Israel and Revelation.

FORGET IT often though we do, the issue at stake between conservatives and liberals is that between Revelation and "Reason." And there are two strategic errors the conservative must not make in the continuing debate about that issue (I say debate not discussion because the liberal, as a matter of settled practice, refuses to discuss).

The first is to let the liberal substitute for the real problems as to the status of revealed truth his own question-begging restatements of them that is, to turn the debate into one about values" or value judgments." The second is to compromise his insistence that the status of those truths turns exclusively on whether or not they were revealed-directly, by the One God, to His creature man -as the conservative does when he acquiesces in the liberal notion that revelation is a matter of private" religious" conviction, and so should never be mentioned in polite company. Both errors are now habitual with most American conservatives; both are fatal to the conservative cause.

Conservatism has, on such a showing, been poorly served by the political literature of recent decades. The textbooks from which our college students learn what little they are ever to know about politics tacitly equate the separation of church and state with the separation of religion and politics. Revelation, therefore, is never so much as mentioned in them; the "conflict" between Revelation and Reason" is tacitly resolved in favor of the latter; right becomes anything in the way of law or principle that emerges from the decision-making process laid down in the Constitution; and commitment to the Decalogue is reduced to a "value preference," in the same category with a fondness for Bel Paese cheese.

The rare student who takes an "advanced" course in political theory does, to be sure, finally hear of revelation and its possible relevance to politics; but what he learns is that some sinister fellows like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas once tried to "enslave" "Reason" to some alleged truths that had to be accepted because they had been handed down from on high-as also that Modern Man, having seen through the whole notion of truths handed down from on high, is on his own with what Burke calls his "private stock of reason." The liberals have, in a word, had things all their way.

I am going to resist the temptation to say that this book will, by reclaiming for revelation its rightful ascendancy over political thought, speedily alter all that, and point modem man down the path that leads to political sanity. The book has yet to meet the test of scholarly criticism in a score of "fields"; it is only the first volume of a five-volume work; many students of politics will refuse to read it, or dismiss it as inconsequential because of its attitude toward revealed truth; and before it can have much influence it must change minds that belong to men who would greatly prefer to keep on thinking what they now think, and what their teachers thought before them.

But if the next four volumes prove worthy of this one, if the book's scholarship is as sound as it appears to be, and if erudition and logic and wit and sweet reasonableness can sway men's minds, then I think it might rally the generation of scholar-pohticists that might rescue modern man from the futility, the fury, and the destructiveness of modern politics. The book offers to conservatives, in a word, a ray of hope; and it will behoove them to steep themselves in it, to cherish it, and to gird themselves for battle against the liberal hatchetmen who will as a matter of course be told off to discredit it.

When men establish a government, according to Professor Voegelin, they analogically repeat "the divine creation of the cosmos," and thus, within their existential limitations, participate in the "creation of cosmic order itself." The kind of order they create, therefore, depends upon their relatedness to God, which in turn depends upon a) the extent to which He has revealed Himself to them, and b) the response to His revelation; and from this it follows that, from the political scientist's point of view, the first important event in world history was the leap from mere existence into "consubstantiality with the being of which [man] is a creaturely part"-a leap that occurred with Moses' experience of revelation. For the revelation to Moseswhether an historical, flesh-and-blood Moses or a symbolic representation of Israel's experience of order is, he thinks, inconsequential-was only the beginning of a progressive disclosure of divine will of which the entire Old Testament, correctly read, is an account.

Previous readings of the Old Testament, Professor Voegelin shows us, have been incorrect because the critics have approached it without a theory as to how in his literary creations man represents" to himself his experience of order. The first task for the scholar politicist becomes, accordingly, that of developing such a theory, and his second that of reinterpreting the crucial sections of the Old Testament in the light of that theory. So reinterpreted, it takes on new and ever-deeper meaning as regards the proper ordering of society, and, finally, its deepest meaning, which is that man-all men, not merely the people of Israel, and all men as individuals, not collectivities-move through History, under God, for a purpose outside History. And, so reinterpreted, it yields up the breathtaking implication that any attempt to order society as if man did not live under God, or as if the purpose of ordering society were within History, is impious, doomed to be punished by destruction, and so self-defeating. The breathtaking implication, in a word, that all modern political theory is an attempt to square the circle.

In Israel and Revelation we have, then, 1) a distillation of wisdom about the ordering of society from sacred scriptures that previous historians of political theory have simply ignored, 2) the articulation and fleshing out of a theory (the "theory of symbolic forms") that enables us to find political wisdom where before we have seen only cosmology or theology or poetry, 3) an attempt to rescue world history from the chaos of meaninglessness to which, for our generation anyhow, it has been reduced by Spengler and Toynbee, and 4) an invitation to accompany the author on a journeythrough the remaining literature of politics-that promises to be the most exciting intellectual adventure of our time. Because of 2), the author mines out of 1) a message that, insofar as one had previously understood it at all, one had associated with the New Testament; enriches it by baring its roots in the fertile soil of experience; and doubly enriches it by showing us how it can have its roots simultaneously in experience and in revelation. For revelation, we understand at the end, is not the less revelation because its truths can be explained "anthropologically"-that is, in terms of the "need" for it generated in man by his history.

To say more than that to the prospective reader of Israel and Revelation would be to rob him of one or another of the most unforgettable moments he has ever spent over a book-and to impair the satisfaction, intellectual and aesthetic, with which he will read its concluding lines:

The Ethiopian eunuch of the queen, sitting on his cart and reading Isaiah, ponders on the passage: Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter." He inquires of Philip: "Tell me, of whom is the prophet speaking.? Of himself, or of someone else?" Then Philip began, . . . and starting from this passage he told him the good news about Jesus.

So let me leave it at that.