Reaching into our own time, "Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man"
confronts the disintegration of traditional sources of meaning and
the correlative attempt to generate new sources of order from
within the self. Voegelin allows us to contemplate the crisis in
its starkest terms as the apocalypse of man that now seeks to
replace the apocalypse of God. The totalitarian upheaval that
convulsed Voegelin's world, and whose aftermath still defines ours,
is only the external manifestation of an inner spiritual turmoil.
Its roots have been probed throughout the eight volumes of "History
of Political Ideas, " but its emergence is marked by the age of
Enlightenment.
In our postmodern era, discussions of the collapse of the
"enlightenment project" have become commonplace. Voegelin compels
us to follow the great-souled individuals who sought to go from
disintegration of the present toward evocations of order for the
future. Such thinkers as Comte, Bakunin, and Marx suffered through
the crisis and fully understood the need for a new outpouring of
the spirit. They resolved to supply the deficiency themselves. As a
consequence they launched us irrevocably on the path of the
apocalypse of man.
One of the great merits of Voegelin's analysis is his exposition
of the pervasive character of this crisis. It is not confined to
the megalomaniacal dreamers of a revolutionary apocalypse; rather,
echoes of it are found in the more moderate Enlightenment
preoccupation with progress to be attained through application of
the scientific method. Faith in the capacity of instrumental reason
to answer the ultimate questions of human existence defined men
such as Voltaire, Helvetius, Diderot, D'Alembert, and Condorcet. It
remains the authoritative faith of our world today, Voegelin
argues, demonstrated by our continuing inability to step outside
the parameters of the Enlightenment. Are we condemned, then, to
oscillate between the rational incoherence of a science that never
delivers on its promises and a now discredited revolutionary
idealism that wreaks havoc in practice? This is the question toward
which Voegelin's final volume points. While not direct, his
response is evident everywhere. "Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man"
could have been written only by a man who had reached his own
resolution of the crisis.
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