Suchergebnisse

Address before the Royal institute of international affairs, London, Eng., Jan. 1, 1957.

The substitution in modern times of a secular, materialistic metaphysic for Christian theology has not eliminated the essential quality of the millenarian state of mind. The transformation which the millenarian heretics (Taborites, Anabaptists) of the Middle Ages sought to accomplish was necessarily of universal scope because the conflict between God & Satan was a cosmic struggle which involved the whole of mankind. Their purposes were essentially unlimited & were thus of an entirely diff order from the parochial expansionist schemes of medieval kings or the limited aims of baronial factions or merchant guilds. Similarly, in modern times the spirit of totalitarian movements is fundamentally unlike that of ordinary politics based on the calculated interests of sectional soc groups or of nation-states. A millenarian ideology must aim at domination of the world, for it is clearly out of the question for God to win in one part of the world while Satan prevails in another. Such an ideology must claim a total subordination of the individual, for anything less than complete acceptance of the divine will is mortal sin. J. A. Fish-an.