Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: Israel and Revelation

Titel: Israel and Revelation

Stichwort: Israels: Hinderungsgründe für eine Entwicklung der Philosophie

Kurzinhalt: Israel: Gott nicht als das unsichtbare Maß des Seele im Sinne Platos;

Textausschnitt: 38/8 With regard to philosophy, one must say that its development in the Hellenic sense was prevented by the irresolution concerning the status of the soul. The philia reaching out toward the sophon presupposes a personalized soul: the soul must have disengaged itself sufficiently from the substance of particular human groups to experience its community with other men as established through the common participation in the divine Nous. As long as the spiritual life of the soul is so diffuse that its status under God can be experienced only compactly, through the mediation of clans and tribes, the personal love of God cannot become the ordering center of the soul. In Israel the spirit of God, the ruach of Yahweh, is present with the community and with individuals in their capacity as representatives of the community, but it is not present as the ordering force in the soul of every man, as the Nous of the mystic philosophers or the Logos of Christ is present in every member of the Mystical Body, creating by its presence the homonoia, the likemindedness of the community. Only when man, while living with his fellow men in the community of the spirit, has a personal destiny in relation to God can the spiritual eroticism of the soul achieve the self-interpretation which Plato called philosophy. In Israelite history a comparable development was impossible for the previously discussed reasons. When the soul has no destiny, when the relation of man with God is broken through death, even a revelation of the world-transcendent divinity as personal and intense as the Mosaic (more personal and intense than ever befell a Hellenic philosopher) will be blunted by the intramundane compactness of the tribe. The God of Israel revealed himself in his wrath and his grace; he caused the joy of loyal obedience as well as the anguish of disobedience, triumph of victory as well as despair of forsakenness; he manifested himself in natural phenomena as well as in his messengers in human shape; he spoke audibly, distinctly, and at great length to the men of his choice; he was a will and he gave a law-but he was not the unseen Measure of the soul in the Platonic sense. A Prophet can hear and communicate the word of God, but he is neither a Philosopher nor a Saint. (240f; Fs)
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No Platonic "practice of dying" developed in Israel. Still, the leap in being, when it created historical present as the existence of a people under the will of God, had also sharpened the sensitiveness for individual humanity. Perhaps because the soul had no destiny beyond death, triumph and defeat in life were experienced with a poignancy hitherto unknown to man.