Autor: Walsh, David

Buch: The Third Millenium

Titel: The Third Millenium

Stichwort: Achsenzeit (Jaspers): Kompaktheit und Differenziertheit

Kurzinhalt: Unity is the primary experience of the cosmos within which we find ourselves; transcendent Being, whose revelation is, of necessity, wholly inward

Textausschnitt: 165a Even the discovery of that necessity cannot be fully made in the absence of revelation. It is an inescapable aspect of the transcendent constitution of our existence that the illumination of its dimensions is also dependent on the revelatory events. Apart from the discovery of God, the adumbration of the full range of human nature cannot take place. Differentiation is thus not merely the history of man's increasing penetration of the order in which he participates; it is more properly conceived as the history of the episodic irruptions of transcendent Being, whose radiance irrevocably changes the order of things. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as human history apart from the history of the encounters between God and man. To the extent that the most momentous events consist of breakthroughs from a level of reality beyond anything known in our ordinary experience, the differentiation of self-consciousness is punctuated by theophanic outbursts. In retrospect the illuminations may be recognizable as elaborations of what is already known, but the luminosity that makes the apprehension possible cannot be accounted for without remainder. Even the retrospective continuity that is recognized is in some sense prepared by the preceding flow of revelation within an immanent reality that has never completely forgotten its originating divine touch of creation. Wherever we turn, we never seem to gain the purely natural unfolding of consciousness by which the odyssey of self-discovery and self-realization might become the preserve of routinized human instrumentality. (Fs)

165b We are thrown back on the revelatory process and the moment of its transparence as the decisive breakthrough of self-consciousness. Theophanic irruptions, the self-disclosure of the Beyond, are indeed the events that have structured our history. To the extent that the emergence of the world religions has been the single most significant development of meaning, then we may regard their emergence as the turning point of history. The justification for regarding them as such is that, even today, they constitute the limits of the horizons of meaning within which we live. Modernity, which has sought to absorb them within itself as external phenomena, has succeeded only in missing their import. It has not succeeded in replacing them, and the reason is clear. Mundane rationality is capable of organizing only the world of beings; it is neither capable nor receptive of the transcendent glimpse by which their permeability toward Being is apprehended. The durability of the great symbolic forms of the world religions is not coincidental. It derives precisely from their formative relationship toward Being. Only a further illumination of the transcendent is capable of extending them and, once they have emerged, they have the durability of marking a distinct limit in the glance of eternity within time. Insofar as there is any absolute turning point within history, we are justified in regarding the theophanic outbursts as the legitimate contenders. They structure history into a Before and After by which even the differentiation of history itself arises. (Fs)

166a Historians have long been fascinated by the question because the study of the past virtually invites reflection on its structure. A pattern that has impressed several generations with its significance is the occurrence of parallel irruptions of transcendent revelation between 800 and 200 B.C. This is the period when the prophets in Israel, the mystic philosophers in Greece, the Vedists and Buddhists in India, the Taoists and Confucians in China, and the Zoroastrians in Persia were all engaged in the opening of the soul toward the extracosmic revelation by which universal humanity is constituted. It was a period of such momentous significance in terms of the break with the cosmological myth, the discovery of rationality, and the emergence of universal human nature that Karl Jaspers named it the axis time.1 All history seemed to revolve around it, and we recognize the source of the great symbolic forms that endure architectonically up to the present. A particularly striking convergence seems to occur around 500 B.C., at least in retrospect, when we contemplate that Confucius, the Buddha, Heraclitus, and Deutero-Isaiah were contemporaries. The pattern could not be merely coincidental, since the moment seemed to have inaugurated the decisive opening of history toward universality. Jaspers may even be forgiven the enthusiasm of denoting the epochal contemporaneity as the "axis time" because such outbursts do signal a decisive differentiation of order. Of course, reminder is needed that the axis designation omits such momentous irruptions as the Mosaic revelation and the epiphany of Christ as well as the experience of Mohammed, but the inclination is not false. Each of the theophanies is axial, but neither individually nor in aggregate are they reducible to a mundane pattern of occurrence. The axis is precisely the shattering of the cosmic realm as the scale of measurement of reality. (Fs)

167a They converge in rupturing the compactness of the cosmological form of experience. Unity is the primary experience of the cosmos within which we find ourselves. It is one order whose consubstantial wholeness indicates that all levels of reality are connected from the most ephemeral to the most enduring. Only the cosmos as a whole is the comprehensive embodiment of order, and everything else gains its position by participating in the imitation of the cosmos.2 Just as order in the cosmos is mediated hierarchically from the highest visible divinities to the lowliest elements of nature, so too can human society live in order by analogically reflecting the hierarchical mediation of the cosmos. Just as the cosmos undergoes its cyclical redemption from disorder and the rebirth of new order by returning to its first day of creation, so human existence can participate in the same rhythms of regeneration from decay by fitting within the New Year renewal of the cosmos. Cosmological order, as it developed in the ancient high civilizations or as it perennially exists among all archaic societies, is an enchanted world. It is a world "full of gods" in which any event can become the occasion for a hiero-phany and in which magical transformations can break out at any moment. Not only is nothing simply what it is, but rational speculative unfolding is impossible. The most poignant feature is surely the degree of unself-consciousness concerning the source of its order. Everything must be depicted in tangible visible terms, since there is no differentiation of the mind, soul, or heart as the seat of its symbolic profusion.3 (Fs) (notabene)

168a All of that unexamined unity is ruptured, not by the breakdown of order that compels men to think about their situation, but only by the concomitant irruption of transcendent Being, whose revelation is, of necessity, wholly inward. The instrument by which it is apprehended is illumined only in the radiance from the Beyond. Apprehension of the radical otherness of the transcendent casts varying degrees of negativity over all other immanent transmitters. Divinity withdraws from the cosmos as it is concentrated in the revelation of Being. Mediation by the hierarchy or rhythms of the cosmos can no longer occupy central place, when the incompatibility of the God with all intrascosmic embodiments has been more or less dramatically discerned. The move is not from polytheism to monotheism, since both variants are discoverable at every point in the cosmological myth. Indeed, the consciousness of the gods as all derived from a common divine cosmic substance is its overriding emphasis. What is decisively new is the irruption of transcendent Being. The encounter with an utterly different order of reality is the signal event. Having once felt its unmistakable touch, the derivative character of all other reality can never be eliminated. All of the epochal spiritual outbursts move in the direction of this fundamental distinction from which all other differentiations follow. (Fs) (notabene)