SOURCE: Nieli, Russell. “The Cry against Nineveh: Whittaker Chambers and Eric Voegelin on the Crisis of Western Modernity.” Modern Age 31, nos. 3-4 (summer 1987): 267-74.

In the following essay, Nieli contends that both Chambers and Eric Voegelin, a political writer and teacher, have similar ideas about Western modernity.

Now the word of the Lord came unto Jonah, the son of Amitai, saying, “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.”

—Jonah, 1:1

Whittaker Chambers and Eric Voegelin were born in the same year (1901); and although they had vastly different personal experiences—the one as a university professor and refugee from Nazism, the other as a left-wing journalist and Communist spy—they were both in their mature years to adopt a nearly identical position on what they saw as the crisis of Western modernity. Somewhat surprisingly in view of the...