Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Chambers, Whittaker - Russell Nieli (essay date summer 1987)

Russell Nieli (essay date summer 1987)

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...

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