Summary – Part 2, Ch. 4-6

03/13/10 – Joanne Tetlow – Voegelin – Order and History, Volume One: Israel and Revelation – Part II – chaps. 4-6 – The Historical Order of Israel Summary The emergence of Israel as a historical form occurs when God chooses a people under the Mosaic covenant. Exodus from Egypt and its cosmological society to Canaan, the promised land is a differentiating event. The experience of the Israelites in Canaan ending in destruction and not permanence reveals that the symbol of Canaan is not the kingdom of God. As a result of the ambiguity of Canaan, which represents the historical form of Israel and the end of Israelite history because of conquest, there is no Israelite civilization residing in a permanent territory, but a people constituted in covenant. Voegelin distinguishes between pragmatic and paradigmatic events, or sacred and profane history. The Old Testament is about the Jews relationship with God; they are the carrier of truth. Cosmological societies did not produce an Old Testament, because their experience of order was undifferentiated. With Israel, “history as an inner form of existence” emerges in contrast to the cosmological myth. What Spengler and Toynbee miss is the understanding that the experience of order and symbols is not a product of a civilization, but its constitutive forms. This eclipse of God is blind to understanding Israel as “a form of existence of a society under God.” Pragmatically, Israel exists in time; paradigmatically it is the inner form which constitutes a society. Israel as an historical form expands its meaning beyond the present into the past with the following problems: (1) ontological reality of mankind: the process of human history is ontologically real, because the historical truth contained in compact symbolism becomes articulate, and the past inarticulate form can be seen; (2) origin of history is a historically moving present: Israel is the first, but not the last history. Because faith is not subjective, but a leap in being, the historical form is an ontologically real event in history represented by symbols, which can be generalized as “Either-Or” or “Before-After.” Gentiles, Jews, and Christians experience this in different degrees of clarity, i.e., the Gentiles in the law of divine creation; Jews in the covenant and divine command; and Christians in Christ and the law of the heart; and (3) loss of historical substance: historical form can be lost when men and society reverse the leap and reject God. Both “emergence” and “recession” occur in Israelite history. By wanting a king and establishing a kingdom, the Exodus is reversed and the Sheol of civilization revisited. The kingdom “recession” evokes the Yahwism of the Prophets. Israel’s historical form is not regained by the kingdom, but by the Prophets retaining a community under God who does not reside in Canaan. Ironically, the kingdom and covenant are pairs in and out of sequence. Chronologically, the kingdom is second; motivationally in pragmatic history, the kingdom precedes the covenant; but in content, the covenant dominates the kingdom. It is this break of the initial compact order that creates the reversals in hierarchy. Monarchy was necessary to preserve Israel, but the Mosaic instructions were violated. The principle is that political success was no substitute for life in obedience to the divine law. Relation between the life of the spirit and life of the world remains unresolved, but the emergence from the compactness of the Mosaic period to the Prophetic differentiation actualized the life of the spirit and substantive order under the covenant. The nature of Israelite compactness was the “perpetual mortgage of the world-immanent, concrete event on the transcendent truth that on its occasion was revealed.” This new community was to integrate into mankind pursuant to the Abrahamic promise, and though the Talmudic Jews separated from mankind, Christianity became “one mankind under God.” The idea of history has its origin in covenant, and we are currently living in the present of that covenant. Israel has become mankind, and thus, Israelite history is world-history. The Old Testament is paradigmatic world-history—the compactness of cosmological symbolism broken by the Prophets and universalistic understanding of divine transcendence, albeit burdened by Israelite pragmatic existence; nevertheless, provided paradigmatic symbols of relation of order to covenant. As such, Israel is a symbol of revelation.