Eric Voegelin (1901-85) is often portrayed as one of the severest critics of modernity–its belief in human reason’s ability to understand and convey the fundamental structures of reality and its dismissal of transcendent teleologies as private and suspect beliefs.

In his personal and scholarly demeanor, Eric Voegelin's stance was overtly and explicitly that of a philosopher and teacher professing truth and resisting corruption. The mark of his life was intellectual integrity in the Weberian sense, and his only professional commitment was that of a partisan of truth.

Modern ideology, like ancient Gnosticism, Voegelin argues, sees the world as evil and beyond reform. The modern Gnostic seeks the knowledge (“gnosis”) of the laws of history or nature by which he can reconstitute society into a heaven on earth, thus “immanentizing the eschaton.”

From an examination of Voegelin’s writings one can identify four important antecedent assumptions that factor into his approach to reading Plato; these concern (1) the association between socio-historical events and philosophic insights, (2) the nature of the core philosophic experience, (3) the appropriate way to examine symbols of order, and (4) the level of analysis at which the author’s meaning must be sought.

According to Voegelin, human existence is always and everywhere “existence-in-tension,” existence in the “in-between” reality that Plato termed the metaxy and that is constituted by a simultaneous tension toward both mundane existence and its transcendent divine ground.