Mysticism and the Playful Slippage of Symbols: A Voegelinian Meditation on the Areopagite and his Heirs

"The fact of revelation is its content."1 [1] This sentence, whose seeming terseness is rivaled only, perhaps, by the famous opening line of Order and History: "The order of history is the history of its order,"2 [2] is a highly particularized symbolization of human participation in a divine Beyond. It is a symbolization whose differentiation is cloaked under the guise of an admirable degree of seeming succinctness, or compactness, for the noetically and pneumatically underinitiated.3 [3] Yet we should not be surprised if the mystic merely shakes his or her head in ready agreement upon hearing it, while not a few theologians and philosophers of religion pore over Eric Voegelin's later writings in order to wrest some degree of understanding from his statement's somewhat cryptic aura.