ABSTRACT
William James, the most eminent American philosopher before Voegelin, reminded us of the ancient wisdom that, “Where there is no vision the people perish.” He believed that “a philosopher’s vision and the technique he uses in proof of it are two different things,” and that “philosophy is more a matter of passionate vision than of logic.” About the center of Voegelin’s thought, the personal experience that animates its every word and the vision that radiates from it, there can be no doubt at all: it is “the love of being through love of divine Being as the source of its order”. Voegelin’s vision as it articulates a philosophy of consciousness, politics, history, and being finds its gravitational center in experiences of the kind exemplified in the passage just quoted from Gregory of Nyssa. The symbolism of history and the Whole articulates Voegelin’s vision of reality as grasped at the pinnacle of his meditation on truth.
