O conceito de religião política em Eric Voegelin

Abstract

The purpose of the present work is to present, based on the book Political Religions (1938), the problem of political religions in Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) and to assess whether the use of the concept of political religions is valid to refer to modern mass movements. More specifically, the aim is to defend that political movements use religion in the same way, however empty of transcendental meaning, as Voegelin in Autobiographical Reflections (1980) abandons the concept for being too broad, another term will be speculated to refer to that event. The concept serves to explain the problems of modernity, especially the ideological movements of the late 19th century; from the analysis of consciousness through self-interpreting documents, it is confirmed that these movements repeat the same symbolic form of language of the ancient religions, of Christianity and of the Gnostic heresies, as evidenced by analyzing the Egyptian case of Akhenaten, passing through the Christianity era with messianism and metastatic faith, through Gnosticism and its variants, until reaching Hitler's Third Reich. The work is divided into five chapters, the first dealing with the principles and methods of Voegelin's political philosophy and the problem: State and Religion; the second deals with two central concepts: intra-mundane and supra-mundane religions; the third talks about Gnosticism, its variants, the problem of the eidos of history and metastatic faith; the fourth on the similarity of all these symbols to Hitler's Third Reich, communism and fascism. And finally, in the last one, a definition of the concept of political religions is presented, the problem in relation to its use and possible terms that can replace it.