Eric Voegelin’s private letter to Hermann Broch, published in the supplied 2007 edition, moves from concern about a mutual acquaintance to an exchange on myth, spiritual authority, and artistic form. Its intellectual center is Voegelin’s recognition that Broch’s literary practice and his own philosophical inquiry converge on related problems. The letter offers provisional historical judgments and suggestions for further research, grounded in Voegelin’s response to Broch’s introduction to the Iliad.
The opening concerns Hertha Schweiger, whose mother belonged to the friends’ shared Viennese circle. Voegelin distinguishes what he and his wife know about Hertha’s pregnancy from their uncertain information about her relationship and possible marriage. His account combines concern about her isolation with moralizing judgments about her conduct and her partner. He interprets her reported marriage as an attempt to conceal a socially uncomfortable situation, attributing her distress partly to Victorian conventions. These are Voegelin’s assessments, not independently established facts. The passage situates the intellectual correspondence within a network of personal obligations, anxieties, and incomplete knowledge.
Turning to Broch’s work, Voegelin stresses both their agreement and the difference between their perspectives: he approaches artistic creation from outside, whereas Broch knows it through making literature. Their first point of convergence concerns Broch’s account of the decay of myth, with decisive moments in fourteenth-century mysticism, the Reformation, and Romanticism. Voegelin locates the institutional turning point in the age of Meister Eckhart:
Im besondern die Mystik der Eckhart-Zeit wird mir immer mehr zur kritischen Periode unserer westlichen Geschichte, denn hier scheint sich der grosse Bruch zwischen der Bewegung des Geistes und den Institutionen ereignet zu haben.
English translation: In particular, the mysticism of Eckhart’s time increasingly appears to me as the critical period of our Western history, for here the great rupture between the movement of the spirit and the institutions seems to have occurred.
The decisive contrast is between spiritual movements and institutions’ capacity to accommodate them. Whereas the thirteenth-century Church could absorb and institutionalize the Franciscan movement, Voegelin suggests that it lacked comparable elasticity in the following century. Mysticism was consequently pushed into heresy. The Reformation made the institutional rupture public, with consequences for the shared ordering of symbolic life:
Die Mystik wurde in die Häresie abgedrängt, und mit der Reformation kommt der öffentliche Bruch in der Institution, -- mit den unvermeidlichen Konsequenzen der Privatisierung und Verwilderung der Symbolik und des Mythos.
English translation: Mysticism was pushed into heresy, and with the Reformation comes the public rupture within the institution, -- with the inevitable consequences of the privatization and running wild of symbolism and myth.
Myth’s decline thus concerns the dissolution of an authoritative communal framework, not simply the disappearance of inherited stories. Voegelin nevertheless presents this large historical interpretation tentatively, as an emerging judgment confirmed by Broch’s analysis.
Their second convergence concerns the connection between myth in an artist’s late style and what Broch calls abstraction or reduction to syntax. Voegelin supplies Plato’s Laws as corroboration: its polis takes shape through mathematical relations corresponding to cosmic order and musical intervals. He further proposes that this mathematical ordering enters the dialogue’s artistic construction, whose arrangement reflects the sun’s daily and annual cycles. The conceptual move is to connect these phenomena across different media:
Ihre Ausdrücke von „Syntax“ und „Abstraktion“, sowie der für Plato so angemessene der „Mathematisierung“, scheinen mir die Varianten eines identischen Formproblems für die verschiedenen Bereiche des sprachlichen, bildnerischen, musikalischen und spekulativen Werkes anzudeuten.
English translation: Your terms “syntax” and “abstraction,” as well as “mathematization,” which is so appropriate for Plato, seem to me to indicate variants of an identical problem of form across the different domains of verbal, visual, musical, and speculative work.
The letter’s significance lies in this conjunction of institutional history and comparative formal analysis: myth is considered both through the conditions of its public authority and through its transformation within mature works. Voegelin closes by asking about Broch’s Hofmannsthal study and larger project concerning mass psychology, then mentions requested offprints and an unread review. These practical exchanges preserve the exploratory character of the argument: the letter records a developing intellectual partnership rather than a completed theory.
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