Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: The World of the Polis

Titel: The World of the Polis

Stichwort: Konflikt zw.: Vertretern der neuen Wahrheit und den beharrenden Kräften

Kurzinhalt: The conflict between the representative advance of truth and the empirical societies was still so burning that

Textausschnitt: 14/I The phenomena in which originate the problems of a history of mankind had become visible, and a good deal of the problems, too. In Israel it was understood that the Chosen People as constituted by the Sinaitic Berith would not live in its Canaan happily ever after, but that an arduous process of history had begun on the level of revelation. Of this process, the phases of the law, the prophets, and the salvation from the exile had been lived through already, and no end was in sight. In Hellas, correspondingly, the phases of the old myth of the people, of the speculative myth of the poets, and of the truth of the philosophers had already been lived through and distinguished. Moreover, in both Israel and Hellas, it was fully understood that these events were not local conflicts in the competition for social power, but that in the war for the truth of human existence the affairs of mankind were representatively transacted. Nevertheless, there were factors present that limited the penetration of the problems. The recency of the discoveries, the resistance of a hostile environment, the regional isolation in relatively small communities, the contrast between the representative importance of the truth and the insignificant social effect, the continued worldly domination of the compactly ordered societies that were a past of untruth in the spirit of solitary individuals and their small groups of followers - created a situation in which the joy of discovery and the fervor of truth were overcome by the effort of communication, by the struggle against the sluggishness of human nature. And in the bitterness of this struggle for survival the accents would fall more heavily on the character of the past as an untruth than on its character as a preparation for the emergence of a new, differentiated truth. The conflict between the representative advance of truth and the empirical societies was still so burning that the character of the resisting societies as members of the represented mankind, and their historical function as the matrix of the new truth, could not yet be clearly discerned. A deeper penetration of the problems was furthermore handicapped by the fact that the break with the cosmological order was not quite as radical as the emotional impact of even the partial break was massive. In Israel, it was only slowly realized that the order of human existence under God was indeed a universal order of mankind and, therefore, could not be adequately represented by the constitution of a Chosen People on a definite territory. And when the insight was gained at last, the people broke asunder in the two equally vehement responses of the withdrawal into the shell of Judaism and the explosive expansion of Christianity. In Hellas Plato's understanding of the historical epoch created by philosophy was limited in both his experience and symbolization by the myth of the cosmic cycles. And, finally, the insufficient empirical knowledge of the historical process at large must not be underrated as a limiting factor. In the construction of Poseidonius, for instance, must be noted not only the limitation through the cosmological myth which induced him to place the results of the leap in being into a Golden Age (in the Hesiodian manner, at the beginning of cosmic history), but also the lack of precise knowledge about Egyptian and Israelite history, about the relative time positions of the Egyptian cosmological order and the appearance of Moses, which allowed him to make Moses the representative of a primordial knowledge in rebellion against its deterioration. (75f; Fs)