Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: Israel and Revelation

Titel: Israel and Revelation

Stichwort: Geschichtsphilosophie (history of philosophy); Israel: Weiterführung der Schöpfung (Hegel, Nietzsche)

Kurzinhalt: fundamentals of a philosophy of history; historical form: presupposes the existence of the world-transcendent God and the historical fact of his revelation; Israel: the expansion of divine creation

Textausschnitt: (eg Kartei: Geschichte: Existenz unter Gott)

68/13 On several occasions we have spoken of the ontological distinctions implied in the prophetic concern with the order of history. The distinctions themselves, as well as the mode of their implication, require our attention because on the one hand, these questions touch the fundamentals of a philosophy of history, whereas on the other hand, in our contemporary state of intellectual confusion their fundamental character is rarely understood. (464; Fs)

69/13 The prophets had no doubts about the ontological presuppositions of their problem of order: Without the God who "knows" his people and the prophet who "knows" God, there would be no Chosen People, no defection from the commandments, no breaking of the Covenant, no crisis of Israel, no prophetic call to return, and no suspense between destruction and salvation. Existence in historical form presupposes the existence of the world-transcendent God, as well as the historical fact of his revelation. This presupposition, embedded in the prophetic da'ath, did not require articulation at the time because the prophets' environment did not yet contain philosophical atheism among its variegated phenomena of defection from order. Nevertheless, although in the absence of articulate doubt the corresponding positive articulation was unnecessary, the issue was fiercely alive in the contents of prophecy. For the prophets lived concretely as members of a people called Israel, which experienced its order, in historical continuity, as constituted by the Sinaitic revelation. While they anticipated disasters for the empirical humanity surrounding them, they never doubted for a moment that the dispensation of history created by the Message would continue, whatever "remnant" of Israel or "offshoot" from the House of Jesse would be its empirical carrier in the future. History, once it has become ontologically real through revelation, carries with it the irreversible direction from compact existence in cosmological form toward the Kingdom of God. "Israel" is not the empirical human beings who may or may not keep the Covenant, but the expansion of divine creation into the order of man and society. No amount of empirical defections can touch the constitution of being as it unfolds in the light of revelation. Man can close the eye of his soul to its light; and he can engage in the futility of rebellion; but he cannot abolish the order by which his conduct will be judged. (464f; Fs) (notabene)

70/13 Modern symbolic expressions of the crisis, as Hegel's dictum "God is dead" or Nietzsche's even stronger "He has been murdered," which betray the degree to which their authors were impressed by massive events of their time, would have been inconceivable to the prophets - to say nothing of the rebellious fantasy of having the order of history originate in the will of ideological planners left and right. If the prophets, in their despair over Israel, indulged in metastatic dreams, in which the tension of historical order was abolished by a divine act of grace, at least they did not indulge in metastatic nightmares, in which the opus was performed by human acts of revolution. The prophets could suffer with God under the defection of Israel, but they could not doubt the order of history under the revealed will of God. And since they could not doubt, they were spared the intellectual confusion about the meaning of history. They knew that history meant existence in the order of being as it had become visible through revelation. One could not go back of revelation and play existence in cosmic-divine order, after the worldtranscendent God had revealed himself. One could not pretend to live in another order of being than the one illuminated by revelation. And least of all could one think of going beyond revelation replacing the constitution of being with a man-made substitute. Man exists within the order of being; and there is no history outside the historical form under revelation. In the surrounding darkness of Israel's defection and impending political destruction - darker perhaps than the contemporary earthwide revolt against God - the prophets were burdened with the mystery of how the promises of the Message could prevail in the turmoil. They were burdened with this mystery by their faith; and history continued indeed by the word of God spoken through the prophets. There are times, when the divinely willed order is humanly realized nowhere but in the faith of solitary sufferers. (465; Fs) (notabene)

71/13 Their faith in the time of crisis forced the prophets to oppose the order of society and to find the order of their existence in the word spoken by Yahweh. Suffering in solitude meant suffering, in communion with God, under the disorder of a community to which the prophet did not cease to belong. (465; Fs) (notabene)