Essays in Anarchism and Religion

222 Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume 1

Dei are all men equal as participating in the reality of God...”^124
Consequently, “the existence of man becomes existence in com-
munity. In the openness of the common spirit there develops the
public life of society.”^125 In other words,

With regard to the transcendent source of order in the soul, all

men are equal. The discovery of transcendent divinity as the source

of order is paralleled by the discovery of mankind. ‘Mankind’ in

this sense is not a particular group of human beings at any given

time, but indeed the ‘open society’ of all men extending into the

unknown future. The idea of ‘mankind’ has nothing to do with the

idea of a ‘world-government’ established over a group of contem-

poraneously living human beings.^126

Voegelin’s “open society”, influenced by Henri Bergson’s “Open
Society,”^127 is not a concrete society existing in the world, but a
“symbol which indicates man’s consciousness of participating, in
his earthly existence, in the mystery of a reality which moves to-
wards its transfiguration. Universal mankind [or the open soci-
ety] is an eschatological index.”^128 For Voegelin the open society
was a guideline for being in the world, shaped by awareness of
the metaxy. It opens the individual toward transcendent reality
and the community of universal mankind, as opposed to the par-
ticular, pathologically closed society. It is a form of order that
is “knowable only from the perspective of participation in it”^129
because

The experience of being activates man to the reality of order in

himself and in the cosmos... The background of the experience

of being is the primary experience of the cosmos in which man

is consubstantial with the things of his environment, a partnership

that in philosophy is heightened to the wake consciousness of the

community of order uniting thought and being.^130

Voegelin suggested a departure from the model of the polis to-
wards “the politeia in the soul, with the perspective that this
course opens into existence in a spiritual community beyond tem-
poral organization of government”.^131
Finally, then, the purpose of the an-archist community is not
merely to transcend the rigidity of second reality and create