Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: Israel and Revelation

Titel: Israel and Revelation

Stichwort: Ägypten als auserwähltes Volk; der göttliche Pharao; Gott als manifest in Tieren

Kurzinhalt: Egypt is the chosen people of god; Pharao: Manifestation Gottes, doch nicht selbst Gott; Menes, Horus, Anubis; Pharao, Christen: Inkarnation

Textausschnitt: The leap in being toward more perfect attunement with transcendent divinity is not actually taken, but it is vibrating as a possibility in the hymn. Egypt, by grace of Atum, is in the world but not of it; it is closed against the evil of Set, it is open and hearkens to the force of good in Horus. Within the compactness of cosmological experience, and under the veils of polytheistic language, Egypt is the chosen people of god.
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Through the god-king Egyptian society is hearkening in openness to the right order of Atum and Horus; the possession of the Pharaoh secures existence within the world without falling a prey to the evils of the world; without a Pharaoh not only the country will fall into political disorder, but the people will fall from the justice of divine being. Understood in this sense the hymn to Atum reveals the structure of the experiences which lived in the Pharaonic order. It must be considered one of the most important documents for the study of Egyptian civilizational form and the secret of its millennial stability.
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When the god chooses Egypt, he does not reveal himself directly to the people, or enter into a covenant with them, but is present with the people through his manifestation in their ruler. We must now approach the most puzzling aspect of Pharaonic symbolism, the divinity of the king. Divine kingship is a rare phenomenon. ... A divine king is not a god who has assumed human form, but a man in whom a god manifests himself. The god remains distinctly in his own sphere of existence and only extends his substance into the ruler, as it were.
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The Pharaoh thus is not a god but the manifestation of one; by virtue of the divine presence in him, the king is the mediator of divine ordering help to man, though not for all men but for the Egyptian people only.
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It is not certain whether the god is manifest in the species, or in an individual animal, or in the individual animal as a representative of the species. Frankfort concludes ... In animal nature the species outweighs the individual. Hence-as we should formulate it-in the animal species, with its unchanging constancy through the generations, man senses a higher degree of participation in being than his own; the animal species, outlasting the existence of individual man, approaches the lasting of the world and the gods.
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The idea that the divine should be manifest in the species is suggestive. ... The structure of a society, however, differs from that of an animal species in so far as a society gains existence through institutional articulation among a multitude of men and the creation of a representative. ... If we realize the compactness of the experience of order that is implied in such symbols- the firm integration of man in society, the dependence of a sense of order in his own life on the unbroken stability of social order-we can better understand why the Egyptian 'form' proved so tenaciously resistant to differentiating experiences and a reorientation of human existence toward transcendent divinity. And we also get an inkling of the scandal which Christianity must have been for men emerging from cosmological civilizations, if we consider that not a king was the god incarnate but an ordinary man of low social status who represented nobody but nevertheless was claimed by his followers to be the representative mediator and sufferer for mankind.