Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: Israel and Revelation

Titel: Israel and Revelation

Stichwort: Motivation d. Geschichtsschreibers; Rekurs auf die Erfahrung; "subject matter" of history

Kurzinhalt: Einheit von Mythos, "bewusstem" (eg) Mythos und Geschichte; meaning which can be ascertained only by recourse to the experiential motivations of the form

Textausschnitt: 54/6 The historiographic work, thus, contains genuine myths, genuine history, and the strange intertwinings of history, myth, and enactment of the myth that we find in the affair of the Deuteronomy. The three types of content are blended into a new type of story that is neither myth nor pragmatic history but the previously analysed "world-history" with its experiential nucleus in the historical present constituted by Moses and the Covenant, and its elaboration through speculations on the origins of being and the periods of world-history. The "narrative" thus has absorbed variegated types of materials and transformed them according to its own principle of construction. It is a symbolic form sui generis. Hence, when now again we raise the question concerning the "subject matter" of the narrative, we are forced to the conclusion that it has no "subject matter," but a meaning which can be ascertained only by recourse to the experiential motivations of the form. (175f; Fs) (notabene)