Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: Israel and Revelation

Titel: Israel and Revelation

Stichwort: Deuter-Jesaia: unangemessenes Herangehen; Unterschied in der Ordnung: Israel - Griechenland; Offenbarung - Wirkweise

Kurzinhalt: the methods most frequently used in its interpretation must be considered inadequate:; Who is the Suffering Servant?; When man is in search of God, as in Hellas... - when God is in search of man ...

Textausschnitt: 120/13 If this is the nature of the work, the methods most frequently used in its interpretation must be considered inadequate: (495; Fs)

(1) The drama, to be sure, is autobiographical in substance, but the evolution of experience is mediated by the author's interpretation in retrospect. Hence, ... Any attempt to go beyond the drama and to reconstruct the author as a "historical" person is therefore not only hazardous but contributes nothing to the understanding of the work. (495; Fs)

(2) The meaning of the drama cannot be found by tearing an important symbol out of its context and treating it as if it were a piece of somewhat enigmatic information. There exists a library of studies on the question "Who is the Suffering Servant?" Is he the author himself, or some other suffering personage, or does the symbol prophetically envisage Christ - or is he no individual at all but Israel, and if that should be the case is he the empirical or the ideal Israel, and is he the whole of Israel or a remnant? Such attempts to understand the Deutero-Isaianic work through solving the puzzle of the Servant is, on principle, not different from an attempt to understand an Aeschylean tragedy by means of a study on the question "Who is Prometheus" or "Who is Zeus?" () If such studies can be undertaken in the case of Deutero-Isaiah nevertheless with at least a measure of sense, the reason must be sought in the difference between the Israelite historical and the Hellenic mythical form of order. The Aeschylean tragedy moves, in search of order, from its compact expression in the polytheistic myth toward the Logos of the psyche; the Deutero-Isaianic drama moves from the compact revelation from Sinai toward the Logos of God. From Aeschylus the movement goes toward the Platonic Vision of the Agathon; from Deutero-Isaiah it goes toward the Incarnation of the Logos. When man is in search of God, as in Hellas, the wisdom gained remains generically human; when God is in search of man, as in Israel, the responsive recipient of revelation becomes historically unique. Since the human experience of revelation is an event in the history constituted by revelation, historicity attaches to the recipient of revelation, to the very historicity of Christ. As a consequence, the question "Who is the Servant?" is not as outlandish in an Israelite context as a comparable question with regard to an Hellenic literary text would be. Nevertheless, while these reflections will cast some light on the difference between the Logoi of philosophy and revelation, and while they will make intelligible the tendency to search for the historical figure behind the symbol of the Suffering Servant, they do not justify the procedure. Isaiah 40-55 remains a literary composition; and the symbols must be read as expressions of the author's evolving experience, even though what he tries to communicate is an insight concerning the revelation of God in history. (495f; Fs)

121/13 The various errors of interpretation, of which we have just adumbrated the two most important types, can be avoided only if one penetrates to their root in the multiplicity of time levels running through the work: (496; Fs)
(1) The experience of the author evolves and matures over a period of perhaps ten or more years. Hence, there runs through the work the time of the experience from its inception to its completion. The temptation is great, therefore, to isolate this level and to use the clues of the text for a reconstruction of the "historical" course of the experience. This attempt, however, is bound to fail, as we have indicated, because the time of the experience has been absorbed into the structure of the work. The author's own reconstruction bars this possibility. (496; Fs)
(2) The experience is inseparable from its expression in symbolic form. In so far as the component oracles and songs originate at various points of time in the course of the experience, the same argument applies to them as to the time of the experience itself. The text as a whole, however, is not a series of oracles in chronological order. It is a composition in which the single pieces, regardless of the time of their origin, are placed in such a manner that they express the meaning of the experience as it has accumulated during its course. The compositorial work is itself part of the process in which the meaning of the experience is clarified; the revelation is received by the author completely only in the act of composition. Hence, the work is not the account of an experience that lies in the past, but the revelation itself at the moment of its supreme aliveness. From the human side, the time of the composition is the time which accumulates, the time in which one grows old and matures, the durée in the Bergsonian sense; from the divine side, it is the present under God in eternity. This is the time level to which in the literature on the subject practically no attention is given. (496f; Fs) (notabene)

(3) The human response is an event in the history constituted by revelation. With the response begins the divine work of salvation, spreading through communication in space and time from the responsive human center. Since the symbols of the work picture the process of salvation, there is running through the work the time of salvation. And this time of salvation is not the inner time of a work of fiction, but the real time of the order of revelation in history. Hence, the symbols of the work, first, touch on the past history of revelation; they furthermore are concerned with the present revelation as received by the author, with the "new things" in the light of which the "former things" become a past of revelation; and they finally envisage the process of salvation as completed in the future through earthwide acceptance of the message that is received by the author, and communicated by his work, in the present. The time of salvation thus absorbs both the time of the experience and the time of the composition in so far as the historical process of the "new things" has its beginning in the experience of the author and continues in the composition of the work which communicates the revelation. This nature of the work as an event in the history of salvation, as the beginning of a process which in its symbols is imaged as extending into the future, is the inexhaustible source of difficulties for the interpreter. For there can hardly be a doubt that the Servant who dies in the Fourth Song is the same man who speaks of his call and his fate, in the first person, as the prophet in the Second and Third Songs. And is it not against common sense that a man gives an account of his death, as well as of its effects in the process of salvation? Such common-sense arguments have indeed become the basis for the assumption that the Fourth Song was written by a member of the circle after the death of the prophet who wrote the other three songs, and a fortiori that the work as a whole (if it is a literary unit at all) could not have been written by the prophet to whom certain parts of it may be conceded. (497f; Fs)