Eric Voegelin and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy provide an interesting and important contrast in their Augustinian diagnoses of modernity and the role of revolution and faith in salvation in history. For Eric Voegelin the desolation of modern humanity springs from its unreal elevation of the self – its Gnostic inheritance – and its immanentization of God and the eschaton into history and progress. In keeping with this is the moderns’ failure to appreciate that the symbolic order required for a fulfilling human community (...) and experience relies upon the necessity of maintaining God as a beyond in relation to society, man and world. Rosenstock-Huessy is also concerned that the failure of the moderns to understand the sign and significance of God is disastrous. And like Voegelin he is deeply opposed to modern Gnosticism and the pathologies that emerge from it, but Rosenstock-Huessy is also interested in something that is not Voegelin’s primary concern – mainly the role of providence in history. (shrink)

This article argues that two important thinkers of the 20th century, Gregory Bateson (1904–80) and Eric Voegelin (1901–85), developed a set of ideas that are of importance to the history of the human sciences. The article also argues that their ideas are, in essential ways, comparable and display similarities that have not yet been discussed within the larger history of the human sciences. The aim of the article is to show how the diagnostic terms provided by Bateson and Voegelin complement (...) each other toward an understanding of underlying tensions and social pathologies of contemporary civilization. (shrink)