his-
tory of the Logos comes to its fulfillment through the incarnation
of the Word in Christ. To Justin, the difference between gospel and
philosophy is a matter of successive stages in the history of reason.
With this early statement of the issue in mind, we shall now
examine a recent pronouncement on it. I take it from De Nieuwe
Katechismus of 1966, commissioned by the hierarchy of the Neth-
erlands and conventionally called the Dutch Catechism. Its open-
ing chapter bears the title “Man the Questioner”; and on the first
page we find the following passage:
This book . . . begins by asking what is the meaning of the fact that we
exist. This does not mean that we begin by taking up a non-Christian
attitude. It simply means that we, too, as Christians, are men with
enquiring minds. We must always be ready and able to explain how
our faith is the answer to the question of our existence.
The passage, though wanting in polish, is philosophically very

much to the point. Its well-intentioned clumsiness sheds a flood
of light on the difficulties in which the churches find themselves
today. Note above all the difficulty the church has with its own
believers who want to be Christians at the price of their humanity.
Justin started as an inquiring mind and let his search, after it had
tried the philosophical schools of the time, come to rest in the truth
of the gospel. Today the situation is reversed. The believers are at
rest in an uninquiring state of faith; their intellectual metabolism
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must be stirred by the reminder that man is supposed to be a ques-

tioner, that a believer who is unable to explain how his faith is an
answer to the enigma of existence may be a “good Christian” but is
a questionable man. And we may supplement the reminder by gen-
tly recalling that neither Jesus nor his fellowmen to whom he spoke
his word did yet know that they were Christians—the gospel held
out its promise, not to Christians, but to the poor in the spirit, that
is, to minds inquiring, even though on a culturally less sophisticat-
ed level than Justin’s. Behind the passage there lurks the conflict,
not between gospel and philosophy, but rather between the gospel
and its uninquiring possession as doctrine. The authors of the Cat-
echism do not take this conflict lightly; they anticipate resistance
to their attempt at finding the common humanity of men in their
being the questioners about the meaning of existence; and they
protect themselves against all too ready misunderstandings by as-
suring the reader they do not mean “to take up a non-Christian at-
titude.” Assuming them to have carefully weighed every sentence
they wrote, this defensive clause reveals an environment where it
is not customary to ask questions, where the character of the gos-
pel as an answer has been so badly obscured by its hardening into
self-contained doctrine that the raising of the question to which it
is meant as an answer can be suspect as “a non-Christian attitude.”
If that, however, is the situation, the authors have good reason to
be worried indeed. For the gospel as a doctrine which you can take
and be saved, or leave and be condemned, is a dead letter; it will
encounter indifference, if not contempt, among inquiring minds
outside the church, as well as the restlessness of the believer inside
who is un-Christian enough to be man the questioner.
The Catechism’s intent to restore the inquiring mind to the po-
sition that is his due, is a sensible first step toward regaining for
the gospel the reality it has lost through doctrinal hardening. More-
over, however hesitant and tentative it may prove in the execution,
the attempt is a first step toward regaining the life of reason repre-
sented by philosophy. Both Plato’s eroticism of the search (zetesis)
and Aristotle’s intellectually more aggressive aporein recognize in
“man the questioner” the man moved by God to ask the questions
that will lead him toward the cause (arche) of being. The search
itself is the evidence of existential unrest; in the act of questioning,
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man’s experience of his tension (tasis) toward the divine ground

breaks forth in the word of inquiry as a prayer for the Word of the
answer. Question and answer are intimately related one toward the
other; the search moves in the metaxy, as Plato has called it, in
the In-Between of poverty and wealth, of human and divine; the
question is knowing, but its knowledge is yet the trembling of a
question that may reach the true answer or miss it. This luminous
search in which the finding of the true answer depends on asking
the true question, and the asking of the true question on the spiri-
tual apprehension of the true answer, is the life of reason. The phi-
losopher can only be delighted by the Catechism’s admonition to
make “faith” accountable in terms of an answer to questions about
the meaning of existence.
Question and answer are held together, and related to one anoth-
er, by the event of the search. Man, however, though he is truly the
questioner, can also deform his humanity by refusing to ask the
questions, or by loading them with premises devised to make the
search impossible. The gospel, to be heard, requires ears that can
hear; philosophy is not the life of reason if the questioner’s reason
is depraved (Rom. 1:28). The answer will not help the man who has
lost the question; and the predicament of the present age is charac-
terized by the loss of the question rather than of the answer, as the
authors of the Catechism have seen rightly. It will be necessary,
therefore, to recover the question to which, in Hellenistic-Roman
culture, the philosopher could understand the gospel as the answer.
Since the question concerns the humanity of man, it is the same
today as it ever has been in the past, but today it is so badly distort-
ed through the Western deculturation process that it must, first, be
disentangled from the intellectually disordered language in which
we indiscriminately speak of the meaning of life, or the meaning
of existence, or the fact of existence which has no meaning, or the
meaning which must be given to the fact of existence, and so forth,
as if life were a given and meaning a property it has or does not
have.
Well, existence is not a fact. If anything, existence is the non-
fact of a disturbing movement in the In-Between of ignorance and
knowledge, of time and timelessness, of imperfection and perfec-
tion, of hope and fulfillment, and ultimately of life and death. From
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the experience of this movement, from the anxiety of losing the

right direction in this In-Between of darkness and light, arises the
inquiry concerning the meaning of life. But it does arise only be-
cause life is experienced as man’s participation in a movement with
a direction to be found or missed; 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. The connection between
movement and inquiry can best be seen in the case of its deforma-
tion by certain existentialist thinkers. An intellectual like Sartre,
for instance, finds himself involved in the conflict without issue
between his assumption of a meaningless facticity of existence and
his desperate craving for endowing it with a meaning from the re-
sources of his moi. He can cut himself off from the philosopher’s
inquiry by assuming existence to be a fact, but he cannot escape
from his existential unrest. If the search is prohibited from moving
in the In-Between, if as a consequence it cannot be directed toward
the divine ground of being, it must be directed toward a meaning
imagined by Sartre. The search, thus, imposes its form even when
its substance is lost; the imagined fact of existence cannot remain
as meaningless as it is but must become the launching pad for the
intellectual’s Ego.
This imaginative destruction of reason and reality is not Sartre’s
idiosyncrasy; it has representative character in history, because it
is recognizably a phase in a process of thought whose mode has
been set by Descartes. The Meditations, it is true, belongs still to
the culture of the search, but Descartes has deformed the move-
ment by reifying its partners into objects for an Archimedean ob-
server outside the search. In the conception of the new, doctrinaire
metaphysics, the man who experiences himself as the questioner is
turned into a res cogitans whose esse must be inferred from its cog-
itare; and the God for whose answer we are hoping and waiting is
turned into the object for an ontological proof of his existence. The
movement of the search, furthermore, the eroticism of existence in
the In-Between of divine and human, has become a cogitare demon-
strating its objects; the luminosity of the life of reason has changed
into the clarity of the raisonnement. From the reality of the search,
thus, as it disintegrates in the Meditations, there are set free the
three specters which haunt the Western scene to this day. There
250
is, first, the God who has been thrown out of the search and is no
longer permitted to answer questions: living in retirement from the
life of reason he has shriveled into an object of unreasoned faith; and
at appropriate intervals he is declared to be dead. There is, second,
the cogitare of the Archimedean observer outside the movement: it
has swollen into the monster of Hegel’s Consciousness which has
brought forth a God, man, and history of its own; this monster is
still engaged in the desperate fight to have its dialectical movement
accepted as real in place of the real movement of the search in the
In-Between. And, finally, there is the man of the Cartesian cogito
ergo sum: he has sadly come down in the world, being reduced as
he is to the fact and figure of the Sartrean sum ergo cogito; the man
who once could demonstrate not only himself but even the exis-
tence of God, has become the man who is condemned to be free and
urgently wants to be arrested for editing a Maoist journal.
The reflections on the search and its deformation in our time have
been carried sufficiently far to allow for a few conclusions concern-
ing the question and its recovery. First of all, the blight of decultura-
tion has affected philosophy at least as badly as it has the gospel. An
acculturation through the introduction of contemporary philosophy
into the life of the church, the feat of the patres in the Hellenistic-
Roman environment, would today be impossible, for neither have
the churches any use for deformed reason nor do the representa-
tives of deformation ask the questions to which the gospel offers
the answer. Second, however, the situation is not quite so helpless
as it may appear, for the question is present in the time even when
reason is deformed. The search imposes its form even when its sub-
stance is rejected; the dominant philosophoumena of the time are
intelligibly the debris of the search. Deculturation does not consti-
tute a new society, or a new age in history; it is a process within our
society, very much present to the public consciousness and arousing
resistance. As a matter of fact, in these very lines I am analyzing the
phenomenon of deformed reason, and recognizing it as such, by the
criteria of undeformed reason; and I can do it because the Western
culture of reason is quite alive enough, appearances notwithstand-
ing, to furnish the criteria for characterizing its own deformation.
This last observation will, in the third place, dispose of the ideologi-
cal propagation of deculturation processes as a “new age.” We do not
251
live in a “post-Christian,” or “postphilosophical,” or “neopagan”

age, or in the age of a “new myth,” or of “utopianism,” but plainly
in a period of massive deculturation through the deformation of rea-
son. Deformation, however, is not an alternative to, or an advance
beyond, formation. One can speak of a differentiating advance in the
luminosity of the search from myth to philosophy, or from myth
to revelation, but one cannot speak of a pattern of differentiating
progress from reason to unreason. Nevertheless, and fourth, the de-
culturation of the West is an historical phenomenon extending over
centuries; the grotesque rubble into which the image of God is bro-
ken today is not somebody’s wrong opinion about the nature of man
but the result of a secular process of destruction. This character of
the situation must be realized if one does not want to be derailed
into varieties of action which, though suggestive, would hardly
prove remedial. The question of the search cannot be recovered by
stirring around in the rubble; its recovery is not a matter of small
repairs, of putting a patch on here or there, of criticizing this or that
author whose work is a symptom of deculturation rather than its
cause, and so forth. Nor will the conflict be resolved by the famous
dialogues where the partners do not step on each other’s toes, less
because of excessive gentility than because they don’t know which
toes need being stepped on. And least of all can anything be achieved
by pitting right doctrine against wrong doctrine, for doctrinization
precisely is the damage that has been inflicted on the movement
of the search. There would be no doctrines of deformed existence
today unless the search of both philosophy and the gospel had been
overlaid by the late-medieval, radical doctrinization of both meta-
physics and theology.
II
Only the millennial life of reason can dissolve its secular deforma-
tion. We do not have to stay in the ghetto of problems prescribed
by the deformers as contemporary or modern. If the destruction can
go back for centuries, we can go back for millennia to restore the
question so badly damaged in our time.
The searching question for the meaning of life finds its classic
expression, in fifth-century Greece, when Euripides develops the
symbolism of the double meaning of life and death:
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Who knows if to live is to be dead,

and to be dead to live.
Plato resumes the lines of Euripides in the Gorgias (492e) and elab-
orates the symbolism in the myth of the judgment of the dead by
which he concludes the dialogue. Jesus resumes the symbolism in
the saying: “For whoever would save his life (psychen) will lose it;
and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. What, then will
it profit a man, if he gains the whole world but has to suffer the de-
struction of his life?” (Matt. 16:25–26). Paul, finally, writes: “If you
live according to the flesh, you are bound to die; but if by the spirit
you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live” (Rom. 8: 13).
Variants could be multiplied. The earliest case known, though still
couched in the language of the cosmological myth, is to be found in
an Egyptian poem of the late third millennium B.C. But there must
be remembered, because of its closeness to the gospel, the admoni-
tion of the Platonic Socrates, following the Myth of the Judgment
of the Dead at the end of Republic (621b–c): “The tale was saved
. . . it will save us if we believe it . . . and keep our soul (psychen)
undefiled. If we are persuaded by me, we shall believe the soul to be
immortal . . . and so we shall hold ever to the upward way, pursuing
righteousness with wisdom, so that we may be dear to ourselves
and to the gods.” Paul Shorey is right when, in his translation of
the Republic, he adds a footnote to the phrase “keep our soul unde-
filed,” referring to the parallels in James 1:27 and 2 Peter 3:14.
There is direction in existence; and as we follow it or not, life
can be death, and death be life eternal. The philosophers were con-
scious of having gained this insight representatively for mankind.
The question expressed by the double meaning of life and death is
the question of everyman’s, not only the philosopher’s, existence.
Hence, in the Republic, the tale that was saved and now is told by
Socrates, is attributed to Er the Pamphylian, the man of all tribes,
or of the tribe of Everyman, who came back from death and told his
fellowmen of the judgment he had witnessed in the underworld.
Everyman can lose himself in the tangle of existence and, having
returned from its death to life, can tell the tale of its meaning.
Moreover, behind the tale there stands the authority of the rep-
resentative death suffered by Socrates for its truth. The Apology
253
concludes with the ironic parting word to the judges: “But now the
time has come to go. I go to die, and you to live. But who goes to the
better lot is unknown to anyone but the God.”
The new insight became socially effective through the monument
Plato erected to it in his work. By the time of Christ, four centuries
later, it had become the self-understanding of man in the culture of
the Hellenistic-Roman oikumene; and again the universal truth of
existence had to be linked with a representative death: the dramatic
episode of John 12 is the Christian equivalent to the philosopher’s
Apology. The evangelist reports the triumphant entrance of Jesus in
Jerusalem. The story of Lazarus has spread, and the crowd presses
to see and hail the man who can raise the dead to life. The Jewish
authorities want to take measures against him, because he draws
the people away from them, but for the moment they must be cau-
tious: “You see you can do nothing; look, the world (kosmos) is run-
ning after him!” This world of the Jewish authorities, however, is
not the ecumenic world Jesus wants to draw to himself. Only when
a group of Greeks approaches Philip and Andrew, and these apostles
with the Greek names tell Jesus about the desire of the Greeks to
see him, can he reply: “Now the hour has come for the Son of Man
to be glorified” (12 :23). The Greeks are coming—mankind is ready
to be represented by the divine sacrifice. The Johannine Jesus can,
therefore, continue:
Most solemnly I tell you,

unless a wheat grain falls into the earth and dies,
it remains only a single grain,
but if it dies, it bears much fruit.
Who loves his life (psychen) loses it,
but who hates his life in this world (kosmos),
keeps it for life eternal.
If anyone serves me, he must follow me,
and wherever I am, my servant will be too.
If anyone serves me, my Father will honor him.
In the Synoptic Gospels, as in the Gorgias and Republic, the ques-

tion of life and death appears only in the forms of insight, persua-
sion, and admonition (Matt. 10:39, 16:25; Luke 14:26, 17:33); in
254
John 12, as in the Apology, it is lived through by the representative

sufferer, so that the insight becomes the truth of existence in real-
ity by the authority of death. Even the Daimonion that sustained
Socrates in his course by not raising its warning voice has its equiv-
alent in the reflection of Jesus:
Now my soul is troubled. What shall I say?

Father, save me from this hour?
No, for this purpose I have come to this hour.
Father, glorify your name.
To the prayer of submission by the troubled soul heaven answered

with a roll of thunder—historians still are not sure whether the
thunderer was Zeus or Yahweh—and to those who had ears to hear,
the thunder came as a voice: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it
again.” Assured by the thundering voice, Jesus can conclude:
Now Judgment (krisis) has come to this world (kosmos),

now the ruler of this world will be cast out.
And I, when I am lifted up from this earth,
will draw all men to myself.
The appearance of the Greeks is peculiar to John; we do not find

them in the Synoptic Gospels. The interpretation I have given relies
on John’s literary form of letting a narrative of events or signs be
followed by the exposition of their meaning through the response of
Jesus, but the reader should be aware that most commentators tend
to play down the Greeks, in order to assimilate the intent of John
12 to the Synoptic tradition. Still, I see no reason why the author
should be denied the courtesy of having his literary work be taken
seriously at the letter of the text just because his work is a Gospel.
The episode of John 12 expresses an Hellenistic-ecumenic concep-
tion of the drama of existence, culminating in the sacrificial death
of Christ. It receives its peculiar atmosphere from the pre-gnostic
play with the meanings of the word kosmos. In the usage of the
Jewish authorities, the kosmos who runs after Jesus (12:19) prob-
ably means no more than tout le monde. With the appearance of
the Greeks (12:20–22), the meaning grows toward the mankind of
255
the oikumene. With the hatred of one’s life (psyche) in this world
(12:25), the kosmos becomes a habitat from which this life must be
saved for eternity. And in the concluding words (12:31), the kosmos
is the domain of the prince of this world from whose rule Jesus,
when he is “lifted up,” will draw all men to himself, leaving the sa-
tanic archon a ruler without a people. Jesus has become the rival of
the archon in a cosmic struggle for the rule of men. But is that not
gnosticism? It would be rash to indulge in the assumption, for John
moves the episode as a whole, including both the narrative and its
exegesis by Jesus’ response, into the literary position of a narrative
on which a further exegetic response of Jesus is superimposed. In
this superimposed response, Jesus emphatically declares (ekrazen):
I, the light, have come into the world (kosmos),

that whoever believes in me need not remain
in darkness.
If anyone hears my words and does not heed them,
I do not judge him,
for I have not come to judge the world (kosmos),
but to save the world (kosmos).
Who rejects me, and does not accept my words,
has what judges him:
The word I have spoken will be the word that
judges him on the Last Day.
(12:44)
The meaning of the kosmos reverts from the habitat to the inhab-
itants who are not to be evacuated but to be saved. From the cos-
mic struggle of archon and Redeemer we return to the drama of
existence—the light of the word has come into the darkness, saving
those who believe it, and carrying judgment for those who close
their eyes to it. At the present stage of the analysis, it would be
difficult to find a major difference of function between Plato’s Pam-
phylian tale of the last judgment and John’s Last Day.
The search in the In-Between moves from the question of life
and death to the answer in the saving tale. The question, however,
does not arise from a vacuum, but from a field of reality, and points
toward answers of a certain type; and the saving tale, be it Plato’s
256
Pamphylian myth or John’s Gospel, is not an answer given at ran-

dom, but must recognizably fit the reality of existence which in the
question is presupposed as truly experienced. Question and answer
are intimately related to one another in the movement as an intel-
ligible whole. This relationship, which constitutes the truth of the
tale, requires further analysis.
The double meaning of life and death is the symbolism engen-
dered by man’s experience of his being pulled in various directions
among which he has to choose the right one. Plato has identified the
plurality of pulls, the necessity of choosing among them, and the
possibility of knowing the right one, as the complex of experiences
from which arises the question of life and death. Corresponding to
the variety of pulls, there can be distinguished a variety of existen-
tial modes and habits as we follow the one or the other. “When
opinion leads through reason (logos) toward the best (ariston) and
is more powerful, its power is called self-restraint (sophrosyne), but
when desire (epithymia) drags us (helkein) toward pleasures and
rules within us, its rule is called excess (hubris)” (Phaedrus 238a).
The pulls are in conflict, dragging us up or down. A young man may
be “drawn (helkein) towards philosophy” (Republic 494e), but so-
cial pressure may divert him towards a life of pleasure or success
in politics. If he follows the second pull, however, the question of
meaning is not settled for him, for the first pull continues to be ex-
perienced as part of his existence. By following the second pull he
does not transform his existence into a question-free fact, but into
a recognizably questionable course of life. He will sense the life he
leads as “not his own and true life” (495c)—he will live in a state of
alienation. The play of the pulls, thus, is luminous with truth. By
following the wrong course one does not make it the right one, but
slides into existence in untruth. This luminosity of existence with
the truth of reason precedes all opinions and decisions about the
pull to be followed. Moreover, it remains alive as the judgment of
truth in existence whatever opinions about it we may actually form.
The terms seeking (zetein) and drawing (helkein) do not denote
two different movements but symbolize the dynamics in the ten-
sion of existence between its human and divine poles. In the one
movement there is experienced a seeking from the human, a being
drawn from the divine pole. I am deliberately avoiding the language
257
of man and God at this point, because today these symbols are load-
ed with various doctrinal contents which derive from the insights
which, in their turn, are the results of the existential movement
that we call classic philosophy. Only from the travail of this move-
ment there emerges man as the questioner, Aristotle’s aporon and
thaumazon (Metaphysics 982b18), and God as the mover who at-
tracts or draws man to himself, as in Plato’s Laws X or Aristotle’s
Metaphysics. These new insights into man’s humanity and God’s
divinity which mark the end of the classic search must not be pro-
jected back into its beginning as doctrinal premises, or the reali-
ty of the process from which the answering symbols derive their
truth would be eclipsed, if not destroyed. There is a long way from
the compact experiences which engender the Homeric mortals and
immortals to the differentiated movement of existence in the In-
Between which Aristotle characterizes as an athanatizein, as an act
of immortalizing (Nicomachean Ethics X.7, 8)—in historical time
about as long as the way from classic philosophy to the gospel. The
two components of the movement, now, need not always hold each
other in the balance in which Plato keeps them in the construction
of the dialogues where he demonstrates, for the pedagogical pur-
pose of persuasion, the process and methods of seeking which lead
to the right answer. Behind the dialogues, there stands the author
who has found the answer before he engages in the work of literary
composition; and his, as well as Socrates’, way of finding it was not
necessarily the way of dialogical persuasion. What happens in the
life of the man who emerges from the movement of existence as the
paidagogos for his fellowmen can be apprehended rather in such
episodes as the Parable of the Cave. There Plato lets the man who
is fettered with his face to the wall be dragged up (helkein) by force
to the light (Republic 515e). The accent lies on the violence suf-
fered by the man in the Cave, on his passivity and even resistance
to being turned around (periagoge), so that the ascent to light is less
an action of seeking than a fate inflicted. If we accept this suffering
of being dragged up as a realistic description of the movement, the
parable evokes the passion of the Socrates who tells it: his being
dragged up to the light by the God; his suffering the death for the
light when he returns to let his fellowmen have their share in it;
and his rising from the dead to live as the teller of the saving tale.
258
Moreover, this passion of the parable evokes, if I may anticipate,

the passion of conversion inflicted on the resisting Paul by Christ
through the vision on the road to Damascus.
In Plato’s experience, the suffering overshadows the action in
the search so strongly that it becomes difficult to translate the pa-
thos in his tauta ta pathe en hemin (Laws 644e), “all these pathe
in us.” Does this pathos express only the experience of the pull
(helkein) that gives direction to the search, or does it want to ac-
knowledge the movement as so strongly tinged by suffering that
the terms experience and passion approach synonymity? The con-
text in which the passage appears, the Myth of the Puppet Player,
leaves no doubt that the uncertainty is caused by Plato’s explora-
tion of the field of existential tension beyond the movement of the
search that finds its fulfillment in the saving tale. For the surer we
are of knowing the true answer to the question of life and death,
the more puzzling it becomes that there should be a question at
all. Why is the prisoner fettered in the Cave in the first place? Why
must the force that binds him be overcome by a counterforce that
turns him around? Why must the man who ascended to the light
return to the Cave to suffer death at the hands of those who did not
leave it? Why does not everybody leave, so that the Cave as an es-
tablishment of existence would be abandoned? Beyond the search
that receives direction from the pull (helkein) of reason there ex-
tends the larger existential field of “counterpulling,” of anthelkein
(Laws 644–45). Behind the question to which the saving tale is the
answer there looms the darker question why it remains the ques-
tion of existence even when the answer is found. To these ques-
tions arising from the structure of “counterpulling” in existence
Plato has given his answer in the symbolism of man as a puppet
made by gods, “possibly as a plaything, possibly with a more seri-
ous purpose, but that we cannot know,” and now being pulled by
various cords towards opposite actions. On man it is incumbent
always to follow the golden and sacred cord of judgment (logismos)
and not the other cords of lesser metals. The component of human
action, thus, has not disappeared from the movement, but it has
now been fitted into the larger play of pull and counterpull. For the
pull of the golden cord is gentle, without violence; in order to pre-
vail in existence it needs the support of man who must counterpull
259
(anthelkein) to the counterpull of the lesser cords. Man’s self (au-

tos) is introduced as the force which must decide the struggle of
the pulls through cooperation with the sacred pull of reason (lo-
gos) and judgment (logismos). In brief: Rebellious questioners who
want to complain about the structure of existence, in which the
Cave persists to exert its pull even when the saving tale is found,
are given the same brush-off they were given by an earlier great
realist, by Jeremiah:
Behold! What I have built, I will pull down;

and what I have planted, I will tear up—
and you seek great things for yourself?
Seek them not!
For behold! I will bring evil upon all flesh—
says Yahweh—
But your life will I give you, as a prize of war,
in every place where you go.
(45:4–5)
Life is given as a prize of war. Who wants to save his life in it will
lose it. The Saving Tale is not a recipe for the abolition of the an-
thelkein in existence but the confirmation of life through death in
this war. The death of Socrates which, just as the death of Jesus,
could have been physically avoided, is representative because it
authenticates the truth of reality.
These reflections have clarified the problem of truth so far that no
more is needed than an explicit statement of the insights implied.
Neither is there a question vainly looking for an answer, nor is
there a truth of the Saving Tale, imposing itself from nowhere on a
fact of existence. The movement in the In-Between is indeed an in-
telligible whole of question and answer, with the experience of the
movement engendering the language symbols for its expression.
As far as the experiences are concerned, the movement has no
“contents” other than its questioning, the pathe of pull and coun-
terpull, the directional indices of the pulls, and the consciousness
of itself that we have called its luminosity; as far as the symbols
are concerned, they have nothing to express but the experiences
enumerated, the placement of the reality experienced in the wider
260
context of the reality in which the differentiated movement oc-

curs, and the self-conscious movement as an event in man’s exis-
tence in society and history in which hitherto it has not occurred.
Such difficulties of understanding as these insights frequently en-
counter in the contemporary climate of deculturation are caused
by the habits of hypostatizing and dogmatizing. The symbols de-
veloped in the movement, I want to stress therefore, do not refer to
objects in external reality, but to the phases of the movement as it
becomes articulate in its self-illuminating process. There is no In-
Between other than the metaxy experienced in a man’s existential
tension toward the divine Ground of being; there is no question of
life and death other than the question aroused by pull and counter-
pull; there is no Saving Tale other than the tale of the divine pull to
be followed by man; and there is no cognitive articulation of exis-
tence other than the noetic consciousness in which the movement
becomes luminous to itself.
A further difficulty of understanding is encountered by the in-
sight that the symbols belong as much to the In-Between as do the
experiences symbolized. There is not, first, a movement in the In
Between and, second, a human observer, perhaps the philosopher,
who records his observations of the movement. The reality of ex-
istence, as experienced in the movement, is a mutual participa-
tion (methexis, metalepsis) of human and divine; and the language
symbols expressing the movement are not invented by an observ-
er who does not participate in the movement but are engendered
in the event of participation itself. The ontological status of the
symbols is both human and divine. Plato stresses that his Myth
of the Puppet Player is an alethes logos, a true story, whether the
logos be “received from a God, or from a man who knows” (Laws
645b); and the same double status of the “word” is acknowl-
edged by the prophets when they promulgate their sayings as the
“word” of Yahweh, as in the Jeremiah passage previously quot-
ed. This double status of the symbols which express the move-
ment in the metaxy has been badly obscured in Western history
by Christian theologians who have split the two components of
symbolic truth, monopolizing, under the title of “revelation,” for
Christian symbols the divine component, while assigning, under
the title of “natural reason,” to philosophical symbols the human
261
component. This theological doctrine is empirically untenable—

Plato was just as conscious of the revelatory component in the
truth of his logos as the prophets of Israel or the authors of the
New Testament writings. The differences between prophecy, clas-
sic philosophy, and the gospel must be sought in the degrees of
differentiation of existential truth.
There are, finally, in the climate of deculturation, the difficul-
ties of understanding encountered by the problems of mythical
imagination. Myth is not a primitive symbolic form, peculiar to
early societies and progressively to be overcome by positive sci-
ence, but the language in which the experiences of human-divine
participation in the In-Between become articulate. The symbol-
ization of participating existence, it is true, evolves historically
from the more compact form of the cosmological myth to the more
differentiated forms of philosophy, prophecy, and the gospel, but
the differentiating insight, far from abolishing the metaxy of exis-
tence, brings it to fully articulate knowledge. When existence be-
comes noetically luminous as the field of pull and counterpull, of
the question of life and death, and of the tension between human
and divine reality, it also becomes luminous for divine reality as
the Beyond of the metaxy which reaches into the metaxy in the
participatory event of the movement. There is no In-Between of
existence as a self-contained object but only existence experienced
as part of a reality which extends beyond the In-Between. This ex-
perience of the Beyond (epekeina) of existence experienced, this
consciousness of the Beyond of consciousness which constitutes
consciousness by reaching into it, is the area of reality which ar-
ticulates itself through the symbols of mythical imagination. The
imaginative play of the alethes logos is the “word” through which
the divine Beyond of existence becomes present in existence as its
truth. The Saving Tale can be differentiated beyond classic philoso-
phy, as it has historically happened through Christ and the gospel,
but there is no alternative to the symbolization of the In-Between
of existence and its divine Beyond by mythical imagination. The
speculative systems of the Comtian, Hegelian, and Marxian type,
favored today as alternatives, are not “science” but deformations of
the life of reason through the magic practice of self-divination and
self-salvation.
262
III
The God who plays with man as a puppet is not the God who be-
comes man to gain his life by suffering his death. The movement
that engendered the saving tale of divine incarnation, death, and
resurrection as the answer to the question of life and death is con-
siderably more complex than classic philosophy; it is richer by the
missionary fervor of its spiritual universalism, poorer by its neglect
of noetic control; broader by its appeal to the inarticulate human-
ity of the common man; more restricted by its bias against the ar-
ticulate wisdom of the wise; more imposing through its imperial
tone of divine authority; more imbalanced through its apocalyptic
ferocity, which leads to conflicts with the conditions of man’s ex-
istence in society; more compact through its generous absorption
of earlier strata of mythical imagination, especially through the
reception of Israelite historiogenesis and the exuberance of mira-
cle working; more differentiated through the intensely articulate
experience of loving-divine action in the illumination of existence
with truth. The understanding of these complexities by which the
gospel movement differs from the movement of classic philosophy,
though, cannot be advanced by using such topical dichotomies as
philosophy and religion, metaphysics and theology, reason and rev-
elation, natural reason and supernaturalism, rationalism and irra-
tionalism, and so forth. I shall rather proceed by, first, establishing
the noetic core the two movements have in common and by, sec-
ond, exploring some of the problems which arise from the differen-
tiation of divine action in the gospel movement, as well as from the
reception of more compact strata of experience and symbolization.
The analysis will have to start at the point where the gospel
agrees with classic philosophy in symbolizing existence as a field of
pulls and counterpulls. I have previously quoted John 12:32 where
the author lets Christ say that he will, when he is lifted up from
the earth, draw (helkein) all men to himself. In John 6:44, then, this
drawing power of Christ is identified with the pull exerted by God:
“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws
(helkein) him.” More austere on this point than the Synoptic evan-
gelists, John makes it, furthermore, clear that there is no “mes-
sage” of Christ but the event of the divine Logos becoming present
in the world through the representative life and death of a man.
263
The closing words of the great prayer before the Passion express the
substance of this event:
Father, Righteous One,

the world has not known you, but I have known you,
and they know that you have sent me.
To them I have made known your name, and shall make it known,
that the love by which you loved me will be in them, and I in them.
(17:25–26)
To follow Christ means to continue the event of divine presence

in society and history: “As you have sent me into the world, so I
have sent them into the world” (17:18). 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.
(17:3)
With an admirable economy of means, John symbolizes the pull

of the golden cord, its occurrence as an historical event in the rep-
resentative man, the illumination of existence through the move-
ment from the question of life and death initiated by the pull to
the saving answer, the creation of a social field through the trans-
mission of the insight to the followers, and ultimately the duties
incumbent on John to promulgate the event to mankind at large
through writing the Gospel as a literary document: “Now Jesus did
many other signs in the presence of the disciples which are not re-
corded in this book. Those recorded, however, were written down
so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God,
and that believing this you may have life in his name” (20:30–31).
One can imagine how a young student of philosophy, who wanted
to work himself out of the various doctrinal impasses into which
the school philosophers of the time had maneuvered themselves,
264
could be fascinated by the brilliance of these succinct statements

that must have appeared to him as the perfection of the Socratic-
Platonic movement in the In-Between of existence.
The symbol helkein is peculiar to John; it does not occur else-
where in the New Testament. In the letters of Paul, the component
of knowledge in the movement, the luminosity of its consciousness,
dominates so strongly that the pathos of the pull is symbolized as
a divine act of knowing which forcibly grips a man and illuminates
his existence. In 2 Cor. 4:6, Paul writes: “The God who said ‘let
light shine out of darkness’ is the God who shone in our hearts to
make them luminous (or: resplendent, photismos) with the knowl-
edge (gnosis) of God’s glory, the glory on the face of Christ.” The
glory radiating on the face of Christ is the photismos on the face of
the man who has seen God. Moses had still to hide it with a veil un-
til it had faded; this veil that covered the Old Covenant of written
letters has been drawn away from the New Covenant written by
the spirit (pneuma) in the heart; “and we, with our unveiled faces,
reflecting the brightness of the Lord, all grow brighter and brighter
as we are turned into the image that we reflect” (2 Cor. 3:18).
That the resplendence of knowledge in the heart has its origin in
divine action is explicitly stated in such passages as 1 Cor. 8:1–3:
We know that “all of us possess knowledge (gnosis).”

Knowledge (gnosis) puffs up, love (agape) builds up.
If any one imagines he knows something, he does not yet know as
he ought to know.
But if one loves God, one is known by him.
The words are addressed to members of the Corinthian communi-

ty who “possess knowledge” as doctrine and unwisely apply it as
a rule of conduct; such possessors of truth are reminded that the
knowledge which forms existence without deforming it is God’s
knowledge of man. In a similar admonition to the Galatians Paul
writes:
Formerly, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to be-
ings who are not really gods at all; but now that you have come to
know God—or rather to be known by God—how can you want to
265
return to the weak and beggarly elemental spirits and be their slaves?
(Gal. 4:8–9)
The occasions which motivate Paul to clarify the dynamics of gno-

sis in existence differ widely from the situation in which the clas-
sic philosophers do their differentiating work. In 2 Corinthians he
wants to set off the radiance of the pneumatic covenant written in
the heart against the more compact, “veiled” truth of the Law of
Moses, using for this purpose a symbolism he takes from the proph-
ets; in 1 Corinthians he has to warn off “idolothytes,” men who
are willing to partake of food sacrificed to idols, because they feel
secure in their knowledge that the idols are no gods anyway; and
in Galatians he has to issue a call to order to believers who relapse
into their former worship of elemental spirits. This all too obvious
difference of cultural context, however, must not obscure the fact
that Paul strives to articulate a dynamics 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 1072a30f.).
The noetic core, thus, is the same in both classic philosophy and
the gospel movement. There is the same field of pull and counter-
pull, the same sense of gaining life through following the pull of the
golden cord, the same consciousness of existence in an In-Between
of human-divine participation, and the same experience of divine
reality as the center of action in the movement from question to
answer. Moreover, there is the same consciousness of newly differ-
entiated insights into the meaning of existence; and in both cases
this consciousness constitutes a new field of human types in his-
tory which Plato describes as, first, the spiritual man (daimonios
aner) in whom the movement occurs; second, the man of the earli-
er, more compact type of existence, the mortal (thnetos) in the Ho-
meric sense; and third, the man who reacts negatively to the appeal
of the movement, the dullard or foolish man (amathes).
Though the noetic core is the same in the gospel, its spiritual dy-
namics has radically changed through the experience of an extraor-
dinary divine irruption in the existence of Jesus. This irruption,
through which Jesus becomes the Christ, is expressed by the author
266
of Colossians in the words: “For in him the whole fullness of divine

reality (theotes) dwells bodily” (2:9). In its whole fullness (pan to
pleroma), divine reality is present only in Christ who, by virtue of
this fullness, “is the image (eikon) of the unseen God, the firstborn
of all creation” (1:15). All other men have no more than their or-
dinary share of this fullness (pepleromenoi) through accepting the
truth of its full presence in the Christ who, by his iconic existence,
is “the head of all rule (arche) and authority (exousia)” (2:10). Some-
thing about Jesus must have impressed his contemporaries as an
existence in the metaxy of such intensity that his bodily presence,
the somatikos of the passage, appeared to be fully permeated by
divine presence.
The passage is precious, because the author has succeeded in
conveying his impression without recourse to older, more com-
pact symbols, such as the Son of God, which would not have done
justice to the newly differentiated experience. This must have re-
quired a conscious effort on his part, for the term theotes is a neol-
ogism coined by him for this occasion. To the various translations
as godhead, divinity, or deity, which carry the implication of a per-
sonal God, I have preferred divine reality because it renders best
the author’s intention to denote a nonpersonal reality which allows
for degrees of participation in its fullness while remaining the God
beyond the In-Between of existence. If the author belonged to the
Pauline “school,” one can understand his symbol theotes as an at-
tempt to overcome certain imperfections in Paul’s symbol theiotes.
In Rom. 1:18ff., Paul speaks of the men who suppress the truth of
God by their impiety and injustice: “For what can be known about
God (to gnoston tou theou) is manifest in them, because God has
made it manifest to them. For ever since the cosmos was made,
God’s invisible reality could be perceived by the mind (noouma-
na) in the things that were made, that is his everlasting power (dy-
namis) and divinity (theiotes).” Paul is a quite impatient man. He
wants the divine reality of the primary experience of the cosmos
right away differentiated as the world-transcendent divinity that
has become incarnate in Christ; he considers it inexcusable that
mankind should have passed through a phase in history when the
immortal God was represented by images “of mortal men, of birds,
quadrupeds, and reptiles”; and he can explain such horror only by
267
a deliberate suppression of the well-known truth. Moreover, in his

Jewish disgust with pagan idols he makes the historical phenome-
non of the cosmological myth responsible for cases of dissolute life
he can observe in his environment and considers further adherence
to them, with consequent moral dissolution, God’s punishment for
having indulged in idolatry in the first place (Rom. 1:26–32). Such
zealous confusion of problems certainly needed to be disentangled;
and the author of Colossians indeed extracted from the Pauline pas-
sage the distinction between the divine “invisibles” and the “vis-
ibles” of participatory experiences; he distinguished the invisible
God, experienced as real beyond the metaxy of existence, from the
theotes, the divine reality which enters the metaxy in the move-
ment of existence.
The distinction, it is true, was already made in Theaetetus 176b,
where Plato describes the purpose of man’s flight from the evils of
the world as the acquisition of the homoiosis theo kata to dyna-
ton, a becoming like God as far as that is possible. Nevertheless,
though Plato’s homoiosis theo is the exact equivalent to the fill-
ing with theotes by the author of Colossians, Plato’s spiritual man,
the daimonios aner, is not the Christ of Colossians, the eikon tau
theou. Plato reserves iconic existence to the Cosmos itself: The cos-
mos is the image (eikon) of the Eternal; it is the visible god (theos
aisthetos) in the image of the Intelligible (eikon tau noetou); it is
the one and only begotten (monogenes) heaven whose divine father
is so recondite that it would be impossible to declare him to all men
(Timaeus 28–29, 92c). In the contraposition of the monogenes theos
in Plato’s Timaeus and John 1:18 the barrier becomes visible which
the movement of classic philosophy cannot break through to reach
the insights peculiar to the gospel.
The obstacle to further differentiation is not some disability
peculiar to the classic movement, such as the limitation of nat-
ural reason unaided by revelation, a topic still favored by theolo-
gians who ought to know better, but the cosmological mode of
experience and symbolization dominant in the culture in which
the movement occurs. For the experience of the movement tends
to dissociate the cosmic-divine reality of the primary experience
into the contingent being of things and the necessary being of the
world-transcendent God; and a culture in which the sacrality of
268
order, both personal and social, is symbolized by intracosmic gods

will not easily give way to the theotes of the movement whose vic-
tory entails the desacralization of traditional order. Moreover, the
rearticulation and resymbolization of reality at large in accordance
with the truth of the movement is a formidable task requiring
centuries of sustained effort. One can discern a strong existential
movement, driving toward an understanding of the hidden divinity,
the agnostos theos, behind the intracosmic gods, for instance, in
the Egyptian Amon Hymns of the thirteenth century B.C., at about
the same time when Moses broke with the Pharaonic mediation of
divine order to society through his effort of constituting a people in
immediacy under God, and yet it took thirteen centuries of history,
and the shattering events of successive imperial conquests, to make
people receptive for the truth of the gospel. Even then the move-
ment might have proved socially and historically abortive, unless
the classic movement, as well as its continuation by the Hellenistic
thinkers, had provided the noetic instrument for the resymboliza-
tion of reality beyond the restricted area of reality of the movement
itself in accordance with the truth of the gospel; and even when the
gospel, favored by this cultural constellation, had become socially
effective, it took another twelve hundred years for the problem of
contingent and necessary being to be articulated by the Scholastic
thinkers. If “revelation” is taken seriously, if the symbol is meant
to express the dynamics of divine presence in the movement, the
mystery of its process in history will assume more formidable pro-
portions than it had to Paul when he struggled, in Romans 9–11,
with the mystery of Israel’s resistance to the gospel.
The dynamics of the process are still imperfectly understood, be-
cause the spectacular breakthroughs in history leave in their wake
a sediment of Before-and-After symbols which severely distort re-
ality, when they are used in the interpretation of cultural history:
before philosophy there was myth; before Christianity there were
pagan idols and the Jewish law; before monotheism there was poly-
theism; and before modern science, of course, there were such prim-
itive superstitions as philosophy and the gospel, metaphysics and
theology, which no self-respecting person should touch nowadays.
Not everybody is as tolerant and intelligent as the Jesus who could
say: “Think not I have come to dissolve the law and the prophets; I
269
have come not to dissolve (katalysai) but to fulfill (plerosai)” (Matt.

5:17). This sediment of phenotypes ignores that, as a matter of his-
torical record, the truth of reality is always fully present in man’s
experience and that what changes are the degrees of differentiation.
Cosmological cultures are not a domain of primitive “idolatry,”
“polytheism,” or “paganism,” but highly sophisticated fields of
mythical imagination, quite capable of finding the proper symbols
for the concrete or typical cases of divine presence in a cosmos in
which divine reality is omnipresent. Moreover, the cases symbol-
ized are not experienced as unrelated oddities, each case forming a
species of reality by itself, but definitely as “the gods,” i.e., man-
ifestations of the one divine reality that constitutes and pervades
the cosmos. This consciousness of divine oneness behind the mul-
titude of gods can express itself in the mythospeculative construc-
tions of theogonies and cosmogonies which compactly symbolize
both the oneness of divinity and the oneness of the world it has
created. The gods of cosmological culture, one may say, have a fore-
ground of specific and a background of universal divine presence;
they are specific divinities who partake of universal divine reality.
I shall now place the gospel movement in the context of the re-
velatory process in which the Unknown God separates from the
cosmological divinities.
In the previously mentioned Amon Hymns of Dynasty XIX
Amon “came into being at the beginning, so that his mysterious
nature is unknown.” Not even the other gods know his form who
is “the marvelous god of many forms.” “All other gods boast of
him, to magnify themselves through his beauty, according as he is
divine. Re himself is united with his body.” “He is too mysterious
that his majesty might be disclosed, he is too great that man should
ask about him, too powerful that he might be known” (ANET, ed.
Pritchard, 1950, p. 368). Behind the known gods, thus, there emerg-
es the unknown god from whom they derive their divine reality.
This unknown Amon, however, though he is in the process of being
differentiated from the specific Amon of Thebes, is not one more
god in the cosmological pantheon, but the theotes of the movement
which, in the further process of revelation, can be differentiated to
its climactic revelation in Christ. Moreover, since the unknown
god is not a new god but the divine reality experienced as present
270
also in the known gods, the revelatory process is bound to become

a source of cultural conflicts as the differentiation of its truth pro-
gresses. “War and battle,” the opening words of the Gorgias, are
caused by the appearance of Socrates; and Jesus says: “I have come
to cast fire on the earth. . . . Do you think I have come to bring peace
on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division” (Luke 12:49, 51). For
the men engaged in the movement tend to raise the divine reality
they experience to the rank of a god in the image of the known gods
and to oppose this true god to the specific gods who are demoted
to the rank of false gods; while the cosmological believers, who are
sure of the true divinity of their gods, will accuse the carriers of the
movement of atheism, or at least of subverting the sacral order of
society through the introduction of new gods. This conflict is still
fundamentally the issue between Celsus in his attack on Christian-
ity and Origen in his Contra Celsum.
The Amon Hymns are the representative document of the move-
ment at the stage where the splendor of the cosmological gods
has become derivative, though the gods themselves have not yet
become false. Seven hundred years later, in the Deutero-Isaianic
equivalent to the Amon Hymns (Isa. 40:12–25), the gods have be-
come man- made idols who no longer partake of divine reality,
while the Unknown God has acquired the monopoly of divinity.
The author visibly struggles with the dynamics of the new situa-
tion. On the one hand, his god is alone with himself and his ruach
from the beginning (40:12–14), thus being properly unknown like
Amon; on the other hand, he is a known god and even berates men
for not knowing him as well as they should, very much in the man-
ner of Paul berating the pagans for not knowing God though he has
revealed himself in his creation:
Have you not known? Have you not heard?

Has it not been told you from the beginning?
Have you not understood from the foundation of the earth?
(40:21)
Both the authors of the Amon Hymns and Deutero-Isaiah recog-

nize the in-the-beginning as the true criterion of divine reality—
in this point there is indeed no difference between the documents
271
under discussion and Aristotle’s prote arche in the speculation on

the etiological chain in Metaphysics—but in the Amon Hymns
the accent falls on the causa sui in the divine Beginning, while in
Deutero-Isaiah it falls on the causa rerum, though in neither case
is the other component of the Beginning neglected. The causa sui
is what makes the differentiated divine reality of the movement
the agnostos theos; the causa rerum is what makes it the god who
is known through creation. When universal divine reality has been
differentiated from its compactly experienced presence in the cos-
mological gods, it returns to the cultural scene as the God of cre-
ation who invalidates the intracosmic gods. The god who returns
from the beginning into which he has disappeared, however, is no
more the same than the man who emerges from the movement. In
the Deutero-Isaianic prophecy, the Yahweh of Israel returns as the
God of all mankind:
who created the heavens and stretched them out,

who spread forth the earth and what comes from it,
who gives breath to the people (am) upon it
and spirit to those who walk in it.
(42:5)
And the prophet, indistinguishable from Israel herself, has become

the Suffering Servant, given by God:
as a covenant to the people (am), a light to the nations,

to open the eyes that are blind,
to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon,
from the prison those who sit in darkness.
(42:6–7)
The treasurer of the queen of Ethiopia had traveled to Jerusalem

to worship. In the episode of Acts 8:26–40 we find him on the way
back, on the road to Gaza, sitting on his cart, pondering the passage
in Deutero-Isaiah: “Like a sheep he was led away to the slaughter. .
. .” An angel of the Lord sends the apostle Philip to meet him: “Do
you understand what you are reading?” “How can I,” the Ethiopian
replied, “without someone to guide me? . . . About whom, pray,
272
does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?”
Then Philip began, reports the historian of the apostles, and start-
ing from this passage explained to him the good news (evangelisa-
to) of Jesus. The revelation of the Unknown God through Christ,
in conscious continuity with the millennial process of revelation
I have adumbrated, is so much the center of the gospel movement
that it may be called the gospel itself. The god of John 1:1ff., who in
the beginning is alone with his Logos, is the God of Deutero-Isaiah
(40:13), who in the beginning is alone with his ruach; the Word
that shines as a light in the darkness (John 1:5, 9:5) is the Suffering
Servant who is given as a light to the nations, to bring out from
the prison those who sit in darkness (Isa. 42 :6–7); and in 1 John 1,
the light that was with the Father, by manifesting itself through
Christ his Son, constitutes the community of those who walk in
the light. The Unknown God himself, then becomes thematic in
Acts 17:16–34, in the Areopagus speech attributed by Luke to Paul.
Praising the Athenians for having devoted an altar to the Agnos-
tos Theos, the Paul of the speech assures them that the god whom
they worship without knowing who he is, is the very god he has
come to proclaim (katangello) to them. In Deutero-Isaianic terms
he describes him as the god who made the world and all that is in it
and, therefore, is not like the gods of the “handmade” shrines (Isa.
40:12, 18–20), and furthermore, as the god of the mankind to whom
he has given life and spirit (Isa. 42:5). He is near enough to us to be
found, for “in him we live, and move, and have our being.” He will
overlook our ignorance of representing him by man-made idols in
the past, but now he commands (apangellei) everybody to repent
(metanoein), everybody is now called to know him as the true god
who will sit in judgment through the man whom he has resurrected
from the dead. More could be added, as the Nunc dimittis of Luke
2:29–32, but the passage quoted will be sufficient to establish the
Unknown God as the god who is revealed through Christ.
IV
In the historical drama of revelation, the Unknown God ultimately
becomes the God known through his presence in Christ. This dra-
ma, though it has been alive in the consciousness of the New Tes-
tament writers, is far from alive in the Christianity of the churches
273
today, for the history of Christianity is characterized by what is

commonly called the separation of school theology from mystical
or experiential theology which formed an apparently inseparable
unit still in the work of Origen. The Unknown God whose theotes
was present in the existence of Jesus has been eclipsed by the re-
vealed God of Christian doctrine. Even today, however, when this
unfortunate separation is recognized as one of the great causes of
the modern spiritual crisis; when energetic attempts are made to
cope with the problem through a variety of crisis and existential
theologies; and when there is no lack of historical information
about either the revelatory process leading up to the epiphany of
Christ, or about the loss of experiential reality through doctriniza-
tion; the philosophical analysis of the various issues lags far be-
hind our preanalytical awareness. It will be necessary, therefore,
to reflect on the danger that has given the Unknown God a bad
name in Christianity and induced certain doctrinal developments
as a protective measure, i.e., on the danger of the gospel movement
derailing into gnosticism.
In his Agnostos Theos (1913; rpr. 1956, pp. 73ff.) Eduard Norden
has placed the problem in its historical context and refers back,
on this occasion, to its first presentation by Irenaeus in Adversus
Haereses (ca. 180). Irenaeus lets the doctrinal conflict between
gnosticism and orthodox Christianity turn on the interpretation of
Matt. 11:25–27:
At that time Jesus declared:

“I humbly acknowledge, Father, lord of heaven and earth,
that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding
and revealed them to the simple;
be it so, Father, for so it seemed good to your sight.
All these things are delivered to me by my Father,
and no one knows the Son except the Father,
and no one knows the Father except the Son
and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”
In orthodox doctrine, the God revealed by Jesus is the same god

as the creator god revealed by the prophets of Israel; in Gnostic
doctrine, the Unknown God of Jesus and the Israelite demiurge
274
are two different gods. Against the Gnostics, Irenaeus proposes to

prove by his work that the god they distinguish as the Bythos, the
Depth, is indeed “the invisible greatness unknown to all” and, at
the same time, the world creator of the prophets (I.19.12). They
make nonsense of the logion, when they interpret the words “no
one knows the Father but the Son” as referring to an absolutely
Unknown God (incognitus deus), for “how can he be unknown if
they themselves know about him?” Should the logion really give
the absurd counsel: “Don’t seek God; he is unknown and you will
not find him”? Christ did not come to let mankind know that Fa-
ther and Son are unknowable, or his coming would have been su-
perfluous (IV.6).
Neither Irenaeus’ presentation of the issue, nor his argument for
the orthodox side, is a masterpiece of analysis. If the Father and
the Son in the critical logion be conceptualized as two persons
who know one another to the exclusion of everybody else, then
the statement would indeed be no more than a bit of information
that one can believe or not. Nothing would follow from it for ei-
ther orthodoxy or gnosticism. Moreover, if Jesus could advance this
conceptualized statement about himself, anybody could; we might
expect the sons of the Father to become numerous. In fact, some-
thing of this sort seems to have happened, for Irenaeus enumerates
as Gnostics, “Marcion, Valentinus, Basilides, Carpocrates, Simon,
and the others,” implying that they claimed this status by adding:
“But none of them has been the Son of God, but only Jesus Christ,
our Lord” (IV.6–4). The situation must have resembled the modern
outburst of new Christs in the persons of Fichte, Hegel, Fourier, and
Comte. At least one important cause of the confusion, thus, is the
conceptual and propositional deformation of symbols which make
sense only in the light of the experience which has engendered
them. Hence, I shall first place the logion in the experiential con-
text of Matthew, recalling for this purpose only the most important
passages; and, then, analyze the structure of the problem that may
lead to the various doctrinal derailments.
At a time when the reality of the gospel threatens to fall apart into
the constructions of an historical Jesus and a doctrinal Christ, one
cannot stress strongly enough the status of a gospel as a symbolism
engendered in the metaxy of existence by a disciple’s response to
275
the drama of the Son of God. The drama of the Unknown God who
reveals his kingdom through his presence in a man, and of the man
who reveals what has been delivered to him by delivering it to his
fellowmen, is continued by the existentially responsive disciple in
the gospel drama by which he carries on the work of delivering
these things from God to man. The gospel itself is an event in the
drama of revelation. The historical drama in the metaxy, then, is
a unit through the common presence of the Unknown God in the
men who respond to his “drawing” and to one another. Through
God and men as the dramatis personae, it is true, the presence of
the drama partakes of both human time and divine timelessness,
but tearing the drama of participation asunder into the biography of
a Jesus in the spatiotemporal world and eternal verities showered
from beyond would make nonsense of the existential reality that
was experienced and symbolized as the drama of the Son of God.
The episode on the way to Caesarea Philippi (Matt. 16:13–20)
may be considered a key to the understanding of the existential
context into which the logion 11:27 must be placed. There Jesus
asks the disciples who the people say the Son of man is, and re-
ceives the answer that he is variously understood as an apocalyptic
of the type of John the Baptist, the prophesied Elijah, a Jeremiah, or
one of the other prophets. His questioning then moves on to who
the disciples think he is, and he receives the reply from Simon Pe-
ter: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (16:16). Jesus
answers: “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona; for flesh and blood has
not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.” The
Matthean Jesus, thus, agrees with the Johannine (John 6:44) that
nobody can recognize the movement of divine presence in the Son
unless he is prepared for such recognition by the presence of the di-
vine Father in himself. The divine Sonship is not revealed through
an information tendered by Jesus, but through a man’s response to
the full presence in Jesus of the same Unknown God by whose pres-
ence he is inchoatively moved in his own existence. The Unknown
God enters the drama of Peter’s recognition as the third person. In
order to draw the distinction between revelation and information,
as well as to avoid the derailment from one to the other, the episode
closes with the charge of Jesus to the disciples “to tell no one that
he was the Christ” (Matt. 16:20).
276
The motif of the silence that will guard the truth of revelation
against abasement to a piece of knowledge available to the general
public is carried by Matthew with particular care through the story of
the Passion. In the trial before the Sanhedrin, Jesus does not answer
the peripheral charges at all (26:13); the central charge of having pro-
claimed himself the Son of God he brushes aside with his “You said
so,” not committing himself one way or another; but then, speaking
as a Jew to Jews, he reminds them of the apocalyptic Son of man
who will come on the clouds of heaven. In the trial before Pilate, the
apocalyptic threat would be senseless; when the representatives of
the Sanhedrin repeat their charges, Jesus remains completely silent,
“so that the governor wondered greatly” (27:11–14). In the mockery
scene before the crucified, then, the vicious resistance is victorious:
“If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross” (27:40). But
ultimately, when Jesus sinks into the silence of death, with the cos-
mos breaking out in prodigies, the response comes from the Roman
guards: “This really was the Son of God” (27:54).
By the time of the Passion, it appears, the great secret of Caesarea
Philippi, the so-called Messiasgeheimnis, has become a matter of
public knowledge after all. In order to explain this oddity, however,
one must not accuse the disciples of loquacious disregard for the
charge of silence, for between this episode and the Passion Mat-
thew lets Jesus be quite generous with barely veiled allusions to his
status as both the Messiah and the Son of God. Hence, the charge
of the Sanhedrin that Jesus had proclaimed himself the Son of God
was well founded. Moreover, even before the emphatic recognition
by Peter, on the occasion of Jesus’ walking on the water, the evan-
gelist lets the disciples as a group acknowledge: “You really are the
Son of God” (14:33). Farther back in the Gospel, the symbol appears
in the logion 11:25–27 as a self-declaration of Jesus, followed by the
invitation:
Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you
rest.
Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and
lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your soul.
For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
(11:28–30)
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This complete logion 11:25–30 apparently is addressed, not to the

disciples, but to the “crowds” mentioned in 11:7. And even earlier
(8:29), the demoniacs of Gadara recognize Jesus, in the hearing of
the bystanders, as the Son of God. The secret, thus, was known to
everybody, including those who resisted—a point to be not forgot-
ten if one wants to understand the conversion of Paul. And yet,
Matthew is no more guilty of confusion in the construction of his
Gospel than the disciples are of loquacity. For a gospel is neither a
poet’s work of dramatic art, nor an historian’s biography of Jesus,
but the symbolization of a divine movement that went through the
person of Jesus into society and history. The revelatory movement,
thus, runs its course on more than one plane. There is, first, the
personal drama of Jesus from the constitution of his consciousness
as the Son of God in the encounters with God (3:16–17) and the
devil (4:1–11), to the full realization of what it means to be the Son
of God (16:21–23), to the submission to the Passion and the last
word: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (27:46).
There is, second, the social drama of his fellowmen who recognize
the divine authority, the exousia, in him by his words and mir-
acles, with its bifurcation into the positive response of the plain
people and the resistance of the wise and public authorities. And
finally, the social blends into the historical drama; for neither the
recognition of the divine Sonship in Jesus’ lifetime, nor the posthu-
mous understanding that the Unknown God has suffered death in
a man to carry him to his life, would have been possible, unless the
praeparatio evangelica of the millennial Movement had created the
readiness of both experiential response and mythical imagination
for the Son of God. The mystery of divine presence in existence had
grown in the consciousness of the Movement long before the drama
of the Gospel started; and the symbols which the evangelist uses for
its expression—the Son of God, the Messiah, the Son of man, the
kingdom of God—were historically at hand through the Egyptian
Pharaonic, the Davidic royal, the prophetic and apocalyptic sym-
bolisms, through Iranian traditions and the Hellenistic mysteries.
Hence, the “secret” of the Gospel is neither the mystery of divine
presence in existence, nor its articulation through new symbols,
but the event of its full comprehension and enactment through the
life and death of Jesus. The apparent contradictions dissolve into
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the use of the same symbols at various levels of comprehension,

as well as at the different stages of enactment, until the Christ is
revealed, not in a fullness of doctrine, but in the fullness of Passion
and resurrection.
What is meant by fullness, as against minor degrees, of compre-
hension can be gathered from the process of advancing differentia-
tion in such chapters as 11 and 16.
In Chapter 11, John the Baptist sends his disciples to inquire of
Jesus whether he is the malak, the messenger of God, prophesied
in Mal. 3:1, who will precede the coming of Yahweh to his temple.
Evading a direct answer, Jesus asks the disciples to report to their
master the miracles and healings of Jesus, knowing quite well that
such deeds are not what is expected of Malachi’s malak ; he leaves
them free to draw their own conclusions, but dismisses them with
the warning to John and his followers that blessed is only who does
not take offense at Jesus (11:2–6). Then he turns to the “crowds”
and explains to them who John is: he is a prophet, but at the same
time more than a prophet; in fact, John rather than Jesus is the true
Malachian malak . In the quotation from Malachi, however, the
Matthean Jesus changes the text from a messenger whom “I [the
Lord] send . . . to prepare the way before me” to a messenger whom
the Lord sends to prepare the way for “thee.” By this change of the
pronoun from “me” to “thee,” the Baptist is converted from the
forerunner of Israel’s Yahweh to the forerunner of the Unknown
God who is present in his Son Jesus (11:7–10). The prophetism of
both the law and the prophets has, as a type of existence in the In
Between, come to its end with John (11:13); what is in the process
of coming, and is even present in Jesus and the plain people who
follow him, is the kingdom of the Unknown Father of the Sermon
on the Mount and of the Lord’s Prayer. The chapter, therefore, con-
sistently closes with the self-declaration of the logion 11:25–30.
In Chapter 16, then, the Matthean Jesus resumes the differentia-
tion of his own status from that of his predecessors. In the previous-
ly quoted 16:13–14, the people’s classifications as a John the Baptist,
an Elijah, a Jeremiah are dismissed for good by Peter’s reply: “You
are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” The significance of the
answer must be seen in the combination of the symbols Messiah-
Christ and Son of God. Up to this passage, the symbol Christ had
279
been used only by Matthew in his role of the narrator, but not by
any of the persons in the drama; now the prophetic and apocalyptic
savior-king of Israel is identified with the Son of God in the pro-
cess of revelation itself. As the Malachian malak had to change his
complexion to become the forerunner of Jesus, so now the Messiah
has to acquire the characteristics of the Son of God which formerly
he did not have. Or at least, that was the intention of the Matthean
Jesus when he accepted Peter’s recognition. Historically, however,
the two symbols have influenced each other, for the absorption of
the “Messiah” has brought into the history of Christianity, as well
as of a Christianized Western civilization, the apocalyptic strand
of violent phantasy that can degenerate into violent action in the
world. Even in the New Testament itself, in Rev. 19:11–16, we see
the Messiah coming:
And now I saw heaven open, and a white horse appear:

Its rider is called Faithful and True; and with righteousness he judges
and makes war.
His eyes are flames of fire; on his head are many diadems; and he has
a name inscribed which no one knows but himself.
He wears a robe soaked in blood; and he is known by the name: The
Word of God (ho logos tou theou).
Behind him, dressed in linen of dazzling white, ride the armies of
heaven on white horses.
From his mouth comes a sharp sword to strike the nations with;
he will rule them with an iron rod; and he treads out the wine of
fierceness and wrath of God the Pantocrator.
On his robe and on his thigh the name is written: King of kings, and
Lord of lords.
This blood-dripping Word of God is a far cry from the Matthean

Jesus who calls to him the poor in spirit, the gentle, the pure in
heart, the peacemakers, those who hunger and thirst after righ-
teousness and are persecuted for righteousness’ sake. In Matthew
16, Jesus certainly does not intend to transform the Son of God into
the field marshal of the Pantocrator, but rather wants to transform
the Messiah into the Son of God. Whatever meanings the symbol-
ism of an Anointed of Israel may have carried hitherto, they are
280
now relegated to the past by the presence of the Unknown God in

the Son. The consciousness of the Sonship must now be unfold-
ed. Hence, “from that time Jesus began to show his disciples that
he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders
and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be
raised.” The pathos of the representative death to be suffered has
entered the consciousness of Jesus. When Peter wants to dissuade
him from this course, Jesus angrily rebukes him: “Get behind me,
Satan! You are an obstacle (skandalon) to me; for the way you think
is not the way of God but of men” (16:21–23). It is no accident that
Jesus rebukes Peter with the same hypage satana he uses in the
rejection of the tempter in 4:10; the formula is indeed meant to
characterize the way “man” thinks as the way of the devil. This
“man” who can be symbolized as the devil is the man who has
contracted his existence into a world-immanent self and refuses to
live in the openness of the metaxy. The Matthean Jesus lets the re-
buke to Peter, administered in the older language of God and Satan,
be followed by the translation of its meaning into the noetic sym-
bolization of existence, previously discussed, through the double
meaning of life and death:
If a man wants to walk after me, let him radically deny himself, and
take up his cross and follow me.
For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his
life for my sake will save it.
For what will it profit a man, if he gains the whole world and forfeits
his life.
(16:24–26)
The saying concludes with the poignant question: What has a

“man,” i.e., his life as an immanently contracted self, to offer in re-
turn for his “life” (psyche) in the second sense? The meaning of the
rebuke, as well as the relation between the two strata of symbols,
is further illuminated by the use of the verb aparneistai (to deny,
disown, repudiate) in the denial of the self of 16:24. The same verb
is used to denote man’s denial of Jesus in the saying: “But whoever
denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in
heaven” (10:33). Moreover, it is specifically used of Peter’s denial
281
in 26:33–34, 69–75, thus creating the great counterpoint of Peter’s

three denials of Jesus to Jesus’ three rejections of the Devil. In the
In-Between of existence, man is faced with the choice of denying
his self and the devil or denying Jesus and the Unknown God.
The analysis of the experiential context into which the logion
11:27 must be placed, though far from being exhaustive, has been
carried far enough to make the noetic problems of reality visible
that lend themselves to misconstruction through doctrinal hypos-
tases, through overemphasis on one area of reality as against oth-
ers, or through plain lack of interest to engage in further noetic
penetration. In the present context, I must confine myself to a brief
enumeration of no more than the principal questions:
1. The various problems transmitted to us through two thousand
years have their center in the Movement in which man’s conscious-
ness of existence emerges from the primary experience of the cos-
mos. Consciousness becomes luminous to itself as the site of the
revelatory process, of the seeking and being drawn. The experience
of a cosmos full of gods has to yield to the experience of eminent
divine presence in the movement of the soul in the metaxy. Hence,
all symbolization of truth about reality, about God, man, society,
and the world, must from now on be filtered through, and be made
compatible with, the eminent truth of existential consciousness.
Moreover, since the place of truth is historically preempted by the
more compact symbolizations of the primary experience, existen-
tial consciousness is historical consciousness in the sense that, on
the occasion of its differentiation, the truth of reality is discovered
as an event in the process of a reality whose truth advances to high-
er stages of realization. If history is to be compatible with the truth
of existence, it must be symbolized as a revelatory process: the cos-
mological past of experience and symbolization must be intelligi-
bly related to the differentiated consciousness to which it has given
birth; and the vision of the future must bear some intelligible rela-
tion to the insight into the double meaning of life and death. The
responses to this problem have a wide range. Its amplitude can be
gauged if one confronts the Augustinian conception of history, with
its patient waiting for the eschatological events, with the Hege-
lian speculation, which enacts the eschatological event through
the construction of the system; or if one confronts the position of
282
a contemporary existentialist theologian who rejects the Old Tes-

tament as irrelevant to Christian theology, with the position of
Clement of Alexandria who insists on adding Greek philosophy as
the second Old Testament for Christians. Regarding visions of the
future, one may confront the millennium introduced by an angel of
the Lord in Revelation 20 with the millennia introduced by Crom-
well and the Puritan army or by Lenin and the Communist party.
2. The cosmos does not cease to be real when the consciousness
of existence in the In-Between differentiates; but the emotional re-
sistance to, and technical difficulty of, resymbolizing the order of
the cosmos, which on its compact level had been quite adequately
symbolized by the intracosmic gods, in the light of the new insight
is enormous; especially because the new historical consciousness
requires the older gods to be resymbolized as symbols of earlier
stages in the process of revelation. In the movement of classic phi-
losophy, as I have shown, the noetic analysis of the metaxy has gone
as far as in the gospel movement, and in some points is superior to
anything we find in the gospel, but the decisive step of making the
experience of man’s tension toward the Unknown God the truth
to which all truth of reality must conform was never taken. To
Plato, the monogenes of the Unknown God is, not a man, but the
cosmos. In the myth of the Phaedrus, then, he explicitly deals with
the relation between the Unknown God and the intracosmic gods:
on festival occasions, the Olympians rise steeply toward the top of
their heaven; “there the utmost (eschaton) toil and struggle await
the soul” when it wants to pass beyond and reach the outer surface
of the vault; but when they take this stand, they can contemplate
the things outside of heaven. The human followers of the gods are
variously, but never completely, successful in achieving this state
of contemplation, so that no poet in this world has ever worthily
praised the hyperouranion, the region beyond the heaven, or ever
will (247). Plato’s mythical imagination, thus, endows the intracos-
mic gods with a tension of their psyche toward the Unknown God
and lets them transmit their true knowledge to man. In the lan-
guage of the cosmological myth, these Olympian god-seekers and
mediators are the equivalent to the Son of God who alone knows
the divine Father in the pleroma of presence, and mediates his
knowledge to his followers according to their human receptiveness.
283
This Platonic resolution to the problem had a durable success in

philosophy: six hundred years later, when the Unknown God had
been further differentiated as the Monad epekeina nou (Enneads
V.iii. 11), Plotinus still went back to the myth of the Phaedrus, in
order to symbolize the relation between the intracosmic gods and
the Unknown God (Enneads V.viii.10). Moreover, he used the argu-
ment of the gods who look up to the “king of the realm beyond” in
his polemic against the Gnostic “sons of god” who want to elevate
themselves above the gods of the cosmos and speak of this world as
“the alien earth” (II.ix.9).
3. The area of existential consciousness, though eminent of rank,
is only one area of reality. If it is overemphasized, the cosmos and
its gods will become the “alien earth” of the Gnostics and life in
the despised world will hardly be worth living. The tendency to-
wards this imbalance is certainly present in the gospel movement.
When Jesus prefers the plain people to the wise and the public au-
thorities, he does not want to start a revolution that will bring the
plain people to power, but judges the kingdom of God more easily
accessible to the “poor” than to men who have vested interests and
positions of responsibility in the affairs of this world. His appeal is
entirely different from Plato’s who addressed himself to the sons of
the ruling class, in order to make them existentially fit to be rulers
in the paradigmatic polis that was meant to supersede the corrupt
polis of the day, for the kingdom of God will have no social organi-
zation or ruling class in this world. In Matthew 16, Jesus concludes
his analysis of existence with the assurance: “Truly, I say to you,
there are some standing here who will not taste death before they
see the Son of man coming in his kingdom” (16:28)—a vision that
probably appeals to members of an establishment no more than to
revolutionaries who want to establish themselves in their place.
Moreover, not only may the future of history be lost, if one takes
“no thought for the morrow” (Matt. 7:34), but there is also the dan-
ger of losing its past. The Matthean Jesus, it is true, has not come
to destroy the law or the prophets but to fulfill them (5:17), but the
fulfillment is difficult to distinguish from apocalyptic destruction.
We have noted the subtle conversions of the malak of Yahweh into
the forerunner of Jesus, as well as of the Messiah into the Son of
God; and the Unknown Father of 11:27, whom nobody knows but
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the Son, is hardly the well-known God who thundered from Sinai
and spoke through Moses and the prophets. Would not the Yahweh
of Israel also have to become a god-seeker and mediator like the
Olympians of the Platonic myth?
4. Because the issues of this type were insufficiently clarified in
the gospel movement, the derailment into gnosticism became pos-
sible. The strength of the gospel is its concentration on the one point
that is all-important: that the truth of reality has its center not in
the cosmos at large, not in nature or society or imperial rulership,
but in the presence of the Unknown God in a man’s existence to his
death and life. This very strength, however, can cause a breakdown,
if the emphasis on the center of truth becomes so intense that its
relations to the reality of which it is the center are neglected or in-
terrupted. Unless the Unknown God is the undifferentiated divine
presence in the background of the specific intracosmic gods, he is
indeed a god unknown to the primary experience of the cosmos. In
that case, however, there is no process of revelation in history, nor
a millennial Movement culminating in the epiphany of the Son of
God, but only the irruption of an extracosmic god into a cosmos to
whose mankind he hitherto had been hidden. Moreover, since the
revelation of this extracosmic god is the only truth that existential-
ly matters, the cosmos, its gods, and its history become a reality
with the index of existential untruth. In particular, the Yahweh of
Israel is imagined as an evil demon who has created the cosmos,
in order to indulge his lust of power and to keep man, whose des-
tiny is extracosmic, prisoner in the world of his creation. This god
of the Gnostics is certainly not the God of the gospel who suffers
death in man to raise man to life, but he is a god who can emerge
from the Movement, when the consciousness of existence isolates
itself, through an act of imagination, from the reality of the cosmos
in which it has differentiated. I say advisedly that the Gnostic god
can emerge from the Movement at large, for he is not necessarily
bound to the gospel movement as one of its possible derailments.
The historians of religion who find the “origins” of gnosticism in
Hellas or Persia, in Babylon or Egypt, in Hellenistic mystery reli-
gions or Jewish sectarian movements, and who diagnose the Gnos-
tic elements in the New Testament itself, are not quite wrong, for
the structural possibility of the derailment is present wherever the
285
existential Movement of differentiating the Unknown God from

the intracosmic gods has begun. One should be clear, however, that
the presence of the structural possibility is not itself gnosticism; it
would be better to apply the term only to the cases where the imag-
inative isolation of existential consciousness becomes the motivat-
ing center for the construction of major symbolisms, as in the great
Gnostic systems of the second century A.D. These systems, though
they are products of mythical imagination, are neither myths of the
intracosmic type, nor are they philosophers’ myths like the Platon-
ic or Plotinic, nor do they belong to the genus of New Testament
Gospels. They are a symbolism sui generis which expresses a state
of alienation from reality, more precisely to be characterized as an
extracosmic isolation of existential consciousness.
Though the possibility of the Gnostic derailment is inherent to
the Movement from its beginning, only the full differentiation of
the truth of existence under the Unknown God through his Son
has created the cultural field in which the extracosmic contraction
of existence is an equally radical possibility. With the gospel as the
truth of reality, Western civilization has inherited extracosmic con-
traction as the possibility of its disruption. I have already intimat-
ed the cultural pattern of the new Christs in the late eighteenth
and the early nineteenth centuries which repeats the pattern of the
“sons of god” who aroused the wrath of Irenaeus and Plotinus. But
on this occasion I cannot go beyond such intimations. We do not
know what horrors the present period of cultural disruption has
yet in store, but I hope to have shown that philosophy is not quite
helpless in the noetic penetration of its problems. Perhaps its per-
suasion can help to restore the rule of reason.
286

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The Gospel and

[“To save the honor of philosophy” Voegelin accepted an invitation

and radically advanced through the differentiating symbolizations

The Steering Committee has honored me with the invitation to

the answer to the philosopher’s search for truth; the introduction

The passage, though wanting in polish, is philosophically very

must be stirred by the reminder that man is supposed to be a ques-

man’s experience of his tension (tasis) toward the divine ground

the experience of this movement, from the anxiety of losing the

live in a “post-­Christian,” or “postphilosophical,” or “neopagan”

Who knows if to live is to be dead,

Most solemnly I tell you,

In the Synoptic Gospels, as in the Gorgias and Republic, the ques-

John 12, as in the Apology, it is lived through by the representative

Now my soul is troubled. What shall I say?

To the prayer of submission by the troubled soul heaven answered

Now Judgment (krisis) has come to this world (kosmos),

The appearance of the Greeks is peculiar to John; we do not find

I, the light, have come into the world (kosmos),

Pamphylian myth or John’s Gospel, is not an answer given at ran-

Moreover, this passion of the parable evokes, if I may anticipate,

(anthelkein) to the counterpull of the lesser cords. Man’s self (au-

Behold! What I have built, I will pull down;

context of the reality in which the differentiated movement oc-

component. This theological doctrine is empirically untenable—­

Father, Righteous One,

To follow Christ means to continue the event of divine presence

And this is life eternal:

With an admirable economy of means, John symbolizes the pull

could be fascinated by the brilliance of these succinct statements

We know that “all of us possess knowledge (gnosis).”

The words are addressed to members of the Corinthian communi-

The occasions which motivate Paul to clarify the dynamics of gno-

of Colossians in the words: “For in him the whole fullness of divine

a deliberate suppression of the well-­known truth. Moreover, in his

order, both personal and social, is symbolized by intracosmic gods

have come not to dissolve (katalysai) but to fulfill (plerosai)” (Matt.

also in the known gods, the revelatory process is bound to become

Have you not known? Have you not heard?

Both the authors of the Amon Hymns and Deutero-­Isaiah recog-

under discussion and Aristotle’s prote arche in the speculation on

who created the heavens and stretched them out,

And the prophet, indistinguishable from Israel herself, has become

as a covenant to the people (am), a light to the nations,

The treasurer of the queen of Ethiopia had traveled to Jerusalem

today, for the history of Christianity is characterized by what is

At that time Jesus declared:

In orthodox doctrine, the God revealed by Jesus is the same god

are two different gods. Against the Gnostics, Irenaeus proposes to

This complete logion 11:25–­30 apparently is addressed, not to the

the use of the same symbols at various levels of comprehension,

And now I saw heaven open, and a white horse appear:

This blood-­dripping Word of God is a far cry from the Matthean

now relegated to the past by the presence of the Unknown God in

The saying concludes with the poignant question: What has a

in 26:33–­34, 69–­75, thus creating the great counterpoint of Peter’s

a contemporary existentialist theologian who rejects the Old Tes-

This Platonic resolution to the problem had a durable success in

existential Movement of differentiating the Unknown God from

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live in a “post-Christian,” or “postphilosophical,” or “neopagan”

component. This theological doctrine is empirically untenable—

a deliberate suppression of the well-known truth. Moreover, in his

Both the authors of the Amon Hymns and Deutero-Isaiah recog-

This complete logion 11:25–30 apparently is addressed, not to the

This blood-dripping Word of God is a far cry from the Matthean

in 26:33–34, 69–75, thus creating the great counterpoint of Peter’s