Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: The World of the Polis

Titel: The World of the Polis

Stichwort: Konstanz der menschlichen Natur; Seinssprung (leap in being) -> Gegenwart unter Gott

Kurzinhalt: the leap in being entails the obligations to communicate and to listen

Textausschnitt: The discernible stages of increasing truth of existence are not caused by "changes in the nature of man" that would disrupt the unity of mankind and dissolve it into a series of different species. The very idea of a history of mankind presupposes that constancy of nature; and the reality of that constancy is attested beyond a doubt by the experiences of the leap in being, by the experience of a transition from untruth to truth of existence in which the same man is the "old man" before, and the "new man" after, he has suffered the infusion of divine Being. Hence, the play of order is always enacted, not before the future, but before God; the order of human existence is in the present under God even at the times when the consciousness of that present has not yet disengaged itself from the compactness of the myth.
()
... For precisely because the problem of order is the same for all men at all times, and because nothing less is at stake than the existence in truth under God, does every newly differentiated insight into the truth of order become everyman's concern. The leap in being entails the obligations to communicate and to listen. Revelation and response are not a man's private affair; for the revelation comes to one man for all men, and in his response he is the representative of mankind. And since the response is representative it endows the recipient of revelation, in relation to his fellow men, with the authority of the prophet. (72; Fs) (notabene)