Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: Israel and Revelation

Titel: Israel and Revelation

Stichwort: Spengler and Toynbee; Grundfehler; Geschichte als Form der Existenz wird nicht anerkannt

Kurzinhalt: while in fact religious founders were concerned with the ordering of human souls and, if successful, founded communities

Textausschnitt: Both Spengler and Toynbee are burdened with the remnants of certain humanistic traditions, more specifically in their late liberal-bourgeois form, according to which civilizations are mystical entities producing cultural phenomena such as myths and religions, arts and sciences. Neither of the two thinkers has accepted the principle that experiences of order, as well as their symbolic expressions, are not products of a civilization but its constitutive forms. They still live in the intellectual climate in which "religious founders" were busy with founding "religions," while in fact they were concerned with the ordering of human souls and, if successful, founded communities of men who lived under the order discovered as true. If, however, the Israelite discovery of history as a form of existence is disregarded, then the form is rejected in which a society exists under God. The conception of history as a sequence of civilizational cycles suffers from the Eclipse of God, as a Jewish thinker has recently called this spiritual defect. Spengler and Toynbee return, indeed, to the Sheol of civilizations, from which Moses had led his people into the freedom of history.