Thanks for your gracious apology, which is accepted. I used "nihilist" and "sophist" knowing that these would be the last things that V. would admit to, and therefore would give greatest offence. But I do have reasons for my charges. In the excerpt that begins this, V. says: "Not even by Reason, because rational argument presupposes the community of true existence; we are forced one step further down to cope with the opponent (even the word debate is difficult to apply) on the level of existential truth. The speculations of classic and scholastic metaphysics are edifices of reason erected on the experiential basis of existence in truth; they are useless in a meeting with edifices of reason erected on a different experiential basis." I would say that abandoning the idea that reason is something that all men can grasp is a kind of nihilism; if different groups have different kinds of reason, (1) rational discourse is impossible, since the world is divided into islands of people who cannot have discourse with other groups, and (2) there is a serious question whether my "reality" or my "reason" is any better or truer than anyone else's, since there is no objective yardstick (beyond my loud voice) of the "real" reality or the "true" reason. And as for the charge of sophism--somewhere in his Dialogues, Plato has Socrates say that the sophist is the one who pretends to be a philosopher.
I would say that abandoning the idea that reason is something that all men can grasp is a kind of nihilism; if different groups have different kinds of reason...Voegelin is not saying that different groups have different kinds of reason. He is presenting an argument in which what he calls a "Second Reality," an outgrowth of scientific materialism, has, in effect, substituted reductionism for a "noetic" apperception of reality. You may disagree with the argument if you like, but you cannot claim that it is nihilism, i.e., the viewpoint that traditional values and beliefs are unfounded and that existence is senseless and useless.
Sophistical argumentation, i.e., the clever manipulation, for ultimately deceitful purposes, of the facts contained in the subject under discussion, couldn't more inaccurately describe Voegelin, a man who is ernest to a fault.
BB has ably outlined the progression of his thought in post #163, which, I believe, was addressed to you.
Voegelin is a very difficult philosopher. You won't get any argument from me on that score. But to dismiss out-of-hand so serious a thinker, on the basis of a brief encounter, is itself an act of sophistry.