That got me thinking: what did it mean for the Emperor and people of Japan to think he was divine. And as I thought about that, it seemed to me that by "god" they may not have thought of it in the same way we Westerners conceive of God. This in turn led me to recall the work of Eric Voegelin, one of the major 20th Century philosophers of history. In the context of the question about the divinity of the Emperor of Japan, Voegelin's significant insight is that people and cultures can come to differentiate between the immanent (the this-worldly) and the transcendent. Ancient Israel came to this realization, as did the philosophers of ancient Greece. But in many primitive societies, this differentiation went unrecognized.
So when we think of the belief that the Emperor of Japan was a god, we may see this as an example, or a vestige, of undifferentiated thought — the divinity of the Emperor was not conceived of as transcendent, as we think of the God of Abraham, transcending this world, but as something that is part of the world, — as difficult as it is for us Westerners who understand the differentiation between immanent and transcendent to grasp.
The starting point for Voegelin's work seems to have been his revulsion at the twin monstrosities of the 20th Century, National Socialism (Naziism) and Communism. He strove to understand how they could have gained the followings they did and came to see them as forms of Gnosticism, a rejection of the tension of living in the in-between, between immanence and transcendence, between this world and the divine. For many, the tension of living on the edge of nothingness, which awareness of our contingency and the very transcendence of God, which we do not participate in, can be unbearable. The rejection of this tension can express itself as a rejection of the world (such as the Manichæan view of matter as evil). Or it can manifest itself as a rejection of the transcendent, with a concomitant imagining of a secular utopia. The totalitarian ideologies fall into the latter category.
I only became aware of Voegelin in grad school, and it is many years now since I read any of his works in depth. But I recall both being overwhelmed at the range of his knowledge and the profundity of his thought and being disturbed at his notion of the "leap in being" from undifferentiated awareness of the world to differentiation as occurring both in Greek philosophy and in Judæo-Christian revelation. Is Jesus (or Moses) no more than Plato? But Voegelin worked as a philosopher, not as a theologian. In the introduction to the (unfinished) final volume of his great work, Order and History, a letter of his is quoted as follows:
And now to your decisive question: is theory possible only within the framework of Christianity? Quite obviously not. Greek philosophy is pre-Christian, yet one can philosophize perfectly well as a Platonist or an Aristotelian. Philosophizing seems to me to be in essence the interpretation of experiences of transcendence; these experiences have, as an historical fact, existed independently of Christianity, and there is no question that today too, it is equally possible to philosophize without Christianity. But this basic and unequivocal answer must be qualified on one essential point. There are degrees of differentiation of experiences. I would take it as a principle of philosophizing that the philosopher must include in his interpretation the maximally differentiated experiences .... Now with Christianity a decisive differentiation has occurred. (In Search of Order, pp.19-20, emphasis added.)So a Christian need not regard Voegelin's philosophy of history as relativizing Christianity at the same time as a non-Christian may be able to see it as not compelling him to accept Christianity. But I haven't yet read volumes 4 and 5 of Order and History. Maybe there is something in them which goes beyond the quote above.
Finally, I'd note that certain forms of fundamentalism and legalism within Christianity may also be forms of the spiritual sickness which has, in other souls, given rise to Naziism and Communism. That is, they may also be ways in which people uncomfortable with the immanent-transcendent tension — and the implicit precariousness of our grasp on being — attempt to give themselves security in place of the reality of faith as "the realization of what is hoped for and the evidence of things not seen." (Hebrews 11:1, emphasis added.)
