Autor: Walsh, David

Buch: The Third Millenium

Titel: The Third Millenium

Stichwort: Christus als Maß der Balance zw. Erfüllung und Realität

Kurzinhalt: If we were either to reach our goal or to conclude that it is impossible, then the dynamic unfolding would cease.

Textausschnitt: 141a Christ is the culminating revelation of our movement toward God and of the significance of existence within this world. Eschatology points toward both the beyond and the present. It is because Christ illuminates both simultaneously that he is the great force for order in history. Civilization is perpetually struggling for balance. The aspiration toward transcendent Being?the inexhaustible longing for complete and perfect reality?must be balanced with the realization of its inherent unattainability within time. If we were either to reach our goal or to conclude that it is impossible, then the dynamic unfolding would cease. All that we known as human life? its restless striving and inquiring?would be no more. Our constitution toward an horizon of mysterious fascination that, the more we approach it, the further it recedes, is the permanent condition of our existence. The difficulty of maintaining a balance between the tensional poles of longing and postponement is a source of notorious instability. How is it possible to maintain the constant fidelity of striving without yielding to the false preemption of fulfillment or the dejection of futile disappointment? Balance can only be maintained if we have been able to reach an insight into the mysterious continuity between the two. Postponement is no longer a source of frustration so long as fulfillment is perceived as being already mysteriously present in the process. The balance realized through the mythic elaboration of trust in the whole is crucial to preserving the revelatory truth from distortion. (Fs) (notabene)

142a No one has done more to bring this problematic to light than Eric Voegelin. It is the major theoretical contribution he sought to articulate over a lifetime. He understood that the great imbalancing tendency in illuminative experiences is the tendency to forget that they emerge from reality as a whole. They are movements of exodus toward transcendent Being, but they are not movements out of reality. Despite the luminosity gained, they do not transfigure earthly existence nor accomplish its abolition. Yielding to illegitimate extrapolations not only distorts our perception of reality and undermines the possibility of balance within it; it destroys the revelatory experience itself. Now the illumination is treated as a piece of information on the basis of which we might effect our escape or domination of reality as a whole. Participation in transcendent Being shrinks into insignificance as the imagination is seized by the prospect of identification with the transformative process itself. The extrapolation eclipses the original experience from which it derived. This was the tendency against which the Church had to struggle from the early days in combatting heretical movements. Transfigurative fantasies are not just a source of imbalance in individual and social life; they are lethal to the preservation of the only process of transfiguration available to us. It is no wonder that all the heretical movements are ultimately directed against the Church itself as the embodiment of the provisional eschatological presence. However, it is a great mistake to suggest, as Voegelin does, that the Church is defined by its struggle with the heretical distortions. (Fs)