Eric Voegelin and Walker Percy: The Political Problem of “Post-Christian” Life

• In Event: Literature, Persons, and Modern Politics

Abstract

Political philosopher Eric Voegelin and novelist Walker Percy both make their readers aware of a certain tension between politics and the demands of the Christian life. To be sure, the tension is not new. However, many contemporary commentators who critique the “post-Christian” political schema effectively blame liberalism for Christians’ discomfort in the world. At first glance, Walker Percy would appear to agree; but, when one attends to the Voegelinian influence upon his writings, it becomes clear that Percy does not point fingers at any particular political movement, but considers uneasiness or “malaise” to be a recurring existential problem throughout all of history. He adopts Voegelin’s formulation that political history has oscillated between “cosmological orders” and post-Incarnation “differentiated” societies which struggle to center themselves as an obedient and expectant people. The same pattern occurs in the interior of the human person, says Percy. The Christian will not feel comfortable in the modern age, because he is a member of an exiled chosen people; and, this alienation is similar to the experience of the Jewish people in the Old Testament. This connection is made most explicit in Voegelin’s Israel and Revelation volume of Order and History and in Walker Percy’s two novels narrating the life of William Barrett, The Last Gentleman and The Second Coming. In these works, political alienation has a place in the religious experience of a people in that it reminds them of their precarious and temporary place in the world and of their supernatural covenant with God. Furthermore, the tension of paradox more truthfully reveals their identity as human persons. Such a tension, then, is essential to the Christian life. Any politics that tries to quiet it presents dangers—not only to the Christian journey, but also to the human person.

Author

• Matalyn Elizabeth Vander Bleek, The Catholic University of America