Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: Israel and Revelation

Titel: Israel and Revelation

Stichwort: Jesaia, Rad (hl. Krieg, "utilitarian component"), Konflikt: kompakte Ordnung - historische Existenz; metastasis

Kurzinhalt: Rad: "spiritualization" of the Holy War; Isaiah ... has tried the impossible: the leap in being a leap out of existence into a divinely transfigured world beyond the laws of mundane existence

Textausschnitt: 48/13 These are the texts. How to categorize their meaning is a thorny problem. We shall first consider the comments of Gerhard von Rad. In the case of Isaiah, von Rad speaks of a "spiritualization" of the ritual of the Holy War. The works of Yahweh in history have, as a whole, become the God's Holy War for Zion in the eschatological sense (Isa. 5,12,19) , a war which requires no human synergism, especially no military action. And Prophetism has become the successor to the old institution of the war ritual so completely that the prophet and his charisma have replaced the defense by armed force. That is a correct description as far as it goes - but it does not touch the crucial question how the prophetic charisma can be considered by anybody an effective substitute for weapons on the battlefield. The ontological question of the ruach of Yahweh,
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49/13 The comments of von Rad, while not conclusive, point toward the magic complexion of the Isaianic experience as the source of the difficulty. The efficacious trust of Isaiah seems to lie somewhere between the sympathetic magic of the Elisha legend and the utilitarian flattening of faith in Chronicles. On the one hand,
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Isaiah's counsel does not originate in an ethics of nonviolence; it is not calculated to lose the war in order to gain something more important than earthly victory but on the contrary to win the war by means more certain than an army. In the counsel of Isaiah, we may say, the element of faith in a transcendent God (which is also contained in the compactness of magic) has differentiated so far that a practice of sympathetic magic, as in the Elisha legend, has become impossible; and the sensitiveness for the gulf between divine plan and human action has even become so acute that all pragmatic assistance in the execution of the plan is considered a display of distrust. And yet, an aura of magic undeniably surrounds the counsel: () That knowledge of the divine plan casts its paralyzing spell on the necessity of action in the world; for if the concrete human action will achieve nothing but what God intends to do himself, it may be indeed considered a distrustful officiousness on the part of man. This is a subtlety of experience beyond magic in the ordinary sense. What can be observed here in the making rather reminds of the later phenomena of Gnosis. With regard to the more immediate setting of the experience one may say: The infusion of society with cosmic-divine order through the cult and myth of the cosmological empires has become, in Israel, the cultic presence of the Kingdom of God in the annual festivals; and it now becomes, in the prophetism of Isaiah, a pragmatically effective presence in the history of the Chosen People. The knowable divine plan, that requires for its embodiment in pragmatic history nothing but the unbounded trust of the "House of Judah," is the cosmic-divine order of the empires, in an ultimate transformation through the medium of Israelite historical existence. (450ff; Fs)

50/13 The conflict between the compact experience of order, of the cosmological type, with the historical form of existence creates the Isaianic problem. In the Introduction to this volume we have explained that the leap in being is not a leap out of existence; the autonomous order of this world remains what it is, even when the one world-transcendent God is revealed as the ultimate source of order in the world, as well as in man, society, and history. Isaiah, we may say, has tried the impossible: to make the leap in being a leap out of existence into a divinely transfigured world beyond the laws of mundane existence. The cultic restoration of cosmic divine order becomes the transfiguration of the world in history when carried into the historical form of existence. To be sure, this peculiar transformation is not a matter of necessity, perhaps inherent in the logic of experience and symbols. The transformation is due to the element of "knowledge" concerning the divine plan. And this "knowledge" seems to ...