I
Erich Auerbach’s Sociology of Literary Religion in the Context of Modern Marcionism
In memoriam Karlheinz Barck
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 Depths1 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.2
Has Adolf von Harnack, cited here, read Erich Auerbach? Impossible. When the historical theologian Harnack published his masterpiece on Marcion, The Gospel of the Alien God, in 1920 (with a revised edition in 1924), nothing relevant was yet available from Auerbach, the scholar of Romance languages and literatures who would later become just as famous as Harnack. But then did Auerbach perhaps study Harnack? Most likely, even though Marcion’s name appears in Auerbach’s writings only when Auerbach mentions Tertullian’s Adversus Marcionem.3 Moreover, Auerbach was a close friend of Ernst Bloch, who had proven to be an excellent reader of Harnack’s study of Marcion; Bloch might have even partly inspired Harnack with his work, The Spirit of Utopia, dated back in 1918.4 Like no one else, Bloch—with his Jacob-Taubesian formation of concepts—adhered to a “modern Marcionism.”5 After all, it was Taubes who had explicitly brought Auerbach and Marcion “together” via St. Paul, both with and without Bloch.
These considerations were raised by Ulrich Raulff in the Süddeutsche Zeitung in early 2004, when he criticized the German Social Democrats’ prevailing discourse on “elitism” and in doing so largely referred to Taubes’s “Conversation with Wolfert von Rahden and Norbert Kapferer: Elite or Avant-garde?”6 This 1982 text was itself initiated by the discourse on elitism of the first director of the Berlin Wissenschaftskolleg at the time, Peter Wapnewski, a discourse strongly influenced by Stefan George.7 The “Conversation” quickly touched on fundamental issues, questioning as a whole the neo-Nietzscheanism still toxic today8: “I hope not to be unjust toward the ‘constellation Nietzsche’—I say constellation, because it is more than a person, because the work of Nietzsche is burdened with implications that describe an era of history, and thus I place the constellation Nietzsche eye-to-eye with the constellation Paul. This is how Nietzsche himself sees it.”
And indeed it was through Nietzsche that Taubes, the son of a rabbi, had first come across the Jewish arch-heretic Paul, perceiving him “as an opponent of Nietzsche.” As Taubes put it, “Nietzsche wants to reverse the Christian values which Paul had built into the transvaluation of classical values. Nietzsche wants to undo Paul’s transvaluation of the ancient values. This is the great horizon in which the Nietzsche-Paul controversy stands,”9 precisely on the question: Elite or avant-garde?
When referring to 1 Cor 1:26, Taubes is certain: “Paul does not deny avant-garde, but he denies elite.” As he glosses:
“But see, dear brothers, your calling”—and “calling” means élection, elite—“not many wise according to the flesh, not many powerful, not many noble are called, but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God has chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are strong; and base things of the world, and things which are despised, has God chosen and things which are not, to bring to nothing the things that are, so that no flesh should glory in his presence.10
As Taubes further comments on this passage from Paul:
So not the noble, the well-born, the wise according to the wisdom of this world are the ones elected, but precisely what is regarded as ignoble, is elected . . . But at first it is an avant-garde, a small community. Yet it is not determined by the measures valid in this world, but by measures that question the world as it is; in a way that Nietzsche was aware of and in a way that was expressed more brutally in a book by Alain de Benoist, this leader of the French Right . . . in which he speaks of the “Bolshevism of Christianity.” This is not wrong. I mean, it is brutal, coarse, but in early Christianity there is a bit of Bolshevism. The “Bolshevist” bit is that it is addressed11 “to all.”12
Auerbach had similarly argued that the New Testament message “addresses everybody,” using as his prime example the evangelist Mark’s “report” on Peter’s betrayal (M, 51). He highlighted its contrast with, for example, the Trimalchio–banquet of Petronius, which is not at all shy of vulgarisms.13 At that time, Petronius’s style was aimed precisely14 at “the taste of a social-literary élite which views things from high up with coolness and indulgence,” as Auerbach notes (M, 50). No wonder Taubes remembers Auerbach as explicitly and emphatically as he does in his 1968 essay “The Justification of Ugliness in Early Christian Tradition”: “What Nietzsche only hinted at aphoristically and polemically, Erich Auerbach described with calm precision and enlightenment in his fragments toward a history of our sense of ‘reality;’” by way of the sociology of religion Taubes emphasizes Auerbach’s “fragments on a kind of christological history of literature.”15
Here already, in the preceding sentence, Taubes has virtually melded Auerbach and Nietzsche by positing that Nietzsche had understood “the ‘sermo humilis’ of Paul as a transvaluation of the religious, ethical, and aesthetic values of the ancient world.”16 Auerbach had done the same, as Taubes argues by citing the “sermo humilis” as a key concept. Here Taubes refers to the 1958 Literary Language and Audience in Late Latin Antiquity and the Middle Ages,17 a collection of essays the author understood as a supplement to his major work Mimesis, published twelve years earlier. In what follows I will rely mainly on this book, which—at least around 1968—was Taubes’s absolute favorite. One of my most lively and enduring memories of Taubes is when, back in the late sixties, he would come to talk about his most hated book, which he mimed trampling on—Arnold Gehlen’s Urmensch und Spätkultur [Prehistoric Man and Later Culture]—to then talk about his most loved one, Auerbach’s Mimesis, which he took into his arms to caressingly dance with it as if it were an eastern Jewish Torah scroll.18
Amongst other things, Mimesis has the advantage that Auerbach included in it one of his thematic essays, “Sacrae scripturae sermo humilis” (M, 74). Taubes drew my attention to this essay of 1941 when—in the early 1980s—I was working on the rhetoric of the anti-rhetorician Johann Peter Hebel, and on his own “Sermo Humilis.”19 Taubes generally defined the anti-rhetoric rooted in the Bible in a paradoxical way, when—emphasizing Auerbach—he formulated that the “Christian form of the sublime” is “the sermo humilis.”20 This short formula cuts Auerbach (and the matter in question) short, unless, like him, one begins with a “new ‘sermo humilis’”: a “low style to be used actually only for comedy and satire, yet which now reaches widely beyond its original sphere into the lowest and the highest, into the sublime and the eternal (M, 74).”21
As Auerbach emphasized, the narrative style of the Synoptic Gospels was a “sermo piscatorius,” but nevertheless, or precisely for this reason, it was “much more effective than the highest rhetorical registers of the tragic work of art; and the most moving thing about these narratives was the Passion. That the King of kings was mocked, spat on, whipped, and nailed to the cross like a common criminal—this story, as soon as it governs the consciousness of humanity, completely destroys the aesthetics of stylistic separation; it generates a new high style, which does not at all spurn the quotidian, and which incorporates the sensorial-realistic, even the ugly, the unworthy, the physically base” (M, 74).
One should take heed: as a new low style develops, so does a new high one: as Auerbach emphasizes again and again, this new high one is a “mixed style” that makes all future realism (in a modern sense) possible in the first place.22 But let us first consider the all-decisive question—asked from Paul to Taubes23—of the cross as such: the “servile supplicium,” as Auerbach puts it in “The Justification of Ugliness in Early Christian Tradition.”24 In “Elite or Avant-garde?” Taubes (in the wake of Nietzsche) points out that Paul actually connects “the reversal of the image of elite” with the theology of the cross: “The promise . . . of the gospel . . . is that it goes out ‘to all.’ Therefore it is no coincidence at all that in one of the most remarkable texts [remarkable also in Auerbach’s estimation25] of the Apostle Paul, where he speaks of ‘God on the cross,’ . . . Paul also speaks of the community and performs the reversal of the ancient concept of elite.”26
Elsewhere Taubes argues: “For Paul, the social status of the community . . . , its status as a pariah, is the consequence and expression of the same divine weakness and foolishness of which the cross is the sign.” Conversely,
By writing to this community about its own place in the world, by writing about the election of the ignoble and those despised by the world, about [this election] which reverses and perverts the values of this world, Paul wants to demonstrate to them the paradox of the foolishness and weakness of God. Toward the end of the paragraph, Paul’s message rises further. His reference to the reversing and perverting social position of the community becomes the ‘metaphysical’ judgment of the world in general. The social judgment changes into a metaphysical one. God has chosen what is not (ta me onta) to destroy what is (ta onta).27
Now this is Marcionite Paulinism in literary form. But I will insist—quite agreeing with Taubes—on the social: that Paul’s teaching on the foolishness of the cross “flies in the face of ancient noble convictions.”28 And I will deepen the plebeian, even rebellious character of this teaching of the cross, before I come to speak of political Marcionism (especially Bloch’s). But first one needs to return to Auerbach’s sociology of literary religion: to his hypothesis that “the real core of the Christian teaching, Incarnation and Passion,” was “fully incompatible with the principle of the separation of styles” (M, 73): “In ancient theory the high, sublime linguistic style was called sermo gravis or sublimis; the base one [was called] remissus or humilis; both had to remain strictly separate. In Christianity, in contrast, both are melded together from the beginning, especially in the Incarnation and Passion of Christ, in which sublimitas as well as humilitas, and both in excess, are realized and united” (M, 147).
To once again illustrate with Auerbach: “Christ did not appear as a hero or king, but as a human of the lowest social rank; his first disciples were fishermen and craftsmen, he moved around the quotidian environment of the small nation in Palestine, talked to tax collectors and prostitutes, to the poor and sick and to children; and every one of his actions and words was nevertheless of the highest and deepest dignity, more significant than whatever else usually took place; the style in which it was told was seen as rhetorically uncultured or raw; it was a sermo piscatorius, but still very moving” (M, 73–74).
Crucial to this approach, especially in the context of Marcionism that is to an extent anti-Jewish, is that “the sublime, the tragic, and the problematic”
already takes shape in the narratives of the Old Testament . . . in the domestic and the quotidian: events like those between Cain and Abel; between Noah and his sons; between Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar; and between Rebekka, Jacob, and Esau are unimaginable in the Homeric style . . . In the stories of the Old Testament, the quietness of the daily goings-on in the house, in the field, and with the herds is constantly undermined by jealousy about the election and the promise of blessing, and entanglements develop that would be incomprehensible for the Homeric heroes. For them, what is needed is a concrete, clearly expressible reason for conflict and enmity to come about, and they take effect in free battles; whilst in the Biblical narratives the permanently smoldering jealousy as well as the link between the economic and the spiritual, between the fatherly blessing and the divine blessing, leads to a saturation of daily life with seeds of conflict and often to its poisoning. The sublime working of God intervenes so deeply into the quotidian that the two domains of the sublime and the quotidian are not only actually undivided, they are essentially indivisible. (M, 25–26)
It is thus clear that Auberbach had deeply thought about “Jewish-Christian literature” as a unity. (This does not contravene Taubes’s reading of Auerbach as providing a “christological history of literature.”) And by the way, he did so at the point where he comes to talk about the story of Peter’s denial. Here one may recognize
at first glance . . . that there can be no talk about a rule of stylistic separation. This certainly realistic scene, in terms of setting and characters, is at once analytically dense and deeply tragic. Peter is . . . in the highest and the lowest sense, in the most tragic sense, an image of the human. Of course there is no artistic intention in this mixture of stylistic spheres. Rather from the beginning it is founded in the character of Jewish-Christian Scripture, and was made [even] more obvious and glaring through the Incarnation of God in a man of the lowest social rank, his walking on earth amongst low, common people and conditions, and his, in worldly terms, disgraceful Passion; and of course, considering how widespread and influential these scriptures later became, it influenced most decisively the understanding of the tragic and the sublime. (M, 44)
Returning to the episode on Peter, Auerbach talks as a political sociologist, though he moves beyond class theory: Peter’s entrance was, “like generally everything connected to Jesus’ arrest, no more than a minor incident in the world-historical context of the Roman Empire, a local event without any significance which nobody except those closely involved takes notice of; just how enormous is it in comparison to the usual life of a fisherman from the Sea of Galilee, and what a tremendous swing of the pendulum (Harnack once used this very phrase when he talked about the Denial scene29) takes place in him!” (M, 45).
“Seen from outside,” this is
about a police operation and its consequences—it involves only ordinary people; in antiquity something like that could only be conceived as a farce or a comedy. But why does that not happen? Why does it arouse the most serious and greatest sympathy? Because it describes something that neither ancient poetry nor ancient history-writing has ever described before: the development of a [not purely] spiritual movement in the depth of ordinary people . . . which is at first almost fully confined to them, but then gradually . . . moves into the historical foreground—but already now, from the very beginning, this movement makes an open claim to immediately concern everyone.
And then, in a manner converging with Taubes and Bloch, Auerbach emphasizes: “For the authors of the New Testament, the current events unfolding in quotidian life are revolutionary world affairs. Later on they will be so for everyone” (M, 45–4630).
As we have heard, “everyone” is important, but the quotidian is “revolutionary” as well. This is the case as early as—or rather, again—with St. Francis and his own radical, “Spiritual” disciples.31 Auerbach admire sFrancis as much as Bloch and Taubes greatly admire Joachim of Fiore (M, 163–6432):
At the beginning of the 13th century a figure appears in Italy who in an exemplary way embodies the New Testament mixture of sublimitas and humilitas, of ecstatic, sublime unity with God and of humble, concrete ordinariness . . . ; it is Francis of Assisi. The essence of his person and the impact of his appearance are based on the will to radical and practical imitation of Christ; after the age of the martyrs had ended, faith had taken a mainly mystic-contemplative form. Francis gave it a [renewed] turn toward the practical, the quotidian, the public, and the folkloric. (M, 15633)
I refrain here from delving into the Joachimite Franciscan Spirituals, Hussites, Thomas Münzer, etc.; and I mention only Rabelais, whom Auerbach saw within the Franciscan tradition (M, 16334). Instead, together with Auerbach I jump across centuries into the modern-proletarian milieu as it was described especially by Émile Zola.
Especially in the case of Germinal, published in 1888, Auerbach without a doubt again diagnoses “a mixture of humble and sublime in which, for the sake of content, the latter is dominant”: it is a “great historical tragedy” (M, 47735). And in terms of reception history he explains: “What filled [Zola’s opponents] with agitation ‘was . . . the fact that Zola by no means presented his art as one of “low style” or as comical; almost each one of his lines reveals that everything is meant completely seriously and morally; that the whole thing is certainly not amusement or an artistic game, but the true image of contemporary society as he, Zola, saw it; and as he asked the audience in these works to see it as well’” (M, 474).
As Harnack had already done in 1920, Auerbach finally comes to talk of “Russian realism,” despite or precisely because of the observation “that it is grounded in a Christian Old-Patriarchal image of the creaturely dignity of each and every human being, no matter of which estate or in which situation; hence that in its foundations it is more closely related to ancient Christian tradition than to modern West European realism” (M, 484)—even more so, one could say in view of Auerbach’s own Zola-characteristics. As he does with the story of Peter in the Gospel of Mark, Auerbach in particular recalls the extremely wide (and Harnackian) “swing of the pendulum” in the essence, actions, thoughts, and feelings of the characters in Dostoyevski, Tolstoy, and “the other” Russians (M, 485–86), but also the revolutionary characters before and alongside them. They, “the reformers, the indignant, and the conspirators, which appear in large numbers,” were still “closely bound up with the Christian Old Patriarchal world, from which they could only tear themselves away with torturous violence” (M, 484).
In any event, at the end of the chapter dedicated to, amongst others, Zola, Tolstoy, and “the other Russians,” Auerbach is convinced: “. . . if, since the last decade before the First World War, the moral crisis had been deepening in many places, including in realist literature, and something like an intimation of the imminent catastrophes could be felt, then the influence of the Russian realists substantially contributed to this” (M, 48736).
The young Bloch in The Spirit of Utopia and Harnack two years later in The Gospel of the Alien God thought no differently, only that they—with Taubes’s much later concept—saw modern Marcionism where Auerbach, almost confusingly, saw the heritage of Christian Old Patriarchalism at work. Taubes refers in 1984 to Bloch’s greatest teacher Max Weber, who—as Edith Hanke has shown37—was powerfully fascinated and even awed by Tolstoy (as he was by Nietzsche38):
Weber traced the origins of the rational lifestyle of the capitalist epoch from the spirit of the Protestant-inner-worldly asceticism up to the dialectical turning-point, that is, up to the denial of any asceticism in the late-capitalist society of affluence: “As asceticism was transferred out of the monks’ cubicles into professional life and began to govern inner-worldly morality, it helped build the mighty cosmos of the modern economy which today governs the lifestyle of all with overwhelming force.” As Christian election becomes “inner-worldly” in the Protestant ethos (i.e., “practical”), “doom” turns our modern world into a “steel-hard shell.” But what is it like living in a “steel-hard shell?” “Nobody knows yet who will live in that shell in the future and whether at the end of this development there will be wholly new prophets or just mechanized fossils.” Max Weber’s prognosis at the end of his study of capitalism has become reality since the end of the First World War, when the spiritual march of progress parading through science and technology came to a halt. The “steel-hard shell” is called “doom” by Max Weber with noble intentions—a Gnostic hieroglyph, which can be deciphered in the different modes of attempted exodus out of the steel-hard shell.39
As Taubes is convinced, “The Gnostic hieroglyph of that epoch after the First World War up until the inheritance of that epoch, and the controversy about that inheritance, can be made clear” above all “in the argument about Marcion.” And: “Marcion marks the parting of the ways.”40 Taubes probably also thought of Carl Schmitt and Hans Blumenberg, with whose controversial relationship to Marcion I have dealt elsewhere.41 What follows is about Bloch, who understands his œuvre as a testimony to “revolutionary Gnosis”—“in the spirit of the arch-heretic Marcion, this most important interpreter of the Apostle Paul, whose ‘Gospel of the alien God’ like a revolutionary smashes the tablets of values so much that all church-Christians . . . would cross themselves before Marcion’s teaching if only they knew about him.”42 Up to this point I have considered Taubes; from now on I will directly follow Bloch (whom Taubes, following the early Walter Benjamin, deinterprets on a decisive point43).
Bloch’s Marcion argues that Paul, unlike he himself, did not “contradict Yahweh as the creator of the world, but instead as the law-giver. Paul [first] 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, 23944). 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.45 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.”46 This is not Bloch’s, but rather the formulation of the Marcion-scholar Harnack. But he does so in exactly the same sense as Bloch (perhaps inspired by him). 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”47 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 that it 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 toward the human. Toward 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,”48 a Blochian Marcion we are introduced to here. But this atheist philosopher, or rather this philosophical atheist, always thinks further than, but also 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 were 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.49
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 starting points for counting 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.
This kind of Christianity in revolutionary atheism, or rather this kind of atheism in revolutionary Christianity, is not for everyone—today less so than ever. That neither of the two—at least historically—is a chimera, one can already learn from Max Weber, Bloch’s teacher as well as his most decisive opponent. I would like to refer to Philippe Despoix’s magisterial essay “Poetic Prophecy and Polytheistic Narration,” in which—along with St. Paul, the synoptics, and Tolstoy—Nietzsche, Auerbach, and Taubes play a prominent role.
Despoix’s work on Max Weber’s implicit definition of the literary medium ends with the conviction: “Certainly the atheist Weber thought that the highest form of sociology is to say what the divine is in any given society.” Despoix here presumes a widely held belief, possibly also Auerbach’s own, that “‘literary’ media . . . bear the most visible traces of ‘the divine.’”50 This idea is connected to a complementary one, which Auerbach makes plausible: that it is above all in “the occident” that “divine” texts give us an idea of “literary” media; put in a Nietzschean way, that they give us an idea about their “genealogy.” All scholars that I mention and discuss, no matter which “discipline” they belong to, more or less connect the sociology of literature with the sociology of religion and so prove the heuristic fertility—if not necessity—of this connection: of what in 1989 I called with a neologism “the politology of religious literature.”51
And what about Karlheinz Barck, who is to be honored here via Auerbach? Drawing on Auerbach, Barck also engaged with Taubes’s theorem of “modern Marcionism,” and intervened specifically in the discussion provoked by Taubes, that philosopher of religion, about: “surrealism and Gnosis” instead of realism. I refer to my friend “Carlo” Barck’s contribution to the volume Abendländische Eschatologie: Ad Jacob Taubes, which I edited.52 Finally, I content myself with the following note: in 1929 Bloch had sympathetically talked about the “Thinking Surrealisms” of Walter Benjamin’s “One-Way Street.”53 With this he signified a corpus of texts that no doubt also contains “modern Marcionisms”—not in Taubes’s, but in Bloch’s sense.54 (In particular I’m thinking of texts such as “Fire Alarm.”55)
The last, if not the first, question to be answered is: “Where is the ‘modern Marcionism’ in Auerbach, the very one to be honored here?” But is this question not reduced to absurdity by the question with which Auerbach closed his 1933 essay “Romanticism and Realism”: “ . . . how could the order and truth of what is real possibly be imagined without seeing God in it?” One has to put this question in context:
Once, long before the Romantic era, a tragic realism already existed, which regarded our disordered world as the true reality, so that it was ordered. I mean the tragic realism of the Middle Ages and its source, the story of Christ. In contrast to antiquity, it is the most radical destruction of the principle of stylistic separation, and altogether the most radical realization of tragic realism; it developed out of God’s giving himself to worldly reality. The reality of our world today has changed so much that simply reaching back would make no sense. But how could the order and truth of what is real possibly be imagined without seeing God in it?56
No doubt, merely reaching back to the Middle Ages or (early) Christian antiquity and its characteristic incarnational faith in God seems to “make no sense” to Auerbach. But then how could the thought of God which he held in principle be any other than the thought of an alien “God,” one who is yet to come, redeeming or precisely newly creating and ordering? We may additionally look at his essay “Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal and the Sublime” (1951), which is mentioned neither by Barck nor by Taubes. It explicitly declares this emphatically modern lyric poet to be the bridge-builder between realism and surrealism, despite the fact that he is imputed to display a “mixed level of styles,” and that here, Russian realism is also recalled: “The human figure appearing in them [the Fleurs du Mal] is as important as is the figure of Ivan Karamasov, whether it be for the destruction or the transformation of the European tradition.”57
Even Harnack is indirectly mentioned again when Auerbach talks about the enormous “swing of the pendulum,” specifically of the Fleurs du Mal.58 After all, several pages earlier it reads:
• the only time when Christ appears in the text, he is “played off against God”;59
• Baudelaire’s hope was not “for redemption by God’s grace, but the ‘absolute Elsewhere.’”
And—irony of ironies—this hope for a “way out” out of the “dungeon” of the world was “bitterly” hopeless. Auerbach consistently calls the Fleurs du Mal “a work of despair.”60
I shall explain this much more Adornian than Blochian Marcionism by recurring to Baudelaire’s, Adorno’s, and others’ work on the myth of “Tasso.”61 The mature Goethe passed this judgment on Lord Byron: “He was so very dark about himself. He always passionately lived a life of leisure, and never knew or considered what he was doing. Taking the liberty to do everything, but never approving of anything in others, he was bound to fall out with himself and instigate the world against himself. . . . Everywhere was too narrow for him, and in the most uninhibited personal freedom he felt anxious. The world was like a prison to him.”62
These remarks may appear as a “counter-song to Alfonso’s characterization of Tasso” in Goethe’s Tasso;63 I list the well-known keywords: darkness about oneself, passion, the liberty to do everything, and “instigating the world against oneself.” Definitive doom and especially the prison of the world is only the case in Byron’s Tasso and—besides Byron himself—the Tasso of Delacroix and Baudelaire, inspired by Byron. In “The Lament of Tasso,” as its title suggests, the Englishman was the first to make the prison the (only) setting of Tasso’s tragedy.
The “Lament” begins with the display of the mental, spiritual, and physical decay wrought by many years of life in a dark, musty prison cell with scarce, bland food. It evokes the screams of the tormented and tortured insane, crammed together in the rooms above Tasso. We are reminded of Tasso’s passionate and doomed love for Eleonora d’Este. Yet in their repetition and increasing intensity Tasso’s lamentations are more than a description of his conditions. The dungeon becomes the image for the narrowness of existence, the world as a whole.64
With all this, Byron inspired Baudelaire (via Delacroix), but not with his own aesthetic hope for the power of beauty and poetry. Throughout, “The Lament of Tasso” is accompanied by a hymn to poetic beauty, so that melancholy is sublated into aesthetic transcendence. In both the idea and affect of melancholy Byron remains congruent with Baudelaire. Passion and melancholy, despair and rebellion are “Byronesque” themes also characteristic of the Fleurs du Mal. But hope is excluded from them. Poetry as a way of rescue, of overcoming melancholy, is no longer mentioned in Baudelaire:65
The poet in prison, unkempt and sick,
With convulsed foot crushes a manuscript,
His eyes seize, with terror shot through,
The stairs for his soul, descent to vertigo.
The frenzied laughter filling the prison
To the Strange and Absurd invite his reason;
Doubt surrounds him, and Fear is mocking,
Hideous, multiform, into circles they lock him.
This spirit trapped in an unhealthy hole
These grimaces, cries, the swarm of spectres
Whirling, a swirling pack behind his ear,
This dreamer, in his quarters roused by horror,
Now here is your image, O spirit entangled,
By Reality’s walls suffocated and mangled.66
Baudelaire’s Tasso is definitively suffocated, and he is so without any poetic transcendence, however sublimated it may be. From the very beginning his defense against what is threatening him is futile; his paralysis rushes unstoppably towards death. The threat is the same reality to which Baudelaire the author is also subject; despite all stylization,67 his “Tasso in prison” is a self-portrait: Baudelaire’s “Mon cœur mis à nu” is a self-portrait and hence explicitly a heart exposing itself, as Goethe’s friend Carl Friedrich Zelter condemned it in the example of Beethoven & Co.68 Nevertheless, one could at first hold the opinion that Baudelaire’s expressionism merely pushes to the extreme what can in nuce be found already in Goethe’s Tasso, especially in the verses “Though in their mortal anguish men are dumb / To me a God hath given to tell my grief”:69
In gloomy vaults of inscrutable sadness,
Where hostile Fate already cast me,
Where no beam ever enters, bright and rosy,
Where I’m alone with Night, a sullen hostess,
I’m like a painter; the mocking God—alas! to art
Condemns me, to brush-strokes into darkness;
Where, a cook of appetites macabre,
I boil and eat my heart.70
But after these stanzas, arguing that Goethe’s Tasso is pushed to the extreme would be much too straightforward: the person lamenting here is “doomed” to paint by a “god” inclined to malicious jokes. The god has turned the painting poet into a cannibal of himself: he boils and ingests his own heart.
It is well known that Baudelaire was convinced hell was “here”;71 this is consistent only for someone who is a Marcionite such as himself, one who thought that the world was a prison created by an evil creator. Regarding the political aspect of Baudelaire’s gnosis, I will confine myself to the well-known works of the “modern Marcionite” Benjamin,72 and now turn to Adorno. Adorno was equally interested in Marcion’s “denunciation of the creator god.”73 “If at the centre of the Meditations on Metaphysics stands the question ‘Can one live after Auschwitz?’ (GS 6, p. 355),” remarked Adorno’s editor Rolf Tiedemann on this passage from a letter, “then the connection with Marcion’s accusation of the malicious god is obvious enough.”74
Auschwitz and its consequences: this is also Auerbach’s, Bloch’s, and Taubes’s topic, whether explicitly or implicitly.75 However, Adorno was fundamentally steeped in it: “The need to give suffering a voice is the condition of all truth. For suffering is an objectivity burdening the subject; what the subject experiences as its most intensely subjective, its expression, is objectively mediated.” This is certainly the case; but for the sake of reference to Tasso, we will emphasize the subjective side, citing Adorno’s formulation of the “expressive urge of the subject.” It is followed by the “freedom of philosophy,” which now consists no more than in “helping it express its very lack of freedom.”
Could one say, as Hans Kudzus supposed, that “the ability to think the disaster” was for Adorno “the most subtle joy of thinking”?76 No doubt Adorno has posed the rhetorical question: “Is being capable of suffering not the only guarantor of happiness?” Yet he immediately added that “this can be no maxim.”77 Nevertheless, the reformulation of suffering and the restitution of the capacity to suffer is the force of resistance that Adorno’s Critical Theory in general, and his Aesthetic Theory in particular, are meant to convey. The reason: “The potential of a positive is contained in the negation of the negation, that is, in itself a state of negativity, of suffering.”78 Art as much as philosophy—the two repeatedly go together for Adorno79—is defined as the “awareness of sorrow.” As long as there is such an awareness, neither philosophy nor art could come to an end, since suffering finds its voice only in them: “the consolation that does not betray [suffering] right away.” The greatest artists of the epoch had abided by this principle: “The uncompromising radicalism of their works, and especially the moments chided as formalistic, gives them this terrible force that is lacking in helpless poems dedicated to the victims.”80
Adorno argues like no other in this section surrounding his dictum: “to write poetry after Auschwitz would be barbaric.”81 This is by no means forgotten when I now turn to music: Thomas Mann’s novel Dr. Faustus about a composer, partly inspired by Adorno—primarily for the sake of the demand for consolation that does not betray the suffering. The recurrenceto “Serenus Zeitblom’s” final interpretation of “Doctor Faust’s Lament” allows us to comprehend what has become of the musical lament beyond Goethe/Zelter and Beethoven82—what had to, or rather should become of it in Adorno’s and Thomas Mann’s view.
The orchestral final movement of Adrian Leverkühn’s testamentary lament sounds
like God lamenting the loss of his world, like the creator’s woeful “I did not want it” . . . Here, towards the end, the most extreme pitches of mourning are reached, despair has become an expression, and . . . it would be to damage the uncompromising nature of the work, its incurable pain, if one were to say: up until the last note there is another consolation but the expression itself, becoming audible—the consolation that the creature is given a voice for its suffering at all. No, until the end, this musical poem does not allow for any consolation, reconciliation, transfiguration. But what if the artistic paradox, that expression—expression as lament—is born out of a total construction, was akin to the religious paradox: that in the deepest hopelessness lies the seed of hope, if only as the most tender question? It would be hope beyond hope, the transcendence of despair—not its betrayal, but the miracle beyond belief. Just listen to the end, listen to it with me: one group of instruments after the other falls silent, and what remains is the high G of a cello, the last word, the last lingering note, slowly fading away in pianissimo-fermata. And then there is nothing—silence and night. But the note remains vibrating in the silence, the note that is no more, that only the soul can hear, the dying fall of lament, it is this no more; it changes its meaning, and stands like a light in the dark.83
A lot in this passage is Adornian: the Marcionite beginning, the generally negative theological approach, and finally the “hope against all hope.”84 Above all, this last lays the trace back to Goethe, though the Goethe critically rescued by Benjamin. Zeitblom’s final words—“the note remains vibrating in the silence . . . and stands like a light in the dark”—almost reads like a Goethe quote from Benjamin’s essay “Elective Affinities,” which was central for him: “Like a star falling from the sky, hope shot across their heads.” The “Elective Affinities” essay ropes it in against Goethe, and concludes: “Hope is only given to us for the hopeless’ sake.”85 With Zeitblom’s final sentence in mind, one should cite the following from Adorno: “As long as the world is what it is, all images of reconciliation, peace, and quiet resemble the image of death. The refuge of hope would be the minute difference between Nothing and the one finding rest, a no-man’s-land between the boundaries of Being and Nothing.”86
This passage from Adorno may be found in the following context:
[Samuel] Beckett alone reacted appropriately to the concentration camps—which he never mentions, as if the prohibition against idolatry hung over it. Whatever is, may it be as the concentration camp was. Once he talks about a lifelong death sentence. The only hope is that nothing would exist any longer. But he dismisses even that. From this fissure of inconsistency the imagery of nothingness emerges as a something, which his poetry records. But in these leftovers of a plot, the appearance of stoically carrying on, there is a silent scream: it should all be different. Such nihilism implies the very opposite of an identification with nothingness. In a Gnostic way it understands the created world as radically evil, and its negation harbors the possibility of a different world, one that does not yet exist. As long as the world is what it is, all images of reconciliation, peace, and quiet resemble the image of death. The refuge of hope would be the minute difference between nothing and the one finding rest, a no-man’s-land between the boundaries of Being and Nothing.87
In this passage from Negative Dialectics, Adorno again presents a Marcionite argument, i.e., a theological, though heterodox, argument; it begins with Auschwitz and is oriented towards Auschwitz. As Adorno interprets Beckett’s screaming silence on the concentration camps as obedience to the biblical commandment against idols, Auschwitz becomes the true place of God, and so God becomes untrue: the created world is “radically evil,” but its negation is “the possibility of a different world, one that does not yet exist.”—“Perhaps the more profound reason for what I have tried to describe as the constituent negativity of the new art is that, unlike horror or absolute negativity, the artwork’s motif of ‘what has not yet been’ cannot be experienced; it is a utopia, beyond experience, it is nothing. In Beckett all these motifs culminate.”88
This passage from the Lectures also had to be cited, because a question from the audience was the occasion for Adorno to clarify his definition of the relationship between modern art and negative theology in terms of the philosophy of history:
The place of theological imagination in history is strangely reversed. Once, the Enlightenment wanted to critique religion and art, because religion was merely the horrific fear of fate. Today, art is equally an expression of fear, in the same way myths used to be, but this fear is of the opposite kind. It is a fear of the absence of a metaphysical essence, the expression of a horror vacui. This reversal, this metaphysical experience, which is inseparable from inner-worldly, historical experience, marks the decisive turning point in modern art.89
After that Adorno ontologically sharpens his sociological thesis that “this metaphysical experience . . . is inseparable from inner-worldly, historical experience”: “Today, even the claim that the world could be conceived as meaningful is pure mockery. In this sense, I understand . . . what has happened as a factum of all-decisive importance. This world now makes a fool of any art that attempts to portray it in a meaningful way. The claim that we live in a meaningful world is no more than an apologetic, defensive reflex. This moment of a lie is deeply engrained in art, and the present crisis of art only sues for a debt which art has shouldered from its very inception.”90
For our context, the metaphysical quality of the “factum” Auschwitz is decisive. That this ontic being—as Günther Anders has said about the factum “Hiroshima”91—has become ontological is the ‘a postiori’ of the ‘a priori.’92 Only by starting from this a posteriori, one can understand Adorno’s famous dictum that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” He never wanted to “tone it down.” As he writes, “The impulse, which [in principle correctly so] inspires socially engaged poetry, is negatively expressed in this way. The question . . . whether art is still permitted at all; whether mental regression as part of the concept of socially engaged literature is not mandated by society’s own regression. But [Martin] Enzensberger’s reply also holds true,” as Adorno is convinced, “which is that poetry has to bear this verdict; that is, it should not surrender itself to cynicism merely by virtue of its own existence after Auschwitz. Its own situation is paradox, not only our reaction to it. The excess of real suffering permits no forgetting; Pascal’s theological words ‘On ne doit plus dormir’ must be secularized. But that suffering, in Hegel’s words ‘the awareness of sorrow,’ also captures the continued existence of art, which it prohibits.”93 It is the continued existence of an art which—in contrast to “socially committed” art—gains “social content” not “in a literal sense . . . but in a modified, cropped, ephemeral sense”;94 and as such it is authentic.
Adorno openly pledged himself to hermetic art. So it is even more regrettable that his essay on Paul Celan was never written. From early on, Celan was convinced: “In the midst of all losses, this one thing remains within reach, close at hand, and never lost: language. Yes, despite everything, language remains and is never lost. But now it had to go through its own failure to give answers, had to go through a horrific silence, had to go through the thousand darknesses of death-harboring speech.”95 Peter Szondi then seconded his friend Celan with a sentence dialectically appropriating Adorno: “After Auschwitz no poem is possible, unless it is because of Auschwitz.”96 It is the Auschwitz that, according to Dan Diner, represents “the real crucifixion.”97
This “crucifixion,” which infinitely surpasses that of Jesus of Nazareth, led to such a simplification of style—for example in Beckett—that humilitas, more than ever, turned into sublimitas, even into hermeticism and enigmatism. (It would be most interesting to read Auerbach drawing the line from Virginia Woolf and James Joyce to Beckett, and others.98 It is quite likely he would have drawn attention to Beckett’s inheritance of the medieval mystery plays, especially the passion plays.99 Regarding Waiting for Godot, would he have drawn attention to Beckett’s negative, or rather desperate Marcionism, waiting in vain for an [alien] god yet to come? We will never know . . .
1. Translators’ note: Gorky’s original title is Na dne—On the Ground. Translated as The Lower Depths in English, it was rendered in German as Das Nachtasyl [The Night Asylum], the title Harnack and Faber use.
2. Adolf von Harnack, Marcion, Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott: Eine Monographie zur Geschichte der Grundlegung der katholischen Kirche (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1996), 232.
3. Cf. Erich Auerbach, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur romanischen Philologie (Bern: Francke, 1967), 65ff.; concerning Harnack in general, see at least Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur, 4th ed. (Bern: Francke, 1967), 45; in the following, “M” will stand for Mimesis.
4. With the following words Bloch dedicated a copy of the 2nd edition of 1923 to the couple Erich and Marie Auerbach: “This book . . . for Erich and Marie Auerbach with warm affection as a little wedding torch./ Berlin, 11.6.1923 Ernst Bloch.” Cf. Erich Auerbachs Briefe an Martin Hellweg (1939–1950). Edition und historisch-philologischer Kommentar, edited by Martin Vialon (Tübingen/Basel: Francke, 1997), 122.
5. Cf. Jacob Taubes, “Walter Benjamin—ein moderner Marcionit? Scholems Benjamin-Interpretation religionsgeschichtlich überprüft,” in Antike und Moderne: Zu Walter Benjamins “Passagen,” edited by Norbert W. Bolz and Richard Faber (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1986), 138–53. Whether Taubes knew the titles: Adolf von Harnack, Marcion. Der moderne Gläubige des 2. Jahrhunderts, der erste Reformator. Die Dorpater Preisschrift (1870), and Harnack, [speech manuscript of the lecture] Marcion: Der radikale Modernist des 2. Jahrhunderts (1923), is relatively unimportant, because Taubes’s modernity signifies that of the twentieth century, so a (once again) modernized Marcion(ism). (It is impossible that Taubes knew the texts themselves; both were first edited in 2003 by Friedemann Steck in Berlin/New York [de Gruyter].)
6. Ulrich Raulff, “Die Auserwählten,” Süddeutsche Zeitung (8 Jan 2004), 11.
7. *Translators’ note: Stefan George (1868–1933). For George’s “afterlife” in post-war West Germany see also Ulrich Raulff, Kreis ohne Meister (Munich: Dt. Taschenbuch Verlag, 2009), and Richard Faber, “Aus Anlass von Ulrich Raulff’s Buchpublikation ‘Kreis ohne Meister. Stefan Georges Nachleben’ (2010),” in A propos: kulturwissenschaftliche Miszellen von und für Richard Faber, edited by Christine Holste and Barbara von Reibnitz (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2013), 150–154.
8. Even Peter Sloterdijk’s much later eugenic fantasies of breeding humans are criticized in advance; cf. “J. Taubes im Gespräch mit W. von Rahden und N. Kapferer. Elite oder Avantgarde?,” in Tumult: Zeitschrift für Verkehrswissenschaft 4 (1982), 75–76.
9. Ibid., 72, 74.
10. Ibid., 71.
11. *Translators’ note: es geht an alle refers to an act of addressing, as in a letter delivered to everybody. At the same time, es geht alle an means “it concerns everybody.” Taubes’s punctuation plays with both meanings.
12. Ibid., 71–72.
13. On the different characteristics of Petronian and New Testament ‘vulgarisms,’ see more extensively Erich Auerbach, Literatursprache und Publikum in der lateinischen Spätantike und im Mittelalter [Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages] (Bern: Francke, 1958), 46–48.
14. *Translators’ note: Faber creates an adverbial cluster here: noch oder gerade, “still or precisely,” whereby “still” indicates the imminent waning of the elites.
15. Jacob Taubes, “Die Rechtfertigung des Häßlichen in urchristlicher Tradition,” in Die nicht mehr schönen Künste: Grenzphänomene des Ästhetischen [The Not So Fine Arts Anymore: Borderline Phenomena of the Aesthetic], edited by Hans Robert Jauß (Munich: Fink, 1983), 169. Taubes may well have taken ‘christological history of literature’ from: Helmut Kuhn, ‘Literaturgeschichte als Geschichtsphilosophie’ [The History of Literature as Philosophy of History], Philosophische Rundschau 11 (1963), 248. But no doubt Taubes remodels Kuhn; the conservative-Catholic philosopher denies that Auerbach’s “Christology” is orthodox, so that it is one only seemingly “pseudo-Christology”; whereas Taubes as a sympathizer of (Marcionite) “heresy” needs to have no qualms about Auerbach’s ‘christological history of literature.’ In all likelihood he even felt indirectly confirmed by Kuhn’s critique of Auerbach.
16. Taubes, “Die Rechtfertigung des Häßlichen,” 169.
17. Auerbach Literatursprache und Publikum in der lateinischen Spätantike und im Mittelalter, 20ff.
18. I am not exaggerating, but leaving aside the anecdotal: Taubes regarded Auerbach’s “Interpretation of a few sections” (M, 509), published under the title Mimesis, as a legitimate Bible commentary and—of course above all—as a masterly interpretation of the not illegitimate continuations of Bible writing in the more profane and in that regard also more realistic context of ‘occidental’ literature. (On the wider context of “Bibel und Literatur” [Bible and Literature] see, e.g., the volume of collected essays of the same name, edited by Jürgen Ebach and myself in Munich: Fink, 1995.)
Auerbach’s approach to biblical literary scholarship (M, 315, 316 and 516) is of general cultural-historical and cultural-theoretical relevance, particularly in the German-speaking world, which was hellenocentric and even philhellenic (and romanophile) up until the 1970s. It is just as remarkable today that Auerbach did not fall into the other, ‘pan-Judaist’ extreme. Auerbach recognizes and acknowledges the whole ‘méditerranée’ as the origin of the ‘occident’ (M, 9, 13, 27, 76–77, 515; cf. also Literatursprache und Publikum, 66 and 259 and Gesammelte Aufsätze, 117); with this he anticipates a view that has gained acceptance in the latest New Pauly and hence in Classical philological quarters. (Cf. Hubert Cancik, “Altertum und Antikerezeption im Spiegel der Geschichte der Realencyclopädie (1839–1993),” in Cancik, Antik, Modern: Beiträge zur römischen und deutschen Kulturgeschichte (Stuttgart; Weimar: Metzler, 1998), 12–15. One should by no means overlook the fact that as a biblical scholar, which he is just as much as he is a classical philologist, Cancik makes different emphases than does Auerbach, specifically regarding the synoptics; cf. Cancik, “Die Gattung Evangelium. Das Evangelium des Markus im Rahmen der antiken Historiographie” [The Genre of Gospel: The Gospel of Mark in the Context of Ancient Historiography], Humanistische Bildung 4 (1981), 63–101, and Cancik, “Die Berufung des Johannes. Prophetische Tradition des Alten in der Geschichtsschreibung des Neuen Testaments” [Prophetic Tradition of the Old in the Writing of History in the New Testament], Der Altsprachliche Unterricht 25.2 (1982), 45–62.)
Regarding the inner-Jewish, it is noteworthy that Auerbach also acknowledges the New Testament and quite naturally integrates it into an all-biblical canon, even though he understands ‘canon’ as only socio-cultural; this is in complete contrast to e.g., Hermann Cohen and Gershom Sholem, but once again in accordance with Bloch, Taubes, and also Buber and Benjamin. (Cf. Ernst Bloch, Atheismus im Christentum. Zur Religion des Exodus und des Reichs [Frankfurt: 1968], as well as Jacob Taubes, “Walter Benjamin—ein moderner Marcionit?” [Walter Benjamin—A modern Marcionite?]; concerning Benjamin, see also Richard Faber, “Walter Benjamin und das ‘Vater unser’—mehr als eine historisch-philologische Glosse” [Walter Benjamin and the Lord’s Prayer—More than a Historical-Philological Commentary], Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 51 [1999] 70–74.)
19. Cf. Richard Faber, “Sermo humilis: Erzählung, Moral und Rhetorik Johann Peter Hebels,” in Spiegel und Gleichnis: Festschrift für Jacob Taubes, edited by Norbert W. Bolz and W. Hübener (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1983), 205–32, and Faber, “Sagen lassen sich die Menschen nichts, aber erzählen lassen sie sich alles.” [People won’t let anyone have any say over them, but you can tell them anything.] Über Grimm-Hebelsche Erzählung, Moral und Utopie in Benjaminscher Perspektive (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002), especially chapters 1, 4, and 5. Already in 1948 Gerhard Hess identified Hebel as a very special “candidate” for Auerbach’s Mimesis (“Zu Erich Auerbachs Geschichte des abendländischen Realismus,” Romanische Forschungen 61 [1948] 192–93).
20. Taubes, “Die Rechtfertigung des Häßlichen,” 169; Taubes relies on Auerbach, Literatursprache und Publikum, 22.
21. Cf. also Auerbach, Literatursprache und Publikum, 53.
22. This making-possible, like modern realism itself, is not my topic, but I venture to make a reference to: M, 34–35, 236–37, 246, 291, and 515.
23. On the gigantic role that Paul played for Taubes—up to the point of self-identification—informs us best, in all brevity: Christoph Schulte, “Paulus,” in Abendländische Eschatologie. Ad Jacob Taubes, edited by Richard Faber et al. (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2001), 93–103. (Of course Schulte also takes into account Taubes’s “Paulus”-lectures included in his will and coedited by him, Die Politische Theologie des Paulus [Munich: Fink, 1993].) Of decisive importance here is that Taubes always includes Marcion when he mentions Paul. In fact, quite frequently “the Apostle” Paul is merely a code name for “the heretic” Marcion.
24. Taubes, “Die Rechtfertigung des Häßlichen,” 184.
25. [Faber’s insertion]
26. “J. Taubes im Gespräch mit W. v. Rahden und N. Kapferer,” 71.
27. Taubes, “Die Rechtfertigung des Häßlichen,” 174; cf. also Taubes, “Die Entstehung des jüdischen Pariavolkes: Ideologiekritische Noten zu Max Webers ‘Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie,’ vol. III, ‘Das antike Judentum,’” in Max Weber-Gedächtnisschrift der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München zum 100. Geburtstag 1964, edited by Karl Engisch et al. (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1966), 185–94.
28. Taubes, “Die Rechtfertigung des Häßlichen,” 170.
29. In Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt [Dante as a Poet of the Temporal World] (Leipzig: de Gruyter, 1928), 20, Auerbach refers explicitly to Adolf von Harnack, “Die Verklärungsgeschichte Jesu, der Bericht des Paulus I Kor. 15,3ff. und die beiden Christusvisionen des Petrus,” in Sitzber. Preuß. Ak. Wiss. Phil. Hist. Kl. 1922. (Cf. also p. 25 n. 11, where Auerbach refers to a study of Augustine by Harnack.)
30. Cf. also E. Auerbach, Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt, 19, where it says: Jesus “unleashed a movement in Jerusalem which necessarily could not remain purely spiritual.”
31. *Translators’ note: Faber alludes to the Franciscan Spirituals and Joachimites mentioned next.
32. Concerning Bloch, I refer to his “Zur Originalgeschichte des Dritten Reiches” [On the Original History of the Third Reich] in: Ernst Bloch, Erbschaft dieser Zeit [Inheritance of Our Time] (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973), 126–52. Besides the chapters on Joachim of Fiore in Taubes’s Abendländische Eschatologie [Occidental Eschatology] (Munich: Matthes und Seitz, 1991, 77ff., 90f., and 98ff.), see his “Die Intellektuellen und die Universität,” in: Taubes, Vom Kult zur Kultur. Bausteine zu einer Kritik der historischen Vernunft [From Cult to Culture: Building Blocks for a Critique of Historical Reason] (Munich: Fink, 1996), 319ff. Among new works on Joachim is to be mentioned that of Matthias Riedl, Joachim von Fiore. Denker der vollendeten Menschheit [Joachim of Fiore: Thinker of the Perfected Humanity] (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2004). Riedl (harshly) criticizes Bloch and Taubes on details, but on essential points also agrees with them; cf. above all 235–41, 245, 251, 257, 260–70, 283–84, 291, 294–97, 307–8, 321, 330, 337–41.
33. Cf. also Auerbach, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur romanischen Philologie, 33ff. and 43ff.
34. Cf. also Jürgen Link and Ursula Link-Heer, who relativize Auerbach: “Karwoche oder Karneval? Auerbach und Bachtin über literarische Realistik,” in Poetologische Umbrüche. Romanistische Studien zu Ehren von Ulrich Schulz-Buschhaus, edited by Werner Helmich et al. (Munich: Fink, 2002), 405–27.
35. Conversely and congruently it says in the Dante-book of 1928: “The depth and extent of naturalism in the story of Christ is unique.” One page later he talks about “the mimetic potential of the story of Christ” as such (22–23). This formulation leaves no doubt about the Dante-book’s fundamental importance for the Mimesis-book.
36. Concerning the imminent catastrophes which have by now long occurred, one should by all means associate here the sentence with which Auerbach’s “Epilegomena to Mimesis” ends: “Mimesis quite consciously is a book written by a particular person, in a particular situation, at the beginning of the 1940s” (Romanische Forschungen 65 (1953), 18)—at the height of the “catastrophes.”
37. Cf. Edith Hanke, Prophet des Unmodernen: Leo N. Tolstoi als Kulturkritiker in der deutschen Diskussion der Jahrhundertwende (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993), esp. Part 2, Chapter III, 168–208.
38. Concerning the great proximity between Weber and Nietzsche in Taubes’s view, cf. Andreas Urs Sommer, “‘Pathos der Revolution’ im ‘stahlharten Gehäuse’ des ‘Verhängnisses.’ Marginalien zum Thema ‘Max Weber bei Jacob Taubes,’” in Abendländische Eschatologie, edited by Faber et al., 365–71.
39. Cf. Jacob Taubes, “Das stählerne Gehäuse und der Exodus daraus oder ein Streit um Marcion, einst und heute,” in Gnosis und Politik, edited by Jacob Taubes (Munich: Fink, 1984), 10.
40. Ibid., 11.
41. Cf. Richard Faber, Der Prometheus-Komplex: Zur Kritik der Politotheologie Eric Voegelins und Hans Blumenbergs (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1984), Part B.; below as Excursus I.
42. Taubes, “Walter Benjamin—ein moderner Marcionit?,” 139.
43. Cf. ibid.
44. “A” here and in the following stands for: Ernst Bloch, Atheismus im Christentum: Zur Religion des Exodus und des Reichs [Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom] (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968).
45. Cf. Carsten Colpe, “‘Das eschatologische Widerlager der Politik.’ Zu Jacob Taubes’s Gnosisbild,” in Abendländische Eschatologie, edited by Faber et al., 124.
46. Harnack, Marcion, 225.
47. Cf. Taubes, “Das stählerne Gehäuse und der Exodus daraus,” 11.
48. Once again I refer to Taubes, “Walter Benjamin—ein moderner Marcionit?”
49. Harnack, Marcion, 232.
50. Philippe Despoix, “Dichterische Prophetie und polytheistisches Erzählen. Zu Max Webers impliziter Bestimmung des literarischen Mediums,” in Kunst und Religion. Studien zur Kultursoziologie und Kulturgeschichte, edited by Richard Faber and Volker Krech (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1999), 97.
51. [Religionsliteraturpolitologie.] Cf. Faber, Erbschaft jener Zeit. Zu Ernst Bloch und Hermann Broch (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1989), 9.
52. Karlheinz Barck, “Jacob Taubes und der Surrealismus,” in Abendländische Eschatologie, edited by Faber et al., 311–18.
53. Ernst Bloch, Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1973), 367ff.
54. One should never forget the dedication of this book: “This street is called ASYA-LACIS-STREET after the [militant Marxist, R.F.] engineer who broke it open in the author” (Walter Benjamin, Einbahnstraße [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969] 5) Moreover, by now one should emphatically refer to Erdmut Wizisla, Benjamin und Brecht. Die Geschichte einer Freundschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004).
55. Cf. Benjamin, Einbahnstraße, 76–77; regarding the later Benjamin, one should above all refer to the XV. of his theses “On the Concept of History.”
56. Erich Auerbach, “Romantik und Realismus,” Neue Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft und Jugendbildung 9 (1933), 153; emphasis added.
57. Erich Auerbach, Gesammelte Aufsätze, 277–79 and 290.
58. Ibid., 289.
59. Ibid., 285.
60. Ibid., 285–88.
61. More extensively: Richard Faber, Der Tasso-Mythos. Eine Goethe-Kritik [The Myth of Tasso: A Critique of Goethe] (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1999); what follows is largely identical with 374–80 of that book.
62. Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, 1823–1832. vol. 1, Berlin (without year), 150.
63. Cf. Maria Moog-Grünwald, “Tassos Leid. Zum Ursprung moderner Dichtung” [The Pains of Tasso. On the Origin of Modern Poetry], Arcadia 21 (1986), 113–28, 117.
64. Cf. ibid., 119.
65. Cf. ibid., 123.
66. *Translators’ own version of Charles Baudelaire, Sur Le Tasse en prison d’Eugène Delacroix, in Les Fleurs du Mal (1868); Faber cites Baudelaire, Die Blumen des Bösen, trans. by Therese Robinson, edited by Fr. Blei (Dreieich: Melzer, 1981), 162.
67. Tobias Bube kindly directed me to the section in Mimesis where Auerbach connects Baudelaire with the Goncourts (M, 464), though without identifying Baudelaire with their aestheticism of the “ugly, repulsive, and morbid.” On decisive matters Baudelaire is closer to Zola than to the Goncourts. With this he also demonstrates that he is an heir of a Romanticism that never simply resisted Realism. (I refer again to Auerbach’s 1933 essay “Romantik und Realismus.”)
68. Goethe-Zelter, Briefwechsel (Zürich: Artemis Verlag, 1987), 64–65.
69. *Translators’ note: “Und wenn der Mensch in seiner Qual verstummt/Gab mir ein Gott zu sagen wie ich leide” (Tasso V.5). English in: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Torquato Tasso, transl. Goethe’s Works, vol. 3 (Philadelphia: G. Barrie, 1885). Faber cites: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sämtliche Werke. Artemis Gedenkausgabe. dtv–Dünndruck (Munich, 1977), vol. 6, 313.
70. Charles Baudelaire, “Un Fantôme. I. Les Ténèbres,” in Les Fleurs du Mal (1868); Die Blumen des Bösen, 60.
71. Cf. Walter Benjamin, Illuminationen: Ausgewählte Schriften, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969), 260.
72. Additionally, see Wolfgang Fietkau, Schwanengesang auf 1848. Ein Rendezvous am Louvre: Baudelaire, Marx, Proudhon und Victor Hugo (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978).
73. Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysik Begriff und Probleme (1965), edited by Rolf Tiedemann, (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998), 235.
74. Ibid.
75. Concerning Auerbach, I would like to recall once again his “Epilegomena zu Mimesis,” and additionally Earl Jeffrey Richards, “Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis as a Meditation on the Shoa,” German Politics and Society XIX, 59 (Summer 2001), 62–91. Concerning Bloch, I refer to Atheism in Christianity, 319ff., and in the case of Taubes once again Christoph Schulte’s contribution to the collection Abendländische Eschatologie is to be consulted.
76. Hans Kudszus, “Die Kunst versöhnt mit der Welt,” in Über Theodor W. Adorno (Frankfurt: 1969), 34.
77. Theodor W. Adorno, Vorlesungen zur Ästhetik 1967–1968 (Zürich: H. Mayer Nachfahren, 1973), XI, or rather, 20.
78. Ibid., 20.
79. Cf. also Adorno, Metaphysik, 218.
80. Theodor W. Adorno, Noten zur Literatur III (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969), 125–26.
81. Ibid.; cf. also Adorno, Metaphysik, 172–74.
82. Cf. Faber, Der Tasso-Mythos, 373–74.
83. Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1967), 650–51.
84. Cf. also Thomas Macho, “Hermeneutik der Tränen. Notizen zu Hans Blumenberg’s ‘Matthäuspassion,’” Neue Rundschau 109 (1998), 61–77, especially 66.
85. Walter Benjamin, “Goethes Wahlverwandschaften,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), 201.
86. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, 372.
87. Ibid., 371–72; recently to be mentioned: Pierre Temkine, Warten auf Godot. Das Absurde und die Geschichte (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2008).
88. Adorno, Vorlesungen zur Ästhetik, 73; Adorno’s numerous Beckett studies and preparatory notes are collated in the Frankfurter Adorno Blätter III, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, Theodor W. Adorno Archiv (Frankfurt: edition text + kritik, 1994).
89. Adorno, Vorlesungen zur Ästhetik, 74.
90. Ibid., 74, 76.
91. Günther Anders, Die atomare Bedrohung. Radikale Überlegungen, 2nd ed. (Munich: Beck, 1981), 173ff.
92. Regarding Auschwitz, cf. also Th. W. Adorno, Metaphysik, 160ff., 181ff., and 194ff.
93. Adorno, Noten zur Literatur III, 125–26.
94. Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973), 459.
95. Paul Celan, “Ansprache anläßlich der Entgegennahme des Literaturpreises der Freien Hansestadt Bremen” (26 January 1958), in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 3 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), 185–86.
96. Peter Szondi, Schriften II (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978), 384.
97. Dan Diner, “Negative Symbiose. Deutsche und Juden nach Auschwitz,” Babylon: Beiträge zur jüdischen Gegenwart 1 (1986), 15.
98. Regarding interpretations of Beckett by Günther Anders, mentioned above, see Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, vol. 1 (Munich: Beck, 1980), 216ff., and also Faber, “Sagen lassen sich die Menschen nichts, aber erzählen lassen sie sich alles,” Conclusion (119ff.). For “post-surrealism’s,” especially Antoine Artaud’s relationship to gnosis, I refer (as did Karlheinz Barck) to an essay by Taubes’s student Susan Sontag, “Annäherung an Artaud,” in Sontag, Im Zeichen des Saturn. Essays (Munich: Hanser, 1981), 41–93. [“Approaching Artaud,” The New Yorker, May 19, 1973, 39ff.]
99. I’m grateful to Gerd Poppenberg for pointing out this “inheritance” to me.