To immanentize something is to draw it in closely, to make it a part of one’s immediate, subjective consciousness and experience. The eschaton is our ultimate destination, the final end toward which our lives are ordinated. Affirming an insight that lies at the core of classical Greek philosophy as well as Judaism and Christianity (the three streams of what Voegelin terms “the Mediterranean tradition”), Voegelin views the yearning for transcendence, the restlessness for a world better and higher than this world, as a universal and empirically self-evident component of human personhood, nothing less than a fundamental part of who we are. Consequently, to immanentize the eschaton is to commit a basic error in self-understanding. It is to assume wrongly that human aspiration and destiny are coterminous with the natural world. It is to assume wrongly that metaphysical questions, which are life’s core questions, either do not exist at all, or can be rationally investigated only through the methods of physics, which in practice tends to be another way of defining such questions as unanswerable and therefore irrelevant. In sum, to immanentize the eschaton is to assume wrongly that ultimate reality, of which God is the final measure, is instead some form of this-world reality, of which man is presumed to be the final measure. In the case of Christian symbolism, when the gospel song says “This world is not my home,” it affirms the Christian eschaton. Conversely, when the singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman recently produced a hit song called “Heaven’s Here on Earth,” and when, some years earlier, John Lennon, in perhaps his most famous song, invited us to “imagine there’s no heaven, it’s easy if you try,” these poets were quite consciously seeking to immanentize the eschaton. Why does any of this matter? [Because] Voegelin takes great pains to show historically that religious leaders, speaking in the name of their faith, are quite capable of immanentizing the eschaton, with frequently tragic results. Following text unrecoverable... |