On Being Human
Faith, reason, and their Deformations.
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“This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live...” – Deuteronomy 30:19
The desire to escape the structure of reality as given, to collapse under the weight of the tension of existence rather than endure it, is a perennial human folly.
We are seemingly bound to attempt various fantasies in perpetuity, be they secret knowledge, elaborate systems, purified identities, or final solutions, with varying degrees of catastrophe in our wake.
Yet, modern man finds himself in markedly different circumstances than in times past.
With unprecedented global connectivity, access to information, and technological power, we are now capable of carrying out evil at an unimaginable scale. Unlocking prosperity comes with risk, and the 20th century alone should teach us that the pit is indeed bottomless.
This is the crisis that Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) dedicated his life’s search (zetesis) to better understanding.
A philosopher and political scientist, Voegelin was forced to flee Nazi-occupied Austria, where he witnessed the catastrophe of the 20th century first-hand. Teaching in the United States for the remainder of his career, he remained steadfastly committed to inquiry until his death in 1985, gaining a reputation as a remarkably interdisciplinary thinker.
If the ‘polis is man written in large letters’, then any political philosophy concerned with order must ultimately concern itself with the order of the soul, including man’s experience within given reality.
Accordingly, among his most significant contributions is a philosophy of consciousness, expressed in the symbolic pattern of a dynamic tension between “immanent” (finite, temporal, ignorant) and “transcendent” (perfect, eternal, ordered) poles that structure our experience.
As rational and physical beings, we’re simultaneously drawn to the immediacy of worldly life and the mysterious pull of meaning, stability, and perfection beyond it.
Yet, even with this pull to something more, we cannot possess any of it, nor free ourselves from the given state of reality, including the mundane. We’re left with a feeling of being incomplete, insufficient, and under eternal judgment.
As painful as this may be, however, these inescapable experiences are precisely what give dimension to the human life, and are therefore not a problem to be resolved but something to be endured, ideally with gratitude and humility. And, as Voegelin argued, it is in this sense of contingency and finitude that we find the personal seeds of civilizational order and disorder.
Thus, our purpose here is to reflect on the “handshake of faith and reason” as an existential posture to a living reality, passed down to Americans as a practice of spiritual endurance within this tension, and what that means for understanding the interior deformations that inevitably lure us away.
Accepting the reality of the poles at a common experiential level, we can consider implications for how we either endure or collapse these dimensions of human consciousness, including how that manifests into ideologies and civilizational disorder more broadly.
By understanding what drives these movements within us and recognizing the common experiences and impulses that animate them, my hope is that we’ll improve our capacity to keep watch over our own hearts, as well as sincerely engage with our countrymen caught in their grasp.
If and when they turn around and come back into the American covenant, we must be able to forgive and welcome them back with open arms.
The Metaxy
While I cannot provide a full accounting for Voegelin’s Metaxy framework, its history, development, and use in his work, consider the following a minimal summary for our brief exploration here.
For the purposes of articulating this symbol, we can describe it as “the” Metaxy, but it’s important to remember that it is neither a place nor a thing, but the structure of reality for man experienced subjectively as a tension and pull between different perceived realms.
While the Metaxy is the existential center that gives rise to symbols of varying degrees and articulations among civilizations, Voegelin is primarily expanding and clarifying its (more passing) use in the philosophical language of Plato.
In Diotima’s speech on Eros in Symposium, Plato employs the adverb “metaxy” (between) to signify the mediating role of Eros as a liminal divine force (daimon) between two opposing realms: one immanent, mortal, and ignorant, and the other transcendent, eternal, and wise. Here, love (Eros) is roughly the dynamic longing that, when properly oriented, mediates the soul’s mysterious ascent ‘upward’ towards the stable realm of Forms, where Universals like Goodness, Truth, and Beauty reside.
Similarly, in The Republic, Plato situates the soul’s spiritual middle part, the thumos, between reason and appetite, embodying a similar mediating function that can either be disordered or ordered. Here, the visible world is articulated as a shadow of an eternal intelligible realm, pointing again to the in-between structure of man’s experienced reality and his ‘converse with the gods’.
What Voegelin is ultimately interested in here, however, is not ontological ascent but the experience that gives rise to these symbols of man’s consciousness. This includes contact with ineffable order, the longing for wisdom and stability, and the intuitive awareness that there is more than what’s immediately present.
As we move from the noesis of Athens to the spirit of Jerusalem, we find a deepening richness and dimensionality, especially in Christian symbols.¹
Here, the Platonic vision of Eros is replaced by the symbol of Agape, or self-giving love, embodied in the living Theanthropos of Christ, fully God and fully man in hypostatic union, without intermingling or admixture. The Logos of God and the Light of the World.
Rather than Plato’s erotic movement of ascent upward to the transcendent, the Christian symbol reveals a God who empties Himself, descends into this world as a man, and redeems us in an unearned gift of grace.
The Metaxy, then, is not only where the human soul yearns for transcendence, but where God meets man in his finitude, illuminates the idolatries in his heart, and turns him back around, yet again. Likewise, the suffering, longing, and limitation of human existence are not something to be overcome but endured through humility, participation, and love.
While this is ultimately an inadequate discussion of the frame, we can begin with this existential structure: of man who experiences himself in-between an immanent, fleeting, and shadowy world and an unchanging transcendent beyond that illuminates it, and who carries within him longings that this world cannot satisfy.
Nonetheless, man is man, and he will inevitably and repeatedly fail to withstand this reality on his own accord. This tension is difficult to bear, and over time, we grow weary, look for shortcuts, replacements, and guarantees. It took the Hebrews about ten seconds to start constructing an idol when Moses left, and we all must face that these temptations live in our own hearts.
It is in this tension that the American covenant was established, with the understanding that our terminal flaws are precisely what allow us to be ‘turned around’ towards the good, over and over again, and that this inherently individual experience is what can facilitate societal order.
Thus, this living posture of faith and reason, passed down to us in our Anglo-American tradition and embodied by everyday individuals, is what forms the soul of our shared covenant.
Faith
In its most general sense, faith is a lived trust in something that you cannot fully see or know, without the kind of certainty we often desire. Most relevant in relational and existential contexts, it usually means entrusting ourselves to a higher promise or given reality that exceeds our full grasp, but not without some resonance or sense of coherence to hold it together. Thus, it’s not “irrational” but transcends reason, and calls for our fidelity and participation.
This basic sense of faith can be a part of life for anyone (yes, even atheists), and plays a foundational role in everyday human life.² We exercise faith when we commit to a long-term goal or act on convictions or first principles that cannot be guaranteed. It underlies our capacity to love, orient ourselves to meaning, and persevere through uncertainty. In this way, it’s part of a healthy existential orientation to reality and should be cherished in its fullness.
That being said, exercising such faith is not easy. In fact, the whole point is that you’re not going to have certainty and therefore must endure without it, sometimes indefinitely. There will be times of proverbial silence, where outcomes don’t align with hope, and where given reality will feel alien, disjointed, and even evil.
In such times, the tension becomes seemingly unbearable, and the temptation to escape it through various means of certainty grows overwhelming.
When faced with the kind of spiritual endurance required of faith, one deformation is to collapse the immanent pole and reject wordly reality, favoring a dream of urgent deliverance brought about through sheer conviction in the unseen. This error deforms into an apocalyptic, metastatic faith that “the very structure of pragmatic existence in society and history is soon to undergo a decisive transformation.”
Though it may be controversial, Voegelin identifies the prophet Isaiah’s counseling of King Ahaz to lay down his arms and trust God as a symbolic example of metastatic faith. This should not be read as a critique of the full prophetic context or hope for miracles, but rather as a warning about the risks of disconnection from our pragmatic realities and responsibilities in lieu of an act of sheer faith.
In the context of modern ideologies, this deformation manifests in a unique form of man-centered Parousiasm, where Christian eschatological symbols like the Coming of the Kingdom of God are immanentized and converted into political programs achieved through men’s actions.
By far, Marxism is the clearest example of this, and has become one of the most effective parasites on faith in known human history, especially through its revival by Paulo Freire and the pseudo-Christian liberationists.
Here, History becomes a closed system and redemptive force that completes, and is completed by, men. The symbols of Judgment and Renewal are deformed into a revolutionary image of a return to Eden on Earth, in defiance of the given limitations of reality and through the convictions of men on the Right Side of History.
What can be, unburdened by what once was.
In both cases, lived faith becomes a deformed inversion grounded in certainty and control, rather than an enduring posture of trust and limitation. In these demands, it ceases to be faith and becomes an attempt to escape the metaxic tension that structures man’s inescapable existence.
Reason
On the other side of this handshake is reason, which we can describe as the soul’s active participation in the intelligibility of reality. This is not just logic or problem-solving, but an overall orientation to what is, discernment between what we know and what we do not, and the ongoing act of seeking, questioning, judging, and updating.
This kind of participatory reason is foundational to human life. It’s how we make decisions, discern true from false, and come to insights about reality and ourselves within it. While it includes science and logic, it also engages conscience, moral deliberation, and, in conjunction with faith, the contemplative search for answers to life’s biggest questions.
Like faith, however, reason is also prone to deformations, which result from our inability to endure the metaxic tension of consciousness. It requires us to remain open to new insights, face uncomfortable truths about reality or ourselves, and be grounded in our ignorance rather than our knowledge.
When this tension becomes seemingly unbearable, the danger is to abandon the search altogether, bringing about the opposite error: a collapse of the transcendent pole and the belief that, through the sheer power of man’s mind, we can know and therefore control the totality of an immanent reality.
This is the core of the Promethean revolt: a refusal to accept “creaturely” status as participants in a larger order and use technical knowledge to attain a complete view of reality for our control. Here, reason loses its contemplative dimension and becomes an act of theft against what is symbolically the domain of the gods, claiming for ourselves as possession what we instead receive as a gift in our ignorance.
A vivid example can be found in the story of the Tower of Babel, where humans come together to build a structure “with its top in the heavens” and make a name for themselves against the given order of being. Rather than seeking communion with the divine, the Tower of Babel was about conquest, using technical knowledge and collective power to will ourselves out of our lower position.
In modernity, this collapse of the transcendent pole manifests through ideological consciousness, where reason becomes an instrument of systems-building to achieve total domination over immanent reality. The openness of the search and respect for limits is replaced with certainty and procedure, giving us the feeling that we’re in control, creating a closed loop of logic that mistakes a system of thought for a living reality.
Think of technocracy, positivism, or the French Revolution’s Cult of Reason, the latter quite literally enthroning a goddess of reason in Notre Dame Cathedral. The mysterious dimensions of the fullness of reality are replaced with a pseudo-objectivity that seeks to use data and power to resolve the human condition. What transcends reason is discarded, and all that remains is human will.
The result is a closing off of the soul into existential darkness, replacing the real with an idol.
Just as metastatic faith denies the world for the sake of an imagined beyond, ideological reason denies the beyond in favor of an imagined world. In both cases, the structure of existence feels like too much bear, and so it is refused.
Our Living Covenant
Yet, our refusal does not change reality.
As Voegelin notes in Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, “the structure of the order of being will not change because one finds it defective and runs away from it. The attempt at world destruction will not destroy [it], but only increase the disorder.”
This is precisely why I have made the case that our primary concern is not ontological but existential; reality is what it is, it’s only man who can construct elaborate means of trying (and ultimately failing) to escape it.
In total, the result of these various and often overlapping deformations is a flattening of our given reality, rejecting the humility and gratitude that come with accepting our position for what it is.
Whether through the apocalyptic comfort of metastatic faith or the technical hubris of ideological reason, we run from the burden of existence and turn inward into ourselves, failing to uphold our end as participants and becoming captives of our own deformed constructions.
What is lost in the process is not just the experience of living in existential openness, but the precise experiences that make us human.
In all of this, it’s worth remembering that it is not man who can turn himself or others around, but only the pull of something beyond, received as a gift in our innate unworthiness.
This is why the handshake of faith and reason, as a living posture of the soul oriented to reality, cannot be compelled or reduced to mere assent, and remains accessible to every person.
I hope that by focusing more on the first-person dimensions and shared nature of these weaknesses, we will become more aware of our roles in the American covenant, especially in the everyday interactions that can help restore it.
To conclude, I will leave you to sit with the verse Eric Voegelin chose for his funeral, from the Gospel of John (2:15-17).
When asked why, he said, “For repentance.”
Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.
See Katie’s other work at The Kids Are Not Alright on X and Substack.
In the interest of keeping things simple, I have foregone citations. However, please note that I rely on the following sources and influences:
Eric Voegelin’s Anamnesis
Eric Voegelin’s Hitler and the Germans
Eric Voegelin’s Plato
Eric Voegelin’s Science, Politics, and Gnosticism
Eric Voegelin’s On Hegel, A Study in Sorcery
Michael Franz’s Eric Voegelin and the Politics of Spiritual Revolt: The Roots of Modern Ideology
Michael Franz’s (Ed.) Eric Voegelin's Late Meditations and Essays: A Critical Companion Edition
James M. Rhodes’ What is the Metaxy?
Zdravko Planinc’s The Uses of Plato in Voegelin’s Philosophy
Sovereign Nations’ Mere Simulacrity conference, particularly the lectures by James Lindsay
Saint Jerome University’s The Metastatic Faith
Robert McMahon’s Augustine’s Confessions and Voegelin’s Philosophy
1 I mean no offense to Christians here. I am not a Christian, and this is not an orthodox Christian analysis or exegesis. Nevertheless, I take seriously the symbolic weight and living philosophical richness, as well as the role of the Judeo-Christian ethos in Western civilization.
2 Eric Voegelin clearly takes a different view of atheism in its apparent collapse of the transcendent pole. In my view, what matters here is not “belief” but contact with the primary experience of reality that allows us to understand “that which is called God."
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