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.

Hannah Arendt and The Constants of Human Nature

. . . .The delimitation of subject matter through the emotions aroused by the fate of human beings is the strength of Dr. Arendt's book. ^FN The concern about man and the causes of his fate in social upheavals is the source of historiography. The manner in which the author spans her arc from the presently moving events to their origins in the concentration of the national state evokes distant memories of the grand manner in which Thucydides spanned his arc from the catastrophic movement of his time, from the great kinesis, to its origins in the emergence of the Athenian polis after the Persian Wars.

The emotion in its purity makes the intellect a sensitive instrument for recognizing and selecting the relevant facts; and if the purity of the human interest remains untainted by partisanship, the result will be a historical study of respectable rank—as in the case of the present work, which in its substantive parts is remarkably free of ideological nonsense. With admirable detachment from the partisan strife of the day, the author has succeeded in writing the history of the circumstances that occasioned the movements, of the totalitarian movements themselves, and above all of the dissolution of human personality, from the early anti-bourgeois and antisemitic resentment to the contemporary horrors of the "man who does his duty" and of his victims.