Immanentize the eschaton

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

To immanentize the eschaton means trying to make the eschaton (the transcendent, uncreated, spiritual, or future; the end of days, to trigger the apocalypse, see eschatology) in the immanent (within the limits of possible experience) world. More recently, it has been used by conservatives as pejorative against what they perceive as utopian schemes, such as socialism, communism, etc. It has also been used by Christian libertarians to criticize George W. Bush and the neo-conservative movement.^[1] In all these contexts it means "trying to make that which belongs to the afterlife happen here and now (on Earth)" or "trying to create heaven here on Earth."

Contents 1 Origin 2 Dispensationalist Christianity 3 Catholic Christianity 4 Popular culture 5 References 6 External links

[edit] Origin

According to Jonah Goldberg, writing in National Review Online:

In modern parlance, the phrase was coined by Eric Voegelin in The New Science of Politics in 1952. In the 1950s and 1960s, thanks largely to William F. Buckley's popularization of the phrase, Young Americans for Freedom turned it into a political slogan.^[2]

Buckley was the most notable of many US conservative readers of Voegelin's work.

Voegelin identified a number of similarities between ancient Gnosticism and the beliefs held by a number of modernist political theories, particularly communism and Nazism.

He identified the root of the Gnostic impulse as alienation, that is, a sense of disconnection with society and a belief that this lack of concord with society is the result of the inherent disorder, or even evil, of the world. This alienation has two effects:

• The first is the belief that the disorder of the world can be transcended by extraordinary insight, learning, or knowledge, called a Gnostic Speculation by Voegelin (the Gnostics themselves referred to this as gnosis).
• The second is the desire to implement a policy to actualize the speculation, or as Voegelin described to Immanentize the Eschaton, to create a sort of heaven on earth within history.

One of the more oft-quoted passages from Voegelin's work on Gnosticism is the following:

The problem of an eidos in history, hence, arises only when a Christian transcendental fulfillment becomes immanentized. Such an immanentist hypostasis of the eschaton, however, is a theoretical fallacy.

The book Fire in the Minds of Men explores the idea further.^[3][4]

[edit] Dispensationalist Christianity

The term has been used in reference to Christian sects that ascribe to Dispensationalism and work to hasten the Second Coming of Jesus and consequently the end of the world. This belief is similar to Gnosticism insofar as it values secret knowledge of the methods to immanentize the eschaton and of the manner in which the eschaton will be or is being immanentized. There are some small differences however: gnosticism in the ancient world did not involve a belief in trying to make heaven on earth, because in ancient Gnostic speculation the world was considered to be inherently imperfect and limited.^{[citation needed]} Ancient Gnosticism valued transcendence,^{[citation needed]} and thus perfection could not exist in the imperfection simply because one would like it to exist, one sought to transcend this world.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Catholic Christianity

The Catechism of the Catholic Church makes an oblique reference to the desire to "Immanentize the Eschaton" in article 676:

The Antichrist's deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgment. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism, especially the "intrinsically perverse" political form of a secular messianism.

[edit] Popular culture

The phrase is cited in the Principia Discordia, and appears fifteen times in The Illuminatus! Trilogy, the first of which is the first line of the novel, "It was the year when they finally immanentized the Eschaton."

The phrase is also used in issue four of Warren Ellis' comic, Doktor Sleepless. It is the goal of the main character, Doktor Sleepless to bring about the end of the world because the future was not what society was promised. Sleepless wants to end the world to keep it from getting worse. The phrase is quoted several times, and it can been regarded as the driving force behind the comic.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• "Diversity, Diversity" in The Religion & Society Report (Volume 17 Number 09 September 2000) from The Howard Center.
• "The Once and Future Heresy": The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount by Gershom Gorenberg, Reviewed by Thomas J. Herron.