Order and History, Volume 1 (CW14): Israel and Revelation [Hardcover]

Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) is one of the most well-known of modern political philosophers and theorists, but his massive five-volume series "Order and History," as well as the posthumously published eight-volume History of Political Ideas History of Political Ideas (Volume 8): Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man (Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 26), put forward a coherent and somewhat influential philosophy of history.

In the Preface to Volume II, Voegelin says, "Order and History is a philosophical inquiry concerning the principal types of order of human existence in society and history as well as the corresponding symbolic forms." Volume I (1956) begins with a Preface which states, "The order of history emerges from the history of order." Voegelin proposes to conduct a historical review to attempt to discern this order. The volume is in four parts: "The Cosmological Order of the Ancient Near East"; "The Historical Order of Israel"; "History and the Trail of Symbols"; and "Moses and the Prophets."

In the Preface to Volume III, Voegelin summarized the first volume thusly: "The oldest civilizational societies were the empires of the ancient Near East in the form of the cosmological myth. And from this oldest stratum of order emerged, through the Mosaic and Sinaitic revelations, the Chosen People with its historical form in the present under God. The two types of order, together with their symbolic forms, were the subject matter of Volume 1."

One of the aspects of the book which many readers find congenial is its respectful treatment of the concept of divine revelation in human history. (Volume I even contains at the back an extensive list of the "Biblical references" used in the book.)

Here are some representative quotations from the first volume:
"Ideology is existence in rebellion against God and man."
"God and man, world and society form a primordial community of being."
"Hence, the emphatic partnership with God removes a society from the rank of profane existence and constitutes it as the representative of the civitas Dei in historical existence."
"In the Desert God spoke to the leader and the tribes; by listening to the voice, by accepting its offer, and by submitting to its command, they at last reached life and became the people chosen by God."
"The historian's work subtly transfers the authority of Israel's order from the Kingdom to the new carriers of the spirit."
"There are times, when the divinely willed order is humanly realized nowhere but in the faith of solitary sufferers."

(Read my reviews of the subsequent volumes to see how Voegelin's project changed over the successive volumes.)

Eric Voegelin's monumental historical masterpiece encompass a series of 5 volumes of a new vision of a theoretical history. Voegelin's Israel and Revelation approached the question of revelation from a highly sophisticated view of revelation as part of a historical context. The traditional theological analysis imparts only a limited dimension to the historical reality of revelation. Voegelin's theoretical conception takes us to the heart of revelation as a human activity that created a discontinuity from the the secular world view. He carefully used the Biblical account of revelation against a scholarly approach to revelation that is grounded in the order of being, i.e., the order that reflected the symbolism of revelation. He pointed out the inherent limitations of confusing the order of revelation with the pragmatic dimensions of the human existence couple with confusing revelation as a "second reality" experience. Voegelin investigation in the historical figures of revelation and the complex relationship that must be mastered to keep the religious tension with the order of being and pragmatic structure of human existence. A very absorbing book and a great understanding of revelation in a historical context.

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