Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: Israel and Revelation

Titel: Israel and Revelation

Stichwort: Leap in being; Problem des Todes und der Unsterblichkeit bei den Griechen und Israeliten; Hades, Sheol, Saul

Kurzinhalt: in Hellas, the understanding of the psyche as an immortal substance ... In Israel a parallel development was barred ... Israel: Unvereinbarkeit zwischen Gott und Mensch zur Zeit von Saul

Textausschnitt: 28/8 The leap in being, the experience of divine being as world-transcendent, is inseparable from the understanding of man as human. The personal soul as the sensorium of transcendence must develop parallel with the understanding of a transcendent God. Now, wherever the leap in being occurs experientially, the articulation of the experience has to grapple with the mystery of death and immortality. Men are mortal; and what is immortal is divine. This holds true for both Greeks and Israelites. Into this clean ontological division, however, does never quite fit the postexistence of man. In the Homeric epic, afterlife is the existence of the psyche, of the life-force, as an eidolon, a shadow in Hades; and in the same manner, Israelite afterlife is a shadowy, ghostlike existence in Sheol. In neither case is it an existence that would bring ultimate perfection to the order of the human personality. From this initial situation was developed, in Hellas, the understanding of the psyche as an immortal substance, ... In Israel a parallel development was barred by the early, even if imperfect, understanding of the true nature of a universal, transcendent God. The dead were elohim, and no man was supposed to be an elohim. Genesis 3:22-24
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29/8 The incompatibility of human and divine status seems to have been realized fully for the first time by Saul. Since the dead were elohim, and since the belief that they were continued unshaken, these gods had to be relegated by means of a royal ordinance to a kind of public subconscious. Ancestor worship, the myth of a heros eponymos, and above all the evocation of such gods as rival authorities to Yahweh had to be suppressed. As a consequence the understanding of a personal soul, of its internal order through divine guidance, and of its perfection through grace in death that will heal the imperfection of mundane existence, could not develop. The relation to Yahweh, precarious in this life, was completely broken by death; what was not achieved in life was never achieved. A pathetic expression of this plight was the psalm of Hezekiah (late eighth century) by which the King thanked Yahweh for recovery from a sickness (Isa. 38: 18-19) (236f; Fs)
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30/8 Throughout the history of the Kingdom the question of the soul remained in this submersion of a "public subconscious," and even the prophets were unable to deal with it. Only in the time of Ezekiel (late sixth century), the first step toward a solution became noticeable, from the side of ethics, in the hesitant admission of personal responsibility and retribution according to a man's merit (Ezek. 14, 18, and 33). But even the break with the principle of collective responsibility did not break the impasse of experience with regard to the order of the soul and its salvation. Only under Persian influence, in the third century, did the rigid position weaken and could the idea of immortality enter the Jewish orbit. (236; Fs)
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31/8 The state of suspension in which the issue of the soul remained in Israelite history had curious consequences in the realm of symbols. On the one hand, it favored the advance of historical realism. On the other hand, it prevented the development of philosophy. (236f; Fs)
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