Order and History

* Book: Order and History, Volume I, Israel and Revelation. By Eric Voegelin, edited by Maurice P. Hogan. Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol.14, 2001

URL = https://upress.missouri.edu/9780826213518/order-and-history-volume-1-cw14/

Directory

• Volume 14: Order and History, Volume I, Israel and Revelation, edited by Maurice P. Hogan [1]
• Volume 15: Order and History, Volume II, The World of the Polis, edited by Athanasios Moulakis
• Volume 16: Order and History, Volume III, Plato and Aristotle, edited by Dante Germino
• Volume 17: Order and History, Volume IV, The Ecumenic Age, edited by Michael Franz
• Volume 18: Order and History, Volume V, In Search of Order, edited by Ellis Sandoz

Contents

Israel and Revelation

"Eric Voegelin's Israel and Revelation is the opening volume of his monumental Order and History, which traces the history of order in human society. This volume examines the ancient near eastern civilizations as a backdrop to a discussion of the historical locus of order in Israel. The drama of Israel mirrors the problems associated with the tension of existence as Israel attempted to reconcile the claims of transcendent order with those of pragmatic existence and so becomes paradigmatic.

According to Voegelin, what happened in Israel was a decisive step, not only in the history of Israel, but also in the human attempt to achieve order in society. The uniqueness of Israel is the fact that it was the first to create history as a form of existence, that is, the recognition by human beings of their existence under a world-transcendent God, and the evaluation of their actions as conforming to or defecting from the divine will. In the course of its history, Israel learned that redemption comes from a source beyond itself.

Voegelin develops rich insights into the Old Testament by reading the text as part of the universal drama of being. His philosophy of symbolic forms has immense implications for the treatment of the biblical narrative as a symbolism that articulates the experiences of a people's order. The author initiates us into attunement with all the partners in the community of being: God and humans, world and society. This may well be his most significant contribution to political thought: "the experience of divine being as world transcendent is inseparable from an understanding of man as human."

(https://upress.missouri.edu/9780826213518/order-and-history-volume-1-cw14/)

Discussion

Michael Franz:

(from a review of: The Voegelinian Revolution: A Biographical Introduction. Ellis Sandoz. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981;)

"Sandoz’s fifth chapter, entitled, “History and Its Order: 1957,” is essentially a gloss on Volumes I-III of Order and History: Israel and Revelation (1956), The World of the Polis, and Plato and Aristotle (1957). Although the basic character of this chapter is shared with the preceding one on The New Science of Politics, it must treat works that incorporate more than twelve times as many pages. Not surprisingly, therefore, Sandoz’s treatment is impressive more for its concision than its comprehensiveness or detail. A concise treatment is achieved by following the “central speculative thread” running through these three volumes, which Sandoz regards as “Voegelin’s attempt to trace the emergence of human consciousness through analysis of the experiences of the order of being and their attendant symbolic forms.” (117) Sandoz devotes special emphasis to what Voegelin called the “leap in being” (or discovery of transcendent reality), which Sandoz understands as “the crucial event in this historical continuum of experience and articulation.” While this chapter is no more critical than its predecessor, Sandoz effectively focuses the reader’s attention upon the most important theoretical issues at stake in the volumes, and also points up “a most serious difficulty” in Voegelin’s “metaphysical position” that remained unresolved until the publication of Volume IV in 1974.31

Observations of this sort help readers navigate their way through Voegelin’s writings with a clearer sense of their stages of development, and Sandoz opens his sixth chapter (“Myth, Philosophy, and Consciousness: 1966”) with a helpful account of the theoretical differences distinguishing Voegelin’s Anamnesis from the earlier stages expressed in Order and History I-III and The New Science of Politics. Sandoz summarizes the progression as one expanding the theory of politics first into the theory of history (1952), second into the philosophy of order (1957), and then into the philosophy of consciousness (1966). To unpack these last two stages a bit, Sandoz describes the philosophy of order as one illuminating political reality “through recollection and analysis of the trail of experiences and their symbols manifested in the field of history” (143), whereas the philosophy of consciousness in Anamnesis further augments the philosophy of politics with “the experiences and symbols through which the process of consciousness articulates itself in time.” (144)"

(https://voegelinview.com/commentaries-on-the-work-of-eric-voegelin/)