Eric Voegelin

Ecumenical Angst

The Driving Force behind Global Capitalism?

Etymological Origin from Google AI:

Ecumenical: late 16th century (in the sense ‘belonging to the universal Church’): via late Latin from Greek oikoumenikos from oikoumenē ‘the (inhabited) earth’.

Excerpts from above video:

Gnosticism

"For the cosmological civilizations of Mesopotamia, Syria, and Egypt, as well as for the peoples of the Mediterranean, the seventh century before Christ inaugurates the age of ecumenical empires."

"...the interpenetration of cultures reduce men who exercise no control over the proceedings of history to an extreme state of forlorness in the turmoil of the world, of intellectual disorientation, of material and spiritual insecurity. The loss of meaning that results from the breakdown of institutions, civilizations, and ethnic cohesion evokes attempts to regain an understanding of the meaning of human existence in the given conditions of the world."

"Among these efforts, which vary widely in depth and insight and substantive truth, are to be found the Stoic reinterpretation of man (to whom the polis has become meaningless) as the polites (citizen) of the cosmos, the Polybian vision of a pragmatic ecumene destined to be created by Rome, the mystery religions, the Heliopolitan slave cults, Hebrew apocalyptic, Christianity, and Manichaeism. And in this sequence, as one of the most grandiose of the new formulations of the meaning of existence belongs Gnosticism."

"Gnosticism: 1st-2nd Century Judeo-Christian movement denounced by the early Church."

Common thread:

"The experience of the world as an alien place into which man has strayed and from which he must find his way back home to the other world of his origin."

"The world is no longer well ordered, the cosmos, in which the Hellenic man felt at home, nor is it the Judeo-Christian world that God created and found good. Gnostic man no longer wishes to perceive in admiration the intrinsic order of the cosmos. For him the world has become a prison from which he wants to escape."

"From this attitude springs the programmatic formula of Gnosticism... Gnosis is 'the knowledge of who we were and what we became, of where we were and where-into we have been flung, of where-to we are hastening and where-from we are redeemed, of what birth is and what rebirth'."

"... escape from the world, means of deliverance."

"... the aim always is destruction of the old world and passage to the new. The instrument of salvation is gnosis itself - knowledge."