(DOWNLOAD) "Civil Theology in the Gnostic Age: Progress and Regress (Critical Essay)" by Modern Age * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Civil Theology in the Gnostic Age: Progress and Regress (Critical Essay)
- Author : Modern Age
- Release Date : January 01, 2005
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 199 KB
Description
ONE OF ERIC VOEGELIN's most trenchant apercus is his observation that Gnosticism, which he considered modernity's core, is fundamentally a flight from the universally human "horror of existence," (1) by which he meant, I believe, the horror not of existence itself but of life's seemingly precarious suspension over the void of non-existence. Our terror of the summum malum of annihilation is only partially assuaged in the Western tradition by Christianity's teaching that the world is securely grounded in an eternal, absolutely good, unchanging divine will, for Christianity, which demands faith and bestows no certainty, also teaches that we have a natural inclination to choose nothingness while deluding ourselves that we possess the greatest good. The ironic result of our predicament between uncertain share in reality and certain possession of unreality in a world "dedivinized" by Christianity is, as Voegelin saw, that the theories which modern Western societies have devised to eliminate conscious existential horror have instead intensified it in the depths of the soul. This is the point of David Hart's observation that modernity believes in nothing, that is, the alternatives are Christianity or nothing, and the modern faith has evolved through a rejection of Christianity into the Epicurean conviction of the reality of nothingness, the absence of truth, a cosmic void, a belief formulated as the greatest good because on this emptiness we are free to project our own personal preferences regarding values and meaning. Because such a "faith" makes no demands and seems to eliminate any risk of being wrong, modernity's religion is, he says, "one of very comfortable nihilism," (2) comfortable because it is designed according to our own wishes so that anything that we want to be true can be "true for us." Nevertheless, it is also very uncomfortable because the nature of meaning, which requires searching and submission, is vitiated by our attempts to create it in conformity with our own personal inclinations, however superficially consoling that may seem. Contrary to modernity's claim that power over reality is a great good, it is, as the soul profoundly knows, the ultimate horror, for in a cosmos we can master and possess we are groundless.
 "Civil Theology in the Gnostic Age: Progress and Regress (Critical Essay)" by Modern Age * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free){kind=link}