from  The Northern Lights

History and the Holy Koran - Pt 2

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 in New Political Religions, or An Analysis of Modern Terrorism, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, 2004. It appears as an appendix and the references are to chapters in the main volume. This is published with permission of the publisher. This is the second of two parts.

Today, for Muslims living within Islamic history, matters are made worse when the inquiring minds are also Western and so doubly damned as both infidel and formerly or neo-colonial. For Westerners derailed by dogmatic postcolonial, postmodern sensibilities, things are no better: there can be no serious distinction between scholarship and polemic for postmoderns because there are no inquiring minds. There are only interested minds. Or, as Michel Foucault once put it, there is no knowledge, only power-knowledge. Notwithstanding the unpropitious context for the appearance of a mind inquiring into the text-critical problems of the Koran, or into what the Koran "really says," a good deal of the traditional understanding has been radically revised by the past gener­ation of scholars — inquiring Muslim and non-Muslim minds working in the area of Middle Eastern studies — to give as neutral a designation as possible. Their concerns, to reiterate a point just made, are not with the perverse interpretations of ijtihad nor of the politics of the Ikhwan, though we shall argue that it has political as well as scholarly significance.

The Pauline Vision of the Resurrected — Part 1

§1. The Pauline Theophany

The potential of distortion through metastatic imagination, it should be understood, is inherent to the mystery of meaning. If the mystery were not real, the distortions would have no appeal. This tension inherent to the mystery has received its classic formulation through Paul in Romans 8:18-25. In the wake of the Fall, the whole creation has been submitted to a state of futility or senselessness (mataiotes) of existence (20). The whole creation exists in the earnest expectation (apokaradokia) of the revelation (apokalypsis) that will come to the sons of God (19). "We know that the whole creation is groaning in the one great act of giving birth; and not only creation but we ourselves, who possess the first fruits of the spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for our bodies to be set free (apolytrosis)" (22-23). Together with creation, our bodies will be set free (or: ransomed) from bondage (douleia) to the fate of perishing (phthora) and enter into the freedom (eleutheria) and glory (doxa) of the children of God (21). In Anaximander's language, transfigured reality will have the structure of genesis without phthora. ^FN

THE GROWTH OF THE LIBERAL SOUL

by David Walsh

Chapter One:  The Crisis of Liberal Politics

Part 2

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.

The Irony of Liberal Nihilism

The irony is that it was precisely the confrontation with totalitarian nihilism that provoked the contemporary rejuvenation of liberal convictions. We have difficulty remembering the extent to which the liberal ethos died in the period between the two world wars. The Great War had discredited the nineteenth-century brand of liberal politics that had seemed so helpless to avoid the conflagration. Social and economic upheavals that reached a crescendo in the Great Depression seemed to have sealed the fate of liberal economics. Even the historically stable democracies of the West appeared to be in a prerevolutionary state. Communist and fascist movements were not exclusively a German or Italian or Slavic phenomenon. Ideological mass movements were to be found in most of the countries of Europe and the Americas.

The realization of the destructiveness of such movements if they were to attain power was the shock that jolted liberal democracies back to life. Suddenly, liberals discovered that they were unarmed, militarily and spir­itually, against far more vigorous opponents. Faced with movements that inspired fanatical commitment, with members that were willing to kill and be killed for the cause they overwhelmingly believed in, liberal democracies discovered the depth of their own ambivalence. Having drifted along as the danger mounted before it, liberal societies and liberal intellectuals suddenly awoke to the realization that history was about to pass them by. Without any apparent deep, sustaining convictions they were no longer a match for the more vital revolutionary forces of the day.

The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Skepticism  -Part 1

by Elizabeth Campbell Corey

Elizabeth Campbell Corey is Assistant Professor of Politics in the Honors Program at Baylor University. More information is available at her department website. She is the author of Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics, 2006, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, from which the following excerpts are taken. This appears with permission and will be shown in two parts.

[It is] in The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism (Brit. sp.) that we see the full extent of [Michael] Oakeshott's transposed Augustinianism and his religious objections to the Pelagian character of modern politics.The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism implicitly recalls Oakeshott's 1929 essay "Religion and the World," in which he presents a choice between "worldly" and "religious" ways of living. In the book he presents a similar pairing: faith and skepticism. Here, however, the two alternatives are not presented as styles of government that might be explicitly chosen by an individual or a society. Instead, Oake­shott calls them the "poles" of an activity (politics), an activity that may at times swing from one extreme to the other but generally ends up somewhere in between.

Faith and skepticism are thus necessarily "ideal" types and alternative visions of what politics might look like. Neither of these is a style of politics, per se, but rather, in Oakeshott's words, they are "logical opposites."¹² In reality, politics partakes of each type, and neither can exist without the other. Faith and skepticism sprang up together over the past five hundred years as a result of specifically modern conditions that Oakeshott describes over the course of the work.