Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: Israel and Revelation

Titel: Israel and Revelation

Stichwort: Propheten - Dekalog, Seele: Mangel eines positiven Vokabulars; Jeremiah

Kurzinhalt: difference between Israelite Revelation and Hellenic Philosophy: A positive articulation of the existential issue; Covenant: on tablets had to give way to the Covenant written in the heart

Textausschnitt: 24/13 Since the Decalogue was accepted as Israel's fundamental law, the prophetic criticism not only could but had to judge the people's conduct by its standards. Nevertheless, while the complaints, reproaches, and admonitions of the prophets construed reprehensible conduct as violation of the Commandments, obviously more was at stake than an interpretation of legal rules.... While the appeal to decalogic standards lent authority to prophetic criticism, it obscured rather than clarified the real issue: that the prophets judged conduct in terms of its compatibility not with a fundamental law but with the right order of the soul. (438f; Fs)
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... A positive articulation of the existential issue would have required the experience of the soul and its right order through orientation toward the invisible God; and that experience never in Israelite history clearly is differentiated from the compact collectivism of the people's existence - not even in the prophetic age, and certainly not in the age that formed the Decalogue. Hence, at a time when a theory of the psyche and a theology would have been required to unfold the meanings implied in the Sinaitic legislation, the prophets were badly handicapped by the want of a positive vocabulary. They had at their disposition neither a theory of the aretai in the Platonic-Aristotelian sense so that they could have opposed character to conduct in human relations, nor a theory of faith, hope, and love in the Heraclitian sense so that they could have opposed the inversion of the soul toward God to ritual observance of his commandments. In particular, the lack of a differentiated theology must have been a tremendous obstacle to a proper articulation of the prophetic intentions: When reading the story of Jeremiah's squabbles with the Judaite refugees in Egypt (Jer. 44), one wonders whether the Israelite common man, and even more so the common woman, had ever really understood why they should have no other gods besides Yahweh; and one begins to wonder whether the prophets had ever been able to make the reasons clear to them. The famous defections from Yahweh to Canaanite and Mesopotamian gods will appear in a new light if one considers that the people at large probably never had understood a Commandment whose spiritual meaning had remained inarticulate. (439; Fs) (notabene)

26/13 The insight that existence under God means love, humility, and righteousness of action rather than legality of conduct was the great achievement of the prophets in the history of Israelite order. Even though their effort to disengage the existential issue from the decalogic form did not lead to expressions of ultimate, theoretical clarity, the symbols used in their pronouncements leave no doubt about the intended meaning: The normative component of the decalogic constitution was a source of evil in as much as it endowed the institutions and conduct of the people, which derived through interpretation from the Decalogue, with the authority of divinely willed order, however much the actual institutions perverted the will of God. Moreover, the prophets recognized that any letter, as it externalized the spirit, was in danger of becoming a dead letter, and that consequently the Covenant written on tablets had to give way to the Covenant written in the heart. (440; Fs) (notabene)

27/13 A few representative examples will illustrate the prophets' struggle with the variegated phenomena of externalization, their inquiry into its motives, their search for a language that would positively express the right order of the soul in openness toward God, and their ultimate vision of a Covenant that would preclude the danger of externalization. (440; Fs) (notabene)