从“轴心时代”到“天下时代”——论沃格林《天下时代》中的核心问题

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Abstract Since the beginning of the 18th century, European thinkers began to face and think about the “Chinese spirit”, and the prominent figures include Leibniz, Hegel, Weber and Voegelin. Voegelin can be counted as one of the most thoughtful historical philosophers of the 20th century. He thought about the relationship between “order and history” of human beings from the perspective of world political history and the history of political ideas, and replaced Jaspers’ “Axis Age” with the concept of “Ecumenic Age”. Geographically and historically, “Ecumenic Age” refers to changes from Persian Empire to Roman Empire in the West. In Parallel with this is the rise of Chinese Empire in the Far East. The West and the East developed two different “world concept” in parallel. “Ecumenic Age” also has a universal meaning of metaphysics, which refers to the perpetual nature of the world: the world is always full of violence, misfortune and disaster due to conflicts between groups or political units. The “world concept” reveals a spiritual response to the conquest of the world: The diversity and conflict of human polities has troubled us as much as they did for the early empires in human history. Whether in polities of empires or Greek city-states or Israelite polities, all speculations about the origin of polities are related to the field of history. This means that thinking of political order is limited in the field of history and historiography has the basic form of mythological time and traceable narration. The cosmological imperial order encapsulates human ideas, and it is Israel’s existence that allows human ideas to break through the imperial cosmic order. Therefore, the fundamental difference between Eastern and Western civilizations is that the leap of existence does not completely break the cosmological order as the West did.

Key words： Voegelin Gnosticism “Axial Age” “Ecumenic Age” world concept political order in-between ethics

Received: 10 September 2019

PACS:	G04
	B505

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Cite this article:

LIU Xiao-feng. From “Axial Age” to “Ecumenic Age”: on Core Issues in Eric Voegelin’s The Ecumenic Age[J]. , 2019, 36(5): 13-17.

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https://xb.szu.edu.cn/EN/ OR https://xb.szu.edu.cn/EN/Y2019/V36/I5/13