Immortality While We Wait?

Our next essay is on an essay by Voegelin called "Immortality": Experience and Symbol. If that sounds familiar, it's because we blogged about it ourselves way back in 2014. Let's see if anything is worth recovering: 

For Voegelin, religion begins in a religious experience that is codified via symbolism. Thus, "the symbols in question intend to convey a truth experienced." 

Unlike more conventional symbols, these "are not concepts referring to objects existing in time and space but carriers of a truth about nonexistent reality." As such, the symbols are meant to facilitate "a consciousness of participation in nonexistent reality."

And when he says "nonexistent," he doesn't mean "unreal," rather, immaterial and transcendent. For example, the statement "all men are created equal" is not derived from any empirical observation, but is nonetheless real and true for all time. And it is true even if no one has discovered it, or if people have forgotten the experience that engendered it.

One of Voegelin's great concerns is what happens when the experiential reality from which the symbols derive their meaning is no longer conveyed or accessed. 

Sometimes this can occur because the symbol is overly reified in such a way that it excludes experience of the engendering reality that brought it about. Then religious symbolism becomes a kind of empty shell, or shadow of itself. 

For when "misunderstood as propositions referring to things in the manner of propositions concerning objects of sense perception," this provokes "the reaction of skepticism." 

Now, what could be the engendering experience symbolized by the word "immortality?" For it seems that no human group is unfamiliar with the concept. Indeed, one definition of humanness could be "awareness of mortality," and therefore immortality. 

That's about as far as we got before discretely changing the subject. Now let's see if this new essay advances the discussion. As alluded to above, Voegelin does not 

speak in terms of an idea. He wants to get to the heart of the experience that has engendered the symbol of immortality (which in turn has become an "idea" or even a "dogma").

Yes, but who has experienced immortality? Well, as we know, "Human existence is existence in tension 'between time and the timeless.'" And

the variety of symbols that point toward the timeless, immortality among them, are ways in which we as human beings attempt to understand and make sense of that larger reality and the structure of existence. 

So, the word immortality is a symbol of the experience of timelessness? Perhaps, but in any event,

When symbols such as "immortality," "soul," "spirit," or even "God" become dogmatic assertions, unmoored from the engendering experiences in which they were grounded, the skeptic or ideologue can demolish the symbols as meaningless...  

Now, this alienation from the experience can occur for the religious literalist no less than for the atheist, for both, in their own way, reify the symbol:

The only way to recover the truth is by a return to the experiences, the very real experiences... which engendered the symbols in the first place. 

Now, supposing we live in the tension between immanence and transcendence, it may equally be symbolized time and eternity, respectively. But this is a paradoxical space, because, properly speaking, we live neither in time nor eternity, but deploy those terms more as "directions" or "poles" of the tension in which we actually live. 

We are coming up against the limits of the expressible, but it seems that the immanentization of transcendence -- or the temporalization of eternity -- is both a cause and consequence of alienation "from the most basic structure of existence." As a result, 

We lock out one part of reality, we ridicule it, deconstruct it, psychologize it, and then throw it out the window, with nothing seemingly having been lost or destroyed, since there was nothing there to begin with.

Now that I'm thinking about this, something very similar must occur with the use of the symbol "providence" for the experience that engenders it. I'm thinking in particular of how easy it is to ridicule Trump for saying that it was providence that spared him from the assassin's bullet. 

Maybe, maybe not, but the experience is the experience, and he is hardly the first to experience it.

It reminds me of something C.S. Lewis said, and I wish I could remember what it was -- something to the effect that one man's religious experience will be inaccessible to another, and that each of us has access to only a piece of the puzzle, with no one able to see or experience the whole area rug.