An Important Book: Israel and History by Eric Voegelin
Eric Voegelin, philosopher and historian,is not considered a religious thinker; as a result he may receive less attention from religious students than he merits.
The basic argument of Eric Voegelin’s entire Order and History series, of which this volume was the first, is simply stated elsewhere by him:
““The life of people in a political community cannot be defined as a profane realm, in which we are concerned only with legal questions and the organization of power. A community is also a realm of religious order.” (“The Political Religions)
He identifies Israel as the first civilization to develop a conscious sense of its existence in relation to both time and a God acting through time. This was a breakthrough, a “leap in being” for a world with generally cosmological perspectives: eternal earth and sky, universe and kingdoms, all revolving around a central sun or king-god, with time moving (if at all) in great cycles.
EV has a reputation as a difficult read, and there is something in that. He uses terms that I have to look up, and certain terms that he uses in a unique way. Best known of these is “immanentizing the eschaton,” by which he means hurrying up the arrival of the Kingdom of God and the apocalyptic transformation of the world. Most insightful for me is his use of “gnosticism” to describe modern political ideologies, especially Marxism.
His great summation of the modern/modernist crisis is contained in The New Science of Politics:
“The death of the spirit is the price of progress. Nietzsche revealed this mystery of the Western apocalypse when he announced that God was dead and that He had been murdered. This Gnostic [ideological] murder is constantly committed by the men who sacrifice God to civilization. The more fervently all human energies are thrown into the great enterprise of salvation through world-immanent action, the farther the human beings who engage in this enterprise move away from the life of the spirit. And since the life of the spirit is the source of order in man and society, the very success of a Gnostic civilization is the cause of its decline…Totalitarianism, defined as the existential rule of gnostic activists, is the end form of progressive civilization” Continue reading →
O Ben Finiti 