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

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does not arise only in connection with the obscurer sects, but
also with regard to the leading personalities of the great
Reform. He who would look in Luther’s reform treatises for
ideas concerning the relation of a reformed Christianity to the
secular power, would experience a surprise. Luther had no
distinct ideas concerning the relation between church and
state, and he is so vague on the point that obviously he was not
aware that this relation might be a major problem. Here we
find the typical movement attitude of the person with strong
religious experiences, burning with wrath over the evils of the
institution, throwing himself into the revolt without knowing
what he is doing. When the movement of which he was a
leading figure produced among other unpleasant results the
Peasant War, Luther was horrified by the anti-civilizational
consequences and fell into the other extreme of inciting to
massacres against unhappy peasants, who after all did in their
own sphere nothing but what he was doing on the higher level
of intellectual and spiritual attack. The disgusted Nietzsche
found for Luther the acid formula of the “Peasant Revolt of the
Spirit”. We meet the type again and again down to the savior
who wants to make the world safe for democracy without
having more than the haziest notions of what the world is like.
On a more moderate level the type is well known to everybody
who has experienced the European totalitarian revolutions: the
honest soul who foamed at the bad state of the world, joined a
movement which promised to clean up and reform, and when
the anti-civilizational hell breaks loose comes trembling and
assures you “I did not want this” and expects to be comforted
by the victim of his stupidity. Ignorance, not as an indifferent
lack of knowledge of a private person with regard to
indifferent subjects, but as a political force arising out of the
sectarian position, ignorance defined as the combination of the
limited sectarian horizon with the righteous aggressiveness of
the sincere and honest believer, is one of the great forced
determining political thought since the Reformation.