[DOWNLOAD] "Eric Voegelin's Immanentism: A Man at Odds with the Transcendent? Part II, Continued from Appraisal, Vol 7, No. 2 (Critical Essay)" by Appraisal # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Eric Voegelin's Immanentism: A Man at Odds with the Transcendent? Part II, Continued from Appraisal, Vol 7, No. 2 (Critical Essay)
- Author : Appraisal
- Release Date : January 01, 2009
- Genre: Religion & Spirituality,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 261 KB
Description
Abstract My objective in this paper is to present an alternative interpretation of the thought of the renowned political philosopher Eric Voegelin (1901-1985). He has been understood by many of his most devoted followers as a classically based Christian thinker, and sometimes simply as a deeply spiritual person, who was critical of modernity for its abandonment of Christian-inspired political and social standards. In this article, I demonstrate that Voegelin was not only not a Christian in any sense of the term that is acceptable, but he was not a theist or even a deist. I argue rather that Voegelin was a modern thinker and an atheist, who, curiously, unlike a number of modern thinkers who are also atheists, rejected the idea of any kind of immanent or earthly fulfilment for mankind. Of course, any kind of transcendent fulfilment was also out of the question for him. I further argue that his seeming support for Christianity in his writings stemmed from his desire to use a modified or immanentised understanding of Christianity as the basis on which to erect a civil theology that would serve as a substitute for what he viewed as the contaminated civil theologies of the left and right that issued out of the Enlightenment era, and which, according to Voegelin, have proven to be so very devastating for political order and common civility in our time.