from The Collected Works

The Pauline Vision of the Resurrected

— Part 3

§5. Truth and History

The truth of existence emerges from the theophanic events in history. Paul's exegesis of his vision, with its concentration on the dynamics of the theophany, brings the historicity of existential truth into sharper focus than did the philosopher's exegesis of the noetic theophany. Regarding the relation of truth and history, a new accent falls on the area of "history" and its rank in the whole of reality. The account of the hard structure of truth, as I have called it, in the Pauline myth would be incomplete if this issue, with its rich potential for misunderstandings, and deformations, were not clarified.

 

In classic philosophy, the discovery of noetic consciousness is inseparable from the consciousness of the discovery as an event that constitutes meaning in history. The statement summarily refers to a field of relations in reality that now must be detailed. The discovery has "meaning," because it advances man's insight into the order of his existence. The meaning of the advance, therefore, derives from the "meaning" of existential order in the sense of man's openness toward the divine ground, as well as from man's desire to know about the right order of existence and its realization. This derivation of historical meaning from the meaning of personal existence should be noted as peculiar to the noetic experience of reality; in the Pauline context we shall find the relation inverted. The advance of insight, furthermore, is an "advance" indeed. For the discovery is not dumped as a block of meaning into a "history" in which previously nobody had ever been concerned with such problems of meaning.

from The Collected Works

The Pauline Vision of the Resurrected — Part 2

§3. Death and Transfiguration

Such assurance met with skepticism among the recipients of the message, and Paul felt compelled to answer pertinent questions concerning the source of his assurance. In I Corinthians 15:12-19, he established the connection between his prediction (kerygma) of resurrection and his vision of the Resurrected. "If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; if Christ has not been raised, then your faith is vain (mataia)" (16-17). "If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is empty (kenon) and your faith is empty" (14). The argument closes with the revealing sentence: "If we have no more than hope in Christ in this life, then we are of all men the most pitiful" (19). This sentence is the key to the understanding of Paul's experience of reality—or so at least it appears to me. Hope in this life, in our existence in the Metaxy, not only is not enough, it is worse than nothing, unless this hope is embedded in the assurance that derives from the vision.

from  The Northern Lights

The Genealogy of Islamic Terrorism

Part 1

by Barry Cooper

Professor Cooper is the author of numerous books and essays in political science. He is the editor of several volumes of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. This essay appears as Chapter 3 in New Political Religions, or An Analysis of Modern Terrorism, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, 2004. This is published with permission of the publisher and will appear in five parts.

There are major differences between the way that the political impli­cations of Islam have been worked out historically and the political order of liberal, constitutional democracy. It is as important not to ignore those differences as it is to begin from the self-evident consideration that, although Islam broadly considered does not provide a threat to Western liberal democracy, militant jihadist Islam, what we have been calling Islamism, most certainly does. That, quite simply, was the mean­ing, the significance, and the message of September 11, 2001.⁹

 

Let us begin to consider this problem with the commonsense obser­vation of Max Weber: "Neither religions nor men are open books. They have been historical rather than logical or even psychological construc­tions without contradiction. Often they have borne within themselves a series of motives, each of which, if separately and consistently followed through, would have stood in the way of the others or run against them head-on. In religious matters consistency has been the exception and not the rule."¹⁰ With respect to Islam, understood in as wide a sense as possible, we should not expect consistency between the pious traditional Muslim who seeks in his or her religion only to learn how to live in ac­cord with God's will, and the fanatic who is clear that he knows God's will and that God's will demands that he attack the Great Satan by flying airplanes into buildings or by other murderous deeds.

THE GROWTH OF THE LIBERAL SOUL

by David Walsh

Chapter One:  The Crisis of Liberal Politics

Part 3

David Walsh is professor of politics at Catholic University of America. He is the author or editor of many books; he is editor of three volumes of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. His Guarded by Mystery has been serialized here at VoegelinView in its entirety. His most recent book is The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. The Growth of the Liberal Soul is available from the University of Missouri Press and appears here with permission. "Crisis of Liberal Politics" appears here in five parts.

Liberalism without Clothes  (continued)