Download Notes on Voegelin, Order and History, v. 2 The World of the Polis Pt

9/24/2011 – Joanne Tetlow on Eric Voegelin, Order and History, Volume Two: =The World of the Polis
– Part III – chap. 10– Tragedy
Summary
The spiritual discoveries of the poets and philosophers within the polis constitute
Greek civilization. The fifth century B.C. is the Athenian period where something on the
order of a “great awakening” occurred to the people, the whole society, not simply
individuals. It is this spiritual and intellectual community substance that was the necessary
precondition for Plato and Aristotle. In Part Three, Voegelin addresses three sets of
problems that arise in the move from myth to philosophy: (1) rise and end of tragedy; (2)
sophistic movement; and (3) rise and fall of Athens as a political power.
Chapters 10 deals with tragedy.
Tragedy
According to Voegelin, “Power and spirit were linked in history for one golden hour
through the inseparable events of the Athenian victory in the Persian War and the
Aeschylean creation of the tragedy.” (317) Aeschylus’ faith in Dike and the unseen measure
was that of Solon’s, which expressed itself politically in a constitutional democratic form.
Between these two men occurred the tyranny of Peisistratus and the reform of Cleisthenes.
Under Pesistratus, the poor people were represented undermining the hereditary
priesthood of the noble clans. When the Dionysian festivals of 535 B.C., goat-singers, or
chorus of tragodoi, appeared, tragedy was established as a cult institution of the people.
Cleisthenes’ democratic reform of 508 B.C. had further broken the power of nobility creating
the situation for a new democratic experience. Tragedy was connected to Athenian
democracy.
Consider Aristophanes’ Frogs where poet Aeschylus as educator confronts Euripides
as corrupter. The poet is the teacher of the people about politics and morals in a direct,
straightforward manner eliminating the complexity of meaning. Because direct speech
without complication is all the people can hear and understand, the tragedy became
representative of the political decay and decline of Athens. Aristotle’s Poetics reveals that it
is reduced to a literary genre defined as:
“A representation of an action that is serious, coming to an end, and of a
certain magnitude enriched by language of all kind, used appropriately in the
various parts of the play—representing through action, not through
narrative—and through pity and fear effecting catharsis of these and other
emotions.”
Aristotle illuminates this further by comparing the object of the poet to the object of the
historian. The poet does not state what actually happened as the historian, but what
happens “according to likelihood and necessity.” Thus, poetry is more philosophical than
history, because it communicates what is “general” and “essential,” not merely facts. The
“much-knowing” of the historian is opposed to the “deep knowing” of the philosopher, and
the poet provides a “general” insight in the search for truth from Hesiod to the mysticphilosophers.
So, the tragedy conveys “general” truth by action. Myths are used in the tragedy, but
it is not a narrative as the Homeric epic attempting to tell a true story; and neither it is
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morphed into speculative form as in Hesiod in order to oppose falsehood with a new truth.
The tragedy is a play. According to Voegelin,
“The truth of the tragedy is action itself, that is, action on the new,
differentiated level of a movement in the soul that culminates in the decision
of a mature, responsible man. The newly discovered humanity of the soul
expands into the realm of action. Tragedy as a form is the study of the human
soul in the process of making decisions, situations, in which a fully
developed, self-conscious soul is forced into action.” (321)
The action and decision in Aeschylus’ Suppliants is whether Pelasgus, the king of the polis,
should follow the nomos of the Aegyptians which requires the fifty daughters of Danaus to
marry their kinsmen, or follow Dike and incur the wrath of the gods. Themis, the daughter
of Zeus, is the protector of the suppliants, who will kill themselves unless they marry
exposing Zeus to the charge of injustice and destruction of the polis. This is the conflict for
the king, who must descend into the order of his soul for dike, a higher standard than themis
or rightness according to law. Connecting the tragedy to the democratization of the polis,
the king must communicate with all the citizens before making a decision or taking action.
The democratic community must go to the depth of the Dike of Zeus.
The tragedy moves beyond the Homeric epic by moving beyond themis based on an
utilitarian calculation or outside divine counsel. As Voegelin states, “The decision must be
reached, without such counsel, from a searching of the soul. The leap in being does not
assume the form of an Israelite revelation of God, but of the Dionysiac descent into man, the
depth where Dike is to be found.”(325) As representative of the people, the Greek tragedy
required a common and binding descent into the soul. Through persuasion, the
paradigmatic action of the hero in the tragedy expands into the soul of the people. And, if
the democratic order may no longer be persuaded to base its politics on dike, then
disintegration follows. This is where Plato finds himself, and why he uses “spiritual
persuasion” to restore political and social order in the polis.
The fact that Dike appears to be real only in the soul of the king is a caution. Without
diminishing the achievement of order through philosophical speculation from the Milesians
to Heraclitus, or the discovery of the Solonic unseen measure, or the Parmenidean Being, as
foundations of understanding being, the demonic reality remains. Voegelin writes, “The
discovery of truth by the mystic-philosophers, and still more the Christian revelation, can
become a source of serious disorder if it is misunderstood as an ordering force that
effectively governs society and history.” (329) In short, the transcendental order is not a
world-immanent order, which becomes real in society without the life of the soul. The order
achieved is provisional and precarious. Prometheus symbolizes this demonic force of self,
which is, nevertheless, only one aspect of the soul, which prevents him from being a tragic
hero. Only the whole soul is capable of tragic action. Both the Promethean drive and failure
of dike in Zeus produce tragedy. Zeus is a god within the world, not beyond it—a false
foundation.
The truth of the Greek tragedy is that the ordering force of the soul—wherever it
may lay—is the ordering force of society. Thus, history in Hellas arises from tragedy, or the
work of man making decisions and taking action by finding order in his soul through the
descent to its depth.
In terms of historiography, Greek history as tragedy may be placed between the
more compact Chinese experience of dynasties and the Israelite break with the cosmological
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myth through its historical form of existence as the Chosen People. Athenian tragedy is not
bound by the cosmological myth, but it carries the “mortgage” of the polis. It did not
achieve a leap in being under God in existence, because its effort was to descend to the
divine depth. As such, “the Dionysiac component in tragic existence precludes the irruption
of a divine revelation from above.” (338) Notwithstanding, Aeschylus provided a
foundation for the philosophy of history from which Plato borrowed.
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