II
Ernst Bloch’s Revolutionary Marcionism100
For Francesca Vidal
My soul does magnify the Lord: And my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior. For He has regarded the lowliness of His handmaiden. For behold, from henceforth, all generations shall call me blessed. For He that is mighty has magnified me: and holy is His Name. And His mercy is on them that fear him: throughout all generations. He has shown strength with his arm: He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He has put down the mighty from their seat, and has exalted the humble and meek. He has filled the hungry with good things: and the rich He has sent empty away. He, remembering his mercy, has helped His servant Israel, as He promised to our forefathers, Abraham and his seed forever.
Now immersed in a book with the seemingly absurd title Atheism in Christianity, the reader should be hardly surprised to be confronted with a lengthy Bible quote (even though this one surprisingly does not appear in Ernst Bloch101). But of all possibilities: why this Marian hymn, the Magnificat? Claudio Monteverdi, Johann Sebastian Bach, and others may have splendidly set it to music, but isn’t the Marian in itself sugary and kitschy, eo ipso folk-religious, Catholic? It is hard to believe, but for the French arch-fascist Charles Maurras, a “condisciple” of Friedrich Nietzsche,102 Luke 1:46–55 was his main piece of evidence in his relentless trial against Christianity.
The thought, “Well, of course, the text is Jewish through and through,” may occur to those who have heard of this Maurras, a prominent anti-Dreyfusard and Nazi collaborator,103 and of his vehement, ultimately eliminatory anti-Semitism.
“He, remembering his mercy, has helped His servant Israel, as He promised to our forefathers, Abraham and his seed forever.” If, according to Maurras, this final passage of the Magnificat is usually not taken seriously—because of people’s cultural and religious sloppiness—then even less so is the passage central to him, this anti-liberal and anti-socialist:104 “He has shown strength with His arm: He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He has put down the mighty from their seat, and has exalted the humble and meek. He has filled the hungry with good things: and the rich He has sent empty away.” Above all, in light of these supposedly anarchist verses, Maurras talked about “the poison of the Magnificat”105 and declared “Judaeo-Christianity” to be the root cause of all modern evils. (Alain de Benoist, the chief ideologue of the French New Right, still does so today.106)
Like some anti-clerical freethinker or Marxist, Maurras went so far in his extremism as to profess to be a militant atheist.107 One irony is that, unlike all of the ‘Left,’ beginning with the Deist Voltaire, Maurras did so not for humane and humanist reasons, but for decisively inhumane and anti-humanist ones.108 The other irony, no less remarkable, is that this counter-revolutionary and in the end fascist atheist Maurras was highly interested109 in forging a political alliance with the mainly anti-democratic Catholicism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—itself a kind of natural enemy of the secularist Republic. Still, he loudly proclaimed his atheism on anti-Jewish and anti-Christian grounds—“Catholicism without Christianity,” as Robert Spaemann put the Maurrasian paradox in a nutshell.110
As Maurras himself put it: “Je suis athée, mais je suis catholique.” He chose this phrasing in light of an atheism which had been largely left-wing up to that point. But towards Catholicism, as Christian as ever, the reversal was appropriate: “I am (also) a Catholic, but I’m (at the same time) an atheist.” In polar opposition to Maurras, Bloch explicitly condensed his “Atheism in Christianity” into a double formula: “Only an atheist can be a good Christian, only a Christian can be a good atheist” (A, 15). Most briefly, the main task of my presentation may be described as the exegesis of this apparent double paradox. But I would like to further emphasize this quest for “differentiations in the concept of atheism,”111 the polar tension between Maurras and Bloch, and share the following anecdote:
In the early years of the war Helmut Gollwitzer—pastor in Berlin-Dahlem after Martin Niemöller’s arrest—was once paid a visit by a communist hiding underground. Hardly surprisingly, their talk was mostly about the Nazis. But suddenly the communist made an astonishing remark: the Nazis, said the Marxist full of ‘holy wrath’, were “godless pagans.” Gollwitzer could do nothing but agree, but (in all politeness) had to submit that such a formulation, coming out of the mouth of a dedicated and surely atheist communist, sounded rather peculiar. His interlocutor was unusually confident, waved his hand slightly, and explained that he fully understood what Gollwitzer was saying. But he said that his atheism and the atheism of the Nazis were two completely different things. Gollwitzer remained convinced by this formulation until the end of his life (as a professor at Freie Universität Berlin)—though probably not in the sense that the Nazis were simply devils and the communists angels.
Gollwitzer’s writing directly engages with Bloch’s “Atheism in Christianity,” yet always with the greatest respect.112 As a theologian in the literal, theist sense, he had to do so, though here I cannot expound on the reasons why. Rather, I am interested in the almost identical confrontation of the two with fascism, particularly in religionibus: their defense against what Gollwitzer’s visitor during that fascist night had called “godless (neo-)paganism.” From the perspective of religious studies, this approach is not unproblematic,113 but in view of the discourse still popular today, it is understandable, even vivid. As late as 1968, Bloch again writes in his Atheism in Christianity “that fascist scoundrels like Alfred Rosenberg were selling cheap swill under that label [of metaphysics],114 and fascist abetters like C. G. Jung or Ludwig Klages were selling what was earthy these days”—which effectively means neo-pagan: “neo” stands for “these days” and “pagan” for “earthy.”115 Bloch, like his unofficial students Paul Tillich and Theodor W. Adorno,116 was a decisive opponent of myths of origins, indeed of all genealogical thinking: “Whatever there was, it has to be examined. It is not valid by virtue of itself; it is perhaps familiar, but it lies behind us. It is only valid in so far and in as much as the Where-to lying before us is alive, or not, in what has become. If what is binding backwards has become false, then the tie that binds us has to be cut. And even more so if it was false from the beginning, true only as a shackle” (A, 115).
Unsurprisingly, in Bloch, the utopian thinker of the future, the decisive criterion of truth is the “Where-to before us,” which he also calls “the Tomorrow within today,” as a “true meta” (A, 96). Hans-Jürgen Krahl quite followed Bloch’s meaning, when, eye to eye with Martin Heidegger and only a year after the publication of Atheism, he declared: “The anti-ontological concept of alaetheia—that is: the Messiah—is the past of present generations as the departure from the origin.”117 It is “significant” already for Bloch, and explicitly so in the sense of the Old Testament, “that the faithful Ruth did not return to where she came from; she did not turn back, but went to where she belonged of her own choosing” (A, 115): to the Jew Boas, with whom together she, the woman from Moabit, became the ancestress of David and Jesus.118
It is only logical that Bloch then talks about Jesus himself, not as a Messiah—who cannot possibly exist—but as a great messianic “sign” (A, 169), a sort of Jewish-Christian “seal of the prophets.”119 Also for Bloch: “. . . how strangely even Jesus’ goodness at this point (of origin, or of future) swings to the other side, to that of departure. How disconnected, even as the natural son, he feels from the old home and obedience. He has surpassed it, has cast off its spell, none of it hangs above him anymore. The old Father-I itself breaks away, as a newborn he stands here with others just like him, leaving behind father and mother” (A, 115).
Up to this point, the messianic Jesus is an important ally, not only in the anti-fascist struggle. Quite a different matter is the crucified one as a hero in the “pagan” sense. Bloch understands the contemporary sacralization of human sacrifice as a regression back to an era before the humanization of religion, as it was scripted and realized in principle by the prophets:
Even animal sacrifices were, seven hundred years before Jesus, unforgettably attacked by Amos, this oldest of the prophets (Amos 5:22), and later by Hosea: “For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings” (Hosea 6:6) . . . And even more so human sacrifices: since the sacrifice of Isaac had been rejected . . . human sacrifices . . . had a bad liturgical conscience. “And Abraham called the name of that place Jĕ-hō-vă-jī-rēh as it is said to this day, In the mount of the Lord it shall be seen” (Gen 22:14); the Golgotha of the Pauline sacrificial death takes this mountain back, along with the prophets.
And it lets—which is consistent, but nonetheless terrible—the “long forgotten, or at least no longer worshipped, cannibal in heaven” raise another Moloch, “satisfactorily accepting Jesus’ self-sacrifice. It was for a reason that this teaching of sacrificial death,” Bloch continues, “led Marcion, otherwise a great admirer of Paul, to a reversed faith in Yahweh, meaning: Jesus may have died as a sacrifice, but as one ‘of a murderer from the very beginning,’ of evil in the world” (A, 223).
Like other German-Jewish philosophers—Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Jacob Taubes—Bloch was a “modern Marcionite”;120 Gollwitzer, Taubes’s Evangelical-Protestant colleague close by at the Freie Universität, could hardly have been a Marcionite, integral Pauline and Barthian that he was. As a master student of “such a firm anti-fascist” as Karl Barth, Gollwitzer owed himself to a totaliter aliter that was altogether different from the neo-pagan totaliter aliter of the phenomenologist of religion, Rudolf Otto.121 Gollwitzer’s “mysterious Numinous” had nothing to do with that of Otto. Of course for Otto, “the religious” was “tied as closely as possible to the shudder of myth—also in the Bible. Hence even Christian meekness was drawn into the pagan Rough Night;122 it was now called ‘mysterium fascinosum’, and could see itself as equally mysterious besides the ‘mysterium tremendum’ of the old God of Thunder—that is, it could not be seen” (A, 73): it could be seen no longer in the fascist Rough Night arising for real in town and country. This is what Bloch alludes to123 when he indirectly quotes himself:
“Today . . . town and country are both becoming a superstition; in the towns too, the earth has been victorious over movement, and so has a very old space been victorious over time . . . . Despairing people are wearing animal masks, the way only drunken peasants do during Bavarian-Austrian Rough Night; rutting season with a grimace appears as Advent.” Already in 1929 Bloch shrewdly saw what lay ahead. In the essay “Amusement Co., Horror, Third Reich,” dated September 1930, the month of a great electoral success for the National Socialists, he writes:
the old grimaces are rising like ghosts, but they are real: like the Nazi who, clad in yellow fur down to his feet, danced in front of Böss’s house upon his arrival; five hundred years ago, when Jews were clubbed to death, he used to be just as wild and funny. He danced with a fur skin, swinging and raging all night, because Böss, the mayor of Berlin, was also involved in a scandal to do with fur. But the stench of this performance is ancient, despite its miserable joke, the shabby stupidity of its allusion; it is ancient and horrific, as if from a nightmare and the abysses it touches on.124
This Nazi, so particularly agile against the left-liberal mayor of Berlin, is an “ancient” figure, but—as Bloch saw as early as 1929—only “this time the employees of the town . . . are crossing the ditches of arrogance between town and country,” and now they are letting the “myth of the earth into their world”: “Only now, as for the peasants, the Jew has invented the crisis; indeed the crisis, capitalism, and Marxism are identified with fantastical, even fantastically intentional ignorance; the town turns itself into rubble. In all its ruins one can see today how far”—here he freely adapts Ludwig Klages—“the instinctive ‘drive’ is out on the loose against the ‘spirit,’ the blood drive, the drive of the wild, which is the only ‘country’ of town people.”125
The large city’s reaction “regresses as far as . . . the berserker and his dark rampage.” This berserker marches “in every direction . . . where destruction is to be wrought,” as Bloch repeats in the essay on Böss, “Amusement Co., Horror, Third Reich.” In any case, “the emptiness of amusement (which nobody had believed in . . . )” has become the emptiness “of intoxication . . . with the exotic at home, with a national myth (which the National Socialist certainly believes in); it is filled with kitsch and a myth that does not have its fantasies in the distance, but rather in the vertical, so to speak, right underneath the ground of home”—meaning the Germanic home.126
So much for Bloch’s confrontation with the völkisch and ultimately National-Socialist neopaganism on political and humane grounds. His response implied a partial apology for Christianity, though not just for the sake of “political alliances” with the Volksfront127 strategy he shared.128 Already with regard to Nietzsche, for whom he often expresses high esteem,129 Bloch had rejected the confusion between atheism and anti-Christianity (A, 323): “an atheist who has understood that everything conceived under God is really an instruction for a human content which has not yet appeared, is not an atheist” (H, 1527). But at the same time there can be no doubt about Bloch’s own, humanist atheism. According to an episode in his autobiography, he was only thirteen years old when, during his confirmation ceremony, he provoked his baffled relatives and the Ludwigshafen clergy by shouting several times in the direction of the surrounding guests: “I’m an atheist!” He recalls, “I pronounced the ei as a diphthong; we had always only read, but never heard the word.”130
Moreover, in the chapter entitled “God as the Utopically Hypostasized Ideal of the Unknown Man” one may find the categorical statement “all mythology of a being in view of a divine, all theology as science proper has been done away with. However, what has not been done away with,” Bloch adds, simultaneously furthering both Hegel and Feuerbach, “is what is conceived as divine, towards the side of its hope and non-alienation, the content of its hope not yet relinquished to heaven” (H, 1515–16).
And conversely: if religions do not leave the ultimate absolute open as a utopia and always order humanity towards it, but if instead they cover its topos through God’s or gods’ hypostasis, then there is no hope precisely where there is religion;131 where there is “re-ligio,” a “re-connection, specifically with a mythical God of the beginning, the creation of the world; . . . the received Exodus-confession of ‘I am, who I am.’” For Bloch, however, “even confessing the Christianity of the Son of Man and the eschaton,” is “no [such] religion anymore” (A, 15); “because what the numinous [of religion] promised, the Messianic aims to keep: its humanum and the world adequate to it are . . . the distant shore in the early light of dawn . . . .” Bloch is convinced that “The aim of all higher religions was a land where milk and honey flow, in reality as much as symbolically; the aim of an atheism with content, which is left after the religions, is precisely the same—without God, but with the uncovered face of our absconditum and the salvific latency in this difficult earth” (H, 1415, 1550).
Bloch here speaks about the “uncovered face of our absconditum” in a meta-Feuerbachian way, and simultaneously as a meta-Hegelian, or rather a Marxist, about “the salvific latency in this difficult earth.” Therefore let us first look at “this so-very-important atheist” Feuerbach; “with him the final story of Christianity begins. Not only did he want to be the undertaker of traditional religion—an easy office one hundred years after Voltaire and Diderot. More than that, he was gripped by the problem of religious inheritance” (H, 1519); Bloch himself was too, being an anthropologist and indeed a humanist. Bloch cites also Karl Marx, with whom he agrees: “Atheism is humanism mediated by the [Feuerbachian] sublation of religion.” And he explicates that Feuerbach’s atheism was “conceived as the destruction of an annoying illusion . . . as well as the encouraging re-transformation of theological limitations back into human ones at last” (A, 87, 282). Certainly, at the same time Bloch ‘meta-criticizes’ Feuerbach for knowing “the human being, the doubled subject in religion, only in the way it has appeared in existence so far, and this existence only as an abstractly stable one, the so-called species–being of the human. What is lacking . . . is its non-finality. In the shallowness of the bourgeois human, which Feuerbach has absolutized, there is definitely no space for the religious contents . . . And in the least . . . the religious images blasting all status . . . , the chiliastic images of ‘Behold, I make all things new’ and of the Kingdom.” For Bloch, “Evidently . . . only openness of the subject and his world is capable of taking up again the anticipation of absolute perfection in the same way it has posited it outside of itself. Hence, if religion is to be anthropologized, Feuerbach’s anthropologization presupposes a utopian concept of the human being, not a static completed one. Equally it presupposes a homo absconditus, like the belief in heaven always contained a Deus absconditus, a hidden, latent God” (H, 1517–18).
The wholly Other of that God then is, in view of his “human transformation (formation of kingdom),132 no longer the Other, but the Actual that was longed for” (H, 1417), as Bloch defines his own radical humanist position, adapting both Barth and Otto. What is desperately needed is a utopian anthropology: a “transcending without all heavenly transcendence, but with an understanding of it: as a hypostasized presumption of its being for itself” (H, 1522).
Bloch is convinced that “no humanism able to be carried out” can exist, “unless beyond its morality it also implies . . . the happiest border images of the Where-to, What-for, At-All . . . [But] their freedom lies in the elongation of the homo absconditus not yet brought out in the world” (A, 352–13). Or to put it in other words, freedom lies in the uncovering of the hidden, human “face,” by which is meant “our always intended identity itself, not only in an eschatological, but apocalyptic, i.e., un-covering sense,” precisely “as the Kingdom of the Son of Man everywhere. The ancient ‘Day of Yahweh’ at the end of time . . . in the fourth Gospel is set up as a parousia of Christ, that is, the Son of Man who is without Yahweh, really A-Kyrios and A-Theos at the same time.” As “it says accordingly elsewhere [in Bloch]: ‘The truth of the ideal of God is solely the utopia of the Kingdom; its presupposition is precisely that there is no God up on high, that there is none, nor was there ever one.’ (Das Prinzip Hoffnung, 1959, p. 1514)” (A, 218).
So the biblical key words of Bloch’s utopianization of Feuerbach’s anthropology are the Son of Man and his Kingdom, whereby Bloch (by this point quite unsurprisingly) reads the Son of Man “instead of the Son of God” and in consequence understands Kingdom as a human kingdom “of freedom” (A, 190). Indeed the Son of Man, whose “power and figure” is “the final one, overcoming all” (A, 191), had posited himself—eschatologically (A, 207)—“in God as a human” (A, 183), thus realising the “Eritis sicut deus” of the paradisiacal snake.
This “Eritis sicut deus” for Bloch is the “Good News of Christian salvation” (H, 1504). Humans turn out so well in the Bible, “indeed much better than anywhere else” (A, 191). Bloch talks about the “transhumanization . . . of God” (H, 1487) by the Son of Man Jesus; in this way he also articulates his own transcending of Feuerbach: “The religion of the gathering kingdom . . . does not call the divine back in under well-known human standards . . .; on the contrary, the Son of Man and his space are [still] human—not yet given. They stand askew in relation to the existing figure of the subject, as much as they stand askew in relation to the gigantic measures of the existing cosmos” (A, 205–6).
At the end here this is once again the ontologist speaking, or rather the cosmologist or Marxist materialist indebted to Hegel, but in any case the natural philosopher Bloch. And down to the original terms of on/ontos, cosmos, materia, and natura he is indebted to Greek-Roman antiquity. Indeed he makes no secret of it; “creation ex nihilo” and world escapism (whether addicted to death or heaven) was never his thing anyway. Certainly he always presumes that in a Bible not yet dogmatized and therefore manipulated—including Christian dogma and manipulation—the “earthly beautiful life of nature” is not “simply shaken off, but radically transformed” and even “surpassed” (A, 259). In any case he is also highly interested in its utopianization or “messianization’.”
No matter how strong Bloch’s inclination towards an arcadian, that is—as is commonly understood—a pagan nature and his taste for its rediscovery by the likes of Goethe, he still protested against the latter’s exemplary Spinozism: “This pantheism which is not even aware of its own utopianism” derived “images of happiness from the humanization of an all-nature, as if this deus sive natura was already here” (A, 302). “Everything about Pan” for Goethe and his intellectual relatives is supposedly “all in good order” (A, 301), already now, rebus sic stantibus. But this could hardly be the case. “The no longer alienated humanum, the not-yet-found of its possible world—both lie necessarily in the experiment of future, the experiment of World” (A, 354). With these words Bloch’s Atheism-book closes.
And it is with these sentences that the 1628-page-long Principle of Hope closes: “Humanity everywhere still lives in”—as Marx called it—“pre-history, indeed everything has”—in the words of a paradoxical theology of creation—“the creation of the world still ahead of itself, as a just world. True Genesis is not at the beginning, but in the end.” This is a thesis Bloch italicizes: “and it only starts to begin when society and existence become radical, that is, they take themselves by their roots. The root of history, however, is”—again this is Marxist—“the human being, who works, creates, reshapes, and overcomes present realities. Once he has grasped himself and has founded what is his own in a real democracy, without divestment and without alienation, something will come into the world that shines into everyone’s childhood, but where no one has ever been: home” (H, 1628). An earthly, not a heavenly home, as we need not emphasize again.
New (for us) is Bloch’s departure into the social and political dimension of his “real,” as it were, materialist humanism: “Suffering no longer . . . teaches us to pray, simply because most of it is caused and brought upon us by humans like us” (A, 37), as it says in Atheism in Christianity. Emphasizing in this atheism the a- (or rather the anti-) monarchic, anti-monarchist, he writes of “an above which is deaf . . . for most people never became such an above; the king’s messengers on horseback hardly ever turn up, and kings in general are not the custom anymore. Even in places where the Enlightenment did not take hold so much, the old feeling ceases or is still only paid lip service. The experience of the Father–I in the family is almost gone, and hence also its projection into a high above. In almost all the states it is still the case that there is no longer a throne, neither is there a projection of it, which would fill the gaps of earthly needs and explanations with additional supernatural weight” (A, 38).
Instead of monarchy, democracy is the order of the day, and for that matter as a “real” one: “Humanity finds space in a democracy truly made possible, in the same way that this democracy itself is the first humane place to live” (H, 1608). It is simultaneously the space that, in Bloch’s understanding of Christianity, is truly Christian, akin to the Son of Man. Because for Bloch “only in later Hellenic Christianity the Kyrios Christos, venerated like a god of the imperial cult, appeared beside, and even instead of, the figure of the imminently coming Son of Man. And . . . what remained for the poor, those who rebelled from the inside and above all on the outside against everything above, where there is no human being,” was “the figure of the Son of Man”: “for the heretical brothers of good will, of common life, of full spirit, of free spirit, for Thomas Münzer and his Allstedt sermon about the Son of Man’s face in the Book of Daniel and the true cornerstone Jesus, whom the builders have rejected” (A, 211).
Thomas Münzer, whom Bloch as early as the 1920s celebrated as “the theologian of the revolution,”133 referred back to the Magnificat we cited at the beginning, and he never thought it was an impossibility or even that it was “enthusiasm . . . to bring the godless down from the chair of judgment, and to raise the low and the coarse” (H, 1482). In our context it is decisive that Bloch, extending Münzer’s work, puts forward the following thesis: “The Son of Man not only smashed . . . the myth of the Son of God into pieces, but . . . also the myth of his sitting on the throne ‘on the right hand of the Father’; now a tribune (of the people) sits there, and so he does away with the throne itself” (A, 227). Despite (or precisely because of) the Roman title “tribune,” Christ is a “rebel,” “politically straightforwardly . . . against [imperialist] Rome” and all its Euro-American descendants.134 “The cross is the punishment for insurgency,” Bloch emphasizes (A, 173). Jesus “was executed by the Romans as an accuser,” and even further, it was “for a reason” that “the High Priest and the Pharisees” feared “the man . . . for whom the whole theocracy of the priests and the religion of the law . . . was part of a world ripe for destruction. Such a Jesus was dangerous; it was not necessarily a misunderstanding that, against him and his eschatological radicalism, the interests of the Jewish upper class and the Roman oppressors were aligned,” Bloch summarizes (A, 182).
Specifically with regard to the Jewish upper class he gets more precise:
It was deception when the priests appealed to Jesus’ having professed to be the son of God, that is the Messiah, and when they said that because of his blasphemy (John 19:7) he would have to die “according to the law” (Lev 24:16). Because even in the century before Jesus . . . enthusiasts had appeared who also claimed to be the Messiah, but nothing had happened to them. Similarly, after Jesus there was the hero of the insurgency against Hadrian, Bar Kochba, meaning “Son of the Stars,” and such an authority as Rabbi Akiba consecrated him as the Messiah. But Bar Kochba fought . . . for the existing Judaea, together with the rich, the poor, and the priests. He was an insurgent against Rome, but he fought to preserve the world of homely tradition, including the priestly tradition of theocracy; so he could be blessed by the priests, and the title of Messiah, unique and awesome, did not count as a blasphemy, as it had with Jesus. With Jesus, by contrast, it was not that he was too peaceful to be given consideration as the Messiah; rather, his kingdom of the Son of Man was too remote from that Master-Yahweh [of the upper class], who re-appeared and re-legitimized himself over and over again, and who had not led the people out of Egypt. (A, 182–83)
We will have to come back to the “Master-Yahweh” and the Exodus in Bloch’s formulations. At this point we will keep the focus on the non-peaceability of Bloch’s Jesus. “Of course, with the Sermon on the Mount,” Bloch at first admits,
Jesus was not enthusiastically commending to his disciples the incitement of people against each other for Christ’s sake (Matt 10:35f.). But rather the Sermon on the Mount, with its blessings of the meek and the peacemakers, refers not to the days of struggle, but to the end of time, which Jesus believed to be near . . . ; hence the immediate, chiliastic reference to the Kingdom of Heaven (Matt 5:3). Yet for the struggle, for bringing about the Kingdom there are these words: “I came not to send peace, but a sword.” (Matt 10:34)
as well as the related: “I have come to send fire on the earth; and how I wish it were already kindled” (Luke 12:49)! Bloch is convinced, “This is exactly the meaning of William Blake’s corollary, applicable to 1789”:
in Blake’s verses: “The spirit of turmoil shot down from the Saviour / And in the vineyards of red France appear’d the light of his fury.” In Jesus’ preaching the sword and the fire, which destroys as much as it purifies, are not merely aimed at palaces; they go against all of the old aeon, which has to pass away. It is spearheaded by the enemies of the weary and the burdened, the rich, who are as likely to go to heaven as—with all the irony of the impossible—a camel is likely to pass through the eye of a needle. Later on the Church widened the eye of the needle so much that Jesus fell out of revolutionary sight. Not the wrath of Jesus but his mildness, even toward the unjust, now became triumphant. But even Kautsky, who saw nothing but “religious mantles” everywhere, had to admit in his Origin of Christianity: “Rarely has the modern proletariat’s class-hatred taken such fanatical forms as has that of the Christians.” And from another side, the very side of the “religious mantle,” so malgré lui and hence particularly épatant, Chesterton [the Catholic priest and author] clarifies the misunderstanding and dispels all pretence of sweet little Jesus and all its resultant ethical demureness and its reforms. In The Everlasting Man he chides it in this way: “Those who charged the Christians with burning down Rome with firebrands were slanderers; but they were at least far nearer to the nature of Christianity than those among the moderns who tell us that the Christians were a sort of ethical society, being martyred in a languid fashion for telling men they had a duty to their neighbours, and only mildly disliked because they were meek and mild.” (A, 170–71)
And as Bloch glosses Chesterton: “the subversive element of early Christianity unmistakably surfaces in this way” (A, 171), but Chesterton is and remains a witness malgré lui. For Bloch the mutinous peasants of almost all European countries are downright witnesses, that is martyrs, from the Middle Ages until the Cevennes, “almost 90 years before the French Revolution” (A, 20–21). And a prominent one—an arch-martyr, as it were—is Thomas Münzer. This enormously significant theologian not only defied the Catholic and Lutheran “ruler-clerics,” but presciently also the “anti-Semitic liberal theologians” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who “separated Jesus from the Jewish dream of the Messiah,” which “also means from political eschatology” (A, 174).
One cannot overlook for a single moment that Bloch’s Jesus, who defied the Jewish authorities, was himself Jewish through and through: revolutionary as an apocalyptic prophet, and finally a Moses redivivus or rather ultimus, committed to the Exodus, surpassing and also theologically perfecting Moses.135 Needless to say, in making this claim as Martin Buber also does, Bloch sets himself against those Jews who, like Hermann Cohen, essentially wanted to excommunicate Jesus from Judaism (A, 85–86).
If they want to be consistent, the Jews who are one-sidedly committed to “Rabbinic Orthodoxy” have to ban all apocalypticism. In any case, Jesus and some of his followers over the centuries were also apocalypticists. Bloch emphasizes this in a way that, of all Jewish philosophers of religion, only Jacob Taubes emphasized as forcefully. And he emphasizes it again in particular with Thomas Münzer in mind: it had been “for a reason” that “Luther called the final book of the Bible”—the Revelation of St. John—“‘the conjuror’s bag of all mob leaders,” since the eschaton there is neither within it, nor is it an inaccessible taboo—not even as a wild myth—nor does it lack a break from the regional governor, from the father of the world, or from instituted authority. On the contrary, it contains the strongest discontent within all re-ligio, all re-connection; the Advent in it completely lacks an ordo sempiternus rerum” (A, 63–64).
There is in Revelation the promise of “a New Heaven and a New Earth,” as Bloch enthusiastically quotes over and over again. Yet within Judaism it is of the utmost significance that this Christian apocalypticism is an heir of an altogether Jewish propheticism, in the same way that Jesus himself and everyone else—as I have already mentioned with regard to Jesus—stand on the shoulders of Moses. Amos, the “first prophet,” was “a courageous man, embittered about the rich oppressors like no one before him,” and yet he has “like Daniel, the last” prophet—or first apocalypticist—“an inheritance as well. Indeed it says (Amos 2:5–7): ‘But I will send a fire upon Judah, and it shall devour the palaces of Jerusalem . . .; because they sold the righteous for silver, and the poor for a pair of shoes. That pant after the dust of the earth on the head of the poor, and turn aside the way of the meek’—such a torch, such a ‘red rooster on the convent’s roof,’136 had never been lit before,” as Bloch glosses.
And then there is even the world revolution without Yahweh, with a new regent in Daniel (7:13–14): “And behold, one like the Son of Man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days, and they brought him near before him. And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed.” Looking backwards, this mysterious text on the superseding Son of Man is almost all on its own; even in the prophets it is alluded to only in Ezekiel (1:26), never in the books of Moses. And yet the Israelite prophets appeared . . . always in the light of Moses, as if they were none without him. Because the moral command, the promise of the future did not only originate in the prophets, and neither do they leave Moses aside in their older origin or more heated eschaton, for example to replace him with sources from outside Israel. As it was once [around 1900]attempted in a “pan-Babylonian”137 manner, with the ancient pre-Mosaic book of Hammurabi and, concerning promises of the future, with the supposedly only post-Mosaic messianism from Persia, the teaching of Zoroaster’s future return. But both the law of Hammurabi and Persian messianism, appearing only after Isaiah (11:1), lack the memory of a time in slavery, stripped of all rights, of a daring exodus to Canaan—all of this a demolition rather than a trumpeting apotheosis. It is also this permanent resonance of the unique which the prophets possess exclusively in their . . . Moses, and which he sustains in them, however large the break and the leap. (A, 140–41)
To keep it brief: Bloch’s Atheism in Christianity carries the subtitle “On the Religion of Exodus and Kingdom.” It is thus first of all “the Jewish Exodus,” which is then followed by “the Kingdom that is also Christian.” Without doubt, the latter perfects the Exodus, and as specifically Christian it is also an “Exodus from the God of the Exodus” (H, 1527). However, what binds together the Exodus and the Kingdom [Reich] from beginning to end is a Jewish messianism. Not only for that reason does “Atheism in Christianity” signify “Atheism in Judaism” as well:
The utopia of the Kingdom destroys the fiction of a creator god and the hypostasis of a heavenly god, but does not destroy the final space in which the ens perfectissimum has an abyss of its still unthwarted latency. The existence of God, God as a general essence as such, is a superstition; real faith is only in a messianic Kingdom of God—without God. Hence atheism is hardly the enemy of religious utopia, because it is its premise: without atheism there is no room for messianism. (H, 1413)
Nonetheless, and maybe precisely in that way, this atheism remains messianic: “The truth of the ideal of God is simply the utopia of the Kingdom” (H, 1524). And “an Omega of Christian utopia was nowhere else . . . posited in such a non-transcendent way, while still being most powerfully transcendent (as with the “New Jerusalem” [Rev 21:23]). And even this utopia as “New Canaan” had as its “most central part” “the Omega of ‘a free people on a free earth’” (A, 303). Joachim of Fiore (the great high-medieval warrantor for Münzer, Bloch, and Taubes) had long before posited “the true vine of Canaan” “as a historical Omega” (A, 265).
Bloch summarizes, “Item: the dream of the messiah rushes forward . . . from the Exodus,” and from its God of the “I am who I am”; “Moses evokes this risen symbol as the ‘way out of servitude,’ pointing toward a horizon of expectant liberation” (A, 124). But then of course the prophets began, and the last of them, Jesus of Nazareth, completed the “exodus from Pharaoh with the idea of an exodus from Yahweh.” Or to be more precise: it was Marcion, the heretical disciple of Paul, who completed this prophesied “exodus from Pharaoh with the idea of an exodus from Yahweh”; it was only he who consequently and radically set the savior Son of Man against the creator God, indeed played one off against the other: “Marcion represents . . . the strongest concept of Anti-Yahweh, in favor of Christ as the radical Novum, . . . in Yahweh’s world. Of course, by tearing down the bridge to the Old Testament, he himself stands on that bridge” (H, 1499). This is the decisive point for our context here. Bloch writes, “Marcion not only starts from Paul, he also starts from Moses; the true or alien God is dawning in the God of the Exodus, between Egypt and Canaan” (H, 1500).
But let us first examine more closely the Exodus, that out of Egypt; this exodus breaks with the tradition of the autochthonic, and searches for a homeland through emancipation from the origin, removal from the earth that is not home.138 But even Canaan would prove to be an unworthy homeland: “The people were freed . . . from lifting bricks. But milk and honey they never got to taste in the holy land, the land so much fought for . . . . The Egyptian masters had only changed names; they were now in the in the Israelite cities, and the estates that had been taken over.” Or to calculate the loss:
As the Israelite Bedouins entered the preformed stratification of rich and poor in Canaan . . . the old, simple life of the tribe, a partly ur-communist life, was lost. The wealth of the few here, as everywhere and in all ages, created the suffering of the many; common wealth disappeared, private property took its place. With it arose the well-known differences between master and slave. Those in debt were sold off into slavery by their creditors, grains were exported at higher prices out of the land by the big landowners, and so a shortage crisis was created at home. The Book of Judges, with its age of heroics, obscures all this. But the two Books of Kings are full of reports of famine and its related opposite: “There was a great inflation in Samaria” (1 Kings 18:2); and then: “The King [Solomon] had it that there was so much silver in Jerusalem as there were stones” (1 Kings 10:27). (A, 126)
In this strongly re-Egyptianized situation, Israel’s own God—not a god of land ownership but a god of the migration of peoples—once again came to rescue the exploited impoverished, thanks to the half-nomads who were calling attention back to him. Bloch calls them by the name—at that time current in academic usage—“Nazirites,” i.e., “separated,” and, if one is not so well-meaning, “sectarian.” In any case, these Nazirites “preach nothing less than a new religious dream (under the mask of the old): a return to the old, communal life, Yahweh as a God of the poor.” And, as I skip some material here, he points to what is decisive: “few institutions of old, with all their ascetic–‘anti-Canaanite’ provocative character, have remained standing so consistently throughout the Bible in the way the Nazirite vow has. Samson, Samuel, Elijah were Nazirites (Judges 13:5; 1 Sam 1:11; 2 Kings 1:8), but also John the Baptist, this unwieldy figure from the desert” (A, 128).
“Links between the Nazirites . . . and other late Jewish sects of the Anti-Mammon, the Essenes and Ebionites (ebionim: the poor) are uncertain [for Bloch as well]; but what remains certain [for him]: the early Christian communism of love did not spring from the Book of Kings. He could [instead] rely on a tradition in Israel which” went back as far as “the memory of nomadic common property in Nazirism.” The key point for Bloch—especially in view of John, Jesus, and the early church—is “the hugely consequential connection of Nazirism and . . . prophecy, that is: the connection of a social sermon and the will of a new Yahweh and his day” (A, 128–129)—“by virtue of an actual turn from . . . the merely archaic to what is listening, judging, hoping” (A, 129); and to accentuate Bloch’s meaning here: to the apocalyptic–Jesuan.
I shall turn his divine length into diabolic brevity, if you like. To take away some of its enigmatic character, I will finally present Bloch’s own collage made up of “social-moral” sermons from the prophets:
“Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow” (Isa 1:17). Yahweh detests exploitation and enclosure . . . Sure, private property is no longer fought as the Nazirites had fought it; each and every one is to sit under his own vine and his own fig tree. But this is so that there are no longer slaves and so that no one is smothered before their time. “And I will punish the world for their evil, and the wicked for their iniquity; and I will cause the arrogance of the proud to cease, and will lay low the haughtiness of the terrible. I will make a man more precious than fine gold; even more than the golden wedge of Ophir” (Isa 13:11–12). The God who wants this is certainly not the one for whom churches were and are consecrated in the various Fifth Avenues of the world; but neither is he—by the oath of Thomas Münzer—the opium of the people: “But thus said the Lord, Even the captives of the mighty shall be taken away, and the prey of the terrible shall be delivered: for I will contend with him that contends with you, and I will save your children. And I will feed them that oppress you with their own flesh; and they shall be drunken with their own blood, as with sweet wine: and all flesh shall know what I the Lord am your Savior and your Redeemer, and the mighty One of Jacob” (Isa 49:25–26). So this is the social-moral content in the prophets; it became explosive once and for all with the social-apocalyptically subversive sermon. (A, 131)
as Bloch ends his text collage, which I have slightly shortened, on a Christian note.
Once again I would like to bring back to mind Luke 1:46–55, partly because of the churches in the world’s various Fifth Avenues mentioned by Bloch. But I shall decelerate Bloch and stress that he still identifies the “will stretching from Amos to Isaiah,” which he regards as “arch-humane,” as Yahweh’s will. Yahweh’s role as the creator God is of course notably underexposed by the prophets: they show
remarkably little interest in quotes from Genesis; there is almost an interest to the contrary. Not an interest against “the spirit of God” as creative, but against the pathos of Genesis about the beginning of such an inadequate world, and about a God who even finds his creation very good and passes the blame for everything else on to humans, like scapegoats, even though he has created them as well. And as this very Yahweh, the world’s creator and simultaneously its ruler, continues with these powerful-yet-void machinations against humans, particularly against his chosen people, the prophets begin to turn against everything that has essentially come to pass, in short . . . a bringing-to-an-end, an eschatological finishing with all this “Egypt,” with “Babylon” altogether. Hence Isaiah (43:18): “Remember you not the former things, neither consider the things of old”—all this referring to the degeneration that happened, to the catastrophes of the promise, while never referring to the deus creator who allows such catastrophes, thereby urgently leaving open a future not yet discredited, indeed a promise not yet fulfilled. (A, 144–5)
So as to leave no room for doubt, Bloch once again probes: “Even ‘Paradise’ before the ‘Fall,’ to which this ‘See, and it was very good’ could still refer, seemed . . . so far from perfect, that the ‘new Zion’ of prophecy could by no means be a mere reconstitution” (A, 146). Theologically, in the narrowest sense of the word, the emphatically new Genesis of the end came about with the appearance of the rescuer-God Yahweh in place of the old creator-God. Between this last and what was more likely to be a new rescuer, or rather savior, a polar tension developed over time. “Though the extent of this tension” is, at first,
hardly reflected on, not even in light of the creator’s vast omissions (for the sake of the savior). The antithetic consequences of the tearing apart of God may not yet be drawn, in the way they are later in the Book of Job, and as they are much later . . . in Marcion, where “our Father, the creator of the world” . . . became the enemy . . . for the sake of the scheme of Christ the Savior. For all the prophets . . . the world of Genesis . . . became incriminating for Yahweh; there was still no exodus from him, but there was already an exodus from the heavens, which . . . went on praising the works of the Eternal One. (A, 146)
In any case, already in the prophets “the original category of exodus . . . continues to . . . work,” and it does so in a moral way: “Morality was given . . . to man as a dangerous standard for measuring the ways of God, whohe was taught”—by the prophets—“was a synonym for justice . . . Yahweh as the epitome of moral [sittlich] reason. This is,” for Bloch, “after the God of Exodus, the second great wishful image of theology . . . Justice now ceases to be merely given from above, an exchange mechanism which is supposed to pay out the exact amount of atonement for sinful debt, justice as the reward for righteousness . . . But where the connection sin–atonement as an equivalence was nevertheless insisted on, there justice was turned from an apology for Yahweh into a weapon against him” (A, 134–5). With this Bloch arrives at the book of Job.
According to Bloch, in Job began the “Exodus from the idea of Yahweh itself” (A, 152 and 148): a despotic, or rather—already in view of Jesus—“Caesarian idea of God” (A, 165). Here for the first time the human being is set “above every kind of tyranny,” “above the questionable one of a justice from above,” but “also above the new–mythological one of a majestic nature as such”: “The God in Job: known by his fruits, ruling and oppressing with so much violence and strength, approaches from Heaven only as Pharaoh, yet Job . . . is indeed pious by not having faith. Except faith in an exodus, and faith that the last word has not yet been humanely spoken on the blood avenger, the blood-stauncher, in short, on the Son of Man . . . instead of the grand master. A Word out of which one does no longer flee, but which itself, altogether without terror, enters into the sublated Above” (A, 165–66).
“The despotic might of the idea of Yahweh is eradicated in it, but what is thought of as the God of Exodus becomes effective as godless, as the Son of Man. As a highly incomplete effectivity, it is in itself by no means solved” (A, 206). Bloch leaves hardly any doubt here, though he does not diminish the fundamental importance of “Jesus’ stake in Yahweh” (A, 173). And the title of Son of Man, towering over all others, is especially significant: because “the Son of Man as a pre-existent heavenly being” does “not take part in the creation of the world”; “because [this] must be the activity only at the end of time, when a new heaven and a new earth are created” (A, 209).
Clearly this is once again Bloch the Marcionite speaking, to whom we now must turn. For him, who was himself a philosopher of the religion of Exodus, the strongly inspiring and highly controversial arch-heretic Marcion139 counts as “the most extreme” Exodus-theologian (A, 240), and he does so precisely because he denies the law-giving God of Exodus no less than he denies the creator-God of Genesis. Against the latter Marcion opposes Christ Jesus dualistically as the Savior- and Redeemer-God (A, 61): “Marcion . . . sought to radically break Jesus away from the Jewish-Biblical dream of God.” He
not only posited Christ’s message as one opposed to the Old Testament, but as absolutely other; so the break with the old here follows from the seemingly incomparable leap of the gospel into the new. The concept of the New Testament as such developed and was made to stand out in this form, though Marcion of course, sensing old wineskins everywhere, only included Paul’s friend Luke and ten of Paul’s surviving letters in his canon of ‘new wine.’ (A, 238–39)
For Marcion Paul is the absolute apostle, unlike anyone before or after; because in his understanding Paul was the first to contradict Yahweh “not as the creator of the world . . . but instead as the law-giver. Paul put that hiatus between ‘law’ and ‘gospel,’ also between the ‘morality of the law’ and ‘freedom,’ ‘justice’ and ‘grace,’ so that Jesus should at least become unique” (A, 239). But even beyond this Marcionite resolution of the Pauline dialectics of law and gospel, Marcion extends the dualism between the two, which in fact he postulated first, to the creator and the redeemer god, or lets their duality, as the earlier and more fundamental duality, precede or rather found the dialectic. Either way the law is in effect assigned to the world’s creator, who then tyrannically rules over the world, and the gospel to the “alien god” Jesus, who is the god of consolation.140 This divine duality “sharpens”—as Bloch expresses himself—the antithesis between law and gospel that is not correctly Pauline in any case “to the point of irreconcilability and hence also the radical novum,” which is how Marcion distinguishes the Gospel from the Old Testament (A, 239).
Intriguingly he synonymizes the radical nature of the gospel’s novelty with “foreignness” and also calls the redeeming god of the gospel “alien.” This god “does not call us home from foreign lands where we have gotten lost, but from the horrific home to which we belong, into a blessed foreign land.”141 This is not Bloch’s, but rather the formulation of the historical theologian Adolf von Harnack in his seminal work on Marcion’s Gospel of the Alien God. But he does so in exactly the same sense as Bloch (perhaps inspired by him142). As late as in his Atheism, for instance, Bloch speaks of “something which shines into everyone’s childhood, but where no one has ever been: home” (A, 294)—as he already had done in the Principle of Hope, where he seems to be “orchestrating”143 Harnack.
Certainly a problem for Bloch’s understanding of Marcion is this extreme ascetic’s escape from the world, even enmity towards it. The problem is that the message of this most extreme theologian of the exodus, because he leads out of all worldliness, is, in Bloch’s understanding, “itself dark.”
For it not only leads out of captivity, like the great archetype of the exodus in the Old Testament excluded by Marcion, but out of the flesh and out of every temporality, and not into a better one. This purely pneumatic, purely logos–mythical farewell to the world in its asceticism sees no land before itself, one where—at least comparatively—milk and honey flow. And according to this purely pneumatic docetism of the Marcionites it became even less true that Christ had risen in flesh. Indeed the true Christ was not even born in flesh for them; thus flawed, the message of the wholly new, wholly alien god according to Marcion could not have given an impulse of such purity. Meanwhile, also here, also in this abstract asceticism so often trivialized, also with this flipside of a total orientation towards the alien in Marcion’s god, there is no evidence of a turn away from the human being in this world.
Bloch is convinced: “on the contrary: what was envisioned was an even more complete turn towards the human being. Towards his own, specifically designated transcendence into the foreignness of a home that is singularly identical with him” (A, 240).
Well, this is already a further developed, a “modern,”144 a Blochian Marcion we are introduced to here. But this atheist philosopher, or rather this philosophical atheist, always thinks further and beyond both humanism and the Enlightenment. In doing so he recurs, in order to transcend the historical Enlightenment, to the pre-Enlightened, the religious, though always the potentially utopian. Bloch is always concerned with what will be better in the future; in that regard, one can and even should by all means polemicize against “the existing world,” the more so when it is understood—in an apocalyptic rather than Marcionite way—as “this aeon,” and when this aeon is juxtaposed with another, better one in the sense of—irony of ironies—“new world.” There is no question that “the old one” has gone “awry”; if that was not the case, “there would be no need for a messiah” (A, 173). But there is a need for one, even if it is a fully human, indeed collective messiah: in every sense human-some (A, 183), and in that regard of course also containing world, and world-capable.
There is a need for rebels and revolutionaries who can and should learn from the heretics spearheaded by Marcion. Speaking only in a historical sense, Harnack—a right-wing rather than left-wing liberal—stated what I repeat here: that Tolstoy is
a Marcionite Christian through and through. The directly religious passages we have from Marcion could well have been written by him, and conversely Marcion would have recognized himself in Tolstoy’s “miserable and despised,’ in his reading of the Sermon on the Mount . . . and in his zeal against common Christendom. On the other hand, Gorky’s moving play The Lower Depths can be understood as a Marcionite play as well; ‘The Stranger’ who appears here is the Marcionite Christ, and his ‘Lower Depths’ are the world.145
No doubt what is meant is the miserable social world.
In Bloch’s view it should be “blown up” by way of revolution (A, 148); here he is commemorating Marcion and certainly also thinking normatively. With reference to abrupt, immediate novelty he writes: “Jesus’ birth . . . took place in the year zero.” And:
Interpreted in a Marcionite way, the year zero . . . is completely different from the calendar beginnings set within history, which hence merely occur, such as the Roman ab urbe condita. Paradoxically one could only recall the new beginning of the Jacobins’ year zero, “likewise” intended to be total; its tearing away from the whole “Old Testament” of history as purely the fraud of dukes and clerics. But in this incomparably different, that is, religious topos, Marcion also rejects, with full primeurs, any possible historical mediation before his novum. (A, 241–42)
One should take note of how Bloch almost didactically draws an analogy, which is our sole concern here: he explicitly compares the “incomparably” different only in view of the same understanding of time as a radical break, the sudden and strict separation of the old and the new. Precisely with that aim, he can then analogically call the year of Jesus’ birth “year zero” (following the example of the French Revolution) and the ancien régime (following the example of the “Old Covenant”) “Old Testament.” In a kind of circular argument, this is about the immanentization of Jewish-Christian, specifically Marcionite topoi after they have already been re-interpreted or rather “charged” with immanent and social-revolutionary meaning.
Before we turn to this in more detail, Bloch’s second most important premise—after “Only an atheist can be a good Christian, only a Christian can be a good atheist”—shall be explained: “The best thing about religion is that it creates heretics” (A, 15).
The “Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom” is judged positively by Bloch, who always understands it as heretical. Even where, and especially when it speaks biblically, it stands as a whole on the shoulders of heretics. For Bloch the authentic Bible itself is “heretical” (in a certain sense he here spells out the incredibly influential and repeatedly praised “left pietist” Gottfried Arnold146). At any rate, it is “necessary to read the Bible analytically, indeed like a detective, sub specie of its continuing history of heresy” (A, 23). And this gets even easier as biblical history often goes “against its own grain” (A, 24). Hence, what “the ruling clerics have done to it”—for example de-emphasizing the prophets in favor of the clerics (A, 101)—“in large parts” could “be corrected by beginning from Scripture” (A, 53) It is never linear, but rather contains “contrary principles,” such as (and most importantly) creation and apocalypse, with two deeply contradictory basic formulas: “And behold, it was very good” and “Behold, I make all things new” (A, 59).
In short, there are—not least because of the prophetic-apocalyptic writings—possibilities for critique through the Bible (A, 111). Bloch even considers it “the most revolutionary religious book of them all” (A, 104). “There is an incisive, often repressed revolt in it against pressure, spearheaded by the unprecedented expectation of a truly Altogether Different which will one day fill the earth” (A, 111). Where it represents “the true Biblia pauperum”—even as a “subterranean Bible”—it intends (which is almost Marxian) the “abolition of all conditions in which the human merely lives as an oppressed, despicable, missing creature” (A, 110).
Marxism, so one of Bloch’s most basic convictions,
implies the subversive and non-static inheritance . . . that goes around . . . in the Bible. As a sublation of the whole Above in which the human does not appear, as at once a transcending with a revolt and a revolt with a transcending—even without transcendence. This is in so far as the Bible can now, at last, be read with the eyes of the Communist Manifesto, and at the same time can prevent all that atheist salt from losing its saltiness,147 a salt that understands what is implicit in Marxism, using that same Meta that prevents that salt itself from losing its saltiness. (A, 98)
It goes without saying that this last point presupposes a good bit of revision of Marxism-Leninism, or is a consequence of it—and the leaders of the SED148 understood this very well.149 Its atheist salt, on the verge of losing its saltiness, indeed having lost it for quite some time, was meant to return to strength and saltiness, perhaps stronger and saltier than ever before. Indeed, which Marxist before Bloch would have insisted so strongly on the “unsettled” in biblical religion, and therefore would have taken “the real Christianity” seriously in a comparable way, and so being the only “real Marxist” (A, 353)? Certainly, for his part the young Marx had no reductive understanding of Christianity, and hence he is Bloch’s shibboleth against all later and contemporary reductionism (A, 352). He is fully right to point out the complete isolation of the famous-infamous sentence about religion as “the opium of the people” and is keen on its firm recontextualization: “this very true sentence on the opium of the people stands in an equally true and at the same time much more profound context than the vulgar materialists would like and can bear it to be,” writes Bloch, to introduce his extended quotation from Marx:
Religion is the fantastic realization of the human being, since the human being has not acquired any true reality. . . . Religious suffering is at once the expression of real suffering and at the same time a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The sublation of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. . . . Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. . . . The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest creature for man—hence, with the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable creature. (A, 91–92)
“So only in this way,” comments Bloch, “the context becomes complete, including a ‘sigh’, even ‘protest’ against the current bad conditions, and audibly it cries not for sedation alone. Against all vulgarization it signifies (amongst other things), that the sermon in the German Peasant War was indeed more than and different from a ‘religious cover,’ as Kautsky later thought” (A, 92). Throughout his life Bloch could not stop worrying that the “Enlightenment . . . should be perfected” not only against “shoddy superstition,” “but unfortunately, against vulgar Marxism, and against the thundering prophets, against those so-called ‘little bits of apocalyptic mysticism,’ the taste of which not even Kautsky liked in Thomas Münzer” (A, 19–20).
Quite different is the response of Bloch’s friend Bertold Brecht, who—like Kautsky and of course Bloch himself—“hated popish obfuscation to the point of retching.” But nonetheless, when asked about his favorite reading material, he replied: “‘You’re probably going to laugh: the Bible.’ As cheeky and surprising as this was, it was surprising only for the kind of educated people that never go away, and who confuse Enlightenment with En-litterment150” (A, 20). Indeed, this comment demonstrates that Bloch was fighting against (a) clericalism as much as what he called “En-litterment.”151 He formulates his very concrete and synthesized utopia as follows: “Just as a non-banal movement of the godless always could and will read the Bible, so will a subterranean, paradoxical, biblical heresy read the movement of the godless—to the benefit of both. The former gains depth (‘banality,’ Isaac Babel said, ‘is the counter-revolution’), while the latter gains a Promethean-active, atheist-utopian understanding [Verstand] of human becoming” (A, 22).
I cannot elaborate here on the deeply moving words Bloch wrote on “the Bible of humanity,”152 which is much more than “the most important work of world literature”153—though it is indeed that, too. Yet I have to emphasize that he wrote all that under the the principled and emphatic imputation of biblical criticism; it was one of “the most exciting examples of human acuity” (A, 104). Nonetheless, it should also become a saving criticism154 in the way he exercises it, uniting itself with the criticism contained in the Bible itself, and hence in a manner superior to the “trivial” enlightenment. Bloch has no problem with so-called secularization, only it must not be “dull” (H, 1521).
He is vehemently in favor of profanization, and agreeingly he cites Friedrich Engels: “Before the existing social conditions could be attacked, they had to be stripped of their halo of sanctity” (H, 1528). Still, even Engel’s definition of materialism, which he shares in principle, finds Bloch’s assent: “the explanation of the world through itself,” and connected to this of course the rejection of “a heaven above, with a God as master: his case was closed not only scientifically, but by the critique of ideology he was filed away under ‘pre-history,’ which lasts until today, as he himself legitimized, sanctified the master-slave relation, the social heteronomy on earth. This way the subversive gets the last word against everything heteronomous, but also against the most useful illusion: the theocratic (from way above),” as Bloch approvingly recognizes. Still, he could hardly applaud the fact that for many “the role, the topos of religion” seemed “to be fully exhausted” (A, 20). He synthesizes—in his idiolect—the “warm and the cold current” in Marxism: “To see through history and its ideologies like a detective is part of . . . the cold current in Marxist thought, but the purpose that is sought, the distant, human-oriented goal of this seeing-through, is part of . . . the warm current of original Marxism, indeed undeniably it is part of the first, Christ-formed basic text on the ‘Kingdom of Freedom’” (A, 349–50). Moreover, which is not surprising in the least: both currents are meritorious and necessary. Or rather: one current is the corrective of the other.
Sub specie Marxism(-Leninism)—it is well known that Marx did not want to be “a Marxist”—the utopia that Engels prematurely considered overcome is to be revitalized, and within its frame, indeed as its Where-from and its Where-to, the “religion of Exodus and the Kingdom” must be revitalized as well. Or, to epitomize further: (Marxist) atheism has to be Christianized in a dialectical manner, whereby “dialectical” means not least that such a Christianization does not negate atheism, but rather presupposes it. Bloch’s concern is Christianity in atheism, but only because he always already starts from “Atheism in Christianity”: “Only an atheist can be a good Christian, only a Christian can be a good atheist” (A, 15).
We shall leave behind now the first part of the sentence by translating it into the final result: good Christianity presupposes the enlightenment, which includes atheism. Yet, once again: Why does the good atheist also have to be a Christian? Because, as Bloch first answers negatively,
triviality becomes the pathetic, nihilism the hellish effect . . . once the disenchantment of transcendence has also dispelled every well-founded transcendere, a utopia well founded in the content of man and world. Fear may be removed by triviality, but at the price of a different narrowness: atrophy. In nihilism fear is also removed, but at an even higher price: despair. However, a concrete disenchantment leads not into triviality, but a shock about what has never before entered a human’s mind and gaze, that is, what lies in the Not-Yet-Become; and it leads not into nihilism, but the well-founded hope that it is not the last word. (A, 316)
“Real Enlightenment neither trivializes nor destroys the background” (A, 313), as Bloch’s relevant chapter heading aphoristically decrees. But we shall first explain the hellish effect of nihilism—with Bloch and the best example of all:
New paganism . . . , also drawing on Haeckel and Bölsche, as well as on “The forest is my Church,” by no means abolished true slave morality and even less the masters’ press. Where the law of the fittest, including their natural selection, replaced the sermon of love, it became clear . . . that not every abolition of the Bible may be Enlightenment, that Nero’s torches may burn even more brightly. But in addition to these fruits: the Enlightened educated Philistine from long ago, from before Haeckel, Bölsche and the forest as church—he showed that not only faith is blinding. “The Truth about Monasteries and the Stupidification of the People,” also “Moses or Darwin?”—these little tracts by the half-educated, and hence the only half-disenchanted, did not make the thought of the so-called freethinker in those days any lighter or more capacious. But above all, this remains instructive: in a world that had become anti-Biblical, jumping across Yuletide fires became particularly easy, because it is not from Jesse’s lineage. There was also no clear support for conscience, even in a clerical and therefore still spiritual movement. Against the holy spring of German power, especially when it was thought to be flowing so clearly from the Antichrist. If it had been Francis of Assisi instead of the whore of Babylon in the background, it would have had a much harder time. (A, 40–41)
Perhaps Bloch is too kind at the end—in clerical-fascist Croatia, Franciscans were the “avant garde” of the pogrom—but there is no doubt about what he formulates elsewhere in this way:
Certainly nihilism . . . also has . . . premises in mechanical materialism; it has them in the cosmological pointlessness and aimlessness. As mere circulation of moving matter, existence has no meaning: in this absolutized disenchantment, existence has gone completely to the dogs, the apes, the atoms. In contrast, apart from physical-chemical starting points, dialectical materialism (with the sign above its gate: no mechanist shall enter here) knows a continuous series of starting points, hot spots of production: the cell, economic man, the arch-qualitative interlacings of base and superstructure . . . Most importantly, it knows the really existing problem of a human-qualified Kingdom of Freedom: all antidotes to triviality and nihilism, or the activation of what is precisely not the opium, or even the pressing idol of religion. (A, 316)
It is precisely
after all the opium and the fools’ paradise of the afterlife have burnt down . . . [that] the secret appears which is adequate to the undaunted human being. Precisely the affect assigned to this secret and so alien to triviality and nihilism—reverence—represents the reception of something uncanny without any fear, of something monstrous without inhumanity. Reverence has as a correlate that sublimity which transports an intimation of our future freedom. It signifies a transcendere without any self-alienation at all, and as a correlate of this surmounting, this outdoing it does not signify the hypostasis of a frightful idol, but the latency of our intended day of rising, in which neither fear nor ignorance has a refuge, but instead the wish to know and the ability to know hope find their source. The Messianic is the red secret of every revolutionary Enlightenment that sustains itself in plenitude.”[Bloch’s italics.] (A, 317)
Some pages down he repeats in different words: “Everywhere the Messianic is the last support of life, but also at the same time the last thing from the utopian truth shining in,” and he adds: “For the all too wise, this is foolishness; the all too pious turn it into a pre-fabricated house, (but) for the wise the utopian meaning is the most solid, really existing problem of the world itself, the unsolved world. And in this way life has as much meaning as develops first in discontent, work, the fissure of what is inadequate for us, intuition of the measured; surmounting, not eccentric” (A, 334–35). Or to use another one of Bloch’s favorite idioms: Full of hope, but without any confidence, or even guarantee.
For Bloch a belief in a heavenly beyond always seemed outrageously eccentric and the epitome of all “reified confidence” (A, 324). Such fundamentalism for him was worth fighting against, just as it was worth fighting the belief in a hypostasized, equally otherworldly God. Indeed, with Feuerbach, he is in favor of a “de-heavening” (A, 281) in all respects, of course in order to—as the young Hegel already formulated—“vindicate the treasures squandered to heaven as the property of humanity” (A, 95). Supernatural transcendence is rejected, but inner-natural transcending is explicitly demanded (A, 282): “A transcending without transcendence” (A, 15), but certainly with an eschatological telos. Fully turned inwards to the anthropological, the innerworldly utopian, Bloch over and over again proclaims with Augustine against Augustine: “Dies septimus nos ipsi erimus” (A, 15).
“Atheism is the premise of concrete utopia, but a concrete utopia is the equally indispensable implication of atheism. Atheism with a concrete utopia is, via one and the same thorough act, the obliteration of religion as well as the heretical hope of religion put on its human feet” (A, 317). Once again this means that Christian religion of a heretical kind is the irreplacable reservoir and potential of every utopianism, especially since no heavenly hope, but certainly a worldly hope, was widely at work in Judaism and broadly in Christianity itself: the “unprecedented expectation of a truly Altogether-Different, which will one day fill the earth,” (A, 111) as Bloch formulated.
The story of creation has always been read as an (also) eschatological one.155 In any case, Bloch comments specifically on the para-biblical myth of the Makanthropos “Adam Kadmon” as follows: “The image of the form here is an image of the aim; under Adam Kadmon only Alpha and Omega were seriously considered, and the Alpha only just so the Omega of the end would be in sight throughout the whole creation. Makanthropos is the head at the end of the world, the shape of the future kingdom. In this sense, the weighty humanism of such a vision justifiably survived in Christian speculation, no longer in a cosmocentric sense, but one that put its faith in humans” (A, 203).
Of course, Marcion’s preaching of the alien end-god, which still touches on the Makanthropos myth, is to be “hominized,” as Bloch frankly admits, whilst still holding on to its utopian essence: “The Son of Man Christ (Jesus) surely has no god, that is also no alien god, above himself . . ., but then Marcion’s phantasm had its High-above only as a signalling light towards us from Atopos,” (A, 243) or rather Outopos.
This is Bloch’s projection hypothesis in this specific case, vindicating a High–above to something futuric or, as it were, utopian. As regards Exodus, prophecy, and apocalypticism, he only needs to continue re-writing in a social-revolutionary manner, to re-write what was already then an innerworldly—increasingly eschatological—promise. “Even just to be able to sit under a vine without anyone making one afraid becomes [in the prophets] a future, as well as the land where milk and honey were meant to flow, as well as a justice of Yahweh that would fill the earth and the sea (Isa 48:18)”156 (A, 143). The salvific image of the heavenly Jerusalem as a new heaven and a new earth in John’s Revelation was also meant to signify a re-creation [Umschaffung] of this immanent world. The city of Jerusalem is a proper new heaven only in so far as it has a real qualitative alterity as opposed to the old aeon. This means that the blissful alterity of heaven is essential for the heavenly Jerusalem. Yet heaven is not conceived as God’s private space, but instead as a city of humans, cleared of all images of the divine that existed up until now, a city which is built according to the measurements of the Son of Man, who is not only the authoritative architectural principle of this city, but at once its inner and innermost steering principle.157
“The inhabitants of this new Jerusalem will be citizens of a human existence that has finally come to consciousness,” concludes Elke Kruttschnitt, Bloch’s interpreter, speaking as a social philosopher.158 Earlier, the Marxist Bloch himself had put a communist emphasis on the social dimension of the “Kingdom of God” as man’s final destination: “. . . the Philadelphia of a communism of love is the basic premise of the Kingdom; and in this way it becomes a worldly norm,” (A, 187) as Bloch emphasizes. His utopia is a social utopia, and quite essentially so, indeed in an active, even militant way:
Optimism is justified only as militant, never as complete; in light of the world’s misery in this last form it is not merely wicked, but actually imbecilic (Das Prinzip Hoffnung,1624). Equally: in its concrete form, utopia is the will to the being of the All, a will that has undergone trial; in utopia, the suffering of being is at work, which had previously turned towards an order of the world supposedly already founded and successful, even a kind of overworld order [Überweltordnung]. Yet this suffering is only effective inasmuch as it belongs to the Not-Yet-Being, and to the hope for the summum bonum in it. Moreover, after the use of that nothingness in which history still continues, this suffering does not look away from the danger of extinction, not even from the hypothetical possibility of Nothingness as the definite end. What counts here instead is the work of militant optimism: in the same way that the proletariat and the bourgeoisie may sink into the same barbarity without it, so without this work, deeper down and further on, there may still be the threat of a sea without a shore, of a midnight without a sunrise, as the final state of things. This kind of finality would then signify the absolute futility of the historical process; and as something that has not yet happened, it can be no less excluded as a possibility than, in a positive sense, the finality of an All filling all. So finally there is the changeable alternative between an absolute Nothing and an absolute All: the absolute Nothing is the sealed thwarting of utopia; the absolute All—in the pre-appearance of the Kingdom of Freedom—is the sealed fulfilment of utopia or Being like utopia (loc. cit., 364). (A, 326–27)
I shall explain this Blochian self-collage as follows:
• The hope, not confidence, he champions is one that “connects with the indignation which is grounded in the concrete given possibilities of a new existence, as a salvation in the future in a trial that is by no means already thwarted, though neither is it already won” (A, 165).
• Particularly in the Bible, and there from the very beginning, “the last word about what one should do, and what is done to oneself, has not yet been said” (A, 58).
• Above all, “the land of wish and will in biblical prophecy” can be discerned through a “changeable fate as anti-fate” (A, 139).159 As it says with realism and expressionism in Bloch’s earlier hagiography of Thomas Münzer, this also means that: “Here there is no guaranteed path to salvation from high above, ‘but a harsh, dangerous voyage, suffering, wandering, erring, searching for the hidden home; full of tragic disturbance throughout, boiling, split with cracks, outbreaks, lonely promises, (only) discontinuously charged with the conscience of light.’ (Thomas Münzer als Theologe der Revolution, 1962, p. 14)” (A, 325).
That Bloch rejected what he called “materialized despair” no less than he rejected “materialized confidence” will not surprise anyone. However, his vehement protest against any “trivialization of the negative” (A, 324) is perhaps underappreciated.160
I shall bring to mind again something Bloch felt was problematic: “since the Enlightenment (i.e., since the revolution passed its decree against the devouring, the evil, the fiendish), the so-called satanic . . . , much more than the theistic,” may not have gone out of “literarily exciting fashion,” but it is no longer a “concept subject to philosophically enlightening reflection.” “To enlighten here means,” as Bloch is quite certain, “not so much to denounce with the aim of making visible that which is against the light, so that in all its appearances it may be centrally displayed, stated, and made contestable. [Instead,] in the optimism of the Enlightenment . . . evil is to be . . . regarded as merely weak and small, like mere blemishes on an otherwise perfect world. But precisely for the battle, for the sake of its most thorough target”—in Bloch’s view—
more concepts such as delusion, the aggressive drive, and so on, on the subjective side, and all inhumanities of the class-like mode of production and exchange, all the oppressions and wars on the social-objective side . . . are nonetheless insufficient to causally explain a phenomenon like Auschwitz, or even just to put it into representative yet non-reductive language of experience. Even Schopenhauer, the only philosopher of the nineteenth century who set out to describe his “thing in itself,” the will to life, as a creature of the devil, in his description of the horrific night that his world-as-will is plunged into, never consistently reached the speaking speechlessness of that horror, which only Dante has pointed at in the Lasciate ogni speranza on the gate . . . [of the] Inferno. (A, 319–20)
Bloch’s realism, or rather his materialism, is so realistic that he fully factors in Kant’s “radical evil” and hence dismisses not even hell and the devil as merely horrific fairy tales.161 For Bloch, Christianity and Judaism are to be taken very seriously, in large part because they—before Kant and after him—know the topoi of hell and the devil. Bloch’s Christianity in atheism, as the counterpart to his explicitly declared atheism in Christianity—integral as it is—is also Satanism in atheism. In any case, he clearly distances himself from the kind of atheism that declares that everything satanic, no less than everything divine, is beyond discussion, not even in discussions of myth. Bloch is almost horrified that “the shallow-optimistic denial of evil in the world, this Enlightenment taking the easy way out of it” finds “a refuge” in such an atheism (A, 324).
His atheism is one that is enlightened also about the Enlightenment—enlightened in large part by Christianity. Atheism means meta-enlightenment, particularly so in religionibus, but at the same time, and here I quote Bloch word for word, it means “meta-religious humanism” (H, 1521) after Feuerbach has already “broken up the triviality of Enlitterment. . . ,” and he did so “through the power of the human” (H, 1521). But Bloch’s “anthropological atheism” goes beyond those long-outdated Left Hegelians, because his reintegration of heaven into human subjectivity implies not a static but a utopian concept of the human being. So the heart of the matter is still an anthropological re-duction; but the utopian human being, by virtue of a concept adequate to him, is given such divine depth and heavenly otherness that Bloch’s reduction can no longer be misunderstood as reductionism.162 Already “the growing humanization of religion [within itself] by no means . . . corresponds to a relaxation of its horrors. On the contrary: the humanum in addition now gains the mystery of a divine, of something that can be deified” (H, 1409). However, “only to the deus absconditus adheres the question of what the legitimate mystery of the homo absconditus is all about” (H, 1406). The “anthropos agnostos” (A, 200) remains a mystery, but it is a, if not the, philosophically legitimate one.
Bloch’s anthropological atheism begins with the words “Deus homo factus est,” but because for him it is all about “the final biblical turn of events, the biblical Exodus out of Yahweh” (A, 212), he remains anthropological, exceeding even the moral [sittlich] atheism of Job and the prophets (A, 163). As it is also a socialist atheism, it accepts that heritage. At the same time, at once and once again, Bloch’s atheism surmounts Feuerbach’s individual humanism. One theological consequence, or rather, a premise of this is the reception of the Kingdom–topos, which is now social-anthropological: the Kingdom-utopia, “the humanum gains the mystery of a divine, of something that can be deified . . . as the future formation of the Kingdom” (H, 1409). Indeed,
God becomes the Kingdom of God, and the Kingdom of God no longer has a God in it. That is: this religious heteronomy and its materialized hypostasis fully dissolves into the theology of the community, but as one that itself has crossed the threshold of the creature hitherto, its anthropology and sociology. Precisely for this reason, the very religion that proclaimed the Kingdom of God to be in our midst (cf. Luke 17:21) has most decisively held up the Wholly Other against the old Adam and the old createdness as it has come down to us. Here as a rebirth, there as a new heaven and a new earth, as the transfiguration of nature. It is this borderline content of the wonderful, that is: the totally redeemed, which nonetheless turns the best human society into a means to an end, the end of the totally redeemed, which has been religiously thought of as lying within the Kingdom. And whose unattainability may be discerned even in the best of all societies: as the unsublated frailty of the creature, the unsublated immediacy of the surrounding nature—a borderline content which, as a consequence, also opposes every partial optimism of several social utopias that have fallen out of the totum of utopia. (H, 1408)
In his Atheism book Bloch goes so far as to declare that Marxism has “plenty in common with Christianity and its transition to the religion of the Roman state” (A, 315). But be that as it may: socialism, or rather communism, is no end in itself, even though it is an absolutely necessary means—of course not even a sufficient one—to that end: what is religiously conceived as the “Kingdom.” This end is, if at first theologically, hypostasized as God personally, himself not a “Nothing”; this he would only be “if atheism were nihilism, not only of theoretical hopelessness, but a nihilism that universally and materially destroys every substantial possibility of a final end and perfection” (H, 1412). But since, as of now, this is not the case, the principle of hope is in effect (until further notice); it lacks principle in so far as this hope presents itself without guarantee, indeed without confidence. But of course precisely in this way it converges with a “militant optimism.”
As Lucien Goldmann has pointed out, Bloch’s hope shares some features with Pascal’s Wager on the existence of God. The certainty of that hope is also an “absolute, absolutely uncertain certainty.”163 To quote Bloch himself: “Nothing and Everything, Chaos and Kingdom are lying on the scales in the former area of religious projection; and it is the human labor in history that weighs heavily on the side of the Everything or Nothing” (H, 1532). Yet because of this, once the bet has been made—and one cannot evade it, only decide in favor of the nothing (if that is a decision at all)—then all objective reasons are consulted in order to increase the (Pascalian) faith that is the basis of this bet. Similarly the (Blochian) hope is taught and is itself being taught, whereby it justifies its doings and its doings in return justify this hope itself.
It goes without saying that in the end action has to be taken; it all depends on the “human labor in history”—Bloch could only laugh (or cry) about all historical automatisms. Hence there is no way to forego the (Marxist-inspired) social revolution. For this world-revolutionary it has by no means primacy, but at all times it has priority, the dialectical relationship of which Bloch has expressed in an “Haggadian” way or “parabolically”164 through this Chassidim story:
“It is as the Baalshem says: the Messiah can only come when all the guests have sat down at the table; but it is first and foremost the table of labor and only after that the table of the Lord. In the secret of the Kingdom, the organization of the world has its immediately effective, its immediately deductive metaphysics.”165
100. With a few exceptions, Bloch will be cited in the text as follows: A = Atheismus im Christentum: Zur Religion des Exodus und des Reichs (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968), and H = Das Prinzip Hoffung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1967). I thank Martin Leutzsch, Francesca Vidal, and Karlheinz Weigand for their bibliographical recommendations.
101. Cf. at least H, 1482.
102. Cf. Ernst Nolte, Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche: die Action française, der italienische Faschismus, der Nationalsozialismus, 2nd ed. (Munich: Piper, 1965), 257.
103. Cf. Richard Faber, “Religiöse, laizistische und neureligiöse (Anti-)Intellektuelle: Ansätze zu einer Realtypologie,” in Völkische Religion und Krisen der Moderne: Entwürfe ‘arteigener’ Glaubenssysteme seit der Jahrhundertwende, edited by Stefanie v. Schnurbein and Justus H. Ulbricht (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2001), 108–10.
104. Cf. ibid.
105. Cf. Nolte, Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche, 170.
106. Cf. Alain de Benoist, Heide sein: Zu einem Neuen Anfang; die europäische Glaubensalternative (Tübingen: Grabert, 1982); critical: K. Kriener, “Julfest versus Christfest: Über das politische ‘Heidentum’ Alain de Benoists,” in Politische Weihnacht in Antike und Moderne: Zur ideologischen Durchdringung des Fests der Feste, edited by Richard Faber and Esther Gajek (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1997), 141–64.
107. Cf. Richard Faber, “Religiöse, laizistische und neureligiöse (Anti-)Intellektuelle,” 108.
108. On anti-humanism in general, see Streit um den Humanismus, edited by Richard Faber (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003), chapter 3.
109. Cf. Faber, “Religiöse, laizistische und neureligiöse (Anti-)Intellektuelle,” 108–11.
110. Robert Spaemann, “‘Politik zuerst’? Das Schicksal der Action Française,” Wort und Wahrheit 8 (1953), 655ff.
111. I am applying Bloch’s lecture title: “Differenzierungen im Begriff Fortschritt” [Differentiations in the Concept of Progress], in Sitzungsberichte der Deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin: Klasse für Philosophie, H. 5, 1955.
112. Cf. Helmut Gollwitzer, “Die Bibel—marxistisch gelesen.” Verkündigung und Forschung 14 (1969), 2–37, as well as Gollwitzer, Krummes Holz—aufrechter Gang: Zur Frage nach dem Sinn des Lebens (Munich: Kaiser, 1970).
113. Cf. Richard Faber, “‘Pagan’ und ‘Neo-Paganismus,’” in Die Restauration der Götter: Antike Religion und Neo-Paganismus, edited by R. Faber and R. Schlesier (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1986), 10–25.
114. *[Faber’s insertion].
115. Cf. also Richard Faber, “Salzburg—Land der Perchten. Ein Syndrom des Urigen” In Salzburg: Blicke, edited by Helga Embacher et al.( Salzburg: Residenz-Verlag 1999), 175–79.
116. Cf. above all Theodor W. Adorno, Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971), especially 12–47: “The Concept of a Philosophy of Origin” [Begriff der Ursprungsphilosophie].
117. Hans-Jürgen Krahl, Konstitution und Klassenkampf: Zur historischen Dialektik von bürgerlicher Emanzipation und proletarischer Revolution (Frankfurt: Verlag Neue Kritik, 1971), 358.
118. Extensively: Jürgen Ebach, “Fremde in Moab—Fremde aus Moab: Das Buch Ruth als politische Literatur.” In Bibel und Literatur, edited by Jürgen Ebach and Richard Faber (Munich: Fink, 1995), 277–304.
119. Cf. Carsten Colpe, Das Siegel der Propheten: Historische Beziehungen zwischen Judentum, Judenchristentum, Heidentum und frühem Islam (Berlin: Inst. Kirche u. Judentum Berlin, 1990).
120. Cf. Jacob Taubes, “Walter Benjamin—ein moderner Marcionit?,” in Antike und Moderne: Zu Walter Benjamins “Passagen,” edited by Norbert W. Bolz and Richard Faber (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1986), 138–47, as well as his Vom Kult zur Kultur (Munich: Fink 1996), chapter 2, and “Revolution und Transzendenz: Zum Tode des Philosophen Herbert Marcuse,” Der Tagesspiegel, no. 10290 (31.07.1979), 9; concerning Adorno, see his Negative Dialektik, pirated copy, 371—2, and Metaphysik: Begriff und Probleme (1965), edited by Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998), 235. Secondary literature to be mentioned is, among others, Thomas Ruster, Der verwechselbare Gott: Theologie nach der Entflechtung von Christentum und Religion, 4th ed. (Freiburg i. Br.: Herder, 2000).
121. Cf. Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige: Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen, 11th ed. (Stuttgart/Gotha: Frdr. Andreas Perthes, 1923); critical is, amongst others, R. Flasche, “Religionsmodelle und Erkenntnisprinzipien der Religionswissenschaft in der Weimarer Zeit.” In Religions und Geistesgeschichte der Weimarer Republik, edited by Hubert Cancik (Düsseldorf: Patmos-Verlag, 1982), 261–76.
122. *Translators’ note: [Rauhnacht]: the nights around the New Year during which, according to Germanic myths, the realm of spirits opens up. Through processions involving demon and animal masks, bells, and other loud noise, evil spirits are exorcised.
123. More extensively: Richard Faber, Erbschaft jener Zeit: Zu Ernst Bloch und Hermann Broch (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1989).
124. Ernst Bloch, Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973), 57–58 and 62.
125. Ibid., 57.
126. Ibid., 60, 65, and 59.
127. *Translators’ note: Deutsche Volksfront: a resistance group founded in 1936 with members from the Communist and Social Democratic parties; it was broken up by the Nazis in 1938.
128. Cf. Richard Faber, “Ernst Bloch und das Hambacher ‘Fest der Hoffnung’” In Liberalismus in Geschichte und Gegenwart, edited by Faber (Würzburg: Königshausen &Neumann, 2000), 21–37, especially, 30–33.
129. Cf., amongst others, Hanna Gekle, “Utopisches Versprechen irdischer Glückseligkeit: Ernst Blochs Rezeption der Antike.” In Antike heute, edited by Faber and Bernhard Kytzler (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann: 1992), 216–37.
130. Cf. Ernst Bloch, Spuren (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1959), 82; as well as Arno Münster, “Ernst Blochs Religionsphilosophie im Spannungsfeld von jüdischem Messianismus: ketzerischen Christentum und materialistischem Atheismus.” In VorSchein. Jb. der Ernst-Bloch-Assoziation 22–23 (2002), 49.
131. Cf. Elke Kruttschnitt, Ernst Bloch und das Christentum: der geschichtliche Prozeß und der philosophische Begriff der “Religion des Exodus und des Reichs” (Mainz: M. Grünewald, 1993), 312.
132. [Reich].
133. Cf. Ernst Bloch, Thomas Münzer als Theologe der Revolution (Munich: Kurt Wolff, 1921), 2nd ed. Frankfurt, 1963.
134. Cf. Richard Faber, Das ewige Rom, oder, die Stadt und der Erdkreis: zur Archäologie “abendländischer” Globalisierung [Eternal Rome, or, The City and the Globe: On the Archaeology of the “Occidental” Globalization] (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2000).
135. Cf. Martin Leutzsch, “Das Jesusbild von Ernst Bloch.” VorSchein. Jb. der Ernst–Bloch–Assoziation 22/23 (2002), 25.
136. *Translators’ note: A line in a political folk song after the First World War, Wir sind des Geyers schwarzer Haufen (We Are Geyer’s Black Mob), referred to Florian Geyer during the German Peasants’ War (1524–25): Setzt aufs Klosterdach den roten Hahn! (“Put the red rooster on the abbey’s roof!” i.e., “Torch that convent down.”)
137. *Translators’ note: Within Assyriology and Religious Studies, Panbabylonism appeared in the late nineteenth century. It considers the Hebrew Bible and Judaism to be directly derived from Mesopotamian (Babylonian) mythology. It gained popularity in the early twentieth century, advocated by e.g., Alfred Jeremias.
138. Cf. Norbert Bolz, “Erlösung als ob: Über einige gnostische Motive der Kritischen Theorie,” in Gnosis und Politik, edited by Jacob Taubes (Munich: Fink, 1984), 264–89, 289.
139. Besides Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, and Taubes, who have already been mentioned, I refer above all to Carl Schmitt (especially Politische Theologie II: Die Legende von der Erledigung jeder Politischen Theologie [Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1970]) and Hans Blumenberg (especially Säkularisierung und Selbstbehauptung. Erweiterte und überarbeitete Neuausgabe von ‘Die Legitimität der Neuzeit’, erster und zweiter Teil [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974], as well as Arbeit am Mythos [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,1979]). Critical towards both Schmitt and Blumenberg: Richard Faber, Der Prometheus-Komplex: Zur Kritik der Politotheologie Eric Voegelins und Hans Blumenbergs (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1984), Teil B (below as Excursus I).
140. Cf. Carsten Colpe, “‘Das eschatologische Widerlager der Politik.’ Zu Jacob Taubes’s Gnosisbild,” in Abendländische Eschatologie, edited by Faber et al., 124.
141. Harnack, Marcion, 225.
142. Cf. Bloch, Geist der Utopie (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1918).
143. Cf. Taubes, “Das stählerne Gehäuse und der Exodus daraus,” 11.
144. Once again I refer to Taubes, “Walter Benjamin—ein moderner Marcionit?”
145. Harnack, Marcion, 232.
146. Cf. amongst others Leutzsch, “Das Jesusbild von Ernst Bloch,” 21.
147. *Translators’ note: see Mark 9:50.
148. *Translators’ note: Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands.
149. I shall just hint at Ernst Blochs Leipziger Jahre, edited by Manfred Neuhaus and Helmut Seidel (Schkeuditz: GNN Verlag, 2001), as well as Hoffnung kann enttäuscht werden: Ernst Bloch in Leipzig, introd. and commentated by Volker Caysa et al. (Meisenheim/Glan: Hain, 1992).
150. *Translators‘ note: Bloch’s word-creation Aufkläricht combines Aufklärung (Enlightement) with Kehricht (litter, rubbish).
151. Horst Folkers has very well summarized: “As a reader of the Bible Bloch tries to please no one, not the Marxists and the Enlightened contemporaries, because he reads the Bible with such intensity and impartiality as if the truth was immediately written down there; not the Jews, because he reads the New Testament with the same naturalness as he reads the Old Testament and finds in it . . . the solution to the question of Job; finally not the Christians, because he reads the Bible of the Old and New Testament as an integral Jewish book and wants to hear nothing about the church” (Folkers, “Transzendenz und Utopie in Ernst Bloch’s ‘Atheismus im Christentum.’” In Vom Jenseits. Jüdisches Denken in der europäischen Geistesgeschichte, edited by Eveline Goodman–Thau [Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1997], 111).
152. Ernst Bloch, Leipziger Vorlesungen zur Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985), 491.
153. Cf. Jan Milič Lochman, “Eine atheistische Interpretation der Bibel,” Reformatio 20 (1972), 232.
154. On the concept of “saving criticism,” see not least Peter Bürger, “Benjamins ‘rettende Kritik.’ Vorüberlegungen zum Entwurf einer kritischen Hermeneutik,” Germ.-Rom. Monatsschr. N.F. 23 (1973), 198ff.
155. Cf. Richard Faber, “‘Mit uns zieht die neue Zeit.’ Differenzierungen in der Kategorie ‘Novum’,” in Säkularisierung und Resakralisierung. Zur Geschichte des Kirchenlieds und seiner Rezeption, edited by Faber (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2001), 189–97, especially 193–95.
156. *Translators’ note: see Mic 4:4.
157. Cf. Kruttschnitt in Faber, “‘Mit uns zieht die neue Zeit,’” 196.
158. Ibid.
159. Extensively: Klaus Heinrich, Parmenides und Jona (Basel: Stroemfeld, 1982), as well as Jürgen Ebach, Kassandra und Jona. Gegen die Macht des Schicksals (Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1987).
160. Even by Günther Anders; cf. Faber, “Sagen lassen sich die Menschen nichts, aber erzählen lassen sie sich alles.” Über Grimm–Hebelsche Erzählung, Moral und Utopie in Benjaminscher Perspektive (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002), 119–30.
161. Cf. once again: Faber, “Sagen lassen sich die Menschen nichts,” in particular 107ff.; as regards Kant’s and others’ “radical evil,” I refer to Christoph Schulte, Die Karriere des Bösen: Kants radikales Böses und seine Wirkungsgeschichte in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Fink, 1988).
162. Cf. E. Kruttschnitt, in Faber, “Sagen lassen sich die Menschen nichts,” 372.
163. Lucien Goldmann, Weltflucht und Politik: Dialektische Studien zu Pascal und Racine (Neuwied a. Rh.; Berlin: Luchterhand, 1967), 99.
164. On the notion of aggada, cf. Chaim N. Bialik, “Halacha und Aggada.” In: Bialik, Drei Essays (Berlin: 1925), 82–107, as well as Faber, “Sagen lassen sich die Menschen nichts,” especially Chapter 4.
165. Bloch, Geist der Utopie, 411.