Immanentize The Eschaton - Origin

Origin

According to Jonah Goldberg, writing in National Review Online:

In modern parlance, the phrase was coined by Eric Voegelin in The New Science of Politics in 1952. In the 1950s and 1960s, thanks largely to William F. Buckley's popularization of the phrase, Young Americans for Freedom turned it into a political slogan.

Buckley was the most notable of many US conservative readers of Voegelin's work.

Voegelin identified a number of similarities between ancient Gnosticism and the beliefs held by a number of modernist political theories, particularly Communism and Nazism.

He identified the root of the Gnostic impulse as social alienation, that is, a sense of disconnection from society and a belief that this lack of concord with society is the result of the inherent disorder, or even evil, of the world. This alienation has two effects:

• The first is the belief that the disorder of the world can be transcended by extraordinary insight, learning, or knowledge, called a Gnostic Speculation by Voegelin (the Gnostics themselves referred to this as gnosis).
• The second is the desire to implement a policy to actualize the speculation, or as Voegelin said, to Immanentize the Eschaton, to create a sort of heaven on earth within history.

One of the more oft-quoted passages from Voegelin's work on Gnosticism is the following:

The problem of an eidos in history, hence, arises only when a Christian transcendental fulfillment becomes immanentized. Such an immanentist hypostasis of the eschaton, however, is a theoretical fallacy.

The book Fire in the Minds of Men explores the idea further.