Essays in Anarchism and Religion

A Reflection on Mystical Anarchism in the Works of Gustav Landauer^221

Whoever brings the lost world in himself to life – to individual

life – and whoever feels like a true part of the world and not as a

stranger: he will be the one who arrives not knowing where from,

and who leaves not knowing where to. To him the world will be

what he is to himself. Men such as this will live with each other in

solidarity – as men who belong together. This will be anarchy.^116

While Voegelin appears more pessimistic, his vision resonates with
Landauer’s, stating that the building block for change is not the
masses, but the individual, which, reinterpreting its relationship to
the world, also affects social relationships. He stated,

We know what the life of reason and the good society are; we can

cultivate the former and try, by our actions, to bring about the

latter. We can restate the problem: the formation of the psyche by

encouraging participation in transcendent reason... And that is all

one can do; whether or not this offer is accepted depends on the

Spirit that blows where It pleases. Collectively, as a society, there is

at the moment little, if anything, we can do...^117

Through experience, Landauer and Voegelin argued, the individu-
al gives up the certainty of its particular self, instead opening itself
to the universe, or reality, and to the infinite possibilities for exis-
tence. When the “world-I” replaces the “I” bewilderment, loss of
direction and perplexity replace the simplistic limitations and re-
ductive images which the “I” used to confine its self, others and the
world to attune to its imagination. The more one moves inward
the more one realises oneself and others not to be pure, undivid-
ed individuals, but rather “points of passage, electrical sparks of
something greater,”^118 namely the “unbreakable chain that comes
from infinite and proceeds to the infinite,”^119 toward the “most
ancient and most complete community.”^120 Landauer’s true anar-
chist community proceeds from this unbreakable community, that
one finds “in the deepest depths of our selves”.^121 “Our most indi-
vidual”, he continued, “is our ever most common.”^122 Humanity
is but the term for an “alliance of the plenty”.^123
For Voegelin, as already established above, the tension of the
metaxy and the continuous motion of existence constituted the
universal structure of consciousness. “Man” Voegelin argued,
“is man insofar as he is Imago Dei, and insofar as he is Imago