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CONSIDERING NATURAL LAW a conventional topic rather than part of the philosophy of order, Eric Voegelin never wrote systematically on the subject. However, his studies on the right by nature and on the nature of nature pose a radical challenge to the project of natural law. This challenge is clarified by several of his other writings, including the important, posthumously published Nature of the Law.' These studies reveal the thoroughgoing character of Voegelin's search for an undoctrinaire, experiential account of personal and social order, 2 and should be of interest to those seeking a more supple natural right.
Voegelin's suspicions of natural law stem from his understanding of its origins. As he sees it, the Stoics made a dogma of natural law by mishandling symbols such as the "right by nature," which Aristotle, in particular, had developed to capture and to communicate his experience of fitting participation in reality. Failure to grasp the essential link between experience and symbol led the Stoics to give the symbols a misplaced concreteness, to manipulate them as if they intended objects rather than existential experiences, and to try to derive a body of eternally valid norms from them. Voegelin does not trace the details of this alleged derailment, but he does discuss the general character of the Stoics' "deformation of symbols," a process whose effects he thinks are still being felt.
Their chief error, as he sees it, was "the abolition of Plato's critical distinction between the dialectical movement of thought in the Metaxy and the mythopoetic symbolization of the divine ambience."3 In other words, they forgot that our partly immanent, partly transcendent life involves experiences of the divine that can only be conveyed in allusive speech, such as that used in myth. When we adopt the more direct speech of objective propositions to refer to such experiences, we may succeed in convincing ourselves that we are dealing with things or objects. However, in the process, we will lose a sense of the living relationship with the divine which is the ultimate source of order. The ability of allusive speech to preserve a fuller openness toward God causes Voegelin to call myth "an indispensable forming element of the social order."4 The Stoics, unaware of the problem, treated symbols of...