(no subject)
Voegelin states that "the structure of history is empirically nonapocalyptic." There is no escape from the metaxy (the permanent structure of existence) in history. Humans are forced to confront the challenge of attuning their souls to the transcendent. Spiritually indolent individuals, those whose souls are not "ordered by faith," look for ways out of this difficult and unpleasant reality. The anxiety of life that Pascal identifies as noirceur is a "blackness that pervades the soul, the emptiness that results in boredom and ultimately in despair." Escape from boredom and despair comes in the form of diversions (what Pascal called divertissements) like narcotic intoxication, television, and music, or it may be found in gnostic ideologies that transform the problem of attaining virtue to one of political action and faith in ideological doctrines.
-M. P. Federici, Eric Voegelin
I am very relieved by that recognition, "this difficult and unpleasant reality"