In the beginning, God created heaven and earth. That is how the Bible begins, and that is what everyone whose faith is determined by the Bible believes to believe.
To believe is not to know, but it is not sheer ignorance either. At least it appears that both faith and knowledge are focused on the same question: What was at the beginning? How was the beginning? Does it make sense to ‘think’ about the beginning in this or that way and to infer something from it?
Those who ‘hold on to’ the first sentence of the Bible think they possess something other than a proposition about how the world ‘emerged.’ It did not emerge, it was created, and the creator was called ‘God.’ Nothing seems to cut deeper into mind and spirit than this hiatus between ‘creation’ and ‘emergence.’ But what does it consist in? Do we even know what we are talking about when faced with this alternative, which might well be that of an ‘absolute fundamentalism’? Do we know what we inflict upon ourselves when we choose this or that ‘answer’ to the question of beginning?
What is meant by the phrase ‘God created’? For those with a wider historical horizon, it is remarkable that this part of the first sentence of the Bible is increasingly difficult to understand, whereas the temporal determination ‘in the beginning,’ which only a few centuries ago seemed to represent the greatest hurdle to reason, now only attracts minor and milder inquiry. Cosmological models of the world’s ‘emergence’ have become retroconvergent: they ‘refer’ back to a degree zero of space and time, to a quasi-nothing of all matter. Because we know of the expansion of the universe and the background radiation of three degrees Kelvin, this implies a beginning—but not a beginning when something was ‘created.’ Just a short time ago everyone seemed to know from human experience and self-understanding what such ‘creation’ could entail. Humans, too, ‘created,’ were creatively active: as inventors, as artists.
Much was made of the fact that human beings possessed this quality of ‘being creative,’ especially by those who appeared to have been given it. All others could participate in it by enjoying and using what was so mysteriously ‘created.’ The backlash and reversal came from those who claimed to have been endowed with this creative quality—they no longer wanted this ‘exceptional’ quality. Everyone should be able to do what they, the creative ones, could do; it was only by virtue of a quirk in the division of labor that some were pursuing this métier, and others a different one. Those deemed special no longer wanted to be special, and they accomplished this by rejecting, in words, the aura of creativity: they called themselves ‘makers,’ because everybody ‘made’ something even when it became odious to find oneself called just a ‘maker’ in a field where everybody seemed to be ‘making’ something. Disqualifying a politician by calling him a ‘maker’ or ‘doer’ was an anticipation of new, still vague attributes that endowed this ability with an aura of the fateful, perhaps of the sacred, more certainly of the moral, if not of the aesthetic. However the attributes may have shifted and changed their values, the intelligibility of the ‘creative’ as something that was concerned with ‘origin’ had been lost. The equivalent, in human terms, for what God was thought and said to have done in the beginning was no longer apparent. To what could one point if, prior to any belief or knowledge, one was asked to understand what the names for the alternative even ‘meant’? Should God also be renamed a ‘maker’ in order to keep him intelligible among all the song makers and film makers, text makers and thing makers?
The exegetical tradition seemed strictly to forbid this. It had put the utmost effort into dissociating ‘creating’ from the curse of ‘making,’ into differentiating the creator of the world from a demiurge who seems to have ‘accomplished’ his cosmos by executing a given design with given materials like a master craftsman. The origin of the world could not have been like that. It did not follow a model, there were no raw materials in which and from which it was formed; and if there were any, they had to be part of what originated in the beginning. This is what resisted the assignation of ‘making’; and this resistance was anchored in the text of the Bible by the second word of the first sentence: bara’ in Hebrew was a verb that could refer only to this context, and in every translation it would have to be matched by a similarly exalted and singular equivalent, even if it had to be invented for this purpose.
With such a unique concept, it is always difficult to control the translation; lexical identity can only be determined by the context. The Alexandrian Septuagint used the Greek verb ktizein and did well with it, because it preserves a crucial aspect of the biblical expression: effecting something by sovereign command rather than by craft. An example would be those situations that were preceded by ‘nothing,’ like the ‘founding’ by sovereign fiat of cities or temples in the Hellenistic world or, after the proclamation of the German Reich, the ‘Gründerzeit’ [founding period] for industries and companies. Perhaps at the turn of the century the biblical God would even have become an ‘inventor’ if the aesthetic dignity of the creator of the Gesamtkunstwerk had not attained even higher acclaim at almost the same time and in opposition to the inventor, in order to deny historical-critical and evolutionary explanations to that which could not be understood.
In all this, the ‘subject’ of the first sentence of the Bible has been overlooked as the most obvious of things, as if this were a minor matter, just as ‘beginning’ and ‘creation’ once had been. Is it not pure tautology to insist on knowing who this Elohim is who in the beginning created heaven and earth—someone who could do this and initially only this? But this entire story was not told in order to educate about the origin of the world, to instigate or to answer the questions of future metaphysicians about being and nothingness. The beginning with ‘the’ beginning was as casual as any once-upon-a-time or a-long-time-ago, and ‘creation’ was a sacred word with a lot of pathos but very little meaning. Everything was designed ‘to provide’ the subject of the sentence with the power to do something like this, and to legitimize this subject to do similar things within its self-posited historical frame.
The stress falls on the sense that it could have been no one else but this one who set the conditions for everything and who therefore could set the rules everything had to obey. In short, it is the intention of the text to imply the lawgiver in the existence giver. This is also noticeable in the specification to let everything happen through the commanding word and to send the world on its course with a word of affirmation. Everything was ‘good’ to ‘very good,’ and that it had to stay that way might not have been obvious, because it had to be said in the ‘beginning.’
This was not a God of ‘automatic success.’ He had to look closely and determine whether everything had turned out as it had been ordered—like those founders of cities who would return to ‘inspect’ them. It is therefore not far-fetched to presume or to fear that events might occur that would contradict the initial approbation. For that, too, the subject of the first sentence in the Bible had to be qualified, and this sentence at least made sure that no other would be his rival, regardless of what might happen.
Let me explain the results of this analysis of the first sentence of the Bible with an ‘analogous case.’ When Giambattista Vico and his followers first uttered the statement that humans make history, it contained little as to what history making entails, and little about the human as its ‘subject.’ Everything hinged on excluding the notion that anyone or anything else could be a ‘maker’—least of all the ‘maker’ of something else: namely, of nature. Between humanity and history only a relationship of exclusivity was established, not one of causation. The latter was, for the ‘beginning,’ rather uninteresting and irrelevant compared to the exclusion of contingencies that would fall under the domain of someone else. For only if humans alone made this one thing—just as God alone had made the other thing—could they know, like he does, what and how everything was and how it ought to be. Humans qualified themselves to become the lawgiver of their own historical deeds.
The God of the Bible was all this when he first appeared ‘in the beginning.’ No art of interpretation, however, could tease out from this first sentence that he could or would also be a ‘father.’ For a lawgiver and a covenant partner, this would not have been a plausible qualification.
“A theme for a great poet would be God’s boredom on the seventh day of creation.” Nietzsche wrote this in a short, three-sentence text entitled “Spirit and Boredom.”1 This is not blasphemy. Otherwise, Luther’s claim that God watches history like a theater play or carnival would also be blasphemous. He is excited to see how it will all turn out. To preserve this suspense, he could not have determined how it would end. Freedom of the will guarantees that God does not get bored.
But why is this restricted to the seventh day of creation? This was, of course, because creation had come to an end and God had nothing more to do than to watch—that is why he had done all of this in the first place. If this is true, then creation was the consequence of God’s previous boredom. Is this statement less dignified than the one that claims God started creation only in order to replenish the lacunae, caused by the fall of Lucifer and his minions, in the heavenly choir of angels exulting him? This is the case only if choir music is more appropriate for God’s eternal court than spectacle, if listening is better than watching. It is in the nature of spirit that the threat of boredom hangs over it or eats into it. This does not make boredom inferior. Rather, it is the motor that drives the creativity of the mind. Most things in the world happen so as to avoid boredom, including all those extravagances one might regard as the complicated cult of an unknown Godhead, if one ascribes such belief to its practitioners, advocates, and supporters. It is just that for some inexplicable reason it is considered ignoble to admit as a reason for one’s superfluous action: ‘I did not want to be bored.’ There is a hint here for nonconformists: they can excel by claiming to have done something simply because they did not want to be bored. They are then almost like perpetrators without a motive.
Nietzsche’s imagined subject for a great poet—to represent God’s boredom on the seventh day of creation—thus suffers from the defect of not representing God’s boredom before creation as the reason that drove him to make the world no less suspenseful than it is. The best of all possible worlds would be boring for this absolute spectator. Instead of creating it, he could simply have deduced it. It would be a world that does not need to exist, that could be construed in thought alone. “Existence is not a real predicate”2—Kant’s harshest indictment of the ontological proof of God’s existence applies to the world as well: if it is to satisfy its rationale, it cannot be perfect. It is only its contingency that justifies its existence as a ‘novelty’ ripped from nothingness. Precisely because it would be superfluous for the ‘most perfect of all possible worlds’ to exist (in addition to being thought), it also lacked a sufficient reason for its creation. This diagnosis does not explain anything, but it prevents facile explanations.
One might well say that the human’s role as a ‘novelty act’ on the world’s stage before the eyes of God is just too demeaning and desperate; a Pulcinella, and nothing more. Yet in its banality this figure has enough allure to dispel the boredom of another. According to Nietzsche, even “the small, repetitive tragicomedies” of everyday life, because they are being “represented by ever different actors,” are capable of defying boredom, as can be seen in the fact that they always have interested spectators, even though “one would presume that the spectators of the world theater had long tired of it and committed suicide en masse.”3 If the little that an individual offers or is being offered is already entertaining to a spectator, how much more must this be the case for the one spectator who sees the totality, and with perfect resolution? Were one to share this viewpoint, one would see the species engaged in a curious sort of self-portrayal for the enrichment of its self-preservation, as if it had always lived in awareness of acting before this one spectator, even without Nietzsche’s remarks.
At all times and in all places, human beings have made astonishing efforts to appease their gods and gain their favor—much greater efforts than those necessary for self-preservation. Against the background of the history of humanity and its religions, it is not specious to imagine humans as destined for entertaining a highest being, because they saw themselves as constantly providing for this being, petitioning and praising it.
The supposed foundational myth of the theatricality of world history reduces the demands on human life to merely living that life: to implementing what one would have been resolved to do anyway. People play themselves by being themselves. Exhausting their potential freedom determines the level of suspense they bring to the comedy or tragedy. The immanent dimension of their freedom, their morality, their responsibility would not be touched by this. For they could take care of their happiness, worry about their unhappiness—and above all: evade their own boredom, having been made in the image and likeness of their creator. They would become artists in a work of art, just like artists became the favorite subjects of epic and lyric poetry.
This aesthetic conception does not diminish the seriousness of the situation. It remains incredibly difficult to cut a good figure in this play, even without being the comedic or tragic hero. No one needed to think that he in particular had the task of pleasing the world spectator, even though erring in this matter would contribute greatly to this spectator’s amusement (in the best sense). The same applies to the mistakes of the ascetics and prophets, of the saints and fanatics, who all remain in the world as they are, without anyone knowing which figure in particular would increase or decrease the appeal of it all.
At the end what would come is not judgment, but critique.
This God of commands and laws starts out by forbidding humans in paradise to eat from the tree of knowledge. They may, however, eat from the tree of life. They do not have to die so long as they renounce knowledge. As soon as they know, they have to die.
The general consensus has been that the prohibition in paradise against enjoying knowledge was intended for humanity’s own good. It would have been better for them to live without knowledge and without the fear of death. The snake’s tempting promise that they would be like the gods if they ate from the forbidden tree was detrimental not only because it led to the loss of paradise and the tree of life, but also because the promised similarity to God would not be good for them. God had provided for the good of human beings when he excluded them from the knowledge he himself possessed, the burden of which he could bear but did not believe they could.
What the temptation of the snake really meant—that eating from the tree of knowledge would make humans like God—remains unclear in the biblical context. What does it mean to be like gods? To be omnipotent? In that case, it would have been a tree of power, not of knowledge.
A rather insidious, skeptical, yet entirely permissible and even inevitable thought in the context of this myth is contained in the question of whether God did not enact this prohibition in order to protect himself: the original imperative of all reason, that of self-preservation, is here the self-preservation of a God. In this case, even this God would have had his ‘cares’ [Sorge]. Even he would have suffered from the lack of obviousness regarding self-preservation. Even for him it would have been a risk being God. Did he know that he could be killed? That his murderer would be the ‘madman’? This is a thought of Nietzsche’s that is incompatible with this myth.
To eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil meant ‘seeing through’ a thought that God thought incessantly when he decided what was good and what was evil. He had given his assent to every act of creation he accomplished. But how did he arrive at the decision that something he had ordered into existence had been good or even very good?
Humans would never know this. That is why they had to obey and believe. Theodicy would be their final attempt to figure out God’s thought, why he let there be something rather than nothing—not, ultimately, to defend him, as the title ‘justification’ seemed to indicate, but to see through him.
As knowing subjects, human beings wanted something from God that he refused his own kind: to be transparent. The snake had exaggerated only a little. For being able to see through someone means, strictly speaking, to be or have the ability to be like them. Therein lies the intrusiveness that everybody who refuses to be transparent rejects. Humans are God’s image and likeness insofar as their entire comportment is a defense against being transparent. They are similar to their God as entia abscondita [hidden beings] that want to be in control of their esse revelatum [being revealed]. Humans want to communicate, but this presupposes that they are concealed and opaque and withdrawn from openness as much as they want to be. One is a correlative of the other.
The God who forbade the fruit in paradise is the God who does not want to be known. He created knowing beings only for the knowledge of what he made, not of what he is. Perhaps he did so to show himself a little but remain essentially concealed. The world distracted the knowing being from its claim to recognize and know its origin and likeness. Most likely, one can be God only when one rejects this claim. He thus forbids any access to a possible ‘psychoanalysis’ of God. He opposes himself to humans at this limit.
Humans were never content to just stop at this limit and not set foot beyond it. And so God distracted them with a torrent of dictates and regulations, whose observance drove to desperation beings who strove for nothing more than to see through their God—just as these beings never rest until they manage to see through each other, and who dislike it just as much as the God whom they resemble.
We can now see better the monstrosity in the fact that everywhere ‘priests’ of all colors want people to bare themselves, want to exercise and even ‘savor’ the divine power to make transparent, as ‘caretakers of the soul’ in the literal sense of the word.
In 1922 a drama entitled Kain by Anton Wildgans had its premiere. In his review, Alfred Polgar wrote a profound sentence about the God of humanity’s original tragedy: “It almost looks as though God had denied his creatures the fruit from the tree of knowledge so that they don’t see through him. As soon as they had eaten, they saw him as he is. He could not forgive this.”4
What can turn the biblical God into a figure of tragedy would not be his watching while humans suffer; he himself would have to play a part in this history. Something has to be at stake that gives existential weight to his ‘cares.’ He has to have something to lose. What he can indeed lose is the exclusivity of his self-reflection, the sovereign reservation to be himself just for himself. That is why humans were not allowed to participate in the knowledge of good and evil. That was more than ‘something’ with him or in him. It was everything. That is why he made creation, in order to display and practice for himself this knowledge: in judging his own works—just as one day he would pass judgment on humanity who had also wanted to be a ‘judge’ but was doomed to founder in the attempt: one who was to be judged, but should not judge.
In his third octavo notebook, Kafka jots down a remark about biblical primordial history that looks like extreme nitpicking: “Why do we complain about the Fall? We were not expelled from Paradise because of it, but rather because of the tree of life, lest we eat from it.”5 Here we find the substance, the secret that is at the center of The Trial. There was no original sin in paradise, no eating from the prohibited tree of knowledge. There was the permitted tree of life, the fruits of immortality. Right when they began to reach for it, human beings, who had done nothing to be refused this tree, got involved in an affair that served as a pretense for denying them their likeness to God—a desire for which no temptation was needed, because there it stood, the tree of life. That is how the fiction of guilt arose that would seem to justify the expulsion from paradise. The expulsion consigned life to death because the ambrosia from the tree was missing: thus death came into the world, as the apostle Paul would later say. Death turned a fictive guilt into a real one: mortal beings, due to their finite lifetime, cannot live without the guilt of not being able to love each other because they are rivals for every good of life.
The innocent became guilty because they were expelled from the reach, from the cultivated garden of the tree of life. God was afraid of what other immortals would do with their infinity. In order not to have a rival, he made his likenesses into rivals of each other who could not escape their guilt. The trial and judgment made the accused guilty.
In four lines Kafka revealed the reversal that was hidden in the myth of paradise. It was all about the tree of life; the tree of knowledge was just a pretext. Perhaps man ate from the tree of knowledge only after realizing that the tree of life was prohibited. A last instance of paradisiac clairvoyance: if one has to be mortal, ‘knowledge’ is the only means of making use of the remainder of life.
Why else were the sons Cain and Abel—each in his own way, as a nomad or as a farmer—intent on using all their skill to wrest from the earth what it would yield, and perhaps more? It was the illusory hope that something other than death could come from it, above all because the first death was violent. This first murder may look like an act of jealousy due to the other’s winning God’s favor; in fact, it was an act of rivalry for the ‘technics’ of mastering nature as a substitute for the possession of the tree of life.
In another entry in the same notebook, Kafka expressed in one sentence what kind of illusions resulted from the expulsion into finitude: “The fact that our task is commensurate with our life gives this task an appearance of infinity.”6 It is in appearances that we possess life—as if life still came from that tree that nourishes the gods yet whose fruits they did not want to share with us.
Adam has to die when he eats from the tree of knowledge. But he does not die, at least not immediately; instead he is expelled from the garden in which the tree of life stands, whose fruits would have offered immortality if he had been able to reach them. It is an indefinitely deferred death sentence. More precisely: it is the exclusion from a preventative against death, like the ambrosia of the Olympian gods.
This ‘small difference’ is not pedantic and insignificant, because for Christian theology this ‘sin’ is such a terrible crime against God’s majesty that the punishment, which is immediately imposed but not enforced, does not even come close to what the theologians insinuated. The Lord of the Garden revokes the right to its fruits, but hesitates to follow through on his threats: Adam survives his transgression, does not suffer the vagus death of the breaker of taboos, and grows very old.
Did God make a mistake when he issued the death threat, when he predicted that none of his creatures would survive if they were to resist him? In that case, the snake would have been right: By eating the fruit, Adam would have attained something like the status of a coequal who could bear and survive the Other’s enmity. This would have been the first act in a long human ‘enlightenment’: the experience that measuring oneself against this God was, in fact, not as blameworthy as commandments and threats would have it. The difference between commandment and autonomy emerges for the first time—as a survivable conflict.
At least ‘enlightenment’ had been given a taste of paradise. This had to be taken into account for all the promises that this or that enlightenment would bring paradise back. Adam’s triumph in not dying after eating the fruit was premature. It may be that he did not recognize this in his initial relief over being spared. The first actual death was irregular, a crime: Cain murdered Abel. The God of the lost paradise was not entirely innocent in this matter; he refused to accept ‘fruits’ as sacrifice, because he suspected in them a stubborn insistence on life in paradise—but he did accept Abel’s lambs. For this favor Abel had to die.
Why was Cain enraged over Abel’s favored status? Because their God was a weather god, whose favor was more important to the farmer Cain than to the nomad Abel? It might indeed have been so.
Even before Adam’s death, Cain’s misdeed showed that evil had come into the world—paradoxically because humans now had to die. The brevity of their lifetimes pressured them not to renounce things they could enjoy or things belonging to others that they coveted for themselves. It took time out of life to get everything that one could get from life. Otherwise, Cain could have waited for better weather.
Humans are not god, much as they wanted to be.
They are not master over life and death. They have to die themselves instead of letting others die, and they have to live themselves instead of letting others live. One is as difficult as the other.
It is one of the greatest self-domestications of humanity to have renounced the instrument of capital punishment, even against the majority of most public opinions. Even the great autocracies of the twentieth century did it with gritted teeth. With gritted teeth? Yes, because the ground over this abyss is very thin. But humans are also not masters over life. They are not permitted to impose it. An ever more important problem of their power through knowledge is at stake here. Ever more people live because living was imposed on them through artificial means.
This is a test case of an ethics that we do not have. The myth of the prohibition against eating from the tree of Good and Evil gains new relevance. Humanity could perish not from its ability to destroy itself but from the ability to preserve itself indefinitely. This ability would have turned the legitimacy not to use it into the necessity not to use it.
Humans will never be able to meet this necessity. Nobody can grant the authority not to save what can be saved. Because we know what evil is does not mean that we will be able to do good.
In mythical terms: History is ruptured by the dilemma with which it began.
What would this God be without the humans who magnified him? The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—using here the ambiguous subjective and objective genitive that Pascal intentionally used to distinguish him from the god of the philosophers. Without noticing, however, that this genitive cuts both ways and makes God a creature of the patriarchs in just the same way he wanted to shunt aside the god of the philosophers. Moses is not mentioned, even though he finalized this work with a new and trademarked name for God: Moses turned into divine law what the forefathers, in the manner of theologians, had achieved before the descent into Egypt, with painstaking labor and without normative or threatening intent.
Only the evangelist Luke attributes to Mary as she visits John the Baptist’s mother the singular saying that has resisted so many attempts to set it to music because it precisely describes the labor of the faithful for their God: megalynei he psyche moy ton kyrion—magnificat anima mea Dominum [My soul magnifies the Lord]. God created humans so that they would ‘magnify’ him.
There is only a difference in time in Anselm of Canterbury’s foundational myth that correlates the fall of the angels and the creation of man. The eternal task of those found worthy was to bring the depleted choirs of angels back to their target strength. The beauty of this myth in motivating the world can still be seen in the simplicity of this Magnificat. In it, both time and function are preemptively suspended. Already here and now, in this moment between Elizabeth and Mary—just as in the search of the patriarchs for the solitary inaccessibility of their God behind every accessible one—the mandate is fulfilled that lets world and humanity be: the mandate to do theology. In other words, to boost God, to exaggerate him in the sense of the leap between the two definitions that this Anselm of Canterbury had found: God is that beyond which nothing can be thought—and he is greater than anything that can be thought. In this interval—not to call it ‘leeway’—the magnification of God takes place, which, like everything else in religion, can degenerate into thoughtless phraseology.
Julien Green, raised in a puritanical household but softened as a Catholic, relates in the memoirs of his childhood how confused he was to hear the Anglican formula of God: “We magnify him.” He could understand this only as similar to what a “magnifying glass”7 could do. Martin Meyer once wrote to me that he was invited by Green’s new German publisher in the fall of 1986 to a dinner with the author, and that he had prepared for the conversation by reading in the Pléiade edition on the train from Munich to Zurich. “I noticed this passage, but without thinking about it. When we sat down to dinner, the old gentleman took out the aforementioned magnifying glass—in order to study the menu. Was he looking for ambrosia? In any case, I reminded him of the semantic confusion.” The narrator, who graciously gave me this anecdote, added that he had not read all that much by Green and had obviously landed a lucky shot, “for he looked at me as if I had come from that office that administers the balances for the Great Transition.”
I responded that I knew only one author who had described the ‘magnifying’ of God without the aid of modern optics—Thomas Mann in the mythlike introduction to the temporal frame of his Joseph and His Brothers tetralogy. Here, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob certainly was not the god of the philosophers, as Pascal would have wanted; he was a pure artifice of humans, created in their likeness so that they could have a God without being dependent on his prophecies and suggestions.
In an ambivalent ‘catharsis,’ the beings that were made in the image of God create for themselves this God in their image, a God they then subject themselves to because of this likeness. That He does not tolerate a god beside Himself, according to the first of the laws from Sinai, is an expression of humans’ jealousy demanding for themselves an incomparable, absolute singularity. It would have been only a small step to rise from jealousy to generosity and to let this God be indifferent to the throng of humanity’s nascent or decaying gods—there were so many that the proto-philosopher [Thales] could not bear it that “all was full of gods” and invented philosophy instead. But philosophy itself turned into nothing but another means of intensifying and magnifying the One, to the chagrin of Pascal.
Was it the Northern protestant in Thomas Mann who could not and did not want to leave the work of magnification to the patriarchs in the prelude to his Joseph novels? Who had to write something like a post-Christian sequel, perhaps even an Augustinian-Lutheran amplification, as his last work, as the completion of the myth of God? For it is only in the light of the stories of the patriarchs that a reader can see the strict correlation with the legend of Pope Gregorius in Thomas Mann’s The Holy Sinner: the reciprocal buildup of sin and grace, the lowness of humanity and the glory of God, the unimaginable abyss and the safe bridge across it. It goes so far that the sinner humiliates God with his penitence, and challenges Him to display the greatest insights of His so-called inscrutability. This is most impressive, perhaps, when Sibylla commits double incest but withdraws rigorously from this God through self-castigation and poverty, “but not out of the love of God, but to defy him, so that he may tremble through and through and be frightened.”8 Sibylla, the one who no longer wanted to dedicate her beauty to her God, made it her will “that God be aggrieved and that the rejection of the suitors should sadden him, even though as penitence he could not have disapproved of it. This dilemma she did not begrudge him.”9 A theological duel, or rather: theology as a duel.
Does this mean that the exuberance of the interpreter has been added to the exuberance of the penitent? If neither the prelude to the Joseph novels nor the reference to the (never executed) plan for the “Wedding of Luther” weigh heavily enough against this suspicion, then perhaps a last pointer from The Holy Sinner may be helpful for the person immersed in and burdened by the book, which I strengthen with this thesis: This—this too—the late Thomas Mann got from Goethe.
This claim loses its apparent improbability only when it is supported by the most incontrovertible of evidence: by the proof—often overlooked—that Goethe’s “prodigious saying” [ungeheuerer Spruch]10 is introduced by the narrating monk Clemens during a reflection preceding the chapter about saving the abandoned child of sin in his little barrel on the Channel. Immediately after God’s infliction of grief, Clemens praises the Lord’s wisdom, represented by the Channel between Carolingia and England on which the baby’s tiny conveyance can be saved by the island’s fishermen and their abbot. The pious narrator, who knows these waters, shudders at the “paucity of hope,” the counterpart of which is an ambiguous divine quality that is rarely named: “God’s skillfulness.” It helps Him to master the adversity that He Himself as the agent of providence has heaped upon the babe and his little ship. It is this inner contradiction of God’s decrees that lets the narrator close with the words: “on such an occasion the saying ‘Nemo contra Deum nisi Deus ipse’ [No one (can go) against God except God himself] suggests itself.”
What a masterly use of irony, to attribute to a pious narrator in the imaginary Middle Ages Goethe’s saying of absolute impiety! Just as the saying’s multiple meanings had marked Goethe’s mythical bent of mind in the unfinished fourth part of Poetry and Truth, here it is the model for the variegated interplay of contradictions in the mythical irony with which Thomas Mann seals off, and reflects on, his life’s work. Because Master Thomas of Lübeck has a monk write this, there is no longer the escape into the imprecision of thinking the god of the saying without a definite article, as the lowercase script implies, an escape that Goethe perceived and took. The monk means the One whom he can write only with a capital letter because he is about to magnify him through the divine self-duel of this legend, God against God, who stays his own hand from the absolutism of the depths as well as of the heights.
Praise—to whom? To the God who can put up with himself in this implacable conflict?
The general theme of The Stories of Jacob, the first part of Thomas Mann’s tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers, is how the sublime and jealous God—named El or Yahu—was distilled from the multiplicity of Baalim in the swamps and deserts between the Euphrates and the Nile. This prelude to the enormous epic was planned and begun in 1925 after the Magic Mountain and was published in October 1933, still in Berlin. At the end of the last volume, Joseph the Provider, which was finished in January of 1943, the sons of Jacob are established with the God of their father in Egypt. Fortunately for him and his readers, the author does not have to expand on the fortunes of this God, who was raised with such difficulty, during the subsequent three to four centuries in the Land of Goshen.
The Bible is discreetly silent about this long epoch. For God’s sublimity and singularity were jeopardized, given away, forgotten: perhaps it was a legacy too exhausting, too alienating in its exclusivity. It will take forty years in the desert to end the mésalliance with the bull of Apis and the cow of Hathor, the guarantors of fertility for rustic worshippers. There must have been something right about fertility, however: otherwise the small clan of Joseph could not have turned into the numerous people whom Moses had to drive out of Egypt. A lot speaks for assuming that Moses—even if he was an Egyptian, as Freud discovered—used the old godhead from the times of the patriarchs and purified it more than even Jacob’s striving for God (as described by the novelist) managed to do.
In the process of refining God, Egypt, with its bovine deities, would have been the perfect rest stop, a chance for Yahweh to catch his breath after Yahu, and the incubation time for the law-giving God on Sinai. The deities El Shaddai and Horus-Sapdu, merged in Goshen, had to be separated again: Yahweh’s ark no longer showed the symbol of a bull. The ark was the symbol of the transportability of a god who in the Land of Goshen was bound to the settlement of those who championed him; he could be fruitful only as a couple, like Horus and Hathor—the latter who appears as Baalat Mana in the inscriptions at the mines in Sinai (Serabit). There was no use for that anymore during the Exodus from Egypt through the desert.
It would take more than another millennium for it to become conceivable, as a further intensification in divinity, that this God ‘procreated’ by himself a begotten Son (genitum non factum) who—as if to overcome this ‘lack’—needed as Logos incarnate the Virgin as mother and the angel as announcer. The god-fearing patriarchs—following Thomas Mann’s Stories of Jacob—would not have been able to bear this human face, and would have become culprits in the Passion of the Son of man, with the right of the inventors and refiners on their side. But also with the incapacity to understand that intensification is also ‘evaporation,’ and that what is incompatible with intensification is not only ‘un-refinement’ but also a return to vividness that alone can withstand the coalition of abstraction and palpable idols. Paul the Pharisee would understand what the despair over obeying the Law would threaten in a world of migrating gods. The ‘Son of God’ was a violation of the first law of the Decalogue, but ceased to be so when he died, because this in itself was the negation of the glory (kavod) pertaining to God.
The crucifixion was another one of the intensifications that Abraham contemplated during the Exodus from Charran. Léon Bloy, one of the great ranters in modern French literature and in the Renouveau Catholique, declared in his 1897 novel The Woman Who Was Poor: “God would not have been worthy to create the world had he forgotten to evoke from the void the terrible scum that one day would crucify him.”11 This monstrous coupling of the first and second articles of the Apostles’ Creed makes the dignity of God depend on exhausting all possibilities contained in the creation from Nothing; it does so in such a way that God could not avoid the direct lineage to the perpetrators of the Passion if he did not want to humiliate himself before his own mortification. It is a strange thought, but again one of divine intensification and of fearlessness in the face of what had since creation awaited its presumed Lord: having to be more than this ‘Lord.’
Nothing in Thomas Mann’s ancestry, biography, education, or palpable experiences pointed toward the theological intimacy displayed in the first part of Joseph and His Brothers; nothing in his sources and notes, in his essays and letters, allows us to understand how he developed this sensibility. In the case of this nonbeliever there is only one answer, one that he himself has given in many variants, not least in the figure of Joseph: all art is sustained by a bit of imposture, if not by something more.
And theology? Is it not art’s closest relative, with its arrogant claims of ineffability and inaccessibility, with its parading before the occult majesty, its objections to the withdrawal of divinity? Joseph turns into the Egyptian Felix Krull, a serene comedian; but he only continues on a larger scale what the patriarchs began when they, in their earnest ruminations, deemed themselves ‘too good’ for the cruelties of the cults around them. Jacob had flourished under the surreptitiously obtained blessing of his father and was called to order only when he wanted to correct the higher decision on the sequence of Laban’s daughters destined to him. His God is jealous of the person who has magnified Him and thereby alienated Him from His wishes: “For what is this unbridled feeling of one human being for another that Jacob allowed himself first for Rachel and then, in perhaps even stronger transference, for her firstborn—what is it other than idolatry?” There should be no doubt “that this is jealousy in its purest meaning and finest luster.”12
This God rivals humans in precisely the qualities that the latter’s nobility of mind and profundity had attributed to him: a God with a passion for eminence. “Call it a vestige of the desert,” the narrator continues, but it is still true “that the thundering word of the ‘living God’ fulfills and proves itself in passion.”13 It will be Joseph who understands what had still troubled his father and who takes this God with all his escalations; he had a better sense for “this God’s vitality and was able to take it into account more adroitly than his progenitor.”14 Joseph in his pleasantness was above all suited to respond to the excessive demands of his father’s God, as if he was created by Him for Himself. But there was also this trait of imposture, the exact correlate to the increasing demands that the narrating ‘theologian’ puts into these words: “Let Me become holy in you, and you are to be holy as well!”15 It was strange, but it was the result of The Stories of Jacob: “The purification of God from murky perfidy to holiness also encompasses, in retrospect, the purification of humanity, for whom God wanted it urgently.”16 It is a circle, but it need not be a vicious one.
Only because humans project into the dignity of God the rigorism and burden of commandments and laws does “this amalgamation, this sublime marriage, this reciprocity of relations” emerge, which is “sealed in the flesh and guaranteed by the ring of circumcision.” It is an alliance or covenant in which humans have lost the “prerogative of emotional exuberance”17—a loss equivalent to not thoroughly examining the small print. The ‘becoming God’ became not out of himself but through humans, and he became, inadvertently, the God of Care, not the wished-for God. Only the Passion of Jesus of Nazareth, I contend, will represent the extreme: the extreme of fulfillment and of imposition, pleroma and kenosis.18
This work on God, the work on the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, on the God of Jesus Christ, might have had its epilogue in the God of Anselm of Canterbury, even though his formulae were directives rather than the implementations of such work: God as that beyond which nothing greater can be thought and as that which is greater than anything that can be thought. A young Romanian despiser of God published in Bucharest in 1937 Lacrimi si Sfinti, which half a century later appeared—after the author advanced to being the French master of tough thoughts—as Des larmes et des saints and a year later in an amended German translation as Von Tränen und von Heiligen [English: Tears and Saints]. Emil Michel Cioran in his early aphorisms worshipped both Johann Sebastian Bach and tears, and compressed his metaphysical resistance into the sentence: “Music has made me too bold towards God.”19 Under these auspices he could hardly be oblivious of the final chorale of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, and indeed, he dared to formulate the ‘proof’ that God had to exist because otherwise the cantor of St. Thomas would have sung in vain: “When we listen to Bach, we see God sprout, his music gives birth to God. After an oratorio, a cantata, or a Passion, He must exist. Otherwise the entire oeuvre of the cantor would be a heartbreaking illusion.… To think that so many theologians and philosophers have wasted days and nights searching for a proof for God’s existence and have forgotten the proper one …”20
Is this not the God of Pascal’s Mémorial? Or is this just a sophisticated way, through the Passion and its ‘proof of God’s existence,’ to ‘save’ the god of the philosophers as the misunderstood pseudonym for the God elaborated by the patriarchs? It is to be feared that even this detour toward a proof of God’s existence would fall prey to Kant’s devastating critique of all imaginable proofs: whatever might be shown can never be demonstrated to be ultimate and insuperable, to be Anselm’s ens quo maius cogitari nequit [a being than which no greater can be thought].
But does the person listening to Bach’s Passion really have to insist on this so that the tears of the ending are not mocked by a “heartbreaking illusion”? No, the sufferer on the cross does not have to be measured by the standards of the ‘god of the philosophers.’ ‘Does not have to be’ is too weak, still susceptible to evasion; he cannot be measured by these standards, and for the simplest reason in the world: we do not know what the biblical names for this sufferer mean: not ‘Son of man,’ not ‘servant of God’ not even—if he ever called himself this—‘Messiah.’
To continue in the subjunctive: even if he ever had called himself a ‘god,’ we would not know what this means. Paul on the Areopagus wanted the Athenians finally to get acquainted with the ‘unknown god’ for whom they had built an altar as a precaution. He presupposed that they would know what a god is, because they had so many. For us, it is the other way around: we cannot handle an ‘unknown god,’ because no god is ‘known’ to us. That is why we look with relief to the ‘servant of God’ because he said to us: his ‘Lord’ could be called “Abba”—“Father.” It is a suggestion of the philosophers that the name ‘god’ is the most precise of our concepts. This is not so. It is a boundary case between marked clarity and the most merciful indeterminacy.
It must suffice for those who listen to the Passion that its suffering is not mere appearance, and that the one suffering and dying for them is all but an indifferent being, and that through this being they can experience something so moving, so decisive, that this music was needed to reach them finally, the listeners.
On November 23, 1654—a Monday—at about 10:30 in the evening, Blaise Pascal begins his Mémorial, the ‘last word’ of his religious life, with the unfathomable signal-word Feu, “fire,” before invoking his God as the “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not the god of the philosophers and scholars.”21 This fiery antithesis is different from the fragments of his planned apologia of Christianity, the Pensées. For the God of Abraham could not be defended with the means of philosophy, as perhaps the God of Jesus Christ could, whom Pascal invokes immediately afterward. Naming the God of Abraham was—even if it was never said—a challenge to a philosophically ‘tolerable’ god, even if he was no longer subject to proofs.
What the philosophers could not tolerate about this God was the obedience, against all nature, that he demanded from Abraham in requiring the sacrifice of his only son, and preventing it only at the last moment with the messenger’s voice from heaven: “Do not lay your hand on the lad or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me” (Gen. 22:12). Abraham then receives the confirmation of an oath that God had already sworn and that he would have had to break if he had accepted the sacrifice of the late-born son: the oath to make him the ancestor of a great people, as could be seen from his name.
We hear nothing about the father’s state of mind after being released from sacrificing his son, after the confirmation of the oath. Abraham takes his son and wanders with him from the mountain to Beersheba and stays there. Was he angry for the rest of his life with the God who had demanded this from him? Was he grateful for the reprieve from having to kill his son? Did God lie, just to test him one more time? Or had He forgotten about the oath that was tied to the overdue conception of this son, and remembered it only in the last moment? Was this not a God who always remembered later or needed to be reminded, a forgetful contractor? We do not know any of the questions Abraham asked himself, nor any of the answers. We only know the attempts of the exegetes to sanitize the immorality of the story, to save the God who got entangled in it. Singular is the remark attributed to Rabbi Yehuda ben Simon at the beginning of the fourth century: “Abraham thought by himself and said: perhaps there was something unsuitable in my son, that he was not accepted.”22 He thought about this until a voice from heaven (Bath Kol) assured him that God had not rejected the sacrifice because of displeasure. That would have really taken the philosophers’ breath away. But they did not know of ben Simon’s remark.
The late rabbinical musing over the story of Abraham is not simple pedantry. It denies the father—willing to sacrifice but prevented from doing so—the subjective frame of mind in which he can accept the waiving of the sacrifice with satisfaction, assured of the promise; instead, it lets him think intently about how God could reject the most valuable of all gifts, the most precious gift a father could give: this God who was entitled to exactly that, here and wherever ritualistic sacrifice took place. Was the sacrifice perhaps objectively not of the quality the father assumed? Perhaps this one, among the many sons, was not the most appropriate, and therefore the surrogate ram was accepted in his place? To wit: Abraham could have doubted whether his mental submission was really what this demanding God wanted.
In the Christian tradition, Abraham stands for the primal image of faith in its extreme form: the credo quia absurdum [I believe because it is absurd]. Against all nature, this son was promised to him, and he did not doubt. Against all nature, this son was supposed to be taken from him and he did not hesitate to trust that it would be good. That is the faith that Paul’s theory of justification would provide, an absolute mental state that is so impermeable to psychology that only the addressee of such obedience can pass it off as mercy. But what would ever render the subjective surrender of self-consciousness fitting for God? From this point of view, the effort of Rabbi Yehuda ben Simon to objectify the rejection of Isaac as a sacrifice is a subtle criticism of the ‘Father of Faith,’ the image of Abraham projected by the Christian New Testament.
The Abraham of the Old Testament and of the rabbinical tradition is first and foremost the recipient of the promise, the forger of the first identity of this people with God. He ended its nomadic existence, founded the first religious sites, wandered with Isaac to Beersheba, and was buried in Hebron. To Abraham, God’s promise of the seed and the land was given unconditionally—even if this was always only after the fulfillment of what later turned out to be the ‘condition’ of salvation—whereas the covenant of Sinai was and remained conditional and tied to the fulfillment of a law that in all experience—and definitely in the mind of Paul—could not be fulfilled. It is because of this difference between the unconditional oath given to Abraham and the conditions implied in the covenant with Moses that the figure of the patriarch has overshadowed the leader of his people out of Egypt—especially at times when the burden of the law and the punishment for its infraction confused the sense of justice with which Paul, with a view to Abraham and Jesus, wanted to, and for millennia managed to, eliminate the problem: to elevate the patriarch of devotion over the founder of the unity of people and history in the promise of God.
Theologically speaking, Rabbi Yehuda ben Simon’s concerns are not fully exhausted in the antithesis to the ‘Father of Faith.’ On the contrary, the doubt about the Christian viewpoint offers an unexpected twist that was not yet available to the rabbi. He lets Abraham wonder whether his son might not have been a worthy sacrifice, whether the ram was preferable in God’s eyes, regardless of what his own resolve to give away what was most precious to him might have said about his state of mind. This had to have been the most perfect, the absolute sacrificial gift, if the origin of this late-born son and his value for the future of humanity had been a factor. But the rejection reveals something about the doubtful quality of the sacrifice, which here perhaps was more important than the sheer obedience of a slighted father. This thought, attributed so specifically and so late to Abraham, could be followed to its conclusion by those against whom it was perhaps directed.
If Abraham’s God had been dissatisfied with the sacrifice of Isaac, and if this had been the secret and long-concealed reason for the rejection, a question immediately arises: What else could have satisfied this God if not the begotten son of this father? This EL or JHWH was insatiable when it came to sacrifices, and since rejecting Cain’s gift had insisted on the highest quality. Highest quality—theologically speaking, this always implies: a tendency toward the insuperable, the unheard-of, the infinite, the absolute. If the son of the promise to the patriarch was not ‘acceptable,’ it could only be—following the logic of the ‘only begotten’—one other son who could satiate God’s thirst for sacrifice: His own only Son.
This Son was, insofar as he was allowed to exist, the solution to the dilemma of objective quality. In him the doubt of Abraham in its deepest form was nullified: he was the solution that could not be wished for. That is why he had to exist. “What is needed, is needed,” is the refrain of all theologies since the beginning of time. So it is here: once JHWH’s dissatisfaction with all sacrifices and their suitability became legible in the failures in the history of the people, in the withholding of premiums for promises, all that was left was the ideal construct of a sacrificium perfectissimum and the final and infinite satiation of the highest thirst for sacrifice.
This construct was not initially connected to the passion of Jesus of Nazareth. He himself understood his death—following the later, communal testimony of the synoptic gospels—more as the obedience of the ‘servant of God,’ that is, as following the ideal of the subjective quality of Abraham’s sacrifice. The objective quality emerged with the theological speculations about ransoming all of humanity. If initially the Son of man was offered to the Antagonist as the prize for the liberation of those who had fallen to his temptation, he was later taken out of this mythical ‘exchange’ and offered, as the Son of God, to the ‘infinite satisfaction’ of the offended majesty of the creator Father for the benefit of humanity fallen to his wrath. Finally, the only fitting sacrifice: the lamb, not the ram.