Eric Voegelin The People of God - Geschwister-Scholl-Institut für ...

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problems of the individual with their unsolvable conflicts are
taken on the shoulders of the Church. 2
bb. The Church as the Basis of Western
Civilization. The very achievement of this magnificent merger
of spiritual and temporal power in the unit of the Sacrum
Imperium produces the reaction which threatens to undermine
it. Through the compromise the Church is enabled to accept
the whole social structure of a people with its occupations and
habits and social differentiations as a whole and to instill into
the social body the spiritual and ethical values with such
gradations as are bearable for the average human being. No
jump is required which would bring about the Kingdom of
God within the generation of the living; the tension of
eschatological expectation is relaxed into the atmosphere of a
civilizing process which in slow and patient work extends over
centuries. The compromise Church can operate on the masses
and utilize the wealth of natural gifts, slowly ennobling them
by giving them the direction toward supernatural aims. The
vicarious sacrifice of Christ can be extended into a social
principle according to which the extraordinary asceticism of
individuals who are gifted for a saintly life assumes the
function of a vicarious offering which accrues to the salvation
of the less gifted brethren in the community through the
clearing of the sacramental Church. The vast organism finds a
rank for the rich and the poor, the priest and the layman, the
prince and the subject, the educated and the uneducated, the
heroic ascet and the weak sinner, the warrior, the tradesman
and the peasant. And in this sense the Church has become the
basis of Western Civilization; in this sense our civilization is
essentially Christian. 3
cc. The Reaction of the Movement. The reaction is
directed against every single function which is essential to the
balanced existence of the Christian society. The main attack of
2 On the sacramental doctrine see Troeltsch, 1.c., p. 231ff.
3 See Troeltsch, 1.c., pp. 241ff.