Tomasz Niezgoda

This text is dedicated to uncovering conditions for interpretation in the philosophy of Eric Voegelin. According to Voegelin, human existence is a matter of interpretation and its essence is constituted in tension towards the so-called divine ground of reality, i.e. nonobjective transcendence. I argue that the condition for any understanding of the human being, as well as the reorientation of human existence, is the divine presence dwelling in language, in history and in the subject itself. However, it is not a presence of some kind of object, content, or being –rather, it is a unpresentable ‘flow’or ‘flux’of presence, a flow that instils a primordial mobility in reality and orients man in his being.

* The article was written as part of the research project 2019/33/N/HS1/01868 “Filozofia religii Erica Voegelina – pomiędzy fenomenologiąa hermeneutyką”, financed by the Narodowe Centrum Nauki in Poland.

This article applies the conceptual blending theory designed by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner to an analysis of Adam Mickiewicz’s early messianic ideas, presented in Dziady (Forefathers’ Eve) and Księgi narodu i pielgrzymstwa polskiego”(The Book and the Pilgrimage of the the Polish Nation). The article concentrates on the influences from christian concepts of passion and the messianism presented in the bible which is understood as one of the input spaces. The author claims that messianism created by Mickiewicz is not poetic fiction, but rather a religious statement about the true nature of Polish nation. Furthermore the fate of Poland has an eschatological meaning for the history of the world because Poland is seen as an agent completing the eschatological work of Jesus Christ. Therefore creating a millenaristic kingdom within history is Poland’s final destination.

The aim of this article is to investigate philosophical Christology in the works of Eric Voegelin. It seems that for Voegelin, in the person of Jesus Christ the so-called metaleptical structure of consciousness along with divine reality became luminous as present in every human being. What is more, divine reality (self-)revealed in the event of Christ as an eschatological movement of transfiguration. But the Voegelinian Christ is not the hypostatic union of God and man, but the full presence of divine reality in the consciousness of a man named Jesus. I conclude that Voegelinian Christology points to conditions of God’s revelation: the appearance of God is limited by the metaleptical structure of consciousness and his own transcendence.