Vision
Etty Hillesum and the Flow of Presence: A Voegelinian Analysis revisits the core of valuable materials of two major thinkers of the twentieth century, Eric Voegelin and Etty Hillesum. It contributes to a new understanding of familiar material by treating it in an original and thought-provoking manner. This study blends the thought and life experiences of two mystical thinkers in one overall vision for the twenty-first century. Prof. Dr. Macon Boczek writes: "Coetsier devotes the opening chapter to Etty Hillesum’s life. He follows this with a chapter on her letters and diaries. He then devotes a further chapter to the thought of Eric Voegelin and in the final chapter, shows the remarkable coincidence of her spiritual experiences with Voegelin’s own." The major contribution of Voegelin's notion "the flow of presence" is that it makes the inner development of Hillesum’s mystically grounded resistance to Nazism transparent. The theory of Voegelin’s analytic of experience and symbolization is brought to life in relation to Hillesum's work. The book thereby confirms the hermeneutical value of such an approach as well as retrieving one of the lesser known heroes of the Holocaust. The Voegelin material is well expressed and the argument is tight as, for example, in Chapter 4 where Hillesum’s scattered meditations are comprehended within a number of the categories Voegelin has made available.
An interesting sentence from Meins Coetsier’s book on Etty Hillesum. He comments on the fact that her writing and silent meditation helped her to “tap into an area within herself that in society had mainly vanished.” Voegelin believed that the disappearance of meditation as a ‘cultural factor’ resulted in the practical ignorance of those aspects of reality touched on by myth, philosophy and mysticism. In other words the secularisation of society has deprived people, or most people perhaps, of an awareness of the depth of reality, of the spiritual dimension. He goes on to talk about a ‘perverse closure of consciousness against reality’ (p. 129). I wonder about the ‘perverse’. For some, perhaps, yes. They make a conscious decision to ignore any spiritual promptings. But for many, I think, socialisation into a secular and materialist culture has simply obscured any such awareness. The occasions when they might perhaps suspect that there is more to reality than the material surface of things are when they encounter a limit situation. Though it is also the case, as David Hay found in his Nottingham survey, that many people feel that there is ‘something there’, that there is more to reality than surface appearances. But ‘a feeling’ is about as far as it goes. This is not something people generally feel they can talk about with others. Spirituality, religion, mysticism are all taboo subjects. We all have capax dei and in some exceptional people, like Etty Hillesum, awareness of it develops in spite, or maybe because of external circumstances. But in most of us it needs to be nurtured and guided.
Eric Voegelin and Etty Hillesum could help us to 'nurture and guide,' they contribute to our understanding of cathartic resistance to totalitarian crisis, and to the spiritual truth emergent within such existence. Hillesum's search as presented in this book fits well within themes integral to the Voegelin literature.
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Famous quotes containing the word vision:
“To me this world is all one continued vision of fancy or imagination, and I feel flattered when I am told so. What is it sets Homer, Virgil and Milton in so high a rank of art? Why is Bible more entertaining and instructive than any other book? Is it not because they are addressed to the imagination, which is spiritual sensation, and but mediately to the understanding or reason?”
—William Blake (17571827)
“The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendencythe belief that the here and now is all there is.”
—Allan Bloom (19301992)
“Every civilization when it loses its inner vision and its cleaner energy, falls into a new sort of sordidness, more vast and more stupendous than the old savage sort. An Augean stable of metallic filth.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)