Eric Voegelin.pdf - Geschwister-Scholl-Institut für Politikwissenschaft

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There is no way to exorcise expressive violence in its entirety
from the use of instrumental violence. The airman who
releases the bombs on his distant targets in war selfconfessedly
gets a rush of satisfaction from contemplating the
destruction he has conveyed with pinpoint accuracy. Nor can
we carte blanche condemn from the earthly perspective of
collectivities organized for power the unleashing of deadly
violence. Individuals may sacrifice themselves and chose
martyrdom, but representatives of political collectivities
cannot responsibly do so, as Max Weber showed in his
distinction between the ethics of intention and the ethics of
responsibility and as Reinhold Niebuhr demonstrated in Moral
Man and Immoral Society. 5
So, violence, including some measure of expressive violence,
is part of the human condition. That scarcely makes violence
good, and it is a qualitative leap from such an admission of the
role of violence in human affairs and in the recesses of our
personalities to what I call in this paper the Cult of Violence.
The notion that the enemy must not merely be defeated but
must be annihilated is very much akin to the gnostic idea that
the cosmos is wretchedly made and must either be remade,
abandoned, or destroyed.
Eric Voegelin has been well described by both Jürgen
Gebhardt and Ellis Sandoz as a „spiritual realist“. That is to
say, the life of the spirit must be lived in what Plato called the
metaxy — between good and evil, life and death, the
Beginning and the Beyond. This „process of reality“ by no
means conforms to our every wish, and may entail brutal
suffering and the sacrifice of innocents. The temptation to
replace reality is strong, but we have no alternative but to
resist the temptation and to seek understanding, not in the vain