Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: The World of the Polis

Titel: The World of the Polis

Stichwort: Heraklit ("Weg der Wahrheit"), Deutero-Jesaia; vom Pathos des Ruhms zur indviduellen Seele -> vom auserwählen Volk zum Gottesknecht

Kurzinhalt: from the immortalizing pathos of the polis to the truth for the individual soul, runs parallel in time to the way, in Israelite history, from the Chosen People to the Suffering Servant of Deutero-Isaiah

Textausschnitt: 274b In his didactic poem, C. 485 B.C., the Eleatic philosopher created the symbol of the "Way of Truth" that leads man beyond the deafness and blindness of the Doxa toward his fulfillment. The Way of Truth was a "type" in the Platonic sense. This way, from the immortalizing pathos of the polis to the truth for the individual soul, runs parallel in time to the way, in Israelite history, from the Chosen People to the Suffering Servant of Deutero-Isaiah. The process in which the soul disengages itself from collective existence and achieves its attunement with transcendent-divine reality was in both instances on principle the same-with the important difference, however, that in no period of Jewish history before the appearance of Christ had the articulation of the life of the soul, as well as of the truth, reached an intensity and a precision of symbolism comparable with Hellenic of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. Only with Jesus does the symbol of the Way of Truth appear in the Jewish orbit. But when Jesus answers the question of the apostle with his "I am the way, the truth, and the life" (John 14:6), he firmly takes the symbol away from the philosophers. From then onward the redemption of the soul goes through Christ; the component of redemption, which is still present in the compact philosophizing of Parmenides, has been revealed in its true meaning; and philosophy, the sole source of transcendent order for the polis, has become one of the two sources of order for mankind, that of Reason by the side of Revelation. (Fs) (notabene)