Abstract

Voegelin's analysis of mystery is central to his philosophies of conscience existence and history, and plays a crucial role in his critique of modernity. In his view, because human consciousness is a "knowing questioning" that can inquire about what lies beyond the scope of finite intelligence and imagination--that can affirm, for example, a "ground" of being, the ultimate meaning or nature of which transcends all possible knowing from the perspective of finite participation in the process of reality--we can explicitly understand that our existences are embraced by a mystery of transcendent meaning. When such explicit recognition takes place--when consciousness differentiates dimensions of "immanent" and "transcendent" meaning-- everything that pertains to the decisive core of existence becomes haunted by the same dead center of ignorance. The objects of our deepest concerns, such as the ultimate purpose of moral striving, or the meaning of history, are revealed as humanly unknowable in any definitive sense. Such insight into the fact of transcendent meaning has, in Western culture, introduced serious problems into personal and political life. One set of problems concerns the difficulties entailed in explicitly accepting mysteries and in orienting oneself by their truths. A second concerns the temptations of ignoring or denying them. Western modernity has notoriously rejected transcendent meaning and mystery, and in so doing has established cultural conditions tending to promote skewed moral, educational and political ideals. Voegelin's analysis of mystery is part of a therapeutic critique of those conditions, as is his philosophy of myth. Myth, Voegelin argues, is the precise symbolic instrument for the articulation of transcendent meaning, since the myth does not claim to be definitive--it is a likely story that accords with accurate knowledge about reality--and so doesn't violate our awareness of the limitations of human perspective, and the myth tells a story that makes sense, in a context of ultimate meaning, of our experiences of purpose and struggle, risk and failure, desire and achievement