9
first discussed consubstantiality in Israel and Revelation with specific attention to the Egyptian
experience of the cosmos and the symbolization of this experience in the cosmogonic myth. He
opened the first volume of Order and History with the now famous sentence: “God and man, world
and society form a primordial community of being.”
20
This opening of Order and History was
preceded by other important formulations. For example, in 1943, Voegelin wrote:
Human consciousness is not a process that occurs in the world in isolation, in contact with other
processes only through cognition; rather, it is based on animal, vegetative, and inorganic being, and
only on this basis is it the consciousness of a human being. This structure of being seems to be the
ontic premise for man’s ability to transcend himself toward the world, for in none of its directions of
transcending does consciousness find a level of being that is not also one on which it itself is based.
Speaking ontologically, consciousness finds in the order of being of the world no level that it does not
also experience as its own foundation. In the “base-experience” of consciousness man presents
himself as an epitome of the cosmos, as a microcosm. Now we do not know in what this base “really”
consists; all our finite experience is experience of levels of being in their differentiation; the nature of
their connections is inexperienceable, whether this nexus be the foundation of the vegetative in the
inorganic, of the animal in the vegetative, or of human consciousness in the animal body. There is no
doubt, however that this base exists. Even though each level of being is clearly distinguishable with
its own structure, there must be something common that makes their continuum in human existence
possible.
21
As Voegelin moves through his meditation “What is Political Reality?” in Part III of Anamnesis, The
Order of Consciousness—empirically grounded by his exploration and remembrance of the depths of
his consciousness (recalling the Heraclitean depths of the psyche)—he simultaneously refines his
understanding of the compact symbolization of cosmological experience in myth, the differentiated
symbolization of the Greek noetic experience in philosophy and the relation between the two forms. In
the mythic symbolization, consubstantiality is experienced by human beings as a community of being
in which the partners participate in the being of the other partners. As men began to experience
disorder in this world full of gods and searched for the source of order in the cosmos and in society,
breakthroughs occurred that culminated in the noetic exegesis of the philosophers. It is clear from the
following passage, however, that the philosopher's search for order that culminated in noetic exegesis
20
The following discussion presupposes some familiarity with important components of Voegelin’s work, especially
“experience and symbolization,” “mythological and noetic symbolizations” (or “compact and differentiated
symbolizations”), and “metaleptic (or participatory) reality”.
21
Voegelin, “The Theory of Consciousness,” Anamnesis, 75-76. Even though this passage was written in 1943, it would
not be published until 1966 in Anamnesis. Zur Theorie der Geschichte und Politik.
Convention