Order and History (Volume 1): Israel and Revelation (Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 14) [Hardcover]

Eric Voegelin (Author), Maurice P. Hogan (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 13, 2001

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."

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

About the Author

Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) was one of the most original and influential philosophers of our time. Born in Cologne, Germany, he studied at the University of Vienna, where he became a professor of political science in the Faculty of Law. In 1938, he and his wife, fleeing Hitler, immigrated to the United States. They became American citizens in 1944. Voegelin spent much of his career at Louisiana State University, the University of Munich, and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. During his lifetime he published many books and more than one hundred articles. The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin will make available in a uniform edition all of Voegelin's major writings.

About the Editor

Maurice P. Hogan is Professor of Sacred Scripture (Old Testament) at St. Patrick's College in Maynooth, Ireland. He is the author of The Biblical Vision of the Human Person: Implications for a Philosophical Anthropology.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 616 pages
• Publisher: University of Missouri (December 13, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0826213510
• ISBN-13: 978-0826213518
• Product Dimensions: 10.8 x 6.1 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,122,369 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #76 in Books > History > Historical Study > Philosophy of History

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3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars THE BEGINNING OF AN INFLUENTIAL (BUT UNFINISHED) PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY, October 14, 2009

By 

Steven H. Propp (Sacramento, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Order and History (Volume 1): Israel and Revelation (Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 14) (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.)

11 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Classical Consensus: Reason and Revelation, August 25, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Israel and Revelation (Order and History, Volume One) (Hardcover)

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.