In political theory and theology, to immanentize the eschaton means trying to bring about the eschaton (the final, heaven-like stage of history) in the immanent world. It has been used by conservative critics, foremost William F. Buckley, as a pejorative reference to certain utopian projects, such as socialism, communism and transhumanism.[1] In all these contexts it means "trying to make that which belongs to the afterlife happen here and now (on Earth)" or "trying to create heaven here on Earth."
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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.[1]
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 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:
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.[2][3]
The term has been used in reference to Christian sects that subscribe to dispensationalism and work to hasten the Second Coming of Jesus and consequently the end of the world.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church makes an oblique reference to the desire to "Immanentize the Eschaton" in article 676:
The Antichrist's deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgment. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism, especially the "intrinsically perverse" political form of a secular messianism.
The phrase is cited in the Discordian text Principia Discordia, and appears fifteen times in Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's The Illuminatus! Trilogy, the first of which is the first line of the novel, "It was the year when they finally immanentized the Eschaton."
The phrase is also used in issue four of Warren Ellis' comic, Doktor Sleepless. It appears to be the goal of the main character, Doktor Sleepless, to bring about the end of the world, driven by disappointment over how the future of the past has transpired. Sleepless wants to end the world to keep it from getting worse. The phrase is quoted several times, and can be regarded as the driving force behind the comic. According to the Doktor Sleepless Wiki, this concept is the inspiration for the fictional group blog 'imminent.sea'.
In Ken Macleod's science fiction novel The Stone Canal, one of the chapters is called, 'Another crack at Immanentising the Eschaton'.