Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: Israel and Revelation

Titel: Israel and Revelation

Stichwort: Zoroastrismus; Dualismus, Monotheismus

Kurzinhalt: "leap in being," requires a monistic symbolism; Dualismus: a speculative extrapolation of a world-immanent conflict of substantially the same type that in China has produced the yin-yang symbolism

Textausschnitt: it will be sufficient to dispel an unclearness that originates in the conventional designation of Zoroastrianism as a dualistic religion. Religions can be classified as dualistic or monistic only at the risk of destroying by the numerical nomenclature the experiential differences which require either a dualistic or a monotheistic symbolism for their expression. The conversion, on the one hand, which results in the previously discussed "leap in being," requires a monistic symbolism for expressing the differentiating experience of world-transcendent divine being. Within the logic of conversion it is inadmissible to symbolize the mystery of iniquity by a second divinity. The experience, on the other hand, that can be adequately expressed by a dualism of good and evil forces must be sufficiently compact to comprehend in an undifferentiated state the experience of the world-immanent tension between good and evil. A dualistic theology, while it may carry monotheistic overtones, is by principle a speculative extrapolation of a world-immanent conflict of substantially the same type that in China has produced the yin-yang symbolism. Because of this world-immanent component the experience that expresses itself adequately in a dualism of divinities or principles can, in variegated historical circumstances, absorb the conflicts of the age and become the originating experience of political theologies which identify their own cause with cosmic truth and the enemy with cosmic evil.