Voegelin's Philosophy of History and Human Affairs, with Particular Attention toIsraelandRevelationand Its Systematic Importance

Abstract

AbstractEric Voegelin's master work isOrder and History, published over a period of three decades with the fifth and final volume appearing posthumously in 1987. The focus of attention here is on the first of these volumes,Israel and Revelation(1956), which may be regarded as intellectually the sequel of volumes two and three, since the writing of those volumes (published in 1957) antedates composition of the study of Israel. From the outset, Voegelin makes clear that his concern is with a philosophy of order historically grounded as the primary means of combating the contemporary crisis of human existence, which he identifies with pervasive deformation of consciousness by ideology and the threat of civilization's extinction through totalitarian mass movements. Thus the task is to regain reality through a recovery of the principal experiences upon which man's historical existence is dependent, with both diagnostic and therapeutic intentions. The attention to the historical record is a means of anamnetically overcoming the social amnesia that threatens to extinguish human existence as it has emerged over millennia back to the Stone Age. Diagnosis and therapy are intended to go hand in hand, since the eclipse of reality, and especially of its highest and hegemonic dimension, the divine Ground of being, in favour of various substitute grounds, is the principal danger to be understood and addressed. The enduring experience of open existence in history is glimpsed, in man's continual Exodus in loving partnership with God, in tension toward the mystery symbolized in eschatological fulfillment.