Book Reviews 413
for a long time. Notwithstanding that one
or two, such as the ‘casual relationship’
between conduct and rebirth mentioned
on p. 45, are mildly amusing, the number
is unacceptable, given that, at £40, this is
not an inexpensive book.
SUE HAMILTON
King’s College, London
doi:10.1006/reli.2000.0273, available online at
http://www.idealibrary.com on
Michael P. Morrisey, Consciousness and
Transcendence: The Theology of Eric Voegelin.
Notre Dame, IN, University of Notre
Dame Press, 1994, xiii+334 pp., $41.95
ISBN 0 268 00793 4.
Eric Voegelin is in many respects a puz-
zling figure for contemporary scholars
used to the conventions of the contempo-
rary academic division of labour. Offi-
cially, Voegelin is classed as a political
scientist, but one whose work at least at
surface acquaintance seems far away from
the policy and electoral issues that
form the staple of the discipline. Even a
revised designation as political philosopher
does not entirely conform to present
usage, as his work seems relatively uncon-
cerned with the issues of legitimacy,
difference and distributional justice of
much post-Rawslian political thought and
seems unfashionably preoccupied with
apparently ‘spiritual’ issues. Yet ‘spiritual’
matters are now no longer quite so
marginalised by contemporary social
scientists as they once were, and it is
possible that we are now on the verge of
seeing a rising interest in the work of
Voegelin.
There are several reasons for thinking
that Voegelin’s time will come. First, the
publication of his collected works is mak-
ing good progress. It will finally run to
some thirty-four volumes, not the least
significant of which, the monumental
eight volumes of The History of Political
Ideas, have now appeared. This work in
 2000 Academic Press
itself seems likely to attract scholarly atten-
tion. In addition to the greater accessibility
of Voegelin’s own work, recent years have
seen a steady stream of secondary literature
that helps expore Voegelin’s work from a
variety of angles, not least among which is
the book under review. It is the first
sustained book-length, single-authored
attempt to assess Voegelin from the
perspective of a Christian theologian.
In many respects, the book is exemplary
in giving a broad and thoughtful introduc-
tion that goes some way toward contex-
tualising Voegelin’s work for theologians,
Given Morrissey’s interests, it was perhaps
to be expected that the bulk of his
work concentrates on the later and more
clearly philosophical writings of Voegelin.
Indeed, hardly any work of Voegelin’s
before 1951 is given any detailed discus-
sion, with the partial exception of The
Form of the American Mind, first published
in 1928, after Voegelin’s study period in
the United States. This focus is something
of a shame because it is difficult to appre-
ciate some of the important and continu-
ous themes in Voegelin’s work if one does
not take into account his attempt to make
sense of the disorders of modernity. His
explorations of the nature of nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century social move-
ments are developed in his books on the
racial social movement that swirled around
Central Europe in the 1930s: The History
of the Race Idea (1933), Race and State
(1933) and The Political Religions (1938).
One important aspect of Voegelin’s efforts
was that he worked within the perspective
of a Weberian-inspired social science that
in his hands was acutely sensitive to the
connections between arenas normally seen
in modernity as separate: the political and
the spiritual.
A theologian’s interests will naturally
focus on other, perhaps equally important,
aspects of Voegelin’s work. Morrissey is
seeking great things from Eric Voegelin,
for, as he puts it, ‘I believe Voegelin
has provided theology with a profound
414 Book Reviews
analysis of human existence that spells
out its genuine philosophical foundations’
(p. 5). Central to this achievement is, for
Morrissey, Voegelin’s transcendence of
the division between philosophy and the-
ology, which Morrisey believes amounts
to a veiled reconstruction of theology. But
Voegelin in fact opposed what he termed
‘propositional metaphysics’ and ‘doctri-
nalization’ and tried to recover the pri-
mary experiences and the languages of
myth, philosophy, revelation and mysti-
cism. In this, his guide was Plato, who
stood as a model for Voegelin of a thinker
who sought to explore the mystery of
reality. From Plato, Voegelin took his
model of what true philosophy and theol-
ogy should be, that is, the meditative
exploration of reality in all its fullness, not
as a scientising venture but as ‘a quest
motivated by the erotic response to the
divine pull on one’s soul’ (p. 10).
Morrissey is clear that Voegelin was not
and never claimed to be a Christian theo-
logian. In fact, it seems clear from this
book that the present importance of
Voegelin lies in the fact that he stands
outside conventional theology and is thus
able to point to the traps and dead ends
into which both it and philosophy have
fallen. In this context one apparently sur-
prising feature of the book helps to clarify
the significance of Voegelin for theology:
the inclusion of a chapter on the work of
Bernard Lonergan. On the face of it a
surprising comparison this is, given
Voegelin’s institutional and intellectual
separation from theology and Longeran’s
premier insider position at the heart of
twentieth-century Catholic thought. In
fact, the two men knew each other’s work
and had a cautious respect for each other.
Despite their clear differences, which
Morrissey does not gloss over, they shared
a concern for the exploration of con-
sciousness as a central dimension to
religious understanding, and this con-
cern allows for at least some common
ground.
 2000 Academic Press
Overall, I have no hesitation in recom-
mending this book as an excellent survey
of Eric Voegelin’s thought from the per-
spective of a Christian theologian. It is to
be hoped that the book will encourage
more theologians to engage with the
richness of Voegelin’s thought.
PETER McMYLOR
University of Manchester
doi:10.1006/reli.2000.0278, available online at
http://www.idealibrary.com on
Robert A. Segal, Theorizing About Myth.
Amherst, University of Massachusetts
Press, 1999, $50.00 (hardback) ISBN 1
55849 194 5, $15.95 (paperback) ISBN 1
55849 191 0.
Robert Segal is one of the most prolific
and wide-ranging expositors of the study
of myth. His published works have
covered most of the significant thinkers on
myth. Theorizing About Myth reflects
Segal’s cross-disciplinary interests, touch-
ing on anthropology, sociology, psychol-
ogy, theology and literary theory. The
book is as much an exercise in intellectual
history as a study of myth. The thinkers
covered include Tylor, Frazer, Hooke,
Eliade, Bultmann, Jonas, Freud, Jung,
Campbell, Lévi Strauss and Blumenberg.
Several of the chapters focus on particular
groups of thinkers showing the inter-
relationships and conflicts both within and
between the different theories. Many of
these chapters address different issues
about the nature and role of myth, for
example, the role of myth within modern
society and the issues surrounding the
myth-ritual school. Other chapters pro-
vide fascinating applications of method-
ologies to particular myths, such as the
application of a Frazerian approach to
the Grail Myth. One of the themes of the
volume is that of the relationship between
rationality and romanticism in relation to
the analysis of myth. The volume opens
with Tylor, the representative of the