The Bookshelf: Don’t Immanentize the Eschaton! (Matthew J. Franck, 7/24/25, Public Discourse)
Buckley’s catchphrase about the eschaton is generally attributed to Voegelin’s 1952 book The New Science of Politics, but it does not appear verbatim in that work. The idea is there, in sentences such as this: “The attempt at constructing an eidos of history will lead into the fallacious immanentization of the Christian eschaton.” What is he saying here? Voegelin’s New Science, based on lectures given at the University of Chicago, is an attempt to give an account of “representation” as the author understands that concept. At times he means just what any political scientist might mean by representation—the work of one who speaks and acts for a political community. But Voegelin abstracts much more from the concept, taking in a sweeping history from ancient times to modernity. He observes that “the early empires, Near Eastern as well as Far Eastern, understood themselves as representatives of a transcendent order, of the order of the cosmos.” A claim about “cosmological truth” was at the heart, for instance, of Babylonian politics. With the emergence of philosophy in Athens, an “anthropological truth”—an account of man’s nature as a political animal—came to be represented in Western political life, and, with Christianity, a “soteriological truth,” regarding the saving power of Christ to redeem the human race.
But here is the crucial point for Voegelin: “What made Christianity so dangerous [to pagan Rome] was its uncompromising, radical de-divinization of the world.” Politics—the city of man—was, in the Christian worldview, nothing sacred. Political life occurred in the “profane sphere of history in which empires rise and fall,” in contrast to “sacred history which culminates in the appearance of Christ and the establishment of the church.” Sacred history from the founding of the church onward has a known endpoint in the second coming of Christ, an “eschatological fulfillment. Profane history, on the other hand, has no such direction.” This much Voegelin drew heavily from St. Augustine.Modern political thought, according to Voegelin—especially since Hegel in the early nineteenth century—had erased the Augustinian distinction between sacred and profane history. Cities and empires, nations and states, moved in a stream of history that could be viewed as an intelligible process, each age bringing us closer to the fulfillment of human destiny. This conflation of profane history with sacred history is what Voegelin meant by the “fallacious immanentization of the Christian eschaton.” The eschaton, the last judgment, is an event we cannot see coming: “you know neither the day nor the hour,” says Jesus in Matthew 25:13. But the gnostic (from the Greek gnosis, knowledge) claims a special insight into its arrival, and thus makes a claim of its immanence, its here-and-nowness in past and present events and its knowable realization just over the horizon.
The Anglospheric difference lies in our rejection of such earthly Utopianism and skepticism about any system–not least Reason–that promises to achieve one.