Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: Israel and Revelation

Titel: Israel and Revelation

Stichwort: Israel: Geschichte in einem pragmatischen Sinn u. als bezogen auf den Willen Gottes

Kurzinhalt: Precision with regard to the pragmatic details of time, location, ...will be much less important than precision with regard to the will of God on the particular occasion; Old Testament, AT

Textausschnitt: Nevertheless, the events are not experienced in a pragmatic context of means and ends, as actions leading to results in the intramundane realm of political power, but as acts of obedience to, or defection from, a revealed will of God. They are experienced by souls who struggle for their attunement with transcendent being, who find the meaning of individual and social actions in their transfusion with the plans of God for man. When experienced in this manner, the course of events becomes sacred history, while the single events become paradigms of God's way with man in this world. Now, the criteria of truth applying to paradigmatic events in this sense cannot be the same as those applying to pragmatic events. For an event, if experienced in its relation to the will of God, will be truthfully related if its essence as a paradigm is carefully elaborated. Precision with regard to the pragmatic details of time, location, participating persons, their actions and speeches will be much less important than precision with regard to the will of God on the particular occasion, as well as to the points of agreement, or disagreement, of human action with the divine will. Moreover, an original account, once it has entered the stream of oral tradition, can be submitted to reworking for the purpose of improving the paradigmatic essence; stories can be dramatically pointed up, if necessary through imaginative detail; and the meaning of speeches can be made more luminous through paraenetic interpolations. A pragmatic historian, to be sure, would regret such transformations as a falsification of sources, but the writer of sacred history will understand them as an increase of truth.
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Reflection on this bewildering complex of successively superimposed meanings should make it clear that paradigmatic and pragmatic histories are not rivals. Israelite history was not written in order to confuse pragmatic historians ... For the truth which Israel carried would have died with the generation of the discoverers, unless it had been expressed in communicable symbols. The constitution of Israel as a carrier of the truth, as an identifiable and enduring social body in history, could be achieved only through the creation of a paradigmatic record which narrated (1) the events surrounding the discovery of the truth, and (2) the course of Israelite history, with repeated revisions, as a confirmation of the truth. This record is the Old Testament. Precisely when its dubiousness as a pragmatic record is recognized, the narrative reveals its function in creating a people in politics and history.
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Hence, there is an intimate connection between the paradigmatic narrative of the Old Testament and the very existence of Israel, though it is not the connection that exists between a narrative and the events which it relates. The nature of this elusive relationship will become clearer if one remembers that no problem of this nature did arise in the treatment of Mesopotamian or Egyptian history. ... . Israel alone had history as an inner form, while the other societies existed in the form of the cosmological myth. History, we therefore conclude, is a symbolic form of existence, of the same class as the cosmological form; and the paradigmatic narrative is, in the historical form, the equivalent of the myth in the cosmological form. Hence it will be necessary to distinguish between political societies according to their form of existence: the Egyptian society existed in cosmological, the Israelite in historical form.